The Silver Key - H.P. Lovecraft

When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams. Prior to that time he had made up for the prosiness of life by nightly excursions to strange and ancient cities beyond space, and lovely, unbelievable garden lands across ethereal seas; but as middle age hardened upon him he felt those liberties slipping away little by little, until at last he was cut off altogether. No more could his galleys sail up the river Oukranos past the gilded spires of Thran, or his elephant caravans tramp through perfumed jungles in Kled, where forgotten palaces with veined ivory columns sleep lovely and unbroken under the moon.

He had read much of things as they are, and talked with too many people. Well-meaning philosophers had taught him to look into the logical relations of things, and analyse the processes which shaped his thoughts and fancies. Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other. Custom had dinned into his ears a superstitious reverence for that which tangibly and physically exists, and had made him secretly ashamed to dwell in visions. Wise men told him his simple fancies were inane and childish, and even more absurd because their actors persist in fancying them full of meaning and purpose as the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness.

They had chained him down to things that are, and had then explained the workings of those things till mystery had gone out of the world. When he complained, and longed to escape into twilight realms where magic moulded all the little vivid fragments and prized associations of his mind into vistas of breathless expectancy and unquenchable delight, they turned him instead toward the new-found prodigies of science, bidding him find wonder in the atom's vortex and mystery in the sky's dimensions. And when he had failed to find these boons in things whose laws are known and measurable, they told him he lacked imagination, and was immature because he preferred dream-illusions to the illusions of our physical creation.

So Carter had tried to do as others did, and pretended that the common events and emotions of earthy minds were more important than the fantasies of rare and delicate souls. He did not dissent when they told him that the animal pain of a stuck pig or dyspeptic ploughman in real life is a greater thing than the peerless beauty of Narath with its hundred carven gates and domes of chalcedony, which he dimly remembered from his dreams; and under their guidance he cultivated a painstaking sense of pity and tragedy.

Once in a while, though, he could not help seeing how shallow, fickle, and meaningless all human aspirations are, and how emptily our real impulses contrast with those pompous ideals we profess to hold. Then he would have recourse to the polite laughter they had taught him to use against the extravagance and artificiality of dreams; for he saw that the daily life of our world is every inch as extravagant and artificial, and far less worthy of respect because of its poverty in beauty and its silly reluctance to admit its own lack of reason and purpose. In this way he became a kind of humorist, for he did not see that even humour is empty in a mindless universe devoid of any true standard of consistency or inconsistency.

In the first days of his bondage he had turned to the gentle churchly faith endeared to him by the naive trust of his fathers, for thence stretched mystic avenues which seemed to promise escape from life. Only on closer view did he mark the starved fancy and beauty, the stale and prosy triteness, and the owlish gravity and grotesque claims of solid truth which reigned boresomely and overwhelmingly among most of its professors; or feel to the full the awkwardness with which it sought to keep alive as literal fact the outgrown fears and guesses of a primal race confronting the unknown. It wearied Carter to see how solemnly people tried to make earthly reality out of old myths which every step of their boasted science confuted, and this misplaced seriousness killed the attachment he might have kept for the ancient creeds had they been content to offer the sonorous rites and emotional outlets in their true guise of ethereal fantasy.

But when he came to study those who had thrown off the old myths, he found them even more ugly than those who had not. They did not know that beauty lies in harmony, and that loveliness of life has no standard amidst an aimless cosmos save only its harmony with the dreams and the feelings which have gone before and blindly moulded our little spheres out of the rest of chaos. They did not see that good and evil and beauty and ugliness are only ornamental fruits of perspective, whose sole value lies in their linkage to what chance made our fathers think and feel, and whose finer details are different for every race and culture. Instead, they either denied these things altogether or transferred them to the crude, vague instincts which they shared with the beasts and peasants; so that their lives were dragged malodorously out in pain, ugliness, and disproportion, yet filled with a ludicrous pride at having escaped from something no more unsound than that which still held them. They had traded the false gods of fear and blind piety for those of license and anarchy.

Carter did not taste deeply of these modern freedoms; for their cheapness and squalor sickened a spirit loving beauty alone while his reason rebelled at the flimsy logic with which their champions tried to gild brute impulse with a sacredness stripped from the idols they had discarded. He saw that most of them, in common with their cast-off priestcraft, could not escape from the delusion that life has a meaning apart from that which men dream into it; and could not lay aside the crude notion of ethics and obligations beyond those of beauty, even when all Nature shrieked of its unconsciousness and impersonal unmorality in the light of their scientific discoveries. Warped and bigoted with preconceived illusions of justice, freedom, and consistency, they cast off the old lore and the old way with the old beliefs; nor ever stopped to think that that lore and those ways were the sole makers of their present thoughts and judgments, and the sole guides and standards in a meaningless universe without fixed aims or stable points of reference. Having lost these artificial settings, their lives grew void of direction and dramatic interest; till at length they strove to drown their ennui in bustle and pretended usefulness, noise and excitement, barbaric display and animal sensation. When these things palled, disappointed, or grew nauseous through revulsion, they cultivated irony and bitterness, and found fault with the social order. Never could they realize that their brute foundations were as shifting and contradictory as the gods of their elders, and that the satisfaction of one moment is the bane of the next. Calm, lasting beauty comes only in a dream, and this solace the world had thrown away when in its worship of the real it threw away the secrets of childhood and innocence.

Amidst this chaos of hollowness and unrest Carter tried to live as befitted a man of keen thought and good heritage. With his dreams fading under the ridicule of the age he could not believe in anything, but the love of harmony kept him close to the ways of his race and station. He walked impassive through the cities of men, and sighed because no vista seemed fully real; because every flash of yellow sunlight on tall roofs and every glimpse of balustraded plazas in the first lamps of evening served only to remind him of dreams he had once known, and to make him homesick for ethereal lands he no longer knew how to find. Travel was only a mockery; and even the Great War stirred him but little, though he served from the first in the Foreign Legion of France. For a while he sought friends, but soon grew weary of the crudeness of their emotions, and the sameness and earthiness of their visions. He felt vaguely glad that all his relatives were distant and out of touch with him, for they would not have understood his mental life. That is, none but his grandfather and great-uncle Christopher could, and they were long dead.

Then he began once more the writing of books, which he had left off when dreams first failed him. But here, too, was there no satisfaction or fulfillment; for the touch of earth was upon his mind, and he could not think of lovely things as he had done of yore. Ironic humor dragged down all the twilight minarets he reared, and the earthy fear of improbability blasted all the delicate and amazing flowers in his faery gardens. The convention of assumed pity spilt mawkishness on his characters, while the myth of an important reality and significant human events and emotions debased all his high fantasy into thin-veiled allegory and cheap social satire. His new novels were successful as his old ones had never been; and because he knew how empty they must be to please an empty herd, he burned them and ceased his writing. They were very graceful novels, in which he urbanely laughed at the dreams he lightly sketched; but he saw that their sophistication had sapped all their life away.

It was after this that he cultivated deliberate illusion, and dabbled in the notions of the bizarre and the eccentric as an antidote for the commonplace. Most of these, however, soon showed their poverty and barrenness; and he saw that the popular doctrines of occultism are as dry and inflexible as those of science, yet without even the slender palliative of truth to redeem them. Gross stupidity, falsehood, and muddled thinking are not dream; and form no escape from life to a mind trained above their own level. So Carter bought stranger books and sought out deeper and more terrible men of fantastic erudition; delving into arcana of consciousness that few have trod, and learning things about the secret pits of life, legend, and immemorial antiquity which disturbed him ever afterward. He decided to live on a rarer plane, and furnished his Boston home to suit his changing moods; one room for each, hung in appropriate colours, furnished with befitting books and objects, and provided with sources of the proper sensations of light, heat, sound, taste, and odour.

Once he heard of a man in the south, who was shunned and feared for the blasphemous things he read in prehistoric books and clay tablets smuggled from India and Arabia. Him he visited, living with him and sharing his studies for seven years, till horror overtook them one midnight in an unknown and archaic graveyard, and only one emerged where two had entered. Then he went back to Arkham, the terrible witch-haunted old town of his forefathers in New England, and had experiences in the dark, amidst the hoary willows and tottering gambrel roofs, which made him seal forever certain pages in the diary of a wild-minded ancestor. But these horrors took him only to the edge of reality, and were not of the true dream country he had known in youth; so that at fifty he despaired of any rest or contentment in a world grown too busy for beauty and too shrewd for dreams.

