The Call of CthulhuÅldersanpassad version

One day I inherited a collection of papers that would not let me rest. They were written and gathered by my uncle, Professor Angell, a quiet but curious man who had spent his life studying languages, myths, and traces of forgotten peoples. He was the one who could always reassure me that the world had order – until the notes in a gray tin box began to whisper otherwise.

The first thing that struck me was how many artists and poets had suddenly dreamed the same thing in the same weeks. Between February 28 and April 2, a strange fever had seized their imaginations. Some spoke of dark cities with wet stones, others of a smell of sea and slime and angles that did not behave like normal angles.

My uncle had written down everything they told him, and it repeated again and again: a nameless figure that just came closer and closer. It got especially bad while a young sculptor named Henry Anthony Wilcox lay sick in a kind of sleepwalking state. Then the dreams were strongest all over the world, as if someone had a hidden radio and turned up the volume in every head sensitive enough to receive it.

A well-known architect in our city became so angry and frightened by what he saw in his sleep that he lost his mind the same day Wilcox was at his worst. He died a few months later – he screamed to the end that a demon

had been let loose and was hunting him. My uncle did not stop with the notebooks. He had pasted in newspaper clippings from everywhere he could reach.

Without context, they seemed random and strange, but the datelines made me break into a cold sweat. Nightly suicides in London, where someone suddenly screamed and threw themselves out of a window. A murky reader's letter from South America in which a man said he had seen fate coming rolling. A small colony of Theosophists in California stood in white clothes waiting for a joy that never came. In India there was unrest in the streets without clear reason.

In Haiti voodoo circles danced harder and wilder than before, and in Africa, at outposts far from the cities, officers said something rumbled in the dark. Even in New York, a group of strange men came running trembling to the police on the very night of March 22–23, as if something had passed through them.

Western Ireland spoke of old giants waking in the hills, and in Paris a painter, completely without shame, exhibited a picture of a dream-black landscape that made the public recoil at once. Without knowing each other, so many small signs pointed to the same strange center that it was hard to believe it was just coincidence.

After a while in the stack came the older cases; my uncle had seen and heard this before. Already in 1908 he had encountered both the name and the

form that now recurred in the dreams – and a small stone idol that made him sit awake nights afterward just staring. Back then, at a large meeting of archaeologists in St. Louis, he was approached by a policeman who needed help with something he could not show to ordinary scholars back home. The policeman's name was John Raymond Legrasse, and he came from New Orleans. He was not interested in old jars or king's graves. He had found something out in the swamps, during a raid on what they first thought was a voodoo meeting. What he carried was a small stone statuette, so ugly that people sucked in their breath between their teeth when they saw it. It was as if it had not been made by any human, and as if it had been ancient already when the first cities in the world were new. I have held it in my own hand: it was perhaps seven or eight inches high, smooth yet rough, greenish-black with glints that did not resemble metal. No one could tell what kind of stone it was, let alone where it came from. On a low block of the same material – a sort of pedestal – sat a winged figure. The body was thick and somewhat bloated, with claws gripping over the edge and the feet drawn up toward the belly. The head was worst: a cluster of tough, writhing feelers where a face should have been. The feelers brushed over the forepaws' backs, and behind them one could see a pair of

narrow wings. It was like seeing an octopus that had tried to be human but stopped in the middle of the attempt and become something third that does not belong in any book.

Along the foot were characters. None of those in the room could read them. No one could even guess what language they might resemble. No one knew anything like it.

It became especially quiet when an elderly professor from Princeton, William Channing Webb, looked at the statuette and said: I have seen something that reminds me of this. Nearly fifty years earlier, he had gone to Greenland to search for ancient runes. There he met a small tribe that the other Eskimos were afraid to talk about. They danced under the Northern Lights and worshipped not gods, but something they called an old devil.

Webb, who did not believe in such things, still became sweaty from what they did and said. They had a slab of stone with a figure carved into it – and strange signs. Crudely and simply done, but oddly similar to the thing Legrasse had. Even stranger: Webb had written down what they sang as they danced around the slab. He had done it as best he could with Roman letters, sound by sound.

