H.P. Lovecraft. The Unnamable
The Unnamable
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written Sept 1923
Published July 1925 in Weird Tales, Vol. 6, No. 1, p. 78-82.
We were sitting on a dilapidated seventeenth-century tomb in the late
afternoon of an autumn day at the old burying ground in Arkham, and
speculating about the unnamable. Looking toward the giant willow in the
cemetery, whose trunk had nearly engulfed an ancient, illegible slab, I
had made a fantastic remark about the spectral and unmentionable
nourishment which the colossal roots must be sucking from that hoary,
charnel earth; when my friend chided me for such nonsense and told me that
since no interments had occurred there for over a century, nothing could
possibly exist to nourish the tree in other than an ordinary manner.
Besides, he added, my constant talk about "unnamable" and "unmentionable"
things was a very puerile device, quite in keeping with my lowly standing
as an author. I was too fond of ending my stories with sights or sounds
which paralyzed my heroes' faculties and left them without courage, words,
or associations to tell what they had experienced. We know things, he
said, only through our five senses or our intuitions; wherefore it is
quite impossible to refer to any object or spectacle which cannot be
clearly depicted by the solid definitions of fact or the correct doctrines
of theology - preferably those of the Congregationalist, with whatever
modifications tradition and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle may supply.
With this friend, Joel Manton, I had often languidly disputed. He was
principal of the East High School, born and bred in Boston and sharing New
England's self-satisfied deafness to the delicate overtones of life. It
was his view that only our normal, objective experiences possess any
esthetic significance, and that it is the province of the artist not so
much to rouse strong emotion by action, ecstasy, and astonishment, as to
maintain a placid interest and appreciation by accurate, detailed
transcripts of everyday affairs. Especially did he object to my
preoccupation with the mystical and the unexplained; for although
believing in the supernatural much more fully than I, he would not admit
that it is sufficiently commonplace for literary treatment. That a mind
can find its greatest pleasure in escapes from the daily treadmill, and in
original and dramatic recombinations of images usually thrown by habit and
fatigue into the hackneyed patterns of actual existence, was something
virtually incredible to his clear, practical, and logical intellect. With
him all things and feelings had fixed dimensions, properties, causes, and
effects; and although he vaguely knew that the mind sometimes holds
visions and sensations of far less geometrical, classifiable, and workable
nature, he believed himself justified in drawing an arbitrary line and
ruling out of court all that cannot be experienced and understood by the
average citizen. Besides, he was almost sure that nothing can be really
"unnamable." It didn't sound sensible to him.
Though I well realized the futility of imaginative and metaphysical
arguments against the complacency of an orthodox sun-dweller, something in
the scene of this afternoon colloquy moved me to more than usual
contentiousness. The crumbling slate slabs, the patriarchal trees, and the
centuried gambrel roofs of the witch-haunted old town that stretched
around, all combined to rouse my spirit in defense of my work; and I was
soon carrying my thrusts into the enemy's own country. It was not, indeed,
difficult to begin a counter-attack, for I knew that Joel Manton actually
half clung to many old-wives' superstitions which sophisticated people had
long outgrown; beliefs in the appearance of dying persons at distant
places, and in the impressions left by old faces on the windows through
which they had gazed all their lives. To credit these whisperings of rural
grandmothers, I now insisted, argued a faith in the existence of spectral
substances on the earth apart from and subsequent to their material
counterparts. It argued a capability of believing in phenomena beyond all
normal notions; for if a dead man can transmit his visible or tangible
image half across the world, or down the stretch of the centuries, how can
it be absurd to suppose that deserted houses are full of queer sentient
things, or that old graveyards teem with the terrible, unbodied
intelligence of generations? And since spirit, in order to cause all the
manifestations attributed to it, cannot be limited by any of the laws of
matter, why is it extravagant to imagine psychically living dead things in
shapes - or absences of shapes - which must for human spectators be
utterly and appallingly "unnamable"? "Common sense" in reflecting on these
subjects, I assured my friend with some warmth, is merely a stupid absence
of imagination and mental flexibility.
Twilight had now approached, but neither of us felt any wish to cease
speaking. Manton seemed unimpressed by my arguments, and eager to refute
them, having that confidence in his own opinions which had doubtless
caused his success as a teacher; whilst I was too sure of my ground to
fear defeat. The dusk fell, and lights faintly gleamed in some of the
distant windows, but we did not move. Our seat on the tomb was very
comfortable, and I knew that my prosaic friend would not mind the
cavernous rift in the ancient, root-disturbed brickwork close behind us,
or the utter blackness of the spot brought by the intervention of a
tottering, deserted seventeenth-century house between us and the nearest
lighted road. There in the dark, upon that riven tomb by the deserted
house, we talked on about the "unnamable" and after my friend had finished
his scoffing I told him of the awful evidence behind the story at which he
had scoffed the most.
