Haggopian and Other Stories

Cement Surroundings

Two months before writing “The Caller of The Black”, in June 1967 I had finished “Cement Surroundings”, which August Derleth had immediately accepted for Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, an anthology he was then preparing for publication. I took my payment (seventy-five dollars—wow!—for which I was most grateful) in Arkham House books. This was a wise move; those books would be worth a fortune now, if I still owned them! But while I might shed a tear now and then I can’t complain, because they’ve saved my skin (financially speaking) on several occasions. Anyway, in due time “Cement Surroundings” did indeed appear in TOTCM along with one other Lumley tale, plus stories by a good many literary heroes of mine and various contemporaries. “Cement Surroundings” didn’t rest there, however, for I then used it as a chapter in my first Mythos novel—The Burrowers Beneath.

I

It will never fail to amaze me how certain allegedly Christian people take a perverse delight in the misfortunes of others. Just how true this is was brought forcibly home to me by the totally unnecessary whispers and rumours which were put about following the disastrous decline of my closest living relative.

There were those who concluded that just as the moon is responsible for the tides, and in part the slow movement of the Earth’s upper crust, so was it also responsible for Sir Amery Wendy-Smith’s behaviour on his return from Africa. As proof they pointed out my uncle’s sudden fascination for seismography—the study of earthquakes—a subject which so took his fancy that he built his own instrument, a model which does not incorporate the conventional concrete base, to such an exactitude that it measures even the most minute of the deep tremors which are constantly shaking this world. It is that same instrument which sits before me now, rescued from the ruins of the cottage, at which I am given to casting, with increasing frequency, sharp and fearful glances. Before his disappearance my uncle spent hours, seemingly without purpose, studying the fractional movements of the stylus over the graph.

For my own part I found it more than odd the way in which, while Sir Amery was staying in London after his return, he shunned the underground and would pay abortive taxi fares rather than go down into what he termed “those black tunnels”. Odd, certainly—but I never considered it a sign of insanity.

Yet even his few really close friends seemed convinced of his madness, blaming it upon his living too close to those dead and nigh-forgotten civilizations which so fascinated him. But how could it have been otherwise? My uncle was both antiquarian and archaeologist. His strange wanderings to foreign lands were not the result of any longing for personal gain or acclaim. Rather were they undertaken out of a love of the life, for any fame which resulted—as frequently occurred—was more often than not shrugged off onto the ever-willing personages of his colleagues. They envied him, those so-called contemporaries of his, and would have emulated his successes had they possessed the foresight and inquisitiveness with which he was so singularly gifted—or, as I have now come to believe, with which he was cursed. My bitterness towards them is directed by the way in which they cut him after the dreadful culmination of that last, fatal expedition. In earlier years many of them had been “made” by his discoveries but on that last trip those “hangers-on” had been the uninvited, the ones out of favour, to whom he would not offer the opportunity of fresh, stolen glory. I believe that for the greater part their assurances of his insanity were nothing more than a spiteful means of belittling his genius.

Certainly that last safari was his physical end. He who before had been straight and strong, for a man his age, with jet hair and a constant smile, was seen to walk with a pronounced stoop and had lost a lot of weight. His hair had greyed and his smile had become rare and nervous while a distinct tic jerked the flesh at the corner of his mouth.

Before these awful deteriorations made it possible for his erstwhile “friends” to ridicule him, before the expedition, Sir Amery had deciphered or translated—I know little of these things—a handful of decaying, centuried shards known in archaeological circles as the G’harne Fragments. Though he would never fully discuss his findings I know it was that which he learned which sent him, ill-fated, into Africa. He and a handful of personal friends, all equally learned gentlemen, ventured into the interior seeking a legendary city which Sir Amery believed had existed centuries before the foundations were cut for the pyramids. Indeed, according to his calculations, Man’s primal ancestors were not yet conceived when G’harne’s towering ramparts first reared their monolithic sculptings to pre-dawn skies. Nor with regard to the age of the place, if it existed at all, could my uncle’s claims be disproved. New scientific tests on the G’harne Fragments had shown them to be pre-triassic and their very existence, in any form other than centuried dust, was impossible to explain.

It was Sir Amery, alone and in a terrible condition, who staggered upon an encampment of savages five weeks after setting out from the native village where the expedition had last had contact with civilization. No doubt the ferocious men who found him would have done away with him there and then but for their superstitions. His wild appearance and the strange tongue in which he screamed, plus the fact that he had emerged from an area which was “taboo” in their tribal legends, stayed their hands. Eventually they nursed him back to a semblance of health and conveyed him to a more civilized region from where he was slowly able to make his way back to the outside world. Of the expedition’s other members nothing has since been seen or heard and only I know the story, having read it in the letter my uncle left me. But more of that later.

