The Call of Cthulhu | Page 3

This verbal jumble was the key to the recollection which excited and
disturbed Professor Angell. He questioned the sculptor with scientific
minuteness; and studied with frantic intensity the bas-relief on which
the youth had found himself working, chilled and clad only in his night
clothes, when waking had stolen bewilderingly over him. My uncle
blamed his old age, Wilcox afterwards said, for his slowness in
recognizing both hieroglyphics and pictorial design. Many of his
questions seemed highly out of place to his visitor, especially those
which tried to connect the latter with strange cults or societies; and
Wilcox could not understand the repeated promises of silence which he
was offered in exchange for an admission of membership in some
widespread mystical or paganly religious body. When Professor Angell
became convinced that the sculptor was indeed ignorant of any cult or
system of cryptic lore, he besieged his visitor with demands for future
reports of dreams. This bore regular fruit, for after the first interview
the manuscript records daily calls of the young man, during which he
related startling fragments of nocturnal imaginery whose burden was
always some terrible Cyclopean vista of dark and dripping stone, with a
subterrene voice or intelligence shouting monotonously in enigmatical
sense-impacts uninscribable save as gibberish. The two sounds
frequently repeated are those rendered by the letters "Cthulhu" and
"R'lyeh."
On March 23, the manuscript continued, Wilcox failed to appear; and

inquiries at his quarters revealed that he had been stricken with an
obscure sort of fever and taken to the home of his family in Waterman
Street. He had cried out in the night, arousing several other artists in the
building, and had manifested since then only alternations of
unconsciousness and delirium. My uncle at once telephoned the family,
and from that time forward kept close watch of the case; calling often at
the Thayer Street office of Dr. Tobey, whom he learned to be in charge.
The youth's febrile mind, apparently, was dwelling on strange things;
and the doctor shuddered now and then as he spoke of them. They
included not only a repetition of what he had formerly dreamed, but
touched wildly on a gigantic thing "miles high" which walked or
lumbered about.
He at no time fully described this object but occasional frantic words,
as repeated by Dr. Tobey, convinced the professor that it must be
identical with the nameless monstrosity he had sought to depict in his
dream-sculpture. Reference to this object, the doctor added, was
invariably a prelude to the young man's subsidence into lethargy. His
temperature, oddly enough, was not greatly above normal; but the
whole condition was otherwise such as to suggest true fever rather than
mental disorder.
On April 2 at about 3 P.M. every trace of Wilcox's malady suddenly
ceased. He sat upright in bed, astonished to find himself at home and
completely ignorant of what had happened in dream or reality since the
night of March 22. Pronounced well by his physician, he returned to his
quarters in three days; but to Professor Angell he was of no further
assistance. All traces of strange dreaming had vanished with his
recovery, and my uncle kept no record of his night-thoughts after a
week of pointless and irrelevant accounts of thoroughly usual visions.
Here the first part of the manuscript ended, but references to certain of
the scattered notes gave me much material for thought - so much, in
fact, that only the ingrained skepticism then forming my philosophy
can account for my continued distrust of the artist. The notes in
question were those descriptive of the dreams of various persons
covering the same period as that in which young Wilcox had had his

strange visitations. My uncle, it seems, had quickly instituted a
prodigiously far-flung body of inquires amongst nearly all the friends
whom he could question without impertinence, asking for nightly
reports of their dreams, and the dates of any notable visions for some
time past. The reception of his request seems to have varied; but he
must, at the very least, have received more responses than any ordinary
man could have handled without a secretary. This original
correspondence was not preserved, but his notes formed a thorough and
really significant digest. Average people in society and business - New
England's traditional "salt of the earth" - gave an almost completely
negative result, though scattered cases of uneasy but formless nocturnal
impressions appear here and there, always between March 23 and and
April 2 - the period of young Wilcox's delirium. Scientific men were
little more affected, though four cases of vague description suggest
fugitive glimpses of strange landscapes, and in one case there is
mentioned a dread of something abnormal.
It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I
know that