Why I did not do so, I will never know. Perhaps I feared to see the knowing smirk in the pale eyes of the storekeeper, Jenkins, and to hear his leering chuckle when he learned that I was giving up and running back home to Boston.
Building up the fire a bit later, I found some old newspapers under the stacked kindling in the shed and was about to scull them into the stove when the headline
HORROR IN BILLINGTON’S WOOD
and the names Ambrose Dewart and Stephen Bates leaped from the page to seize my attention. With hands that shook, ever so slightly, I bore the newspapers, brown and withered with age, to the table and read the news item that had caught my eye.
They related, in fragmentary fashion and without any explanation, an account of the mysterious and inexplicable disappearances of Dewart and the young Bostonian, Bates, a visiting relative, from a huge old house in Billington’s Wood some miles south of my cabin, and how no trace of the missing men had come to light and the local constabulary was without a single clue. There was nothing in the straightforward newspaper account, written in dry journalese, which hinted at weird horrors from the sky, or the lingering survival into our own time of horribly ancient devil cults which should have perished or been ruthlessly exterminated generations or even centuries ago ... nothing which mentioned blasphemous and forbidden old books which any sane man would burn or bury, rather than read ... but there was a grisly suggestiveness which lurked behind the succinct newspaper items, with their passing reference to a Druidic-like ring of stones deep in the wood, near a crude stone tower of unknown workmanship and uncertain date, which sent a thrill of clammy fear up my spine.
I buried the newspapers in the stove, and resolved to put all of these matters out of my head.
I wish to God I had done so.
TOWARD afternoon I donned my winter gear and returned to the woods. I found again the altar-like “Great Stone” in the sterile glade, where it squatted like some loathsome altar left behind by a savage and bloodthirsty race when they receded into the dimness of mercifully forgotten ages. It was not my second sight of that massive block of stone, lying upon the earth like some toppled Druidic menhir, however, that froze me where I stood—
The snow had fallen thickly in the clearing the early evening before, and now it could be seen that the white blanket which covered the dead soil like a burial shroud was marked and trampled under the tread of many feet.
It was not even this—clear evidence that the cult which worshiped Ossadagowah or “Zvilpoggua" indeed gathered nightly about this stony altar—that chilled me to the bone with fear.
It was the huge marks with which the human footprints were intermingled ... the marks of splayed, webbed feet, huger than those of any elephant that ever walked the earth, which had broken the crusted snow and left deep tracks sunken in the hard soil as if beneath the tread of ponderous, incredible weight.
(About one and a half pages which follow are quite illegible.)
(Apparently from the diary of Jared Fuller):
... those passages from the Latin of Phillipus Faber, as follows:
Of the wist Yzduggor, whom the wizards of Commoriom held in the highest repute, it was rumored that he was a devotee of the obsolete and interdicted cultus of Zvilpoggua, even he, firstborn of the spawn of Tsathoggua and begotten by the Black Thing upon the female entity, Shathak, upon far and frozen Yaksh the seventh world [here my cousin had scribbled another gloss: "7th fr. the Sun? Neptune?"]. Therefore unto his remote, secluded dwelling-place did the fearful Vooth Raluorn forthwith eloign ...
... the eremite at length yielded grudging reply to his entreaties, and erelong did the young Commorian learn from Yzduggor's reluctant lips that presently Zvilpoggua resided upon the dark planet Yrautrom, a world circumambient about the green star Algol, and may be called down to this world during those months of the year when Algol rises about the horizon [here my cousin scribbled: “Algol is in the night sky during the fall"] whereupon it is his grisly wont to feed upon the flesh and to drink of the blood of men, wherefore is he known to sorcerers as the Feaster from the Stars. ...
At the end of his translations of these fragments, evidently from the Book of Eibon, my cousin had scribbled a page reference to Nec. by which he probably meant the Necronomicon, which he had several times named in his diary. It would appear that he had entreated the scholar Wilmarth to copy certain parts of this volume for him, and I gather now, from the context, that this was one of the books he had tried in vain to secure permission from the librarian at Miskatonic University to consult. Thereupon fol(lowed? Manuscript illegible here for about three-quarters of a page.)
... which appear to have been scissored from a letter, doubtless from his correspondent Wilmarth, as the handwriting is quite different from my cousin Jared's. I read:
... no need to laboriously translate from the Latin of Olaus Wormius, for Miskatonic owns a partial copy of John Dec's English version of the Necronomicon, which makes the task easier. The two passages below come from quite different portions of the volume, but as both seem relevant to the matter at hand, I will cite them here.
To Summon-Down the Feaster from the Scars, seek those nights when first Algol riseth above ye Horizon, and, if that ye be Thirteen gather'd in Coven, join hands in ye ring about ye Stone and chaunt in unison as followeth, Iä! Iä! Iä! N’ghaa, n’n’ghai-ghai! Iä! Iä! N’ghai, n-yah, n-yah,shoggog, phthaghn! Iä! Iä! Y-hah, y-nyah, y-nyah! N'ghaa, n'n'-ghai, waphl phthagbn-Zvilpoggua! Zvilpoggua! N’gui, n'-gha'ghaa y'hah, Zvilpoggua! Ai! Ai! Ai! And note well that ye Response to ye Name Zvilpoggua, the which is to be onlie chaunted by ye Coven-Master, is Ghu-Tsathoggua, the which doth signify ye Son of Tsatboggua, and ye above Name onlie may be spake forth in ye common or vulgar Tongue.
I put down the manuscript with trembling hands, then took it up again and leafed back to that earlier passage where Jared had written down what he had heard on the night of September 8, 1929 [see page 7 of the present text]. The two chants were word for word the same, until my cousin’s jottings broke off; the only differences between them were that Jared Fuller had set them down phonetically and with little attempt at punctuation.
The pieces of the puzzle were fitting together into a dreadful and horribly meaningful pattern.
I must leave this place soon, very soon. They must know the cabin, situated so fearfully close to their place of worship, is once again inhabited. Surely, it was the coven-folk, or whatever I should call them, that murdered or carried off my cousin ... they or the monstrous demon-thing they serve ... and surely I will be the next victim.
That night I had another of those ghastly dreams that have of late haunted my troubled slumbers [apparently a reference to matter contained in the several passages illegible because of damp]. It seemed I hovered, shivering beneath the bit of ultra-telluric and bone-chilling cold, above a dark and frozen world dimly lit by the spectral light of three pallid moons. On an ice-sheathed plain rose the hoary ruins of a black city of monolithic, windowless walls ... was it a dream of Yaksh (but Neptune has only one moon, as I recall from my boyhood enthusiasm for astronomy), or of that dark world revolving about Algol, where Zvilpoggua resides?