





The Festival

By H. P. Lovecraft

Author of “Dagon,” “The Rats in the Walls,” etc. “Efficiunt daemones, ut quae non sunt, sic tamen quasi
    sint, conspicienda hominibus exhibeant.”--Lactantius. I was far from home, and the spell of the eastern sea was upon me. In
the twilight I heard it pounding on the rocks, and I knew it lay just
over the hill where the twisting willows writhed against the clearing
sky and the first stars of evening. And because my fathers had called
me to the old town beyond, I pushed on through the shallow, new-fallen
snow along the road that soared lonely up to where Aldebaran twinkled
among the trees; on toward the very ancient town I had never seen but
often dreamed of. It was the Yuletide, which men call Christmas, though they know in
their hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than
Memphis and mankind. It was the Yuletide, and I had come at last to
the ancient sea town where my people had dwelt and kept festival in
the elder time when festival was forbidden; where also they had
commanded their sons to keep festival once every century, that the
memory of primal secrets might not be forgotten. Mine were an old
people, old even when this land was settled three hundred years
before. And they were strange, because they had come as dark, furtive
folk from opiate southern gardens of orchids, and spoken another
tongue before they learnt the tongue of the blue-eyed fishers. And now
they were scattered, and shared only the rituals of mysteries that
none living could understand. I was the only one who came back that
night to the old fishing town as legend bade, for only the poor and
the lonely remember. Then beyond the hill’s crest I saw Kingsport outspread frostily in the
gloaming; snowy Kingsport with its ancient vanes and steeples,
ridgepoles and chimneypots, wharves and small bridges, willow trees
and graveyards; endless labyrinths of steep, narrow, crooked streets,
and dizzy church-crowned central peak that time durst not touch;
ceaseless mazes of colonial houses piled and scattered at all angles
and levels like a child’s disordered blocks; antiquity hovering on
gray wings over winter-whitened gables and gambrel roofs. And against
the rotting wharves the sea pounded; the secretive, immemorial sea out
of which the people had come in the elder time. Beside the road at its crest a still higher summit rose, bleak and
windswept, and I saw that it was a burying-ground where black
gravestones stuck ghoulishly through the snow like the decayed
fingernails of a gigantic corpse. The printless road was very lonely,
and sometimes I thought I heard a distant horrible creaking as of a
gibbet in the wind. They had hanged four kinsmen of mine for
witchcraft in 1692, but I did not know just where. As the road wound down the seaward slope I listened for the merry
sounds of a village at evening, but did not hear them. Then I thought
of the season, and felt that these old Puritan folk might well have
Christmas customs strange to me, and full of silent hearthside prayer. So after that I did not listen for merriment or look for wayfarers,
but kept on down past the hushed, lighted farmhouses and shadowy stone
walls to where the signs of ancient shops and sea taverns creaked in
the salt breeze, and the grotesque knockers of pillared doorways
glistened along deserted, unpaved lanes in the light of little,
curtained windows. I had seen maps of the town, and knew where to find the home of my
people. It was told that I should be known and welcomed, for village
legend lives long; so I hastened through Back Street to Circle Court,
and across the fresh snow on the one full flagstone pavement in the
town, to where Green Lane leads off behind the Market House. I was
glad I had chosen to walk. The white village had seemed very beautiful
from the hill; and now I was eager to knock at the door of my people,
the seventh house on the left in Green Lane, with an ancient peaked
roof and jutting second story, all built before 1650. There were lights inside the house when I came upon it, and I saw from
the diamond window-panes that it must have been kept very close to its
antique state. The upper part overhung the narrow, grass-grown street
and nearly met the overhanging part of the house opposite, so that I
was almost in a tunnel, with the low stone doorstep wholly free from
snow. There was no sidewalk, but many houses had high doors reached by
double flights of steps with iron railings. It was an odd scene, and
because I was strange to New England I had never known its like
before. Though it pleased me, I would have relished it better if there
had been footprints in the snow, and people in the streets, and a few
windows without drawn curtains. *       *       *       *       *

When I sounded the archaic iron knocker I was half afraid. Some fear
had been gathering in me, perhaps because of the strangeness of my
heritage, and the bleakness of the evening, and the queerness of the
silence in that aged town of curious customs. And when my knock was
answered I was fully afraid, because I had not heard any footsteps
before the door creaked open. But I was not afraid long, for the
gowned, slippered old man in the doorway had a bland face that
reassured me; and though he made signs that he was dumb, he wrote a
quaint and ancient welcome with the stylus and wax tablet he carried. He beckoned me into a low, candlelit room with massive exposed rafters
and dark, stiff, sparse furniture of the seventeenth century. The past
was vivid there, for not an attribute was missing. There was a
cavernous fireplace and a spinning-wheel at which a bent old woman in
loose wrapper and deep poke-bonnet sat back toward me, silently
spinning despite the festive season. An infinite dampness seemed upon
the place, and I marveled that no fire should be blazing. The
high-backed settle faced the row of curtained windows at the left, and
seemed to be occupied, though I was not sure. I did not like
everything about what I saw, and felt again the fear I had had. This
fear grew stronger from what had before lessened it, for the more I
looked at the old man’s bland face, the more its very blandness
terrified me. The eyes never moved, and the skin was too like wax. Finally I was sure it was not a face at all, but a fiendishly cunning
mask. But the flabby hands, curiously gloved, wrote genially on the
tablet and told me I must wait a while before I could be led to the
place of festival.