Weirder Shadows Over Innsmouth

THE ARCHBISHOP’S WELL

by REGGIE OLIVER

MY FATHER NEVER spoke about his war experiences. That was quite common for men of his generation, but what is strange is that he hardly ever said anything to me about his life before it. I knew his academic career as a medieval historian had begun in the 1930s and that was all. It was only after his death a decade ago that I discovered the diaries that he had kept during this period, and a sort of explanation for his reticence started to emerge.

Reading them was an odd experience for me in many ways, chiefly because the person in these diaries was not at all like the one I knew. It was hard to reconcile this lively young man with my father, the dour, sarcastic Oxford don who seldom had any time for me. Only a few characteristic quirks and turns of phrase suggested that they were the same person at all.

The journals begin in late 1936 when, at twenty-five, my father, Dr. Charles Vilier, was appointed to a lectureship in Medieval History at the new University of Wessex. Its campus occupies land just outside the town of Bartonstone, some ten miles south-west of Morchester. My father’s first years there seem to have been carefree and happy. He was a great giver and frequenter of sherry parties, then a popular form of entertainment for those who were not quite smart enough for cocktails. By 1938, the year of the Munich Crisis, my father was beginning to be faintly aware that the world around him was darkening, but it was not until September that his own personal crisis began.

SEPTEMBER 2ND, 1938

Bertie Winship drove down from Morchester in his old banger. I gave him dinner at the Crown, the only half-decent hostelry in Bartonstone, and we imbibed not a few glasses of Amontillado, followed by a bottle of the best claret mine host could provide. I have barely seen young Bertie since varsity days, but he is the same cheery idiot who once introduced a python into the Master of Balliol’s lodgings, causing much consternation and merriment thereby. It is strange to think of him now as a man of the cloth, a Canon of Morchester Cathedral no less, and a master at the choir school.

He regaled me with stories of Cathedral Life which seems to be by no means as dull as one might think. The Bishop, a gouty old sport called Bulstrode, is completely under the thumb of the Dean who goes by the name of the Very Reverend Herbert Grice. Grice is, according to Bertie, a holy terror, all for change and doing what he calls “meeting the challenges of the modern world”. Needless to say, this does not go down too well with some of his colleagues who call him “Il Duce” behind his back because he is so fearfully keen on efficiency and making the Cathedral services start and finish on time. His main opponent is the Venerable Thaddeus Hill, the Archdeacon, a white-bearded old patriarch who has been at Morchester since the Ark. All this would be very amusing but not worth recording were it not for the business of the Archbishop’s Well.

According to Bertie, this well has stirred up a veritable hornet’s nest. It’s hard at first to conceive why. I have of course visited the Cathedral and seen it. It stands in the middle of the cloister garth, a patch of greensward on the south side of the Cathedral. The cloisters that enclose it are the oldest part of the Cathedral, dating back to the eleventh century, being the only surviving portion of the original Abbey Church of Morchester. The well, by all accounts, is even older, but it is extremely unimpressive to look at.

It is a roughly circular enclosure of irregular stones which have been frequently repaired over the years with ugly slatherings of mortar. The opening is capped with a heavy circular lid of oak, bound with elaborately arabesqued iron bands and attached to the stone surround by heavy iron rings and padlocks. No one knows quite why it is called the Archbishop’s Well, except of course that the Cathedral itself is St. Anselm’s, named after Anselm, the eleventh-century Archbishop of Canterbury and inventor of the celebrated Ontological Argument for the existence of God.

Well—the pun is purely accidental—the long and short of it is that Bishop Bulstrode, at Dean Grice’s prompting of course, wants to do away with this ancient relic and replace it with something useful and “up to date”. A drinking fountain for the benefit of visitors to the Cathedral has been suggested. A drinking fountain, forsooth! No doubt one of those polished granite monstrosities that rich “philanthropists” are in the habit of inflicting on our public parks. Oddly enough, says Bertie, the Bishop’s proposal has met with quite a bit of support, but there is also some vehement opposition, most notably from old Archdeacon Hill. Bertie, to his credit, is with the old boy, but his voice counts for very little.

Bertie says there was a fearful row about it at the last meeting of the Dean and Chapter a couple of days ago. The Archdeacon said that the well went back quite possibly to pre-Christian times and that to remove it would be a sacrilege. To which Dean Grice smartly replies that if the well is pre-Christian it could not possibly count as sacrilege to dispose of it.

It was then that Bertie had what he is pleased to call his “brain wave”. He proposed that an independent expert be called in to pronounce on the historic and architectural importance of said well. When asked, in sarcastic tones by the Dean, where that expert might be found, Bertie replied that there was a just such a blighter with all the correct qualifications lecturing on things medieval only up the road at the University of Wessex, to wit, yours truly.

I don’t know whether to feel flattered or to knock young Bertie about the mazzard for being an infernal, interfering pill. I expect nothing will come of it, though.

SEPTEMBER 5TH

A letter arrived this morning with the Morchester Cathedral crest embossed on the back of the envelope. Everything about it is stiff: the envelope, the note-paper within and the wording typed thereon. It is from Dean Grice inviting me over to Morchester to consult about the well and proposing a date for the meeting. The final paragraph reads as follows:

I must earnestly entreat you to say nothing about this commission to friends or colleagues and on no account to inform the press. I cannot emphasise too strongly that the utmost confidentiality is essential. You will receive an adequate honorarium for the benefit of your expertise and any researches that might be required. However, should you breach the seal of discretion in any way, no such remuneration will be forthcoming.

It all seemed unnecessarily pedantic to me, perhaps even a little “neurotic”, as the followers of Dr. Freud would say. What had got the wind up? Anyway, I wrote back agreeing to his terms as I must admit to being rather intrigued.

