The "Tcho-Tcho lama" ... was he one and the same as the “Elder Hierophant" mentioned in the Necronomicon in the chapter on Leng ... the nameless one whose face was forever hidden behind a mask or veil of yellow silk?
One possible connection between Leng and the Pacific which had already occurred to Hoskins had been casually mentioned early on by his former literature instructor at Miskatonic, the amateur folklorist and anthropologist, Professor Wilmarth.
The shunned and forbidden Plateau of Leng, where the Ancient Ones supposedly ruled long before the first men evolved .... Wilmarth’s very words echoed unforgotten in Hoskins’ memory.
The "Ancient Ones" were the same as "the Great Old Ones", and Cthulhu and his spawn were great powers among the Great Old Ones, he knew from his research in the pages of Alhazred. If they came down from the stars so long ago that the first men (or first mammals!) had not even evolved, perhaps the plateau or desert of Leng had been then submerged beneath the primal seas of that age ... and, also perhaps, Cthulhu and his spawn and their minions had ruled the prehistoric world from Leng, before the seas drained away and the dry land emerged, whereupon they migrated to the vast Pacific—well, it wasn't much of a theory, but it did satisfy Hoskins in that it answered the problems and contradictions which baffled him, and which robbed him of his rest.
Something else was robbing Hoskins of his rest during those last weeks of September and early October, 1928. His dreams ...
Ever, the same recurring dream ... that blank and desolate expanse of sterile, frozen waste ... that squat and ugly stone tower thrusting against the weirdly deformed constellations ... that circling, bloody beam of light that flashed and flashed and ever and again flashed from the topmost circular window.
In his dreams, night after night, Hoskins floated bodiless across the plateau ... and always, when the dream-spell broke and he awoke, shaking like a leaf and drenched in icy perspiration, he had come ever nearer to the portal of the tower.
What might happen when the dream-sequence ended he could not guess, but he feared it mightily. For something within the tower aroused in him a primal sense of fear ... an inarticulate and dreadful loathing.
Desperate to find surcease of dreams, Hoskins purchased opiates from pharmacies in his neighborhood, and even consulted a physician, Dr Ephraim Sprague, who came highly recommended. Dr. Sprague listened to Hoskins' rambling account of his nightly excursion into dreamland without comment, his expression wryly skeptical, and prescribed a sleeping powder which proved as ineffective as the opiates Hoskins had already tried.
The doctor must have told Hoskins' superior at the library something of his condition, because the next morning Cyrus Llanfer called the young man into his office, inquired sympathetically about his health, and suggested a brief vacation.
"I've noticed you seem drawn and haggard recently, as if you weren't getting enough rest, Hoskins," he said. "You seem run down, as if your nerves were bothering you. These New England winters can be dangerous for someone with as little resistance as you seem to have, so ... what do you say? A few weeks in a warmer climate, eh? Do you a world of good!”
Hoskins left Dr. Llanfer's office, trembling uncontrollably. He couldn't recall just what he had said by way of counter-argument, and on the whole he rather feared he had become belligerent, almost hysterical, and certainly rather incoherent. But—the very thought of breaking off his work at this point filled him with a cold and depthless horror... he was so close co the Ultimate Secret which he knew was concealed within the R’lyeh Text, that to break his concentration by accepting a vacation now would be disastrous.
He hoped that he had neither insulted nor affronted Dr. Llanfer, but—couldn't the senile old idiot see that the world needed the wisdom he would soon be able to bestow upon the multitudes of hapless mankind?
If needful, he would steal the Text itself as he had already stolen the "R'lyehian Key", and flee from Arkham and from the interference of others. There was a cabin in the woods that had belonged to his father, and where the family had vacationed during the long summers of his boyhood ... it would provide a perfect refuge in which he could complete his work without being pestered by meddling outsiders ....
If only he could find surcease from those terrible dreams as easily!
DURING the late fall of 1928, Bryant Hoskins fell into a serious decline. The nervous affliction which he suffered from soon became blatantly obvious to everyone. His features were drawn and haggard, his eyes bloodshot, his form wasted as from some debilitating disease.
In part, this was assigned to the insomnia which, it was believed, he suffered from. In actuality, of course, it was Hoskins himself who strove to refrain from sleeping ... because of those ghastly dreams which now preyed upon him almost nightly ... chose dreams in which he floated stealthily nearer and nearer to that horrible stone tower which brooded enigmatically amid the wastes of frozen Leng.
When neither the panaceas available at the pharmacy nor the medicines prescribed by Dr. Ephraim Sprague availed him in his struggle to cease dreaming, Hoskins turned to certain furtive folk who lurked in disreputable dives along the rotting waterfront of Arkham—dark, foreign men who purveyed obscure narcotics from squalid bars and fetid alleyways.
These drugs, indeed, kept him from dreaming, but at a grisly price. For his strength declined even as his mind lost its wonted lucidity, and his health began to crumble. Cognizant of Hoskins' rapid decline, Dr. Llanfer finally insisted that he take the undesired vacation he had earlier offered. Hoskins could only accept, but he stole the Rtyab Text and vanished into the thick woodlands to the north of Arkham.
The New England winters were hard and cruel in chose parts, and backwoods farmers were often snowed in for months. Hoskins brought with him, therefore, sufficient supplies of food and coffee and kerosene for the stove, together with clean clothing, blankets, and writing paper. That very night, his first in the little cabin in the woods, the snow fell heavily; when he awoke from a dreamless sleep at dawn, it was to find himself completely isolated, surrounded on all sides with a smooch field of unbroken snow.
The isolation, however, was exactly what he most desired. Not Dr. Llanfer nor any other could pester him here ... here he could accomplish his great work, which was to translate the whole of the R'lyeh Text, and to reveal its secrets to the ignorant and unsuspecting world.
One thing, however, Bryant Hoskins had forgotten in his haste. The narcotics he had purchased from the furtive, foreign men in the crumbling dives along the waterfront would soon be exhausted ....
ON the night of November 11, 1928, lacking the drugs which alone could protect him from his dreams, Bryant Hoskins fell at last into an exhausted slumber toward dawn. No longer able to resist the urge to sleep, he took the precautions of putting a tablet and a pencil by his bedside, so that he could, upon awakening, record the substance of his dreams—a practice into which he had fallen.
The note found later by his bedside, scribbled by a hand so palsied as to be virtually illegible, reads as follows: