H.P. Lovecraft. The Horror in the Museum
The Horror in the Museum
by H. P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald
Written October 1932
Published July 1933 in Weird Tales, 22, No. 1, 49-68.
IT WAS languid curiousity which first brought Stephen Jones to Rogers'
Museum. Someone had told him about the queer underground place in
Southwark Street across the river, where waxen things so much more
horrible than the worst effigies at Madame Tussaud's were shown, and he
had strolled in one April day to see how disappointing he would find it.
Oddly, he was not disappointed. There was something different and
distinctive here, after all. Of course, the usual gory commonplaces were
present--Landru, Doctor Crippen, Madame Demers, Rizzio, Lady Jane Grey,
endless maimed victims of war and revolution, and monsters like Gilles de
Rais and Marquis de Sade--but there were other things which had made him
breathe faster and stay till the ringing of the closing bell. The man who
had fashioned this collection could be no ordinary mountebank. There was
imagination--even a kind of diseased genius--in some of this stuff.
Later he had learned about George Rogers. The man had been on the Tussaud
staff, but some trouble had developed which led to his discharge. There
were aspersions on his sanity and tales of his crazy forms of secret
worship--though latterly his success with his own basement museum had
dulled the edge of some criticisms while sharpening the insidious point of
others. Teratology and the iconography of nightmare were his hobbies, and
even he had had the prudence to screen off some of his worst effigies in a
special alcolve for adults only. It was this alcolve which had fascinated
Jones so much. There were lumpish hybrid things which only fantasy could
spawn, molded with devilish skill, and colored in a horribly life-like
fashion.
Some were the figures of well-known myth--gorgons, chimeras. dragons,
cyclops, and all their shuddersome congeners. Others were drawn from
darker and more furtively whispered cycles of subterranean legend--black,
formless Tsathoggua, many-tentacled Cthulhu, proboscidian Chaugnar Faugn,
and other rumored blasphemies from forbidden books like the Necronomicon,
the Book of Eibon, or the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt. But the
worst were wholly original with Rogers, and represented shapes which no
tale of antiquity had ever dared to suggest. Several were hideous
parodies on forms of organic life we know, while others seemed to be taken
from feverish dreams of other planets and galaxies. The wilder painted of
Clark Ashton Smith might suggest a few--but nothing could suggest the
effect of poignant, loathsome terror created by their great size and
fiendishly cunning workmanship, and by the diabolically clever lighting
conditions under which they were exhibited.
Stephen Jones, as a leisurely connoisseur of the bizarre in art, had
sought out Rogers himself in the dingy office and workroom behind the
vaulted museum chamber--an evil-looking crypt lighted dimly by dusty
windows set slit-like and horizontal in the brick wall on a level with the
ancient cobblestones of a hidden courtyard. It was here that the images
were repaired--here, too, where some of them had been made. Waxen arms,
legs, heads and torsos lay in grotesque array on various benches, while on
high tiers of shelves matted wigs, ravenous-looking teeth, and glassy,
staring eyes were indiscriminately scattered. Costumes of all sorts hung
from hooks, and in one alcove were great piles of flesh-colored wax-cakes
and shelves filled with paint-cans and brushes of every description. In
the center of the room was a large melting-furnace used to prepare the wax
for molding, its fire-box topped by a huge iron container on hinges, with
a spout which permitted the pouring of melted wax with the merest touch of
a finger.
Other things in the dismal crypt were less describable--isolated parts of
problematical entities whose assembled forms were the phantoms of
delerium. At one end was a door of heavy plank, fastened by an unusually
large padlock and with a very peculiar symbol painted over it. Jone, who
had once had access to the dreaded Necronomicon, shivered involuntarily as
he recognized that symbol. This showman, he reflected, must indeed be a
person of disconcertingly wide scholarship in dark and dubious fields.
Nor did the conversation of Rogers disappoint him. The man was tall,
lean, and rather unkempt, with large black eyes which gazed combustively
from a pallid and usually stubble-covered face. He did not resent Jones'
intrusion, but seemed to welcome the chance of unburdening himself to an
interested person. His voice was of singular depth and resonance, and
harbored a sort of repressed intensity bordering on the feverish. Jones
did not wonder that many had thought him mad.
With every successive call--and such calls became a habit as the weeks
went by--Jones had found Rogers more communicative and confidential. From
the first there had been hints of strange faiths and practices on the
showman's part, and later on those hints expanded into tales--despite a
few odd corroborative photographs--whose extravagence was almost comic.
