In the restless quiet of night, the mind wanders where it ought not. Shadows stretch across the floor, and the lamp’s weak glow pools uncertainly, illuminating fragments of forgotten scholarship and half-remembered fears. The scent of old paper and ink mingles with the cold, hinting at secrets best left undisturbed. It is here that the narrator contemplates the merciful boundaries of human ignorance, the walls that guard sanity against the encroaching, infinite dark.

Driven by a compulsion both dreadful and irresistible, the narrator sifts through the notes of the late professor. The professor’s script is hurried, almost frantic, as if he sensed his time was short. Each sentence pieced together hints at a cosmic cycle, a reality far vaster and more terrifying than the world outside the window. The rain seems to echo the growing unease, falling in relentless, mournful rhythm.

The accidental correlation of the old newspaper and the professor’s notes reveals a glimpse of forbidden aeons—a truth that chills the blood and feverishly agitates the mind. Theosophists had spoken in veiled terms, their optimism masking horror, but this truth is raw, unvarnished, and overwhelming. The narrator’s breath becomes shallow, fingers trembling as the pieces align to form a vista of reality so frightful it threatens to unravel sanity itself.

The narrator wishes fervently to undo the connection, to banish the knowledge that presses inward like a suffocating shroud. Thoughts spiral, torn between fleeing from the deadly light of truth and seeking refuge in ignorance. The notes, once a testament to curiosity, now seem accusatory—reminders that some doors, once opened, cannot be shut. The sense of isolation is profound, as if the world beyond the study has receded into irrelevance.

A grim understanding settles in: the narrator must never supply another link in this monstrous chain. The professor, too, must have intended silence, his notes preserved only by the cruel hand of sudden death. The story’s burden now rests on trembling shoulders, an unspoken vow to keep the dread secret buried. The wind howls outside, as if mourning the loss of innocence.

The world continues, placid and oblivious, floating on its island of ignorance amidst black seas of infinity. Yet beneath the surface, the terror remains—an invisible wound, a secret glimpse into the abyss. The narrator hopes that none will ever repeat this fatal assembly of knowledge, for the price of truth is madness, and the peace of a new dark age may be the only refuge left to humankind. My knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 1926–27 with the death of my grand-uncle George Gammell Angell, Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages in Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Professor Angell was widely known as an authority on ancient inscriptions, and had frequently been resorted to by the heads of prominent museums; so that his passing at the age of ninety-two may be recalled by many. Locally, interest was intensified by the obscurity of the cause of death. The professor had been stricken whilst returning from the Newport boat; falling suddenly, as witnesses said, after having been jostled by a nautical-looking negro who had come from one of the queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside which formed a short cut from the waterfront to the deceased’s home in Williams Street. Physicians were unable to find any visible disorder, but concluded after perplexed debate that some obscure lesion of the heart, induced by the brisk ascent of so steep a hill by so elderly a man, was responsible for the end. At the time I saw no reason to dissent from this dictum, but latterly I am inclined to wonder—and more than wonder.As my grand-uncle’s heir and executor, for he died a childless widower, I was expected to go over his papers with some thoroughness; and for that purpose moved his entire set of files and boxes to my quarters in Boston. Much of the material which I correlated will be later published by the American Archaeological Society, but there was one box which I found exceedingly puzzling, and which I felt much averse from shewing to other eyes. It had been locked, and I did not find the key till it occurred to me to examine the personal ring which the professor carried always in his pocket. Then indeed I succeeded in opening it, but when I did so seemed only to be confronted by a greater and more closely locked barrier. For what could be the meaning of the queer clay bas-relief and the disjointed jottings, ramblings, and cuttings which I found? Had my uncle, in his latter years, become credulous of the most superficial impostures? I resolved to search out the eccentric sculptor responsible for this apparent disturbance of an old man’s peace of mind.The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about five by six inches in area; obviously of modern origin. Its designs, however, were far from modern in atmosphere and suggestion; for although the vagaries of cubism and futurism are many and wild, they do not often reproduce that cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric writing. And writing of some kind the bulk of these designs seemed certainly to be; though my memory, despite much familiarity with the papers and collections of my uncle, failed in any way to identify this particular species, or even to hint at its remotest affiliations. Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evidently pictorial intent, though its impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful. Behind the figure was a vague suggestion of a Cyclopean architectural background.The writing accompanying this oddity was, aside from a stack of press cuttings, in Professor Angell’s most recent hand; and made no pretence 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. The 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-Elliot’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.