Following his lone return to England, Sir Amery developed those eccentricities already mentioned and the merest hint or speculation on the part of outsiders with reference to the disappearance of his colleagues was sufficient to start him raving horribly of such inexplicable things as “a buried land where Shudde-M’ell broods and bubbles, plotting the destruction of the human race and the release from his watery prison of Great Cthulhu…” When he was asked officially to account for his missing companions he said that they had died in an earthquake and though, reputedly, he was asked to clarify his answer, he would say no more…

Thus, being uncertain as to how he would react to questions about his expedition, I was loath to ask him of it. However, on those rare occasions when he saw fit to talk of it without prompting I listened avidly for I, as much as if not more so than others, was eager to have the mystery cleared up.

He had been back only a few months when he suddenly left London and invited me up to his cottage, isolated here on the Yorkshire moors, to keep him company. This invitation was a thing strange in itself as he was one who had spent months in absolute solitude in various far-flung desolate places and liked to think of himself as something of a hermit. I accepted, for I saw the perfect chance to get a little of that solitude which I find particularly helpful to my writing.

II

One day, shortly after I had settled in, Sir Amery showed me a pair of strangely beautiful pearly spheres. They measured about four inches in diameter and though he had been unable to positively identify the material from which they were made, he was able to tell me that it appeared to be some unknown combination of calcium, chrysolite and diamond-dust. How the things had been made was, as he put it, “anybody’s guess.” The spheres, he told me, had been found at the site of dead G’harne—the first intimation he had offered that he had actually found the place—buried beneath the earth in a lidless, stone box which had borne upon its queerly angled sides certain utterly alien engravings. Sir Amery was anything but explicit with regard to those designs, merely stating that they were so loathsome in what they suggested that it would not do to describe them too closely. Finally, in answer to my probing questions, he told me they depicted monstrous sacrifices to some unnameable, cthonian deity. More he refused to say but directed me, as I seemed so “damnably eager,” to the works of Commodus and the hag-ridden Caracalla. He mentioned that also upon the box, along with the pictures, were many lines of sharply cut characters much similar to the cuneiform etchings of the G’harne Fragments and, in certain aspects, having a disturbing likeness to the almost unfathomable Pnakotic Manuscripts. Quite possibly, he went on, the container had been a toy-box of sorts and the spheres, in all probability, were once the baubles of a child of the ancient city; certainly children—or young ones—were mentioned in what he had managed to decipher of the odd writing on the box.

It was during this stage of his narrative that I noticed Sir Amery’s eyes were beginning to glaze over and his speech was starting to falter—almost as though some strange, psychic block were affecting his memory. Without warning, like a man suddenly gone into a hypnotic trance, he began muttering of Shudde-M’ell and Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth and Yibb-Tstll— “alien Gods defying description” and of mythological places with equally fantastic names; Sarnath and Hyperborea, R’lyeh and Ephiroth and many more…

Eager though I was to learn more of that tragic expedition I fear it was I who stopped Sir Amery from saying on. Try as I might, on hearing him babbling so, I could not keep a look of pity and concern from showing on my face which, when he saw it, caused him to hurriedly excuse himself and flee to the privacy of his room. Later, when I looked in at his door, he was engrossed with his seismograph and appeared to be relating the markings on its graph to an atlas of the world which he had taken from his library. I was concerned to note that he was quietly arguing with himself.

Naturally, being what he was and having such a great interest in peculiar, anthropoligical problems, my uncle had always possessed—along with his historical and archaeological source books—a smattering of works concerning elder-lore and primitive and doubtful religions. I mean such works as the Golden Bough and Miss Murray’s Witch Cult. But what was I to make of those other books which I found in his library within a few days of my arrival? On his shelves were at least nine works which I know are so outrageous in what they suggest that they have been mentioned by widely differing authorities over a period of many years as being damnable, blasphemous, abhorrent, unspeakable and literary lunacy. These included the Cthaat Aquadingen by an unknown author, Feery’s Notes on the Necronomicon, the Liber Miraculorem, Eliphas Lévi’s History of Magic and a faded, leather-bound copy of the hideous Cultes des Goules. Perhaps the worst thing I saw was a slim volume by Commodus which that “Blood Maniac” had written in AD 183 and which was protected from further fragmentation by lamination.

And moreover, as if these books were not puzzling enough, there was that other thing!! What of the indescribable, droning chant which I often heard issuing from Sir Amery’s room in the dead of night? This first occurred on the sixth night I spent with him and I was roused from my own uneasy slumbers by the morbid accents of a language it seemed impossible for the vocal chords of Man to emulate. Yet my uncle was weirdly fluent with it and I scribbled down an oft-repeated sentence-sequence in what I considered the nearest written approximation of the spoken words I could find. These words—or sounds—were:

Ce’haiie ep-ngh fl’hur G’harne fhtagn,

Ce’haiie fhtagn ngh Shudde-M’ell.