It was some time in June, on a night when Jones had brought a bottle of
good whisky and plied his host somewhat freely, that the really demented
talk first appeared. Before that there had been wild enough
stories--accounts of mysterious trips to Tibet, the African interior, the
Arabian desert, the Amazon valley, Alaska, and certain little-known
islands of the South Pacific, plus claims of having read such monstrous
and half-fabulous books as the prehistoric Pnakotic fragments and the Dhol
chants attributed to malign and non-human Leng--but nothing in all this
had been so unmistakably insane as what had cropped out that June evening
under the spell of the whisky.
To be plain, Rogers began making vauge boasts of having found certain
things in nature that no one had found before, and of having brought back
tangible evidences of such discoveries. According to his bibulous
harangue, he had gone farther than anyone else in interpreting the obscure
and primal books he studied, and had been directed by them to certain
remote places where strange survivals are hidden--survivals of aeons and
life-cycles earlier than mankind, and in some case connected with other
dimensions and other worlds, communication with which was frequent in the
forgotten pre-human days. Jones marvelled at the fancy which could
conjure up such notions, and wondered just what Rogers' mental history had
been. Had his work amidst the morbid grotesequeries of Madame Tussaud's
been the start of his imaginative flights, or was the tendency innate, so
that his choice of occupation was merely one of its manifestations? At
any rate, the man's work was merely[?] very closely linked with his
notions. Even now there was no mistaking the trend of his blackest hints
about the nightmare monstrosities in the screened-off "Adults only"
alcove. Heedless of ridicule, he was trying to imply that not all of
these demoniac abnormalities were artificial.
It was Jones' frank scepticism and amusement at these irresponsible claims
which broke up the growing cordiality. Rogers, it was clear, took himself
very seriously; for he now became morose and resentful, continuing to
tolerate Jones only through a dogged urge to break down his wall of urbane
and complacent incredulity. Wild tales and suggestions of rites and
sacrifices to nameless elder gods continued, and now and then Rogers would
lead his guest to one of the hideous blashphemies in the screen-off
alcolve and point out features difficult to reconcile with even the finest
human craftsmanship. Jones continued his visits through sheer
fascination, though he knew he had forfeited his host's regards. At times
he would humor Rogers with pretended assent to some mad hint or assertion,
but the gaunt showman was seldom to be deceived by such tactics.
The tension came to a head later in September. Jones had casually dropped
into the museum one afternoon, and was wandering through the dim corridors
whose horror were now so familiar, when he heard a very peculiar sound
from the general direction of Rogers' workroom. Others heard it too, and
started nervously as the echoes reverberated through the great vaulted
basement. The three attendants exchanged odd glances; and one of them, a
dark, taciturn, foreign-looking fellow who always served Rogers as a
repairer and assistant designer, smiled in a way which seemed to puzzle
his colleagues and which grated very harshly on some facet of Jones'
sensibilities. It was the yelp or scream of a dog, and was such a sound
as could be made only under conditions of the utmost fright and agony
combined. Its stark, anguised frenzy was appalling to hear, and in this
setting of grotesque abnormality it held a double hideousness. Jones
remembered that no dogs were allowed in the museum.
He was about to go to the door leading into the workroom, when the dark
attendant stopped him with a word and a gesture. Mr. Rogers, the man said
in a soft, somewhat accented voice at once apologetic and vaguely
sardonic, was out, and there were standing orders to admit no one to the
workroom during his absence. As for that yelp, it was undoubtedly
something out in the courtyard behind the museum. This neighborhood was
full of stray mongrels, and their fights were sometimes shockingly noisy.
There were no dogs in any part of the museum. But if Mr. Jones wished to
see Mr. Rogers he might find him just before closing-time.
After this Jones climbed the old stone steps to the street outside and
examined the squalid neighborhood curiously. The leaning, decrepit
buildings--once dwellings but now largely shops and warehouses--were very
ancient indeed. Some of them were of a gabled type seeming to go back to
Tudor times, and a faint miasmatic stench hung subtly about the whole
region. Beside the dingy house whose basement held the museum was a low
archway pierced by a dark cobbled alley, and this Jones entered in a vague
wish to find the courtyard behind the workroom and settle the affair of
the dog comfortably in his mind. The courtyard was dim in the late
afternoon light, hemmed in by rear walls even uglier and more intangibly
menacing than the crumbling facades of the evil old houses. Not a dog was
in sight, and Jones wondered how the aftermath of such a frantic turmoil
could have completely vanished so soon.
