Editor’s note: The loose pages that constitute this account were found in a hastily packed trunk abandoned on Stoke Newington High Street on the first day from the year of our Lord 1900.
Let me preface this account with, if not a disclaimer, then a pre-emptory answer to some of the more derisive criticisms it shall no doubt find from some of the more condescending fellows I have had a habit to fall in with in my near forty years. It is true that in my youth I read voraciously of the then-recently departed Mr. Poe of Baltimore and shewed a great appreciation for all matters and fancies “Gothic”. So if my words do sometimes lapse into childish evocation of Maturin, of Lewis’ mad monk Ambrosio or of my dear matchlessly macabre Edgar then please do not judge the meaning of them false; merely treat them as a foul blackening patina upon a fine silver candlestick that can be wiped clear, exposing the true subject below.
And so it occurred that in the very last day of October in the year eighteen hundred and ninety-nine, I left my small but comfortable bachelor’s residence in Arkham, Massachusetts on the trail of a fabled grimoire of Henrich Cornelius Agrippa’s that had been recently rumoured to have been discovered in an old private collection over three thousand miles Eastwards in North-East London. Having spent the better part of the last ten years on wild goose chases around much of the New England in pursuit of similar legends that resulted without exception in poor quality fakes or nothing at all to show for my investment, I was initially less than willing to depart for months, missing Thanksgiving and possibly Christmas. But having been idly perusing a recently published omnibus collection of Mr. Poe’s letters on a quiet autumnal afternoon after having most definitively proven a page of esoterick sigils discovered in the quaint little town of Innsmouth to be no older than forty or fifty years and almost certainly meaningless, I came upon a passage in which he had described the small village in which he was schooled:
“A dream-like and spirit-soothing place, that venerable old town. At this moment, I fancy, I feel the refreshing chilliness of its deeply-shadowed avenues, inhale the fragrance of its thousand shrubberies, and thrill anew with undefinable delight, at the deep hollow note of the church-bell, breaking, each hour, with sullen and sudden roar, upon the stillness of the dusky atmosphere in which the fretted gothic steeple lay imbedded and asleep…”
It was then that I noted with an almost unsurpassable surprise that the ancient cobbled streets Mr. Poe had been recalling were none other than Stoke Newington, where this supposedly rare and powerful document had been discovered in the cellar of a small public house. At that point I pursued my patrons at Miskatonic University and most propitiously secured funding for a two-month expedition to determine the veracity of the fabled grimoire.
My travel was initially uneventful (I am not accustomed to long-distance journeys, so arrived late in New York and had to settle for a slow boat for my crossing) until ominous and towering dark clouds began to gather in the East as we crossed the Atlantic Ocean. They began to gather late on the third day of the voyage, though distant enough that the mostly-continental crew happily dismissed them as “traditional English weather”, though by the time our vessel was two days from Southampton their voices had been drained of levity and the mutterings amongst them were darker and less readily repeatable upon the page. Having retired to my quarters for fear of being lashed by the threatened rainstorm, I lay uneasily in my bunk and stared at those clouds, fancying I perceived within them great unnatural temples and towers constructed in something darker and stranger than obsidian, though their geometry seemed not to make sense or match anything built by human hand, save perhaps for a fleeting likeness to those famed spires of Angkor, mapped and recorded recently in the deepest jungles of French Indochina.
But then as mentioned earlier in this manuscript, I am aware of my own predilection towards the pathetic fallacies of gothic literature and passed off these impressions as inventions of my own over-active and irretrievably polluted fancies. It is only now, ruminating in my cramped salon above the inn on Stoke Newington High Street where this darkly fantastical tale began proper, that I perceive the true and abhorrent import of those ominous visions etched blackly onto the English skies high above where I finally made landfall on November 15th.
