The Mask of Cthulhu Read online

  THE MASK OF CTHULHU

  August Derleth

  BALLANTINE BOOKS ● NEW YORK

  To the memory of

  Howard Philips Lovecraft,

  in whose work is to be found the beginnings of this

  novel.

  Copyright © 1962 by August Derleth

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

  The House on Curwen Street (as The Trail of Cthulhu), copyright 1943 by Short Stories, Inc., for Weird Tales, March, 1944; copyright 1953, by August Derleth.

  The Watcher from the Sky, copyright 1945, by Short Stories, Inc., for Weird Tales, July, 1945; copyright 1953, by August Derleth.

  The Gorge Beyond Salapunco (as The Testament of Claiborne Boyd), copyright 1948, by Short Stories, Inc., for Weird Tales, March 1949; copyright 1953, by August Derleth.

  The Keeper of the Key, copyright 1951, by Short Stories, Inc., for Weird Tales, May 1951; copyright 1953, by August Derleth.

  The Black Island, copyright 1951, by Short Stories, Inc., for Weird Tales, January 1952; copyright 1953, by August Derleth.

  ISBN 0-345-25095-8-150

  This edition published by arrangement with Arkham House

  Contents

  The Return of Hastur

  The Whippoorwills in the Hills

  Something in Wood

  The Sandwin Compact

  The House in the Valley

  The Seal of R’lyeh

  Introduction

  THE NARRATIVES in this book are, manifestly, on Lovecraftian themes. Indeed, one of them—The Return of Hastur—was begun before the death of H. P. Lovecraft, who saw its opening pages and the outline of my proposed development, and in consequence made several suggestions which were enthusiastically incorporated into the story. The remaining stories also stem directly from the Cthulu Mythos created by Lovecraft, who was in the habit of urging his writer friends to add to and expand the Mythos.

  These tales were written over a period of roughly two decades, beginning with The Return of Hastur in 1936, and ending with The Seal of R’lyeh, which was conceived and written in Los Angeles in the summer of 1953. While all the stories owe their existence to the myth-pattern created by Lovecraft, one, The House in the Valley, had its inception in a sketch of the setting taken from an actual scene by the well-known artist-cartoonist, Richard Taylor, whose jacket wraps around this book.

  The stories in these pages represent, as it were, a postscript in tribute to the creative imagination of the late H. P. Lovecraft.

  —AUGUST DERLETH

  The Return of Hastur

  ACTUALLY, IT BEGAN a long time ago: how long, I have not dared to guess: but so far as he is concerned my own connection with the case that has ruined my practice and earned me the dubiety of the medical profession in regard to my sanity, it began with Amos Tuttle’s death. That was on a night in late winter, with a south wind blowing on the edge of spring. I had been in ancient, legend-haunted Arkham that day; he had learned of my presence there from Doctor Ephraim Sprague, who attended him, and had the doctor call the Lewiston House and bring me to that gloomy estate on the Aylesbury Road near the Innsmouth Turnpike. It was not a place to which I liked to go, but the old man had paid me well to tolerate his sullenness and eccentricity, and Sprague made it clear that he was dying: a matter of hours.

  And he was. He had hardly the strength to motion Sprague from the room and talk to me, though his voice came clearly enough and with little effort.

  “You know my will,” he said. “Stand by it to the letter.”

  That will had been a bone of contention between us because of its provision that before his heir and sole surviving nephew, Paul Tuttle, could claim his estate, the house would have to be destroyed—not taken down, but destroyed, together with certain books designated by shelf number in his final instructions. His death-bed was no place to debate this wanton destruction anew; I nodded, and he accepted that. Would to heaven I had obeyed without question!

  “Now then,” he went on, “there’s a book downstairs you must take back to the library of Miskatonic University.”

  He gave me the title. At that time it meant little to me; but it has since come to mean more than I can say—a symbol of age-old horror, of maddening things beyond the thin veil of prosaic daily life—the Latin translation of the abhorred Necronomicon by the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred.

