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The Horror from the DepthsProfessor Jordan Holmes is dead, and the story of the incredible horror that threatened Chicago in the spring of 1931 can be told at last. In that spring, the reclamation of land from Lake Michigan for the coming World’s Fair was already well under way, when the first of those inexplicable events took place. It was an occurrence essentially prosaic, yet fraught with untold horror, as all of us at work on the project on the lake shore were soon to learn. Late one March afternoon, one of the enormous dredges brought up from the lake bottom what was undoubtedly a portion of some long-dead animal’s limb in a remarkable state of preservation. It was a sort of fossil, and yet seemingly not possessed of the consistency of a fossil. John Tennant, the chief engineer, was summoned, his interest aroused, and he in turn called upon Professor Jordan Holmes of the Field Museum for assistance in identifying the curious discovery from the lake. Confident that Holmes would know to what animal the fragment belonged, Tennant and I anticipated his arrival. But Holmes’ surprise at sight of the fossil was equalled only by his bewilderment. “The thing’s boneless,” he said at once, “and doesn’t show any sign of ever having had bone formation!” He examined it further. “And you’ll notice that the limb is extraordinarily well preserved, hard only on the surface. The end severed by the dredge is strangely resilient, spongy!” A close scrutiny revealed yet another odd fact. The creature evidently had had no blood at any time in its existence, unless the odd greenish-black veins could be said to have carried something that served as blood. Holmes was utterly unable to venture a guess about the nature of the animal, and departed finally, taking the fossil with him for laboratory examination. A second piece of this strange fossil was brought from the depths on the following morning. This bore no resemblance to any portion of animal anatomy either Tennant or I had ever seen. It was oddly round, its surface broken by horny ridges and bumps, and at one end there showed the same spongy resilience which had marked the first find. Except for the fact that it had no opening of any kind, it might by its shape have been a head. Once more we called in Professor Holmes, who wished to take this second piece with him. Since it was bulky, Tennant sent me along. It was in the cab, on the way to the museum, that we noticed the first slight change in our burden. The thing was dripping a dark greenish-black fluid to the floor of the taxi. Holmes at once turned the thing over and peered intently at the spongy severed end from which the fluid dropped. “Seems to be coming from the veins,” he murmured. I bent closer. Here and there, where the veins had been cut cleanly by the jaws of the dredge, great drops of liquid formed and trickled down, leaving repulsive greenish-black traces. There was also a slight malodorous stench. “Couldn’t be water from the lake, dissolving some of spongy tissues?” I ventured. “I hardly think so,” Holmes replied, shaking his head. “This fluid seems to be the regular contents of those veins, and now that they’re cut, it’s naturally flowing away.” I voiced his own perplexing doubt. “Then, if even the liquids in the animal are intact, the preservation is even more remarkable!” He shook his head again, and made an abrupt motion with one hand “Very remarkable,” he said shortly. At the museum, I helped Holmes put it under a glass case with the fossil we had discovered the day before. It was easily apparent that both parts came from the same kind of animal, if not the same one. From that moment on, things began to happen. When I returned to my work from the museum, I had no intimation of the ghastly horror that was to shroud the city. It was on the following morning that the first manifestation of the horror occurred, though at that time there was nothing to suggest the frightful things that were to come. Holmes roused me from my sleep by calling me from the museum and excitedly asking me to come down. I was astounded at the sight that he had called me to see. During the night, the horny structure, which encased the spongy mass of our fossil, had distinctly cracked. The head, which had been left lying on its side, now stood on its severed end, and at the base a wide crevice, narrowing down to a similar crack, had sprung open. In the limb, too, a similar crack had appeared, though it was not as large as that on the other fossil. Beneath could now clearly be seen the glistening green body of the creature. But what was most remarkable was the discovery I made, when, at Holmes’ urgent suggestion, I examined the fossils more closely. Then I saw tiny, fingerlike tendrils of flesh which had sprung into being in the base of the head where the horny outer covering had cracked! Holmes rapidly explained his astonishment at finding this inexplicable change, murmuring something vague about atmospheric conditions bringing it about. Then he suggested that we watch the thing, to see whether any further change might set in during the day as they had during the night. Whatever we had expected to see, we were disappointed. Though we sat quietly throughout the morning with our eyes fixed upon those strange fossils, there was nothing to reward our interest. And when we finally went out to lunch, both of us were not only definitely crestfallen, but not a little perplexed. But our astonishment upon our return from lunch that noon was infinitely greater than our first surprise of the morning, for what we saw brought home to both of us, with unpleasant suddenness, a startling fact. During the previous night, when there was no one to observe them, the fossils had mysteriously changed, but when we watched that morning, nothing had taken place. And yet, during the lunch hour, when there had been no one to watch, the fossils had changed again! Where the flesh like tendrils had at first been small, thin, underdeveloped, and occasional, they now covered the entire base of the head structure. Now they were materially larger and heavier, having assumed now the actual proportions of fingers. But when we approached the case, despite this apparent change, the tendrils hung there limp and still, and the fossils were as immobile as ever. It was only later that we noticed that the green bulge of glistening flesh beneath the fissure was greater, and had taken on a richer color. I think that what both Holmes and I desired to avoid was the admission, even to ourselves, that this long-buried thing might still have life. So even after our return that noon, we continued to entertain the theory that perhaps atmospheric change was bringing about the phenomena. At five o’clock, both of us were convinced that our theory of slow development was erroneous, for the fossils were precisely as they had been at our