Legrasse perked up. For he himself had noted the song that was chanted during the meeting in the swamp. The two men, the cold scholar and the weary detective, stood shoulder to shoulder and slowly recited the same sounds, entirely

alike, even though they came from opposite ends of the globe. They agreed that this was what everyone had chanted, and they agreed on where the pauses came. Thus it stood in my uncle's book: Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.

And the meaning? Some of Legrasse's prisoners had said what the oldest in the group told: In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming. We who are used to reading fairy tales in peaceful parlors may smile at such words, but there are stories that do not let go when the book closes.

What Legrasse told further that day made my uncle sit and write until the ink dried in the pen and then start again. This policeman had seen something he could not explain away, yet had to live with.

On November 1, 1907, word came from homesteaders in the swamps south of New Orleans. Something was happening there every night. Something scary.

Tom-toms beat. Screams were carried on the wind. Women and children had disappeared. No one dared go in under the cypresses.

Legrasse gathered nearly twenty men, weapons in hands, lanterns on the wagons. They drove as far as they could, and walked the rest through tree trunks that leaned toward each other as if whispering secrets. Moss hung from the branches and snagged around their faces. They came to a ramshackle collection of huts, and from there they only pointed. No one would go further.

The tom-toms were clearer now. And occasionally, if the

wind shifted, a scream – not human, yet not an animal either. Further in lay a red glow.

What they met, someone should have painted. I know there are painters who have tried. On a grassy knoll in the middle of the swamp danced a crowd of people around a fire that burned in a ring like a burning wreath. They were naked and dirty, but that was not the bad part. It was the movements, the unbridled joy, the animalistic, the childish and ruthless in how they jumped and sang the same words again and again, the same phrase as in Greenland: Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.

In the center stood a stone monolith, as tall as two men, and on it, small and yet all too large, stood the same little statuette that Legrasse had brought to St. Louis. Around the monolith were ten wooden scaffolds with corpses hanging head-down.

I will not dwell on who they were. Suffice it to say they were homesteaders who had been missing.

Some of the policemen wept from sheer terror when they saw it. Still, they did not forget what they had to do. There was a fight.

No descriptions do it justice, my uncle said in the notes. Screams, panic, shots, flight. In the end, the police had taken away forty-seven men, covered again with rags, lined them up and led them out of the woods.

Five lay dead, two were too injured to walk and were carried. The idol statuette on the

monolith was carefully taken down and brought along. The night was not completely silent.

One of the men, a Spaniard, said he heard wingbeats in the dark and saw glints of eyes coming loose from solidified cliffs. The others said it was just the wind playing tricks on him. The prisoners were a mixed bunch. Seamen, not many from the same place, and many with roots in the West Indies. Some voodoo the police knew from before, but this was something else.

They would not, or could not, say everything, but they held fast to something at the core of their faith with a calm that was uncomfortable to see. They said they worshipped the Great Old Ones, who existed before humans and came from the stars. They were not here in the same way we are here. They lay in hibernation, inside the earth and under the sea, and the mightiest among them, a priest of them all, was named Cthulhu.

He lay in a house of stone in a great city under water, R'lyeh. One day he would rise when the stars were right in the sky. Then those who knew would hear the call and free him.

That was not all they said, and much they would never say. They whispered that they were not alone – there were shadows that came from dark caves to visit them at midnight – but that no human eyes had seen the Great Old Ones themselves. The thing they danced around was Cthulhu; perhaps the others were like

him, perhaps not. The writing on the base no one understood anymore; the words were only passed down from mouth to mouth over generations. The sentence they shouted aloud, they said, was not the secret. The real secret was only whispered, and perhaps only under water. One of the arrested, an old mestizo who called himself Castro, told more than the others. He had sailed many places, he said, and met men who never died in the mountains of China. From them he had heard that a very, very long time ago, long before our own animals had named themselves, the earth was ruled by others. These had cities of stone so vast and heavy that fragments still remained as islands in the Pacific. The Great Old Ones, said Castro, were not of flesh alone. They had shape, yes, but not of the substance we know. They could cross space when the stars were right, but if the sky was wrong, they sank into a sleep that was like both death and dream. That which kept them alive also kept them trapped; they lay and thought together, with thoughts that could pass from grave to grave without words. When humans finally came, they began to dream with them too – in those humans who were sensitive enough, who were a little different in the brow or the soul. Thus the cult grew, with small idol images the Great Ones had brought from the stars, and promises that everything would be different when the time came.

