Great Tales of Horror Read online

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  This 2012 compilation published by Fall River Press.

  The stories in this volume have been reprinted with the permission of Robert C. Harrall, Administrator of the Literary Estate of H. P. Lovecraft.

  The publisher would like to thank S. T. Joshi for preparing the headnotes for the stories in this volume.

  ISBN 978-1-4351-5316-5

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  Contents

  Introduction

  The Call of Cthulhu

  The Colour out of Space

  The Lurking Fear

  The Music of Erich Zann

  Dagon

  Pickman’s Model

  The Dunwich Horror

  The Statement of Randolph Carter

  In the Vault

  Cool Air

  The Thing on the Doorstep

  The Dreams in the Witch House

  The Shadow over Innsmouth

  At the Mountains of Madness

  Herbert West—Reanimator

  The Rats in the Walls

  The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

  The Whisperer in Darkness

  The Haunter of the Dark

  The Shadow out of Time

  Introduction

  In the three-quarters of a century since his death, H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) has enjoyed a shift in literary reputation akin to that of Edgar Allan Poe, the writer whose work he held in highest regard. Like Poe, Lovecraft has gone from being perceived as a writer of a peculiar type of fiction with appeal only to a limited audience, to being respected as a literary figure whose work measures up to that of other classic American writers, Poe among them. In Lovecraft’s case, this change in critical estimation is perhaps a little more surprising. Whereas Poe wrote for mainstream publications and saw several collections of his poetry and short stories published in his lifetime, Lovecraft sold his writings to disposable pulp fiction magazines that were read almost exclusively by horror enthusiasts. Only one book of his work, published in a miniscule print run, saw print before his death, and for much of the next quarter century his work was nearly the exclusive property of the specialty press Arkham House, named for the famous town that dominates Lovecraft’s weird tales and created largely for the purpose of getting Lovecraft’s work between hardcovers. Unlike Poe, until recently, Lovecraft’s legacy was as obscure after his death as in his lifetime.

  It is as a horror writer that most readers know Lovecraft, and in that regard there is no question that he is one of the genre’s most important authors, the greatest American horror writer after Poe and an artist who has influenced every horror writer of consequence who came after him. Prior to Lovecraft, most writers of supernatural fiction built stories around traditional genre fixtures—the vampire, the werewolf, the demon, and especially the ghost—and framed their dramas in terms of the struggle between good and evil. Lovecraft, by contrast, gave a cosmic scope to his horrors more akin to that of science fiction (albeit a science fiction that looked apprehensively over its shoulder more than it looked forward).

  In a 1927 letter to Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales, the magazine that published most of his stories, Lovecraft wrote: “Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large … To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligent and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all.” To make his point about the insignificance of human concerns outside of a human frame of reference, Lovecraft conjured a pack of monstrous entities with such provocative names as Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Azathoth, Shub-Niggurath, and the like. Biologically impossible, these beings exist outside of space and time, though they occasionally emerge in our world to wreak havoc. Lacking a sensibility appropriate for appreciating these beings’ incomprehensible alienness, humans tend to refer to them in a vocabulary usually reserved for describing gods and their awesome supernatural powers.

  The stories in which Lovecraft explicitly references these monsters were singled out by his publisher as his tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. Over the years, many of Lovecraft’s colleagues and literary disciples contributed their own Lovecraft-inflected stories to the mythos, making it one of the biggest and most enduring shared worlds in modern fantastic fiction. Though Lovecraft’s so-called mythos tales represent some of his best writing and best-known work, it’s not really appropriate to consider them as entities apart from his other stories. The mythos is just one approach Lovecraft used to express the strangeness of horrors beyond human ken. All but a handful of the twenty stories in this volume—mythos and non-mythos—are set in Lovecraft’s fictionalized version of New England, where towns named Arkham, Dunwich, and Innsmouth are home both to backwoods rustics and civilized sophisticates who chance upon horrors in the course of their daily lives. Invariably, the revelations they uncover are mind-shattering, driving them to despair, madness, and even death. Ultimately, this is what unites all of Lovecraft’s macabre fiction: the terror that characters (and by extension, the reader) feel when they come to realize the inconceivable horrors that lie in wait just beyond the small, well-lit circle of the familiar world they have always known—and the understanding that, for all of their education, they are little better than superstitious primitives, cowering in fear at the sounds of vast and incomprehensible things that lumber about unseen in the surrounding darkness.