Hai G’harne orr’e ep fl’hur,

Shudde-M’ell ican-icanicas fl’hur orr’e G’harne…

Though at the time I found the thing impossible to pronounce as I heard it, I have since found that with each passing day, oddly, the pronunciation of those lines comes easier—as if with the approach of some obscene horror I grow more capable of expressing myself in that horror’s terms. Perhaps it is just that lately in my dreams, I have found occasion to speak those very words and, as all things are far simpler in dreams, my fluency has passed over into my waking hours. But that does not explain the tremors—the same inexplicable tremors which so terrorized my uncle. Are the shocks which cause the ever-present quiverings of the seismograph stylus merely the traces of some vast, subterrene cataclysm a thousand miles deep and five thousand miles away—or are they caused by something else? Something so outré and fearsome that my mind freezes when I am tempted to study the problem too closely…

III

There came a time, after I had been with him for a number of weeks, when it seemed plain that Sir Amery was rapidly recovering. True, he still retained his stoop,—though to me it seemed no longer so pronounced—, and his so-called eccentricities, but he was more his old self in other ways. The nervous tic had left his face completely and his cheeks had regained something of their former colour. His improvement, I conjectured, had much to do with his never-ending studies of the seismograph: for I had established. by that time that there was a definite connection between the measurements of that machine and my uncle’s illness. Nevertheless, I was at a loss to understand why the internal movements of the Earth should so determine the state of his nerves. It was after a trip to his room, to look at that instrument, that he told me more of dead G’harne. It was a subject I should have attempted to steer him away from…

“The fragments,” he said, “told the location of a city the name of which, G’harne, is only known in legend and which has in the past been spoken of on a par with Atlantis, Mu and R’lyeh. A myth and nothing more. But if you give a legend a location you strengthen it somewhat—and if that location yields up relics of the past, of a civilization lost for aeons, then the legend becomes history. You’d be surprised how much of the world’s history has in fact been built up that way.

“It was my hope, a hunch you might call it, that G’harne had been real—and with the deciphering of the fragments I found it within my power to prove, one way or the other, G’harne’s elder existence. I have been in some strange places, Paul, and have listened to even stranger stories. I once lived with an African tribe who declared they knew the secrets of the lost city and their story-tellers told me of a land where the sun never shines; where Shudde-M’ell, hiding deep in the honeycombed ground, plots the dissemination of evil and madness throughout the world and plans the resurrection of other, even worse abominations!

“He hides there in the earth and awaits the time when the stars will be right, when his horrible hordes will be sufficient in number, and when he can infest the entire world with his loathsomeness and cause the return of others more loathsome yet! I was told stories of fabulous star-born creatures who inhabited the Earth millions of years before Man appeared and who were still here, in certain dark places, when he eventually evolved. I tell you, Paul,” his voice rose, “that they are here even now—in places undreamed of! I was told of sacrifices to Yog-Sothoth and Yibb-Tstll that would make your blood run cold and of weird rites practiced beneath prehistoric skies before old Egypt was born. These things I’ve heard make the works of Albertus Magnus and Grobert seem tame and De Sade himself would have paled at the hearing.”

My uncle’s voice had been speeding up progressively with each sentence, but now he paused for breath and in a more normal tone and at a reduced rate he continued:

“My first thought on deciphering the fragments was of an expedition. I may tell you I had learned of certain things I could have dug for here in England—you’d be surprised what lurks beneath the surface of some of those peaceful Cotswold hills—but that would have alerted a host of so called ‘experts’ and amateurs alike so I decided on G’harne. When I first mentioned an expedition to Kyle and Gordon and the others I must have produced quite a convincing argument for they all insisted on coming along. Some of them though, I’m sure, must have considered themselves upon a wild goose chase for, as I’ve explained, G’harne lies in the same realm as Mu or Ephiroth—or at least it did—and they must have seen themselves as questing after a veritable lamp of Aladdin; but despite all that they came. They could hardly afford not to come, for if G’harne was real…why! Think of the lost glory… They would never have forgiven themselves. And that’s why I can’t forgive myself; but for my meddling with the fragments they’d all be here now, God help them…”

Again, Sir Amery’s voice had become full of some dread excitement and feverishly he continued.

“Heavens, but this place sickens me! I can’t stand it much longer. It’s all this grass and soil. Makes me shudder! Cement surroundings are what I need—and the thicker the cement the better… Yet even the cities have their drawbacks… Undergrounds and things… Did you ever see Pickman’s Subway Accident, Paul? By God, what a picture… And that night… That night! If you could have seen them—coming up out of the diggings? If you could have felt the tremors… Why! The very ground rocked and danced as they rose… We’d disturbed them, d’you see? They may have even thought they were under attack and up they came… My God! What could have been the reason for such ferocity? Only a few hours before I had been congratulating myself on finding the spheres, and then… And then…”

Now he was panting and his eyes, as before, had partly glazed over. His voice had undergone a strange change of timbre and his accents were slurred and alien.

“Ce’haiie, Ce’haiie… The city may be buried but whoever named the place dead G’harne didn’t know the half of it. They were alive! They’ve been alive for millions of years; perhaps they can’t die… And why shouldn’t that be? They’re Gods aren’t they, of a sort?… Up they come in the night…”

“Uncle, please!” I said.