return from lunch. They occupied the same amount of space in the glass, the tendrils hung as limply as ever at the base, and the fissure had not moved beyond the little ridge topping the horny surface where we had noted it that noon. “It’s as if it knows we are watching, and could understand,” said Holmes, laughing a little. His laugh was not reassuring. He had voiced my own thought. It was as if he said, “The thing has life, intelligence!” I could not smile with him, for the suggestion carried with it an unaccountably chilling fear. Holmes gave up at last. Shortly after six o’clock, he looked at me, a ghost of a smile lurking on his lips. “Hungry?” I nodded. “I’m both hungry and tired. I think we’d better give it up for the time being and get food and sleep. Tomorrow I’ll call in Jameson of Chicago University and Morrison from Northwestern. They may be able to suggest something.” “And this?” I asked. “Are you leaving it alone all night?” He looked at me for a moment without replying. “Don’t be too surprised at what you see in this building, Sharp,” he said. “A good many strange things happen here. As for this—strange and weird, I’ll admit, but nothing to worry over. I’ll tell one of the guards to come through here occasionally during the night. If anything unusual happens, he’ll call me.” That night the horror struck for the first time. I knew, from the moment that I heard Holmes’ excited voice over the telephone, shortly after seven the next morning, that something highly out of the ordinary had occurred. Fortunately, I was already dressed and ready to go out when his call came, and was consequently waiting for him to pick me up in his car. What he told me, as we sped toward the museum, was given to me in such an incoherent manner, that I cannot even attempt to reproduce it as I heard it from his lips. Apparently there had been a telephone call from the museum sometime just before dawn. Holmes had been half asleep, had not gathered exactly what some incoherent voice had said over the wire, and had gone back to sleep. Now that he was awake, he could remember someone screaming. But he could not say now whether this had been the fragment of a nightmare or semi-conscious reality. Yes, there had been horrible babbling sounds, and a sucking noise. Someone whistling, too, he thought. Then at six-thirty, another guard had called him. Something had happened in the laboratories—something serious! Professor Holmes had better come down at once. The car came to a sudden stop. Holmes and I jumped quickly from it, mounted the steps, and ran down the corridors to the laboratory where the fossil remains were. Together, we burst through the already opened door of the laboratory—then halted abruptly. There, on the floor near the open door, lay the guard, his legs twisted out of all human shape, his arms crushed under his body, his face fixed horribly in an expression of awful fear. It needed no examination to know that he was dead. Then I saw what I had tried to believe on my way down that I might not see—the broken glass on the floor near the body, and a little way away, dark green pieces of a horny shell. Holmes saw them, too. He started at them for a moment, wild-eyed. Then he looked at me. To myself, I had already admitted the possibility of our fossil’s having life, but I had not anticipated malignance. But now, in the awful moments that we stood there in the laboratory, between the dead body of the guard and the fragments of glass and shell on the floor, we knew. Running footsteps broke the spell of horror that held us. A moment later, another guard burst into the room, coming up short at sight of us. “I’ve just called the police,” he said. “Better call the coroner, too,” answered Holmes curtly. As the guard left the room, Holmes turned to me. “We can’t hide it any longer, Sharp. That thing had life, intelligence, small though it was. Light and heat are all it needs to develop. It played dead under observation. With us gone for the night, it swelled to the case’s capacity, broke the glass, thrust the shell aside, crept from the case. It expanded rapidly, developing a great, crushing power. When the guard came, it killed him, mangled him. Then this thing, an unknown being with a living intelligence—this thing escaped!” “Then—” But Holmes silenced me with a curt gesture. On the threshold of the room stood a policeman. When the body of the unfortunate guard had been removed and the debris of glass and shell cleared away, we went into consultation. Dr. Jameson and Professor Morrison, both noted anthropologists, had arrived, and, as best we could, Holmes and I explained to them precisely what had happened as we understood it. It was at the conclusion of this explanation, when it had been made apparent that the thing which had escaped must be apprehended at all costs, that we first realized how we were hampered by our lack of knowledge. What, if anything, did we know of the thing? That must first be determined. We began to set down the little information we had. Certain salient facts confronted us. Evidently the thing had been at the bottom of the lake for a long time. Even though it was now apparently alive, it had been dead for centuries as far as civilization was concerned. It was obviously of an amphibian nature, and structurally resembled the amoeba, for apparently it could expand within itself, although the head fossil may have added to its growing body the limb portion which had been near. From that evidence, it might be supposed that the creature did not have limbs by nature, but could at will put forth feelerlike appendages by means of which to move on land. The horny outer covering must have been the foreign material which had collected around the body in the lake, serving as a protective covering. Holmes believed that its real outer skin was that green, glistening coat just under the protective shell. The body tissue was the spongy, boneless fleshlike material through which coursed a dark, ugly green-black fluid which must serve the creature for blood. But what of those veins? And why had the fluid ceased to flow? If the fluid were the creature’s life blood, then it must have had a good amount when it left the museum. And that meant that the veins must have closed where they had been cut! Yet, most disturbing of the facts that seemed so obvious, was the agreement that was reached by the four of us. Though both pieces of the fossil were alive, only one piece had motivating force. And the peculiar growth habits of the dead fossil were conclusive proof of what none of us wished at first to mention—the thing had an intelligence! Moreover, it had great strength and an inconceivable capacity for expanding and growing, for it must have been huge when it broke from the glass cage and attacked the guard. And apparently, it could grow with no other stimulation than heat and light. Holmes looked up at last. “Gentlemen, have