My tale had been called The Attic Window, and appeared in the January,
1922, issue of Whispers. In a good many places, especially the South and
the Pacific coast, they took the magazines off the stands at the
complaints of silly milk-sops; but New England didn't get the thrill and
merely shrugged its shoulders at my extravagance. The thing, it was
averred, was biologically impossible to start with; merely another of
those crazy country mutterings which Cotton Mather had been gullible
enough to dump into his chaotic Magnalia Christi Americana, and so poorly
authenticated that even he had not ventured to name the locality where the
horror occurred. And as to the way I amplified the bare jotting of the old
mystic - that was quite impossible, and characteristic of a flighty and
notional scribbler! Mather had indeed told of the thing as being born, but
nobody but a cheap sensationalist would think of having it grow up, look
into people's windows at night, and be hidden in the attic of a house, in
flesh and in spirit, till someone saw it at the window centuries later and
couldn't describe what it was that turned his hair gray. All this was
flagrant trashiness, and my friend Manton was not slow to insist on that
fact. Then I told him what I had found in an old diary kept between 1706
and 1723, unearthed among family papers not a mile from where we were
sitting; that, and the certain reality of the scars on my ancestor's chest
and back which the diary described. I told him, too, of the fears of
others in that region, and how they were whispered down for generations;
and how no mythical madness came to the boy who in 1793 entered an
abandoned house to examine certain traces suspected to be there.
It had been an eldritch thing - no wonder sensitive students shudder at
the Puritan age in Massachusetts. So little is known of what went on
beneath the surface - so little, yet such a ghastly festering as it
bubbles up putrescently in occasional ghoulish glimpses. The witchcraft
terror is a horrible ray of light on what was stewing in men's crushed
brains, but even that is a trifle. There was no beauty; no freedom - we
can see that from the architectural and household remains, and the
poisonous sermons of the cramped divines. And inside that rusted iron
straitjacket lurked gibbering hideousness, perversion, and diabolism.
Here, truly, was the apotheosis of The Unnamable.
Cotton Mather, in that demoniac sixth book which no one should read after
dark, minced no words as he flung forth his anathema. Stern as a Jewish
prophet, and laconically unamazed as none since his day could be, he told
of the beast that had brought forth what was more than beast but less than
man - the thing with the blemished eye - and of the screaming drunken
wretch that hanged for having such an eye. This much he baldly told, yet
without a hint of what came after. Perhaps he did not know, or perhaps he
knew and did not dare to tell. Others knew, but did not dare to tell -
there is no public hint of why they whispered about the lock on the door
to the attic stairs in the house of a childless, broken, embittered old
man who had put up a blank slate slab by an avoided grave, although one
may trace enough evasive legends to curdle the thinnest blood.
It is all in that ancestral diary I found; all the hushed innuendoes and
furtive tales of things with a blemished eye seen at windows in the night
or in deserted meadows near the woods. Something had caught my ancestor on
a dark valley road, leaving him with marks of horns on his chest and of
apelike claws on his back; and when they looked for prints in the trampled
dust they found the mixed marks of split hooves and vaguely anthropoid
paws. Once a post-rider said he saw an old man chasing and calling to a
frightful loping, nameless thing on Meadow Hill in the thinly moonlit
hours before dawn, and many believed him. Certainly, there was strange
talk one night in 1710 when the childless, broken old man was buried in
the crypt behind his own house in sight of the blank slate slab. They
never unlocked that attic door, but left the whole house as it was,
dreaded and deserted. When noises came from it, they whispered and
shivered; and hoped that the lock on that attic door was strong. Then they
stopped hoping when the horror occurred at the parsonage, leaving not a
soul alive or in one piece. With the years the legends take on a spectral
character - I suppose the thing, if it was a living thing, must have died.
The memory had lingered hideously - all the more hideous because it was so
secret.
During this narration my friend Manton had become very silent, and I saw
that my words had impressed him. He did not laugh as I paused, but asked
quite seriously about the boy who went mad in 1793, and who had presumably
been the hero of my fiction. I told him why the boy had gone to that
shunned, deserted house, and remarked that he ought to be interested,
since he believed that windows retained latent images of those who had sat
at them. The boy had gone to look at the windows of that horrible attic,
because of tales of things seen behind them, and had come back screaming
maniacally.
