H.P. Lovecraft. The Festival
The Festival
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written Oct 1923
Published January 1925 in Weird Tales, Vol 5, No. 1, p. 169-74.
Efficiut Daemones, ut quae non sunt, sic tamen quasi sint, conspicienda
hominibus exhibeant.
- Lacantius
(Devils so work that things which are not appear to men as if they were
real.)
I was far from home, and the spell of the eastern sea was upon me. In the
twilight I heard it pounding on the rocks, and I knew it lay just over the
hill where the twisting willows writhed against the clearing sky and the
first stars of evening. And because my fathers had called me to the old
town beyond, I pushed on through the shallow, new-fallen snow along the
road that soared lonely up to where Aldebaran twinkled among the trees; on
toward the very ancient town I had never seen but often dreamed of.
It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their
hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and
mankind. It was the Yuletide, and I had come at last to the ancient sea
town where my people had dwelt and kept festival in the elder time when
festival was forbidden; where also they had commanded their sons to keep
festival once every century, that the memory of primal secrets might not
be forgotten. Mine were an old people, and were old even when this land
was settled three hundred years before. And they were strange, because
they had come as dark furtive folk from opiate southern gardens of
orchids, and spoken another tongue before they learnt the tongue of the
blue-eyed fishers. And now they were scattered, and shared only the
rituals of mysteries that none living could understand. I was the only one
who came back that night to the old fishing town as legend bade, for only
the poor and the lonely remember.
Then beyond the hill's crest I saw Kingsport outspread frostily in the
gloaming; snowy Kingsport with its ancient vanes and steeples, ridgepoles
and chimney-pots, wharves and small bridges, willow-trees and graveyards;
endless labyrinths of steep, narrow, crooked streets, and dizzy
church-crowned central peak that time durst not touch; ceaseless mazes of
colonial houses piled and scattered at all angles and levels like a
child's disordered blocks; antiquity hovering on grey wings over
winter-whitened gables and gambrel roofs; fanlights and small-paned
windows one by one gleaming out in the cold dusk to join Orion and the
archaic stars. And against the rotting wharves the sea pounded; the
secretive, immemorial sea out of which the people had come in the elder
time.
Beside the road at its crest a still higher summit rose, bleak and
windswept, and I saw that it was a burying-ground where black gravestones
stuck ghoulishly through the snow like the decayed fingernails of a
gigantic corpse. The printless road was very lonely, and sometimes I
thought I heard a distant horrible creaking as of a gibbet in the wind.
They had hanged four kinsmen of mine for witchcraft in 1692, but I did not
know just where.
As the road wound down the seaward slope I listened for the merry sounds
of a village at evening, but did not hear them. Then I thought of the
season, and felt that these old Puritan folk might well have Christmas
customs strange to me, and full of silent hearthside prayer. So after that
I did not listen for merriment or look for wayfarers, kept on down past
the hushed lighted farmhouses and shadowy stone walls to where the signs
of ancient shops and sea taverns creaked in the salt breeze, and the
grotesque knockers of pillared doorways glistened along deserted unpaved
lanes in the light of little, curtained windows.
I had seen maps of the town, and knew where to find the home of my people.
It was told that I should be known and welcomed, for village legend lives
long; so I hastened through Back Street to Circle Court, and across the
fresh snow on the one full flagstone pavement in the town, to where Green
Lane leads off behind the Market House. The old maps still held good, and
I had no trouble; though at Arkham they must have lied when they said the
trolleys ran to this place, since I saw not a wire overhead. Snow would
have hid the rails in any case. I was glad I had chosen to walk, for the
white village had seemed very beautiful from the hill; and now I was eager
to knock at the door of my people, the seventh house on the left in Green
Lane, with an ancient peaked roof and jutting second storey, all built
before 1650.
There were lights inside the house when I came upon it, and I saw from the
diamond window-panes that it must have been kept very close to its antique
state. The upper part overhung the narrow grass-grown street and nearly
met the over-hanging part of the house opposite, so that I was almost in a
tunnel, with the low stone doorstep wholly free from snow. There was no
sidewalk, but many houses had high doors reached by double flights of
steps with iron railings. It was an odd scene, and because I was strange
to New England I had never known its like before. Though it pleased me, I
would have relished it better if there had been footprints in the snow,
and people in the streets, and a few windows without drawn curtains.