  Stefan Dziemianowicz

  New York, 2012

  The Call of Cthulhu

  (Found among the Papers of the Late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston)

  This momentous story—which introduced the ersatz mythology that came to be called the “Cthulhu Mythos”—was written in the summer of 1926. Lovecraft had come up with a plot synopsis as early as August 1925, but could not write the story until he returned to Providence. Several literary influences have been put forth—ranging from Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla” to A. Merritt’s “The Moon Pool” to theosophical writings—but Lovecraft has synthesized these multifarious sources into something entirely new. It was initially rejected by Weird Tales (and also by the obscure pulp magazine Mystery Stories); but, upon Donald Wandrei’s suggestion, Lovecraft resubmitted it to Weird Tales, where it appeared in the February 1928 issue.

  “Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival … a survivial of a hugely remote period when … consciousness was manifested, 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

  I

  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 survivals 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 1926–27 with the death of my grand-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.

  As my grand-uncle’s heir and executor, for he died a childless widower, I was expected to go over his papers with some thoroughness; and for that purpose moved his entire set of files and boxes to my quarters in Boston. Much of the material which I correlated will be later published by the American Archaeological Society, but there was one box which I found exceedingly puzzling, and which I felt much averse from shewing to other eyes. It had been locked, and I did not find the key till it occurred to me to examine the personal ring which the professor carried always in his pocket. Then indeed I succeeded in opening it, but when I did so seemed only to be confronted by a greater and more closely locked barrier. For what could be the meaning of the queer clay bas-relief and the disjointed jottings, ramblings, and cuttings which I found? Had my uncle, in his latter years, become credulous of the most superficial impostures? I resolved to search out the eccentric sculptor responsible for this apparent disturbance of an old man’s peace of mind.

  The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about five by six inches in area; obviously of modern origin. Its designs, however, were far from modern in atmosphere and suggestion; for although the vagaries of cubism and futurism are many and wild, they do not often reproduce that cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric writing. And writing of some kind the bulk of these designs seemed certainly to be; though my memory, despite much familiarity with the papers and collections of my uncle, failed in any way to identify this particular species, or even to hint at its remotest affiliations.

  Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evidently pictorial intent, though its impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful. Behind the figure was a vague suggestion of a Cyclopean architectural background.

  The writing accompanying this oddity was, aside from a stack of press cuttings, in Professor Angell’s most recent hand; and made no pretence to literary style. What seemed to be the main document was headed “CTHULHU CULT” in characters painstakingly printed to avoid the erroneous reading of a word so unheard-of. The manuscript was divided into two sections, the first of which was headed “1925—Dream and Dream Work of H. A. Wilcox, 7 Thomas St., Providence, R.I.,” and the second, “Narrative of Inspector John R. Legrasse, 121 Bienville St., New Orleans, La., at 1908 A. A. S. Mtg.—Notes on Same, & Prof. Webb’s Acct.” The other manuscript papers were all brief notes, some of them accounts of the queer dreams of different persons, some of them citations from theosophical books and magazines (notably W. Scott-Elliot’s Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria), and the rest comments on long-surviving secret societies and hidden cults, with references to passages in such mythological and anthropological sourcebooks as Frazer’s Golden Bough and Miss Murray’s Witch-Cult in Western Europe. The cuttings largely alluded to outré, mental illnesses and outbreaks of group folly or mania in the spring of 1925.