Manton remained thoughtful as I said this, but gradually reverted to his
analytical mood. He granted for the sake of argument that some unnatural
monster had really existed, but reminded me that even the most morbid
perversion of nature need not be unnamable or scientifically
indescribable. I admired his clearness and persistence, and added some
further revelations I had collected among the old people. Those later
spectral legends, I made plain, related to monstrous apparitions more
frightful than anything organic could be; apparitions of gigantic bestial
forms sometimes visible and sometimes only tangible, which floated about
on moonless nights and haunted the old house, the crypt behind it, and the
grave where a sapling had sprouted beside an illegible slab. Whether or
not such apparitions had ever gored or smothered people to death, as told
in uncorroborated traditions, they had produced a strong and consistent
impression; and were yet darkly feared by very aged natives, though
largely forgotten by the last two generations - perhaps dying for lack of
being thought about. Moreover, so far as esthetic theory was involved, if
the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what
coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a
nebulosity as the specter of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid
blasphemy against nature? Molded by the dead brain of a hybrid nightmare,
would not such a vaporous terror constitute in all loathsome truth the
exquisitely, the shriekingly unnamable?
The hour must now have grown very late. A singularly noiseless bat brushed
by me, and I believe it touched Manton also, for although I could not see
him I felt him raise his arm. Presently he spoke.
"But is that house with the attic window still standing and deserted?"
"Yes," I answered, "I have seen it."
"And did you find anything there - in the attic or anywhere else?"
"There were some bones up under the eaves. They may have been what that
boy saw - if he was sensitive he wouldn't have needed anything in the
window-glass to unhinge him. If they all came from the same object it must
have been an hysterical, delirious monstrosity. It would have been
blasphemous to leave such bones in the world, so I went back with a sack
and took them to the tomb behind the house. There was an opening where I
could dump them in. Don't think I was a fool - you ought to have seen that
skull. It had four-inch horns, but a face and jaw something like yours and
mine."
At last I could feel a real shiver run through Manton, who had moved very
near. But his curiosity was undeterred.
"And what about the window-panes?"
"They were all gone. One window had lost its entire frame, and in all the
others there was not a trace of glass in the little diamond apertures.
They were that kind - the old lattice windows that went out of use before
1700. I don't believe they've had any glass for a hundred years or more -
maybe the boy broke 'em if he got that far; the legend doesn't say."
Manton was reflecting again.
"I'd like to see that house, Carter. Where is it? Glass or no glass, I
must explore it a little. And the tomb where you put those bones, and the
other grave without an inscription - the whole thing must be a bit
terrible."
"You did see it - until it got dark."
My friend was more wrought upon than I had suspected, for at this touch of
harmless theatricalism he started neurotically away from me and actually
cried out with a sort of gulping gasp which released a strain of previous
repression. It was an odd cry, and all the more terrible because it was
answered. For as it was still echoing, I heard a creaking sound through
the pitchy blackness, and knew that a lattice window was opening in that
accursed old house beside us. And because all the other frames were long
since fallen, I knew that it was the grisly glassless frame of that
demoniac attic window.
Then came a noxious rush of noisome, frigid air from that same dreaded
direction, followed by a piercing shriek just beside me on that shocking
rifted tomb of man and monster. In another instant I was knocked from my
gruesome bench by the devilish threshing of some unseen entity of titanic
size but undetermined nature; knocked sprawling on the root-clutched mold
of that abhorrent graveyard, while from the tomb came such a stifled
uproar of gasping and whirring that my fancy peopled the rayless gloom
with Miltonic legions of the misshapen damned. There was a vortex of
withering, ice-cold wind, and then the rattle of loose bricks and plaster;
but I had mercifully fainted before I could learn what it meant.
Manton, though smaller than I, is more resilient; for we opened our eyes
at almost the same instant, despite his greater injuries. Our couches were
side by side, and we knew in a few seconds that we were in St. Mary's
Hospital. Attendants were grouped about in tense curiosity, eager to aid
our memory by telling us how we came there, and we soon heard of the
farmer who had found us at noon in a lonely field beyond Meadow Hill, a
mile from the old burying ground, on a spot where an ancient
slaughterhouse is reputed to have stood. Manton had two malignant wounds
in the chest, and some less severe cuts or gougings in the back. I was not
so seriously hurt, but was covered with welts and contusions of the most
bewildering character, including the print of a split hoof. It was plain
that Manton knew more than I, but he told nothing to the puzzled and
interested physicians till he had learned what our injuries were. Then he
said we were the victims of a vicious bull - though the animal was a
difficult thing to place and account for.
After the doctors and nurses had left, I whispered an awestruck question:
"Good God, Manton, but what was it? Those scars - was it like that?"
And I was too dazed to exult when he whispered back a thing I had half
expected -
"No - it wasn't that way at all. It was everywhere - a gelatin - a slime
yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory. There
were eyes - and a blemish. It was the pit - the maelstrom - the ultimate
abomination. Carter, it was the unnamable!