  I found the book easily enough. For the last two decades of his life Amos Tuttle had lived in increasing seclusion among books collected from all parts of the world: old, worm-eaten texts, with titles that might have frightened away a less hardened man—the sinister De Vermis Mysteriis of Ludvig Prinn, Comte d’Erlette’s terrible Cultes de Ghoules, von Junzt’s damnable Unaussprechlichen Kulten. I did not then know how rare these were, nor did I understand the priceless rarity of certain fragmentary pieces: the frightful Book of Eibon, the horror-fraught Pnakotic Manuscripts, and the dread R’lyeh Text; for these, I found upon examination of his accounts after Amos Tuttle’s death, he had paid a fabulous sum. But nowhere did I find so high a figure as that he had paid for the R’lyeh Text, which had come to him from somewhere in the dark interior of Asia; according to his files, he had paid for it no less than one hundred thousand dollars; but in addition to this, there was present in his account in regard to this yellowed manuscript a notation which puzzled me at the time, but which I was to have ominous cause to remember—after the sum above mentioned, Amos Tuttle had written in his spidery hand: in addition to the promise.

  These facts did not come out until Paul Tuttle was in possession, but before that, several strange occurrences took place, things that should have aroused my suspicion in regard to the countryside legends of some powerful supernatural influence clinging to the old house. The first of these was of small consequence in view of the others; it was simply that upon returning the Necronomicon to the library of Miskatonic University at Arkham, I found myself conveyed by a tight-lipped librarian straightway to the office of the director, Doctor Llanfer, who asked me bluntly to account for the book’s being in my hands. I had no hesitation in doing so, and thereby discovered that the rare volume was never permitted out of the library, that, in fact, Amos Tuttle had abstracted it on one of his rare visits, having failed in his attempts to persuade Doctor Llanfer to permit his borrowing it. And Amos had been clever enough to prepare in advance a marvelously good imitation of the book, with a binding almost flawless in its resemblance, and the actual reproduction of title and opening pages of the text reproduced from his memory; upon the occasion of his handling the mad Arab’s book, he had substituted his dummy for the original and gone off with one of the two copies of this shunned work available on the North American continent, one of the five copies known to be in existence in the world.

  The second of these things was a little more startling, though it bears the trappings of conventional haunted house stories. Both Paul Tuttle and I heard at odd times in the house at night, while his uncle’s corpse lay there particularly, the sound of padding footsteps, but there was a strangeness about them: they were not like footsteps falling within the house at all, but like the steps of some creature in size almost beyond the conception of man walking at a great distance underground, so that the sound actually vibrated into the house from the depths of earth below. And when I have reference to steps, it is only for lack of a better word to describe the sounds, for they were not flat steps at all, but like a kind of spongy, jelly-like, sloshing sound made with the force of so much weight behind them that the consequent shuddering of earth in that place was nothing more than this, and presently it was gone, ceasing, coincidentally enough, in the hours of the dawn when Amos Tuttle’s corpse was borne away forty-eight hours sooner than we had planned. The sounds we dismissed as settlings of th
e earth along the distant coast, not alone because we did not attach too great importance to them, but because of the final thing that took place before Paul Tuttle officially took possession of the old house on the Aylesbury Road.

  This last thing was the most shocking of all, and of the three who knew it, only I now remain alive, Doctor Sprague being dead this day a month, though he took only one look and said, “Bury him at once!” And so we did, for the change in Amos Tuttle’s body was ghastly beyond conception, and especially horrible in its suggestion, and it was so because the body was not falling into any visible decay, but changing subtly in another way, becoming suffused with a weird iridescence, which darkened presently until it was almost ebon, and the appearance of on the flesh of his puffy hands and face of minute, scale-like growth. There was likewise some change about the shape of his head; it seemed to lengthen, to take on a curious kind of fish-like look, accompanied by a faint exudation of thick fish smell from the coffin; and that these changes were not purely imaginative was shockingly substantiated when the body was subsequently found in the place where its malignant after-dweller had conveyed it, and there, at last falling into putrefaction though it was, others saw with me the terrible, suggestive changes that had taken place, though they had mercifully no knowledge of what had gone before. But at the time when Amos Tuttle lay in the old house, there was no hint of what was to come, we were quick to close the coffin and quicker still to take it to the ivy-covered Tuttle vault in Arkham cemetery.