you any scientific explanation?” he asked his colleagues. “If there’s a scientific explanation, Holmes, we’re unaware of it,” said Jameson. I made an abrupt protest. “But there must be something!” Three pairs of eyes settled on me. Holmes spoke. “It’s difficult for a scientist to admit that he can’t explain something like this by his knowledge, Sharp. Yet we must admit that this thing’s beyond our knowledge, is perhaps older than the beginning of our knowledge.” Whatever I might have said was broken off by the entrance of a group of reporters. Holmes made short work of them, carefully withholding any suggestion of the uncanny, and promising them any information which would come out at future investigations. We left the museum shortly before noon, and despite our probings, we had arrived at nothing fundamental in the mystery of the weird lake creature. True, there had been mention by Dr. Jameson of some old, long-forgotten books, and Holmes’ consequent agreement to begin a search that afternoon in the museum library. Jameson, who was somewhat more steeped in ancient lore than the others, had suggested several titles of works so obscure that I had never heard of them, and some of which Holmes himself did not know. If ancient books, scientific or not, could explain this thing upon which we had stumbled, this thing hitherto unknown to science or to any branch of human knowledge, there still remained some hope that the fear that was beginning to enshroud us might be cleared away. We had already admitted that perhaps this creature might return! We were destined to suffer yet another shock, for as we were coming down the museum’s outer steps, we were greeted by a newsboy’s raucous calling. “Mysterious Murders Near Field Museum!” Holmes stopped at the boy’s side, his eyebrows drawn in a frown. He took a paper from him and read quickly down the column. I, too, bought a paper and with Jameson and Morrison at my side, read rapidly. There was an account of the guard’s mysterious death, together with a brief note about the disappearance of the fossil remains. It was, of course, a somewhat garbled report. But it was the latter half of the column that drew our attention: The body of an unidentified man was found at about seven o’clock this morning in Grant Park. The discovery was made by Plainclothesman John Harbinger. The man had apparently been crushed to death, and must have been dead for some time, for the body was extraordinarily cold and rigid. The victim had evidently been walking in the direction of the Fair Grounds when he was assaulted and killed. The body, which was found under a clump of trees, had, to all appearances, suffered in the same manner as that of the Museum guard. For some distance around the body, the grass had been trampled down, and there was evidence of a struggle, for in places clods of earth had been torn up. It is believed that some wild animal was loose in the park, for near the spot and leading away from it, were great tracks, similar to the tramplings of an elephant, but having no definite outline. They seem more like impressions made by rounded posts. These tracks were followed through the Fair Grounds, and disappeared into the lake. I looked quickly up at Holmes, crushing the paper in my hand. “The second!” Holmes’ face had gone white. At my words, he drew a deep breath. “It’s gone back to the lake now,” he said, “and will probably stay there.” The four of us started for the scene of the second murder, but we had barely left the terraced facade of the museum for the park lawns when we, too, saw the distinct tracks the paper had mentioned. The marks were clear in the grass and soft ground. They were like great pads, pressed down by tremendous weight. And apparently there were two limbs. They must have been of such proportion and at the same time such formlessness that I realized more sharply than before that the creature that made them was like no other beast that had walked the earth within the memory of man. We followed the tracks past the scene of the assault to where they could plainly be seen leading into the water. The thing had returned to the place from whence our great dredge had brought it! Each of us fervently hoped that it had gone back forever, largely because there had been growing in us the conviction that the beast from the depths was not fundamentally of earth, despite its earthly home at the bottom of the lake. And this hope dispelled in a measure that terrible sense of immediate and inexplicable danger which had so vividly obsessed us but a short time before. That afternoon, for the first time in two days, I returned to the work from which I had been called by the mysterious happenings. As first assistant to Tennant, my position was at least one of semi-authority, and it had not been a difficult matter to gain my chief’s consent to take a few days absence. It was a relief to get back to work, a relief to order men about, to work with something tangible, to feel again that one had some authority, some power, some control over a situation. And there were times in that bright afternoon when I could hardly believe that what had just happened was reality, when I could only believe that the whole affair was an evil chimera without meaning. How much better that it been a chimera! At five o’clock, Holmes came for me as he had promised. We spent some time together. But it was not until dinner that night that I knew, from his attitude, that there was something he wanted to impart. Over our coffee, each with a good cigar, I finally spoke of the matter. “Something seems to be bothering you,” I said. “Why not say it?” He shrugged his shoulders jerkily. “I don’t like to open that business again,” he said. “I want it closed—for good.” “The fossils, is it? You might as well tell me.” He needed no urging. In the afternoon, he had followed Jameson’s suggestions and looked about in the museum library. That collection is famous for its work on archeology, anthropology, and everything even remotely connected with them. Consequently its shelves on folk lore, ancient and modern, are large. Holmes had no difficulty in finding the books which his colleague had named as possible sources of information regarding our fossil remains. He had gone through several of the old volumes without much success. Here and there he had run across vague hints, suggestive sentences, and some of the volumes, vague paragraphs about mythology older than the universe, a strange mythology traceable to long, long dead aspects of ancient and elder Gods of Good and Evil. It was not until he opened the frightful Necronomicon of the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred, that he discovered the key to the half-hinted mythology in the other books. And thus, he stumbled upon the lost and terrible legend of Hastur, the Unspeakable, upon evil as old as, older than the universe, upon those ancient genii of