“You needn’t look at me so, Paul, or think what you’re thinking either… There’s stranger things happened, believe me. Wilmarth of Miskatonic could crack a few yarns, I’ll be bound! You haven’t read what Johansen wrote! Dear Lord, read the Johansen narrative! Hai ep fl’hur… Wilmarth… The old babbler… What is it he knows which he won’t tell? Why was that which was found at those Mountains of Madness so hushed up, eh? What did Pabodie’s equipment draw up out of the earth? Tell me those things, if you can? Ha, ha, ha! Ce’haiie, Ce’haiie—G’harne icanica…”

Shrieking now, and glassy-eyed he stood, with his hands gesticulating wildly in the air. I do not think he saw me at all, or anything, except—in his mind’s eye—a horrible recurrence of what he imagined had been. I took hold of his arm to calm him but he brushed my hand away, seemingly without knowing what he was doing.

“Up they come, the rubbery things… Goodbye Gordon… Don’t scream so—the shrieking turns my mind… Thank heavens it’s only a dream!… A nightmare just like all the others I’ve been having lately… It is a dream, isn’t it? Goodbye Scott, Kyle, Leslie…”

Suddenly, eyes bugging, he spun wildly round.

“The ground is breaking up! So many of them…I’m falling…it’s not a dream! Dear God! IT’S NOT A DREAM! No! Keep off, d’you hear! Aghhh! The slime… Got to run!… Run! Away from those—voices?—away from the sucking sounds and the chanting…”

Without warning he broke into a chant himself and the awful sound of it, no longer distorted by distance or the thickness of a stout door, would have sent a more timid listener into a faint. It was similar to what I had heard before in the night and the words do not seem so evil on paper, almost ludicrous in fact, but to hear them issuing from the mouth of my own flesh and blood—and with such unnatural fluency…

“Ep ep fl’hur G’harne,

G’harne fhtagn Shudde-M’ell hyas Negg’h.

While chanting these incredible mouthings Sir Amery’s feet had started to pump up and down in a grotesque parody of running. Suddenly he screamed anew and with startling abruptness leapt past me and ran full tilt into the wall. The shock knocked him off his feet and he collapsed in a heap on the floor.

I was worried that my meagre ministrations might not be adequate, but to my immense relief he regained consciousness a few minutes later. Shakily he assured me that he was “all right, just shook up a bit!” and, supported by my arm, he retired to his room.

That night I found it impossible to close my eyes so I wrapped myself in a blanket and sat outside my uncle’s room to be on hand if he were disturbed in his sleep. He passed a quiet night, however, and paradoxically enough, in the morning, he seemed to have got the thing out of his system and was positively improved.

Modern doctors have known for a long time that in certain mental conditions a cure may be obtained by inciting the patient to re-live the events which caused his illness. Perhaps my uncle’s outburst of the previous night had served the same purpose, or at least, so I thought, for by that time I had worked out new ideas on his abnormal behaviour. I reasoned that if he had been having recurrent nightmares and had been in the middle of one on that fateful night of the earthquake, when his friends and colleagues were killed, it was only natural that his mind should temporarily become somewhat unhinged upon waking and discovering the carnage. And if my theory were correct, it also explained his seismic obsessions…

IV

A week later came another grim reminder of Sir Amery’s condition. He had seemed so much improved, though he still occasionally rambled in his sleep, and had gone out into the garden “to do a bit of trimming.” It was well into September and quite chill, but the sun was shining and he spent the entire morning working with a rake and hedge clippers. We were doing for ourselves and I was just thinking about preparing the mid-day meal when a singular thing happened. I distinctly felt the ground move fractionally under my feet and heard a low rumble. I was sitting in the living room when it happened and the next moment the door to the garden burst open and my uncle rushed in. His face was deathly white and his eyes bulged horribly as he fled past me to his rooms. I was so stunned by his wild appearance that I had barely moved from my chair by the time he shakily came back into the room. His hands trembled as he lowered himself into an easy chair.

“It was the ground…I thought for a minute that the ground…” He was mumbling, more to himself than to me, and visibly trembling from head to toe as the after-effect of the shock hit him. Then he saw the concern on my face and tried to calm himself. “The ground. I was sure I felt a tremor—but I was mistaken. It must be this place. All that open space…I fear I’ll really have to make an effort and get away from here. There’s altogether too much soil and not enough cement! Cement surroundings are the thing…”

I had had it on the tip of my tongue to say that I too had felt the shock but upon learning that he believed himself mistaken I kept quiet. I did not wish to needlessly add to his already considerable disorders.