SEPTEMBER 10TH

This morning I took the train into Morchester, arriving shortly before ten. It was a fine, balmy day, so I walked the quarter-mile to the Deanery which is in the south-west corner of the Cathedral close. The Deanery is a pretty little three-storey Queen Anne house of mellow red brick with, over the front door, an elegant little pedimented portico made out of the local limestone. There is no bell-push, but there is a bronze knocker on the door of curious design. I believe it to have been modelled from one of the gargoyles on the Cathedral roof. (Morchester Cathedral, of course, is famous for its grotesque carvings.) It was in the shape of the head of some sort of beast. The eyes were large and saucer-like and there was little in the way of a nose, apart from a rather ugly cavity for a nostril. Where the mouth should have been there was a mass of strands or tentacles that seemed to writhe snakelike as if each one had a life of its own. It was a finely crafted piece, but all the more distasteful to handle because of it.

Nevertheless I grasped the thing and rapped on the door which was opened by a tall, elderly, angular woman who looked as if her morning bath had had an iceberg in it. She scrutinised me with some disdain, then, pointing imperiously to her right, told me that all hawkers, vagrants and people seeking assistance from the diocese should apply at the tradesman’s entrance.

I had on an old pair of grey flannel bags and a heavily patched tweed sports coat, but I didn’t think that I looked that disreputable. Perhaps the fact that I had no tie on and wear sandals at all times of the year gave me a bohemian or even—oh horror!—a socialist look.

I explained that I was Dr. Vilier and had an appointment to see the Dean. The lady still regarded me with suspicion.

“My husband is not unwell,” she said indignantly.

Before I could explain to her that my doctorate was in History not Medicine, she had disappeared into the dark bowels of the Deanery. After a while she re-emerged from the gloom to tell me that the Dean would see me now in his study, indicating the second door on the left of a dingy corridor that passed right through the house. I smiled and tried to thank her warmly but the frost on her upper slopes failed to thaw.

I knocked and was bidden to enter the Dean’s study. The room I came into was lit only by the light from a window which faced onto a back garden. At the bottom of the garden I could just see, through the willows, the glitter of a stream.

I have to say that Dean Grice’s welcome was not much cheerier than his wife’s. He greeted me by rising from behind his desk and favouring me with a handshake that felt like a long-dead haddock. He has a narrow face, parchment skin, and little round, silver-rimmed spectacles that glinted in the dimness of the study, occasionally turning his eyes into blank discs of reflected light. Having obtained from me the solemn assurance that I had told no one about my visit, he suggested briskly that we should walk over together to the Cathedral and take a look at the well.

As we stepped out of the deanery a cool breeze blew up. The rooks, who inhabit a stand of elms at the west end of the Cathedral close suddenly all flew as one from their “buildings” (as I believe their nests are called) in the trees and began to wheel around screeching, making their characteristic kaa, kaa sound. Once across the road and onto the green, the Dean and I took a diagonal paved path which leads directly to the West door of the Cathedral. I stared in awe at the rooks as they circled and cried. I could not get it out of my head that they were, for purposes unknown, putting on a demonstration of some kind. The Dean, evidently well accustomed to this curious animal behaviour, took no notice whatsoever.

While I was looking around me I noticed that someone was on the path behind us and trying to attract our attention. It was a tallish man wearing a cloak and a battered sombrero hat. He appeared somewhat eccentric, but as he was a hundred and fifty yards away I could not make out his features. He waved a thin arm and said “Hi!” so I alerted the Dean to his presence. The Dean, without breaking his stride, turned round to look, then almost immediately turned back and began to walk even more determinedly towards the Cathedral. I had seen a look of disgust, perhaps even of fear, pass across his ascetic features.

“We wish to have no intercourse with that man,” said the Dean.

“Who is he?”

“He is called Felix Cutbirth.”

“Unusual surname.”

“It is a variant of Cuthbert, an Anglo-Saxon name. He comes from a very old family which has lived in Morsetshire since before the Norman Conquest. Unhappily, in his case, ancient lineage is no guarantee of respectability. The Cutbirths have long had an evil reputation.”

“What does he want with us?”

“I cannot possibly imagine,” said the Dean dismissively. We were now at the West Door. “Come! Let us go into the Cathedral. He will not follow us in there, I fancy.”

Once we were inside, I was conscious of a certain relaxation in the Dean. He became almost animated. Clearly he loved the place, and his knowledge of medieval architecture was intelligent and extensive. My own complemented his, so we enjoyed each other’s company as we walked down the great Early English nave, like an avenue of tall and stately trees. Weak sunlight filtered through the high windows and few people were about. I glanced quickly behind me. The Dean’s surmise was correct: Cutbirth had not followed us into the Cathedral. After this brief interlude, the Dean took me out into the cloisters to survey the well.

Though I had seen it before I had not examined it at close quarters because, as notices proclaimed, it was forbidden for ordinary mortals to tread the lawn of the cloister garth. The Dean led me boldly across it.

“There you see,” he said. “Not a thing of beauty and a joy forever.”

I had to admit he was right. The “thing” had been built, rebuilt and repaired over centuries. There was no unity in this strange circular wall. Some of the stones were large, some small, some rough-hewn, a few dressed. I noticed that there was a section at the base on the south side that was not made of stone at all, but brick, and Roman bricks at that. I recognised their flat shape and the excellent quality of the mortar. I mentioned my discovery to the Dean, who merely nodded.