When I sounded the archaic iron knocker I was half afraid. Some fear had
been gathering in me, perhaps because of the strangeness of my heritage,
and the bleakness of the evening, and the queerness of the silence in that
aged town of curious customs. And when my knock was answered I was fully
afraid, because I had not heard any footsteps before the door creaked
open. But I was not afraid long, for the gowned, slippered old man in the
doorway had a bland face that reassured me; and though he made signs that
he was dumb, he wrote a quaint and ancient welcome with the stylus and wax
tablet he carried.
He beckoned me into a low, candle-lit room with massive exposed rafters
and dark, stiff, sparse furniture of the seventeenth century. The past was
vivid there, for not an attribute was missing. There was a cavernous
fireplace and a spinning-wheel at which a bent old woman in loose wrapper
and deep poke-bonnet sat back toward me, silently spinning despite the
festive season. An indefinite dampness seemed upon the place, and I
marvelled that no fire should be blazing. The high-backed settle faced the
row of curtained windows at the left, and seemed to be occupied, though I
was not sure. I did not like everything about what I saw, and felt again
the fear I had had. This fear grew stronger from what had before lessened
it, for the more I looked at the old man's bland face the more its very
blandness terrified me. The eyes never moved, and the skin was too much
like wax. Finally I was sure it was not a face at all, but a fiendishly
cunning mask. But the flabby hands, curiously gloved, wrote genially on
the tablet and told me I must wait a while before I could be led to the
place of the festival.
Pointing to a chair, table, and pile of books, the old man now left the
room; and when I sat down to read I saw that the books were hoary and
mouldy, and that they included old Morryster's wild Marvels of Science,
the terrible Saducismus Triumphatus of Joseph Glanvil, published in 1681,
the shocking Daemonolatreja of Remigius, printed in 1595 at Lyons, and
worst of all, the unmentionable Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul
Alhazred, in Olaus Wormius' forbidden Latin translation; a book which I
had never seen, but of which I had heard monstrous things whispered. No
one spoke to me, but I could hear the creaking of signs in the wind
outside, and the whir of the wheel as the bonneted old woman continued her
silent spinning, spinning. I thought the room and the books and the people
very morbid and disquieting, but because an old tradition of my fathers
had summoned me to strange feastings, I resolved to expect queer things.
So I tried to read, and soon became tremblingly absorbed by something I
found in that accursed Necronomicon; a thought and a legend too hideous
for sanity or consciousness, but I disliked it when I fancied I heard the
closing of one of the windows that the settle faced, as if it had been
stealthily opened. It had seemed to follow a whirring that was not of the
old woman's spinning-wheel. This was not much, though, for the old woman
was spinning very hard, and the aged clock had been striking. After that I
lost the feeling that there were persons on the settle, and was reading
intently and shudderingly when the old man came back booted and dressed in
a loose antique costume, and sat down on that very bench, so that I could
not see him. It was certainly nervous waiting, and the blasphemous book in
my hands made it doubly so. When eleven struck, however, the old man stood
up, glided to a massive carved chest in a corner, and got two hooded
cloaks; one of which he donned, and the other of which he draped round the
old woman, who was ceasing her monotonous spinning. Then they both started
for the outer door; the woman lamely creeping, and the old man, after
picking lip the very book I had been reading, beckoning me as he drew his
hood over that unmoving face or mask.
We went out into the moonless and tortuous network of that incredibly
ancient town; went out as the lights in the curtained windows disappeared
one by one, and the Dog Star leered at the throng of cowled, cloaked
figures that poured silently from every doorway and formed monstrous
processions up this street and that, past the creaking sigus and
antediluvian gables, the thatched roofs and diamond-paned windows;
threading precipitous lanes where decaying houses overlapped and crumbled
together; gliding across open courts and churchyards where the bobbing
lanthorns made eldritch drunken constellations.
Amid these hushed throngs I followed my voiceless guides; jostled by
elbows that seemed preternaturally soft, and pressed by chests and
stomachs that seemed abnormally pulpy; but seeing never a face and hearing
never a word. Up, up, up, the eery columns slithered, and I saw that all
the travellers were converging as they flowed near a sort of focus of
crazy alleys at the top of a high hill in the centre of the town, where
perched a great white church. I had seen it from the road's crest when I
looked at Kingsport in the new dusk, and it had made me shiver because
Aldebaran had seemed to balance itself a moment on the ghostly spire.
