The Call of Cthulhu (Simplified): The Horror in Clay

A hopefully more accessible version of the first segment of Lovecraft's classic.

The most merciful thing in life, I think, is the inability of the mind to connect all of its contents.  We live on a peaceful island of ignorance amongst a raging sea of infinity, and we were not meant to voyage far from shore.  The sciences, each leaning in their own direction, have done little harm; but some day we will unlock this horrid Pandora’s Box.  We shall either go mad from such a revelation, or flee from the light of truth into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

The most learned spiritual figures can only guess at the awesome cosmic cycle that our world is a part of.  They have hinted at some strange aspects of existence which would freeze the blood of any man.  But it is not this that granted me a glimpse of forbidden aeons, such horrors that drove me to the brink of madness.  That glimpse, like all fleeting glimpses of horrible truths resulted from the accidental piecing together of information; in this case newspaper articles and notes from a dead professor.  I only hope that no one else will imitate my investigations.  I think that the professor too would have destroyed these notes, had his death not been so sudden. 

It all began during the winter of 1926-27 after the death of my great-uncle George Gammell Angell, Professor of semantic languages at Brown University.  He was widely known as an authority on ancient inscriptions, and had often been called upon by prominent museums; so that his passing at the age of 92 was common knowledge.  Most were interested by his mysterious cause of death.  A man had bumped into the professor after both were exiting a boat in Newport; he fell suddenly down a hill to his death.  Onlookers described the assailant as a nautical-looking Negro who had disappeared into a dark alley of Williams Street.  Physicians were unable to find anything other than an obscure lesion of the heart they’d assumed was caused by his age and the impact of the fall.  At the time I didn’t argue with the diagnosis, but I am now inclined to wonder�"and more than wonder.

As my great-uncle was left childless and unmarried I was both his heir and executor, so I was expected to go over his will and his research so I brought them to my office in Boston.  Some of the material will appear in the American Archeological Society, the second box was far more puzzling, which I prudently decided to keep secret.  The box was locked, and it was not until I remembered the ring my great uncle always kept in his pocket that I made a breakthrough.  This allowed me to finally open the box, but also confronted me with the greatest mystery of all.  All I found inside were some wood cuttings, cryptic writings, and a clay statue.  Perplexed, I wondered what my uncle had been studying in his final days.  I had decided to start with the sculpture in my investigation. 

The clay figure was a rectangle less than an inch thick and about five by six inches in area; which had been manufactured recently.  Its designs however were far from modern the aesthetic suggested a far more arcane atmosphere.  And the writings too seemed to be arcane.  Though my education, and evaluation of the papers have far from explained the species of the figure sculpted in clay.

Above these apparent hieroglyphics was the depiction of a figure that was beyond any art I’d ever encountered.  It seemed to be some sort of monster or symbol representing one, which only the most perverse of minds could conceive.  My imagination yielded the simultaneous images of an octopus, dragon, and a human caricature this was as far as my mind could venture.  A pulpy head atop a grotesque and scaled body with rudimentary wings; but the general outline was what made it so shocking.  Behind the figure was the faintest suggestion of ancient architecture.

The writings which accompanying the images were nearly indecipherable, lacking any literary style.  What seemed to be the main document was titled “CTHULU CULT” written in painstaking detail.  They were divided into two sections, the first was headed “ 1925�"Dream and Dream Work of H. A. Wilcox, 7 Thomas St, Providence, R.I., New Orleans La., at 1908 A. A. A. Mtg.�"Notes on Same, & Prof. Webb’s Acct.”  The other papers were brief notes, some of them accounts of the queer dreams, some citations from theosophical books and magazines focusing on secret societies, and hidden cults which reference mythological and anthropological texts.  The wood cuttings portrayed morbidity, mental illness and outbreaks of mania in the spring of 1925.

The first half of the manuscript told a peculiar tale.  Apparently a thin, dark, anxious young man called upon Professor Angell with the clay sculpture which was still damp and fresh.  He introduced himself as Henry Anthony Wilcox, whose family my uncle had recognized, the young man attended the Rhode Island School of design, and lived in an apartment nearby.  He was a precautious youth known for his genius but also for his eccentricities from a young age.  Locally popular as a youth for his penchant for telling strange stories, and odd dreams to anyone who would listen, he’d called himself “psychically hypersensitive”.  But the inhabitants of the stodgy old town merely referred to him as “queer”.