The whole world, said Castro, would on that day become free in a way that made law books into ashes and goodness into an old joke. Then there would be shouting and striking and celebrating without limits. Until then, the secret priests must do their things in darkness, keep the memories warm, and signal each other where and when they could meet.

In the meantime, something had happened. R'lyeh, the great stone city, sank beneath the sea, and the deep closed tightly over it. The water blocked the thoughts, like a thick, icy quilt. Yet, said Castro, the city would rise again when the stars said it was time.

He would say no more about what waited above the ocean floor. About the place where the cult was largest – in the middle of a desert in Arabia, in a city that no one finds – he only smiled. He mentioned an old book that only the bravest read: the Necronomicon, written by a mad Arab. In it stood a riddle that the initiates read as a key: That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die.

Legrasse, who was used to murderers who think they are wise, sensed that here was a faith so old that it needed no books or drawings. He asked institutions in New Orleans for help. No one could tell him anything.

Even at the big meeting in St. Louis, he found only a trembling parallel – Webb's Eskimos. The reaction that evening was both eager and cautious. Learned

friends love puzzles, but they are also afraid of looking foolish. The idol statuette stayed with Professor Webb for a while, but later came back to Legrasse. I myself saw it not long ago.

I understand why my uncle was so shaken when Wilcox stood in the door of his office with a small clay figure in his hand that had already been seen in the swamp and under the Northern Lights. It was as if someone had drawn exactly the same figure in two places without knowing about each other. And not just the figure: the hieroglyphs on the base were equally strange. And even scarier: the young man not only dreamed of a city and a figure – he murmured in his sleep words that were the same as those chanted in the swamp and wailed under the Northern Lights.

What else could my uncle do but ask and ask and collect every rumor that might fit? I thought my own thoughts nonetheless. Young men read strange things, I said to myself. And young men like to make an impression.

I decided to go visit him and tell him. He had his studio in the Fleur-de-Lys building on Thomas Street – a thick building in fake old style that never fit in on the hill with the fine, old houses. When I entered, I felt a bit shy. The clay and plaster showed sides of him that made me realize he was sincere, even if he was strange and not the easiest

to like. He showed me the figure he had modeled in his sleep, and drawings of a wet, giant city with giant stones and wrong angles. He said he had heard a faint voice the last week before he got sick; one that did not speak in words, but in images and threads that pulled him behind his forehead. Cthulhu fhtagn, the voice said, and he repeated it himself without fully knowing what it was. I left faster than I had intended, with an uneasy feeling behind my solar plexus, and decided to be sensible. Sure, there was a secret cult out there, as Legrasse said, but I did not need to believe the dreams were real messages. Wilcox must have heard about all this somewhere and pressed it into his sleep. Still, not everything let go. I traveled south to New Orleans. I talked to old men from the raid. They told of tramping through the swampland, tom-toms that made the chest tighten, the cyclic roar around the monolith, the curtains of flame, and the stench. The idol statuette lay in a closet at the police station, and I held it again. It was as cold as before, and as unrelated in geology's books. Some of the prisoners still lived, but they were empty-eyed. Old Castro was dead. Everything else they said was just shadows of what he had told. Then another thought began to gnaw. My uncle had died in a narrow alley near the

sea. A strange man had bumped into him. His heart had stopped, they said.

But I could not forget what kind of people were caught in Louisiana – sailors without land and name. I could not forget either that a sailor in Norway, who had also seen something strange, had suddenly died. It was no longer hard to imagine that a strange assembly could carry poison on ringed spikes, or could push just hard enough at the right moment.

Was I next? I did not say these thoughts aloud. But I wrote them down.

It was a new, pure coincidence that made everything fall into place so hard that the paper almost cut my fingers. I was visiting a friend in Paterson who worked at a museum. In a back room, on a shelf between rock samples, lay a stack of newspapers. One of them, the Sydney Bulletin, April 18, 1925, had a picture that made my heart cold: a stone idol almost exactly like the statuette from the swamp.