There was an open space around the church; partly a churchyard with
spectral shafts, and partly a half-paved square swept nearly bare of snow
by the wind, and lined with unwholesomely archaic houses having peaked
roofs and overhanging gables. Death-fires danced over the tombs, revealing
gruesome vistas, though queerly failing to cast any shadows. Past the
churchyard, where there were no houses, I could see over the hill's summit
and watch the glimmer of stars on the harbour, though the town was
invisible in the dark. Only once in a while a lanthorn bobbed horribly
through serpentine alleys on its way to overtake the throng that was now
slipping speechlessly into the church. I waited till the crowd had oozed
into the black doorway, and till all the stragglers had followed. The old
man was pulling at my sleeve, but I was determined to be the last.
Crossing the threshold into the swarming temple of unknown darkness, I
turned once to look at the outside world as the churchyard phosphorescence
cast a sickly glow on the hilltop pavement. And as I did so I shuddered.
For though the wind had not left much snow, a few patches did remain on
the path near the door; and in that fleeting backward look it seemed to my
troubled eyes that they bore no mark of passing feet, not even mine.
The church was scarce lighted by all the lanthorns that had entered it,
for most of the throng had already vanished. They had streamed up the
aisle between the high pews to the trap-door of the vaults which yawned
loathsomely open just before the pulpit, and were now squinning
noiselessly in. I followed dumbly down the foot-worn steps and into the
dark, suffocating crypt. The tail of that sinuous line of night-marchers
seemed very horrible, and as I saw them wriggling into a venerable tomb
they seemed more horrible still. Then I noticed that the tomb's floor had
an aperture down which the throng was sliding, and in a moment we were all
descending an ominous staircase of rough-hewn stone; a narrow spiral
staircase damp and peculiarly odorous, that wound endlessly down into the
bowels of the hill past monotonous walls of dripping stone blocks and
crumbling mortar. It was a silent, shocking descent, and I observed after
a horrible interval that the walls and steps were changing in nature, as
if chiselled out of the solid rock. What mainly troubled me was that the
myriad footfalls made no sound and set up no echoes. After more aeons of
descent I saw some side passages or burrows leading from unknown recesses
of blackness to this shaft of nighted mystery. Soon they became
excessively numerous, like impious catacombs of nameless menace; and their
pungent odour of decay grew quite unbearable. I knew we must have passed
down through the mountain and beneath the earth of Kingsport itself, and I
shivered that a town should be so aged and maggoty with subterraneous
evil.
Then I saw the lurid shimmering of pale light, and heard the insidious
lapping of sunless waters. Again I shivered, for I did not like the things
that the night had brought, and wished bitterly that no forefather had
summoned me to this primal rite. As the steps and the passage grew
broader, I heard another sound, the thin, whining mockery of a feeble
flute; and suddenly there spread out before me the boundless vista of an
inner world - a vast fungous shore litten by a belching column of sick
greenish flame and washed by a wide oily river that flowed from abysses
frightful and unsuspected to join the blackest gulfs of immemorial ocean.
Fainting and gasping, I looked at that unhallowed Erebus of titan
toadstools, leprous fire and slimy water, and saw the cloaked throngs
forming a semicircle around the blazing pillar. It was the Yule-rite,
older than man and fated to survive him; the primal rite of the solstice
and of spring's promise beyond the snows; the rite of fire and evergreen,
light and music. And in the stygian grotto I saw them do the rite, and
adore the sick pillar of flame, and throw into the water handfuls gouged
out of the viscous vegetation which glittered green in the chlorotic
glare. I saw this, and I saw something amorphously squatted far away from
the light, piping noisomely on a flute; and as the thing piped I thought I
heard noxious muffled flutterings in the foetid darkness where I could not
see. But what frightened me most was that flaming column; spouting
volcanically from depths profound and inconceivable, casfing no shadows as
healthy flame should, and coating the nitrous stone with a nasty, venomous
verdigris. For in all that seething combustion no warmth lay, but only the
clamminess of death and corruption.