“Yes. That is known. Quite late Roman, I believe. Fourth or fifth century.” He seemed unimpressed. I also noticed that some of the Roman bricks had a crude drawing of an eye scratched on them: a so-called “apotropaic eye” of the kind you see on the sides of Greek fishing vessels, designed to ward off evil. This I did not mention to the Dean.

When the Dean asked my opinion, I told him that the well was of no architectural but of great archaeological interest. I said that there would need to be a thorough archaeological survey of the well before anything was done to it and that, to expedite matters, I would, with his permission, discover all I could about the well from the Cathedral archives.

The Dean took all this in with a kind of weary resignation, as I suppose it was the answer he was expecting. The cloisters had been deserted when we entered them, but just as we were about to leave we heard a voice.

“I see you!” It said. The voice was a man’s; the tone was mocking with a hint of menace about it.

We looked around. Finally we saw a face poking over the wall of one of the open Gothic arcades. On the head was a battered sombrero. It was Cutbirth.

The Dean started violently when he saw him, executing a little involuntary jump which made Cutbirth laugh as he got up off his knees, lifted a long leg over the cloister wall and stepped through the arcade onto the cloister garth.

“You may not walk on this grass!” yapped the Dean.

“Why not? You do.”

“What are you doing here?”

Cutbirth began to walk lazily towards us over the manicured lawn, removing his hat as he did so. He must have been about forty, but age with such a strange creature was hard to assess. He was long and loosely built, with abnormally large hands. His skin was a yellowish colour, coarse and porous in texture. His head was a large, virtually hairless oval, but the features were small, strangely caught together in the middle of his face, like those of a horrible baby. He was trying to exude an air of insouciant mockery, but the eyes—green, I think—were full of rage.

“I might ask you the same question,” said Cutbirth. His accent was odd. He spoke with the languid drawl of the upper classes, but some of his vowels were pure rural Morsetshire.

“It is none of your business,” said the Dean raising his voice and sounding petulant.

“I think it is, Mr. Dean. You do realise that this has been a sacred spot long before your psalm-singing milk-white Christians started erecting their pious monstrosities over it? I know what you want to do. You want to obliterate the sanctity of centuries. You want to banish the Old Gods forever. And for what? For some damned, provincial little water trough to slake the putrid tongues of cheap charabanc tourists!”

“Who told you that?”

“Never you mind, Mr. Dean.” Then turning to me, with disdainful a glance at my sandals, he said: “And what’s your little game, my Communist Friend?”

“Don’t answer him!” said the Dean. To tell the truth, I was so shocked at being denounced as a Communist on account of my footwear that I was incapable of speech. “Will you kindly leave forthwith, or I shall be forced to summon assistance and have you thrown off.”

Cutbirth laughed harshly: “I warn you, Dean Grice—” he pronounced it grease “—the House of Dagon will suffer wrong no more! The Old Gods are awaking from their long sleep and you would do well not to despise their help in the gathering storm. Soon the rivers of Europe will run with blood. You will bleat for the Nazarene to help you, but he will not come, and the tide of blood will advance till it engulfs even Morchester. I warn you, Grice!”

With that he turned and left us, jamming his sombrero down on his head as he did so. Despite this faintly ludicrous gesture we were both stunned—I might almost say impressed—by his speech. For nearly a minute we stood there silent, motionless. Though, objectively, I have nothing but contempt for Cutbirth, I had been made aware of a certain power in him, or about him.

The Dean finally broke the silence: “Come, Dr. Vilier. Let me show you the library where you will be conducting your researches.”

“What was that about the House of Dagon?”

“Oh, just his usual nonsense,” said the Dean irritably. Then he paused, hesitating whether to confide in me. At last he said: “Felix Cutbirth is by way of being an artist. I had the misfortune to see some of his paintings at an exhibition in Morchester not so long ago. They are vile things, vile… But not without accomplishment. He studied at the Slade in London, I believe. While there, he became involved with something called the Order of the Golden Dawn, an occult society. You remember: Yeats, Crowley, Machen, Mathers—?” I nodded. “Well, after a while he became dissatisfied with them and broke away to found his own little magical sect called the Order of Dagon. I am happy to say it failed miserably. On his return to Morchester, Cutbirth tried to set up the Order here. He had a temple for a while at the back of a Turkish Restaurant in Morchester High Street, but neither the temple nor the restaurant prospered. He still has a few devotees among the credulous of this city, but they may be counted on the fingers of one hand. That is all we need to know about Mr. Cutbirth!”

And with that we proceeded to the library.

SEPTEMBER 13TH

This is my second day in the library and I have made some progress. There is surprisingly little information to be had on the well other than the rather surprising fact that it has not been used as such since the early twelfth century. A date of 1107 or 1108 is usually given for the closing of the well, but no explanation is given. I presume that it became contaminated in some way, but I could not understand why the whole structure was not destroyed.

Today, however, I have made a discovery. Of course the real story will, I suspect, remain hidden, but at least we have the legend. Legends are revealing in their own way.

One of the oldest volumes in the library is a kind of scrapbook, an untidy binding together of all sorts of early manuscripts to do with the Cathedral. Most of these are deeds and charters and inventories, not very interesting, but towards the end of the book I found what I recognised as a very early—perhaps even the original—manuscript of William of Morchester’s Gesta Anselmi.

In the 1160s Archbishop Thomas Becket was, no doubt for his own political purposes, pressing the Pope to make a former Archbishop of Canterbury, Anselm (1033–1109) a saint. To this end he commissioned William of Morchester to write a life of Anselm, praising him and listing all his miracles: a hagiography in other words. This William called the Gesta Anselmi or “The Deeds of Anselm”.

It is a typical work of the period, with very little of historical value in it. It deals in the kind of absurd legends and miracles that the Medievals loved: Anselm restores sight to a blind man; he revives a dead child; a barren woman prays at the tomb of Anselm and soon finds herself with child, and so on. I had seen copies of it before, but this manuscript seemed fuller and older than the others.

Towards the end of the MS I came across a passage that I had certainly never previously encountered. Several lines had been drawn through it, as if the scribe had deemed it unsuitable for further publication, but I was able to read it quite easily. It began:

Anselmus cum in Priorium Benedictinum Morcastri advenerat monachos valde perturbatos de puteo suo vidit…

When Anselm came to the Benedictine Priory at Morchester he saw the monks in much distress on account of their well. For they had built their cloister around an ancient well which had been there for many centuries and where in time past many foul and blasphemous ceremonies had been enacted to worship the ancient Gods and Demons of the Pagans. For, it was said, in the depths of this ancient well were many caverns and paths beneath the earth which connected with sea caverns on the southern shores. [In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the sea was much closer to Morchester than it is now.] And it was said that these demons came out of the sea and through the caverns to the well where they had been worshipped as gods in former times.

Now certain of the monks, hoping to draw greater quantities of the sweet water to be found in the well, had descended into its depths to dig deeper and uncover new springs. But in so doing they had awakened the demons who had lain dormant in caverns beneath the well for many centuries. They had troubled their unholy sleep and awakened their anger. And these demons had arisen from the well to bring destruction on the monks and the people of Morchester. The monks were tormented by ill dreams and by odours as of fish putrefying. Women of the town began to give birth to all manner of abominations: infants with two heads, and mouths in their fundaments, horns upon their head, many arms but without hands; and one had the face of a great serpent. Such was their consternation that the whole people cried out to Anselm to deliver them from terrors by night and abominations by day.

Then did the Blessed Anselm pronounce absolution for the sins of the whole people. Having done so, the Archbishop, taking his staff of office which contained a reliquary holding a fragment of the true cross and a thumbnail of St. Paul, ordered the monks to let him down into the depths of the well. There Blessed Anselm remained for seven days and seven nights alone wrestling with the spawn of Hell and in particularly the chief of these demons whose name was—[Here the manuscript has been corrected, scratched out and altered several times so that the name is unclear. My best guess is Dagonus.]

After seven days and seven nights Blessed Anselm commanded that he be lifted out of the well for he had vanquished the demons therein. Thereupon he commanded that a lid of oak bound with iron be placed over the well and that no person should thereafter remove it, and that new wells be dug to the north of the Abbey. And moreover, Anselm blessed the waters of the Orr [the river that flows past Morchester] so that water might be drawn from it in safety. And he commanded that a great cathedral be erected in place of the Abbey Church for all the people, and that this cathedral be consecrated to St. Michael the Archangel, the vanquisher of demons, and St. George, the slayer of dragons.

It was only after Anselm’s official canonisation in 1494 that the Cathedral was rededicated to him. This was not such a radical act as it might seem because it was simply sanctioning local practice. The building had long been known by the inhabitants of Morchester as “Anselm’s Cathedral”.

I suspect that there is a tiny core of truth in this absurd fable: namely that the well is very old indeed, which the presence of Roman brickwork confirms. It is just possible also that, as the text suggests, the well had at some stage become contaminated by seawater from an underground source. Hence also the stench of rotting fish?

I cannot help being intrigued by the coincidence—and it is only a coincidence!—that Cutbirth’s little sect is called the Order of Dagon, and Anselm’s main adversary in the well was Dagonus.

SEPTEMBER 15TH

I have given the Dean a précis of my findings and he has agreed that the well should be opened up and surveyed. Bertie is in a state of high excitement and jumping up and down at the prospect of what he insists on calling “an archaeological dig”. I remind him that no digging will be involved, just the descent into a well which may, after all, be filled with rubbish, but nothing dampens Bertie. He clamours to be part of the “adventure”.

A strange thing happened today. While I was in the cloister discussing the opening of the well with the Clerk of Works, a boy came up to me and handed me a letter. It was one of the town boys, I think, certainly very scruffy, and before I could speak to him he had run off.

Inside the envelope was a piece of stiff card, like an invitation. It had been expensively engraved with the heading: ORDO TEMPLI DAGONIS (Order of the Temple of Dagon). Below this was an elaborate design, rather well executed but curiously unpleasant. Within a fancy baroque cartouche was a drawing of a figure crouched on a throne. I say figure because it was not wholly human nor wholly bestial, but something in-between. It seemed to be in an attitude of deep and trancelike thought, but its outward appearance was savage. Curious tentacles drooped over its mouth-parts. It reminded me somewhat of the Dean’s knocker, but I did not study it long. Below it in capitals was written:

DO NOT MEDDLE WITH THE ANCIENT AND INFINITE. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

The sender can only be Cutbirth.

SEPTEMBER 21ST

Troubling rumours from Europe. A cloudy day. The Clerk and his workmen set up equipment to raise the lid of the well and, if necessary, let me down into it. Bertie was there whenever he could to watch progress, which was painfully slow. In the first place nobody could find the keys to the padlocks which secured the wooden lid to the wall, so they had to be smashed off by main force. It was beginning to get dark before the lid was raised.

The first of our surprises when the well was finally uncovered was the smell. A faint but still unpalatable odour, as of rotten fish, wafted up to us from the bottom of the well which was so deep that my torch could not penetrate its abysses. I noticed, however, that the well was skilfully made with dressed stone forming a perfect cylinder. The walls were virtually black and covered with a thin layer of darkish slime like the tracks of a thousand snails. We had not rope enough to let me down to the bottom, but I noticed that, some thirty feet below, steps had been built into the wall. They descended in an elegant spiral into the unseen depths and looked manageable.