After a couple of days spent pleasantly in Southampton, availing myself of the local hospitality and browsing the most bewitching ruins of Netley Abbey, immortalised by both Sotheby’s moonlit verses and Mr. Warner’s base but breathless account of gothic skulduggery, I received a wired message from Professor Treadwell of University College, availing me to make my way to London and inspect the discovered manuscript in the location of its discovery. So I settled my bill and took a train several hours North-East to Waterloo station, arriving as night fell and darkened the slate-grey and still clouded skies a rich sable.
As I stepped onto the platform, I noted another engine marked for Brookwood moving inexorably South-West and appearing to contain no living souls - its windows affording no views of passengers or cargo. I was to learn from a friendly if relatively inarticulate brakeman that this mournful conveyance carried only coffins, ferrying the bodies of the recently departed down the London Necropolis Railway to their final resting place in a cemetery in Surrey. Accustomed as I am to the icy winters of rural Massachusetts, and clothed sensibly for the season in a tweed overcoat and a thick woollen scarf, I am not ashamed to admit I felt an involuntary shiver upon learning of the true nature of the silent passengers of that dread service. The combination of this necrotic transport and my own fascination with the lurid newspaper reports of Jack the Ripper I had devoured just under a decade ago hastened my resolve to head North to my destination immediately, so I caught a Hansom Cab and we proceeded Northwards over Blackfriars bridge and plunged into a deep, thick fog on the far bank.
I must confess that my imaginative nature quite overcame me as we journeyed through the narrow London streets, their gas lamps merely distant stars in the solid walls of mist that enveloped us and tumbled from slate to cobble, as if we were being dragged to the seabed of some alien ocean from whence we should surely never be able to struggle to the surface again. In my reverie, the journey quite passed me by and I could not relate any details of the buildings we passed, save brief flashes of the imposing European architecture of the City giving way to unkempt terraced dwellings around Old Street, beautiful three-storey manor houses in de Beauvoir and finally tumbledown cottages as we made our way up Stoke Newington’s high street and to our final destination, a run-down yet inviting hostelry known as the Rochester Castle.
After paying my driver, I made my way inside and secured my rooms - including the salon I am sitting in now as I record the history of the past two months to paper - before ordering a pint of a warm but not unpleasant Kentish ale and an unremarkable but filling supper. I made brief conversation with the landlord’s daughter, a jolly and well-mannered girl of some twenty years, who correctly surmised from my accent my true identity as the “famous Yankee expert here to look at the magic book”. Having eventually extricated myself from her flattering if somewhat tiring line of questioning, I climbed two flights of the narrow wooden stairs that creaked and groaned on every step (as if in sympathy with my own exhausted body) and settled down for a restful sleep, without even unpacking my case.
Untroubled by the dreams that would shortly begin to plague my nights, I slept for a full 10 hours and rose refreshed and excited to meet my erudite colleague and perhaps visit some of the local landmarks I had read about in the few volumes concerning North London I had managed to peruse before setting out on my journey. Descending the stairs, I was given a message by Rose, the girl I had conversed with on the previous evening, that Dr. Treadwell had an urgent matter to attend to at Gower Street and would join me at approximately six o’clock that evening to begin an inspection of the supposed grimoire, that was at this very moment beneath my feet in the cellars of the Rochester Castle public house. Presented with some free time, I decided to make a visit to the college Poe attended in his youth, though was dismayed to discover that Manor House School was long closed down. Disheartened, but not discouraged, I wandered further Westwards down Church Street, hoping to investigate St. Mary’s church, which was mentioned in a number of Daniel Defoe’s historical writings I had read as a boy, though found it to be quite dominated by a gaudy new church built immediately adjacent to it, evidently in the last few decades. This was also called St. Mary’s, its steeple dominating the surrounding area and extending significantly more than 200ft into the air, where the top was wreathed in the dark clouds that had seemed to dog me from halfway across the Atlantic Ocean.