Having perceived at last the hollowness and futility of real things, Carter spent his days in retirement, and in wistful disjointed memories of his dream-filled youth. He thought it rather silly that he bothered to keep on living at all, and got from a South American acquaintance a very curious liquid to take him to oblivion without suffering. Inertia and force of habit, however, caused him to defer action; and he lingered indecisively among thoughts of old times, taking down the strange hangings from his walls and refitting the house as it was in his early boyhood - purple panes, Victorian furniture, and all.

With the passage of time he became almost glad he had lingered, for his relics of youth and his cleavage from the world made life and sophistication seem very distant and unreal; so much so that a touch of magic and expectancy stole back into his nightly slumbers. For years those slumbers had known only such twisted reflections of every-day things as the commonest slumbers know, but now there returned a flicker of something stranger and wilder; something of vaguely awesome imminence which took the form of tensely clear pictures from his childhood days, and made him think of little inconsequential things he had long forgotten. He would often awake calling for his mother and grandfather, both in their graves a quarter of a century.

Then one night his grandfather reminded him of the key. The grey old scholar, as vivid as in life, spoke long and earnestly of their ancient line, and of the strange visions of the delicate and sensitive men who composed it. He spoke of the flame-eyed Crusader who learnt wild secrets of the Saracens that held him captive; and of the first Sir Randolph Carter who studied magic when Elizabeth was queen. He spoke, too, of that Edmund Carter who had just escaped hanging in the Salem witchcraft, and who had placed in an antique box a great silver key handed down from his ancestors. Before Carter awaked, the gentle visitant had told him where to find that box; that carved oak box of archaic wonder whose grotesque lid no hand had raised for two centuries.

In the dust and shadows of the great attic he found it, remote and forgotten at the back of a drawer in a tall chest. It was about a foot square, and its Gothic carvings were so fearful that he did not marvel no person since Edmund Carter had dared to open it. It gave forth no noise when shaken, but was mystic with the scent of unremembered spices. That it held a key was indeed only a dim legend, and Randolph Carter's father had never known such a box existed. It was bound in rusty iron, and no means was provided for working the formidable lock. Carter vaguely understood that he would find within it some key to the lost gate of dreams, but of where and how to use it his grandfather had told him nothing.

An old servant forced the carven lid, shaking as he did so at the hideous faces leering from the blackened wood, and at some unplaced familiarity. Inside, wrapped in a discoloured parchment, was a huge key of tarnished silver covered with cryptical arabesques; but of any legible explanation there was none. The parchment was voluminous, and held only the strange hieroglyphs of an unknown tongue written with an antique reed. Carter recognized the characters as those he had seen on a certain papyrus scroll belonging to that terrible scholar of the South who had vanished one midmght in a nameless cemetery. The man had always shivered when he read this scroll, and Carter shivered now.

But he cleaned the key, and kept it by him nightly in its aromatic box of ancient oak. His dreams were meanwhile increasing in vividness, and though showing him none of the strange cities and incredible gardens of the old days, were assuming a definite cast whose purpose could not be mistaken. They were calling him back along the years, and with the mingled wills of all his fathers were pulling him toward some hidden and ancestral source. Then he knew he must go into the past and merge himself with old things, and day after day he thought of the hills to the north where haunted Arkham and the rushing Miskatonic and the lonely rustic homestead of his people lay.

In the brooding fire of autumn Carter took the old remembered way past graceful lines of rolling hill and stone-walled meadow, distant vale and hanging woodland, curving road and nestling farmstead, and the crystal windings of the Miskatonic, crossed here and there by rustic bridges of wood or stone. At one bend he saw the group of giant elms among which an ancestor had oddly vanished a century and a half before, and shuddered as the wind blew meaningly through them. Then there was the crumbling farmhouse of old Goody Fowler the witch, with its little evil windows and great roof sloping nearly to the ground on the north side. He speeded up his car as he passed it, and did not slacken till he had mounted the hill where his mother and her fathers before her were born, and where the old white house still looked proudly across the road at the breathlessly lovely panorama of rocky slope and verdant valley, with the distant spires of Kingsport on the horizon, and hints of the archaic, dream-laden sea in the farthest background.

Then came the steeper slope that held the old Carter place he had not seen in over forty years. Afternoon was far gone when he reached the foot, and at the bend half way up he paused to scan the outspread countryside golden and glorified in the slanting floods of magic poured out by a western sun. All the strangeness and expectancy of his recent dreams seemed present in this hushed and unearthly landscape, and he thought of the unknown solitudes of other planets as his eyes traced out the velvet and deserted lawns shining undulant between their tumbled walls, and clumps of faery forest setting off far lines of purple hills beyond hills, and the spectral wooded valley dipping down in shadow to dank hollows where trickling waters crooned and gurgled among swollen and distorted roots.

Something made him feel that motors did not belong in the realm he was seeking, so he left his car at the edge of the forest, and putting the great key in his coat pocket walked on up the hill. Woods now engulfed him utterly, though he knew the house was on a high knoll that cleared the trees except to the north. He wondered how it would look, for it had been left vacant and untended through his neglect since the death of his strange great-uncle Christopher thirty years before. In his boyhood he had revelled through long visits there, and had found weird marvels in the woods beyond the orchard.

Shadows thickened around him, for the night was near. Once a gap in the trees opened up to the right, so that he saw off across leagues of twilight meadow and spied the old Congregational steeple on Central Hill in Kingsport; pink with the last flush of day, the panes of the little round windows blazing with reflected fire. Then, when he was in deep shadow again, he recalled with a start that the glimpse must have come from childish memory alone, since the old white church had long been torn down to make room for the Congregational Hospital. He had read of it with interest, for the paper had told about some strange burrows or passages found in the rocky hill beneath.

Through his puzzlement a voice piped, and he started again at its familiarity after long years. Old Benijah Corey had been his Uncle Christopher's hired man, and was aged even in those far-off times of his boyhood visits. Now he must be well over a hundred, but that piping voice could come from no one else. He could distinguish no words, yet the tone was haunting and unmistakable. To think that "Old Benijy" should still be alive!

"Mister Randy! Mister Randy! Wharbe ye? D'ye want to skeer yer Aunt Marthy plumb to death? Hain't she tuld ye to keep nigh the place in the arternoon an' git back afur dark? Randy! Ran... dee!... He's the beatin'est boy fer runnin' off in the woods I ever see; haff the time a-settin' moonin' raound that snake-den in the upper timberlot! ... Hey yew, Ran ... dee!"

Randolph Carter stopped in the pitch darkness and rubbed his hand across his eyes. Something was queer. He had been somewhere he ought not to be; had strayed very far away to places where he had not belonged, and was now inexcusably late. He had not noticed the time on the Kingsport steeple, though he could easily have made it out with his pocket telescope; but he knew his lateness was something very strange and unprecedented. He was not sure he had his little telescope with him, and put his hand in his blouse pocket to see. No, it was not there, but there was the big silver key he had found in a box somewhere. Uncle Chris had told him something odd once about an old unopened box with a key in it, but Aunt Martha had stopped the story abruptly, saying it was no kind of thing to tell a child whose head was already too full of queer fancies. He tried to recall just where he had found the key, but something seemed very confused. He guessed it was in the attic at home in Boston, and dimly remembered bribing Parks with half his week's allowance to help him open the box and keep quiet about it; but when he remembered this, the face of Parks came up very strangely, as if the wrinkles of long years had fallen upon the brisk little Cockney.

"Ran ... dee! Ran ... dee! Hi! Hi! Randy!"

A swaying lantern came around the black bend, and old Benijah pounced on the silent and bewildered form of the pilgrim.

"Durn ye, boy, so thar ye be! Ain't ye got a tongue in yer head, that ye can't answer a body! I ben callin' this haff hour, an' ye must a heerd me long ago! Dun't ye know yer Aunt Marthy's all a-fidget over yer bein' off arter dark? Wait till I tell yer Uncle Chris when he gits hum! Ye'd orta know these here woods ain't no fitten place to be traipsin' this hour! They's things abroad what dun't do nobody no good, as my gran'-sir knowed afur me. Come, Mister Randy, or Hannah wunt keep supper no longer!"

So Randolph Carter was marched up the road where wondering stars glimmered through high autumn boughs. And dogs barked as the yellow light of small-paned windows shone out at the farther turn, and the Pleiades twinkled across the open knoll where a great gambrel roof stood black against the dim west. Aunt Martha was in the doorway, and did not scold too hard when Benijah shoved the truant in. She knew Uncle Chris well enough to expect such things of the Carter blood. Randolph did not show his key, but ate his supper in silence and protested only when bedtime came. He sometimes dreamed better when awake, and he wanted to use that key.

In the morning Randolph was up early, and would have run off to the upper timberlot if Uncle Chris had not caught him and forced him into his chair by the breakfast table. He looked impatiently around the low-pitched room with the rag carpet and exposed beams and corner-posts, and smiled only when the orchard boughs scratched at the leaded panes of the rear window. The trees and the hills were close to him, and formed the gates of that timeless realm which was his true country.

Then, when he was free, he felt in his blouse pocket for the key; and being reassured, skipped off across the orchard to the rise beyond, where the wooded hill climbed again to heights above even the treeless knoll. The floor of the forest was mossy and mysterious, and great lichened rocks rose vaguely here and there in the dim light like Druid monoliths among the swollen and twisted trunks of a sacred grove. Once in his ascent Randolph crossed a rushing stream whose falls a little way off sang runic incantations to the lurking fauns and aegipans and dryads.

Then he came to the strange cave in the forest slope, the dreaded "snake-den" which country folk shunned, and away from which Benijah had warned him again and again. It was deep; far deeper than anyone but Randolph suspected, for the boy had found a fissure in the farthermost black corner that led to a loftier grotto beyond - a haunting sepulchral place whose granite walls held a curious illusion of conscious artifice. On this occasion he crawled in as usual, lighting his way with matches filched from the sitting-room matchsafe, and edging through the final crevice with an eagerness hard to explain even to himself. He could not tell why he approached the farther wall so confidently, or why he instinctively drew forth the great silver key as he did so. But on he went, and when he danced back to the house that night he offered no excuses for his lateness, nor heeded in the least the reproofs he gained for ignoring the noon-tide dinner-horn altogether.

Now it is agreed by all the distant relatives of Randolph Carter that something occurred to heighten his imagination in his tenth year. His cousin, Ernest B. Aspinwall, Esq., of Chicago, is fully ten years his senior; and distinctly recalls a change in the boy after the autumn of 1883. Randolph had looked on scenes of fantasy that few others can ever have beheld, and stranger still were some of the qualities which he showed in relation to very mundane things. He seemed, in fine, to have picked up an odd gift of prophecy; and reacted unusually to things which, though at the time without meaning, were later found to justify the singular impressions. In subsequent decades as new inventions, new names, and new events appeared one by one in the book of history, people would now and then recall wonderingly how Carter had years before let fall some careless word of undoubted connection with what was then far in the future. He did not himself understand these words, or know why certain things made him feel certain emotions; but fancied that some unremembered dream must be responsible. It was as early as 1897 that he turned pale when some traveller mentioned the French town of Belloy-en-Santerre, and friends remembered it when he was almost mortally wounded there in 1916, while serving with the Foreign Legion in the Great War.

Carter's relatives talk much of these things because he has lately disappeared. His little old servant Parks, who for years bore patiently with his vagaries, last saw him on the morning he drove off alone in his car with a key he had recently found. Parks had helped him get the key from the old box containing it, and had felt strangely affected by the grotesque carvings on the box, and by some other odd quality he could not name. When Carter left, he had said he was going to visit his old ancestral country around Arkham.

Half way up Elm Mountain, on the way to the ruins of the old Carter place, they found his motor set carefully by the roadside; and in it was a box of fragrant wood with carvings that frightened the countrymen who stumbled on it. The box held only a queer parchment whose characters no linguist or palaeographer has been able to decipher or identify. Rain had long effaced any possible footprints, though Boston investigators had something to say about evidences of disturbances among the fallen timbers of the Carter place. It was, they averred, as though someone had groped about the ruins at no distant period. A common white handkerchief found among forest rocks on the hillside beyond cannot be identified as belonging to the missing man.

There is talk of apportioning Randolph Carter's estate among his heirs, but I shall stand firmly against this course because I do not believe he is dead. There are twists of time and space, of vision and reality, which only a dreamer can divine; and from what I know of Carter I think he has merely found a way to traverse these mazes. Whether or not he will ever come back, I cannot say. He wanted the lands of dream he had lost, and yearned for the days of his childhood. Then he found a key, and I somehow believe he was able to use it to strange advantage.

I shall ask him when I see him, for I expect to meet him shortly in a certain dream-city we both used to haunt. It is rumoured in Ulthar, beyond the River Skai, that a new king reigns on the opal throne of Ilek-Vad, that fabulous town of turrets atop the hollow cliffs of glass overlooking the twilight sea wherein the bearded and finny Gnorri build their singular labyrinths, and I believe I know how to interpret this rumour. Certainly, I look forward impatiently to the sight of that great silver key, for in its cryptical arabesques there may stand symbolised all the aims and mysteries of a blindly impersonal cosmos.

The Statement of Randolph Carter - H. P. Lovecraft

Again I say, I do not know what has become of Harley Warren, though I think--almost hope--that he is in peaceful oblivion, if there be anywhere so blessed a thing. It is true that I have for five years been his closest friend, and a partial sharer of his terrible researches into the unknown. I will not deny, though my memory is uncertain and indistinct, that this witness of yours may have seen us together as he says, on the Gainsville pike, walking toward Big Cypress Swamp, at half past 11 on that awful night. That we bore electric lanterns, spades, and a curious coil of wire with attached instruments, I will even affirm; for these things all played a part in the single hideous scene which remains burned into my shaken recollection. But of what followed, and of the reason I was found alone and dazed on the edge of the swamp next morning, I must insist that I know nothing save what I have told you over and over again. You say to me that there is nothing in the swamp or near it which could form the setting of that frightful episode. I reply that I knew nothing beyond what I saw. Vision or nightmare it may have been--vision or nightmare I fervently hope it was--yet it is all that my mind retains of what took place in those shocking hours after we left the sight of men. And why Harley Warren did not return, he or his shade--or some nameless thing I cannot describe-- alone can tell.

As I have said before, the weird studies of Harley Warren were well known to me, and to some extent shared by me. Of his vast collection of strange, rare books on forbidden subjects I have read all that are written in the languages of which I am master; but these are few as compared with those in languages I cannot understand. Most, I believe, are in Arabic; and the fiend-inspired book which brought on the end--the book which he carried in his pocket out of the world--was written in characters whose like I never saw elsewhere. Warren would never tell me just what was in that book. As to the nature of our studies--must I say again that I no longer retain full comprehension? It seems to me rather merciful that I do not, for they were terrible studies, which I pursued more through reluctant fascination than through actual inclination. Warren always dominated me, and sometimes I feared him. I remember how I shuddered at his facial expression on the night before the awful happening, when he talked so incessantly of his theory, why certain corpses never decay, but rest firm and fat in their tombs for a thousand years. But I do not fear him now, for I suspect that he has known horrors beyond my ken. Now I fear for him.

Once more I say that I have no clear idea of our object on that night. Certainly, it had much to do with something in the book which Warren carried with him--that ancient book in undecipherable characters which had come to him from India a month before--but I swear I do not know what it was that we expected to find. Your witness says he saw us at half past 11 on the Gainsville pike, headed for Big Cypress Swamp. This is probably true, but I have no distinct memory of it. The picture seared into my soul is of one scene only, and the hour must have been long after midnight; for a waning crescent moon was high in the vaporous heavens.

The place was an ancient cemetery; so ancient that I trembled at the manifold signs of immemorial years. It was in a deep, damp hollow, overgrown with rank grass, moss, and curious creeping weeds, and filled with a vague stench which my idle fancy associated absurdly with rotting stone. On every hand were the signs of neglect and decrepitude, and I seemed haunted by the notion that Warren and I were the first living creatures to invade a lethal silence of centuries. Over the valley's rim a wan, waning crescent moon peered through the noisome vapors that seemed to emanate from unheard of catacombs, and by its feeble, wavering beams I could distinguish a repellent array of antique slabs, urns, cenotaphs, and mausoleum facades; all crumbling, moss-grown, and moisture-stained, and partly concealed by the gross luxuriance of the unhealthy vegetation.