Despite the assistant's statement that no dog had been in the museum,
Jones glanced nervously at the three small windows of the basement
workroom--narrow, horizontal rectangles close to the grass-grown pavement,
with grimy panes that stared repulsively and incuriously like the eyes of
dead fish. To their left a worn flight of stairs led to an opaque and
heavily bolted door. Some impulse urged him to crouch low on the damp,
broken cobblestones and peer in, on the chance that the thick green
shades, worked by long cords that hung down to a reachable level, might
not be drawn. The outer surfaces were thick with dirt, but as he rubbed
them with his handkerchief he saw there was no obscuring curtain in the
way of his vision.
So shadowed was the cellar from the inside that not much could be made
out, but the grotesque working paraphernalia now and then loomed up
spectrally as Jones tried each of the windows in turn. It seemed evident
at first that no one was within; yet when he peered through the extreme
right-hand window--the one nearest the entrance alley--he saw a glow of
light at the farther end of the apartment which made him pause in
bewilderment. There was no reason why any light should be there. It was
an inner side of the room, and he could not recall any gas or electric
fixture near that point. Another look defined the glow as a large
vertical rectangle, and a though occurred to him. It was in that
direction that he had always noticed the heavy plank door with the
abnormally large padlock--the door which was never opened, and above which
was crudely smeared that hideous cryptic symbol from the fragmentary
records of forbidden elder magic. It must be open now--and there was a
light inside. All his former speculation as to where that door led, and
as to what lay behind it, were now renewed with trebly disquieting force.
Jones wandered aimlessly around the dismal locality till close to six
o'clock, when he returned to the museum to make the call on Rogers. He
could hardly tell why he wished so especially to see the man just then,
but there must have been some subconscious misgivings about that terribly
unplaceable canine scream of the afternnon, and about the glow of light in
that disturbing and usually unopened inner doorway with the heavy
padlock. The attendants were leaving as he arrived, and he thought that
Orabona--the dark foreign-looking assistant--eyed him with something like
sly, repressed amusement. He did not relish that look--even though he had
seen the fellow turn it on his employer many times.
The vaulted exhibition room was ghoulish in its desertion, but he strode
quickly through it and rapped at the door of the office and workroom.
Response was slow in coming, though there were footsteps inside. Finally,
in response to a second knock, the lock rattled, and the ancient
six-panelled portal creaked reluctantly open to reveal the slouching,
feverish-eyed form of George Rogers. From the first it was clear that the
showman was in an unusual mood. There was a curious mixture of reluctance
and actual gloating in his welcome, and his talk at once veered to
extravagances of the most hideous and incredible sort.
Surviving elder gods--nameless sacrifices--the other than artificial
nature of some of the alcove horrors--all the usual boasts, but uttered in
a tone of peculiarly increasing confidence. Obviously, Jones reflected,
the poor fellow's madness was gaining on him. From time to time Rogers
would send furtive glances toward the heavy, padlocked inner door at the
end of the room, or toward a piece of coarse burlap on the floor not far
from it, beneath which some small object appeared to be lying. Jones grew
more nervous as the moments passed, and began to feel as hesitant about
mentioning the afternoon's oddities as he had formerly been anxious to do
so.
Rogers' sepulchrally resonant bass almost cracked under the excitement of
his fevered rambling.
"Do you remember," he shouted, "what I told you about that ruined city in
Indo-China where the Tcho-Tchos lived? You had to admit I'd been there
when you saw the photographs, even if you did think I made that oblong
swimmer in darkness out of wax. If you'd seen it writhing in the
underground pools as I did. . . .
"Well, this is bigger still. I never told you about this, because I
wanted to work out the later parts before making any claim. When you see
the snapshots you'll know the geography couldn't have been faked, and I
fancy I have another way of proving It isn't any waxed concoction of
mine. You've never seen it, for the experiments wouldn't let me keep It
on exhibition."
The showman glanced queerly at the padlocked door.
"It all comes from that long ritual in the eighth Pnakotic fragment. When
I got it figured out I saw it could only have one meaning. There were
things in the north before the land of Lomar--before mankind existed--and
this was one of them. It took us all the way to Alaska, and up the Nootak
from Fort Morton, but the thing was there as we knew it would be. Great
cyclopean ruins, acres of them. There was less left than we had hoped
for, but after three million years what could one expect? And weren't the
Eskimo legends all in the right direction? We couldn't get one of the
beggars to go with us, and had to sledge all the way back to Nome for
Americans. Orabona was no good up in that climate--it made him sullen and
hateful.