Stepping inside, I caught sight of a strikingly beautiful and exceptionally pale-skinned lady deep in conversation with two men, one dressed in an Anglican cassock who I (correctly) took to be this church’s vicar, and the other was a tall and swarthy fellow, dressed easily in tweed and gesturing most warmly around him, appearing to be having some sort of disagreement with the clergyman he was addressing with apparent impropriety. I was so engaged with this scene, it took a few moments to notice the woman had noticed me. She was gazing at me with piercing green eyes which seemed to bewitch mine own, and I began to lose all awareness of my surroundings. We stared deeply into each others’ eyes, and I honestly could not say what would have befallen me if I had at that point not felt a light tap on my shoulder, which wrenched me unceremoniously from my reverie and pulled me back into the waking world, free of my induced somnabulence. It was Rose from the Rochester Castle. I noted with little interest that she had tied a garish ribbon in her hair and changed into a dress that was attempting to be more flattering.
“Master Yankee,” she began - a title she had decided to bestow upon me several times in our brief conversation the previous evening, “I was wondering if we couldn’t take a look around the village together. Or take a stroll around the gardens of Clissold House; it is such a lovely day.”
Trying my best not to betray my bewilderment at her positive pronouncement upon the weather when the sky above was so leaden and foreboding, I assented to her suggestion and we proceeded out of the church. Just before I traversed the threshold, I stole a quick glance behind, hoping to snatch a brief glance at the woman who had so caught my eye earlier, but she was gone, and her companion too. Her eyes still burned brightly in my mind however, and I found it difficult to make conversation with my companion as we traipsed around the old village.
Returning to the inn at around half past three, I instructed the staff to send Professor Treadwell to my rooms when he arrived. I settled down and wrote a few pages in my diary, a letter to send back to my backers at Miskatonic University and a few more words in my in-depth and still unfinished treatise on that most famous demonological text, the Liber Officium Spirituum. I barely noticed the clock strike until it heralded the seventh hour after noon. Roused from my work by remembrance of the task I had travelled over three thousand miles to accomplish, I descended the creaking staircase and resolved to send a message to enquire as to the Professor’s whereabouts. As I rounded a corner and stepped into the public house itself, I caught side of a grey-bearded man being attended to by Rose. He had evidently received a thorough beating; there was blood staining the right side of his face, and his neck looked badly bruised. As I noted them, Rose caught sight of me.
“Master Yankee!” she cried, with alarm audible in her quavering voice, “Professor Treadwell was set upon as he made his way through Dalston village!”
The concern must have been well evident upon my face, as the grey-bearded fellow raised himself to his feet and attempted to allay my dismay.
“Don’t worry about me, young man,” he began, in a distinctively piercing Scottish accent, “I’ve suffered worse fates in faculty meetings! Allow me to introduce myself; I am Professor Gregory Treadwell from University College - you must be our grimoire expert from Arkham?”
I nodded in assent and took his proffered hand, noticing that despite his brave words, it trembled slightly as we shook in greeting.
I asked how his journey had been, and whether he needed a rest before we inspected the manuscript.
“Don’t be silly, lad. I was just knocked around a bit ’tis all. A bunch of silly chaps in black robes; I don’t doubt they were some University society or similar out for a jape.”
How I wish he had been proved correct, though my recent experiences give me dark thoughts as to the identity of his assailants. At the time, I was more amused at this indomitable spirit of this sprightly Caledonian gentleman. At his insistence, we followed the landlord behind the bar and down a set of stone steps into the cellar where the barrels of ale were stored. It became clear that a clumsy delivery boy had caught a corner of the basement’s walls with a keg, and had knocked several stones loose, revealing a heretofore sealed chamber. The chamber had contained little of note, save an old, securely-fastened wooden chest. Upon finally forcing the lock off the container (no doubt destroying the value of an otherwise beautifully-preserved antique), the proprietor of the establishment had discovered its only contents: an extremely old tome with the inscription on its curiously pale leather-bound cover reading “De Occulta Philosophia Libri Quattuor”.
Being intensely familiar with the works of Cornelius Agrippa, I had inspected several obviously faked fourth volumes of his well-known works Concerning Occult Philosophy before. This was different, however, and on first glance appeared to be very old and significant.