The article told of the freighter Vigilant that had come in with a half-empty steam yacht in tow – the Alert – and one man alive, one dead. The living one was a Norwegian first mate named Gustaf Johansen. He clung to the strange idol that now lay in a museum. He told a halting, short story: Emma's crew, traders on their way without cargo, had encountered a sinister yacht, the Alert, manned by strange men.

Without a word they shot. Emma's men fought and won, took over the yacht, and went on. The next day they landed on an island that was not on any chart.

Six men died there. Then came a great storm on April 2, and everything after was unclear.

The dates! My uncle had noted that on March 1 there was a great earthquake off the coast of Chile. That day, he had written, some ships stopped to wait out the weather, and others sped up, as if they were called. The same weeks the dreams grew darker.

On March 23 some men landed on an unknown island, and that evening the dreams all over the world turned to black waves. April 2, the day of the great storm – that day the dreams stopped. That day Wilcox woke up as if a lid had been twisted off his head.

A strange, sinister set of points lay under a ruler, and pointed straight to a place in the ocean where no name had been drawn. I decided to travel as soon as I could. In Dunedin, New Zealand, few knew anything about the Alert, but many knew the ship had been frowned upon for years. In Auckland I learned that Johansen, the Norwegian first mate, had gone home and that his hair had turned white in Sydney. He had sold his house in Auckland, taken his wife and coffin, and sailed to Oslo.

In Sydney I spoke

with sailors and saw the yacht, now sold and in ordinary use. I also saw the idol in the museum. When I mentioned geologists who said the stone did not exist in any rock book, I felt the cold all the way into my mouth. I imagined old Castro murmuring: They came from the stars and brought their images with them. Everything in me resisted, but I bought my ticket north. In Oslo I found a name in a city directory and an address in a narrow quarter with small yards leaning toward each other. A woman in black opened the door. Her face was still like a frozen lake. Her husband was dead. Not long after they came home, she said, it was as if everything just became too much. The events at sea had eaten him up from the inside. He had left a long document written in English, with a note that it was best this way. He wanted to spare her. He himself died in a strange accident at Gothenburg harbor; a pile of papers that blew out of an attic window hit him and knocked him to the ground. Two sailors helped him, but before the doctor came, it was over. I do not like writing these lines. But I no longer believe in coincidences that are so perfect. She let me read. On the boat to London I opened the envelope and did not put the pages down again until I had blue Ethiopian rings under my eyes. Johansen was no

writer, yet what he wrote is the clearest I have read. It is like hearing a single, pure voice tell about something it did not know was possible.

Emma, he wrote, sailed from Auckland on February 20, empty of cargo and light on the water. The storm that came from the earthquakes in Chile hit them, but they managed.

On March 22 a steam yacht stopped them – the Alert. They knew the rumors about the ship and kept their weapons ready. The others opened fire.

Emma's men, pushed to the limit, fought their way aboard the yacht and killed its crew. There were eight of them left when they started the engine and steered out into the open sea with the yacht between skerries and wave crests.

The next day they saw something sticking up from the sea. First a pillar of stone, then a low cliff, then an uneven skerry that grew larger the closer they came. When they realized what they had before their eyes, no one said a word, but they all swallowed hard.

This was no ordinary island. It was a coastline of glistening green stone, built in layer upon layer of blocks so huge they did not look like anything humans should ever have lifted.

The angles between the surfaces were not what the eye and brain expect. The sun above seemed to stand askew.

The shadows went where they should not. They had reached R'lyeh, I said to myself when I

read it, and I had to hold on to the armrest. They rowed ashore onto something more slime than soil. The smell prickled in the nose like cold brain stings. They climbed, but stumbled more; everything was slippery as seaweed, and slippery in a different way than our own slimy slipperiness. One of them, Rodriguez, saw something and shouted. The others followed him up to a wall where a door was hewn. Over the doorway was a heavy lintel, and along the frame were patterns and carvings. The door itself bore the hated figure in bas-relief: a head with tentacles, a body that was both claw and fish and bat and something they had no words for. They were not sure whether the door stood vertical as in a house, or slanted outward like a hatch. Something was wrong with this world itself. One man, Briden, pushed on a spot and shouted that it did not move. Donovan climbed the side jambs, trying to find a weak spot, a place to put his palm. He pressed. The others heard how something far inside grated quietly against something. Suddenly the whole surface slid inward. Not up, not down – inward, on a slant, as if the world were made of soft rubber and twisted a bit. The darkness within was not like ordinary darkness. It lay thick as smoke and drifted out like a cold breath that smelled green of a grave. The air outside became grayer, and the sun took on the color

