Call of Cthulhu

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I. The Clay

My grand-uncle George died on his way home from the Newport boat. He was ninety-two and the hill was steep. The doctors felt that between the two they had enough to work with. A witness said a sailor had bumped into him. At the time I thought there must be a great many sailors who had bumped into somebody and gone home to supper.

George Gammell Angell taught ancient languages at Brown. He kept the key to his tin box on the same ring as his house key. I tried it in an old suitcase before I tried it in the box. For a few seconds I was more interested in what might be in the suitcase.

Inside was a piece of clay about the size of a sandwich. Somebody had put wings on an octopus and given it the shoulders of a man who had been carrying something heavy for a very long time. There was writing underneath. I turned it upside down, which is about all you can do for a language you don’t know.

A young sculptor named Henry Wilcox brought it to my uncle on March 1, 1925. The clay was still damp. An earthquake had shaken Providence the night before. Wilcox dreamed of a green city with water running down the walls. The stones were the size of houses, and there were marks on them that he felt he could read if he could get a little closer. Every time he got closer, he was farther down in the city.

Then something underneath it spoke.

“Cthulhu fhtagn,” Wilcox said.

My uncle asked him to say it again. Then he asked if Wilcox belonged to any secret society. Wilcox said he barely belonged to the art school.

He came back the next morning and nearly every morning after that. The city was always wet. Sometimes there was a word that sounded like R’lyeh. My uncle wrote it down as neatly as he wrote down the young man’s address.

On March 23, Wilcox failed to come. He was in bed with a fever, talking about something miles high that walked among the buildings. Dr. Tobey took his temperature. There was very little the matter with his temperature.

At three in the afternoon on April 2, Wilcox sat up and asked how he’d got to his mother’s house. The next time my uncle saw him, he told him an ordinary dream. My uncle put up with a week of those and stopped writing them down.

By then he’d asked everybody he could think of what they’d been dreaming. Most of the businessmen had nothing to report. A surprising number of painters and poets had been to the green city. An architect had been taken away screaming. My uncle had numbered the cases, and there were some I could never put a name to.

I set the newspaper clippings out across my table in Boston. They came from places where the people would have had to look up Providence on a map. I kept finding the same dates. After a while I went to the kitchen and made myself an egg. I ate it standing up. There was nowhere left on the table to put a plate.