I caught Treadwell’s eye and noted a similar expression on his face to the one that was no doubt playing across my own countenance. Could it be that the fourth volume of Agrippa’s work wasn’t a myth? There was only one way to find out, and that was a careful examination of the grimoire that lay in front of us. We carefully extricated it from its casket and carried it upstairs to my rooms, where we pored over the first few pages. Scribed with a clear hand and in excellent Latin with a few archaic phrases familiar to scholars of 16th century writing, my first impressions were of relief. After a relatively successful but by no means groundbreaking career, this discovery could establish my name amongst experts of occultism. My expensive and time-consuming journey across half the globe was now completely vindicated, and this discovery would reach well beyond the rarified cloisters of Miskatonic University.
Writing these words now, over a month later, I am shocked and disappointed at the breadth of my ambition and the lack of humility. No philosophy on heaven or earth could have dreamt what was to befall both me and Treadwell, it is certain; but if I had cared less for my own fame I surely would have been more public with my discovery straight away, and who knows if that would have spared me from the utter horrors I strongly suspect pursue me even now. Why, I can almost hear their feet upon the stairs… But I am labouring a point, and no doubt giving in to my overly Romantic disposition. I shall return to my account.
The next few weeks are as a blur to me - working together with Treadwell on the manuscript was a most unfettered pleasure; in my long years studying weird texts, I can honestly account that I have never known a document that more willingly gave up its secrets than the one we had before us. Precise instructions for all manner of incantations, rituals and cantrips spilled forth from the long-lost grimoire and pooled in the professor’s conscientious notes. The only slight restraint on our ebullience were the occasional references to a thirteenth chapter which was no longer extant within the discovered pages. A few dark murmurings from the author regarding a great summoning that could only take place once a century at the most frequent, and hints toward some great truth concerning the development of man were found scattered throughout the twelve sections we greedily perused, but these came to naught upon reaching the end of the text, which simply consisted of a strange numerological instruction that calculated letters in place of digits.
We finally finished our initial translation and decoding (for the early sorcerers were fond of obfuscating the meaning of their occult writings in case they should fall into the wrong hands) of De Occulta Philosophia Libri Quattuor on - auspiciously enough - the night of December the twenty-fourth. I bid Treadwell a most hearty season’s greetings as I prepared to exit the University library in which I had been ensconced almost my entire stay on these distant shores and asked him where he would be for Christmas. He shook his head sadly and told me that he lived on his own (we had spent well over a month together, yet so enraptured were we both with our task that we had learned almost entirely nothing about each other) and would probably spend the next few days in the library before heading North to spend Hogmanay with his family in Edinburgh. Dismayed at his loneliness I invited him to come stay with me in the inn (a suggestion he greeted with a genuine and warm smile) and shook him warmly by the hand before stepping out onto Gower Street to catch a cab back North.
A brief but determined snowfall had made our route treacherous, and my driver was forced to take a different way through the back streets around Dalston, which is how I came to be at Newington Green at around seven in the evening on Christmas Eve. I was staring absent-mindedly from the window of my cab, marvelling at how the blizzard had turned an already picturesque village into a scene from a chocolate-box when I saw a familiar figure standing in the door of a chapel on the North side of the square. I blinked and looked again, and was amazed that I had not been mistaken - no, it really was the striking woman I remembered from St. Mary’s church, so many weeks ago.