That night, after Sir Amery had retired, I went through into his study—a room which, though he had never said so, I knew he considered inviolate—to have a look at the seismograph. Before I looked at the machine, however, I saw the notes spread out on the table beside it. A glance was sufficient to tell me that the sheets of white foolscap were covered by fragmentary jottings in my uncle’s heavy handwriting and when I looked closer I was sickened to discover that they were a rambling jumble of seemingly disassociated—yet apparently linked—occurrences connected in some way with his weird delusions. These notes have since been delivered permanently into my possession and are as reproduced here:

HADRIAN’S WALL.

AD 122–128. Limestone Bank. (Gn’yah of the Fragments)??? Earth tremors interrupted the diggings and that is why cut, basalt blocks were left in the uncompleted ditch with wedge holes ready for splitting

W’nyal-Shash (MITHRAS).

Romans had their own deities but it wasn’t Mithras that the disciples of Commodus, the Blood Maniac, sacrificed to at Limestone Bank! And that was the same area where, fifty years earlier, a great block of stone was unearthed and discovered to be covered with inscriptions and engraven pictures! Silvanus the centurion defaced it and buried it again. A skeleton, positively identified as Silvanus’s by the signet ring on one of its fingers, has been lately found beneath the ground (deep) where once stood a Vicus Tavern at Housesteads Fort—but we don’t know how he vanished! Nor were Commodus’s followers any too careful. According to Caracalla they also vanished overnight—during an earthquake!

AVEBURY.

(Neolithic A’byy of the Fragments and Pnakotic Mss???) Reference Stukeley’s book, A Temple to the British Druids, incredible…Druids, indeed… But Stukeley nearly had it when he said Snake Worship! Worms, more like it!

COUNCIL OF NANTES.

(9th century) The council didn’t know what they were doing when they said: “Let the stones also which, deceived by the derision of the demons, they worship amid ruins and in wooded places, where they both make their vows and bestow their offerings, be dug up from the very foundations, and let them be cast into such places as never will their devotees be able to find them again…” I’ve read that paragraph so many times that it’s become imprinted upon my mind! God only knows what happened to the poor devils who tried to carry out the Council’s orders…

DESTRUCTION OF GREAT STONES.

In the 13th and 14th centuries the Church also attempted the removal of certain stones from Avebury because of local superstitions which caused the country folk to take part in heathen worship and witchcraft around them! In fact some of the stones were destroyed—by fire and douching—”because of the devices upon them.”

INCIDENT.

1920–25. Why was a big effort made to bury one of the great stones? An earth-tremor caused the stone to slip, trapping a workman. No effort appears to have been made to free him… The “accident” happened at dusk and two other men died of fright! Why did other diggers flee the scene? And what was the titanic thing which one of them saw wriggling away into the ground? Allegedly the thing left monstrous smell behind it… By their SMELL shall ye know them… Was it a member of another nest of the timeless ghouls?

THE OBELISK.

Why was Stukeley’s huge obelisk broken up? The pieces were buried in the early 18th century but in 1833 Henry Browne found burnt sacrifices at the site… And nearby, at Silbury Hill… My God! That devil-mound! There are some things, even amidst these horrors, which don’t bear thinking of—and while I’ve still got my sanity Silbury Hill better remain one of them!

AMERICA: INNSMOUTH.

1928. What actually happened and why did the Federal government drop depth charges off Devil Reef in the Atlantic coast just out of Innsmouth? Why were half Innsmouth’s citizens banished? What was their connection with Polynesia and what also lies buried in the lands beneath the sea?

WIND WALKER.

(Death-Walker, Ithaqua, Wendigo etc….) yet another horror—though of a different type! And such evidence! Alleged human sacrifices in Manitoba. Unbelievable circumstances surrounding Norris Case! Spencer of Quebec University literally affirmed the validity of the case…And at…

But that is as far as the notes go and when I first read them I was glad that such was the case. It was quickly becoming all too apparent that my uncle was far from well and still not quite right in his mind. Of course, there was always the chance that he had written those notes before his seeming improvement, in which case his plight was not necessarily as bad as it appeared.

Having put the notes back exactly as I found them I turned my attention to the seismograph. The line on the graph was straight and true and when I dismantled the spool and checked the chart I saw that it had followed that almost unnaturally unbroken smoothness for the last twelve days. As I have said, that machine and my uncle’s condition were directly related and this proof of the quietness of the earth was undoubtedly the reason for his comparative well-being of late. But here was yet another oddity… Frankly I was astonished at my findings for I was certain I had felt a tremor—indeed I had heard a low rumble—and it seemed impossible that both Sir Amery and myself should suffer the same, simultaneous sensory illusion. I rewound the spool and then, as I turned to leave the room, I noticed that which my uncle had missed. It was a small brass screw lying on the floor. Once more I unwound the spool and saw the counter-sunk hole which I had noticed before but which had not made an impression of any importance upon my mind. Now I guessed that it was meant to house that screw. I am nothing where mechanics are concerned and could not tell what part that small integer played in the workings of the machine; nevertheless I replaced it and again set the instrument in order. I stood then, for a moment, to ensure that everything was working correctly and for a few seconds noticed nothing abnormal. It was my ears which first warned of the change. There had been a low, clockwork hum and a steady, sharp scraping noise before. The hum was still attendant but in place of the scraping sound was a jerky scratching which drew my fascinated eyes to the stylus.