My first vivid impression of my own presence in this terrible necropolis concerns the act of pausing with Warren before a certain half- obliterated sepulcher and of throwing down some burdens which we seemed to have been carrying. I now observed that I had with me an electric lantern and two spades, whilst my companion was supplied with a similar lantern and a portable telephone outfit. No word was uttered, for the spot and the task seemed known to us; and without delay we seized our spades and commenced to clear away the grass, weeds, and drifted earth from the flat, archaic mortuary. After uncovering the entire surface, which consisted of three immense granite slabs, we stepped back some distance to survey the charnel scene; and Warren appeared to make some mental calculations. Then he returned to the sepulcher, and using his spade as a lever, sought to pry up the slab lying nearest to a stony ruin which may have been a monument in its day. He did not succeed, and motioned to me to come to his assistance. Finally our combined strength loosened the stone, which we raised and tipped to one side.

The removal of the slab revealed a black aperture, from which rushed an effluence of miasmal gases so nauseous that we started back in horror. After an interval, however, we approached the pit again, and found the exhalations less unbearable. Our lanterns disclosed the top of a flight of stone steps, dripping with some detestable ichor of the inner earth, and bordered by moist walls encrusted with niter. And now for the first time my memory records verbal discourse, Warren addressing me at length in his mellow tenor voice; a voice singularly unperturbed by our awesome surroundings.

"I'm sorry to have to ask you to stay on the surface," he said, "but it would be a crime to let anyone with your frail nerves go down there. You can't imagine, even from what you have read and from what I've told you, the things I shall have to see and do. It's fiendish work, Carter, and I doubt if any man without ironclad sensibilities could ever see it through and come up alive and sane. I don't wish to offend you, and Heaven knows I'd be glad enough to have you with me; but the responsibility is in a certain sense mine, and I couldn't drag a bundle of nerves like you down to probable death or madness. I tell you, you can't imagine what the thing is really like! But I promise to keep you informed over the telephone of every move--you see I've enough wire here to reach to the center of the earth and back!"

I can still hear, in memory, those coolly spoken words; and I can still remember my remonstrances. I seemed desperately anxious to accompany my friend into those sepulchral depths, yet he proved inflexibly obdurate. At one time he threatened to abandon the expedition if I remained insistent; a threat which proved effective, since he alone held the key to the thing. All this I can still remember, though I no longer know what manner of thing we sought. After he had obtained my reluctant acquiescence in his design, Warren picked up the reel of wire and adjusted the instruments. At his nod I took one of the latter and seated myself upon an aged, discolored gravestone close by the newly uncovered aperture. Then he shook my hand, shouldered the coil of wire, and disappeared within that indescribable ossuary.

For a minute I kept sight of the glow of his lantern, and heard the rustle of the wire as he laid it down after him; but the glow soon disappeared abruptly, as if a turn in the stone staircase had been encountered, and the sound died away almost as quickly. I was alone, yet bound to the unknown depths by those magic strands whose insulated surface lay green beneath the struggling beams of that waning crescent moon.

I constantly consulted my watch by the light of my electric lantern, and listened with feverish anxiety at the receiver of the telephone; but for more than a quarter of an hour heard nothing. Then a faint clicking came from the instrument, and I called down to my friend in a tense voice. Apprehensive as I was, I was nevertheless unprepared for the words which came up from that uncanny vault in accents more alarmed and quivering than any I had heard before from Harley Warren. He who had so calmly left me a little while previously, now called from below in a shaky whisper more portentous than the loudest shriek:

"God! If you could see what I am seeing!"

I could not answer. Speechless, I could only wait. Then came the frenzied tones again:

"Carter, it's terrible--monstrous--unbelievable!"

This time my voice did not fail me, and I poured into the transmitter a flood of excited questions. Terrified, I continued to repeat, "Warren, what is it? What is it?"

Once more came the voice of my friend, still hoarse with fear, and now apparently tinged with despair:

"I can't tell you, Carter! It's too utterly beyond thought--I dare not tell you--no man could know it and live--Great God! I never dreamed of this!"

Stillness again, save for my now incoherent torrent of shuddering inquiry. Then the voice of Warren in a pitch of wilder consternation:

"Carter! for the love of God, put back the slab and get out of this if you can! Quick!--leave everything else and make for the outside--it's your only chance! Do as I say, and don't ask me to explain!"

I heard, yet was able only to repeat my frantic questions. Around me were the tombs and the darkness and the shadows; below me, some peril beyond the radius of the human imagination. But my friend was in greater danger than I, and through my fear I felt a vague resentment that he should deem me capable of deserting him under such circumstances. More clicking, and after a pause a piteous cry from Warren:

"Beat it! For God's sake, put back the slab and beat it, Carter!"

Something in the boyish slang of my evidently stricken companion unleashed my faculties. I formed and shouted a resolution, "Warren, brace up! I'm coming down!" But at this offer the tone of my auditor changed to a scream of utter despair:

"Don't! You can't understand! It's too late--and my own fault. Put back the slab and run--there's nothing else you or anyone can do now!"

The tone changed again, this time acquiring a softer quality, as of hopeless resignation. Yet it remained tense through anxiety for me.

"Quick--before it's too late!"

I tried not to heed him; tried to break through the paralysis which held me, and to fulfil my vow to rush down to his aid. But his next whisper found me still held inert in the chains of stark horror.

"Carter--hurry! It's no use--you must go--better one than two--the slab--"

A pause, more clicking, then the faint voice of Warren:

"Nearly over now--don't make it harder--cover up those damned steps and run for your life--you're losing time--so long, Carter--won't see you again."

Here Warren's whisper swelled into a cry; a cry that gradually rose to a shriek fraught with all the horror of the ages--

"Curse these hellish things--legions--My God! Beat it! Beat it! BEAT IT!"

After that was silence. I know not how many interminable eons I sat stupefied; whispering, muttering, calling, screaming into that telephone. Over and over again through those eons I whispered and muttered, called, shouted, and screamed, "Warren! Warren! Answer me--are you there?"

And then there came to me the crowning horror of all--the unbelievable, unthinkable, almost unmentionable thing. I have said that eons seemed to elapse after Warren shrieked forth his last despairing warning, and that only my own cries now broke the hideous silence. But after a while there was a further clicking in the receiver, and I strained my ears to listen. Again I called down, "Warren, are you there?" and in answer heard the thing which has brought this cloud over my mind. I do not try, gentlemen, to account for that thing--that voice--nor can I venture to describe it in detail, since the first words took away my consciousness and created a mental blank which reaches to the time of my awakening in the hospital. Shall I say that the voice was deep; hollow; gelatinous; remote; unearthly; inhuman; disembodied? What shall I say? It was the end of my experience, and is the end of my story. I heard it, and knew no more--heard it as I sat petrified in that unknown cemetery in the hollow, amidst the crumbling stones and the falling tombs, the rank vegetation and the miasmal vapors-- heard it well up from the innermost depths of that damnable open sepulcher as I watched amorphous, necrophagous shadows dance beneath an accursed waning moon.

And this is what it said:

"You fool, Warren is DEAD!"

The Man Behind the Cthulhu Mythos

Howard Phillips Lovecraft, American poet and author of macabre short novels, was born on 20 August 1890 in Providence, Rhode Island. He came from distinguished British ancestry on both sides of his family. His mother made him wear his hair long until the age of six and treated him like a girl. His father was Winfield Scott Lovecraft a travelling salesman, who went mad, probably from syphilis and died when his son was five. At the time of his birth Lovecraft's family was quite well-to-do, most of the wealth derived from the extensive business interests of Lovecraft's maternal grandfather, Whipple Van Buren Phillips. This prosperity, however, was not to last. At the death of Whipple Phillips in 1904 his fortune was squandered and the Lovecrafts were forced to move out of their Victorian home into cramped quarters at 598 Angell Street. Lovecraft was devastated by the loss of his birthplace, and apparently contemplated suicide, as he took long bicycle rides and looked wistfully at the watery depths of the Barrington River. But the thrill of learning banished those thoughts. Lovecraft suffered from terrifying nightly disturbances and nightmares which lasted until his own death. This deeply personal material also marked his stories.

