 This is LibriVox Recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Matt Bonhoff. Herbert West, Reanimator, by HP Lovecraft. Part B. Part 4. The Scream of the Dead. The scream of a dead man gave to me that acute and added horror of Dr. Herbert West, which harassed the later years of our companionship. It is natural that such a thing as a dead man's scream should give horror, for it is obviously not a pleasing or ordinary occurrence, but I was used to similar experiences, hence suffered on this occasion only because of a particular circumstance. And, as I have implied, it was not of the dead man himself that I became afraid. Herbert West, whose associate and assistant I was, possessed scientific interests far beyond the usual routine of a village physician. That was why, when establishing his practice in Bolton, he had chosen an isolated house near the Potters Field. Briefly and brutally stated, West's sole absorbing interest was a secret study of the phenomena of life and its cessation, leading toward the reanimation of the dead through injections of an exciting solution. For this ghastly experimenting, it was necessary to have a constant supply of very fresh human bodies. Very fresh, because the least decay hopelessly damaged the brain structure, and human, because we found that the solution had to be compounded differently for different types of organisms. Scores of rabbits and guinea pigs had been killed and treated, but their trail was a blind one. West had never fully succeeded, because he had never been able to secure a corpse sufficiently fresh. What he wanted were bodies from which vitality had only just departed, bodies with every cell intact and capable of receiving again the impulse toward the motive of motion called life. There was hope that this second and artificial life might be made perpetual by repetitions of the injection, but we had learned that an ordinary natural life would not respond to the action. To establish the artificial motion, natural life must be extinct. The specimens must be very fresh, but genuinely dead. The awesome quest had begun when West and I were students at the Miskatonic University Medical School in Arkham, vividly conscious for the first time of the thoroughly mechanical nature of life. That was seven years before, but West looked scarcely a day older now. He was small, blond, clean-shaven, soft-voiced, and spectacled, with only an occasional flash of a cold blue eye to tell of the hardening and growing fanaticism of his character under the pressure of his terrible investigations. Our experiences had often been hideous in the extreme, the results of defective reanimation when lumps of graveyard clay had been galvanized into morbid unnatural and brainless motion by various modifications of the vital solution. One thing had uttered a nerve-shattering scream, another had risen violently, beaten us both to unconsciousness and run amok in a shocking way before it could be placed behind asylum bars, still another, a loathsome African monstrosity, had clawed out of its shallow grave and done a deed. West had had to shoot that object. We could not get bodies fresh enough to show any trace of reason when reanimated, so had Perforce created nameless horrors. It was disturbing to think that one, perhaps two of our monsters, still lived. That thought haunted us shadowingly, till finally West disappeared under frightful circumstances, but at the time of the scream in the cellar laboratory of the isolated Bolton College, our fears were subordinate to our anxiety for extremely fresh specimens. West was more avid than I, so that it almost seemed to me that he looked half covetously at any very healthy living physique. It was in July 1910 that the bad luck regarding specimens began to turn. I had been on a long visit to my parents in Illinois, and upon my return found West in a state of singular elation. He had, he told me excitedly, in all likelihood solved the problem of freshness, through an approach from an entirely new angle, that of artificial preservation. I had known that he was working on a new and highly unusual embalming compound, and was not surprised that it had turned out well. But until he explained the details, I was rather puzzled as to how such a compound would help in our work, since the objectionable staleness of the specimens was largely due to delay occurring before we secured them. This, I now saw, West had clearly recognized, creating his embalming compound for future rather than immediate use, and trusting DeFate to supply again some very recent and unburied corpse, as it had years before when we obtained the Negro killed in the Bolton Prize fight. At last, DeFate had been kind, so that on this occasion there lay in the secret cellar laboratory a corpse whose delay could not by any possibility have begun. What would happen on reanimation, and whether we could help for a revival of mind and reason West did not venture to predict? The experiment would be a landmark in our studies, and he had saved the new body for my return, so that both might share in the spectacle in a customed fashion. West told me how he had obtained the specimen. It had been a vigorous man, a well-dressed stranger, just off the train on his way to transact some business with the Bolton-worsted mills. The walk through the town had been long, and by the time the stranger paused at our cottage to ask the way to the factories, his heart had become greatly overtaxed. He had refused a stimulant, and had suddenly dropped dead only a moment later. The body, as might be expected, seemed to West a heaven-sent gift. In his brief conversation the stranger had made it clear that he was unknown in Bolton, and a search of his pockets subsequently revealed him to be one Robert Levitt of St. Louis, apparently without a family to make instant inquiries about his disappearance. If this man could not be restored to life, no one would know of our experiment. We buried our materials in a dense strip of woods between the house and the potter's field. If, on the other hand, he could be restored, our fame would be brilliantly and perpetually established, so without delay West had injected into the body's wrist the compound which would hold it fresh for until after my arrival. The matter of the presumably weak heart, which, to my mind, imperiled the success of our experiment, did not appear to trouble West extensively. He hoped at least to obtain what he had never obtained before, a rekindled spark of reason, and perhaps a normal living creature. So on the night of July 18, 1910, Herbert West and I stood in the cellar laboratory, and gazed at a white, silent figure beneath the dazzling arc light. The embalming compound had worked uncannily well, for as I stared fascinatedly at the sturdy frame, which had laid in two weeks without stiffening, I was moved to seek West's assurance that the thing was really dead. This assurance he gave readily enough, reminding me that the reanimating solution was never used without careful tests as to life, since it could have no effect if any of the original vitality were present. As West proceeded to take preliminary steps, I was impressed by the vast intricacy of the new experiment, an intricacy so vast that he could trust no hand less delicate than his own. Forbidding me to touch the body, he first injected a drug in the wrist just beside the place his needle had punctured when injecting the embalming compound. This, he said, was to neutralize the compound and release the system to a normal relaxation, so that the reanimating solution might freely work when injected. Slightly later, when a change in a gentle tremor seemed to affect the dead limbs, West stuffed a pillow-like object violently over the twitching face, not withdrawing it until the corpse appeared quiet and ready for our attempt at reanimation. The pale enthusiast now applied some last pre-functory tests for absolute lifelessness, withdrew satisfied and finally injected into the left arm an accurately measured amount of the vital elixir prepared during the afternoon with a greater care than we had used since college days when our feats were new and groping. I cannot express the wild, breathless suspense with which we waited for results on this first really fresh specimen, the first we could reasonably expect to open its lips in rational speech, perhaps to tell of what it had seen beyond the unfathomable abyss. West was a materialist, believing in no soul and attributing all the working of consciousness to bodily phenomena. Consequently, he looked for no revelation of hideous secrets from the gulfs and caverns beyond death's barrier. I did not wholly disagree with him, theoretically, yet held vague instinctive remnants of the primitive faith of my forefathers, so that I could not help eyeing the corpse with a certain amount of awe and terrible expectation. Besides, I could not extract from my memory that hideous inhuman shriek we heard on the night we tried our first experiment in the deserted farmhouse at Arkham. Very little time had elapsed before I saw the attempt was not to be a total failure. A touch of color came to cheeks hitherto chalk-white and spread out under the curiously ample stubble of sandy beard. West, who had his hand on the pulse of the left wrist, suddenly nodded significantly and almost simultaneously a mist appeared on the mirror inclined above the body's mouth. There followed a few spasmodic muscular motions and then an audible breathing and visible motion of the chest. I looked at the closed eyelids and thought I'd detected a quivering. Then the lids opened, showing eyes which were gray, calm and alive, but still unintelligent and not even curious. In a moment of fantastic whim, I whispered questions to the reddening ears, questions of other worlds, of which the memory might still be present. Subsequent hair drove them from my mind, but I think the last one, which I repeated, was, where have you been? I do not yet know whether I was answered or not, for no sound came from the well-shaped mouth, but I do know that at that moment I firmly thought the thin lips moved silently, forming syllables which I would have vocalized as only now if that phrase had possessed any sense or relevancy. At that moment, as I say, I was elated with the conviction that the one great goal had been attained, and that for the first time a reanimated corpse had uttered distinct words impelled by actual reason. In the next moment there was no doubt about the triumph, no doubt that the solution had truly accomplished, at least temporarily, its full mission of restoring rational and articulate life to the dead. But in that triumph there came to me the greatest of