The second was a fragmentary ritual, apparently quoted from another source, which went thusly:
Aye, was it not written of old in R'lyeh that the Deep Ones await their followers, and we must not fail to be present at the Great Awakening? It is written that all shall arise and join with them, we who carry the Emblem and those who have merely looked upon it. From the ends of the earth cometh the Summons and the Call, and we dare nor delay. For in watery R'lyeh Great Cthulhu is stirring. Shub-Niggurath! Yog-Sothoth! Iä! The Goat with a Thousand Young! Are we nor all Her children?
When I delivered these notes to Enos Harker he virtually snatched them from my hand, holding the pages close to his face (for his eyesight had recently grown weakened, perhaps due to the progressive degeneration caused by his disease) and scanned them with fierce intensity.
"Of course!" he mumbled in that weak voice of his. "From Sarkomand they came ... all the way to the Sung plateau, to build their ghastly scone city in the jungles! I should have guessed it from—" but here his voice broke off and he glared at me with wary suspicion, almost as if he thought me spying upon some private thing. Then he went into the screened front room, which faced the beach, to scan the notes in private.
When I retired, a little past midnight, his light was still burning.
IT had by now become quite obvious to me that my employer’s health was failing very rapidly, although I still did not understand the nature of his complaint. I knew that a local physician, a Dr. Sprague, had been treating his scrofula—or whatever it was—with zinc ointment and with a substance called cortisone, then generally unavailable, as it was still in the experimental stage of being tested and had not yet been released to the general market.
None of the medications seemed to halt the spread of the skin condition. In addition, his features became bloated and puffy, and his person, which had been normally corpulent when I had first begun working with him, soon became grossly obese, he had difficulty in walking at times, and gradually the white bandages spread over his swollen, pasty visage until he was virtually masked with bandages, like an Egyptian mummy. There was also a peculiar smell about him that was singularly repulsive ... a nauseating stench, as of sea-water gone foul and rancid, or like the bloated, rotting corpse of some marine creature exposed to the harsh air and the cruel sun.
But perhaps I exaggerate. The cottage stood so close to the empty, deserted beach that the salt wind penetrated every part of it, and the reek of the stagnant seawater in the tidal pools and among the gaunt rocks filled my nostrils night and day.
Harker became increasingly dependent upon me for many of the small necessities of everyday life. It was no trouble for me to ride my bicycle into the edge of town and buy groceries, nor to wash the dishes and remove the garbage and handle his bills as already I was handling his correspondence.
This correspondence ranged all over the world, for Enos Harker was continually in touch with certain scholars in places like France, Peru, India, and even China, who had made a special study of the weird old mythology that had become his life's work. This mythology, by the way, had as its Central belief the notion that the earth had been visited by strange and demonic intelligences from other worlds and galaxies, and even from beyond the universe itself, from the very remotest of ages, long before the evolution of humankind. Not being made of matter as we know it, these "Ancient Ones" or "Old Ones", as they were known, were deathless and unaging.
Aeons before man, they were pursued to this part of space and time by their former masters, a race known only as the "Elder Gods." A titanic conflict ensued, and at its terminus, the Elder Gods were victorious over the rebels who had been their former servants. Unable co destroy the Old Ones, they imprisoned them with powerful spells—and, in particular, with a potent talisman called the "Elder Sign"—and in their charmed imprisonment they, presumably rage and roar to this latter day, for all the world like Fenris the wolf and the Midgard serpent in the Norse legends.
They are served, even in their imprisonment, however, by their minions or subject races, few of which are to be considered even remotely human. The devils which mostly concerned Enos Harker were the sea entities, Cthulhu and Ythogtha and the rest; their minions are called the Deep Ones and the ancient books of this system of superstition describe them shudderingly as huge and bloated things, half frog-like, half fish-like, partly squamous and partly rugose, with ghastly protuberant eyes, and gills.
The Tcho-Tcho people, also among his prime interests, are followers of another group of divinities, not sea elementals at all. They are associated with the "shunned and evil" plateau of Leng, which some texts discuss as though located in "the black heart of Secret Asia", and elsewhere mentioned as near the South Pole. This doubtless makes as little sense to the reader of this statement as it did to me at the time.
But there was an uncanny coherence to all of this. On the surface it seemed a mad, chaotic jumble of nightmarish legend, but underneath it all was a basis of something sinister, age-old and time-forgot but hideously suggestive.
For who would expect myths centuries, even millennia, old to concern themselves with intelligent creatures from other planers, distant stars, remote galaxies, or weird dimensions beyond the three we know?
MOST of the correspondence concerned a particularly rare book called the R'lyeh Text, for which my employer was searching with a furious need that went far beyond mere scholarly or scientific curiosity, and approached the proportions of a fixation.
Copies of this curious old book, while rare, were not unknown; indeed, several redactions (for the book had never been printed and existed only in manuscript copies, furtively circulated between the members of obscure cults) were to be found right on the closed shelves of the library at Miskatonic. The problem was that, while the R'lyeh Text was written in the letters of the common alphabet, the language itself was no longer known or understood. It apparently consisted of rituals or invocations to the devilgods of this mythology, which were read or chanted aloud by their worshipers; hence they needed only to be able to pronounce the uncouth verses, but did not really need to understand what they meant.
Few scholars, if any, could read the “R’lyehian” language, and it was for one of those that Enos Harker was so desperately searching ....
I have previously alluded to the strange mystery surrounding the death of Bryant Hoskins, who died in a madhouse in 1929. While the case attracted considerable attention in the public press, the authorities seemed to have hushed the whole affair up, but it had taken place so very recently, that there were still people about who possessed information concerning what had really happened in that secluded cabin in the woods to the north of Arkham.
By purest chance, one day about six months after I began my employment as the secretary of Enos Harker, a clue to the mystery came to light. A muckraking journalist on one of the less reputable Boston papers began digging into the case and turned up a sensational story which most people, I suspect, dismissed out of hand as wild speculation.
One item of information emerged from the newspaper story which sent my employer into a frenzy of excitement. Young Hoskins had been employed at Miskatonic in the capacity of private secretary to the director of the library, Dr. Cyrus Llanfer. In July of 1928, the library had received, as part of the Tuttle bequest, not only a priceless copy of the R'lyeh Text, but a document in what was believed to be Amos Tuttle’s own hand called the R'lyehian Key. The very existence of the Key went unnoticed for some time, until Bryant Hoskins chanced upon it by accident. It had been bound at the end of another manuscript volume, something called the Celaeno Fragments.