evil—Hastur, Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Lloigor, Zhar, and others. It was then that he had his first vague knowledge of the Elder Gods, the Ancient Ones, and of those others, mad genii of evil who inhabited outer space before the world was born. It was they who descended to ravage Earth and were vanquished by the Elder Gods, and banished to the bottom of the sea. The accursed spawn of Cthulhu was sent into the sea, thrust deep into the caverns of a hidden and lost sea kingdom, the sunken land of R’lyeh. And there were other Evil Ones in this strange mythology, banished to the far forbidden places of the earth, and One, sent back into outer space. It was in the Necronomicon that these long-dead tales were brought together. From this book, Professor Holmes finally drew a consecutive and logical story of the age-long struggle between the forces of cosmic evil and the Elder Gods—the final defeat of the Evil Ones, and their ultimate banishment into the far corners of the earth. Holmes went on for a long time over our table, piecing together those legends, building up for me briefly the whole dead mythology of a time before man roamed the earth. Our coffee grew cold. Our cigars burned down. And still he went on in his quiet, slightly agitated voice. Even then, I was too uncomprehending to see what connection this mythology could have with the facts we had faced. At last he began the strange story he had read in the untitled confessions of Clithanus, telling of vague and terrible rumors that had spread across the earth in the time of man. There was a time, the monk told, when the accursed children of one such Evil One had escaped their prison, had been called back to earth by the power of those black souls who still worshipped them, spawn of mad Cthulhu. Frightful creatures roamed the earth, creatures neither beast nor man, spreading abroad a strange power that bred in the minds of men, making them give way to violence and lust, horrible perversions and sins that had not been known before. Wherever these frightful things appeared, killing and ravaging, crime and horror spread among men, and there was terror throughout the land. It was as if the creatures threw about them a spell under which all men fell, and there was none able to resist. And yet the things had been vanquished at last, by a power from the Elder Gods wielded in the hands of men. Not until the things had been sent deep beneath the waters of the earth, did the men who were still left return to the God they had known before. And never since, Clithanus wrote, has the earth been as fair as it was before the night things crept upon it this second time. Holmes stopped when he had told me the legend of Clithanus, and looked at me as if he believed he had shown me the secret of life itself. Even then, I did not entirely comprehend, for there was apparently nothing in what he had just revealed that I could tie up with our recent experience. But abruptly it struck me. “But a mythology so old that even the most learned don’t know of it!” I protested. “It can’t be! The tale of an ascetic, more like an allegory of some kind—but not based on fact, surely.” “Listen, Sharp,” he cut in, “as a scientist, I have nothing to say on the matter. You’ll remember that two of the country’s most able scholars and scientists directed me to the books of which I’ve been telling you. There’s nothing but this for me to believe—in the light of what we’ve seen here in Chicago.” He shrugged. “It’s true, I’m afraid. That thing, brought to life again unwittingly, back once more among men to work its horror—” “Then thank God it’s gone back!” I breathed, now comprehending what terrifying horror we had so narrowly escaped. For a moment, Holmes said nothing. Then he looked away, shuddering a little. “It’s time to go,” he said. Holmes left me that night at about nine o’clock before my own door. I stood there a moment and watched his car swing out of sight, a little perplexed at the air of uncertainty about him. Then I went in, and began to tackle the work I’d let slide lately. There was a stack of mail to be looked through, and a good number of blueprints to check. But I had barely settled down at my desk, when the telephone rang at my elbow. I took the instrument from its cradle. “Mr. Sharp? This is Jackson, the nightwatch.” The man’s voice was agitated. “What’s up?” “I’ve tried to get Mr. Tennant. He’s out. Can you come?” Damn the man, I thought. “Something wrong?” “I don’t know exactly. But something’s coming up out of the lake.” At that, I jerked up. “What’s that you said? Say that again.” “Something’s coming out of the lake. I don’t know what they are. Big, shadowy shapes, coming up out of the water—very big things. Can you come over? Should I call the police?” For a fleeting moment, I felt that I should like to be in London, Vienna—anywhere but in Chicago. “No, no,” I said quickly. “Where are you? Where are you calling from?” “Administration Building, sir.” “Wait for me!” I said, more agitated than the watchman himself. I ripped off my dressing gown, changed my shoes, slipped into my coat, and ran from my apartment into the street. I saw the light of a nearby cab, and without pausing, jumped into it. “To the Fair Grounds. Quick!” The driver made record time, and we were soon swinging off Michigan Avenue up the still rough, half-finished streets between the buildings under construction, The taxi stopped abruptly before the Administration Building. Without a word to the driver, I jumped out, and ran up the lane toward the lake shore, where the first construction buildings for the House of Art already stood grouped in a little cluster. Jackson’s there, I thought insanely. But he was not. One after the other, I pulled open the doors, looking into the deserted shacks. I ran out on the terrace before the houses, looking wildly from side to side. Then suddenly, to the north, I saw something. I think I cried out involuntarily. Far away, receding rapidly in the distance, I saw eight, ten, perhaps more giant figures limned grotesquely against the sky over the lake. In a moment, they were gone, vanishing even as I looked. Then, in the night, from far away, there came suddenly a sharp scream of terror and of horrifying anguish. Clapping my hands over my ears I ran forward again—and was sent sprawling. I had fallen over something. I scrambled to my feet, looking briefly behind me, and came up short. I had fallen over a crumpled body. For a moment, I stood in frozen horror. Then I dropped to my knees and bent over the body. It was the lifeless form of Jackson, the nightwatch, horribly mangled, crushed in a grip of superhuman power. I turned him over. His face was awful to see. . . . I had called a policeman whom I saw near the Administration Building, and paid my cabman. The officer came hurrying up. Somewhat incoherently, I explained what had happened, as far as I could gather