The Call of Cthulhu

Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a
survival... a survival of a hugely remote period when...
consciousness was manifest, perhaps, in shapes and forms
long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing
humanity... forms of which poetry and legend alone have
caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters,
mythical beings of all sorts and kinds...
- ALGERNON BLACKWOOD


THE HORROR IN CLAY

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability
of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We
live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas
of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have
hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together
of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas
of reality and of our frightful position therein, that we shall
either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly
light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of
the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form
transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survival in
terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a
bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the
single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I
think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse,
like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an
accidental piecing together of separated things - in this case
an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor. I
hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out;
certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so
hideous a chain. I think that the professor, too, intended to
keep silent regarding the part he knew, and that he would
have destroyed his notes had not sudden death seized him.

My knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 1926-7
with the death of my great-uncle, George Gammell Angell,
Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages in Brown University
Providence, Rhode Island. Professor Angell was widely
known as an authority on ancient inscriptions, and had
frequently been resorted to by the heads of prominent
museums so that his passing at the age of ninety-two may be
recalled by many. Locally, interest was intensified by the
obscurity of the cause of death. The professor had been
stricken whilst returning from the Newport boat; falling



suddenly, as witnesses said, after having been jostled by a
nautical-looking negro who had come from one of the queer
dark courts on the precipitous hillside which formed a short
cut from the waterfront to the deceased's home in Williams
Street. Physicians were unable to find any visible disorder,
but concluded after perplexed debate that some obscure
lesion of the heart, induced by the brisk ascent of so steep a
hill by so elderly a man, was responsible for the end. At the
time I saw no reason to dissent from this dictum, but latterly
I am inclined to wonder - and more than wonder.