Bertie, like the ass he is, dropped a stone down the well. No splash was heard. Instead there was a sort of cracking sound that reverberated in an odd way. Perhaps the Gesta was right and there are caverns down there. That blighter Bertie then decided to try out the echo with his voice and sang what he assured me was an E flat above Middle C. The echo lasted a good ten seconds after he had stopped singing and was strange. Once it was over and I had started to tell Bertie off for his fat-headed behaviour, we both heard another sound come from the well which was most certainly not Bertie’s voice. It lasted only for a second or so, but it sounded distinctly as if some thing or things down there were scratching or fluttering about.

Bertie was all for investigating, but I told him not to be an idiot. It was late, it was getting dark and we had done enough for the day. I told the workmen to replace the lid over the well, and it was then that we received our last surprise of the day. On the underside of the lid I noticed that something black had been nailed to the wood. A quick examination showed it to be a crucifix of heavily tarnished silver, early twelfth century and of the finest Norman workmanship.

But what was it doing nailed to the wood, facing downwards into the blackness with nothing and no one to see it?

I decided to leave that and other questions till a later date. I am staying at the Dean’s tonight, so as to start bright and early tomorrow. As I was walking back from the Cathedral towards the Deanery, I noticed that the rooks were making more than their usual fuss. They were wheeling around their elms, cawing away, apparently quite unable to settle for the night. A few distant dogs seemed to have caught their mood and began to howl.

Dinner at the Deanery with the Grices was, as I had rather expected, not a lively occasion. Dean Grice is given to rather pontifical remarks on general subjects and sees himself as having very “up-to-date” opinions. He talked with some pride of his time as a chaplain in the trenches during the Great War and gave me his opinion that it had been “the war to end all wars” and that that sort of thing should on no account ever happen again. Then he asked me what I thought of “Mr. Hitler”. It took me a second or two to understand whom he was referring to. He sounded as if he were talking about an erring member of his congregation.

Mrs. Dean has no conversation at all. Occasionally she will break her silence by simply repeating what her husband has just said. Needless to say I have retired early. I must try to get some sleep, but there seem to be an awful lot of barking or howling dogs about.

SEPTEMBER 22ND

I passed a pretty restless night. In addition to the dogs there were the cats. Everywhere they seemed to be out and about howling and screeching. One climbed up the sloping roof outside my window and started scrabbling at the window-pane. I tried to shoo it away several times, but it was persistent and plaintive. Finally I let it in and it made straight for my bed. I tried to push it off, but it mewed pathetically and curled itself up in the crook of my arm. There it stayed all night and, apart from purring rather too loudly, caused me no further trouble.

But that was not the end of it. The next assault on my ears came from a most unexpected quarter. My bedroom is next to that of the Dean and his wife. It being an old house, the partition walls are quite thin, no more than lath and plaster sandwiched in between wooden panelling. At about two o’clock my fitful slumbers were disturbed by what I can only describe as a bout of amorous activity from the next room. I hesitate to write it down. I could barely believe my ears at the time. To judge from the cries made by the two contenders, the event appeared to be violent and not wholly consensual on the part of Mrs. Grice. Neither can be less than sixty years of age.

At breakfast the following morning, Mr. and Mrs. Dean were more than usually taciturn. I noticed that at different times they looked at me enquiringly. Mrs. Dean’s hair was in quiet disarray. Fortunately I had an excellent excuse to leave as soon as possible. I needed to supervise the means whereby I was to be let down into the body of the well.

To cut a long story short, it was well into the afternoon before all was ready for the descent. A rope ladder had been found to let me down as far as the spiral steps. The idea was that, once I had reached the steps, further equipment, including a long rope, would be let down to me and I would attach the rope to the wall by means of a metal staple knocked into it. This rope would be there as a safeguard in case the steps proved treacherous. Then I was to walk down the steps into the unknown abyss. With me, in a knapsack, I had two electric torches, a tape measure, a notebook and pencils, and a small camera with flash bulb attachments.

Bertie, needless to say, was on hand and bursting with excited enthusiasm. I asked him if he had had a disturbed night but he had, apparently, slept like a baby.

Before I began my descent, I was suddenly seized with apprehension. I checked everything was secure and told the Clerk of Works that at least two of his men should be on hand at the well-head while I was conducting my investigations. A look was exchanged between the Clerk and his men that I did not understand, but he agreed.

The first part of the descent was made easily. I climbed down the rope ladder to the spiral steps which were rather rough-hewn but not, as I had feared, very slippery. There the workmen let down some tools and the rope. I managed to drive a metal staple into the wall and secure a rope to it. Then, taking my electric torch, I began my descent.

I flashed my torch into the depths but could see no bottom, only the spiral staircase endlessly revolving into the blackness. The masonry that clad the walls was smooth and its composition was what is called “Cyclopean”—that is, huge irregular slabs of stone had been dressed and fitted together, making the wall look like a gigantic piece of crazy-paving on the vertical.

The whole, including the spiral steps, was an astonishing feat of construction and certainly not, in my view, medieval. Anglo-Saxon, then? Even less likely. Roman? I had never seen Roman work that remotely resembled this.

Soon the top of the well had become a little white disc, no bigger than the moon. I trudged downwards, taking care not to touch the walls if I could avoid it. They were covered with a thin layer of something dark and glistening, sticky to the touch, that left a dark brown stain on the hands, like half-dried blood. My dear old tweed jacket was already ruined.

I had entered a world of silence, and if silence can be said to echo, then it did. I suppose what I am saying is that the slightest scrape of my feet on the stone steps came back to me in echoes a thousand fold. Once I coughed and it was like a fusillade of rifle shots. The scent of something decaying and fishlike was getting stronger.

