H.P. Lovecraft. The Moon-Bog
The Moon-Bog
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written March 1921
Published June 1926 in Weird Tales, Vol. 7, No. 6, p. 805-10
Somewhere, to what remote and fearsome region I know not, Denys Barry has
gone. I was with him the last night he lived among men, and heard his
screams when the thing came to him; but all the peasants and police in
County Meath could never find him, or the others, though they searched
long and far. And now I shudder when I hear the frogs piping in swamps, or
see the moon in lonely places.
I had known Denys Barry well in America, where he had grown rich, and had
congratulated him when he bought back the old castle by the bog at sleepy
Kilderry. It was from Kilderry that his father had come, and it was there
that he wished to enjoy his wealth among ancestral scenes. Men of his
blood had once ruled over Kilderry and built and dwelt in the castle, but
those days were very remote, so that for generations the castle had been
empty and decaying. After he went to Ireland, Barry wrote me often, and
told me how under his care the gray castle was rising tower by tower to
its ancient splendor, how the ivy was climbing slowly over the restored
walls as it had climbed so many centuries ago, and how the peasants
blessed him for bringing back the old days with his gold from over the
sea. But in time there came troubles, and the peasants ceased to bless
him, and fled away instead as from a doom. And then he sent a letter and
asked me to visit him, for he was lonely in the castle with no one to
speak to save the new servants and laborers he had brought from the North.
The bog was the cause of all these troubles, as Barry told me the night I
came to the castle. I had reached Kilderry in the summer sunset, as the
gold of the sky lighted the green of the hills and groves and the blue of
the bog, where on a far islet a strange olden ruin glistened spectrally.
That sunset was very beautiful, but the peasants at Ballylough had warned
me against it and said that Kilderry had become accursed, so that I almost
shuddered to see the high turrets of the castle gilded with fire. Barry's
motor had met me at the Ballylough station, for Kilderry is off the
railway. The villagers had shunned the car and the driver from the North,
but had whispered to me with pale faces when they saw I was going to
Kilderry. And that night, after our reunion, Barry told me why.
The peasants had gone from Kilderry because Denys Barry was to drain the
great bog. For all his love of Ireland, America had not left him
untouched, and he hated the beautiful wasted space where peat might be cut
and land opened up. The legends and superstitions of Kilderry did not move
him, and he laughed when the peasants first refused to help, and then
cursed him and went away to Ballylough with their few belongings as they
saw his determination. In their place he sent for laborers from the North,
and when the servants left he replaced them likewise. But it was lonely
among strangers, so Barry had asked me to come.
When I heard the fears which had driven the people from Kilderry, I
laughed as loudly as my friend had laughed, for these fears were of the
vaguest, wildest, and most absurd character. They had to do with some
preposterous legend of the bog, and a grim guardian spirit that dwelt in
the strange olden ruin on the far islet I had seen in the sunset. There
were tales of dancing lights in the dark of the moon, and of chill winds
when the night was warm; of wraiths in white hovering over the waters, and
of an imagined city of stone deep down below the swampy surface. But
foremost among the weird fancies, and alone in its absolute unanimity, was
that of the curse awaiting him who should dare to touch or drain the vast
reddish morass. There were secrets, said the peasants, which must not be
uncovered; secrets that had lain hidden since the plague came to the
children of Partholan in the fabulous years beyond history. In the Book of
Invaders it is told that these sons of the Greeks were all buried at
Tallaght, but old men in Kilderry said that one city was overlooked save
by its patron moon-goddess; so that only the wooded hills buried it when
the men of Nemed swept down from Scythia in their thirty ships.
Such were the idle tales which had made the villagers leave Kilderry, and
when I heard them I did not wonder that Denys Barry had refused to listen.