  Paul Tuttle was at that time in his late forties, but, like so many men of his generation, he had the face and figure of a youth in his twenties. Indeed, the only hint of his age lay in the faint touches of gray in the hair of his moustache and temples. He was a tall, dark-haired man, slightly overweight, with frank blue eyes which years of scholarly research had not reduced to the necessity of glasses. Nor was he ignorant of law, for he quickly made known that if I, as his uncle’s executor, were not disposed to overlook the clause of his will that called for the destruction of the house on the Aylesbury Road, he would contest the will on the justifiable grounds of Amos Tuttle’s insanity. I pointed out to him that he stood alone against Doctor Sprague and me, but I was at the same time not blind to the fact that the unreasonableness of the request might very well defeat us; besides, I myself considered the clause in this regard amazingly wanton in the destruction it demanded, and was not prepared to fight a contest because of so minor a matter. Yet, I could have foreseen what was to come, could I have dreamed of the horror to follow, I would have carried out Amos Tuttle’s last request regardless of any decision of the court. However, such foresight was not mine.

  We went to see Judge Wilton, Tuttle and I, and put the matter before him. He agreed with us that the destruction of the house seemed needless, and more than once hinted at concurrence with Paul Tuttle’s belief in his late uncle’s madness.

  “The old man’s been touched for as long as I knew him,” he said dryly. “And as for you, Haddon, can you get up on a stand and swear that he was absolutely sane?”

  Remembering with a certain uneasiness the theft of the Necronomicon from Miskatonic University, I had to confess that I could not.

  So Paul Tuttle took possession of the estate on the Aylesbury road, and I went back to my legal practice in Boston, not dissatisfied with the way things had gone, and yet not without a lurking uneasiness difficult to define, an insidious feeling of impending tragedy, no little fed by my memory of what we had seen in Amos Tuttle’s coffin before we sealed and locked it away in the centuries-old vault in Arkham cemetery.

  II

  It was not for some time that I saw the gambrel roofs and Georgian balustrades of witch-cursed Arkham again, and then was there on business for a client who wished me to see to it that his property in ancient Innsmouth was protected from the Government agents and police who had taken possession of the shunned and haunted town, thought it was now some months since the mysterious dynamiting of blocks of the waterfront buildings and part of the terror—hung Devil Reef in the sea beyond—a mystery which has been carefully guarded and hidden since then, though I have learned of a paper purporting to give the true facts of the Innsmouth horror, a privately published manuscript written by a Providence author. It was impossible at that time to proceed to Innsmouth becaause Secret Service men had closed all roads; however, I made representations to the proper persons and received an assurance that my client’s property would be fully protected, since it lay well back from the waterfront; so I proceeded about other small town matters in Arkham.

  I went to luncheon that day in a small restaurant near Miskatonic University, and while there, heard myself accosted in a familiar voice. I looked up and saw Doctor Llanfer, the university library’s director. He seemed somewhat upset, and betrayed his concern clearly in his features. I invited him to join me, but he declined; he did, however, sit down, somewhat on the chair’s edge.

  “Have you been out to see Paul Tuttle?” he asked abruptly.

  “I thought of going this afternoon,” I replied. “Is anything wrong?”

  He flushed a little guiltily. “That I can’t say,” he answered precisely. “But there have been some nasty rumors loose in Arkham. And the Necronomicon is gone again.”

  “Good Heaven! You’re surely not accusing Paul Tuttle of having taken it?” I exclaimed, half in surprise, half amused. “I could not imagine of what use it might be to him.”

