The Call of Cthulhu | Page 8

Old Ones. The carven idol was great Cthulhu, but none might
say whether or not the others were precisely like him. No one could
read the old writing now, but things were told by word of mouth. The
chanted ritual was not the secret - that was never spoken aloud, only

whispered. The chant meant only this: "In his house at R'lyeh dead
Cthulhu waits dreaming."
Only two of the prisoners were found sane enough to be hanged, and
the rest were committed to various institutions. All denied a part in the
ritual murders, and averred that the killing had been done by Black
Winged Ones which had come to them from their immemorial
meeting-place in the haunted wood. But of those mysterious allies no
coherent account could ever be gained. What the police did extract,
came mainly from the immensely aged mestizo named Castro, who
claimed to have sailed to strange ports and talked with undying leaders
of the cult in the mountains of China.
Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the
speculations of theosophists and made man and the world seem recent
and transient indeed. There had been aeons when other Things ruled on
the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the
deathless Chinamen had told him, were still be found as Cyclopean
stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time
before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when
the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of
eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and
brought Their images with Them.
These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether
of flesh and blood. They had shape - for did not this star-fashioned
image prove it? - but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars
were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but
when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no
longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses
in Their great city of R'lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu
for a glorious surrection when the stars and the earth might once more
be ready for Them. But at that time some force from outside must serve
to liberate Their bodies. The spells that preserved them intact likewise
prevented Them from making an initial move, and They could only lie
awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions of years rolled
by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe, for Their mode of

speech was transmitted thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs.
When, after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones
spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their dreams; for only
thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of mammals.
Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult around tall
idols which the Great Ones shewed them; idols brought in dim eras
from dark stars. That cult would never die till the stars came right again,
and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive
His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to
know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones;
free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown
aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the
liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and
revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a
holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate
rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow
forth the prophecy of their return.
In the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones in
dreams, but then something happened. The great stone city R'lyeh, with
its monoliths and sepulchres, had sunk beneath the waves; and the deep
waters, full of the one primal mystery through which not even thought
can pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse. But memory never died,
and the high-priests said that the city would rise again when the stars
were right. Then came out of the earth the black spirits of earth, mouldy
and shadowy, and full of dim rumours picked up in caverns beneath
forgotten sea-bottoms. But of them old Castro dared not speak much.
He cut himself off hurriedly, and no amount of persuasion or subtlety
could elicit more in this direction. The size of the Old Ones, too, he
curiously declined to mention. Of the cult, he said that he thought the
centre lay amid the pathless desert of