from Jackson’s telephone call. What did I think was wrong? I had no idea. Something peculiar, certainly, or what could the man have meant by his babbling about shapes that he saw coming out of the water? Was he a drunkard? I didn’t know, but perhaps he had been drinking—that seemed to be the only logical explanation for his delusions. Had I seen anyone about when I arrived? No, no one nearby. I had, however, seen some figures disappear in the direction of Soldiers’ Field. What were they like? I didn’t know exactly. They were very large—might have been animals, apes, perhaps. The policeman looked at me as if he thought I might have been drinking. Then he knelt down beside the body and examined Jackson. His shocked face, looking up at me suddenly, was upsetting. “He’s in awful shape,” he said, eyeing me suspiciously. I agreed and suggested that he call an ambulance from the Administration Building, while I called Holmes at the same time. . . . Holmes’ car swung around the curve and drew up at the foot of the steps behind the ambulance just when the police had finished questioning me. Holmes came running up the steps and along the terrace. By that time, the police were already taking the body down on a stretcher, followed by a fussy coroner. Holmes paused a moment as they passed him, looked apprehensively at the stretcher. I answered his breathless questions with a quick account of what had taken place. Holmes looked at me in silence, but in his eyes I read the same thought that crowded horribly through my mind. The horror from the lake was not dead, would not be dead, until the same means which had once subdued it were used again! And now, there was no longer only one of the things. There were many! And these unearthly things had come trooping out of their age-old prison to go ravaging through the world! “We’ve got to do something!” Holmes said hoarsely. “If there’s a way to fight these creatures, and there must be, we must find it. And there’s only one place to look—those old books.” In a little while, we were seated in the museum library, in a small room whose walls were covered with volumes of great age, the rarer items in the museum collection. Holmes drew down a ponderous volume, bound in old leather, torn in places, and very badly worn, and settled himself in a chair at the table in the corner of the room. “Know Latin?” he shot at me. “Fairly well.” “Then read this along with me,” he said. I pulled my chair up next to his and looked at the open book. It was the volume of unnamable confessions by the monk, Clithanus. Words fraught with ghastly suggestion leaped out at me from the faded pages. I began to read where Holmes indicated I should. It was the story of the return of the Evil Ones to earth, and the ruin they had worked. Luridly, the monk had painted the pictures of the unspeakable crime and lust with which the earth had been cursed. Then, more briefly, more vaguely, he told how holy men from the interior of Europe had driven these evil genii into the waters of the earth. The holy men had used the forces of the Elder Gods, the power of the Ancient Ones, which they had come upon in some manner. The things had been scattered over the waters of the earth, but the most wicked of them had been buried in a place Clithanus did not know. In a far country where I have not been. Here few have journeyed. The Evil Ones were gathered in the deep of night—for it is only in the night that they roam—and driven back down into the dim caverns beneath the seas in that land. Holmes turned the page quickly, so that I could not finish it. But I started again at the top of the next heavy page. —held down by the power of the blessed stars laid out over the water in the form of one great star, the five points marking the directions of the earth and the secret place beyond the earth from which the things of Evil had first come, the holy ones meanwhile whispering the secret words, the words know only to them, translated by them into this language from the ancient gibberings in which the Elder Gods had given them the potent words. Holmes reached suddenly for a pad of paper that lay nearby and hastily took down something his advancing eye had seen before I had. The secret words, perhaps! Eagerly, I watched his hand. Negotia Perambulanti in Tenebris. . . . Things walking in the darkness, things not of the earth, things belonging to the damned hosts of evil, get you down into the nameless kingdoms under the seas, get you down and remain, by the power of the five-pointed stars, blessed and sacred, made powerful by the Elder Gods who loathe the evil you work in all being. O, Elder Gods, from your impenetrable fastnesses, look down and confirm, extend your power once more. Go down, you Evil Ones, and remain forever in eternal darkness. Hosts of mad Cthulhu, spawn of unspeakable Hastur, loathsome brood of Yog-Sothoth, get you down into everlasting sleep. Never again shall you rise upon the fair earth. Go, in the name of those Elder Gods, the Old Ones, whom once you sought to displace. Go now, and the power of the five-pointed star shall forever hold you below the face of the earth in the hidden and lost sea kingdoms of the vast unknown! Holmes looked up suddenly. “Finished?” he asked. I nodded. He closed the book and returned it to the shelf. “That’s our one chance,” he said. “If it has been before, it can be done again. We’ve got to find those stars—whatever they are. And if anyone can help us there, it will be Jameson. I’ll see him in the morning.” I agreed, and walked ahead of Holmes from the building, waiting for him on the topmost steps while he bent to lock the outer doors. And suddenly as I stood there, there came suddenly to my ears a sound fraught with horror, a clamor as of a thousands voices in unison, rising abruptly above the noise of traffic on Michigan Avenue and beyond. Holmes swung around. “My God!” he exclaimed. “Those things, you said—went north along the lake shore?” I nodded, speechless with horror. Holmes took his hand from my arm, pulling himself together. “That must be from Municipal Pier. We wouldn’t hear it otherwise.” Then he shot past me, running toward the car, and I pulled myself from the dark horror enshrouding me, and followed. The guess had correctly fixed the scene from which the terrifying clamor originated. As the machine drew up in a line of parked cars, I saw police cars not far distant, and farther along, Black Marias. A loud moaning reached our ears as we came away from the car, and then a sudden, sharp snarling sound. From somewhere, rose a fright-ridden whistling and sucking noise. Someone screamed, and another voice, horribly raucous, laughed hysterically in the night. Holmes and I ran forward, only to meet an impassable line of policemen! Despite our almost frantic efforts, we got no farther than this line of men, and were forced to return home that night with no more satisfaction than the