all horrors, not horror of the thing that spoke, but of the deed that I had witnessed, and of the man with whom my professional fortunes were joined. For that very fresh body, at last writhing into full and terrifying consciousness, with eyes dilated at the memory of its last scene on earth, threw out its frantic hands in a life-and-death struggle with the air, and suddenly collapsing into a second and final dissolution, from which there could be no return, screamed out the cry that will ring eternally in my aching brain. Help! Keep off, you cursed little toe-head fiend! Keep that damned needle away from me! Many men have related hideous things, not mentioned in print, which happened on the battlefields of the Great War. Some of these things have made me faint. Others have convulsed me with devastating nausea, while still others have made me tremble and look behind me in the dark. Yet, despite the worst of them, I believe that I can myself relate the most hideous thing of all, the shocking, the unnatural, the unbelievable horror from the shadows. In 1915 I was a physician with the rank of first lieutenant in a Canadian regiment in Flanders, one of many Americans to proceed the government itself into the gigantic struggle. I had not entered the army of my own initiative, but rather as a natural result of the enlistment of the man whose indispensable assistant I was, the celebrated Boston surgical specialist Dr. Herbert West. Dr. West had been avid for a chance to serve as a surgeon in a great war, and when the chance had come, he carried me with him almost against my will. There were reasons why I could have been glad to let the war separate us, reasons why I found the practice of medicine and the companionship of West more and more irritating. But when he had gone to Ottawa and through a colleague's influence secured a medical commission as major, I could not resist the imperious persuasion of one determined that I should accompany him in my usual capacity. When I say that Dr. West was avid to serve in battle, I do not mean to imply that he was either naturally war-like or anxious for the safety of civilization. Always an ice-cold intellectual machine, slight, blonde, blue-eyed and spectacled, I think he secretly sneered at my occasional martial enthousiasms and censures of supine neutrality. There was, however, something he wanted in embattled Flanders, and in order to secure it, had had to assume a military exterior. What he wanted was not a thing which many persons want, but something connected with the peculiar branch of medical science which he had chosen quite clandestinely to follow, and in which he had achieved amazing and occasionally hideous results. It was, in fact, nothing more or less than an abundant supply of freshly killed men in every stage of dismemberment. Herbert West needed fresh bodies because his life work was the reanimation of the dead. This work was not known to the fashionable clientele who had so swiftly built up his fame after his arrival in Boston, but was only too well known to me, who had been his closest friend and sole assistant since the old days at Miskatonic University Medical School at Arkham. It was in those college days that he had begun his terrible experiments, first on small animals, and then on human bodies shockingly obtained. There was a solution which he injected into the veins of dead things, and if they were fresh enough, they responded in strange ways. He had had much trouble in discovering the proper formula. For each type of organism was found to need a stimulus, especially adapted to it. Terror stocked him when he reflected on his partial failures, nameless things resulting from imperfect solutions or from bodies insufficiently fresh. A certain number of these failures had remained alive. One was at an asylum, while others had vanished. And as he thought of conceivable, yet virtually impossible eventualities, he often shivered beneath his usual stolidity. West had soon learned that absolute freshness was the prime requisite for useful specimens, and had accordingly resorted to frightful and unnatural expedience in body snatching. In college, and during our early practice together in the factory town of Bolton, my attitude toward him had been largely one of fascinated admiration. But as his boldness and methods grew, I began to develop a gnawing fear. I did not like the way he looked at healthy living bodies. And then, there came a nightmarish session in the cellar laboratory, when I learned that a certain specimen had been a living body when he secured it. That was the first time he had ever been able to revive the quality of rational thought in a corpse, and his success, obtained at such a loathsome cost, had completely hardened him. Of his methods in the intervening five years I dare not speak, I was held to him by sheer force of fear and witnessed sights that no human tongue could repeat. Gradually I came to find Herbert West himself more horrible than anything he did. That was when it dawned on me that his once normal scientific zeal for prolonged life had subtly degenerated into a mere morbid and ghoulish curiosity and secret sense of charnel picturesqueness. His interest became a hellish and perverse addiction to the repellently and fiendishly abnormal. He gloated calmly over artificial monstrosities, which would make most healthy men drop dead from fright and disgust. He became, behind his pallid intellectuality, a fastidious baudelaire of physical experiment, a languid elegabulous of the tombs. Dangers he met unflinchingly, crimes he committed unmoved, I think the climax came when he had proved his point that rational life can be restored, and had sought new worlds to conquer by experimenting on the reanimation of detached parts of bodies. He had wild and original ideas on the independent vital properties of organic cells and nerve tissue separated from the natural physiological systems and achieved some hideous preliminary results in the form of never dying artificially nourished tissue obtained from the nearly hatched eggs of an indescribable tropical reptile. Two biological points he was exceedingly anxious to settle. First, whether any amount of consciousness and rational action be possible without the brain, proceeding from the spinal cord and various nerve centers. And second, whether any kind of ethereal, intangible relation distinct from the material cells may exist to link the surgically separated parts of what had previously been a single living organism. All this research work required a prodigious supply of freshly slaughtered human flesh, and that was why Herbert West had entered the Great War. The fantasmal, unmentionable thing occurred one midnight, late in March 1915, in a field hospital behind the lines of St. Aloy. I wonder even now if it could have been other than a demonic dream of delirium. West had a private laboratory in an east room of the barn-like temporary edifice assigned him on his plea that he was devising new and radical methods for the treatment of hitherto hopeless cases of maiming. There, he worked like a butcher in the midst of his gory wares. I could never get used to the levity with which he handled and classified certain things. At times, he actually did perform marvels of surgery for the soldiers, but his chief delights were of a less public and philanthropic kind, requiring many explanations of sounds which seemed peculiar even amidst that babble of the damned. Among these sounds were frequent revolver shots, surely not uncommon on a battlefield, but distinctly uncommon in a hospital. Dr. West's reanimated specimens were not meant for long existence or a large audience. Besides human tissue, West employed much of the reptile embryo tissue, which he had cultivated in such singular results. It was better than human material for maintaining life in organ-less fragments, and that was now my friend's chief activity. In a dark corner of the laboratory, over a queer incubating burner, he kept a large covered vat full of this reptilian cell matter which multiplied and grew puffily and hideously. On the night of which I speak, we had a splendid new specimen, a man at once physically powerful and of such high mentality that a sensitive nervous system was assured. It was rather ironic, for he was the officer who had helped West to his commission, and who is now to have been our associate. Moreover, he had in the past secretly studied the theory of reanimation to some extent under West. Major Sir Eric Moorland Clapham Lee, DSO, was the greatest surgeon in our division, and had been hastily assigned to the St. Heloise sector when news of the heavy fighting reached headquarters. He had come in an airplane piloted by the intrepid Lieutenant Ronald Hill, only to be shot down when directly over his destination. The fall had been spectacular and awful. Hill was unrecognizable afterwards, but the wreck yielded up the great surgeon in a nearly decapitated but otherwise intact condition. West had greedily seized the lifeless thing which had once been his friend and fellow scholar, and I shuddered when he finished severing the head, placed it in his hellish vat of pulpy reptile tissue to preserve it for future experiments, and proceeded to treat the decapitated body on the operating table. He injected new blood, joined certain veins, arteries, and nerves at the headless neck, and closed the ghastly aperture, within graft skin from an unidentified specimen which had borne an officer's uniform. I knew what he wanted, to see if this highly organized body could exhibit without its head any of the signs of mental life which had distinguished Sir Eric Moreland, Clapham Lee. Once a student of reanimation, this silent trunk was now gruesomely called upon to exemplify it. I can still see Herbert West under the sinister electric light as he injected his reanimating solution into the arm of the headless body, the scene I cannot describe. I would faint if I tried it. For there is a madness in a room full of classified, charnal things, with blood and lesser human debris almost ankle deep on the slimy floor, and with hithious reptilian abnormalities sprouting, bubbling, and baking over a winking bluish-green specter of dim flame in a far corner of black shadows. The specimen, as West repeatedly observed, had a splendid nervous system, much was expected of it, and as a few twitching motions began to appear I could see the feverish interest on West's face. He was ready, I think, to see proof of his increasingly strong opinion that consciousness, reason, and personality can exist independently of the brain. That man has no central, connective spirit, but is merely a machine of nervous matter, each