The Call of Cthulhu | Page 4

panic would have broken loose had they been able to
compare notes. As it was, lacking their original letters, I half suspected
the compiler of having asked leading questions, or of having edited the
correspondence in corroboration of what he had latently resolved to see.
That is why I continued to feel that Wilcox, somehow cognizant of the
old data which my uncle had possessed, had been imposing on the
veteran scientist. These responses from esthetes told disturbing tale.
From February 28 to April 2 a large proportion of them had dreamed
very bizarre things, the intensity of the dreams being immeasurably the
stronger during the period of the sculptor's delirium. Over a fourth of
those who reported anything, reported scenes and half-sounds not
unlike those which Wilcox had described; and some of the dreamers
confessed acute fear of the gigantic nameless thing visible toward the
last. One case, which the note describes with emphasis, was very sad.
The subject, a widely known architect with leanings toward theosophy
and occultism, went violently insane on the date of young Wilcox's
seizure, and expired several months later after incessant screamings to
be saved from some escaped denizen of hell. Had my uncle referred to
these cases by name instead of merely by number, I should have

attempted some corroboration and personal investigation; but as it was,
I succeeded in tracing down only a few. All of these, however, bore out
the notes in full. I have often wondered if all the the objects of the
professor's questioning felt as puzzled as did this fraction. It is well that
no explanation shall ever reach them.
The press cuttings, as I have intimated, touched on cases of panic,
mania, and eccentricity during the given period. Professor Angell must
have employed a cutting bureau, for the number of extracts was
tremendous, and the sources scattered throughout the globe. Here was a
nocturnal suicide in London, where a lone sleeper had leaped from a
window after a shocking cry. Here likewise a rambling letter to the
editor of a paper in South America, where a fanatic deduces a dire
future from visions he has seen. A dispatch from California describes a
theosophist colony as donning white robes en masse for some "glorious
fulfiment" which never arrives, whilst items from India speak
guardedly of serious native unrest toward the end of March 22-23.
The west of Ireland, too, is full of wild rumour and legendry, and a
fantastic painter named Ardois-Bonnot hangs a blasphemous Dream
Landscape in the Paris spring salon of 1926. And so numerous are the
recorded troubles in insane asylums that only a miracle can have
stopped the medical fraternity from noting strange parallelisms and
drawing mystified conclusions. A weird bunch of cuttings, all told; and
I can at this date scarcely envisage the callous rationalism with which I
set them aside. But I was then convinced that young Wilcox had known
of the older matters mentioned by the professor.
II. The Tale of Inspector Legrasse.
The older matters which had made the sculptor's dream and bas-relief
so significant to my uncle formed the subject of the second half of his
long manuscript. Once before, it appears, Professor Angell had seen the
hellish outlines of the nameless monstrosity, puzzled over the unknown
hieroglyphics, and heard the ominous syllables which can be rendered
only as "Cthulhu" ; and all this in so stirring and horrible a connexion
that it is small wonder he pursued young Wilcox with queries and
demands for data.

This earlier experience had come in 1908, seventeen years before,
when the American Archaeological Society held its annual meeting in
St. Louis. Professor Angell, as befitted one of his authority and
attainments, had had a prominent part in all the deliberations; and was
one of the first to be approached by the several outsiders who took
advantage of the convocation to offer questions for correct answering
and problems for expert solution.
The chief of these outsiders, and in a short time the focus of interest for
the entire meeting, was a commonplace-looking middle-aged man who
had travelled all the way from New Orleans for certain special
information unobtainable from any local source. His name was John
Raymond Legrasse, and he was by profession an Inspector of Police.
With him he bore the subject of his visit, a grotesque, repulsive, and
apparently very ancient stone statuette whose origin he was at a loss to
determine. It must not be fancied that Inspector Legrasse had the least
interest in archaeology. On the contrary, his wish for enlightenment
was prompted by purely professional considerations. The statuette, idol,
fetish, or whatever it was, had been captured some months before in the
wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed
voodoo meeting; and so singular and