I leafed through the opening pages, and paused to read an entry so intriguing that I copy it here in this Journal.
Sept. 4th. At sundown, or shortly thereafter, when the constellation of Perseus rose in the sky, heard again the sound of chanting from the woods in some bestial language that should not come from human lips. Was it from the “dead place” in the Deep Woods, where the Great Stone lies, or further off? Snowfall too light to leave tracks for me to find by morning. Again, strained to make out anything of the howling, grunting, gibbering language, but one word or name repeated very frequently: Ossadogowah always followed (as in some liturgical response) by a second uncouth name or whatever: Zvilpoggua. These wooded hills home of devil-cults and witch-covens long ago, God knows, and fiendish Indian secret societies back before the first white settlers came into these parts. No Indians around here now, of course, but the rustics hereabouts are ignorant, superstitious, inbred, degenerate—and old beliefs die hard, and are long in the dying.
Sept. 8th. Finally heard from young Wilmarth at Miskatonic, supposed to be an enthusiastic amateur folklorist of the region. Says certain Indian tribes in this region, now long gone (the Nansets, Wampanaugs, and esp. Narragansetts) worshipped—or at least knew how to summon down with spells—a sky-devil they called Ossadogowah; not a name but a title, it seems: “Son of Sadogowah”—whoever was! Will send me photographic copies of (phrase illegible) next week, if possible. Suggests I try rare-book merchants in Salem, Boston, Providence, to obtain copy of something called Of Evill Sorceries Done in New-England of Daemons in no Humane Shape, which he read years ago and which bears on Indian devil-worship cults.
Chanting after dark again. This time, hid in the underbrush at the edge of the clearing: bestial gruntings and gurglings indeed come from the "dead space" where the Stone lies. Was able to make out something of the words, but they are in no human language I know of. As follows, best as I could make them out over the roaring of the wind:
Eeeyaah! Eeeyaah nughun nuh-nuh-guy guy eeyaah
eeyaah nug-hi enyah enyah zhoggoh ffthaghun ....
Sept. 17th. Made the trip into Arkham today, but Wilmarth off on a walking tour somewhere. Ass’t Librarian at Miskatonic refused me access to any of the old texts Wilmarth suggested, damn his eyes! Did, however, let me examine back files of the local papers, Ark. Advertiser in particular, 1921 thru '22. Ltrs. to editor about chanting heard in the woods to the north; mysterious disappearance of locals named Lew Waterbury and Jason Osborn; Osborn’s body turned up later. Autopsy by County Medical Examiner sugg. corpse had been subjected to "severe changes in temperature" and had "fallen or been dropped from a great height." (Fallen from what? Dropped by ... what?)
Conditions of corpse sound dreadfully similar to the body I found in the woods, and buried hastily because of the terrible stench, which was not that of decomposing human flesh. Should have reported disc. to police, I know, but it was torn beyond all possibility of identification. Note that "horribly foetid black slime" found on Osborn corpse.
My eyes were getting tired from trying to read by the unsteady light of the lamp, so I put Jared's manuscript aside, carefully marking the last entry I had read, and went to bed.
But not, as it chanced, to sleep for quite some time.
AS I tossed and turned on the hard, narrow cot, it occurred to me that my cousin Jared had lost his reason. This would, of course, explain many of the weirder aspects of what I had read in his diary: chanting from the depths of the Deep Woods, having found and buried a crushed and mangled corpse, his allusions to eldritch lore. However slightly we had known each other, this seemed unlikely, for he had always seemed stable and eminently sane, to my experience.
I gave the problem up and strove to compose myself for sleep. But sleep did not come easily. For one thing, the star Algol shone like a burning green eye through the window, which was closed against the night’s cold but which I had left unshuttered. Its unusually brilliant, viridian light seemed to burn through my closed lids like some unearthly searchlight from Beyond ....
When, at length, slumber overtook my weary mind, and I sank through ever-darkening layers of shadow, I still found not the repose I sought. As I hovered between wakefulness and dream, it seemed to me that a dim and distant current of rhythmical sound, like far-heard surf or distant chanting, persisted in intruding upon my rest. This, of course, was absurd, for the woods, as I have already noted, were abnormally silent, and the wind had died. Finally, along toward dawn. I awoke, neither rested nor refreshed.
It was then that an odd coincidence occurred co me.
Algol is a star in the constellation of Perseus ....
AFTER a meager breakfast, feeling the need for a little fresh air and some exercise before settling down again to the organization of my notes, I decided to take a tramp through the woods. I was particularly interested in finding the barren glade whereof my cousin had written in his diary, and the “Great Stone” that lay in it. Donning my winter gear, and finishing off my hot black coffee with a gulp, I left the cabin and entered the woods, striking out at pure random, nor knowing in which direction I must travel to find the region my cousin's papers described.
These woods were distinctly unlike any in New England, at least within my personal experience. For one thing, all of the huge, gnarled trees seemed of unnatural, even abnormal age. In such a wood one might expect to find new saplings springing from the fertile mulch, and the skeletal and moldering remains of fallen tree trunks. Not so, however, here in the Deep Woods: No saplings were to be seen; it was as if some extraordinary source of life and vigor had prolonged the life of these ancient trees immeasurably beyond their natural span.
For another thing, the woods were uncannily, even unhealthily, silent. At this season, I would have expected the underbrush to be filled with rabbits and chipmunks, field mice and squirrels, all scampering through the crisp, dry leaves upon their small tasks and errands. Nor so here in the Deep Woods, where an unwholesome silence and a distinctly odd absence of small life reigned ....
I came upon the clearing abruptly, and knew at once that this was the "dead place" Jared had described. The ground underfoot became abruptly barren of anything but sparse, unhealthy, lank grass, which grew in sickly, chin patches, as if the soil beneath it was either somehow poisonous or, for one or another reason, hostile to living things.
There in the very middle of the small open space, ringed about with a thickly crowded wall of gaunt black trees, lay half-buried in the bare soil a huge, rectangular stone—surely, the "Great Stone" of which Jared had written. I came closer to examine it; While the trunks of the trees through which I had passed were slimy with mold and moss and lichen, the enormous, brick-shaped stone was as bare of life in any visible form as if newly scrubbed clean by industrious hands.
Add one more unnatural thing about the Deep Woods, I thought uneasily to myself.
The block measured some ten feet in length and about three and a half feet in height and thickness, although it was not possible to measure the height of the stone with much certainty, so deeply was it sunken into the dead earth. As for the composition, it was of the gray granite commonly found in these parts, brought hither aeons before by the glaciers when those vast serpents of age-old Arctic ice came crawling sluggishly down across the continent.