Most of these rare works were known to Dr. Llanfer, if only by reputation. He was fully cognizant of the extraordinary rarity and priceless value of the bequest and he privately resolved to write personally to the nephew of the late Amos Tuttle, who had given his uncle’s superb collection to the library. Admonishing his assistant to handle the precious volumes with care, he saw them safely stowed away.
Young Hoskins was less familiar with these little-known works than was Llanfer, but as a librarian by profession and a collector in a small way, rumors of some of these fabulous titles had filtered into his knowledge. The R'lyeh Text in particular interested him. He knew the curious old book had never been published in any language, having been circulated in manuscript form for generations, perhaps for centuries, among certain secret sects of occultists and devil-worshipers.
Despite his interest, he found the very appearance of the book oddly repugnant. Opening it, he was appalled at the reek of decay which arose from its crumbling pages. Mastering his repugnance, he examined it gingerly and found that, while the codex was written in English characters, the actual language was unfamiliar to him and bore little if any resemblance to the several tongues, ancient and modern, with which he was acquainted. It was inscribed in faded inks upon thick leaves of yellowed parchment which were flaking and crumbling, as if from curious morbidity. Here along the Atlantic coast, he knew, the damp salt air breeds mildew and mold which often attacks books and papers: the condition of the R'lyeh Text, however, stemmed from some other kind of decay which he could not at once identify.
While the odor of the disintegrating pages was bad enough, Hoskins found the binding repellent in the extreme. It was a tan or brownish leather whose soft, finely grained texture had an unwholesome resemblance to that of human skin. Some of the witch cults of the Dark Ages, he knew, had bound their hellish testaments and grimoires in the tanned skin of human sacrifices ... but, surely, this could not be the case with the Text ....
Everything about the queer old book repelled the young librarian and aroused a squeamish revulsion within him. Its aura of unnatural ancientry and inexplicable decay, the very odor which exuded from the rotting pages, the shuddersome feel of the soft, smooth binding, aroused a certain revulsion within the young man which he could neither deny nor quite explain.
It was as if some uncanny, seldom-awakened sense within his innermost being detected a frightful danger within the ancient book ... and was trying to warn him to leave it alone.
But this was sheer nonsense, of course.
DURING the following weeks, Bryant Hoskins discovered quite a bit about the history of the R’lyeh Text and the other queer old volumes contained in the Tuttle bequest. The book in question had been purchased by the library’s benefactor, Amos Tuttle, for a reputedly enormous price. He had got it somewhere from the dark interior of Asia, obtained from a Chinese priest or shaman in inner Tibet. There was some scandal or other connected with Amos Tuttle’s acquisition of the R’lyeh Text: The less reputable newspapers of the time were full of rumors concerning queer and fearful things which had, supposedly, recently occurred in the old Tuttle house on Aylesbury Road near the Innsmouth Turnpike. There were hints of a ghastly sequence of events surrounding the death of Amos Tuttle, things too starkly dreadful not to be hushed up and quickly forgotten ....
To all such furtive and whispered horrors, Hoskins turned a deaf ear. He was a scientist first and foremost: a scholar, known for his lucid and rational intelligence, a man not given to poking into weird legends and stories based on flimsy or insubstantial evidence. Queer things were happening among the ancient, crumbling seaports of coastal Massachusetts these days which might have given him pause, had he bothered to listen much to the tales going about. Only a few months before, during the hard winter of 1927-1928, there had been mysterious goings-on in the neighboring town of Innsmouth. Agents of the federal government had apparently been conducting a strange and secret investigation of some sort in that vicinity, as a result of which a surprisingly large number of raids and arrests had been made in February of 1928, and certain blocks of crumbling tenements along the abandoned waterfront had been burned and dynamited. There were even stories that a U.S. naval submarine had discharged explosive torpedoes down into the marine chasms off Devil Reef, although sober and sensible local citizens dismissed this wild tale as mere rumor, or, this being the era of Prohibition, as part of the continuing battle against liquor smuggling.
To none of these fanciful stories did Bryant Hoskins bother listening. Doubtless, the government knew what it was doing, he reasoned. Equally certain, whatever events had actually taken place in Innsmouth had been expanded by whispered rumor entirely out of all proportion to the facts.
What fascinated him about the old book was the mysterious language in which it had been originally written, and the reason why the redactor of this particular copy had rendered the strange tongue into English characters. The only conceivable reason was so that it might be read or chanted aloud by persons or cults to whom the original glyphs or characters would otherwise have been illegible.
Among the letters and papers of the late Amos Tuttle were references to a portion of central Asia known as Leng. Whether or not Leng was part of inner Tibet was unknown to Hoskins, nor could he find reference to it in any of the standard atlases or geographical works to hand. One of his former teachers at Miskatonic, however, had heard of Leng in one or another shadowy old Asian mythology.
"Yes, of course, the so-called 'shunned and forbidden’ Plateau of Leng, where the Ancient Ones supposedly ruled long before the first men evolved; you will find information concerning it in Alhazred," his teacher friend remarked. Alhazred, Hoskins vaguely knew, was the author of a work called the Necronomicon, and the Necronomicon was another of the old, little-known books which the Miskatonic Library possessed. It was, in fact, one of the library’s chief treasures.
“Who were these Ancient Ones?” he inquired interestedly. “Some pantheon of Asiatic gods?”
"Demons, rather, I should say," commenced the other. "In Alhazred they are called the 'Old Ones', or the ‘Great Old Ones’, in contrast to the leaders of their minions, whom Alhazred names as the ‘Lesser Old Ones’— Dagon and Hydra. Dokrug, Rlim Shaikorth, and so on."
These names meant nothing to Hoskins at the time, of course.
AMONG the copies of Turtle’s letters, Hoskins found several addressed to the Gupchong Lamasery on the fringes of northern Tibet. These letters entreated that a sealed document be carried by hand through the mountain passes into Tcho-Tcho country and delivered, if possible, to someone or something called “the Tcho-Tcho lama.” Hoskins’ informant, an enthusiastic amateur anthropologist and student of folklore, had information about this item, too.
"The Tcho-Tcho people are a tribe in Burma," he explained. “Some authorities consider them purely legendary; supposedly, their cultus is centered in the ruins of Alaozar in the Sung Plateau region ... nobody knows what’s there, I’m afraid. Only the Hawks Expedition got that far, and you know what happened to it"
"But Burma is not beyond the mountain passes of northern Tibet, but entirely in another direction," argued Hoskins. His informant nodded.
"I said the Tcho-Tcho people were centered in the Sung Plateau country. Actually, they are a religion, or at least a cult, found scattered through the mystic heart of Asia. Since they worship the Great Old Ones, it’s not surprising to find a Tcho-Tcho lama in the Plateau of Leng. All that country was under the dark dominion of the Old Ones ... in the Alhazredic mythology, that is."