That small screw had evidently made all the difference in the world. No wonder the shock we had felt in the afternoon, which had so disturbed my uncle, had gone unrecorded. The instrument had not been working correctly then—but now it was… Now it could be plainly seen that every few minutes the ground was being shaken by tremors which, though they were not so severe as to be felt, were certainly strong enough to cause the stylus to wildly zigzag over the surface of the revolving graph paper…

• • •

I felt in a far more shaken state than the ground when I finally retired that night. Yet I could not really decide the cause of my nervousness. Just why should I feel so apprehensive about my discovery? True, I knew the effect of the now—correctly?—working machine upon my uncle would probably be unpleasant and might even cause another of his “outbursts” but was that knowledge all that unsettled me? On reflection I could see no reason whatever why any particular area of the country should receive more than its usual quota of earth-tremors. Eventually I concluded that the machine was either faulty or far too sensitive and went to sleep assuring myself that the strong shock we had felt had been merely coincidental to my uncle’s condition. Still, I noticed before I dozed off that the very air itself seemed charged with a strange tension and the slight breeze which had wafted the late leaves during the day had gone completely, leaving in its passing an absolute quiet in which, during my slumbers, I fancied all night that the ground trembled beneath my bed…

V

The next morning I was up early. I was short of writing materials and had decided to catch the lone morning bus into Radcar. I left before Sir Amery was awake and during the journey I thought back on the events of the previous day and decided to do a little research while I was in the town. In Radcar I had a bite to eat and then I called at the offices of the Radcar Recorder where a Mr. McKinnen, a sub-editor, was particularly helpful. He spent some time on the office telephones making extensive enquiries on my behalf. Eventually I was told that for the better part of a year there had been no tremors of any importance in England, a point I would obviously have argued had not further information been forthcoming. I learned that there had been some minor shocks and that these had occurred at places as far as Goole, a few miles away (that one within the last twenty-four hours) and at Tenterden near Dover. There had also been a very minor tremor at Ramsey in Huntingdonshire. I thanked Mr. McKinnen profusely for his help and would have left then—but, as an afterthought, he asked me if I would be interested in checking through the paper’s international files. I gratefully accepted and was left on my own to study a great pile of interesting translations. Of course, most of it was useless to me but it did not take me long to sort out what I was after. At first I had difficulty believing the evidence of my own eyes. I read that in August there had been ’quakes in Aisne of such severity that one or two houses had collapsed and a number of people had been injured. These shocks had been likened to those of a few weeks earlier at Agen in that they seemed to be caused more by some settling of the ground than by an actual tremor. In early July there had also been shocks in Calahorra, Chinchon and Ronda in Spain. The trail went as straight as the flight of an arrow and lay across—or rather under—the Straits of Gibralter to Xauen in Spanish Morocco, where an entire street of houses had collapses. Farther yet, to… But I had had enough. I dared look no more; I did not wish to know—not even remotely—the whereabouts of dead G’harne…

Oh! I had seen more than sufficient to make me forget about my original errand. My book could wait, for now there were more important things to do. My next port of call was the town library where I took down Nicheljohn’s World Atlas and turned to that page with a large, folding map of the British Isles. My geography and knowledge of England’s counties are passable and I had noticed what I considered to be an oddity in the seemingly unconnected places where England had suffered those minor ’quakes. I was not mistaken. Using a second book as a straight edge I lined up Goole in Yorkshire and Tenterden on the south coast and saw, with a tingle of monstrous forboding, that the line passed very close to, if not directly through, Ramsey in Huntingdonshire. With dread curiosity I followed the line north and, through suddenly fevered eyes, saw that it passed within only a mile or so of the cottage on the moors! I turned more pages with unfeeling, rubbery fingers until I found the leaf showing France. For a moment I paused—then I fumblingly found Spain and finally Africa. For a long while I just sat there in numbed silence, occasionally turning the pages, automatically checking names and locations… My thoughts were in a terrible turmoil when I eventually left the library and I could feel upon my spine the chill, hopping feet of some abysmal dread from the beginning of time. My previously wholesome nervous system had already started to crumble…

During the journey back across the moors in the evening bus, the drone of the engine lulled me into a kind of half-sleep in which I heard again something Sir Amery had mentioned—something he had murmured aloud while sleeping and presumably dreaming. He had said:

“They don’t like water… England’s safe… Have to go too deep…” The memory of those words shocked me back to wakefulness and filled me with a further icy chill which got into the very marrow of my bones. Nor were these feelings of horrid foreboding misleading, for awaiting me at the cottage was that which went far to completing the destruction of my entire nervous system…

As the bus came round the final wooded bend which hid the cottage from sight I saw it! The place had collapsed. I simply could not take it in! Even knowing all I knew—with all my slowly accumulating evidence—it was too much for my tortured mind to comprehend; I left the bus and waited until it had threaded its way through the parked police cars before crossing the road. The fence to the cottage had been knocked down to allow an ambulance to park in the queerly tilted garden. Spotlights had been set up, for it was almost dark, and a team of rescuers were toiling frantically at the incredible ruins. As I stood there, aghast, I was approached by a police officer and having stumblingly identified myself was told the following story.