knowledge that perhaps it had been better for us not to have seen the terrible carnage left by the things from the lake. The newspapers carried the story the next morning. The horror had begun with an assault upon a pedestrian near the lake shore. It must have occurred almost immediately after the death of the nightwatchman at the Fair Grounds. The papers said that both murders had been committed by the same person or persons, for there were definite tracks between one body and the other—but no paper ventured to guess at what had made the tracks. Fortunately, the outer pier had been almost deserted because of the cool evening. The pier itself was not yet officially open, yet it had been in use since the first warm March days. There were perhaps fifty people on it At about ten o’clock, pedestrians on Michigan Avenue had heard a sudden screaming from the direction of the pier, and the police reached the spot shortly after. The horrible scene upon which they came stopped the whole force for a moment. There were twenty-two newly dead bodies, and the policeman on the pier was one. But terrible as this scene was, its aftermath was even more awful. It would have been better if all of those on the pier had been killed. But some remaining were strangely mad and bestial. None left on the pier had been granted any longer use of his mind. Intelligence was fled, and in its place had been left only evil, vile bestiality. Men and women, killing each other—the scene was too awful to describe. Strangest of all was the manner in which the newspapers received the incident. There were news stories, of course, about the horror. But editorial columns treated the incident more loosely, more facetiously, than any sane editor would write. The police, their inability to give consistent accounts of what they had found, were joked about. The mad gibberings of the unfortunates left alive on the pier, the wild tales of great hulking things that had come in from the lake, were openly mocked at. And while the papers featured the tragedy at the pier, all of them were filled with smaller, less detailed notes, showing terribly that the evil reign of horror, fore-ordained by the appearance of the creatures from the depths, had begun. All night long, evil had reigned. The files of newspapers for those terrifying days are open to anyone who wishes to see. Wherever one’s eye fell on the day’s papers, there were stories of vile and rampant madness. But in the morning, I thought that there was a dead stillness lying over all Chicago, and appalling stillness that was greater than the bustle and noise of commercial activity. Three million people waiting for another night! Was it the horror of those returned now to their senses, horror following quick upon the realization of evil they had done in the night? Or was it the stillness of crouching evil, waiting for the darkness to cloak its being? I did not dress for work. That morning I could not have ordered my men about. I was too shaken. But I went down to the Fair Grounds to explain to Tennant the part that I had played in the death of Jackson. Tennant was not in a good mood. I think it was because he naturally abhorred notoriety, and reporters had been haunting him since dawn. He eyed me glumly as I told him what I knew of the affair. Perhaps I should not have done so, but his incredulity at my story shocked me. “It’s some damned clever trick, that’s all,” he said. “It’s organized crime gone over the edge, the natural result of our tolerating gang rule for so long.” “But, Tennant—” I began, and then broke off. I could not explain to him. Tennant was a man of hopeless common sense and he would never believe that I had come to accept as fact—the legends set down by century-dead scribes. “The police don’t know what to do about it, as usual,” he went on. “But I think I do.” I did not guess at his meaning. “What do you want to do?” “I’m coming down here tonight,” he said, pointing with one extended arm to the spot on the shore where the great, unknown tracks still showed in the moist said. “I’m coming with about four men and a machine gun. Whatever comes out of that water gets shot down!” “Look here, Tennant,” I cut in, “I don’t think you should try anything unless you’re sure—” “Nonsense!” he snapped. “If you don’t want to be on the shore with us, come down and stand up here on the terrace before the Administration Building. You can watch the end of this business, even if you don’t want to help!” I shrugged my shoulders. Knowing Tennant as well as I did, I realized the futility of arguing with him. “What time?” I asked. “I’ll be here by eight. They came about nine last night.” I hesitated. “I’m going to see Holmes,” I said finally. “He’s in on this with me, Tennant. If he wants to come over, I’ll come, too.” “All right, Sharp. I’ll get ’em. Wait and see.” I found Holmes in the museum library. Dr. Jameson was with him. Both of them were searching the old volumes for some clue to the mysteriously potent stars mentioned by Clithanus as the only weapon with which to fight the horror from beneath. I sat down to help them. The anguish of that search was inexpressible—the sudden mad frenzy with which one of us was overcome, thinking he had touched upon the thing for which we sought, the long hours of hopelessness when nothing new came from those pages. But, in the end, our search was utterly futile. It was five o’clock that afternoon when the last possible source of information had been put back on the shelves. We sat there looking at each other in bitter disappointment. There was nothing we could do without the secret of the stars. The suggestion of world terror soon to follow was horrible. Tennant came back to my mind suddenly, and I quickly outlined his plan to Holmes and Jameson. As I had expected, both of them protested angrily. “We’ve got to stop him,” said Holmes with determination. But almost immediately, despair drooped his shoulders. “But we can’t! Despite what has happened, no one would believe us—and we can’t try to tell them. That would only hamper us more. As to coming down—no, no, we must not go.” But at eight o’clock that night, Holmes and I stood on the top-most step of the Administration Building’s terrace, watching the figures down at the shore. The fascination in the promise that we might learn something new of the things from the lake had been too strong for Holmes. We had to come! And so we stood in the dim light and watched the figures silhouetted against the flares Tennant had had put up to light the scene of activity. For half an hour, we stood there watching the men below us, trying to crush down the forebodings that haunted us. Then suddenly, Holmes clutched my arm. I heard him whispering under his breath, hoarsely, frightened. “Look! My God, look at them—look down there!” A horrible fear slowly clamped its hand upon me. A great shadow was rising slowly from the lake. Behind it, another