The Call of Cthulhu

The Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft
Written Summer 1926
Published February 1928 in Weird Tales, Vol. 11, No. 2, p. 159-78,
287.
Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival... a
survival of a hugely remote period when... consciousness was
manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before
the tide of advancing humanity... forms of which poetry and legend
alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters,
mythical beings of all sorts and kinds... - Algernon Blackwood
I. The Horror In Clay
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of
ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant
that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own
direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing
together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of
reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad
from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a
new dark age.
Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic
cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They
have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood
if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there
came the single glimpse of forbidden eons which chills me when I
think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all
dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together
of separated things - in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of
a dead professor. I hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing

out; certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in so
hideous a chain. I think that the professor, too intented to keep silent
regarding the part he knew, and that he would have destroyed his notes
had not sudden death seized him.
My knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 1926-27 with the
death of my great-uncle, George Gammell Angell, Professor Emeritus
of Semitic Languages in Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.
Professor Angell was widely known as an authority on ancient
inscriptions, and had frequently been resorted to by the heads of
prominent museums; so that his passing at the age of ninety-two may
be recalled by many. Locally, interest was intensified by the obscurity
of the cause of death. The professor had been stricken whilst returning
from the Newport boat; falling suddenly; as witnesses said, after having
been jostled by a nautical-looking negro who had come from one of the
queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside which formed a short cut
from the waterfront to the deceased's home in Williams Street.
Physicians were unable to find any visible disorder, but concluded after
perplexed debate that some obscure lesion of the heart, induced by the
brisk ascent of so steep a hill by so elderly a man, was responsible for
the end. At the time I saw no reason to dissent from this dictum, but
latterly I am inclined to wonder - and more than wonder.
As my great-uncle's heir and executor, for he died a childless widower,
I was expected to go over his papers with some thoroughness; and for
that purpose moved his entire set of files and boxes to my quarters in
Boston. Much of the material which I correlated will be later published
by the American Archaeological Society, but there was one box which
I found exceedingly puzzling, and which I felt much averse from
showing to other eyes. It had been locked and I did not find the key till
it occurred to me to examine the personal ring which the professor
carried in his pocket. Then, indeed, I succeeded in opening it, but when
I did so seemed only to be confronted by a greater and more closely
locked barrier. For what could be the meaning of the queer clay
bas-relief and the disjointed jottings, ramblings, and cuttings which I
found? Had my uncle, in his latter years become credulous of the most
superficial impostures? I resolved to search out the eccentric sculptor

responsible for this apparent disturbance of an old man's peace of mind.
The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about
five by six inches in area; obviously of modern origin. Its designs,
however, were far from modern in atmosphere and suggestion; for,
although the vagaries of cubism and futurism are many and wild, they
do not often reproduce that cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric
writing. And