of an old coin. There was a sound in there, a viscous sound, as when something soft and heavy is moved across a wet floor. At first they saw nothing, but they heard, they smelled, and they knew they must not stay. Yet they stood there.

And then, in the opening, like a boat being wrenched out of a boathouse, something slimy and unborn rolled into the light. Johansen's handwriting, which had been steady, became uneven on that line. He could not write words that made it clear. He only said: A mountain walked. A stench as of something old and insane.

Feelers. Wings. Claws. And he wrote the name in a burst: Cthulhu.

Three men were taken up in the sticky claws before they could draw breath. Donovan, Guerrera, Angstrom – gone. Another, Parker, ran in panic and disappeared into an angle that should not have been there, that was sharp as a knife, yet behaved like a large cushion.

The rest, Briden and Johansen, ran as if everything they had ever done in life whipped them forward. They slipped on the weeds and slime, but they made it to the boat and got it into the water with terror as their strongest crew. While they rowed for their lives, It staggered behind them with raw, enormous steps, trying to get used to the light. At the water's edge It bent out like a large dog that first thinks

the water is a floor. The engine on the yacht was not dead. Johansen ran between the machine and the helm with movements not his own. He writes that he does not remember how his hands found everything, but that everything found each other. The ship gained speed. The thick waves were like porridge, but they cut straight across them. It did not help. The Great One was already in the water. It slid out with a sound that makes me tear the paper every time I think of it. Briden turned and laughed – not like a man, but like a child who has seen the sky fall. He laughed for hours. He laughed until he stopped breathing the next night. Johansen then did the only thing a soul could think of: he put the helm straight toward the monster, let the steam boil, and aimed the bow into a mass that should not have been something a ship could penetrate. As the bow met the gelatinous head, it was as if they melted together – and then something snapped. A green cloud shot up and spread over the deck like a dew of poison. The sound, wrote Johansen, cannot be told with letters. Afterward, the water behind them was a boil. That which had been divided drew together again with laughing little threads, and the monster that had been scattered across the water gathered itself as if the two baffling human tubs had never gotten in the way. But in that very moment they

cut through, the yacht had gained just enough speed to slip away, and wind and foam took the rest. Then came the storm on April 2. After that, Johansen remembered only fragments. The rescue, naval hearings, a vague court, all was like seeing himself through glass that someone had breathed on. The journey home was a wave of sleep. He could not tell anyone what he had seen. They would have called him mad. Therefore he finally wrote, in English, for her – she who should not read – and perhaps for someone out there who would one day understand. No one else must know. I folded the paper and put it back in the tin box with my uncle's notes and the photographs of the idols. I closed the lid as if I could lock the world itself with that click. But it is not possible. I know more than it is good to know, and those who know too much become silent in ways no obituary writes about. My uncle died from a bump in a crowd, they said. Johansen got paper on his head, they said. I get up at night and feel the window. I know there are eyes in the dark, eyes that do not need to blink. And when I listen to the sea, I know that under the waves now lies again something that fell asleep, not dead. For the great city sank. After the storm a ship sailed over the spot again, and there were only waves to

see. But Cthulhu is not gone. He lies in his house at R'lyeh. He waits – dreaming, they said, and I know that word is right. And on land there are still men who bind bands around their heads, light fires in places they should not, and set small idol statuettes on stones. They dance, they shout the words that were shouted in the swamp and under the Northern Lights, and they teach each other a secret that passes through generations. No book needs to say it outright for them. They know it anyway. I think of Wilcox, who alone, in a sad studio in an ugly building on Thomas Street, woke from his fever without knowing what the world outside had done parallel with him. He made a statue that was a twin of another statue that was not even in a museum, but in a closet at a police station. He said: the geometry in there is wrong. The angles are not as they should be. And far away, on a ship at the ends of the earth, a man with hands full of rope and old coffee had seen the same thing, but without words for it. That is how things connect when you wish they did not. The most painful of all is to think of the future. Castro whispered that when the time comes, everything we call law and peace, or good and right, will be clay in the hands of something else. People will shout and

laugh and strike and come again and again, as at a burning festival that never ends. The Great Old Ones will teach humans new ways to shout.