section more or less complete in itself. In one triumphant demonstration, West was about to relegate the mystery of life to the category of myth. The body now twitched more vigorously, and beneath our avid eyes commenced to heave in a frightful way. The arms stirred disquietingly, the legs drew up, and various muscles contracted in a repulsive kind of ribing. Then the headless thing threw its arms out in a gesture which was unmistakably one of desperation. An intelligent desperation, apparently sufficient to prove every theory of Herbert West, certainly the nerves were calling the man's last act in life, the struggle to get free of the falling airplane. What followed, I shall never positively know, it may have been wholly a hallucination from the shock caused at that instant by the sudden and complete destruction of the building in a cataclysm of German shellfire. Who can gain say it, since West and I were the only proved survivors. West liked to think that before his recent disappearance, but there were times when he could not, for it was queer that we both had the same hallucination. The hideous occurrence itself was very simple, notable only for what it implied. The body on the table had risen with a blind and terrible groping, and we had heard a sound. I should not call that sound a voice, for it was too awful, and yet its timbre was not the most awful thing about it. Neither was its message, it had merely screamed, Jump Ronald, for God's sake, jump! The awful thing was its source, for it had come from the large covered vat in that ghoulish corner of crawling black shadows. Part 6 The Two Mollegians When Dr. Herbert West disappeared a year ago, the Boston police questioned me closely. They suspected that I was holding something back, and perhaps suspected graver things. But I could not tell them the truth, because they would not have believed it. They knew indeed that West had been connected with activities beyond the credence of ordinary men, for his hideous experiments in the reanimation of dead bodies had long been too extensive to admit a perfect secrecy. But the final, soul-shattering catastrophe held elements of demonic fantasy, which make even me doubt the reality of what I saw. I was West's closest friend, and only confidential assistant. We had met years before in medical school, and from the first I had shared his terrible researches. He had slowly tried to perfect a solution which, injected into the veins of the newly deceased, would restore life, a labor demanding an abundance of fresh corpses, and therefore involving the most unnatural actions. Still more shocking were the products of some of his experiments, grisly masses of flesh that had been dead, but that West waked to a blind, brainless, nauseous animation. These were the usual results, for in order to reawaken the mind, it was necessary to have specimens so absolutely fresh that no decay could possibly affect the delicate brain cells. This need for very fresh corpses had been West's moral undoing. They were hard to get, and one awful day he had secured a specimen while it was still alive and vigorous. A struggle, a needle, and a powerful alkaloid had transformed it into a very fresh corpse. And the experiment had succeeded for a brief and memorable moment, but West had emerged, with a soul callous and seared, a hardened eye which sometimes glanced with a kind of hideous and calculating appraisal at men of a specially sensitive brain and especially vigorous physique. Toward the last, I became acutely afraid of West, for he began to look at me that way. People did not seem to notice his glances, but they noticed my fear, and after his disappearance, used that as a basis for some absurd suspicions. West, in reality, was more afraid than I, for his abominable pursuits entailed life of furtiveness and dread of every shadow. Partially it was the police he feared, but sometimes his nervousness was deeper and more nebulous, touching on certain indescribable things into which he had injected a morbid life, and from which he had not seen that life depart. He usually finished his experiments with a revolver, but a few times he had not been quick enough, there was that first specimen on whose rifled grave marks of clawing were later seen. There was also that Arkham Professor's body, which had done cannibal things before it had been captured and thrust unidentified into a madhouse cell at Sefton, where it beat the walls for sixteen years. Most of the other possibly surviving results were things less easy to speak of. For in later years, West's scientific zeal had degenerated into an unhealthy and fantastic mania. He had spent his chief skill in vitalizing not entire human bodies, but isolated parts of bodies, where parts joined to organic matter other than human. It had become fiendishly disgusting by the time he disappeared. Many of the experiments could not even be hinted at in print. The Great War, through which both of us served as surgeons, had intensified this side of West. In saying that West's fear of his specimens was nebulous, I have in mind particularly its complex nature. Part of it came merely from knowing of the existence of such nameless monsters. While another part rose from apprehension of the bodily harm they might under certain circumstances do him, their disappearance added horror to the situation. Of them all, West knew the whereabouts of only one, the pitiful asylum thing. Then, there was a more subtle fear, a very fantastic sensation resulting from a curious experiment in the Canadian Army in 1915. West, in the midst of a severe battle, had reanimated Major Sir Eric Moreland, Clapham Lee, DSO, a fellow physician, who knew about his experiments and could have duplicated them. The head had been removed, so that the possibilities of quasi-intelligent life in the trunk might be investigated. Just as the building was wiped out by a German shell, there had been a success. The trunk had moved intelligently and, unbelievable to relate, we were both signally sure that articulate sounds had come from the detached head as it lay in a shadowy corner of the laboratory. The shell had been merciful in a way, but West could never feel as certain as he wished that we, too, were the only survivors. He used to make shuddering conjectures about the possible actions of a headless physician with the power of reanimating the dead. West's last quarters were in a venerable house of much elegance overlooking one of the oldest burying grounds in Boston. He had chosen the place for purely symbolic and fantastical aesthetic reasons, since most of the internments were of the colonial period and therefore of little use to a scientist seeking very fresh bodies. The laboratory was in a sub-seller secretly constructed by imported workmen and containing a huge incinerator for the quiet and complete disposal of such bodies or fragments and synthetic mockeries of bodies. As might remain from the morbid experiments and unhallowed amusements of the owner. During the excavation of this cellar, the workmen had struck some exceedingly ancient masonry, undoubtedly connected with the old burying ground, yet far too deep to correspond with any known sepulcher therein. After a number of calculations, West decided that it represented some secret chamber beneath the tomb of the avarils, where the last internment had been made in 1768. I was with him when he studied the nitrous dripping walls laid bare by the spades and mattocks of the men and was prepared for the gruesome thrill which would attend the uncovering of century grave secrets. But for the first time, West's new timidity conquered his natural curiosity and he betrayed his degenerating fiber by ordering the masonry left intact and plastered over. Thus, it remained until the final hellish night, part of the walls of the secret laboratory. I speak of West's decadence, but must add that it was a purely mental and intangible thing. Outwardly, he was the same to the last, calm, cold, slight yellow-haired with spectacled blue eyes and a general aspect of youth which years and fears seemed never to change. He seemed calm even when he thought of that clawed grave and looked over his shoulder even when he thought of the carnivorous thing that gnawed and pawed at sefton bars. The end of Herbert West began one evening in our joint study when he was dividing his curious glance between the newspaper and me. A strange headline item had struck at him from the crumpled page and a nameless titan claw had seemed to reach down through sixteen years. Something fearsome and incredible had happened at sefton asylum fifty miles away stunning the neighborhood and baffling the police. In the small hours of the morning, a body of silent men had entered the grounds and their leader had aroused the attendance. He was a menacing, military figure who talked without moving his lips and whose voice seemed almost ventriloqually connected with an immense black case he carried. The expressionless face was handsome to the point of radiant beauty and had shocked the superintendent when the whole light fell on it. For it was a wax face with eyes painted glass. Some nameless accident had befallen this man. A larger man guided his steps. A repellent hulk whose bluish face seemed half eaten away by some unknown malady. The speaker had asked for the custody of the cannibal monster committed from Arkham sixteen years before and upon being refused gave a signal which precipitated a shocking riot. The fiends had beaten, trampled and bitten every attendant who did not flee killing four and finally succeeding in the liberation of the monster. Those victims who could recall the event without hysteria swore that the creatures had acted less like men than like unthinkable automata guided by the waxed faced leader. By the time help could be summoned, every trace of the men and their mad charge had vanished. From the hour of reading this item until midnight, west sat almost paralyzed. At midnight the doorbell rang startling him fearfully. All the servants were asleep in the attic so I answered the bell. As I have told the police, there was no wagon in the street but only a group of strange looking figures burying a large square box which they deposited in the hallway after one of them had grunted in a highly unnatural voice, express prepaid. They filed out of the house with a jerky tread and as I watched them go I had an odd idea that they were turning toward the ancient cemetery on which the back of the house abutted. When I slammed the door after them, west came downstairs and looked at the box. It was about two feet square and bore west's correct name and present address. It also bore the inscription from