Lovecraft was a precocious youth: he was reciting poetry at age two, reading at age three, and writing at age six or seven. His earliest enthusiasm was for the Arabian Nights, which he read by the age of five; it was at this time that he adapted the pseudonym of “Abdul Alhazred,” who later became the author of the mythical Necronomicon. The next year, however, his Arabian interests were eclipsed by the discovery of Greek mythology, gleaned through Bulfinch’s Age of Fable and through children’s versions of the Iliad and Odyssey. But Lovecraft had by this time already discovered weird fiction, and his interest in the weird was fostered by his grandfather, who entertained Lovecraft with off-the-cuff weird tales in the Gothic mode.

Lovecraft grew up as a fringe member of the conservative New England aristocracy, and was educated at local schools. He was somewhat lonely and suffered from frequent illnesses, many of them apparently psychological. His attendance at the Slater Avenue School was sporadic, and he was often kept away from school by his overprotective mother, but Lovecraft was soaking up much information through independent reading. At about the age of eight he discovered science, first chemistry, then astronomy. During this time he found the works of Edgar Allan Poe, who had visited several times the library in Province, and whose model inspired Lovecraft in his literary aspirations. He also read works by Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James, and Lord Dunsany (1878-1957), who inspired him to write the short novel The dream-quest of unknown Kadath (1926).


Lovecraft later believed that Hellenism and astronomy were the two central influences of his early years, the latter especially because it led directly to his "cosmic" philosophy wherein mankind and the world are but a flyspeck amidst the vortices of infinite space. Lovecraft’s first appearance in print occurred in 1906, when he wrote a letter on an astronomical matter to The Providence Sunday Journal. Shortly thereafter he began writing a monthly astronomy column for The Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner, a rural paper; he later wrote columns for The Providence Tribune (1906-08) and The Providence Evening News (1914-18), as well as The Asheville (N.C.) Gazette-News (1915). It was in the amateur world that Lovecraft recommenced the writing of fiction, which he had abandoned in 1908. W. Paul Cook and others, noting the promise shown in such early tales as The Beast in the Cave (1905) and The Alchemist (1908), urged Lovecraft to pick up his fictional pen again. This Lovecraft did, writing The Tomb and Dagon in quick succession in the summer of 1917. Thereafter Lovecraft kept up a steady if sparse flow of fiction, although until at least 1922 poetry and essays were still his dominant mode of literary expression. Lovecraft also became involved in an ever-increasing network of correspondence with friends and associates, and he eventually became one of the greatest and most prolific letter-writers of the century. L. Sprague de Camp has claimed in Lovecraft: A Biography (1975) that the author wrote over 1000,000 letters. At the age of 27 he was still at home, writing gloomy tales. He was eventually offered the job of editor at the magazine Weird Tales, but he turned the offer down.

Lovecraft was virtually unknown most of his career as a writer. His posthumous fame, particularly in America and France, rests on his Cthulhu Mythos stories that lead him to become a cult figure in the genre of horror fiction. He is considered the most original American writer of weird fiction subsequent to Edgar Allan Poe. Lovecraft's imaginary town in his tales, Arkham, was based on his home town of Providence. He never wrote (or, rather, sold) enough fiction to be a professional writer; instead, his income was provided by an ever-dwindling family inheritance and by the dreary task of literary revision and ghost-writing. This work ran the gamut from textbooks to poetry to novels to articles; but on occasion Lovecraft attracted revision clients who wished to write horror tales, and his "revisions" of the works of such tyros as Hazel Heald, Zealia Bishop, Adolphe de Castro, and others are often tantamount to original composition.

Lovecraft's mother died in 1921, when the author was 31. Mrs. Lovecraft, her frail constitution destroyed by the death of her husband under peculiar circumstances and pathologically overprotective of her only child, died in a sanitarium; the immediate cause of death, however, was a badly managed gall bladder operation. Lovecraft continued to live with his two aunts. His marriage in 1924 with Sonia Greene, who was seven years his senior, lasted only until 1926.

Lovecraft's fiction turned from the nostalgic -- The Shunned House (1924), set in Providence -- to the bitter: He and The Horror at Red Hook (1925) laid bare his feelings about New York, and the ending of the former tale encapsulates his yearning to return to the tranquil and familiar world of New England.

His later works show that he was beginning to outgrow from the genre of horror in the direction of science fiction - among others The Colour Out of Space and The Shadow Out of Time from his mature period were first published in science fiction magazines.

Most of Lovecraft's short stories appeared in the magazine Weird Tales, beginning in 1923. His works from the early phase include The Tomb, The Statement of Randolph Carter, Rats in the Wall, The Shunned House, From Beyond, and Cool Air, all written with more or less conventional scenarios. Lovecraft often used the first-person narrator, who is a scientist or scholar. The narrator witnesses horrors that contradict his beliefs, and going gradually insane he must face his destiny.

After two years in New York, where Lovecraft was horrified with its oppressive size, the hordes of "aliens" at every corner, its emphasis on speed, money, and commercialism, he returned to Providence on April 17, 1926, where he spent with his aunts the rest of his life. The last ten years of his life were the time of his greatest flowering, both as a writer and as a human being. He nurtured the careers of many young writers (August Derleth, Donald Wandrei, Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber); he became concerned with political and economic issues, as the Great Depression led him to support Roosevelt and become a moderate socialist; and he continued absorbing knowledge on a wide array of subjects, from philosophy to the New England heritage, evoking its topography, history and society. This mature period produced such stories as The Colour Out of Space, The Dunwich Horror, The Shadow over Innsmouth, The Thing on the Doorstep, The Dreams in the Witch House. Many of Lovecraft's tales utilize a pseudo-mythical framework, termed the Cthulhu Mythos. His best-known work in the series is The call of Cthulhu (1928), where he created his basic myth of the Elder Race. It once dominated the Earth, but largely destroyed itself. Its members now lie sleeping somewhere under the sea or underground. In this cosmic scheme of things, humans were reduced to a position of hapless victims, who are not important for the incomprehensible forces.

His later stories, increasingly lengthy and complex, became difficult to sell, and he was forced to support himself largely through the “revision” or ghost-writing of stories, poetry, and nonfictions works. In 1936 the suicide of Robert E. Howard, one of his closest correspondents, left him confused and saddened. By this time the illness that would cause his own death – cancer of the intestine – had already progressed so far that little could be done to treat it and he died from a combination of cancer Bright's disease on March 15, 1937 at the Jane Brown Memorial Hospital in Providence. He was buried in the family plot in the Swan Point Cemetery. Lovecraft's friends August Derleth and Donald Wandrei set up in 1939 a publishing house for his work, Arkham House, and the author's books have remained in print ever since. Only recently has a separate marker been erected on his grave, the funds contributed by many of his posthumous admirers; the stone reads: "I am Providence".

source: booksfactory.com

H.P. Lovecraft and Paranormal

Image via WikipediaDreamer of the Dark

Was the most influential horror writer of the 20th century a believer in the paranormal? DANIEL HARMS examines the evidence.

Mention of the name Howard Phillips Lovecraft might elicit nothing more than a noncommittal shrug from most people, but for fans of the macabre he is still a revered figure, held in awe for his unique literary visions of cosmic horror.

Lovecraft spent most of his life (1890-1937) in Providence, Rhode Island. The last son of a once-wealthy family, he devoted his life to literature, soon finding that his strengths lay in tales of the uncanny. These stories attracted a small following among the readers of Weird Tales and other pulp magazines, and his correspondents included a formidable roster of early horror writers. Since his early death, the popularity of his work has grown – in ways he could never have imagined – inspiring countless stories and novels, films, cartoons, games and even cuddly toys.

His tales have continued to compel readers because of their convincing melding of fact and fantasy and their evocation of a world both phantasmagoric and believable at the same time. The stories serve as a loosely constructed chronicle of the "Old Ones," alien creatures from other worlds and other dimensions. The Old Ones include the mindless chaos Azathoth; the Black Goat of the Woods, Shub-Niggurath; and Cthulhu, a winged squid-like god who lives in a sunken city in the Pacific. Once, in the planet’s distant past, the Old Ones lived on Earth, but eventually they fell into an æons-long sleep. Their worshippers, including the fish-men known as the "deep ones," and the crustacean-like fungi from the planet Yuggoth (Pluto) are still awake and sometimes menace humanity. Books such as the infamous Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred hold the Old Ones’ lore, and cults around the world work their rituals in the hope that their masters will return to rule again.