At night I forget to breathe. I also know this – in a way it is good that the sea closed, for a while. If Cthulhu had not been trapped by the sinking itself after the yacht cut him up and fled, if the city had not drowned again just when he was weakest in his wild, black heart, perhaps the whole earth within a few days would have screamed with Wilcox's voice, and we would all have held stones that never grew warm, and danced around fires that never went out.

So I close the box and write a message on the inside of the lid. If this book ever stands alone because I am no longer here, read it slowly.

Do not think you are special or safe because you know. Caution is worth more than courage in this matter. Do not show this to eyes that will hold on to it without understanding why they tremble.

The statuettes exist. The writing exists. The words exist, and some still repeat them.

And that which has risen can sink. That which has sunk can rise. In the deep, on floors with angles that cut the air differently, something waits and dreams of the light in a bad way. And on land, in dark groves and on damp meadows, there still stand

monoliths with small idols on top. Around them people walk in circles – some with open eyes, some with eyes closed, and they do not even know the name of what they shout. But the name is there, nonetheless, in the throat. Cthulhu.

When Professor Angell showed the scholars the statuette from the swamps, many shook their heads and said all this was just remnants of old occult stuff mixed with myths. When Professor Webb told about the Eskimos, some smiled and said people make up all sorts of strange things under the Northern Lights. When Wilcox stumbled around in his sleep and shaped clay as if his hands were guided by someone else, I nodded and said young people are far too easily influenced. When I found the article with Johansen and the yacht Alert in tow, I joked to myself that in the end everything is just sailors' yarns.

Until I read his manuscript and realized he was not writing to be believed – he was writing to empty his own brain of images he could no longer bear to carry. Perhaps that is what this story is too. A way to lift some of the stones off the chest at night.

If someone reads this one day and says this is babble that adults have wrapped in dark paper, I will not contradict them. I actually wish it. For had I been twelve, and read this as a tale, I would have closed the book and felt a terror-tinged delight and run

to play something dangerous. But now, as I am who I am and know what I know, I have only one game left: to go to the window and listen. Listen for tom-toms that do not beat in my land, for words I do not want to understand, for wingbeats that could only be the wind in the gutter. And to hope that when someone one day bumps into me on the street, it is just a workman in a hurry – and not a man who never quite stopped listening to dark seas.

But before I leave the window, I want you, who have read this far, to have some simple things in memory. The little statuette that was found in the swamp, and that stands on monoliths far away, is not made of stone from our earth. The writing on the base corresponds to no known book.

The words of the ritual they chanted in the swamp are the same words Eskimos chanted in a circle on the ice. Wilcox, in a city with beautiful roofs and ugly back alleys, dreamed the same words without knowing. The narrator of this story, who is now me, has held the idols in his hands and felt the cold in them, has read about a sailor from Oslo who drove his ship straight toward what the rest of us would have turned our backs to and prayed to anything to avoid, and has seen how the world's cities, when they become scared enough, continue to pretend

that there is nothing to fear. The Great Old Ones, say those who know, are older than the mountains we have learned to climb, older than the fish we call ancient in rivers that wind through landscapes we think have always been this way. They came here when the universe had other boundaries. They brought their images with them, and they hewed cities with blocks so huge that the sea's small breaths over millions of years have only licked them smooth. They fell asleep because the sky said it was night, and they will wake when the sky again says it is morning.

Humans who dream too easily can hear them mumble. Therefore a man in Providence could shape a clay figure that was twin to another man's stone figure on the other side of the earth. Therefore a British architect could go mad from a vision in sleep and cry out that hell was loose. Therefore a colony of white-clad people in California could smile in the sunset and believe they would be taken the next day. Therefore the painter in Paris could paint a wet place you and I have never been, and give people shivers without knowing why.