Eric Moorland, Clapham Lee, St. Aloy, Flanders. Six years before, in Flanders, a shelled hospital had fallen upon the headless reanimated trunk of Dr. Clapham Lee and upon the detached head which, perhaps, had uttered articulate sounds. West was not even excited now, his condition was more ghastly. Quickly he said, it's the finish, but let's incinerate this. We carried the thing down to the laboratory listening. I do not remember many particulars, you can imagine my state of mind, but it is a vicious lie to say that it was Herbert West's body which I put into the incinerator. We both inserted the whole unopened wooden box, closed the door and started the electricity, nor did any sound come from the box after all. It was West who first noticed the falling plaster on that part of the wall where the ancient tomb masonry had been covered up. I was going to run but he stopped me. Then I saw a small black aperture, felt a ghoulish wind device and smelled the carnal bowels of a putrescent earth. There was no sound, but just then the electric lights went out and I saw outlined against some phosphorescence of the netherworld a horde of silent toiling things which only an insanity or worse could create. Their outlines were human, semi-human, fractionally human and not human at all. The horde was grotesquely heterogeneous. They were removing the stones quietly, one by one from the centuried wall and then as the breach became large enough they came out into the laboratory single file led by a talking thing with a beautiful head made of wax. A sort of mad-eyed monstrosity behind the leader seized on Herbert West, West did not resist or utter a sound. Then they all sprang at him and tore him to pieces before my eyes bearing the fragments away into that subterranean vault of fabulous abominations. West's head was carried off by the wax-headed leader who wore a Canadian officer's uniform. As it disappeared I saw that the blue eyes behind the spectacles were hideously blazing with their first touch of frantic visible emotion. Servants found me unconscious in the morning. West was gone. The incinerator contained only unidentifiable ashes. Detectives have questioned me, but what can I say? The sefton tragedy they will not connect with West. Not that, nor the men with the box whose existence they deny. I told them of the vault and they pointed to the unbroken plaster wall and laughed. So I told them no more. They imply that I am either a madman or a murderer. Probably I am mad, but I might not be mad if those accursed tomb legions had not been so silent. End of Herbert West Re-Animator Recording by Matt Bonehot This is the LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information on the volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Vera Unreal Memory by H.P. Lovecraft In the valley of Nis, the accursed waning moon shines thinly, tearing apart for its light with feeble horns through the lethal foliage of a great Uber's trade. And within the depths of the valley, where the light reaches not, moon forms not meant to be bell. Rank is a herbage on its slope, where evil vines and creeping ponds crawl amid the stones of ruined palaces, twining tightly about broken columns and strange monoliths, and heaving at marble pavements bladed by forgotten heads. And in trees that grow gigantic encrumbling courtyards, deep little apes while in and out of deep treasure vault, with poisoned serpents and scaly things without a name. Vars are the stones which sleep beneath coverlets of dank moths and mighty were the walls from which they fell. For all time did their builders erect them, and in tools they yet serve nobly, for beneath them the gray tote makes its habitation. At the very bottom of the valley lies a river thumb, whose waters are slimy and filled with wheat. From hidden springs it rises, and to subterranean grottoes it flows, so that the demon of the valley knows not why its waters are red, nor whether they are bound. The genie that haunts the moonbeams spake to the demon of the valley, saying, I am old and forget much. Tell me the deeds and aspect, the name of them who built these things of stone. And the demon replied, I am memory, and am wise in law of the past, but I too am old. These things were like the waters of the river thumb, not to be understood. Their deeds I recall not, for they were but of the moment. Their aspect I recall dimly, and was like to that of the little apes in their trees. The name I recall clearly, fired rhyme with that of the river. These things of yesterday were called man. So the genie flew back to the thin horns moon, and the demon looked intently at a little ape in a tree that grew in a crumbling courtyard. Enough memory. I have examined maps of the city with the greatest care, yet have never again found the Rue d'Orsay. These maps have not been modern maps alone, for I know that names change. I have, on the contrary, delved deeply into all the antiquities of the place, and have personally explored every region of whatever name which could possibly answer to the street I knew as the Rue d'Orsay. But despite all I have done, it remains a humiliating fact that I cannot find the house, the street, or even the locality where during the last months of my impoverished life as a student of metaphysics at the university, I heard the music of Eric Zahn. That my memory is broken, I do not wonder, for my health, physical and mental was gravely disturbed throughout the period of my residence in the Rue d'Orsay, and I recall that I took none of my few acquaintances there. But that I cannot find the place again is both singular and perplexing, for it was within a half hour's walk of the university, forgotten by anyone who had been there. I have never met a person who has seen Rue d'Orsay. The Rue d'Orsay lay across a dark river bordered by precipitous brick-blear windowed warehouses, and spanned by a ponderous bridge of dark stone. It was always shadowy along that river, as if the smoke of neighboring factories shut out the sun perpetually. The river was also odorous with evil stenches which I have never smelled elsewhere, and which may someday help me to find it since I should recognize them at once. Beyond the bridge were narrow cobbled streets with rails, and then came the ascent, at first gradual but incredibly steep as the Rue d'Orsay was reached. I have never seen another street as narrow and steep as the Rue d'Orsay. It was almost a cliff closed to all vehicles, consisting in several places of flights of steps, and ending at the top in a lofty, ivied wall. Its paving was irregular, sometimes stone slabs, sometimes cobblestones, and sometimes bare earth with struggling greenish-gray vegetation. The houses were tall, peaked-roofed, incredibly old, and crazily leaning backward, forward, and sideways. Occasionally an opposite pair, both leaning forward, almost met across the street like an arch, and certainly they kept most of the light from the ground below. There were a few overhead bridges from house to house across the street. They impressed me peculiarly. At first I thought it was because they were all silent and reticent, but later I decided it was because they were all very old. I do not know how I came to live on such a street, but I was not myself when I moved there. I had been living in many poor places, always evicted for want of money, until at last I came upon that tottering house in the Rue d'Orsay kept by the paralytic Brando. It was the third house from the top of the street, and by far the tallest of them all. The only inhabited room there since the house was almost empty. On the night I arrived I heard strange music from the peaked garret overhead, and the next day asked Old Brando about it. He told me it was an old German violin player, a strange dumb man who signed his name as Eric Zahn and who played evenings in a cheap theater orchestra. Adding that Zahn's desire to play in the night after his return from the theater was the reason he had chosen this lofty and isolated garret room in the window was the only point on the street from which one could look over the terminating wall at the declivity and panorama beyond. Thereafter I heard Zahn every night, and although he kept me awake I was haunted by the weirdness of his music. Knowing little of the art myself I was yet certain that none of his harmonies had any relation to music I had heard before and concluded that he was a composer of highly original genius. The longer I listened the more I was fascinated until after a week of playing. One night as he was returning from his work I intercepted Zahn in the hallway and told him that I would like to know him and be with him when he played. He was a small, lean, bent person with shabby clothes, blue eyes, grotesque satir-like face and nearly bald head and at my first words seemed both angered and frightened. My obvious friendliness, however, finally melted him and he grudgingly motioned for me to follow him up the dark, creaking and rickety walls on the west side toward the high wall that formed the upper end of the street. Its size was very great and seemed the greater because of its extraordinary barrenness and neglect. Of furniture there was only a narrow iron bedstead, a dingy wash stand, a small table, a large bookcase, an iron music rack and three old-fashioned chairs. Sheets of music were piled in disorder about the floor. The walls were of bare boards made of dust and cobwebs made the place seem more deserted than inhabited. Evidently, Erick Zahn's world of beauty lay in some far cosmos of the imagination. Motioning me to sit down, the dumb man closed the door, turned the large wooden bolt and lighted a candle to augment the one he had brought with him. He now removed his vial from its moth-eaten covering and taking it seated himself in the least uncomfortable of the chairs. He did not employ the music rack over an hour with strains I had never heard before, strains which must have been of his own devising. To describe their exact nature is impossible for one unversed in music. They were a kind of fugue with recurrent passages of the most captivating quality. But to me were notable for the absence of any of the weird notes I had overheard from my room below on other occasions. Those haunting notes I had remembered and had often hummed as I began my request the wrinkled, satir-like face lost the bored placidity it had possessed during the playing and seemed to show the same curious mixture of anger and fright which I had noticed when first I accosted the old man. For a moment I was inclined to use persuasion regarding rather lightly the whims of senility and even tried to awaken my host's weirder mood by whistling a few of