"I'll tell you later how we found It. When we got the ice blasted out of
the pylons of the central ruin the stairway was just as we knew it would
be. Some carvings still there, and it was no trouble keeping the Yankees
from following us in. Orabona shivered like a leaf--you'd never think it
from the damned insolent way he struts around here. He knew enough of the
Elder Lore to be properly afraid. The eternal light was gone, but our
torches showed enough. We saw the bones of others who had been before
us-aeons ago, when the climate was warm. Some of those bones were of
things you couldn't even imagine. At the third level down we found the
ivory throne the fragments said so much about--and I may as well tell you
it wasn't empty.
"The thing on the throne didn't move--and we knew then that It needed the
nourishment of sacrifice. But we didn't want to wake It then. Better to
get It to London first. Orabona and I went to the surface for the big
box, but when we had packed it we couldn't get It up the three flights of
steps. These steps weren't made for human beings, and their size bothered
us. Anyway, it was devilish heavy. We had to have the Americans down to
get It out. They weren't anxious to go into the place, but of course the
worst thing was safely inside the box. We told them it was a batch of
ivory carving--archeological stuff; and after seeing the carved throne
they probably believed us. It's a wonder they didn't suspect hidden
treasure and demand a share. They must have told queer tales around Nome
later on; though I doubt if they ever went back to those ruins, even for
the ivory throne."
Rogers paused, felt around in his desk, and produced an envelope of
good-sized photographic prints. Extracting one and laying it face down
before him, he handed the rest to Jones. The set was certainly an odd
one: ice-clad hills, dog sledges, men in furs, and vast tumbled ruins
against a background of snow--ruins whose bizarre outlines and enormous
stone blocks could hardly be accounted for. One flashlight view showed an
incredible interior chamber with wild carvings and a curious throne whose
proportions could not have been designed for a human occupant. The
carvings of the gigantic masonry--high walls and peculiar vaulting
overhead--were mainly symbolic, and involved both wholly unknown designs
and certain hieroglyphs darkly cited in obscene legends. Over the throne
loomed the same dreadful symbol which was now painted on the workroom wall
above the padlocked plank door. Jones darted a nervous glance at the
closed portal. Assuredly, Rogers had been to strange places and had seen
strange things. Yet this mad interior picture might easily be a
fraud--taken from a very clever stage setting. One must not be too
credulous. But Rogers was continuing:
"Well, we shipped the box from Nome and got to London without any
trouble. That was the first time we'd ever brought back anything that had
a chance of coming alive. I didn't put It on display, because there were
more important things to do for It. It needed the nourishment of
sacrifice, for It was a god. Of course I couldn't get It the sort of
sacrifices which It used to have in Its day, for such things don't exist
now. But there were other things which might do. The blood is the life,
you know. Even the lemures and elementals that are older than the earth
will come when the blood of men or beasts is offered under the right
conditions."
The expression on the narrator's face was growing very alarming and
repulsive, so that Jones fidgeted involuntarily in his chair. Rogers
seemed to notice his guest's nervousness, and continued with a distinctly
evil smile.
"It was last year that I got It, and ever since then I've been trying
rites and sacrifices. Orabona hasn't been much help, for he was always
against the idea of waking It. He hates It--probably because he's afraid
of what It will come to mean. He carries a pistol all the time to protect
himself--fool, as if there were human protection against It! If I ever
see him draw that pistol, I'll strangle him. He wanted me to kill It and
make an effigy of It. But I've stuck by my plans, and I'm coming out on
top in spite of all the cowards like Orabona and damned sniggering
skeptics like you, Jones! I've chanted the rites and made certain
sacrifices, and last week the transition came. The sacrifice
was--received and enjoyed!"
Rogers actually licked his lips, while Jones held himsef uneasily rigid.
The showman paused and rose, crossing the room to the piece of burlap at
which he had glanced so often. Bending down, he took hold of one corner
as he spoke again.
"You've laughed enough at my work--now it's time for you to get some
facts. Orabona tells me you heard a dog screaming around here this
afternoon. Do you know what that meant?"
Jones started. For all his curiousity he would have been glad to get out
without further light on the point which had so puzzled him. But Rogers
was inexorable, and began to lift the square of burlap. Beneath it lay a
crushed, almost shapeless mass which Jones was slow to classify. Was it a
once-living thing which some agency had flattened, sucked dry of blood,
punctured in a thousand places, and wrung into a limp, broken-boned heap
of grotesqeness? After a moment Jones realized what it must be. It was
what was left of a dog--a dog, perhaps of considerable size and whitish
color. Its breed was past recognition, for distortion had come in
nameless and hideous ways. Most of the hair was burned off as by some
pungent acid, and the exposed, bloodless skin was riddled by innumerable
circular wounds or incisions. The form of torture necessary to cause such
results was past imagining.