The man who had brought me now squirmed to a point directly beside the
hideous flame, and made stiff ceremonial motions to the semi-circle he
faced. At certain stages of the ritual they did grovelling obeisance,
especially when he held above his head that abhorrent Necronomicon he had
taken with him; and I shared all the obeisances because I had been
summoned to this festival by the writings of my forefathers. Then the old
man made a sigual to the half-seen flute-player in the darkness, which
player thereupon changed its feeble drone to a scarce louder drone in
another key; precipitating as it did so a horror unthinkable and
unexpected. At this horror I sank nearly to the lichened earth, transfixed
with a dread not of this or any world, but only of the mad spaces between
the stars.
Out of the unimaginable blackness beyond the gangrenous glare of that cold
flame, out of the tartarean leagues through which that oily river rolled
uncanny, unheard, and unsuspected, there flopped rhythmically a horde of
tame, trained, hybrid winged things that no sound eye could ever wholly
grasp, or sound brain ever wholly remember. They were not altogether
crows, nor moles, nor buzzards, nor ants, nor vampire bats, nor decomposed
human beings; but something I cannot and must not recall. They flopped
limply along, half with their webbed feet and half with their membranous
wings; and as they reached the throng of celebrants the cowled figures
seized and mounted them, and rode off one by one along the reaches of that
unlighted river, into pits and galleries of panic where poison springs
feed frightful and undiscoverable cataracts.
The old spinning woman had gone with the throng, and the old man remained
only because I had refused when he motioned me to seize an animal and ride
like the rest. I saw when I staggered to my feet that the amorphous
flute-player had rolled out of sight, but that two of the beasts were
patiently standing by. As I hung back, the old man produced his stylus and
tablet and wrote that he was the true deputy of my fathers who had founded
the Yule worship in this ancient place; that it had been decreed I should
come back, and that the most secret mysteries were yet to be performed. He
wrote this in a very ancient hand, and when I still hesitated he pulled
from his loose robe a seal ring and a watch, both with my family arms, to
prove that he was what he said. But it was a hideous proof, because I knew
from old papers that that watch had been buried with my
great-great-great-great-grandfather in 1698.
Presently the old man drew back his hood and pointed to the family
resemblance in his face, but I only shuddered, because I was sure that the
face was merely a devilish waxen mask. The flopping animals were now
scratching restlessly at the lichens, and I saw that the old man was
nearly as restless himself. When one of the things began to waddle and
edge away, he turned quickly to stop it; so that the suddenness of his
motion dislodged the waxen mask from what should have been his head. And
then, because that nightmare's position barred me from the stone staircase
down which we had come, I flung myself into the oily underground river
that bubbled somewhere to the caves of the sea; flung myself into that
putrescent juice of earth's inner horrors before the madness of my screams
could bring down upon me all the charnel legions these pest-gulfs might
conceal.
At the hospital they told me I had been found half-frozen in Kingsport
Harbour at dawn, clinging to the drifting spar that accident sent to save
me. They told me I had taken the wrong fork of the hill road the night
before, and fallen over the cliffs at Orange Point; a thing they deduced
from prints found in the snow. There was nothing I could say, because
everything was wrong. Everything was wrong, with the broad windows showing
a sea of roofs in which only about one in five was ancient, and the sound
of trolleys and motors in the streets below. They insisted that this was
Kingsport, and I could not deny it. When I went delirious at hearing that
the hospital stood near the old churchyard on Central Hill, they sent me
to St Mary's Hospital in Arkham, where I could have better care. I liked
it there, for the doctors were broad-minded, and even lent me their
influence in obtaining the carefully sheltered copy of Alhazred's
objectionable Necronomicon from the library of Miskatonic University. They
said something about a "psychosis" and agreed I had better get any
harassing obsessions off my mind.
So I read that hideous chapter, and shuddered doubly because it was indeed
not new to me. I had seen it before, let footprints tell what they might;
and where it was I had seen it were best forgotten. There was no one - in
waking hours - who could remind me of it; but my dreams are filled with
terror, because of phrases I dare not quote. I dare quote only one
paragraph, put into such English as I can make from the awkward Low Latin.
"The nethermost caverns," wrote the mad Arab, "are not for the fathoming
of eyes that see; for their marvels are strange and terrific. Cursed the
ground where dead thoughts live new and oddly bodied, and evil the mind
that is held by no head. Wisely did Ibn Schacabao say, that happy is the
tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizards
are all ashes. For it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought
hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm
that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull
scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it.
Great holes secretly are digged where earth's pores ought to suffice, and
things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl."
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The Lovecraft Library wishes to extend its gratitude to Eulogio Garcia
Recalde for transcribing this text.