A passing motorist had actually seen the collapse and the tremors attendant to it had been felt in nearby Marske. The motorist had realised there was little he could do on his own and had speeded into Marske to report the thing. Allegedly the house had gone down like a pack of cards. The police and an ambulance had been on the scene within minutes and rescue operations had begun immediately. Up to now it appeared that my uncle had been out when the collapse occurred for as of yet there had been no trace of him. There had been a strange, poisonous odour about the place but this had vanished soon after the work had started. The rescuers had cleared the floors of all the rooms except the study and during the time it took the officer to bring me up to date even more debris was being frantically hauled away.

Suddenly there was a lull in the excited babble of voices. I saw that the gang of rescue workers were standing looking down at something. My heart gave a wild leap and I scrambled over the debris to see what they had found.

There, where the floor of the study had been, was that which I had feared and more than half expected. It was simply a hole. A gaping hole in the floor—but from the angles at which the floorboards lay, and the manner in which they were scattered about, it looked as though the ground, rather than sinking, had been pushed up from below.

VI

Nothing has since been seen or heard of Sir Amery Wendy-Smith and though he is listed as being missing I know in fact that he is dead. He is gone to worlds of ancient wonder and my only prayer is that his soul wanders on our side of the threshold. For in our ignorance we did Sir Amery a great injustice—I and all the others who thought he was out of his mind. All his queer ways—I understand them all now, but the understanding has come hard and will cost me dear. No, he was not mad. He did the things he did out of self-preservation and though his precautions came to nothing in the end, it was fear of a nameless evil and not madness which prompted them.

But the worst is still to come. I myself have yet to face a similar end. I know it, for no matter what I do the tremors haunt me. Or is it only in my mind? No! There is little wrong with my mind. My nerves are gone but my mind is intact. I know too much! They have visited me in dreams, as I believe they must have visited my uncle, and what they have read in my mind has warned them of their danger. They dare not allow me to investigate, for it is such meddling which may one day fully reveal them to men—before they are ready… God! Why has that ancient fool Wilmarth at Miskatonic not answered my telegrams? There must be a way out! Even now they dig—those dwellers in darkness…

But no! This is no good. I must get a grip of myself and finish this narrative. I have not had time to try to tell the authorities the truth but even if I had I know what the result would have been. “There’s something wrong with all the Wendy-Smith blood” they would say. But this manuscript will tell the story for me and will also stand as a warning to others. Perhaps when it is seen how my—passing—so closely parallels that of Sir Amery, people will be curious; with this manuscript to guide them perhaps men will seek out and destroy Earth’s elder madness before it destroys them…

A few days after the collapse of the cottage on the moors, I settled here in this house on the outskirts of Marske to be close at hand if—though I could see little hope of it—my uncle should turn up again. But now some dread power keeps me here. I cannot flee… At first their power was not so strong, but now…I am no longer able even to leave this desk and I know the end must be coming fast. I am rooted to this chair as if grown here and it is as much as I can do to type! But I must…I must… And the ground movements are much stronger now. That hellish, damnable, mocking stylus—leaping so crazily over the paper…

I had been here only two days when the police delivered to me a dirty, soil-stained envelope. It had been found in the ruins of the cottage—near the lip of that curious hole—and was addressed to me. It contained those notes I have already copied and a letter from Sir Amery which, if its awful ending is anything to go on, he must have still been writing when the horror came for him. When I consider, it is not surprising that the envelope survived the collapse. They would not have known what it was, and so would have had no interest in it. Nothing in the cottage was purposely damaged—nothing inanimate, that is—and so far as I have been able to discover the only missing items are those terrible spheres, or what remained of them… But I must hurry. I cannot escape and all the time the tremors are increasing in strength and frequency… No! I will not have time. No time to write all I wanted to say… The shocks are too heavy… To o hea vy… Int erfer in g with m y t yping…I will finis h this i n th e only way rem ain ing to me and staple S ir Amer y’s lette r to this man usc ript…now…

Dear Paul,

In the event of this letter ever getting to you, there are certain things I must ask you to do for the safety and sanity of the world. It is absolutely necessary that these things be explored and dealt with—though how that may be done I am at a loss to say. It was my intention, for the sake of my own sanity, to forget what happened at G’harne. I was wrong to try to hide it. At this very moment there are men digging in strange, forbidden places and who knows what they may unearth? Certainly all these horrors must be tracked down and rooted out—but not by bumbling amateurs. It must be done by men who are ready for the ultimate in hideous, cosmic horror. Men with weapons. Perhaps flame-throwers would do the trick… Certainly a scientific knowledge of war would be a necessity… Devices could be made to track the enemy…I mean specialized seismological instruments… If I had the time I would prepare a dossier, detailed and explicit, but it appears that this letter will have to suffice as a guide to tomorrow’s horror hunters. You see, I now know for sure that they are after me! And there’s nothing I can do about it. It’s too late! At first even I, just like so many others, believed myself to be just a little bit mad. I refused to admit to myself that what I had seen happen had ever happened at all! To admit that was to admit lunacy! But it’s real all right… It did happen—and will again!