  “Still—he has it,” Doctor Llanfer persisted. “But I don’t think he stole it, and should not like to be understood as saying so. It is my opinion that one of our clerks gave it to him and is now reluctant to confess the enormity of his error. Be that as it may, the book has not come back, and I fear we shall have to go after it.”

  “I could ask him about it,” I said.

  “If you would, thank you,” responded Doctor Llanfer, a little eagerly. “I take it you’ve heard nothing of the rumors that are rife here?”

  I shook my head.

  “Very likely they are only the outgrowth of some imaginative mind,” he continued, but the air of him suggested that he was not willing or able to accept so prosaic an explanation. “It appears that passengers along the Aylesbury Road have heard strange sounds late at night, all apparently emanating from the Tuttle house.”

  “What sounds?” I asked, not without immediate apprehension.

  “Apparently those of footsteps; and yet, I understand no one will definitely say so, save for one young man who characterized them as soggy and said that they sounded as if something big were walking in mud and water near by.”

  The strange sounds Paul Tuttle and I had heard on the night following Amos Tuttle’s death had passed from my mind, but at this mention of footsteps by Doctor Llanfer, the memory of what I had heard returned in full. I fear I gave myself slightly away, for Doctor Llanfer observed my sudden interest; fortunately, he chose to interpret it as evidence that I had indeed heard something of these rumors, my statement to the contrary notwithstanding. I did not choose to correct him in that regard, and at the same time I experienced a sudden desire to hear no more; so I did not press him for further details, and presently he rose to return to his duties, and left me with my promise to ask Paul Tuttle for the missing book still sounding in my ears.

  His story, however slight it was, nevertheless sounded within me a note of alarm; I could not help recalling the numerous small things that held to memory—the steps we had heard, the odd clause in Amos Tuttle’s will, the awful metamorphosis in Amos Tuttle’s corpse. There was already then a faint suspicion in my mind that some sinister chain of events was becoming manifest here; my natural curiosity rose, though not without a certain feeling of distaste, a conscious desire to withdraw, and the recurrence of that strange, insidious conviction of impending tragedy. But I determined to see Paul Tuttle as early as possible.

  My work in Arkham consumed the afternoon, and it was not until dusk that I found myself standing before the massive oaken door of the old Tuttle house o
n Aylesbury Road. My rather peremptory knock was answered by Paul himself, who

  stood, lamp held high in hand, peering out into the growing night.

  “Haddon!” he exclaimed, throwing the door wider. “Come in!”

  That he was genuinely glad to see me I could not doubt, for the note of enthusiasm in his voice precluded any other supposition. The heartiness of his welcome also served to confirm me in my intention not to speak of the rumors I had heard, and to proceed about an inquiry after the Necronomicon at my own good time. I remembered that just prior to his uncle’s death, Tuttle had been working on a philosophical treatise relating to the growth of the Sac Indian language, and determined to inquire about this paper as if nothing else were of moment.

  “You’ve had supper, I suppose,” said Tuttle, leading me down the hall and into the library.

  I said that I had eaten in Arkham.

  He put the lamp down upon a book-laden table, pushing some papers to one side as he did so. Inviting me to sit down, he resumed the seat he had evidently left to answer my knock. I saw now that he was somewhat disheveled, and that he had permitted his beard to grow. He had also taken on more weight, doubtless as a consequence of strictly enforced scholarship, with all its attendant confinement to the house and lack of physical exercise.

  “How fares the Sac treatise?” I asked.

  “I’ve put that aside,” he said shortly. “I may take it up later. For the present, I’ve struck something far more important—just how important I cannot yet say.”

  I saw now that the books on the tables were not the usual scholarly tomes I had seen on his Ipswich desk, but with some faint apprehension observed that they were the books condemned by the explicit instructions if Tuttle’s uncle, as a glance at the vacant spaces on the proscribed shelves clearly corroborated.