He had, however, a great interest in antiquities, and proposed to explore
the bog thoroughly when it was drained. The white ruins on the islet he
had often visited, but though their age was plainly great, and their
contour very little like that of most ruins in Ireland, they were too
dilapidated to tell the days of their glory. Now the work of drainage was
ready to begin, and the laborers from the North were soon to strip the
forbidden bog of its green moss and red heather, and kill the tiny
shell-paved streamlets and quiet blue pools fringed with rushes.
After Barry had told me these things I was very drowsy, for the travels of
the day had been wearying and my host had talked late into the night. A
man-servant showed me to my room, which was in a remote tower overlooking
the village and the plain at the edge of the bog, and the bog itself; so
that I could see from my windows in the moonlight the silent roofs from
which the peasants had fled and which now sheltered the laborers from the
North, and too, the parish church with its antique spire, and far out
across the brooding bog the remote olden ruin on the islet gleaming white
and spectral. Just as I dropped to sleep I fancied I heard faint sounds
from the distance; sounds that were wild and half musical, and stirred me
with a weird excitement which colored my dreams. But when I awaked next
morning I felt it had all been a dream, for the visions I had seen were
more wonderful than any sound of wild pipes in the night. Influenced by
the legends that Barry had related, my mind had in slumber hovered around
a stately city in a green valley, where marble streets and statues, villas
and temples, carvings and inscriptions, all spoke in certain tones the
glory that was Greece. When I told this dream to Barry we had both
laughed; but I laughed the louder, because he was perplexed about his
laborers from the North. For the sixth time they had all overslept, waking
very slowly and dazedly, and acting as if they had not rested, although
they were known to have gone early to bed the night before.
That morning and afternoon I wandered alone through the sun-gilded village
and talked now and then with idle laborers, for Barry was busy with the
final plans for beginning his work of drainage. The laborers were not as
happy as they might have been, for most of them seemed uneasy over some
dream which they had had, yet which they tried in vain to remember. I told
them of my dream, but they were not interested till I spoke of the weird
sounds I thought I had heard. Then they looked oddly at me, and said that
they seemed to remember weird sounds, too.
In the evening Barry dined with me and announced that he would begin the
drainage in two days. I was glad, for although I disliked to see the moss
and the heather and the little streams and lakes depart, I had a growing
wish to discern the ancient secrets the deep-matted peat might hide. And
that night my dreams of piping flutes and marble peristyles came to a
sudden and disquieting end; for upon the city in the valley I saw a
pestilence descend, and then a frightful avalanche of wooded slopes that
covered the dead bodies in the streets and left unburied only the temple
of Artemis on the high peak, where the aged moon-priestess Cleis lay cold
and silent with a crown of ivory on her silver head.
I have said that I awaked suddenly and in alarm. For some time I could not
tell whether I was waking or sleeping, for the sound of flutes still rang
shrilly in my ears; but when I saw on the floor the icy moonbeams and the
outlines of a latticed gothic window, I decided I must be awake and in the
castle of Kilderry. Then I heard a clock from some remote landing below
strike the hour of two, and knew I was awake. Yet still there came that
monstrous piping from afar; wild, weird airs that made me think of some
dance of fauns on distant Maenalus. It would not let me sleep, and in
impatience I sprang up and paced the floor. Only by chance did I go to the
north window and look out upon the silent village and the plain at the
edge of the bog. I had no wish to gaze abroad, for I wanted to sleep; but
the flutes tormented me, and I had to do or see something. How could I
have suspected the thing I was to behold?
There in the moonlight that flooded the spacious plain was a spectacle
which no mortal, having seen it, could ever forget. To the sound of reedy
pipes that echoed over the bog there glided silently and eerily a mixed
throng of swaying figures, reeling through such a revel as the Sicilians
may have danced to Demeter in the old days under the harvest moon beside
the Cyane. The wide plain, the golden moonlight, the shadowy moving forms,
and above all the shrill monotonous piping, produced an effect which
almost paralyzed me; yet I noted amidst my fear that half of these
tireless mechanical dancers were the laborers whom I had thought asleep,
whilst the other half were strange airy beings in white,
half-indeterminate in nature, but suggesting pale wistful naiads from the
haunted fountains of the bog. I do not know how long I gazed at this sight
from the lonely turret window before I dropped suddenly in a dreamless
swoon, out of which the high sun of morning aroused me.