the strains to which I had listened to the night before. His face grew suddenly distorted with an expression wholly beyond analysis and his long, cold, bony right hand reached out to stop my mouth and silence the crude imitation. As he did this he further demonstrated his eccentricity by casting a startled glance toward the lone, curtained window as if fearful of some intruder. A glance doubly absurd since the garret stood high and inaccessible above all the adjacent roofs, this window being the only point the financiers had told me from which one could see over the wall at the summit. The old man's glance brought Blando's remark to my mind and with a certain capriciousness I felt a wish to look out over the wide and dizzying panorama of moonlit roofs and city lights beyond the hilltop which of all the dwellers in the rue d'Orsay only this crabbed musician could see. I moved toward the window and would have drawn aside the nondescript curtains functioning with his head toward the door as he nervously strove to drag me thither with both hands. Now thoroughly disgusted with my host I ordered him to release me and told him I would go at once. His clutch relaxed and as he saw my disgust and offence his own anger seemed to subside. He tightened his relaxing grip but this time in a friendly manner forcing me into a chair. Then with an appearance of fear, Zan said that he was old, lonely and afflicted with strange fears and nervous disorders connected with his music and with other things. He had enjoyed my listening to his music and wished I would come again and not mind his eccentricities but he could not play to another his weird harmonies and could not bear hearing them from another nor could he bear having anything in his room touched by another. So I could not hear him in the night. He would, he wrote, defray the difference in rent. As I sat deciphering the execrable French I felt more lenient toward the old man. He was a victim of physical and nervous suffering as was I and my metaphysical studies had taught me kindness. In the silence there came a slight sound from the window. The shutter must have rattled in the night wind and for the friend. The next day Blendo gave me a more expensive room on the third floor between the apartments of an aged money lender and the room of a respectable upholsterer. There was no one on the fourth floor. It was not long before I found that Zan's eagerness for my company was not as great as it had seemed while he was persuading me to move down from the fifth story. I was liking for him to not grow though the attic room and the weird music seemed to hold an odd fascination for me. I had a curious desire to look out of that window, over the wall and down the unseen slope at the glittering roofs and spires which must lie out spread there. Once I went up to the garret during theatre hours when Zan was away but the door was locked. What I did succeed in doing then I grew bold enough to climb the last creaking staircase to the peaked garret. There in the narrow hall outside the bolted door with the covered keyhole I often heard sounds which filled me with an indefinable dread, the dread of vague wonder and brooding mystery. It was not that the sounds were hideous for they were not but that they held vibrations suggesting nothing more. Eric Zahn was a genius of wild power. As the weeks passed the playing grew wilder whilst the old musician acquired an increasing haggardness and furtiveness pitiful to behold. He now refused to admit me at any time and shunned me whenever we met on the stairs. Then one night as I listened at the door I heard the shrieking vial swell into a chaotic babble of sound. It was the truth that the horror was real, the awful inarticulate cry which only a mute can utter and which rises only in moments of the most terrible fear or anguish. I knocked repeatedly at the door but received no response. Afterward I waited in the black hallway shivering with cold and fear till I heard the poor musician's feeble effort to rise from the floor by the aid of a chair. Believing him just conscious I heard Zahn stumble to the window and close both shutter and sash then stumble to the door which he falteringly unfastened to admit me. This time his delight at having me present was real for his distorted face gleamed with relief while he clutched at my coat as a child clutches at its mother's skirts. Shaking pathetically the old man forced me into a chair whilst he sank into another beside which his vial and the paradoxical suggestion of intense and frightened listening. Subsequently he seemed to be satisfied and crossing to a chair by the table wrote a brief note, handed it to me and returned to the table where he began to write rapidly and incessantly. The note implored me in the name of mercy and for the sake of my own curiosity to wait where I was while he prepared a full account in German of all the marvels while I still waited and while the old musicians feverishly written sheets still continued to pile up that I saw Zahn start as from the hint of a horrible shock. Unmistakably he was looking at the curtained window and listening shudderingly. Then I have fancied I heard a sound myself, though it was not a horrible sound but rather an exquisitely low and infinitely distant musical note suggesting a player in one room was able to look. Upon Zahn the effect was terrible for dropping his pencil suddenly he rose, seized his vial and commenced to rend the night with the wildest playing I had ever heard from his bow save when listening at the barred door. It would be useless to describe the playing of Eric Zahn on that dreadful night. It was more horrible than anything I had ever overheard because I could now see the player something off or drown something out. What I could not imagine awesome though I felt it must be. The playing grew fantastic, danis and hysterical, yet kept to the last the qualities of supreme genius which I knew this strange old man possessed. I recognized the air it was a wild Hungarian dance popular in the theaters and I reflected for a moment that this was the first time I had ever heard Zahn play the work of the whining of that desperate vial. The player was dripping with an uncanny perspiration and twisted like a monkey always looking frantically at the curtained window. In his frenzied strains I could almost see shadowy satires and bacchanales dancing and whirling insanely through seething abysses of clouds and smoke and lightning and then I thought I heard a shriller steadier note that was in a howling night wind which had sprung up outside as if in answer to the mad playing within. Zahn's screaming vial now outdid itself emitting sounds I had never thought a vial could emit. The shutter rattled more loudly, unfastened and commenced slamming against the window. Then the glass broke shiveringly under the persistent impacts and the chill wind rushed in making the candles sputter against conscious observation. His blue eyes were bulging, glassy and sightless, and the frantic playing had become a blind, mechanical, unrecognizable orgy that no pen could even suggest. A sudden gust, stronger than the others, caught up the manuscript and bore it toward the window. I followed the flying sheets in desperation but they were gone before I reached the demolished panes. Then I saw the wall and the city outspread beneath. It was very dark but the city's lights always burned and I expected to see them there amidst the rain and the wind. Yet when I looked from that highest of all gabled windows looked while the candles sputtered and the insane vial howled with the night wind I saw no city spread below and no friendly lights gleamed from remembered streets but only the blackness of anything on earth and as I stood there looking in terror the wind blew out both candles in that ancient peaked garret leaving me in savage and impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium before me and the demon madness of that night-beying vial behind me. I staggered back in the dark without the means of striking a light crashing against the table overturning a chair and finally groping my way but at least try whatever the power is opposed to me. Once I thought some chill thing brushed me and I screamed but my scream could not be heard above that hideous vial. Suddenly out of the blackness the madly sawing bow struck me and I knew I was close to the player. I felt a head touched the back of Zahn's chair and then found and shook his shoulder in an effort to bring him to his senses. I was able to stop and shouted in his ear that we must both flee from the unknown things of the night but he neither answered me nor abated the frenzy of his unutterable music while all through the garret strange currents of wind seemed to dance in the darkness and babble. When my hand touched his ear I shuttered though I knew not why knew not why till I felt the still face the ice cold stiffened unbreathing by some miracle finding the door and the large wooden bolt I plunged wildly away from that glassy eyed thing in the dark and from the ghoulish howling of that accursed vial whose fury increased even as I plunged leaping floating flying down those endless stairs through the dark house racing mindlessly out into the narrow steep and ancient street of steps and tottering houses clattering down steps and over cobbles to the great dark bridge to the broader healthier streets and boulevards we know all these are terrible impressions that linger with me and I recall that there was no wind and that the moon was out and that all the lights of the city twinkled. Despite my most careful searches and investigations I have never since been able to find the Rue d'Orsay but I'm not wholly sorry either for this or for the music of Eric Zahn. End of the Music of Eric Zahn by H.P. Lovecraft Recording by Cameron Hulket This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Scott Carpenter The Nameless City by H.P. Lovecraft When I drew nigh the Nameless City I knew it was accursed. I was travelling in a parched and terrible valley under the moon and afar I saw it protruding uncannily above the sands as parts of a corpse may protrude from an ill-made grave. Fear spoke from the age-worn stones of this hoary survivor of the Deluge, this great-grandfather of the eldest pyramid, and a viewless aura repelled me and bade me retreat for antique and sinister secrets that no man should see remote in the desert of Araby lies the Nameless City, crumbling and inarticulate its low walls nearly hidden by the sands of uncounted ages. It must have been thus before the first stones of Memphis were laid and while the bricks of Babylon were yet unbaked. There is no legend so old as to give it a name or to recall that it was ever alive, but it is told of in whispers around campfires and muttered about by grandmams in the tents so that all tribes shun it without wholly knowing why. It was of this place that Abdel al-Hazred, the mad poet, dreamed of the night before he sang his unexplained couplet, that is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange eons even death may die. I should have known that the Arabs had good reason for shunning the Nameless City. The city told of in strange tales but seen by no living man, I tried them and went into the untrodden waste with my camel. I alone have seen it and that is why no other face bears such hideous lines of fear as mine, why no other man shivers so horribly when the night wind rattles the windows. When I came upon it in the ghastly stillness of unending sleep it looked at me, chilly from the rays of a cold moon amidst the desert's heat. And as I returned its look and stopped still with my camel to wait for the dawn, for hours I waited till the east grew gray and the stars faded and the gray turned to rosy at light edged with gold. I heard a moaning unsaw a storm of sand stirring among the antique stones though the sky was clear and the vast reaches of desert still. Then suddenly above the desert's far rim came the blazing edge of the sun seen through the tiny sandstorm which was passing away from some remote depth there came a crash of musical metal to hail the fiery disc as Memnon hails it from the banks of the Nile. My ears rang and my imagination sieved as I led my camel slowly across the sand to that unvocal place that place which I alone of living men had seen. In and out amongst the shapeless foundations of houses and places I wandered finding never a carving or inscription of these men if men they were who built this city and dwelt therein so long ago. The antiquity of the spot was unwholesome and I longed to encounter some sign or device to prove that the city was indeed fashioned by mankind. There were certain proportions and dimensions in the ruins which I did not like. I had with me many tools and dug much within the walls of the obliterated edifices but progress was slow and I learned I felt the chill wind which brought new fear so that I did not dare to remain in the city and as I went outside the antique walls to sleep a small sighing sandstorm gathered behind me blowing over the grey stones though the moon was bright and most of the desert still. I awakened just at dawn from a pageant of horrible dreams my ears ringing as from some metallic peel I saw the sun peering redly through the last gusts and marked the quietness of the rest of the landscape. Once more I ventured within those brooding ruins that swelled beneath the sand like an ogre under a coverlet and again dug vainly for relics of the forgotten race. At noon I rested and in the afternoon I spent much time tracing the walls and bygone streets and the outlines of the nearly vanished buildings. I saw that the city had been mighty indeed and wondered at the sources to myself I pictured all the splendours of an age so distant that Kaldia could not recall it and thought of Sarnath the doomed that stood in the land of Nahr when mankind was young and of Ibb that was carbon of grey stone before mankind existed. All at once I came upon a place where the bedrock rose stark through the sand and formed a low cliff and here I saw with joy what seemed to promise further traces of the antediluvian people hewn rudely on the face of the cliff were the unmistakable facades of several small squat rock houses or temples whose interiors might preserve many secrets of ages too remote for calculation though sandstorms had long effaced any carvings which may have been outside. Very low and sand choked were all the dark apertures near me but I cleared one with my spade and crawled through it carrying a torch to reveal whatever mysteries it might hold. When I was inside I saw that the cavern and the signs of the race that had lived and worshipped before the desert was a desert. Primitive altars, pillars and niches all curiously low were not absent and though I saw no sculptures or frescoes there were many singular stones clearly shaped into symbols by artificial means. The lowness of the chiseled chamber was very strange for I could hardly kneel upright but the area was so great that my torch showed only part of it at a time. I shuddered oddly for certain altars and stones suggested forgotten rites of terrible, revolting and inexplicable nature and made me wonder what manner of men could have made and frequented such a temple. When I had seen all that the place contained I crawled out again avid defined what the temples might yield. Night had now approached yet the tangible things I had seen made curiosity stronger than fear so that I did not flee from the long mooncast shadows that had daunted me when I first saw the nameless city. In the twilight I cleared another aperture and with a new torch crawled into it finding more vague stones and symbols though nothing more definite than the other temple had contained. The room was just as low but much less broad ending in a very narrow passage crowded with obscure and cryptical shrines. About these shrines I was prying when the noise of a wind and my camel outside broke through the stillness and drew me forth to see what could have frightened the beast. The moon was gleaming vividly with a cloud of sand that seemed blown by a strong but decreasing wind from some point along the cliff ahead of me. I knew it was this chilly, sandy wind which had disturbed the camel and was about to lead him to a place of better shelter when I chanced to glance up and saw that there was no wind atop the cliff. This astonished me and made me fearful again but I immediately recalled the sudden local winds that I had seen and heard before at sunrise and sunset and judged it was a normal thing. I decided it came from some rock fissure leading to a cave and watched the troubled sand to trace it to its source soon perceiving that it came from the black orifice of a temple a long distance south of me almost out of sight. Against the choking sand cloud I plotted toward this temple which as I neared it loomed larger than the rest and shewed a doorway far less clogged with caked sand. I would have entered had not the terrific force of the icy wind almost quenched my torch. It poured madly out of the dark door sighing uncannily and spread among the weird ruins. Soon it grew fainter and the sand grew more and more still till finally all was at rest again but a presence seemed stalking among the spectral stones of the city and when I glanced at the moon it seemed to quiver as though mirrored and unquiet waters. I was more afraid than I could explain but not enough to dull my thirst for wonder so as soon as the wind was quite gone I crossed into the dark chamber from which it had come. This temple as I had fancied from the outside was larger than either of those I had visited before and was presumably a natural cavern since it bore winds from some region beyond. Here I could stand quite upright but saw that the stones and alters were as low as those in the other temples. On the walls and roof I beheld for the first time some traces of the pictorial art of the ancient race curious curling streaks of paint that had almost faded or crumbled away and on two of the alters I saw with rising excitement as I held my torch aloft it seemed to me that the shape of the roof was too regular to be natural and I wondered what the prehistoric cutters of stone had first worked upon. Their engineering skill must have been vast then a brighter flare of fantastic flame showed that form which I had been seeking the opening to those remote or abysses whence the sudden wind had blown and I grew faint when I saw that it was a small and plainly artificial door chiseled in the solid rock I thrust my torch within beholding a black tunnel with the roof arching low over a rough flight of very small numerous and steeply descending steps I shall always see those steps in my dreams for I came to learn what they meant at the time I hardly knew whether to call them steps or mere footholds in a precipitous descent my mind was whirling with mad thoughts and the words and warning of Arab prophets seemed to float across the desert from the land that men know and dare not know yet I hesitated only for a moment before advancing through the portal and commencing to climb cautiously down the steep passage feet first as though on a ladder it is only in the terrible phantasms of drugs or delirium that any other man can have such a descent as mine the narrow passage led infinitely down like some hideous haunted well and the torch I held above my head could not light the unknown depths toward which I was crawling I lost track of the hours I was frightened when I thought of the distance I must have been traversing there were changes of direction and of steepness and once I came to a long low level passage where I had to wriggle my feet first along the rocky floor holding torch at arm's length beyond my head the place was not high enough for kneeling after that were more of the steep steps and I was still scrambling down interminably when my failing torch died out I do not think I noticed it at the time for when I did notice it I was quite unbalanced with that instinct for the strange and the unknown which had made me a wanderer upon earth and a hunter of far ancient and forbidden places in the darkness there flashed before my mind fragments of my cherished treasury of demonic lore sentences from Alhazred the Mad Arab paragraphs from the apocryphal nightmares of Damascus and infamous lines from the delirious image-demand of Gautier de Metz I repeated queer extracts and muttered of Afrasia and the daemons that floated with him down the oxus later chanting over and over again a phrase from one of Lord Dunseny's tales the unreverberate blackness of the abyss once when the descent grew amazingly steep I recited something in Sing-Song from Thomas Moore until I feared to recite more a reservoir of darkness black as witches cauldrons are when filled with moon-drugs in the eclipse distilled leaning to look a foot might pass through that chasm I saw beneath as far as vision could explore the jetty sides as smooth as glass looking as if just varnished ore with that dark pitch the seat of death throws out upon its slimy shore time had quite ceased to exist when my feet again felt a level floor and I found myself in a place slightly higher than the rooms in the two smaller temples now so incalculably far above my head I could not quite stand up right and in the dark I