Heaven only knows what’s been wrong with my seismograph but the damn thing’s let me down in the worst possible way! Oh, they would have got me eventually, but I might at least have had time to prepare a proper warning… I ask you to think, Paul… Think of what has happened at the cottage… I can write of it as though it had already happened; because I know it must! It will! It is Shudde-M’ell, come for his spheres… Paul, look at the manner of my death, for if you are reading this then I am either dead or disappeared—which means the same thing. Read the enclosed notes carefully, I beg you. I haven’t the time to be more explicit but these old notes of mine should be of some help… If you are only half so enquiring as I believe you to be, you will surely soon come to recognize a fantastic horror which, I repeat, the whole world must be made to believe in… The ground is really shaking now but, knowing it is the end, I am steady in my horror… Not that I expect my present calm state of mind to last… I think that by the time they actually come for me my mind will have snapped completely. I can imagine it now…The floor splintering, erupting, to admit them. Why! Even thinking of it my senses recoil at the terror of the thought… There will be a hideous smell, a slime, a chanting and gigantic writhing and… And then…

Unable to escape, I await the thing… I am trapped by the same hypnotic power that claimed the others at G’harne. What monstrous memories! How I awoke to see my friends and companions sucked dry of their life’s blood by wormy, vampirish things from the cesspools of time! Gods of alien dimensions… I was hypnotized then by this same terrible force, unable to move to the aid of my friends or even to save myself! Miraculously, with the passing of the moon behind some wisps of cloud, the hypnotic effect was broken. Then, screaming and sobbing, temporarily out of my mind, I fled; hearing behind me the vile and slobbering sucking sounds and the droning, demoniac chanting of Shudde-M’ell and his hordes.

Not knowing that I did it, in my mindlessness I carried with me those hell-spheres… Last night I dreamed of them. And in my dreams I saw again the inscriptions on that stone box. Moreover, I could read them! All the fears and ambitions of those hellish things were there to be read as clearly as the headlines in a daily newspaper! “Gods” they may or may not be but one thing is sure; the greatest setback to their plans for conquest of the Earth is their terribly long and complicated reproductory cycle! Only a handful of young are born every thousand years; but, considering how long they have been here, the time must be drawing ever nearer when their numbers will be sufficient! Naturally, this tedious build up of their numbers makes them loath to lose even a single member of their hideous spawn. And that is why they have tunnelled these many thousands of miles, even under deep oceans, to retrieve the spheres! I had wondered why they could be following me—and now I know. I also know how. Can you not guess how they know where I am, Paul, or why they are coming? Those spheres are like a beacon to them; a siren voice calling. And just as any other parent—though more out of awful ambition, I fear, than any type of emotion we could understand—they are merely answering the call of their young!

But they are too late! A few minutes ago, just before I began this letter, the things hatched… Who would have guessed that they were eggs—or that the container they were in was an incubator? I can’t blame myself for not knowing it. I even tried to have the spheres X-rayed once, damn them, but they reflected the rays! And the shells were so thick! Yet at the time of hatching they just splintered into tiny fragments. The creatures inside were no bigger than walnuts… Taking into account the size of an adult they must have a fantastic growth rate. Not that those two will ever grow! I shrivelled them with a cigar… And you should have heard the mental screams from those beneath!

If only I could have known earlier, definitely, that it was not madness, there might have been a way to escape this horror… But no use now… My notes—look into them, Paul, and do what I should have done. Complete a detailed dossier and present it to the authorities. Wilmarth may help and perhaps Spencer of Quebec University… Haven’t much time now… Cracks in ceiling…

That last shock…ceiling coming away in chunks…coming up. Heaven help me, they’re coming up…I can feel them groping inside my mind as they come—

Sir,

Reference this manuscript found in the ruins of number 17 Anwick Street, Marske, Yorkshire, following the earth tremors of September this year and believed to be a “fantasy” which the writer, Paul Wendy-Smith, had completed for publication. It is more than possible that the so-called disappearances of both Sir Amery Wendy-Smith and his nephew, the writer, were nothing more than promotion stunts for this story… It is well known that Sir Amery is/was interested in seismography and perhaps some prior intimation of the two ’quakes supplied the inspiration for his nephew’s tale.

Investigations continuing…

Sgt J. Williams.

Yorks. County Constabulary.

2nd October 1933.