My first impulse on awaking was to communicate all my fears and
observations to Denys Barry, but as I saw the sunlight glowing through the
latticed east window I became sure that there was no reality in what I
thought I had seen. I am given to strange fantasms, yet am never weak
enough to believe in them; so on this occasion contented myself with
questioning the laborers, who slept very late and recalled nothing of the
previous night save misty dreams of shrill sounds. This matter of the
spectral piping harassed me greatly, and I wondered if the crickets of
autumn had come before their time to vex the night and haunt the visions
of men. Later in the day I watched Barry in the library poring over his
plans for the great work which was to begin on the morrow, and for the
first time felt a touch of the same kind of fear that had driven the
peasants away. For some unknown reason I dreaded the thought of disturbing
the ancient bog and its sunless secrets, and pictured terrible sights
lying black under the unmeasured depth of age-old peat. That these secrets
should be brought to light seemed injudicious, and I began to wish for an
excuse to leave the castle and the village. I went so far as to talk
casually to Barry on the subject, but did not dare continue after he gave
his resounding laugh. So I was silent when the sun set fulgently over the
far hills, and Kilderry blazed all red and gold in a flame that seemed a
portent.
Whether the events of that night were of reality or illusion I shall never
ascertain. Certainly they transcend anything we dream of in nature and the
universe; yet in no normal fashion can I explain those disappearances
which were known to all men after it was over. I retired early and full of
dread, and for a long time could not sleep in the uncanny silence of the
tower. It was very dark, for although the sky was clear the moon was now
well in the wane, and would not rise till the small hours. I thought as I
lay there of Denys Barry, and of what would befall that bog when the day
came, and found myself almost frantic with an impulse to rush out into the
night, take Barry's car, and drive madly to Ballylough out of the menaced
lands. But before my fears could crystallize into action I had fallen
asleep, and gazed in dreams upon the city in the valley, cold and dead
under a shroud of hideous shadow.
Probably it was the shrill piping that awaked me, yet that piping was not
what I noticed first when I opened my eyes. I was lying with my back to
the east window overlooking the bog, where the waning moon would rise, and
therefore expected to see light cast on the opposite wall before me; but I
had not looked for such a sight as now appeared. Light indeed glowed on
the panels ahead, but it was not any light that the moon gives. Terrible
and piercing was the shaft of ruddy refulgence that streamed through the
gothic window, and the whole chamber was brilliant with a splendor intense
and unearthly. My immediate actions were peculiar for such a situation,
but it is only in tales that a man does the dramatic and foreseen thing.
Instead of looking out across the bog toward the source of the new light,
I kept my eyes from the window in panic fear, and clumsily drew on my
clothing with some dazed idea of escape. I remember seizing my revolver
and hat, but before it was over I had lost them both without firing the
one or donning the other. After a time the fascination of the red radiance
overcame my fright, and I crept to the east window and looked out whilst
the maddening, incessant piping whined and reverberated through the castle
and over all the village.
Over the bog was a deluge of flaring light, scarlet and sinister, and
pouring from the strange olden ruin on the far islet. The aspect of that
ruin I can not describe - I must have been mad, for it seemed to rise
majestic and undecayed, splendid and column-cinctured, the
flame-reflecting marble of its entablature piercing the sky like the apex
of a temple on a mountain-top. Flutes shrieked and drums began to beat,
and as I watched in awe and terror I thought I saw dark saltant forms
silhouetted grotesquely against the vision of marble and effulgence. The
effect was titanic - altogether unthinkable - and I might have stared
indefinitely had not the sound of the piping seemed to grow stronger at my
left. Trembling with a terror oddly mixed with ecstasy, I crossed the
circular room to the north window from which I could see the village and
the plain at the edge of the bog. There my eyes dilated again with a wild
wonder as great as if I had not just turned from a scene beyond the pale
of nature, for on the ghastly red-litten plain was moving a procession of
beings in such a manner as none ever saw before save in nightmares.