  The first half of the principal manuscript told a very peculiar tale. It appears that on March 1st, 1925, a thin, dark young man of neurotic and excited aspect had called upon Professor Angell bearing the singular clay bas-relief, which was then exceedingly damp and fresh. His card bore the name of Henry Anthony Wilcox, and my uncle had recognised him as the youngest son of an excellent family slightly known to him, who had latterly been studying sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design and living alone at the Fleur-de-Lys Building near that institution. Wilcox was a precocious youth of known genius but great eccentricity, and had from childhood excited attention through the strange stories and odd dreams he was in the habit of relating. He called himself “psychically hypersensitive,” but the staid folk of the ancient commercial city dismissed him as merely “queer.” Never mingling much with his kind, he had dropped gradually from social visibility, and was now known only to a small group of aesthetes from other towns. Even the Providence Art Club, anxious to preserve its conservatism, had found him quite hopeless.

  On the occasion of the visit, ran the professor’s manuscript, the sculptor abruptly asked for the benefit of his host’s archaeological knowledge in identifying the hieroglyphics on the bas-relief. He spoke in a dreamy, stilted manner which suggested pose and alienated sympathy; and my uncle shewed some sharpness in replying, for the conspicuous freshness of the tablet implied kinship with anything but archaeology. Young Wilcox’s rejoinder, which impressed my uncle enough to make him recall and record it verbatim, was of a fantastically poetic cast which must have typified his whole conversation, and which I have since found highly characteristic of him. He said, “It is new, indeed, for I made it last night in a dream of strange cities; and dreams are older than brooding Tyre, or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon.”

  It was then that he began that rambling tale which suddenly played upon a sleeping memory and won the fevered interest of my uncle. There had been a slight earthquake tremor the night before, the most considerable felt in New England for some years; and Wilcox’s imagination had been keenly affected. Upon retiring, he had had an unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror. Hieroglyphics had covered the walls and pillars, and from some undetermined point below had come a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensa
tion which only fancy could transmute into sound, but which he attempted to render by the almost unpronounceable jumble of letters, “Cthulhu fhtagn.”

  This verbal jumble was the key to the recollection which excited and disturbed Professor Angell. He questioned the sculptor with scientific minuteness; and studied with almost frantic intensity the bas-relief on which the youth had found himself working, chilled and clad only in his night-clothes, when waking had stolen bewilderingly over him. My uncle blamed his old age, Wilcox afterward said, for his slowness in recognising both hieroglyphics and pictorial design. Many of his questions seemed highly out-of-place to his visitor, especially those which tried to connect the latter with strange cults or societies; and Wilcox could not understand the repeated promises of silence which he was offered in exchange for an admission of membership in some widespread mystical or paganly religious body. When Professor Angell became convinced that the sculptor was indeed ignorant of any cult or system of cryptic lore, he besieged his visitor with demands for future reports of dreams. This bore regular fruit, for after the first interview the manuscript records daily calls of the young man, during which he related startling fragments of nocturnal imagery whose burden was always some terrible Cyclopean vista of dark and dripping stone, with a subterrene voice or intelligence shouting monotonously in enigmatical sense-impacts uninscribable save as gibberish. The two sounds most frequently repeated are those rendered by the letters “Cthulhu” and “R’lyeh.”

  On March 23d, the manuscript continued, Wilcox failed to appear; and inquiries at his quarters revealed that he had been stricken with an obscure sort of fever and taken to the home of his family in Waterman Street. He had cried out in the night, arousing several other artists in the building, and had manifested since then only alternations of unconsciousness and delirium. My uncle at once telephoned the family, and from that time forward kept close watch of the case; calling often at the Thayer Street office of Dr. Tobey, whom he learned to be in charge. The youth’s febrile mind, apparently, was dwelling on strange things; and the doctor shuddered now and then as he spoke of them. They included not only a repetition of what he had formerly dreamed, but touched wildly on a gigantic thing “miles high” which walked or lumbered about. He at no time fully described this object, but occasional frantic words, as repeated by Dr. Tobey, convinced the professor that it must be identical with the nameless monstrosity he had sought to depict in his dream-sculpture. Reference to this object, the doctor added, was invariably a prelude to the young man’s subsidence into lethargy. His temperature, oddly enough, was not greatly above normal; but his whole condition was otherwise such as to suggest true fever rather than mental disorder.