*       *       *       *       *

Here the first part of the manuscript ended, but references to certain
of the scattered notes gave me much material for thought--so much, in
fact, that only the ingrained skepticism then forming my philosophy
can account for my continued distrust of the artist. The notes in
question were those descriptive of the dreams of various persons
covering the same period as that in which young Wilcox had had his
strange visitations. My uncle, it seems, had quickly instituted a
prodigiously far-flung body of inquiries amongst nearly all the friends
whom he could question without impertinence, asking for nightly reports
of their dreams, and the dates of any notable visions for some time
past. The reception of his request seems to have been varied; but
he must, at the very least, have received more responses than any
ordinary man could have handled without a secretary. This original
correspondence was not preserved, but his notes formed a thorough and
really significant digest. Average people in society and business--New
England's traditional "salt of the earth"--gave an almost completely
negative result, though scattered cases of uneasy but formless
nocturnal impressions appear here and there, always between March
23rd and April 2nd--the period of young Wilcox's delirium. Scientific
men were little more affected, though four cases of vague description
suggest fugitive glimpses of strange landscapes, and in one case there
is mentioned a dread of something abnormal. It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came,
and I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to
compare notes. As it was, lacking their original letters, I half
suspected the compiler of having asked leading questions, or of having
edited the correspondence in corroboration of what he had latently
resolved to see. That is why I continued to feel that Wilcox, somehow
cognizant of the old data which my uncle had possessed, had been
imposing on the veteran scientist. These responses from esthetes told
a disturbing tale. From February 28th to April 2nd a large proportion
of them had dreamed very bizarre things, the intensity of the dreams
being immeasurably the stronger during the period of the sculptor's
delirium. Over a fourth of those who reported anything, reported
scenes and half-sounds not unlike those which Wilcox had described;
and some of the dreamers confessed acute fear of the gigantic nameless
thing visible toward the last. One case, which the note describes with
emphasis, was very sad. The subject, a widely known architect with
leanings toward theosophy and occultism, went violently insane on
the date of young Wilcox's seizure, and expired several months later
after incessant screamings to be saved from some escaped denizen of
hell. Had my uncle referred to these cases by name instead of merely
by number, I should have attempted some corroboration and personal
investigation; but as it was, I succeeded in tracing down only a
few. All of these, however, bore out the notes in full. I have often
wondered if all the objects of the professor's questioning felt as
puzzled as did this fraction. It is well that no explanation shall ever
reach them. The press cuttings, as I have intimated, touched on cases of panic,
mania, and eccentricity during the given period. Professor Angell
must have employed a cutting bureau, for the number of extracts was
tremendous, and the sources scattered throughout the globe. Here
was a nocturnal suicide in London, where a lone sleeper had leaped
from a window after a shocking cry. Here likewise a rambling letter
to the editor of a paper in South America, where a fanatic deduces
a dire future from visions he has seen. A dispatch from California
describes a theosophist colony as donning white robes en masse for some
"glorious fulfilment" which never arrives, whilst items from India
speak guardedly of serious native unrest toward the end of March. Voodoo orgies multiply in Haiti, and African outposts report ominous
mutterings. American officers in the Philippines find certain tribes
bothersome about this time, and New York policemen are mobbed by
hysterical Levantines on the night of March 22-23. The west of Ireland,
too, is full of wild rumor and legendry, and a fantastic painter named
Ardois-Bonnot hangs a blasphemous _Dream Landscape_ in the Paris spring
salon of 1926. And so numerous are the recorded troubles in insane
asylums that only a miracle can have stopped the medical fraternity
from noting strange parallelisms and drawing mystified conclusions. A weird bunch of cuttings, all told; and I can at this date scarcely
envisage the callous rationalism with which I set them aside. But I
was then convinced that young Wilcox had known of the older matters
mentioned by the professor. _2. The Tale of Inspector Legrasse._


The older matters which had made the sculptor's dream and bas-relief so
significant to my uncle formed the subject of the second half of his
long manuscript. Once before, it appears, Professor Angell had seen the
hellish outlines of the nameless monstrosity, puzzled over the unknown
hieroglyphics, and heard the ominous syllables which can be rendered
only as "_Cthulhu_"; and all this in so stirring and horrible a
connection that it is small wonder he pursued young Wilcox with queries
and demands for data. This earlier experience had come in 1908, seventeen years before,
when the American Archeological Society held its annual meeting in
St. Louis. Professor Angell, as befitted one of his authority and
attainments, had had a prominent part in all the deliberations; and was
one of the first to be approached by the several outsiders who took
advantage of the convocation to offer questions for correct answering
and problems for expert solution. The chief of these outsiders, and in a short time the focus of interest
for the entire meeting, was a commonplace-looking middle-aged man
who had traveled all the way from New Orleans for certain special
information unobtainable from any local source. His name was John
Raymond Legrasse, and he was by profession an inspector of police. With
him he bore the subject of his visit, a grotesque, repulsive, and
apparently very ancient stone statuette whose origin he was at a loss
to determine. It must not be fancied that Inspector Legrasse had the least interest
in archeology. On the contrary, his wish for enlightenment was prompted
by purely professional considerations. The statuette, idol, fetish,
or whatever it was, had been captured some months before in the
wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo
meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites connected with
it, that the police could not but realize that they had stumbled on a
dark cult totally unknown to them, and infinitely more diabolic than
even the blackest of the African voodoo circles.