I have told this in the simplest way possible, and at the same time I have tried not to crush the small images that make the story hang together. I see the cypresses bending like long fingers over the police that night, and I see the old mestizo who

nodded and held back, nodded again, and then whispered more than he was allowed, because he was old enough that secrets no longer bound him so tightly. I see the yacht with the dead ship dog no one bothers to mention in the log, and I see the stone surface that gave way on a slant. I see the two events on April 2: the storm that extinguished the world for a moment, and a young man who opened his eyes in Providence and no longer said Cthulhu in his sleep.

If anyone asks me what the moral is, I do not answer. For this is not a fable about being nice and getting a candy. This is a journey through a room where the walls sometimes twist.

It is a reminder that not all waves in our head come from our own thoughts. It is a small light in a wet cave that says: You only see what you can bear. The sea takes care of the rest for a while.

But the sea is never full. And stars move slowly across the sky, so that even mountains can call it change.

On those days when the sky is clear and the air almost windless, I remind myself that sometimes silence is a sign that something is listening, not that there is nothing to hear. And then I go, a little too solemnly perhaps, and put the box of papers back in the cupboard. I lock it with a key

and put the key somewhere else than in my pocket. And I say to myself – quietly, not like a prayer, but like a rule I will keep – that if one day I am not here to answer why the box exists, the one who finds it shall know that it is not our job to shout at things that sleep. It is our job to close doors alone in the house when the wind takes hold of them.

It should also be said that in the midst of fear lies something else. Wonder. I have felt, as strongly as terror, a strange respect that the world is larger than we think. I have seen a kind of humor too, perhaps in fate, in how the same little sentence can be whispered under the Northern Lights, shouted in a swamp, murmured by an artist in fever, and noted by a policeman who never thought he would write something that would not become evidence in a courtroom.

It is both frightening and a little beautiful that everything is connected. But I will not let that beauty fool me. For the beauty here is of a kind that carries a barb under velvet.

And for a twelve-year-old child, perhaps all this is just an exciting tale to scare a little and cuddle closer together in the dark. For me, who has seen the idols and felt the cold in them, it is a reason to put a chair under the doorknob in the evening.

If you go out late one evening and look up, and the stars are clear, think that they too, completely independent of us, can stand in patterns that mean something to someone other than us. And if you hear drums far away, rather listen to the librarian who says that not all sound is music, just as all silence is not peace. I do not want you to be afraid of everything. That is too heavy to bear. But I want you to know that there are stories that do not ask to be believed. They are just told. So, when the night is very still, and you lie wondering if the world is safe, instead of imagining ghosts in the closet, you can think of a city of wet, green stone lying on the ocean floor dreaming a difficult dream. And then you can fall asleep anyway. For even when Cthulhu dreams, the baker's clock goes early, and the bus runs with the same old engine sound. We live our lives atop something that sometimes stirs in sleep. And as long as it only turns over in its bed, and does not get up, we are allowed to get up too, make coffee, go to school, get laughing fits, and cling to each other when lightning strikes. I wished all this were a joke, an exam in imagination, something I could tear up when the day came. But every time I

touch the lid of the tin box, it is like opening a window onto a coast I will never travel to. And every time I close it, I hear a little of that same sentence, not because it is shouted, but because it has become lodged in the walls.

In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming. That sentence is not soberly learned. It is a rhythm that many, far too many, recognize without having learned it.

But perhaps – and this is a thought I like – perhaps there is also another rhythm in us that is stronger: the one that makes us build homes with corners that behave, the one that makes us teach each other to read, the one that makes mothers and fathers whisper other sentences by children's cradles. I hope so. I cling to that.

And with that I put the pen down. Not as a man who is finished, but as one who knows that is enough for tonight.

There will always be more to say for those who want to gather every piece and put it together like a puzzle. But I no longer believe the whole picture is something one must have on the wall. The picture exists in the sea, made of stone blocks that our sweat will never wear away, and in a sound that someone, somewhere, now shouts – and that the night air takes and softens – before it reaches here.