shadow began to grow suddenly out of the lake, farther out, wallowing a little in the water. The first of the creatures gained the shore, splashing about a little. Then, the first series of shots rang out. The thing did not fall. It paused a moment, its great unshapely bulk limned against the sky, its unnatural leg formations struck deep into the sand. Then came an abrupt sucking noise, as of a great odious beast drawing water through a tube, and abruptly after, a shrill weird whistling from the shadows still rising out of the lake. The thing on the shore lumbered slowly forward. Another series of shots spoke sharply in the night. Then a pistol report—the thing lumbered closer. Behind it came others. Now the machine gun was emptying itself into the shadows, but in a body, with a great sucking and whistling noise, the creatures walked through the steady firing toward the group of men. Someone screamed suddenly. I felt Holmes’ hand clutching my arm so tightly it hurt, but I did not move. One of the men below turned and started to flee. But at that moment, he was overcome by the first shadow, which seemed to collapse suddenly, draping itself over the fleeing man like an abruptly deflated balloon. There was a sudden death-ridden scream—then another, and another. The shots had stopped. Below us there was indescribable carnage. Great lumbering floundering shapes on the lake shore where the men had been, suddenly ended screams. The terror-fraught sound of sucking and whistling continued. Unconscious of what I was doing, I ran forward a few steps, but Holmes dove for my body, quickly drew me back. From down there came the horribly suggestive sound of snapping and breaking—bones! I put up my hands and stopped my ears. Like a man in a dream, I saw those gigantic shadows draw apart a little, heard the sucking and whistling subside abruptly. The shapes lumbered clumsily but swiftly away along the shore. Somehow, I got to my feet, and followed Holmes toward the still forms that lay on the sand. There was no sound. Holmes bent briefly over the body of the first man, the one who had first tried to flee from the horror. He turned away, shuddering. We examined those crushed and mangled bodies, and one thought was uppermost in my mind. Where was Tennant? Suddenly one of the bodies to my right groaned. I dropped quickly and looked at his face. It was Tennant! I felt of him quickly. By some miracle he was alive—apparently he had suffered no bodily injury! The police had heard the shots, appeared just as we lifted that single living form from the ground and laid it a little apart. Tennant groaned again. Holmes examined the body, quickly, agitated. “Badly frightened, but not hurt. Strange,” he muttered. I took the revolver which my chief still held tightly in his fist, and dropped it into my pocket. Holmes was passing his hand rapidly over Tennant’s body, to assure himself that Tennant was unhurt. Abruptly Holmes’ expression changed to wonder. His hand stopped at Tennant’s coat pocket, fastened around something inside. Then his hand dived inside Tennant’s pocket, and brought out the thing he had felt there. For a moment he held his hand tightly clenched. “Hope, Sharp!” he whispered. Then he opened his hand. In his palm lay a piece of stone, not very large, cut in the shape of a five-pointed star! We followed the ambulance that carried the raving Tennant to the hospital, but they would not admit us to the room in which he was immediately confined. A doctor told us presently that his babbling had lessened, but that his mind still wandered. He would be all right, though, when he recovered from the horrible shock. He had a broken leg, the only serious consequence of his struggle with the thing from the lake. We could wait if he wished, but it might take a long time. We felt we had to wait. It was too important to learn from Tennant where he had gotten the star-shaped stone. Holmes drew it from his pocket while we sat outside Tennant’s door. “It is certainly one of the ‘blessed stars’ mentioned by Clithanus,” he said. “It was only because he had that in his pocket that Tennant was spared !” “But where on earth did Tennant, who knew nothing about the real nature of the things, get this?” Holmes shrugged. “I can’t tell you, but he knows, and he must tell us. Where this one was, there must be others, for so Clithanus intimates.” Once more, he gave his attention to that peculiar stone, cut so exactly into the shape of a five-pointed star. It must have been very old. In color, it was a pale green, but it seemed to have been scraped clean of an outer covering, perhaps by Tennant, for in places there were the distinct marks of a knife blade. We could make out little from the stone itself. But after several hours of waiting a nurse came from the room with the information that we had better return in the morning. So we went to my apartment, where we spent the night in ceaseless conjecture. We went over what had happened again and again, touching especially upon the evil effects caused by the appearance of the horror from the depths. Through some sort of telepathy, these creatures from the lake sent slithering into the minds of men the desires which had led to the awful crimes and orgies of the preceding night—which must be going on this night, too. When dawn came at last, we bathed and ate before leaving for the hospital. Holmes bought several morning papers at once, merely glanced at the headlines, which justified our belief that further crimes were committed during the night, and then put them aside. He remarked angrily upon the lack of any suggested explanation, and the facetious manner of presenting the crime wave. When we got to the hospital, we were told that Tennant was conscious and feeling better. He had been awake for some time, had been asking for us. His mind was still somewhat clouded, although he spoke quite clearly. “Good morning,” he said in an exhausted voice. “I’m feeling about as bad as I can remember ever having felt.” His assumed smile faded abruptly, and he looked up at us with frightened eyes. “My God, Sharp, what happened? Those fellows who were with me? Where are they? What’s become of them? Tell me.” Holmes cut in with a brief account of what had happened the night before, and came quickly to the matter of the stone, which he produced from his pocket. “Where’d you get that, Tennant?” he asked. Tennant looked at the stone for a few moments as if not understanding. Then he closed his eyes tightly, forcing his memory back. “I found that on the lake shore two days ago. The dredge brought up about fifty of them—looked as if they had been laid in a strata or lines along the bottom. At first, I didn’t think much about them, but finally I picked one of them up, scraped it, and put it into my pocket. Most of them are still lying near the construction shacks.” Holmes could hardly contain himself. Before Tennant had