Then I heard a faint pattering sound behind and above me. I looked around and saw a light flickering and flashing, then further pattering, then what sounded like a stifled oath. I shone my torch upwards. Something was coming down the stairway towards me.

It was that infernal ass Bertie Winship! He was carrying a tiny little toy electric torch that was about as much use down there as a paper bag in a thunderstorm.

I gave the blighter a good piece of my mind and told him in no uncertain terms to go back up at once, but he was unrepentant.

“Sorry, old fellow,” he said, “I simply couldn’t resist it. Anyway, I thought you could do with the company.”

I was barely able to admit it to myself, but he was right. The ancient solitude was beginning to oppress me. I told him sharply to put away his stupid little flashlight and take the other of my two torches. I also told him to remain silent as we made our way down.

I don’t know how long we had been going, but the entrance to the well was only a pinpoint of light above us—no more than a distant star on a dark night—when we came across the carvings.

The first of them was a frieze carved into the stone, about a foot and a half in depth that ran the whole of the way around the well, broken only by the run of the staircase. It was a continuous key pattern, or, if you like, a set of interlinked swastikas. Apart from anything else it was astonishing to find workmanship like this at such a depth. What possible purpose could it serve?

I could only conjecture that its presence suggested that an early civilisation, probably of Aryan origin, had been at work here and created the descent for ritual purposes. I began to speculate that it might have been used to commune with spirits of the dead, or some Chthonic deity of the underworld. This structure could be an early monument to a mystery religion, perhaps the earliest in these islands, predating Mithraism by hundreds, even thousands of years.

My thoughts were beginning to run away with me when Bertie gave an odd little yelp. His torch had strayed onto a panel carved in low relief, just opposite him. The artist was skilled and the execution showed no signs of imprecision or crudity. The manner was vaguely reminiscent of those to be found on Babylonian and Assyrian monuments: precise, but stylised.

It showed a group of figures huddled together, one of which was wearing a kind of crown or diadem and seemed to be dominating the others. The figures were not human, nor recognisably animal. They looked like some strange miscegenation between a sea creature, of an octapoid kind, and a human or ape. By one of them I was rather unpleasantly reminded of the figure engraved on Felix Cutbirth’s card.

“By Jove,” said Bertie, “I wouldn’t like to meet one of those on a dark night.”

I told Bertie to stop making idiotic remarks and we continued our descent. There were several more of these relief sculptures, each one stranger than the last. One depicted a group of human beings kneeling in homage, heads touching the ground like Moslems at prayer, before a strange lopsided creature with a head far too big for its body. In another further down, four men in profile were carrying a rigid human body horizontally. They appeared to be feeding it to one of the strange half-fish creatures; in fact most of the body’s head had already entered the beast’s vast open mouth.

Shortly after that my foot encountered not another stone step but soft, muddy soil. We were at the bottom of the well. I commanded Bertie to stop and tried the ground. I was afraid it was a quagmire into which we might sink, never to be recovered, but the soil, though moist and soft, appeared to be solidly founded.

I then noticed a strange thing. The aperture at the well-head was almost exactly ten feet across, but the chamber at its base was wider. I measured it with the tape I had brought for the purpose and discovered that we were in a circular space slightly over twenty-three feet in diameter.

We must have been walking down a funnel that slowly tapered towards the top, but the widening (or narrowing, depending which way you look at it) had been done so gradually and with such cunning that we had never noticed.

The air at the bottom was not free of the odour of rotten fish, but it was not rank or stuffy, and it was almost as if a breeze was coming from somewhere. I noticed that at opposite ends of the circular wall were two black spaces with pointed arches, just wide and tall enough for a man of average height to walk through them. I shone my torch into one of them and it revealed a long, narrow tunnel leading into more blackness.

By this time Bertie had reached the bottom too, and was talking his usual nonsense. He had got it into his head that the whole thing was connected with King Arthur and Merlin, or some such twaddle. He said that the two apertures were bound to lead to “treasure chambers” and that we should explore them at once. I was resolved to do no such thing. We had had quite enough excitement for one day, but just then Bertie let out a cry.

“I say, look at this!” he said.

I prepared myself for yet another inanity, but Bertie had actually found something. He had been idly pushing his foot about in the mud and flashing his torch at it when he had come across something shiny. He pulled it out of the mud and we did our best to clean it up with our pocket-handkerchiefs.

It shone still because it was made of some incorruptible metal or metals, pale yellow in colour. I suspected an alloy of gold and platinum, but this was highly improbable for such an obviously ancient artefact. The workmanship was very fine, but when I say fine, I do not exactly mean beautiful.

It was circular and in the shape of a coronet or diadem, but if it was a sort of crown, then the head it had enclosed was monstrous, at least twice the size of an ordinary adult human head. The pattern was one of intricately entwined whorls and concentric circles which, when you looked closely at them, resolved themselves into the coiling limbs of strange creatures whose bulging eyes were represented by some sort of milky-white semiprecious stone. They were not pearls, but could have been white jade, though this seemed unlikely for England. The lowest band or border was composed of the interconnecting key pattern of swastikas that we had seen on the walls above us.

While Bertie was babbling on about how he had found King Arthur’s crown, I took out the camera from my knapsack and put a flash bulb into the attachment. I only had a few bulbs so I had to choose my subjects carefully. I took one of the area we stood in as a whole to give an impression of the remarkable structure we had found. I took another, at Bertie’s earnest request, of him holding the giant diadem. I then decided that I should point the camera down the two tunnels that projected from our central chamber.