shuffled and crept hither and thither at random I soon knew that I was in a narrow passage whose walls were lined with cases of wood having glass fronts as in that paleozoic and abysmal place I felt of such things as polished wood and glass I shuddered at the possible implications the cases were apparently ranged along each side of the passage at regular intervals and were oblong and horizontal hideously like coffins in shape and size when I tried to move two or three for further examination I found that they were firmly fastened I saw that the passage was a long one so floundered ahead rapidly in a creeping run that would have seemed horrible had any eye watched me in the blackness crossing from side to side occasionally to feel of my surroundings and be sure that the walls and rows of cases still stretched on man is so used to thinking visually that I almost forgot the darkness and pictured the endless corridor of wood and glass in its low studded monotony as though I saw it and then in a moment of indescribable emotion I did see it just when my fancy merged into real sight I cannot tell but there came a gradual glow ahead and all at once I knew that I saw the dim outlines of a corridor and cases revealed by some unknown subterranean phosphorescence for a little while all was exactly as I had imagined it since the glow was very faint but as I mechanically kept stumbling ahead into the stronger light I realized that my fancy had been but feeble this hall was no relic of crudity like the temples in the city above but a monument of the most magnificent and exotic art rich, vivid, and daringly fantastic designs and pictures formed a continuous scheme of mural paintings whose lines and colors were beyond description the cases were of a strange golden wood with fronts of exquisite glass and containing the mummified forms of creatures outreaching and grotesqueness the most chaotic dreams of man to convey any idea of these monstrosities is impossible they were of the reptile kind with body lines suggesting sometimes the crocodile sometimes the seal but more often nothing of which either the naturalist or the paleontologist ever heard in size they approximated a small man and their forelegs bore delicate and evident feet curiously like human hands and fingers but strangest of all were their heads which presented a contour violating all known biological principles to nothing can such things be well compared in one flash I thought of comparisons as varied as the cat, the bullfrog, the mythic satyr, and the human being not Jove himself had had so colossal and protuberant a forehead yet the horns and the nose-lessness and the alligator-like jaw placed things outside all established categories I debated for a time on the reality of the mummies half suspecting but soon decided they were indeed some paleogean species which had lived when the nameless city was alive to crown their grotesqueness most of them were gorgeously enrobed in the costliest of fabrics and lavishly laden with ornaments of gold, jewels, and unknown shining metals the importance of these crawling creatures must have been vast for they held first place among the wild designs on the frescoed walls and ceiling with matchless skill had the artist drawn them in a world of their own they had cities and gardens fashioned to suit their dimensions and I could not help but think that their pictured history was allegorical perhaps shooing the progress of the race that worshipped them these creatures I said to myself were to men of the nameless city what the she-wolf was to roam or some totem beast is to a tribe of Indians holding this view I could trace roughly a wonderful epic of the nameless city the tale of a mighty sea-coast metropolis that ruled the world and the desert crept into the fertile valley that held it I saw its wars and triumphs its troubles and defeats and afterwards its terrible fight against the desert when thousands of its people here represented in allegory by the grotesque reptiles were driven to chisel their way down through the rocks in some marvellous manner to another world where of their prophets had told them it was all vividly weird and realistic and its connection with the awesome descent I had made was unmistakable I even recognized the passages as I crept along the corridor toward the brighter light I saw stages of the painted epic the leave-taking of the race that had dwelt in the nameless city and the valley around for ten million years the race whose souls shrank from quitting scenes their bodies had known so long where they had settled as nomads in the earth's youth queuing in the virgin rock those primal shrines at which they had never ceased to worship now that the light was better I studied the pictures more closely and remembering that the strange reptiles must represent the unknown men pondered upon the customs of the nameless city many things were peculiar and inexplicable the civilization which included a written alphabet had seemingly risen to a higher order than those immeasurably later civilizations of Egypt and Caldea yet there were curious omissions I could for example find no pictures to represent deaths or funeral customs saved such as were related to wars violence and plagues and I wondered at the reticent shown concerning natural death it was as though an ideal of immortality had been fostered as a cheering illusion still nearer the end of the passage was painted scenes of the utmost picturesqueness and extravagance contrasted views of the nameless city and its desertion and growing ruin and of the strange new realm of paradise to which the race had hewed its way through the stone in these views the city and the desert valley were shone always by moonlight golden nimbus hovering over the fallen walls and half revealing the splendid perfection of former times shown spectrally and illusively by the artist the paradisal scenes were almost too extravagant to be believed portraying a hidden world of eternal day filled with glorious cities and ethereal hills and valleys at the very last I thought I saw signs of an artistic anticlimax the paintings were less skillful and much more bizarre than even the wildest of the earlier scenes they seemed to record a slow decadence of the ancient stock coupled with a growing ferocity toward the outside world from which it was driven by the desert the forms of the people always represented by the sacred reptiles appeared to be gradually wasting away though their spirit has shone hovering above the ruins by moonlight gained in proportion emaciated priests displayed as reptiles in ornate robes cursed the upper air and all who breathed it and one terrible final scene showed a primitive looking man who had been torn into pieces by members of the elder race I remember how the Arabs feared the nameless city and was glad that beyond this place the grey walls and ceiling were bare as I viewed the pageant of mural history I had approached very closely to the end of the low sealed hall and was aware of a gate through which came all of the illuminating phosphorescence creeping up to it I cried aloud in transcendent amazement at what they beyond for instead of other and brighter chambers there was only an illimitable void such as one might fancy when gazing down from the peak of Mount Everest upon a sea of sunlit mist behind me was passage so cramped that I could not stand upright in it before me was an infinity of subterranean effulgence reaching down from the passage into the abyss was the head of a steep flight of steps small numerous steps like those of black passages I had traversed but after a few feet there was nothing swung back open against the left hand wall of the passage was a massive door of brass incredibly thick and decorated with fantastic bar reliefs which could have closed shut the whole inner world of light away from the vaults and passages of rock I looked at the step and for the nonce dared not to try them I touched the open brass door and could not move it then I sank prone to the stone floor and my exhaustion could banish as I lay still with closed eyes free to ponder many things I had lightly noted and the frescoes came back to me with new and terrible significance scenes representing the nameless city in its heyday the vegetations of the valley around it and the distant lands with which its merchants traded the allegory of the crawling creatures puzzled me by its universal prominence and I wondered that it would be in the frescoes the nameless city had been shown in proportions fitted to the reptiles I wondered what its real proportions and magnificence had been and reflected a moment on certain oddities I had noticed in the ruins I thought curiously of the lowness of the primal temples and of the underground corridor which were doubtless hewn thus out of deference to the reptile deities there honored though it perforce reduced the worshipers to crawling perhaps the very rites here involved a more religious theory however could easily explain why the level passages in that awesome descent should be as low as the temples or lower since one could not even kneel in it as I thought of the crawling creatures whose hideous mummified forms were so close to me I felt a new throb of fear mental associations are curious and I shrank from the idea that except for the poor primitive man torn to pieces in the last painting mine was the only human form amidst the many relics and symbols of strange and roving existence wonders soon drove out fear for the luminous abyss and what it might contain presented a problem worthy of the greatest explorer that a weird world of mystery lay far down that flight of peculiarly small steps I could not doubt and I hoped to find there those human memorials which the painted corridor had failed to give the frescoes had pictured unbelievable cities and valleys in this lower realm and my fancy dwelt on the rich and colossal ruins that awaited me fears indeed concerned the past rather than the future not even the physical horror of my position in that cramped corridor of dead reptiles and antediluvian frescoes miles below the world I knew and faced by another world of eerie light and mist could match the lethal dread I felt at the abysmal antiquity of the scene and its soul an ancientness so vast that measurement is feeble seemed to leer down from the primal stones and rock-hewn temples in the nameless city while the very latest of the astounding maps in the frescoes shooed oceans and continents that man has forgotten with only here and there some vaguely familiar outlines of what could have happened in the geological ages since the painting ceased and the death-hating race resentfully succumbed to decay