finished, Holmes was plucking excitedly at my sleeve. As fast as we could, we left Tennant’s room and went at once to the scene of the reclamation, Holmes talking excitedly. “Do you see it now, Sharp? Those Elder Gods imprisoned the evil ones by the power of the five-pointed stars, their magic held the things at the bottom of the lake until the dredging operations broke the powerful star design on the lake floor. And the fossil we had—that thing summoned the others after the spell was so unwittingly broken.” That was the crux of the mystery. Now it was clear for the first time. And for the first time, I had a feeling of power, for in the stars lay our success, and already this force had been made manifest, for one of them had saved Tennant by its mere presence! We found the pile of stones at the place Tennant had described. Fortunately it was still intact. We managed without much trouble to find a large crate, into which we dropped the stones. Then, using Holmes’ car, we hauled them to the museum laboratory. There we scraped them clean examining each for any sign of inscriptions. But there was none. They were all alike, except that some were larger. The carving was precise, symmetrical. We laid them out on a table. “It must be at dusk tonight,” said Holmes softly, “when there are no workmen or loiterers about. We’ll want a barge, and it will have to be placed near the spot from which those first remains were drawn forth. And we’ll have to do it alone! We couldn’t explain to the police, and in an extremity, we can depend only upon Jameson and Morrison, no one else.” He turned and looked hard at me. “It’s very dangerous, Sharp. I haven’t any idea what will happen. We may fail.” His eyes were troubled. “Are you ready to do it—knowing what it might mean?” I nodded. We two alone would fight the evil that had been loosed upon the world. At dusk, we met on the terrace of the Administration Building. Two hundred feet out on the lake, directly over the spot on which we had been working three days before, a barge was waiting. I had taken charge in Tennant’s absence, and it was an easy matter to order workmen to leave it there, instead of pulling it up to the shore with the others. A rowboat was waiting at the water’s edge, and into this we put the crate of stones. We paused for a moment before we stepped into the boat and looked back at the buildings. No one was in sight. Silently, Holmes stepped into the boat and took a pair of oars. I shoved the boat away from the beach and jumped in. How could I keep my mind from the horror that I knew lurked beneath the waters? Deep, deep down, there were the things we meant to destroy, things that might so easily destroy us instead. I felt myself gripping hard on the oars to keep from reversing the movement and pulling back toward shore in terror and fright, to flee from that scene and never return. But I kept my mind fixed on the determination that showed in every line of Holmes’ bent figure. In a few moments, the rowboat was scraping at the sides of the barge, and Holmes jumped lightly out and tied it to the heavier craft. Together we lifted out the box with its burden of curious stones and set it on the barge. Then I stepped up. Feverishly, we went to work, marking out the pattern of a five-pointed star on the barge, a star as great as the surface of the craft would allow. Then we began to place the stones at regular intervals along the chalk lines we had drawn, the five largest stones marking the five points. It was a mad business, madly done. I was close upon a frenzy when we finished. Now, more than ever, I wished to get into the rowboat and get back to shore. Together we stepped into the center of that great design, that symbolic thing we had made, outlined by the stars in whose power we had placed our lives. Holmes peered at me. “Ready?” he asked. I nodded. Darkness was falling when Holmes’ strong voice rang out over the waters, speaking in Latin in incantation I knew: “Things walking in the darkness, things not of the earth, things belonging to the damned hosts of evil, get you down into the nameless kingdoms under the seas. Hosts of mad Cthulhu, spawn of unspeakable Hastur, loathsome brood of Yog-Sothoth, get you down into everlasting sleep. Go, in the name of those Elder Gods, the Old Ones, whom once you sought madly to displace. Go now, and the power of the five-pointed star shall forever hold you below the face of the earth in the hidden and lost sea kingdoms of the vast unknown!” The echoes of the strange and alien words died over the water. Then Holmes began again, more loudly, more clearly. His voice must have gone on, but I was suddenly no longer aware of it. Suddenly there was a great whirling in the air, tremendous whispering sounds not unlike a powerful wind coming at a great distance. And at the same time, the stars on the barge had begun to glow like fire. What occurred next I don’t remember clearly. I remember only that suddenly the entire sky was alight, as if on fire, and then consciousness seemed to be seeping out from me. I struggled to keep my feet, to keep the universe from whirling about the sky. Then blackness fell. When I opened my eyes again I was still on the barge. Everything was quiet. I crawled over to Holmes, who lay inert near me. Slowly he opened his eyes as I shook him. Then he got up, looking eagerly about him. The stars were gone—all of them. There was only the barren surface. We leaned far over the side of the barge and peered at the slime around it—a horrible green slime, from which arose a putrid odor of long-dead things. Silently, Holmes led the way across the barge to the rowboat, and we started back to the city. Holmes told me later what had happened after I passed out that night—told me why the things had been destroyed utterly, annihilated, rather than buried again. And this explained at the same time the weird stories of the columns of fire seen over the lake, stories that the papers reported the morning after our adventure. Suddenly, as he chanted the secret words aloud, Holmes heard a great wind come from the north, and in its wake he saw gigantic pillars of fire writhing and flaming in the night, and from these pillars had come stabbing, blinding rays of annihilation and death! What they were, Holmes would not reveal. But in the delirium before his death, he mumbled the secret and I heard it in awe. From the frozen and impenetrable fastnesses in the far and unexplored northlands and from beyond, from the far reaches of the sky, had come a greater power even than our stones to help us in our battle with the evil spawn that lay in the lake. It had come to help annihilate an age-old enemy that once before had fought against it. It was the Elder Gods, sweeping down with the wind from the north, avenging mankind, destroying forever the brood of Cthulhu, the horror from the depths! |
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