Looking back on it now, I mourn every last firing synapse in my brain that encouraged me to take the action I did, but I must recount now with a heavy heart that I did indeed call the driver to stop, hurriedly paid him and hastily exited the hansom in order to converse with this most bewitching creature. I remember that she was tall, and that her eyes were even more illuminated in darkness of the almost entirely descended evening. Speaking with an easiness that belied my usual awkwardness with women of both beauty and learning, I fell headlong into a conversation with her that swept me into raptures. I recall little of the ceremony, save the charismatic leader of the service (who I also recognised from my first glimpse of the woman I was now speaking to), a swarthy Portuguese named Gonzalo, whose easy remarks regarding the birth of our Lord and Saviour might normally have incensed me against him if I were not spending most of the evening speaking with such (I foolishly supposed at the time) an angelic creature. Anne was was tall and slender, strikingly pale and clad entirely in black. Something about her carriage and the antiquity of her speech brought to mind Matilda, the tragic heroine of Walpole’s Otranto, but with an honest-seeming friendliness to go along with her beauty and mystery.
I am ashamed to admit that there was surely something about her that reminded me of gothic spires, ghostly footsteps in the drawing room and misty Transylvanian forests, and that was perhaps the reason I was so uncharacteristically bewitched.
Though my knowledge of love (and it has been slurred, life) comes mainly from romantic books rather than real-life social intercourse, I plainly perceived a positive reaction to my eruditely witty comments on the repressed sexuality bubbling under Ms Radcliffe’s prose within her manner and conversation, and noted a warm delight growing upon her face, which was no doubt returned in my own when she invited me to take a breath of the winter air with her after the ceremony had concluded.
It was then that I was surely damned; her breath soft against my cheek and her fingers carelessly upon my wrist that she whispered dark intimations regarding a society who met with some frequency to plot ill deeds in the chapel of a nearby churchyard. Her effusive and delightful manner of speaking brings to mind Mina Harker from that Irishman Stoker’s recent gothic work (of which I am currently only a few scant chapters through), all excitement and honesty. She also made passing mention to Agrippa’s work as something with which the mysterious cultists were familiar, which instantly energised my already forming plans that I must play the hero in this piece and should investigate this most mysterious of cults.
Further conversation (which on my part was most masterfully and subtly engineered) managed to extricate from her a few key details with which I could track down this organisation and observe their next ritual (planned for tonight!) without alerting her to my brave and possibly dangerous ideas. No, she must not worry for her [HERO], who will single-handedly bring an end to the work of these dark occultists and foil their no doubt monstrous intentions. And such it was, that with most lofty (perhaps in retrospect foolish?) intentions pulsing through my heart and her last deftly coaxed inadvertent instruction (“take the left hand path!”) ringing in my ears, I crept carefully over the wall at the end of Summerhouse Road and landed somewhat less than gracefully in the cemetery just as the celebratory chimes of midnight, and Christmas Day echoed through the empty Stoke Newington streets.
I have read many times of oppressive darkness, but I had truly never fully understood of the meaning before that fateful evening, with even the moonless sky obscured by the thick press of European Oaks and Hawthornes that seemed to grasp downwards for me at every turn. Advancing carefully forwards, with only a sputtering yule candle (stealthily pocketed during the church service) for light, I made my into the central areas of the graveyard, down narrow twisting paths and always accompanied only by constant marble monuments to mortality. It was while on this midnight creep toward the meeting place of some dreadful cult that I began to regret the gothic literature I had most liberally consumed firmly ensconced within my psyche - thorns that whipped at my ankles became clawing, bony hands; owls flapping their wings above transformed to gigantic monstrous vampiric bats and occasional drips of rainwater from the canopy above were transfigured to fresh human blood from some eviscerated victim bound with vicious thorns to the tops of the trees as a grisly warning to interlopers such as myself.
I made it to the centre of the cemetery somehow unmolested by these spectral threats and beheld my ultimate destination. I had not seen its spire looming above even the corpse-fed trees merely because of the pitch-dark night, but close up and illuminated faintly from within, the chapel dominated everything around. Stained blacker even than the night by the thick London smog, its gothic turrets and buttresses seemed as spears thrusting outwards to slaughter and maim with a single rose window glowing like a malevolent unsleeping eye, peering unblinkingly for intruders (such as I, I remembered cooly). The faint light inside indicated that it was inhabited, so I - hands trembling like a decayed velvet drape in a Carpathian breeze - reached out for the imposing, iron-banded door.