Given the power of his vision, many have speculated on just how much Lovecraft knew about the occult. Some occultists hail him as the prophet of a new Dark Age, claiming that his fiction bears genuine traces of ancient knowledge and re-emerging archetypes from the depths of our collective unconscious. Yet, all too often, their conclusions are based on guesswork, rather than the evidence of his own writing. Fortunately for us, he had perhaps one of the best-documented lives in literary history, writing approximately 100,000 letters over his 46 years. Through these letters, and other newly discovered sources, a glimpse into the reality of Lovecraft’s occult lore is finally possible.

Lovecraft as Debunker

To begin with, it’s clear that Lovecraft himself had no belief whatsoever in the occult. As a youth, he had come to doubt the Christian faith of his family, and explored the beliefs of the Greeks, Muslims, Egyptians, and Hindus. None of these satisfied him, and he turned to atheism and scepticism as the only possible alternatives. In 1925, he wrote to his friend Clark Ashton Smith, saying: "I am, indeed, an absolute materialist so far as actual belief goes; with not a shred of credence in any form of supernaturalism – religion, spiritualism, transcendentalism, metempsychosis, or immortality". Anyone who wrote to him asking if the gods and occult tomes mentioned in his stories were real would receive a polite letter stating his disbelief in such notions.

He was not merely a passive believer in a philosophy of scepticism, but a passionate missionary for his creed. He wrote letters to local newspapers attacking claims of the Hollow Earth and astrology. These letters may contain more vitriol than reasoned critique, but they nonetheless make their points effectively and entertainingly. Such debates also raged in his letters, for he kept a wide circle of friends with widely differing perspectives from his own. If he were alive today, Lovecraft would probably be a strong supporter of CSICOP.

Lovecraft’s scepticism was so vehement that, at one point, it almost brought him a book deal. The celebrated stage magician Harry Houdini was known as a debunker of spiritualists and quacks. Lovecraft revised a fictionalised account of one of Houdini’s adventures, in which the conjuror escapes bandits and far worse things in the tunnels beneath the Great Pyramids ("Imprisoned with the Pharaohs"). Houdini was happy with the rewrite, and the two exchanged letters discussing future collaborations. Along with Providence author C M Eddy, they decided to write a book called The Cancer of Superstition, which they thought would strike a final blow against credulity. Houdini’s death in 1926 put an end to the project; if what survives is anything to go by, it was no great loss, the authors’ names being the book’s most interesting feature.

Nevertheless, Lovecraft was at least somewhat familiar with the literature of occultism, especially in his later years. At the time of his death, his library contained such works as Lewis Spence’s Encyclopædia of Occultism, Sir Walter Scott’s Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft, Camille Flammarion’s Haunted Houses, and a variety of works on ghosts, folklore, and mythology. This was not the end of the matter, as Lovecraft also borrowed a number of occult works – as well as Charles Fort’s Book of the Damned and New Lands – from libraries and his friends, most notably Herman C Koenig of New York City. (Interestingly, Lovecraft actually mentions Fort by name in a couple of stories.). Lovecraft, then, was hardly an authority on matters esoteric and uncanny, but he had some basic knowledge that he incorporated into his tales.

New England folklore

To understand Lovecraft’s writing, we must first understand New England. The work is permeated with a love of the old lanes, ancient houses, winding alleys, and sunset skylines of this region. He travelled across the eastern United States and lived (unhappily) for a time in New York City, yet he always returned to Providence and New England. He conducted a good deal of research into the area’s folktales, coming across a number of legends that worked their way into his fiction.

The prize of his library was an old edition of Cotton Mather’s Magnalia Christi Americana. Mather (1663-1728) was a noted New England minister, whose writings encouraged the belief in witchcraft and indirectly led to the Salem witch-trials. Mather devotes one section of the book to the witch-trials, and another to miraculous and supernatural events – witch-findings, ghosts, supernatural warnings, and examples of poltergeist phenomena.

One of Mather’s sermons, reprinted in Magnalia, tells of the punishments God inflicted upon sinners. One prominent figure in the sermon is a young man with a distinctive blemish in his eye, who commits bestiality. His sin is exposed when a farm animal gives birth to an abomination bearing the same mark. The man confesses what he has done, and the local authorities have him executed.

When Lovecraft visited Salem in 1923, its old houses and quaint squares gave him a wonderful thrill. There, in the Charter Street Burying Ground, he found a willow growing around a shattered gravestone, with a crumbling old house beyond it. This house, which still stands, was once the home of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fiancée, and served as the inspiration for that author’s "Dr. Grimshawe’s Secret". The house made a deep impression on Lovecraft, who was also aware of the strand of folklore concerning New England families who kept ill or deformed relatives hidden in the attic. Weaving these elements together with Mather’s account, he created "The Unnamable".

In the story, two men sit in a cemetery and discuss whether anything can be "unnameable." Joel Manton asserts that nothing can bear such a label, save in a cheap horror story, but the narrator insists that such a thing can indeed exist, and alludes to Mather’s story. In this version, the half-human monstrosity grows into a beast that terrorises the countryside, attacking people on the roads and slaying the parson and his family. The townsfolk lock the monster in the attic of its father’s house, where it dies. The narrator ends his demonstration by stating that he found the creature’s bones and buried them – in the grave on which the two men are sitting. As this revelation is made, the monster reappears and attacks the unfortunate pair.

The Salem witch-trials of 1692 form a common motif in Lovecraft’s fiction. While he didn’t believe in witches, he was fascinated with what he saw as the morbidity of the Puritan lifestyle and the executions that had happened only a short train-ride away from 20th century Providence. While he never wrote a story centring on the witch trials, Lovecraft mingled them with other occult beliefs to create his own literary version of such events.

"Pickman’s Model" is the story of Richard Upton Pickman, a gifted painter from an old Salem family, one of whose ancestors was hanged during the witch-trials. Pickman’s paintings are of undeniable genius, but are so morbid that all the local artists ostracise him. Stinging with this rejection, Pickman brings his friend Thurber to a secret apartment in Boston’s North End, where he shows him a hideous series of paintings suggesting that the witches dealt with corpse-eating monsters that burrow beneath cemeteries and cities. In the end, it is revealed that they have more than a little to do with Pickman’s own dark heritage…

In "The Dreams in the Witch-House", a witch named Keziah Mason is imprisoned in the Salem jail, but escapes the authorities by drawing a curious design in blood on the wall of her cell. Such a magical diagram is a common motif in supernatural fiction, but Mason’s mastery of space and time is not due to any knowledge of ‘magic’ in the traditional sense. Rather, she enters other dimensions through her use of advanced mathematics and geometry, and creeps back to our world centuries later to find converts and sacrifices. She decides that a young mathematics student would be the perfect acolyte, and uses her powers and those of her familiar – the rat-like Brown Jenkin – to draw him into her sorcery. As fantasy author Fritz Leiber pointed out, this was one of the first uses of the mathematical concept of hyperspace in fiction.

The Vampires of Providence

Lovecraft’s "The Shunned House" may not be his most famous tale, but it contains one of the most striking uses of folklore in a horror story. He did not take any aspect of the story from just one source, but mixed and matched various elements to fit his own ends.

"The Shunned House" tells of a building on Benefit Street in Providence noted for the ill health of its tenants. When the narrator’s investigation begins, the house is abandoned. As a child, he visits the house, noting its air of desolation and a curious, anthropomorphic patch of phosphorescent mould in the basement. Going back through its history, he discovers tales of illness and creeping insanity engulfing its inhabitants, dating back to the time of the first builders. Invalids die shrieking about monsters, while some mutter in French, a language of which they have no knowledge. Later, it is revealed that the house was built on the site of the Roulet family graveyard – which nobody troubled to move when Benefit Street was straightened. The narrator informs his uncle, a historian, of these strange findings, and the two visit the house with scientific instruments – not to mention flame-throwers! – to put the horror to rest. Yet, the spirit that resides in the house is not easily defeated.

