bore the ownership stamps of the Bibliotheque Nationale of Paris, suggesting that Wilbur had not been above abstracting them from the shelves.
These books were in various languages; they bore titles such as
Pnakotic Manuscripts,
the
R’lyeh Text,
the
Unaussprechlichen Kulten
of von Junzt, the
Book of Eibon,
the
Dhol Chants,
the
Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan,
Ludvig Prinn’s
De Vermis Mysteriis,
the
Celaeno Fragments,
the
Cultes des Goules
of the Comte d’Erlette, the
Book of Dzyan,
a photostat copy of the
Necronomicon,
by an Arabian, Abdul Alhazred, and many others, some of them apparently in manuscript form. I confess that these books baffled me, for they were filled—such of them as I could read—with an incredible lore of myths and legends, related beyond question to the ancient, primitive religious beliefs of the race—and, if I could read it correctly, of other and alien races as well. Of course, I could not hope to do justice to the Latin, French, and German texts; it was difficult enough to read the old English of some of the manuscripts and books. In any case, I soon lost patience with this task, for the books postulated a belief so bizarre that only an anthropologist would be likely to give enough credence to it to amass so much literature on the subject.
Yet it was not uninteresting, though it represented a familiar pattern. It was the old credo of the force of light against the force of darkness, or at least, so I took it to be. Did it matter whether you called it God and the Devil, or the Elder Gods and the Ancient Ones, Good and Evil or such names as the Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss, the only named Elder God, or these of the Great Old Ones—the idiot god, Azathoth, that amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity; Yog-Sothoth, the all-in-one and one-in-all, subject to neither the laws of time nor of space, co-existent with all time and coterminous with space; Nyarlathotep, the messenger of the Ancient Ones; Great Cthulhu, waiting to rise again from hidden R’lyeh in the depths of the sea; the unspeakable Hastur, Lord of the Interstellar Spaces; Shub-Niggurath, the black goat of the woods with a thousand young? And, just as the races of men who worshipped various known gods bore sectarian names, so did the followers of the Ancient Ones, and they included the Abominable Snow Men of the Himalayas and other Asian mountain regions; the Deep Ones, who lurked in the ocean depths to serve Great Cthulhu, though ruled by Dagon; the Shantaks; the Tcho-Tcho people; and many others, some of whom were said to stem from the places to which the Ancient Ones had been banished—as was Lucifer from Eden—when once they revolted against the Elder Gods—such places as the distant stars of the Hyades, Unknown Kadath, the Plateau of Leng, the sunken city of R’lyeh.
Throughout all this, there were two disturbing notes which suggested that my cousin took this myth-pattern more seriously than I had thought. The repeated reference to the Hyades, for instance, reminded me that Wilbur had spoken of the glass in the gable window as “possibly Hyadean in origin.” Even more specifically, he had referred to it as “the glass from Leng.” It is true that these references might have been coincidental, and for a while I took comfort in telling myself that “Leng” might well be some Chinese dealer in antiques, and the word “Hyadean” might readily have been misunderstood. Yet this was a mere pretense on my part, for there was indeed everything to show that Wilbur had had more than a passing interest in this utterly alien mythos. If his possession of the books and manuscripts themselves were not enough, his notes left me in no doubt whatsoever.
For there were in his notes far more than strange references, which I found oddly disturbing; there were crude, yet effective drawings of shockingly outré settings and alien creatures, such beings as I could never, in my
These books were in various languages; they bore titles such as
Pnakotic Manuscripts,
the
R’lyeh Text,
the
Unaussprechlichen Kulten
of von Junzt, the
Book of Eibon,
the
Dhol Chants,
the
Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan,
Ludvig Prinn’s
De Vermis Mysteriis,
the
Celaeno Fragments,
the
Cultes des Goules
of the Comte d’Erlette, the
Book of Dzyan,
a photostat copy of the
Necronomicon,
by an Arabian, Abdul Alhazred, and many others, some of them apparently in manuscript form. I confess that these books baffled me, for they were filled—such of them as I could read—with an incredible lore of myths and legends, related beyond question to the ancient, primitive religious beliefs of the race—and, if I could read it correctly, of other and alien races as well. Of course, I could not hope to do justice to the Latin, French, and German texts; it was difficult enough to read the old English of some of the manuscripts and books. In any case, I soon lost patience with this task, for the books postulated a belief so bizarre that only an anthropologist would be likely to give enough credence to it to amass so much literature on the subject.
Yet it was not uninteresting, though it represented a familiar pattern. It was the old credo of the force of light against the force of darkness, or at least, so I took it to be. Did it matter whether you called it God and the Devil, or the Elder Gods and the Ancient Ones, Good and Evil or such names as the Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss, the only named Elder God, or these of the Great Old Ones—the idiot god, Azathoth, that amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity; Yog-Sothoth, the all-in-one and one-in-all, subject to neither the laws of time nor of space, co-existent with all time and coterminous with space; Nyarlathotep, the messenger of the Ancient Ones; Great Cthulhu, waiting to rise again from hidden R’lyeh in the depths of the sea; the unspeakable Hastur, Lord of the Interstellar Spaces; Shub-Niggurath, the black goat of the woods with a thousand young? And, just as the races of men who worshipped various known gods bore sectarian names, so did the followers of the Ancient Ones, and they included the Abominable Snow Men of the Himalayas and other Asian mountain regions; the Deep Ones, who lurked in the ocean depths to serve Great Cthulhu, though ruled by Dagon; the Shantaks; the Tcho-Tcho people; and many others, some of whom were said to stem from the places to which the Ancient Ones had been banished—as was Lucifer from Eden—when once they revolted against the Elder Gods—such places as the distant stars of the Hyades, Unknown Kadath, the Plateau of Leng, the sunken city of R’lyeh.
Throughout all this, there were two disturbing notes which suggested that my cousin took this myth-pattern more seriously than I had thought. The repeated reference to the Hyades, for instance, reminded me that Wilbur had spoken of the glass in the gable window as “possibly Hyadean in origin.” Even more specifically, he had referred to it as “the glass from Leng.” It is true that these references might have been coincidental, and for a while I took comfort in telling myself that “Leng” might well be some Chinese dealer in antiques, and the word “Hyadean” might readily have been misunderstood. Yet this was a mere pretense on my part, for there was indeed everything to show that Wilbur had had more than a passing interest in this utterly alien mythos. If his possession of the books and manuscripts themselves were not enough, his notes left me in no doubt whatsoever.
For there were in his notes far more than strange references, which I found oddly disturbing; there were crude, yet effective drawings of shockingly outré settings and alien creatures, such beings as I could never, in my
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