Never a socialite, as he grew older Henry had disappeared from the public eye.  Even the Providence Art Club, anxious to retain their conservative public image found him to be quite hopeless.

On meeting my great uncle, Henry had instantly inquired any archeological insight that pertained to the clay sculpture.  My uncle was skeptical, and with some bluntness responded that the figure had little to nothing to do with archeology.  To which the young man shot back “It is indeed new, for I made it last night in a dream of strange cities more ancient than the contemplating sphynx.”

It was then he began a rambling tale which awoke a sleeping memory, and won over the fevered interest of my uncle.  There had been a slight earthquake the night before, the first real one New England had in ages; and Wilcox’s imagination had been keenly affected.  Upon retiring to bed, he had an unprecedented dream of the ancient city with alien architecture of titanic blocks and monoliths that touched the sky, all dripping with green ooze and a singularly sinister aura.  Hieroglyphics covered the walls and pillars, and from some unknown origin came a voice that was not a voice at all; a chaotic sensation only translatable into sound by intuition.  But he nonetheless attempted to pronounce the jumble of letters that read “Cthulu fhtagn.”

This verbal jumble was the key to the recollection which both excited and deeply disturbed my uncle.  He questioned Wilcox with the most scientific thoroughness and studied the sculpture with frantic intensity. 

The young man told my uncle that he had been promised eternal glory in exchange for joining some widespread mystical or pagan religious sect.  After an onslaught of questions on lore related to such cults my uncle realized Wilcox was completely oblivious, demanding any information from future dreams.  This bore some fruit, digging into the manuscript I saw almost daily correspondences from Wilcox which told of dreams depicting the same cyclopean city, the dripping putrescence, and the voice, or intelligence shouting more enigmatic gibberish.  The two sounds most frequently repeated are those rendered by the letters “Cthulu” and “R’lyeh.”

On March 23^rd, the manuscript continued that Wilcox had failed to appear after some inquiries my uncle discovered he had some obscure fever and was staying with his family.  He was found screaming in his flat screaming, and had only been in states of unconsciousness and delirium ever since.  My uncle called the family, and kept a close eye on the case with Dr. Tobey who was the family’s physician.  The doctor could not stop shuddering as he told of young Wilcox’s delusions, which my uncle had heard many times before.  Except for a gargantuan figure which lumbered above the city; Wilcox believed it was the same creature he’d sculpted in clay.  The doctor went on to explain his strange physical condition, despite his normal temperature he showed all of the tell-tale signs of fever rather than a mental disorder.

On April 2^nd at about midday all of Wilcox’s symptoms suddenly ceased.  He sat upright in bed, astonished to find that he was at home with no memory of what had happened in dream or reality since the night of March 22^nd.  Cleared by his physician three days later and returned to his squalid quarters.  All traces of the strange dreams had vanished with his recovery, and after a week’s worth of mundane dreams, my uncle gave up on him all together.

This ended the first segment of the manuscript, the rest were scattered notes of others who had similar dreams in this time period. My uncle had clearly exhausted all of his contacts in order to find these subjects.  Most of which led him nowhere, a majority of his peer saw his endeavor as nothing more than nonsense; although there were four cases of individuals who had dreams of strange landscapes in the same timeframe as Wilcox.

It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would have spread if they had been able to compare their experiences as my uncle had.  From the period of February 28^th until April 2^nd these vivid dreams would run rampant; the majority taking place during the time Mr. Wilcox had his dreams.  All of them seemed to have died several months of living in a state of paranoid mania.

I went on to the press cuttings, which touched on cases of panic, and wild eccentricities through the ages.  There was one about a night time suicide in London where a lone sleeper had leaped from a third story window with nothing more than a shriek as a goodbye.  Another was a rambling letter to the editor of a paper in South America, where a fanatic predicts a dire future from visions he’d seen.  A dispatch from California describes a colony of fanatics who donned white robes for some “glorious fulfillment” which never arrives, whilst in India there were always cases of native unrest toward the end of March.  Voodoo orgies multiply in Haiti, and African outposts report ominous mutterings.  American officers in the Philippines find certain tribes especially bothersome around this time of year, and New York policemen are mobbed by hysterical foreigners annually from March 22-23.  The west of Ireland, too, is full of wild rumors.  And so many recorded incidents inside insane asylums, it was a miracle that no one had been able to correlate these events.  All this information left me with only one certainty that Wilcox had indeed known of the secrets my uncle had investigated from nothing more than his dreams.