I took one without any effect, but when my camera flashed down the other tunnel I thought I saw through my viewfinder something move at the end of the passageway I was photographing: a pale grey-green something that was smooth and glistening. The next moment I heard a noise, halfway between a groan and a retching cough, but cavernous and hugely magnified. I turned sharply round to see if it was Bertie playing some stupid joke, but he was staring back at me, white and horrified.

The next minute we were storming up those spiral stairs as fast as we could go. Bertie, who was ahead of me, stumbled several times. Each time I picked him up and on we went. By the time we had reached the end of the steps and the rope ladder we were both gasping for breath. It was at least five minutes before we made the final ascent.

As we came out of the well the sun was setting in a clear evening sky, but for a few seconds it seemed impossibly bright to us. I ordered the rope ladder to be drawn up and the lid of the well to be replaced.

I had my camera with me. I turned and asked Bertie if he still had the crown with him, but he said he had dropped it on the way up. I believed him; I think I believed him, but he had his arms folded across his jacket in an odd way.

Bertie had recovered from his fright amazingly quickly and was soon chattering away to the Clerk of Works about the well’s “amazing archaeological importance”. I noticed, though, that he was very unspecific about our discoveries and for that, I suppose, I should be grateful.

I returned to the Deanery exhausted, and at dinner, I am afraid, proved very unforthcoming about the day’s events. Fortunately the Dean was in a very talkative mood. He was full of Mr. Chamberlain’s flight to see “Mr. Hitler” and pacify him over the Sudetenland Crisis. He sees the Prime Minister’s mission as the epitome of modern statesmanship and diplomacy. I am too weary and confused to agree or disagree openly, but I do not share his confidence in a peaceful outcome. Mrs. Dean remained entirely mute and he barely looked at her.

The Dean then told me he had just heard the melancholy news that during the previous night the Archdeacon, the Venerable Thaddeus Hill, had died, of a “seizure”. When the Dean said the word “seizure” I noticed that his wife looked at him very sharply indeed, and I think I saw the Dean’s pale skin flush with embarrassment.

SEPTEMBER 23RD

In the early hours of this morning I was rudely awakened by the Dean. No, not like the night before. He entered my room and shook me awake. There were intruders in the Cathedral, he said: lights had been seen in the cloisters. I told him to alert the police; it was nothing to do with me, but he was insistent. I had never seen the Dean so animated.

I dressed rapidly and grabbed my torch. The Dean was waiting for me downstairs in the hall with a heavy old revolver and some cartridges. Handing me the gun, he said: “Take this, my boy. My old service revolver from the Trenches. We have not a moment to lose.” I thought he must be mad.

From the top of the stairs his wife in her night-gown stared down at us, wild and bewildered.

We gained access by the West door but, finding nothing amiss in the Cathedral itself, we hurried on to the cloisters. There, by the light of our torches we could see the lid had been removed from the well and we could hear distant cries. Once we got to the well we could hear the cries clearly, albeit distorted by the well’s weird echo. Someone was screaming for help and I could swear the voice was Bertie’s.

I loaded the revolver and put it in my pocket, then tucked the torch into my belt. The Dean helped me over the parapet and onto the rope ladder. So I began the descent into the well yet again. The cries from below had not stopped, but they seemed muffled and more distant than before.

I reached the steps and began to hurry down them far more rapidly than I would have wished. Once or twice I tripped and nearly fell into the black abyss. I reached the bottom and flashed my torch about. There was nobody, nothing.

I stood quite still, trying not to breathe too hard, the blood pounding in my head. Bertie—or whoever it was—must have gone through one of the two tunnels, but which one?

I decided to try the one where my flash photography had surprised something. I switched off my torch and entered the Stygian blackness of the narrow tunnel. Darkness and silence enveloped me. I felt my way, along smooth, slimed walls.

Then I began to hear something. It was like a chant, but the tune and the language were alien to me. I could see something red flicker against the glistening black walls of the tunnel. It was no more than a whisper of light, but it spoke terror to me.

The tunnel bent slightly, then suddenly debouched into a vast cavern, over a hundred feet high. Naphtha flares, spurting naturally from the rock, lit the space with a pinkish glare from a thousand crevices. I was in an area at least as vast as the Cathedral somewhere far above me. Parts of the rock vault had been carved into strange shapes, parts had been left in their natural state, rugged and glistening.

Again I heard the chanting and, though clearer, it was still alien to my ears:

“Iä-R’lyeh! Cthulhu fhtagn! Iä! Iä!”

About fifty feet from me across a smooth Cyclopean pavement stood a naked man, his back to me. His hands were raised in the air, his almost hairless head thrown back in an ecstasy of adoration. At his feet lay a crumpled form in black. As I approached them across the pavement I recognised the fallen figure. It was Bertie Winship, still in his clerical cassock.

These two were between me and a third figure who stood, or crouched, some yards in front of them. Even now I cannot, or will not describe it fully. Its colour was a greyish-green and its form was stooped with a vast elephantine head on which reposed the coronet that Bertie had discovered at the bottom of the well. Its superabundant flesh, which seemed to disintegrate into a thousand liquid limbs, quivered with infernal energy. It appeared to sway and stoop to the naked man’s chant—or was it the chant that swayed to its movement?

I drew and cocked the Dean’s service revolver. The naked man must have heard this or my footsteps approaching, because he turned and saw me.

“Get out, you damned fool!” he shrieked. “How dare you interfere?” It was Cutbirth, his evil baby features contorted with rage.

“I have come to take Bertie back,” I said.

“You cannot have him! He is already given to the gods. Go back, I tell you!”