If the ‘Shunned House’ really existed, one might expect it to be a dark and forbidding dwelling, whispered about in local folklore. Yet the house which is most likely to have inspired the tale is nothing of the sort; now painted yellow, its cellar doors still open directly onto the sidewalk, and part of the overgrown yard is now a community garden. Lovecraft mentions in his letters that the house had a foreboding air, and that his aunt once lived there for a short time in the early 1920s.

Some scholars have sought the tale’s inspiration in local legends of the vampire. While the word conjures up images of castles perched high in the mountains of Transylvania, similar sources lay closer to home. As recently as a century ago, some Rhode Islanders believed in these monsters. In 1892, a wasting disease, now thought to be tuberculosis, struck the Brown family of Exeter. The locals became convinced that the dead family members fed off the living in spirit form, dragging their brothers and sisters with them to the grave. Digging up one of the daughters, Mercy Brown, they found her body fresh and seeping blood. The family burned the young woman’s heart to ashes and fed them to her brother, in an unsuccessful attempt to cure him. Christopher Rondina’s book The Vampire-Hunter’s Guide to New England details a number of such legends circulating in the rural areas of Rhode Island.

Oddly enough, however, these legends played virtually no role in the construction of Lovecraft’s tale – in fact, he dismisses them in a single sentence, one paraphrasing a book of folklore in his own collection, Charles M. Skinner’s Myths and Legends of Our Own Land (1896). A further perusal of this work uncovers a more likely source for Lovecraft’s story. Skinner writes of a house on Green Street in Schenectady, New York, said to have a patch of mould on the floor shaped like a body. Other parts of the story – the illness of the tenants, the unearthed and forgotten body beneath – may also be found in this story. It is unlikely that Lovecraft tried to find this house during his brief trips to upstate New York, but that did not stop the legend from influencing his work.

What, then, accounts for the sinister nature of the occupant of the forgotten tomb? Lovecraft incorporated a legend from John Fiske’s Myths and Myth-Makers (1872), regarding an event near the French town of Caude in 1598, when a group of men saw two wolves devouring the body of a boy. Chasing them, they found a man coated in blood and gore hiding in the woods. He was revealed to be one Jacques Roulet, who claimed to use a salve to change his shape to that of a wolf. He was convicted of murder but, before he could be executed, the government intervened and locked him in an asylum. In his story, Lovecraft suggests that the same Roulets had come to the New World and taken up residence in Providence, with sinister results.

Lovecraft’s genius, then, was to find inspiration and material aplenty in occult, folkloric and historical sources and to use them – with, as we have seen, no belief in the possibility of their reality – as the raw material for tales of an entirely different nature. When we finally meet the terror at the house on Benefit Street, it is much worse than any werewolf or vampire could be.

Lovecraft and the Western Esoteric Tradition

Black magic and forbidden books have been staples of European folklore for centuries, and Lovecraft makes extensive use of them in his works: immortal wizards plot revenge against their foes, magical keys open gates to other dimensions, and a book called the Necronomicon foretells the doom of humanity at the hands (or tentacles) of the Old Ones. These elements of Lovecraft’s fiction have led to plenty of speculation that he was a practising wizard, or at least had a deep knowledge of the magical lore of past ages. In fact, his knowledge of Western esotericism was pretty spotty for most of his career.

His story "The Horror at Red Hook" was his first attempt to use genuine magical lore as the basis for a story. "Red Hook" tells of a policeman’s fight against a sinister cult based in Brooklyn’s seedy Red Hook district. The cult – which mixes such diverse belief systems as Kurdish Yezidism, Tibetan shamanism, and Nestorian Christianity – meets in an old church used as a dance hall and worships demons such as Astaroth and Lilith. The tale is a jumble of occult lore, with good reason – he took most of his information, including a chant to the Greek goddess Hecate, from the Encyclopedia Britannica’s articles on magic and demonology, hardly a very esoteric source!

If nothing else, "Red Hook" made Lovecraft realise how little he knew about magic. He asked his correspondents for suggestions for his reading list. "Are there any good translations of any mediæval necromancers for raising spirits, invoking Lucifer, & all that sort of thing?" he asks in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith. By the end of his life, Lovecraft had read several works on magic, though most of them were sensationalistic works of a second-hand nature. These included Arthur Edward Waite’s Book of Black Magic and of Pacts, Lewis Spence’s Encyclopædia of Occultism, Sax Rohmer’s Romance of Sorcery, and The Mysteries of Magic by Eliphas Levi (Alphonse Constant).

The latter served Lovecraft well when he came to write The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Ward is a young scholar and historian who discovers that an ancestor, Joseph Curwen, while apparently a prominent and respectable merchant, was also a wizard with a library full of works on alchemy and mysticism. In 1771, a group made up of Providence’s most distinguished citizens attacked Curwen’s farmhouse and did away with him. During the raid, Curwen chanted two spells lifted straight from Levi’s The Mysteries of Magic. Nonetheless, when it came to the final incantation that resurrects the dead, Lovecraft could not find one suitable, so he wrote one in his own "R’lyehian" language.

As time went on, Lovecraft largely abandoned the trappings of magic and adopted a language more congenial to his temperament – that of science. In a letter written near the end of his life, he revealed that he found the language of esotericism "flat, childish, pompous, and unconvincing", and expressed his belief that a writer could make up occult books just as terrifying as any that actually existed. History has proven him right; his arch piece of literary invention, the Necronomicon, has inspired a tremendous number of ‘hoax’ versions, none of which match the power of Lovecraft’s vision.

Mysterious Contacts

Even as Lovecraft sought his terrors in the realm of science, his fame was already spreading among occultists. While he did not share their views, he was nonetheless a polite correspondent who answered their questions and presented his opinions without judgement. So, who were these occult figures? Or, given the rumours that still circulate, who weren’t they?

A great deal of nonsense has appeared about Lovecraft’s connection to the notorious magician Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), coiner of the term "magick" – pronounced may-jick – to distinguish his own "sex-magic" from conjuring parlour-tricks. Some authors say that the two men met, while others claim that Lovecraft’s wife Sonia Greene dated Crowley before marrying Lovecraft. None of this is true. Lovecraft had heard of Crowley, but had little information outside the newspapers of the day and such fictional caricatures as appeared in H Russell Wakefield’s "He Cometh and He Passeth By". He never corresponded with Crowley or read any of his work, and found him to be, if anything, "rather over-advertised". Lovecraft’s "The Thing on the Doorstep" refers to an English cult leader – but this seems to be the extent of Crowley’s influence on the Providence author.

Others have insisted that Lovecraft knew members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an occult fraternity founded in 1877 and whose membership included Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood, two authors whom Lovecraft admired greatly. He never wrote to either of these men, though – he resisted "fawning on the great". Further, no Golden Dawn-specific terminology turns up anywhere in his writings.

One person Lovecraft may have met was the science fiction writer and founder of the Church of Scientology, L Ron Hubbard. The two men did write for the pulps at the same time, and both even attended a Fiction Guild dinner in June 1936. In a letter to Robert Bloch (author of Psycho), Lovecraft mentions Hubbard’s name, but finds himself unable to remember meeting the gentleman. Of course, Hubbard did not found his Dianetics movement until well after Lovecraft was dead, and no researchers have found any Hubbard-Lovecraft letters.

This doesn’t mean that Lovecraft didn’t correspond with occultists. One of his pen pals was descended from a Salem witch, and sent him gruesome pieces of folklore that she hoped he would use in his stories (he never did). Another, a gentleman from Iowa named Olson, claimed he held the secret to immortality. His beliefs, as quoted in a letter from Lovecraft’s friend and fellow author Robert E Howard (of Conan the Barbarian fame), included a mixture of Hindu and Buddhist philosophy with physics and other curious tenets, such as the belief that Jesus was a vampire. Howard thought this was odd, if acceptable, but became most incensed when Olson asked him to send on a chain letter.

Nor should we forget E Hoffman Price, a prolific pulp author from New Orleans. Price was not only a soldier and renowned traveller, but described himself as a Theosophist and Buddhist and sometimes cast horoscopes for money. When Lovecraft travelled to Louisiana, Howard informed Price, and the two men spent the next 36 hours together. Later, Lovecraft collaborated with Hoffman on "Through the Gates of the Silver Key", in which Randolph Carter, Lovecraft’s hero and literary alter ego, goes through a mystical initiation in his search for ultimate meaning.