Half gliding, half floating in the air, the white-clad bog-wraiths were
slowly retreating toward the still waters and the island ruin in fantastic
formations suggesting some ancient and solemn ceremonial dance. Their
waving translucent arms, guided by the detestable piping of those unseen
flutes, beckoned in uncanny rhythm to a throng of lurching laborers who
followed doglike with blind, brainless, floundering steps as if dragged by
a clumsy but resistless demon-will. As the naiads neared the bog, without
altering their course, a new line of stumbling stragglers zigzagged
drunkenly out of the castle from some door far below my window, groped
sightiessly across the courtyard and through the intervening bit of
village, and joined the floundering column of laborers on the plain.
Despite their distance below me I at once knew they were the servants
brought from the North, for I recognized the ugly and unwieldy form of the
cook, whose very absurdness had now become unutterably tragic. The flutes
piped horribly, and again I heard the beating of the drums from the
direction of the island ruin. Then silently and gracefully the naiads
reached the water and melted one by one into the ancient bog; while the
line of followers, never checking their speed, splashed awkwardly after
them and vanished amidst a tiny vortex of unwholesome bubbles which I
could barely see in the scarlet light. And as the last pathetic straggler,
the fat cook, sank heavily out of sight in that sullen pool, the flutes
and the drums grew silent, and the blinding red rays from the ruins
snapped instantaneously out, leaving the village of doom lone and desolate
in the wan beams of a new-risen moon.
My condition was now one of indescribable chaos. Not knowing whether I was
mad or sane, sleeping or waking, I was saved only by a merciful numbness.
I believe I did ridiculous things such as offering prayers to Artemis,
Latona, Demeter, Persephone, and Plouton. All that I recalled of a classic
youth came to my lips as the horrors of the situation roused my deepest
superstitions. I felt that I had witnessed the death of a whole village,
and knew I was alone in the castle with Denys Barry, whose boldness had
brought down a doom. As I thought of him, new terrors convulsed me, and I
fell to the floor; not fainting, but physically helpless. Then I felt the
icy blast from the east window where the moon had risen, and began to hear
the shrieks in the castle far below me. Soon those shrieks had attained a
magnitude and quality which can not be written of, and which makes me
faint as I think of them. All I can say is that they came from something I
had known as a friend.
At some time during this shocking period the cold wind and the screaming
must have roused me, for my next impression is of racing madly through
inky rooms and corridors and out across the courtyard into the hideous
night. They found me at dawn wandering mindless near Ballylough, but what
unhinged me utterly was not any of the horrors I had seen or heard before.
What I muttered about as I came slowly out of the shadows was a pair of
fantastic incidents which occurred in my flight: incidents of no
significance, yet which haunt me unceasingly when I am alone in certain
marshy places or in the moonlight.
As I fled from that accursed castle along the bog's edge I heard a new
sound: common, yet unlike any I had heard before at Kilderry. The stagnant
waters, lately quite devoid of animal life, now teemed with a horde of
slimy enormous frogs which piped shrilly and incessantly in tones
strangely out of keeping with their size. They glistened bloated and green
in the moonbeams, and seemed to gaze up at the fount of light. I followed
the gaze of one very fat and ugly frog, and saw the second of the things
which drove my senses away.
Stretching directly from the strange olden ruin on the far islet to the
waning moon, my eyes seemed to trace a beam of faint quivering radiance
having no reflection in the waters of the bog. And upward along that
pallid path my fevered fancy pictured a thin shadow slowly writhing; a
vague contorted shadow struggling as if drawn by unseen demons. Crazed as
I was, I saw in that awful shadow a monstrous resemblance - a nauseous,
unbelievable caricature - a blasphemous effigy of him who had been Denys
Barry.