Electrified with a pure loathing which conquered his mounting disgust,
Jones sprang with a cry.
"You damned sadist--you madman--you do a thing like this and dare to speak
to a decent man!"
Rogers dropped the burlap with a malignant sneer and faced his oncoming
guest. His words held an unnatural calm.
"Why, you fool, do you think I did this? What of it? It is not human and
does not pretend to be. To sacrifice is merely to offer. I gave the dog
to It. What happened is It's work, not mine. It needed the nourishment
of the offering, and took it in Its own way. But let me show you what It
looks like."
As Jones stood hesitating, the speaker had returned to his desk and took
up the photograph he had laid face down without showing. Now he extended
it with a curious look. Jones took it and glanced at in in an almost
mechanical way. After a moment the visitor's glance became sharper and
more absorbed, for the utterly satanic force of the object depicted had an
almost hypnotic effect. Certainly, Rogers had outdone himself in modeling
the eldritch nightmare which the camera had caught. The thing was a work
of sheer, infernal genius, and Jones wondered how the public would react
when it was placed on exhibition. So hideous a thing had no right to
exist--probably the mere contemplation of it, after it was done, had
completed the unhinging of its maker's mind and led him to worship it with
brutal sacrifices. Only a stout sanity could resist the insidious
suggestion that the blasphemy was--or had once been--some morbid and
exotic form of actual life.
The thing in the picture squatted or was balanced on what appeared to be a
clever reproduction of the monstrously carved throne in the other curious
photograph. To describe it with any ordinary vocabulary would be
impossible, for nothing even roughly corresponding to it has ever come
within the imagination of sane mankind. It represented something meant
perhaps to be roughly connected with the vertebrates of this
planet--though one could not be too sure of that. Its bulk was cyclopean,
for even squatted it towered to almost twice the height of Orabona, who
was shown beside it. Looking sharply, one might trace its approximations
toward the bodily features of the higher vertebrates.
There was an almost globular torso, with six long, sinuous limbs
terminating in crab-like claws. From the upper end a subsidiary globe
bulged forth bubble-like; its triangle of three staring, fishy eyes, its
foot-long and evidently flexible proboscis, and a distended lateral system
analogous to gills, suggesting that it was a head. Most of the body was
covered with what at first appeared to be fur, but which on closer
examination proved to be a dense growth of dark, slender tentacles or
sucking filaments, each tipped with a mouth suggesting the head of an
asp. On the head and below the proboscis the tentacles tended to be
longer and thicker, marked with spiral stripes--suggesting the traditional
serpent-locks of Medusa. To suggest that such a thing could have an
expression seems paradoxical; yet Jones felt that that triangle of bulging
fish eyes and that obliquely poised proboscis all bespoke a blend of hate,
greed and sheer cruelty incomprehensible to mankind because it was mixed
with other emotions not of the world or this solar system. Into this
bestial abnormality, he reflected, Rogers must have poured at once all his
malignant insanity and all his uncanny sculptural genius. The thing was
incredible--and yet the photograph proved that it existed.
Rogers interrupted his reveries.
"Well--what do you think of It? Now do you wonder what crushed the dog
and sucked it dry with a million mouths? It needed nourishment--and It
will need more. It is a god, and I am the first priest of Its latter-day
hierarchy. Ia:! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat with a Thousand Young!"
Jones lowered the photograph in disgust and pity.
"See here, Rogers, this won't do. There are limits, you know. It's a
great piece of work, and all that, but it isn't good for you. Better not
see it any more--let Orabona break it up, and try to forget about it. And
let me tear this beastly picture up, too."
With a snarl, Rogers snatched the photograph and returned it to the desk.
"Idiot--you--and you still think It's a fraud! You still think I made It,
and you still think my figures are nothing but lifeless wax! Why, damn
you, you're going to know. Not just now, for It is resting after the
sacrifice--but later. Oh, yes--you will not doubt the power of It then."
As Rogers glanced toward the padlocked inner door Jones retrieved his hat
and stick from a near-by bench.
"Very well, Rogers, let it be later. I must be going now, but I'll call
round tomorrow afternoon. Think my advice over and see if it doesn't
sound sensible. Ask Orabona what he thinks, too."