no man might say life had once teamed in these caverns and in the luminous realm beyond now I was alone with vivid relics and I trembled to think of the countless ages these relics had kept a silent, deserted vigil suddenly there came another burst of that acute fear which had intermittently seized me ever since I first saw the terrible valley in the nameless city under a cold moon and despite my exhaustion I found myself starting frantically to a sitting posture and gazing back along the black corridor toward the tunnels that rose to the outer world my sensations were like those which had made me shun the nameless city at night and were as inexplicable as they were poignant and received a still greater shock in the form of a definite sound the first which had broken the utter silence of these tomb-like depths it was a deep, low moaning as of a distant throng of condemned spirits and came from the direction in which I was staring its volume rapidly grew till it soon reverberated rightfully through the low passage and at the same time I became conscious of an increasing draft of old air likewise flowing from the tunnels and the city above this air seemed to restore my balance for I instantly recalled the sudden gusts which had risen around the mouth of the abyss each sunset and sunrise one of which had indeed revealed the hidden tunnels to me I looked at my watch and saw that sunrise was near so bracing myself to resist the gale that was sweeping down to its cavern home as it had swept forth at evening my fear again waned below since a natural phenomenon tends to dispel broodings over the unknown more and more madly poured the shrieking off of the inner earth I dropped prone again and clutched vainly at the floor for fear of being swept bodily through the open gate into the phosphorescent abyss such fury I had not expected and as I grew aware of an actual slipping of my form toward the abyss I was beset by a thousand new terrors of apprehension and imagination the malignancy of the blast awakened incredible fancies once more I compared myself shudderingly to the only human image in that frightful corridor of endless race for in the fiendish clawing of the swirling currents there seemed to abide of indictive rage all the stronger because it was largely impotent I think I screamed frantically near the last I was almost mad of the howling wind raids I tried to crawl against the murderous invisible torrent but I could not even hold my own as I was pushed slowly and inexorably toward the unknown world finally reason must have wholly snapped for I fell babbling over and over who dreamed of the nameless city that is not dead which can eternal lie and with strange eons even death may die only the grim brooding desert gods know what really took place what indescribable struggles and scrambles in the dark I endured or what a badden had guided me back to life where I must always remember and shiver in the night wind till oblivion or worse claims me monstrous unnatural colossal was the thing too far beyond all the ideas of man to be believed except in the silent damnable small hours of the morning when one cannot sleep I have said that the fury of the rushing blast was infernal cacodemoniacal and that its voices were hideous with the pent-up viciousness of desolate eternities presently these voices while still chaotic before me seemed to my beating brain to take articulate form behind me I remembered eon dead antiquities leagues below the dawn-lit world of men I heard the ghastly cursing and snarling of strange-tongued fiends turning I saw outlined against the luminous ether of the abyss what could not be seen against the dusk of the corridor a nightmare horrid of rushing devils hate distorted grotesquely panopled half-transparent devils of a race no man might mistake the crawling reptiles of the nameless city and as the wind died away I was plunged into the ghoul pooled darkness of the earth's bowels for behind the last of the creatures the great brazen door clanged shut with a deafening peel of metallic music whose reverberations swelled out to the distant world to hail the rising sun as Memnon hails it from the banks of the Nile end of the nameless city this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain but for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recorded by Durant Hare Nile Lathatep by H.P. Lovecraft Nile Lathatep the crawling chaos I am the last I will tell the Audient Void I do not recall distinctly when it began but it was months ago to a season of political and social upheaval was added a strange and brooding apprehension of hideous physical danger a danger widespread in all embracing such a danger is maybe imagined only in the most terrible phantasms of the night I recall that the people went about with pale and worried faces and whispered warnings and prophecies which no one dared consciously repeat or acknowledged to himself that he had heard a sense of monstrous guilt on the land and out of the abysses between the stars swept chill currents that made men shiver in dark and lonely places there was a demonic alteration in the sequence of the seasons the autumn heat lingered fearsomely and everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe had passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods or forces which were unknown and that Nair Lathetep came out of Egypt who he was none could tell but he was of the old native blood and looked like a pharaoh the fellow he knelt when they saw him yet could not say why he said he had risen up out of the blackness of 27 centuries and that he had heard messages from places not on this planet into the lands of civilization came Nair Lathetep Swarthi, Slender and Sinister always buying strange instruments of glass and metal and combining them into instruments yet stranger he spoke much of the sciences of electricity and psychology and gave exhibitions of power which sent his spectators away speechless yet which swelled his fame to exceeding magnitude men advised one another to see Nair Lathetep and shuddered and where Nair Lathetep went rest vanished for the small hours were rent with the screams of nightmare never before had the screams of nightmare been such a public problem now the wise men almost wished they could forbid sleep in the small hours that the shrieks of cities might less horribly disturb the pale pitying moon as it glimmered on green waters gliding under bridges and old steeples crumbling against a sickly sky the great, the old the terrible city of unnumbered crimes my friend had told me of him and of the impelling fascination and allurement of his revelations and I burned with eagerness to explore his uttermost mysteries my friend said they were horrible and impressive beyond my most fevered imaginings and what was thrown on a screen in the darkened room prophesied things none but Nair Lathetep dared prophecy of the murder of his sparks that was taken from men that which had never been taken before yet which shewed only in the eyes and I heard it hinted abroad that those who knew Nair Lathetep looked on sights which others saw not it was in the hot autumn that I went through the night with the restless crowd to see Nair Lathetep through the stifling night and up the endless stairs into the choking room and yellow evil faces peering from behind fallen monuments and I saw the world battling against blackness against the waves of destruction from ultimate space whirling, churning struggling around the dimming cooling sun then the sparks played amazingly around the heads of the spectators and Nair stood up on in whilst shadows more grotesque than I can tell came out and squatted on the heads more scientific than the rest mumbled a trembling protest about imposture and static electricity Nair Lathetep drove us all out down the dizzy stairs into the damp, hot, deserted midnight streets I screamed aloud that I was not afraid that I never could be afraid and others screamed with me for solace we swore to one another that this city was exactly the same and still alive and when the electric lights burst the company over and over again and laughed at the queer faces we made I believe we felt something coming down from the greenish moon for when we began to depend on its light we drifted into curious and voluntary marching formations and seemed to know our destinations though we dared not think of them once we looked at the pavement and found the blocks loose and displaced by grass with scarce a line of rusted metal to shoe where the tramways had run the car, lone, windowless, dilapidated and almost on its side when we gazed around the horizon we could not find the third tower by the river and noticed that the silhouette of the second tower was ragged at the top then we split up into narrow columns each of which seemed drawn in a different direction one disappeared in a narrow alley to the left leaving only the echo of a shocking moan another filed down a weed choked howling with a laughter that was mad my own column was sucked toward the open country and presently I felt a chill which was not of the hot autumn for as we stalked out on the dark moor we beheld around us the hellish moon glitter of evil snows trackless inexplicable snows swept asunder in one direction only where lay a gulf all the blacker for its glittering walls the column seemed very thin indeed as it plotted dreamily into the gulf I lingered behind for the black rift in the green lit and snow was frightful and I thought I had heard the reverberations of a disquieting whale as my companions vanished but my power to linger was slight as if beckoned by those who had gone before I half floated between the titanic snow drifts quivering and afraid into the sightless vortex of the unimaginable screamingly sentient dumbly delirious thoughts that were can tell a sickened sensitive shadow writhing in hands that are not hands and whirled blindly past ghastly midnight of rotting creation corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cities charnel winds that brushed the pallid stars and make them flicker low beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things have seen columns of unsanctified temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space with a vacua above the spheres of light and darkness and through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled maddening beating of drums and thin monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable unlighted chambers beyond time the detestable pounding and piping were unto dance slowly awkwardly and absurdly the gigantic timorous ultimate gods blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nair Lathatep End of Nair Lathatep