Perhaps the most famous of Lovecraft’s occult correspondents was William Lumley (1880-1960), a night watchman from Buffalo, New York. Before settling down, Lumley had been a sailor who heard strange tales in Port Said and other distant lands. Lumley told Lovecraft of his meetings with Eastern masters – including one who apparently visited him for a short time in Buffalo – and spectral figures in the haunted valleys and houses of western New York. Despite his scepticism, Lovecraft humoured his friend, and the two struck up a lively correspondence which lasted until Lovecraft’s death. When Lumley wrote a story called "The Diary of Alonzo Typer", about a haunted house near Attica, Lovecraft revised it for him. Lumley’s first draft has since been published and closely resembles a real-life journal of a paranormal investigation. Could Lumley have been describing an actual experience? Most of his papers have vanished, so there is no way of knowing.

Lovecraft and Theosophy

In the late 19th century, a Russian émigrée named Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky electrified the West. Blavatsky founded Theosophy, meaning roughly "divine knowledge", in 1875. Blavatsky’s "Masters" showed her the Book of Dzyan, a volume existing on the astral plane and written on palm leaves. With the help of the wisdom of Dzyan, the Theosophical Society set out to uncover the truths behind science, religion, and psychic phenomena. Previous civilisations on the lost continents of Lemuria and Atlantis had destroyed themselves due to lack of spiritual purity, but the Theosophists hoped through their researches to move humanity into the next stage of its spiritual evolution, and thereby bring the world to an age of brotherhood. Despite its high-minded claims, scandal rocked the group, and by the 1920s it was a pale shadow of its former self.

Lovecraft skirted the edges of Theosophical literature for over 10 years. In 1926, he read W Scott-Elliot’s Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria. This work is a description of the geography and culture of the lost continents, with notes on their former inhabitants. Shortly after reading this work, Lovecraft penned one of his most celebrated tales, "The Call of Cthulhu". The story tells of a worldwide psychic disturbance in which authors and poets have strange dreams of an underwater city in the Pacific. While some groups – including the Theosophists – consider this to be a good omen, one student of ethnology pieces together the truth: the dreams do not come from a kindly-disposed spiritual lord, but from an alien monstrosity whose return will destroy all of humanity.

Lovecraft’s friend E Hoffman Price notes in his memoirs how unimpressed he was with Lovecraft’s understanding of Theosophy. Perhaps if Lovecraft had read more of the stuff, many of the key concepts within Theosophical texts would have resonated with his own fictional creations. After all, the Theosophists discussed Lemuria, Atlantis, and the Imperishable Sacred Land to the far north (all of which were now lost), and a similar lore concerning lost continents was not unique to "The Call of Cthulhu", but turns up throughout Lovecraft’s œuvre, for instance in "The Temple" and "Out of the Aeons" (written with Hazel Heald). Another important Eastern concept dear to the Theospophists – reincarnation – serves as the theme for a number of Lovecraft stories, including The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, as mentioned opposite (p38). Finally, we should not neglect the fact that Blavatsky and Lovecraft had, in effect, the same goal – the reconciliation of myth and ancient knowledge with modern science. The difference, of course, is that Lovecraft attempted a fictional synthesis, while Blavatsky created a new philosophy centred on this notion.

Some commentators, among them Colin Wilson, have asked whether Blavatsky’s Book of Dzyan could be the inspiration for the Necronomicon. Lovecraft’s letters, though, tell a different story. He didn’t hear of the Book of Dzyan until E Hoffman Price told him about it in 1933. Price’s account of the phantasmal book intrigued him, and it actually appears alongside the Necronomicon in his later works, including "The Diary of Alonzo Typer" and "The Haunter of the Dark".

So did Lovecraft ever read Blavatsky’s work? As it turns out, he might have done. In November 1936, Californian science fantasy author Henry Kuttner sent one of Blavatsky’s works – either Isis Unveiled or The Secret Doctrine – to Providence. Lovecraft thanked his friend, mentioning that he’d always meant to read Blavatsky, but had never got around to it. He died four months later; if he had finally grappled with Blavatsky’s literary efforts, his thoughts on them were lost forever.

The Master’s Legacy

Lovecraft’s death brought his writer friends out en masse to offer their condolences. It was this outpouring of grief that kick-started Lovecraft fandom. Weird Tales, which had never given Lovecraft a cover illustration during his life, frantically reprinted his old stories and searched for new ones. August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, two of Lovecraft’s friends, founded Arkham House to publish his works in book form. The first Arkham House edition, The Outsider and Others, commands prices of up to $3,000 today. A rather unexpected side effect of all this attention was the adoption of Lovecraftian concepts into occult practice.

Modern occultists may be surprised to know that Lovecraft’s influence first made itself felt among the believers in the Hollow Earth and underground cities. Morris Doreal, head of the Brotherhood of the White Temple, referred to a "Yog Sog-Thoth, the gateway to the cycle below" in his Interpretations on the Emerald Tablets, published in 1948. Others discovered Lovecraft indirectly, through the stories of August Derleth, who in his own additions to the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’, as it came to be known, turned Lovecraft’s essentially amoral creations into the evil "Great Old Ones", who are opposed by the protective "Elder Gods." The book Agartha, written by Buddhist monk Robert Ernst Dickhoff in 1951, mentions both groups of beings, plus Lovecraft’s mountain of "Kadath". Richard Shaver, a Pennsylvania welder and long-time Weird Tales reader, used very similar imagery in his writing about the underground "deros" who inflict suffering upon mankind and the "teros" who oppose them.

Lovecraft’s ideas slowly made their way into other sections of the occult community. John Keel’s concept of "windows" – areas in which extra-dimensional beings might appear – is similar to Lovecraft’s notion that a place or object might serve as a focus for influences from Outside. Robert M Price and Charles Garofalo point out how Lovecraft anticipated von Däniken’s theory of "ancient astronauts" by several decades. I’m not suggesting Lovecraft directly inspired Keel or von Däniken, yet their ‘real’ ideas follow an intriguingly parallel course to the ‘fictional’ ones of the man from Providence.

Rumours of strange sects practising Lovecraftian magic have been with us for years, but two works published in 1972 brought them to a broader audience. Anton LaVey’s The Satanic Rituals included ceremonies by Michael Aquino to call Lovecraft’s gods Shub-Niggurath and Cthulhu into consciousness. LaVey and Aquino maintained that these rituals were merely psychodrama, a fact seemingly lost on many of those who practise them. A hemisphere away, Kenneth Grant published The Magical Revival, which hailed Lovecraft as a contemporary of Crowley who echoed his prophecies of a new æon. While occultists have never been averse to creating their own traditions, the embrace of an admittedly fictional pantheon started a firestorm of controversy that has never died down.

Despite this uncertainty, Lovecraftian magic is here to stay. Erik Davis’s article in the now-defunct magazine Gnosis provided much insight into its practitioners, but failed to capture its broad appeal. For example, I have talked with members of the Miskatonic Alchemical Expedition, a group of spiritual seekers who once met at a farmhouse near West Danby in upstate New York. There, they took hallucinogens and sought visions bringing contact with a wide variety of god-forms – including Lovecraft’s Old Ones. Black Moon Publishing, associated with Cincinnati’s Bate Cabal, provides photocopies of a staggering collection of Lovecraftian conjurations, rituals, Tarot decks, and theoretical speculation. As Lovecraft makes his resurgence in popular culture, it is likely that more people will practice magic based on his fiction.

Perhaps the most widespread and broadly appealing strand in this factitious magical tradition – and perhaps its creator’s most enduring legacy – is that madness-inducing book of eldritch lore, the Necronomicon. Since 1940, numerous attempts were made to write the book Lovecraft had invented. The most commercially successful of these were the Simon Necronomicon (1977), which emerged from the New York occult community, and George Hay’s Necronomicon: The Book of Dead Names (1978), published by Neville Spearman and later by Skoob Books. Having examined their beliefs for many years, I have to say that those who believe in the reality of such books are sincere – not to mention more numerous than most commentators have realised.

So the cult of Cthulhu lives. It may be that some day, Howard Phillips Lovecraft himself will be forgotten, while the devotees of his Old Ones "bellow and prance and slay around idol-capped monoliths in lonely places," as he puts it in "The Call of Cthulhu".

I hope this will not be the case, and that Lovecraft’s unique literary gifts will be remembered alongside his creations.

source: Fortean Times