Dr. Harker had rented a seaside house, barely more than a cottage, on Cairn’s Point. Once a fashionable oceanfront resort for the wealthy merchants and older families of the seaport town, the neighborhood was largely deserted by now, and even rather desolate. But the streetcar connected the suburb with the downtown area, and it was not difficult to find my way.
My potential employer was an unusual figure of a man in his late sixties, I assumed. Inclined to corpulence, he affected a severe clerical suit of drab black, and even a clerical collar. I soon discovered that he was, or had been (I never quite learned which), a preacher in one of the more obscure of the Pentecostal sects—a missionary, in fact, who had spent many years in India and parts of Burma and Tibet. Portions of his face and hands were curiously swathed in surgical bandages, and he informed me at our first meeting that he suffered from a skin condition similar to scrofula or eczema, for which a local physician was treating him. It was this disability that necessitated the hiring of someone to handle the paperwork, for I gathered that it was his hands which were most seriously affected by the disease.
“Blaine, Blaine,” he murmured, with a slight, thoughtful frown. “I wonder if you are by any chance a relative of Dr. H. Stephenson Blaine of the Sanbourne Institute for Pacific Antiquities, in Santiago, California?"
"I have that honor." I acknowledged, "for he is my uncle."
"Excellent, excellent!" Dr. Harker made reply, in that oddly hushed, almost whispering voice of his, which made me wonder, a bit squeamishly, if his peculiar affliction had not somehow affected his vocal cords as well as his face and hands. "I have read a monograph or two of his. A scholar of some reputation. I believe."
Our conversation soon terminated. Dr. Harker seemed to be satisfied with my credentials and I was, as I have already stated, happy with the terms of his employment. I was to begin my work the following Monday. We parted and I returned to my small flat on Parker Street in a mood of considerable elation.
Over the following weekend, it occurred to me that perhaps it would be wise to look up my employer in the various reference works available in the library at Miskatonic, which I did. He had been a graduate of the Byram Theological Seminary in Kingsport, had traveled and lectured widely, and, as I have already remarked, had spent many years as a missionary in the East. An amateur anthropologist of some note, he had published a number of papers on certain aspects of Asian archaeology and upon certain of the cults of the Far East, which interested me greatly, as my own interests, of course, lay much in that area of study.
Apparently an explorer of some repute, he had penetrated into portions of inner Asia seen by few white men, and had been one of the first to explore the ruined stone city of Alaozar in the Sung region of Burma. He had also traveled extensively, it would seem, in the more northerly parts of Tibet.
All of these things made me certain that we should enjoy a mutually profitable and interesting relationship.
Why, then, did I feel an uneasy qualm that warned me to shun this unusual personage?
A qualm almost to be named as ... fear?
MY tasks were simple enough, and did nor require extensive labor.
Until his progressive disability had robbed my employer of the fullest use of his hands, he had been compiling notes toward a scholarly work of great length and complexity. It became my primary duty to organize these items of information into some sort of order, to take down by dictation further data as he gave it in his soft, weak voice, and also to journey to the library of Miskatonic University and the Kester Library in nearby Salem for further research.
Many of the books I delved into for this purpose were tomes I had already consulted in the course of preparing my own thesis. I refer to certain volumes such as the Unaussprechlichen Kulten by the German occultist von Junzt, the Comte d'Erlette’s Cultes des Goules, von Heller’s Black Cults, the original German text of the Unter-Zee Kulten, and the heavily expurgated treatise, Le Culte des Morts. I had also to look into the abhorrent pages of the old of Alhazred for certain references to a singular corpse-eating cult in a place called Leng.
This particular volume is as notorious as it is rare, and its rarity is nigh fabulous. Generally kept under lock and key, my connections among the faculty of the university gave me free access to the damnable volume, although some of the ravings I glimpsed within its thickly written pages were to haunt my dreams thereafter.
In general, my employer was seeking references to a cult or tribe called the “Tcho-Tcho people”, rumored to linger on in certain of the more inaccessible parts of jungled Burma and in Leng—wherever Leng was supposed to be, for I could not find it in any atlas. They were believed to worship gods or devils with names like ”Zhar” and “Lloigor", but so little about them was known for certain that many authorities seemed to consider them to be merely legendary.
I was also to search for any and every reference to Leng itself; to a certain Tcho-Tcho lama who veiled his visage behind a mask of yellow silk and dwelt in a "prehistoric" stone monastery; to Inquanok, which seemed to be both a people and a place, the place being adjacent to the plateau of Leng; and to certain sea divinities or maritime demons with uncouth, unpronounceable names like “Cthulhu”, “Idh-yaa”, “Zoth-Ommog”, “Yeb”, "Ghatanothoa", "Ubb, Father of Worms", “Ythogtha”, and so on.
None of this research was particularly demanding of my time, but it was oddly disturbing. This was not only because my own researches had led me to many of these same sources, but because of certain events in the recent past which were still whispered of by the townspeople, but which had been hurriedly hushed up in the newspapers—the effect being that no one quite knew whether they were wild fables or contained a germ of horrible truth.
What really happened in the old Tuttle house on Aylesbury Road near the Innsmouth Turnpike, and why was the account published in the local papers so oddly cursory? For what reason did federal agents dynamite and burn several blocks of decaying waterfront tenements in nearby Innsmouth back in the winter of 1927-1928, and why did a U.S. naval submarine discharge torpedoes into the underwater chasm off Devil's Reef? And what really happened to poor Bryant Hoskins in that cabin in the woods to the north of Arkham, that led to his death as a raving madman in the County Sanitarium in March 1929?
Nobody really knew; or, if they knew, they didn't speak of it.
And why was Enos Harker so interested in this obscure, damnably ancient mythology?
SOME of the information I extracted from the old, crumbling books excited my employer to a pitch of feverish intensity. For example, I returned from one such trip to the library at Miskatonic with two quotations which seemed to me to be little more than innocuous, but which kept him up all night, pawing through his sheaves of notations with those bandaged hands of his, muttering under his breath, the visible portions of his features flushed with unhealthy and febrile exultation. For the sake of me, I could not guess why!
The first passage from the Necronomicon read thusly:
It was from fabled Sarkomand the Tcho-Tcho people first came into the Waking World, that time-forgotten city whose ruins bleached for a million years before the first true human saw the light of day; and its twin titan lions guard eternally the steps that lead from the Dreamland into the Great Abyss, whereover Nodens reigns as Lord, and the Night Gaunts that serve Him, under dread Yegg-ha, their master.