Rogers bared his teeth in wild-beast fashion.
"Must be going now, eh? Afraid, after all! Afraid, for all your bold
talk! You say the effigies are only wax, and yet you run away when I
begin to prove that they aren't. You're like the fellows who take my
standing bet that they daren't spend the night in the museum--they come
boldly enough, but after an hour they shriek and hammer to get out! Want
me to ask Orabona, eh? You two--always against me! You want to break
down the coming earthly reign of It!"
Jones preserved his calm.
"No, Rogers--there's nobody against you. And I'm not afraid of your
figures, either, much as I admire your skill. But we're both a bit
nervous tonight, and I fancy some rest will do us good."
Again Rogers checked his guest's departure.
"Not afraid, eh?--then why are you so anxious to go? Look here--do you or
don't you dare to stay alone here in the dark? What's your hurry if you
don't believe in It?"
Some new idea seemed to have struck Rogers, and Jones eyed him closely.
"Why, I've no special hurry--but what would be gained by my staying here
alone? What would it prove? My only objection is that it isn't very
comfortable for sleeping. What good would it do either of us?"
This time it was Jones who was struck with an idea. He continued in a
tone of conciliation.
"See here, Rogers--I've just asked you what it would prove if I stayed,
when we both knew. It would prove that your effigies are just effigies,
and that you oughtn't to let your imagination go the way it's been going
lately. Suppose I do stay. If I stick it out till morning, will you
agree to take a new view of things--go on a vacation for three months or
so and let Orabona destroy that new thing of yours? Come, now--isn't that
fair?"
The expression on the showman's face was hard to read. It was obvious
that he was thinking quickly, and that of sundry conflicting emotions,
malign triumph was getting the upper hand. His voice held a choking
quality as he replied.
"Fair enough! If you do stick it out, I'll take your advice. We'll go
out for dinner and come back. I'll lock you in the display room and go
home. In the morning I'll come down ahead of Orabona--he comes half an
hour before the rest--and see how you are. But don't try it unless you
are very sure of your skepticism. Others have backed out--you have that
chance. And I suppose a pounding on the outer door would always bring a
constable. You may not like it so well after a while--you'll be in the
same building, though not in the same room with It."
As they left the rear door into the dingy courtyard, Rogers took with him
the piece of burlap--weighted with a gruesome burden. Near the center of
the court was a manhole, whose cover the showman lifted quietly, and with
a shuddersome suggestion of familiarity. Burlap and all, the burden went
down to the oblivion of a cloacal labyrinth. Jones shuddered, and almost
shrank from the gaunt figure at his side as they emerged into the street.
By unspoken mutual consent, they did not dine together, but agreed to meet
in front of the museum at eleven.
Jones hailed a cab, and breathed more freely when he had crossed Waterloo
Bridge and was approaching the brilliantly lighted Strand. He dined at a
quite cafe, and subsequently went to his home in Portland Place to bathe
and get a few things. Idly he wondered what Rogers was doing. He had
heard that the man had a vast, dismal house in the Walworth Road, full of
obscure and forbidden books, occult paraphernalia, and wax images which he
did not choose to place on exhibition. Orabona, he understood, lived in
separate quarters in the same house.
At eleven Jones found Rogers waiting by the basement door in Southwark
Street. Their words were few, but each seemed taut with a menacing
tension. They agreed that the vaulted exhibition room alone should form
the scene of the vigil, and Rogers did not insist that the watcher sit in
the special adult alcove of supreme horrors. The showman, having
extinguished all the lights with switches in the workroom, locked the door
of that crypt with one of the keys on his crowded ring. Without shaking
hands he passed out the street door, locked it after him, and passed up
the worn steps to the sidewalk outside. As his tread receded, Jones
realized that the long, tedious vigil had commenced.
2
Later, in the utter blackness of the great arched cellar, Jones cursed the
childish naivete which had brought him there. For the first half-hour he
had kept flashing his pocket-light at intervals, but now just sitting in
the dark on one of the visitor's benches had become a more nerve-wracking
thing. Every time the beam shot out it lighted up some morbid, grotesque
object--a guillotine, a nameless hybrid monster, a pasty-bearded face
crafty with evil, a body with red torrents streaming from a severed
throat. Jones knew that no sinister reality was attached to these things,
but after that first half-hour he preferred not to see them.
Why he had bothered to humor that madman he could scarcely imagine. It
would have been much simpler merely to have let him alone, or to have
called in a mental specialist. Probably, he reflected, it was the
fellow-feeling of one artist for another. There was so much genius in
Rogers that he deserved every possible chance to be helped quietly out of
his growing mania. Any man who could imagine and construct the incredibly
life-like things that he had produced was not far from actual greatness.
He had the fancy of a Sime or a Dore joined to the minute, scientific
craftsmanship of a Blatschka. Indeed, he had done for the world of
nightmare what the Blatschkas with their marvelously accurate plant models
of finely wrought and coloured glass had done for the world of botany.
At midnight the strokes of a distant clock filtered through the darkness,
and Jones felt cheered by the message from a still-surviving outside
world. The vaulted museum chamber was like a tomb--ghastly in its utter
solitude. Even a mouse would be cheering company; yet Rogers had once
boasted that--for "certain reasons," as he said--no mice or even insects
ever came near the place. That was very curious, yet it seemed to be
true. The deadness and silence were virtually complete. If only
something would make a sound! He shuffled his feet, and the echoes came
spectrally out of the absolute stillness. He coughed, but there was
something mocking in the staccato reverberations. He could not, he vowed,
begin talking to himself. That meant nervous disintergration. Time
seemed to pass with abnormal and disconcerting slowness. He could have
sworn that hours had elapsed since he last flashed the light on his watch,
yet here was only the stroke of midnight.
He wished that his senses were not so preternaturally keen. Something in
the darkness and stillness seemed to have sharpened them, so that they
responded to faint intimations hardly strong enough to be called true
impressions. His ears seemed at times to catch a faint, elusive susurrus
which could not quite be identified with the nocturnal hum of the squalid
streets outside, and he thought of vague, irrelevant things like the music
of the spheres and the unknown, inaccessible life of alien dimensions
pressing on our own. Rogers often speculated about such things.
The floating specks of light in his blackness-drowned eyes seemed inclined
to take on curious symmetries of pattern and motion. He had often
wondered about those strange rays from the unplumbed abyss which
scintillate before us in the absence of all earthly illumination, but he
had never known any that behaved just as these were behaving. They lacked
the restful aimlessness of ordinary light-specks--suggesting some will and
purpose remote from any terrestrial conception.
Then there was that suggestion of odd stirrings. Nothing was open, yet in
spite of the general draftlessness Jones felt that the air was not
uniformly quiet. There were intangible variations in pressure--not quite
decided enough to suggest the loathsome pawings of unseen elementals. It
was abnormally chilly, too. He did not like any of this. The air tested
salty, as if it were mixed with the brine of dark subterrene waters, and
there was a bare hint of some odor of ineffable mustiness. In the daytime
he had never noticed that the waxen figures had an odor. Even now that
half-received hint was not the way wax figures ought to smell. It was
more like the faint smell of specimens in a natural-history museum.
Curious, in view of Rogers' claims that his figures were not all
artificial--indeed, it was probably that claim which made one's
imagination conjure up the olfactory suspicion. One must guard against
excesses of imagination--had not such things driven poor Rogers mad?
But the utter loneliness of this place was frightful. Even the distant
chimes seemed to come from across cosmic gulfs. It made Jones think of
that insane picture which Rogers had showed him-the wildly carved chamber
with the cryptic throne which the fellow had claimed was part of a
three-million-year-old ruin in the shunned and inaccessible solitudes of
the Arctic. Perhaps Rogers had been to Alaska, but that picture was
certainly nothing but stage scenery. It couldn't normally be otherwise,
with all that carving and those terrible symbols. And that monstrous
shape supposed to have been found on that throne--what a flight of
diseased fancy! Jones wondered just how far he actually was from the
insane masterpiece in wax--probably it was kept behind that heavy,
padlocked plank door leading somewhere out of the workroom. But it would
never do to brood about a waxen image. Was not the present room full of
such things, some of them scarcely less horrible than the dreadful "IT"?
And beyond a thin canvas screen on the left was the "Adults only" alcove
with its nameless phantoms of delerium.
The proximity of the numberless waxen shapes began to get on Jones' nerves
more and more as the quarter-hours wore on. He knew the museum so well
that he could not get rid of their usual images even in the total
darkness. Indeed, the darkness had the effect of adding to the remembered
images certain very disturbing imginative overtones. The guillotine
seemed to creak, and the bearded face of Landru--slayer of his fifty
wives--twisted itself into expressions of monstrous menace. From the
severed throat of Madame Demers a hideous bubbling sound seemed to
emanate, while the headless, legless victim of a trunk murder tried to
edge closer and closer on its gory stumps. Jones began shutting his eyes
to see if that would dim the images, but found it was useless. Besides,
when he shut his eyes the strange, purposeful patterns of light-specks
became more disturbingly pronounced.
