Meanwhile no more must be told. There was a secret which even torture
could not extract. Mankind was not absolutely alone among the conscious
things of earth, for shapes came out of the dark to visit the faithful
few. But these were not the Great Old Ones. No man had ever seen the
Old Ones. The carven idol was great Cthulhu, but none might say whether
or not the others were precisely like him. No one could read the old
writing now, but things were told by word of mouth. The chanted ritual
was not the secret--that was never spoken aloud, only whispered. The
chant meant only this: "In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits
dreaming." *       *       *       *       *

Only two of the prisoners were found sane enough to be hanged, and
the rest were committed to various institutions. All denied a part
in the ritual murders, and averred that the killing had been done
by Black-winged Ones which had come to them from their immemorial
meeting-place in the haunted wood. But of those mysterious allies no
coherent account could ever be gained. What the police did extract
came mainly from an immensely aged mestizo named Castro, who claimed
to have sailed to strange ports and talked with undying leaders of the
cult in the mountains of China. Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the
speculations of theosophists and made man and the world seem recent
and transient indeed. There had been eons when other Things ruled on
the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the
deathless Chinamen had told him, were still to be found as Cyclopean
stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time
before man came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the
stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of
eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought
Their images with Them. These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether
of flesh and blood. They had shape--for did not this star-fashioned
image prove it?--but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars
were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky;
but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They
no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone
houses in Their great city of R'lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty
Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might
once more be ready for Them. But at that time some force from outside
must serve to liberate Their bodies. The spells that preserved Them
intact likewise prevented Them from making an initial move, and They
could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions
of years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe,
for Their mode of speech was transmitted thought. Even now They talked
in Their tombs. When, after infinities of chaos, the first men came,
the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by molding their
dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of
mammals. Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult around small
idols which the Great Ones showed them; idols brought in dim eras
from dark stars. That cult would never die till the stars came right
again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb
to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would
be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old
Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals
thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy. Then
the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill
and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a
holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate
rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow
forth the prophecy of their return. In the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones in
dreams, but then something had happened. The great stone city R'lyeh,
with its monoliths and sepulchers, had sunk beneath the waves; and the
deep waters, full of the one primal mystery through which not even
thought can pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse. But memory
never died, and high priests said that the city would rise again when
the stars were right. Then came out of the earth the black spirits of
earth, moldy and shadowy, and full of dim rumors picked up in caverns
beneath forgotten sea-bottoms. But of them old Castro dared not speak
much. He cut himself off hurriedly, and no amount of persuasion or
subtlety could elicit more in this direction. The _size_ of the Old
Ones, too, he curiously declined to mention. Of the cult, he said that
he thought the center lay amid the pathless deserts of Arabia, where
Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched. It was not
allied to the European witch-cult, and was virtually unknown beyond its
members. No book had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless
Chinamen said that there were double meanings in the _Necronomicon_
of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as they
chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:

    "That is not dead which can eternal lie,
    And with strange eons even death may die." Legrasse, deeply impressed and not a little bewildered, had inquired
in vain concerning the historic affiliations of the cult. Castro,
apparently, had told the truth when he said that it was wholly
secret. The authorities at Tulane University could shed no light upon
either cult or image, and now the detective had come to the highest
authorities in the country and met with no more than the Greenland tale
of Professor Webb. *       *       *       *       *

The feverish interest aroused at the meeting by Legrasse's tale,
corroborated as it was by the statuette, is echoed in the subsequent
correspondence of those who attended, although scant mention occurs in
the formal publication of the society. Caution is the first care of
those accustomed to face occasional charlatanry and imposture. Legrasse
for some time lent the image to Professor Webb, but at the latter's
death it was returned to him and remains in his possession, where I
viewed it not long ago. It is truly a terrible thing, and unmistakably
akin to the dream-sculpture of young Wilcox. That my uncle was excited by the tale of the sculptor I did not
wonder, for what thoughts must arise upon hearing, after a knowledge
of what Legrasse had learned of the cult, of a sensitive young man
who had _dreamed_ not only the figure and exact hieroglyphics of the
swamp-found image and the Greenland devil tablet, but had come _in his
dreams_ upon at least three of the precise words of the formula uttered
alike by Eskimo diabolists and mongrel Louisianans?