Chapter 2

The writing accompanying this oddity was, aside from a stack of
press cuttings, in Professor Angell’s most recent hand; and made no
pretense to literary style. What seemed to be the main document was
headed “_CTHULHU CULT_” in characters painstakingly printed to avoid
the erroneous reading of a word so unheard-of. This manuscript was
divided into two sections, the first of which was headed “1925–Dream
and Dream Work of H. A. Wilcox, 7 Thomas St., Providence, R. I.,” and
the second, “Narrative of Inspector John R. Legrasse, 121 Bienville
St., New Orleans, La., at 1908 A. A. S. Mtg–Notes on Same, & Prof.
Webb’s Acct.” The other manuscript papers were all brief notes, some
of them accounts of the queer dreams of different persons, some of
them citations from theosophical books and magazines (notably W.
Scott-Eliott’s _Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria_), and the rest comments
on long-surviving secret societies and hidden cults, with references
to passages in such mythological and anthropological source-books
as Frazer’s _Golden Bough_ and Miss Murray’s _Witch-Cult in Western
Europe_. The cuttings largely alluded to outré mental illnesses and
outbreaks of group folly or mania in the spring of 1925.

* * * * *

The first half of the principal manuscript told a very peculiar
tale. It appears that on March 1st, 1925, a thin, dark young man of
neurotic and excited aspect had called upon Professor Angell bearing
the singular clay bas-relief, which was then exceedingly damp and
fresh. His card bore the name of Henry Anthony Wilcox, and my uncle
had recognized him as the youngest son of an excellent family slightly
known to him, who had latterly been studying sculpture at the Rhode
Island School of Design and living alone at the Fleur-de-Lys Building
near that institution. Wilcox was a precocious youth of known genius
but great eccentricity, and had from childhood excited attention
through the strange stories and odd dreams he was in the habit of
relating. He called himself “psychically hypersensitive”, but the staid
folk of the ancient commercial city dismissed him as merely “queer”.
Never mingling much with his kind, he had dropped gradually from social
visibility, and was now known only to a small group of esthetes from
other towns. Even the Providence Art Club, anxious to preserve its
conservatism, had found him quite hopeless.

On the occasion of the visit, ran the professor’s manuscript, the
sculptor abruptly asked for the benefit of his host’s archeological
knowledge in identifying the hieroglyphics on the bas-relief. He
spoke in a dreamy, stilted manner which suggested pose and alienated
sympathy; and my uncle showed some sharpness in replying, for the
conspicuous freshness of the tablet implied kinship with anything but
archeology. Young Wilcox’s rejoinder, which impressed my uncle enough
to make him recall and record it verbatim, was of a fantastically
poetic cast which must have typified his whole conversation, and which
I have since found highly characteristic of him. He said, “It is new,
indeed, for I made it last night in a dream of strange cities; and
dreams are older than brooding Tyre, or the contemplative Sphinx, or
garden-girdled Babylon.”

It was then that he began that rambling tale which suddenly played upon
a sleeping memory and won the fevered interest of my uncle. There had
been a slight earthquake tremor the night before, the most considerable
felt in New England for some years; and Wilcox’s imagination had been
keenly affected. Upon retiring, he had had an unprecedented dream of
great Cyclopean cities of Titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all
dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror. Hieroglyphics
had covered the walls and pillars, and from some undetermined point
below had come a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which
only fancy could transmute into sound, but which he attempted to render
by the almost unpronounceable jumble of letters, “_Cthulhu fhtagn_”.

This verbal jumble was the key to the recollection which excited and
disturbed Professor Angell. He questioned the sculptor with scientific
minuteness; and studied with almost frantic intensity the bas-relief
on which the youth had found himself working, chilled and clad only
in his nightclothes, when waking had stolen bewilderingly over him.
My uncle blamed his old age, Wilcox afterward said, for his slowness
in recognizing both hieroglyphics and pictorial design. Many of his
questions seemed highly out of place to his visitor, especially those
which tried to connect the latter with strange cults or societies;
and Wilcox could not understand the repeated promises of silence
which he was offered in exchange for an admission of membership in
some widespread mystical or paganly religious body. When Professor
Angell became convinced that the sculptor was indeed ignorant of any
cult or system of cryptic lore, he besieged his visitor with demands
for future reports of dreams. This bore regular fruit, for after the
first interview the manuscript records daily calls of the young man,
during which he related startling fragments of nocturnal imagery whose
burden was always some terrible Cyclopean vista of dark and dripping
stone, with a subterrene voice or intelligence shouting monotonously
in enigmatical sense-impacts uninscribable save as gibberish. The two
sounds most frequently repeated are those rendered by the letters
“_Cthulhu_” and “_R’lyeh_”.