Then suddenly he began trying to keep the hideous images he had formerly
been trying to banish. He tried to keep them because they were giving
place to still more hideous ones. In spite of himself his memory began
reconstructing the utterly non-human blasphemies that lurked in the
obscurer corners, and these lumpish hybrid growths oozed and wriggled
toward him as though huting him down in a circle. Black Tsathoggua molded
itself from a toad-like gargoyle to a long, sinuous line with hundreds of
rudimentary feet, and a lean, rubbery night-gaunt spread its wings as if
to advance and smother the watcher. Jones braced himself to keep from
screaming. He knew he was reverting to the traditional terrors of his
childhood, and resolved to use his adult reason to keep the phantoms at
bay. It helped a bit, he found, to flash the light again. Frightful as
were the images it showed, these were not as bad as what his fancy called
out of the utter blackness.
But there were drawbacks. Even in the light of his torch he could not
help suspecting a slight, furtive trembling on the part of the canvas
partition screening off the terrible "Adults only" alcove. He knew what
lay beyond, and shivered. Imagination called up the shocking forms of
fabulous Yog-Sothoth--only a congeries of iridescent globes, yet
stupendous in its malign suggestiveness. What was this accursed mass
slowly floating toward him and bumping on the partition that stood in the
way? A small bulge in the canvas far to the right suggested the sharp
horn of Gnoph-keh, the hairy myth-thing of the Greenland ice, that walked
sometimes on two legs, sometimes on four, and sometimes on six. To get
this stuff out of his head Jones walked boldly toward the hellish alcove
with torch burning steadily. Of course, none of his fears was true. Yet
were not the long, facial tentalces of great Cthulhu actually swaying,
slowly and insidiously? He knew they were flexible, but he had not
realised that the draft caused by his advance was enough to set them in
motion.
Returning to his former seat outside the alcove, he shut his eyes and let
the symmetrical light-specks do their worst. The distant clock boomed a
single stroke. Could it be only one? He flashed the light on his watch
and saw that it was precisely that hour. It would be hard indeed waiting
for the morning. Rogers would be down at about eight o'clock, ahead of
even Orabona. It would be light outside in the main basement long before
that, but none of it could penetrate here. All the windows in this
basement had been bricked up but the three small ones facing the court. A
pretty bad wait, all told.
His ears were getting most of the hallucinations now--for he could swear
he heard stealthy, plodding footsteps in the workroom beyond the closed
and locked door. He had no business thinking of that unexhibited horror
which Rogers called "It." The thing was a contamination-it had driven its
maker mad, and now even its picture was calling up imaginative terrors.
It was very obviously beyond that padlocked door of heavy planking. Those
steps were certainly pure imagination.
Then he thought he heard the key turn in the workroom door. Flashing on
his torch, he saw nothing but the ancient six-paneled portla in its proper
position. Again he tried darkness and closed his eyes, but there followed
a harrowing illusion of creaking--not the guillotine this time, but the
slow, furtive opening of the workroom door. He would not scream. Once he
screamed, he would be lost. There was a sort of padding or shuffling
audible now, and it was slowly advancing toward him. He must retain
command of himself. Had he not done so when the nameless brain-shaped
tried to close in on him? The shuffling crept nearer, and his resolution
failed. He did not scream but merely gulped out a challenge.
"Who goes there? Who are you? What do you want?"
There was no answer, but the shuffling kept on. Jones did not know which
he feared most to do--turn on his flashlight or stay in the dark while the
thing crept upon him. This thing was different, he felt profoundly, from
the other terrors of the evening. His fingers and throat worked
spasmodically. Silence was impossible, and the suspense of utter
blackness was beginning to be the most intolerable of all conditions.
Again he cried out hysterically--"Halt! Who goes there?"--as he switched
on the revealing beam of his torch. Then, paralyzed by what he saw, he
dropped the flashlight and screamed--not once but many times.
Shuffling toward him in the darkness was the gigantic, blasphemous form of
a black thing not wholly ape and not wholly insect. Its hide hung loosely
upon its frame, and its rugose, dead-eyed rudiment of a head swayed
drunkenly from side to side. Its forepaws were extended, with talons
spread wide, and its whole body was taut with murderous malignity despite
its utter lack of facial expression. After the screams and the final