There was between them a middle-aged man who travelled all the way from New Orleans to get special information. He was unable to get it from any local source. His name was John Raymond Legrasse. He was an Inspector of Police and he brought the subject of his visit with him. It was a grotesque, repulsive, and apparently very ancient stone statuette. Its origin was unknown.
Inspector Legrasse was not interested in archaeology at all. He came because of purely professional considerations. The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was, was captured some months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting[26]. The rites connected with it were so singular and hideous, that the police immediately realized that it was a dark cult totally unknown to them, and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the African voodoo circles. Absolutely nothing was discovered of its origin. They discovered only erratic and unbelievable tales from the captured members. Hence the police asked for help from scholars. They wanted to identify the frightful symbol, and through it understand the cult itself.
Inspector Legrasse was not prepared for the sensation which his offering created. One sight of the thing was enough to throw the assembled scientists into a state of tense excitement. They crowded around him to gaze at the diminutive strange figure. The figure was apparently very old and nothing alike. An unknown school of sculpture made this terrible object. Centuries and even thousands of years were recorded in its dim and greenish surface of stone.
They passed slowly this figure from man to man for close and careful study. It was between seven and eight inches in height. It represented a vaguely humanoid monster, with an octopus-like head. Its face was a mass of feelers. It had a scaly rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing was an embodiment of a fearsome and unnatural malignancy[27]. It squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal that was covered with undecipherable characters[28]. The tips of the wings touched the back edge of the block. The seat occupied the center. The long, curved claws of the hind legs gripped the front edge and extended toward the bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod head[29] was bent forward. The ends of the facial feelers brushed the backs of huge fore paws which clasped the elevated knees. The creature looked abnormally life-like and fearful. Its source was totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable age was unmistakable. But it was not connected to any known type of art belonging to civilisations youth or indeed to any other time. Even its material was a mystery. The soapy, greenish-black stone with its golden or iridescent flecks and striations was not familiar to geology or mineralogy. The characters along the base were totally unknown. Nobody had the least notion of even their remotest linguistic kinship. They, like the subject and material, belonged to something horribly remote and distinct from mankind as we know it.
The members shook their heads and confessed defeat at the Inspectors problem. Yet there was one man in that gathering who recognized bizarre familiarity in the monstrous shape and writing. This person was the late William Channing Webb[30], Professor of Anthropology in Princeton University, and a famous explorer.
Professor Webb took part, forty-eight years before, in a tour of Greenland and Iceland in search of some Runic inscriptions. On the West Greenland coast he met a singular tribe or cult of degenerate Esquimaux[31]. Their religion was a curious form of devil-worship. It frightened him with its deliberate bloodthirstiness[32] and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which other Esquimaux knew little. They mentioned it only with shudders. They said that it came down from horribly ancient ages before the creation of the world. Besides nameless rites and human sacrifices there were certain queer hereditary rituals. These rituals addressed to a supreme elder devil ortornasuk[33]. Professor Webb took a careful phonetic copy of this from an agedangekok or wizard-priest[34]. It was expressing the sounds in Roman letters as best he knew how. The most important thing was the fetish, around which they danced when the aurora leaped high[35] over the ice cliffs. The professor stated that it was a very crude bas-relief of stone. It was comprising a hideous picture and some cryptic writing. And it was a rough parallel in all essential features of the bestial thing which was now lying before the meeting.
The assembled members received information with suspense and astonishment. It was even more exciting to Inspector Legrasse. He began at once to question his informant. He noted and copied an oral ritual among the swamp cult-worshippers which his men arrested. So he asked the professor to remember the syllables from the diabolist Esquimaux. There then followed an exhaustive comparison of details and a moment of silence. Both detective and scientist agreed on the identity of the phrase common to two hellish rituals. Both the Esquimaux wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests chanted to their kindred idols strange words. They were something like this:
Phnglui mglwnafh Cthulhu Rlyeh wgahnagl fhtagn.
Legrasse said that some his mongrel prisoners told him the meaning of these words. This text meant:
In his house at Rlyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming[36].
And now Inspector Legrasse related his experience with the swamp worshippers. This is the story to which my uncle attached profound significance. It was the wildest dream of a myth-maker or a theosophist.
On November 1st, 1907, some frantic summons came to the New Orleans police from the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The people there are mostly primitive but good-natured descendants of Lafittes men[37]. They were in stark terror from an unknown thing which occurred in the night.
It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of the most terrible sort. Since the malevolent tom-tom[38] began its incessant beating, some of their women and children disappeared. The sounds came from the black haunted woods where no one walked. There were insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling chants and dancing devil-flames. The frightened messenger added that it was impossible to stand that.
So twenty police officers in two carriages and an automobile went there. The shivering squatter was their guide. At the end of the road they walked for miles in silence through the terrible cypress woods where day never came. Ugly roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss beset them. Finally, they saw the squatter settlement, a miserable huddle of huts. Hysterical dwellers ran out to meet them. The policemen heard the beat of tom-toms now. It was far, far ahead; and a curdling shriek came when the wind shifted. The dim red light was visible through the forrest. The squatters refused to go toward the scene of unholy worship. Inspector Legrasse and his nineteen colleagues went into black arcades of horror.
They entered that region of traditionally evil repute. White men normally did not enter it. There were legends of a hidden lake, in which dwelt a huge, formless white polypous animal with luminous eyes. Squatters whispered that bat-winged devils flew up out of caverns in inner earth to worship it at midnight. It was there before the Indians, and before even the beasts and birds of the woods. It was nightmare itself, and to see it was to die. But it was coming to people in dreams, and so they knew enough not to go there. The present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the fringe of this area. But even that location was bad enough. Perhaps the very place of the worship terrified the squatters more than the shocking sounds and incidents.