At this, the creature let out a groaning screech which filled the cathedral cavern with hellish sound. Cutbirth turned his back on me and again addressed the monster:

“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh, wgah-nagl fhtagn—”

Having uttered his cry, he stooped and picked up from the ground something shining and curved like an oriental knife. Then, with his other hand, he gathered up the unconscious form of Bertie by the collar. Bertie’s head lolled back, unwittingly presenting his white throat to Cutbirth’s blade.

“Put him down or I shoot,” I said.

Cutbirth laughed. “You wouldn’t dare, you damned sandal-wearing, psalm-singing socialist!”

I pulled the trigger, but the wretched gun jammed. It was a heavy, clumsy old thing. I pulled the trigger again and the gun fired, but the shot went wide and the recoil nearly threw me onto my back. The echoes of the shot filled the cavern with a clatter like machine-gun fire.

Then, gripping the gun in both hands, I steadied myself and took aim at Cutbirth’s head. I fired again. The bullet missed Cutbirth by quite a margin, but it hit the creature which loomed before him. It went into one of its huge, milky eyes. The eye seemed to explode with the impact, spraying out torrents of green bile in the process. A hideous shriek filled the cavern.

Cutbirth dropped the knife and turned again towards me with rage and hatred in every knotted vein of his face. It was a fatal mistake. The beast, assuming that Cutbirth had been the perpetrator of the outrage against its eye, launched one of its great tentacle limbs against him, lashing him to the ground. Cutbirth scrambled to his feet and tried to make a run for it, but the beast was onto him with more of his limbs. A terrible unequal struggle ensued.

Meanwhile I ran towards the unconscious form of Bertie. I was glad to find he was not dead, just heavily drugged from some hideous narcotic that Cutbirth had pumped into him. I picked him up in a fireman’s lift and ran towards the little cavern entrance.

There I put Bertie down because there was not room enough to carry him on my back through the tunnel. I would have to drag him by the feet.

I took one last look into the cavern. The creature had Cutbirth wrapped in its limbs and their two heads were very close together. It looked horribly like a lover’s embrace. As the creature bent its head towards Cutbirth’s, I saw the man’s face for the last time. It was full of agonised fear, but also a wondering ecstasy, as if he half-welcomed the devouring kiss of his deity.

I heard a rustling and saw that the cavern was beginning to fill with other creatures, some bigger, some smaller than the one that was now feasting on Cutbirth. They were all piscine, shambling, unearthly, imbued with some sort of mind and power that was beyond my capacity to comprehend.

I took Bertie’s feet and began to drag him through the passage. As I was doing so he started to groan. Consciousness of a kind was returning to him, but he was still impossibly weak.

We reached the bottom of the well, and then I had to half-drag, half-carry him up the spiral staircase. It took an age.

When we reached the rope ladder I was faced with a problem. He was still too doped and feeble to climb it himself and I could not carry him up it on my back. Then I remembered the rope that I had tied to the staple at the bottom of the rope ladder.

I detached the rope from the staple and tied one end of the rope securely around Bertie’s waist. Then, taking the other end of the rope, I climbed with it to the top of the rope ladder. Dawn was breaking over the Cathedral as I clambered over the well parapet. Fortunately the Dean was still there.

With much heaving on the rope we managed to pull young Bertie to the top. He was just revived enough by this time to scramble over the well enclosure and flop exhausted onto the dewy lawn of the cloister garth.

Over the next few hours I managed to get some sort of a story out of him. The silly young blighter had still got the coronet with him when we had come out of the well the previous evening. He had then done something which exceeded even my estimation of his fat-headedness. He had taken it to show Felix Cutbirth.

Apparently, Bertie had struck up a weird sort of friendship with Cutbirth, owing to a mutual interest in folklore and local legend. It was undoubtedly Bertie who had alerted him to our schemes with regard to the well.

To cut a long story short, Cutbirth, no doubt with promises of “treasure chambers” and the like, persuaded young Bertie to take him to the well and make another descent in the small hours. Bertie’s memory collapses at this point, but one can guess the remainder.

We are both in a state of shock, and no doubt the reaction will hit us more heavily later on. Meanwhile, the Dean has given orders that the lid is to be put back on the well and the padlocks restored. But has the genie been put back in the bottle? I doubt it.

OCTOBER 5TH, 1938

This is the first time I have written in my journal for some days. I am recovering at Margate and my sister is with me. She takes me down to the front every day, puts me on a bench and tucks a plaid travelling rug around my knees, as if I were an elderly aunt with arthritis. I feel such a fool because there is really nothing wrong me, but every time I close my eyes they come. I can barely sleep, and when I do it is not long before I wake up screaming.

So I sit here watching the sea as it makes its slow gestures of advance and retreat upon the sand, like a sluggish invading army. Sometimes I fancy I see shapes forming themselves in the waves. I wait for them to resolve themselves into the monsters I once glimpsed, but mercifully they never do. One day beasts will come out of the waves, beasts of iron and steel, but not today.

I have just heard news of Bertie Winship. He had it worse than I did. He is in some sort of special Church of England nuthouse, but they tell me he makes a little progress. Bertie will recover, I feel sure of it, but he will never be the same Bertie he once was. Just as well, you may say, the perishing little pill! All the same, a part of me will regret the passing. By the end of it all we’ll none of us be the same.

I know now what I am going to do. I am going to resign my lectureship at Wessex and enlist in the South Morsetshire. Chaos is coming, rivers of blood will flow, and I feel it is better to be in the midst of chaos, than on the edge of it looking down into the black hole…

I must stop this.

It was St. Anselm himself who said: credo ut intelligam—“I believe so that I may understand”. I wish I did not believe. I wish to God I did not understand.