My hands were almost upon it when I heard brisk footsteps and careless conversation coming from behind the structure. Curses! I knew that a rapid entrance into the building would easily reveal my presence, but also that a retreat was impossible without broadcasting my location through my feet on the dead leaves that lay scattered all about. It was then that I noticed two smaller doors on either side of the main portal, and my female companion’s last remarks rose unbidden in my ears; and so it was that I took the left hand path, barely slipping into a gloomy vestibule before the originators of those voices rounded the corner.
As my eyes adjusted to the tomb-like darkness - my candle hurriedly snuffed - I noticed I was in a perfect vantage point to observe the goings on - or would be, once I had climbed a small spiralling wooden staircase to a well-concealed platform embedded within the rafters. And so I mounted the first step, willing with every step to make my leaden legs lighter and imperceptible. And suddenly as my mind lingers on that ascent I am pulled violently back to my present - hermit-like within the Rochester Castle; is that similarly a footstep that I perceive on the stairs that lead to my chamber? Or merely a harmless fancy of my own addled mind? - But back to my recollection.
I was lying prone upon my roost, staring downward at robed figures below, my head swimming with new-found vertigo, when the lead cultist lowered his hood to reveal a pale, reflective pate - truly, my eyes had not deceived me! It was that malevolent-visaged Portugese I had noted leading a very different ceremony in the Unitarian church not more than an hour before! It took all my resolve to restrain myself from crying out in surprise, seeing him daubing opaque, eldritch sigils upon the foreheads of his companions in a thick, crimson liquid that pooled in a classlessly rococo goblet. It is true I had not been bestowing upon him my fullest attention earlier in the evening, but I was sure he had not been practising such esoterick rites in the hallowed hall on Newington Green.
The corrupted service was brief and was mainly conducted in schoolboy Latin with occasional multi-lingual words of power picked from a variety of rather obvious sources. After about six or seven minutes of this, the master placed a few roots into a censer and lit them in order to produce a most impressively dense thick green fog that obscured the figures from my lofty position. I was quick thinking enough to cover my mouth with a handkerchief to avoid announcing my position with a choked cough, though by the time my vision was clear enough to discern the stone floor, the figures had dispersed. I must confess a faint sense of disappointment as I descended the staircase - could this really be all the cultists had been plotting? A few weak invocations and a parlour trick with some colourful fog? But as the imagined reader has no doubt noted, I have tended to be rather too hasty with my conclusions. Such was the case here - as I reached to pull the door open, I found that it had been bolted shut. I began to draw the bolts back, before the realisation struck me, as it no doubt has struck the learned inspector of my scholarly account - it had been, and remained: fastened from the inside! A quick glance around the dimly lit hall revealed the other doors to have been similarly locked. The people I had been observing had not left here, at least not by earthly means.
A cold core of fear began to bloom from within my chest - could I be dealing with something beyond my capabilities? Oh vanity, could you not have departed my breast at this point? Alas no, I transfigured that fear into some grotesque mockery of courage and resolved that I would redouble my efforts to pursue these ebon-robed sorcerers. I cast about the room looking for some hint that I might follow to my quarry - and noted for the first time that this place was clearly intended as the final superterranean station on the long fixed rail journey to oblivion. I counted at least a full score of caskets, some empty - others mercifully sealed shut. All around were instruments of memoriam, but from a variety of different traditions. I saw rosaries, tachrichim and episcopalian urns. This cold silent chapel, like death itself, discriminated between neither faith nor creed, but was here for all. That realisation, perhaps strangely, impressed upon me an intense expression of good natured bravura - if this place could accommodate all on their way to whatever lies beyond the final curtain, then I most surely could screw up my resolve and continue on my journey to foil the fiendish travails I had been warned of.
It was at that zenith, that I heard voices again, somehow seeming to emanate from the floor below my feet. Puzzled indeed, I cast about to find some way of descending and was rewarded in no time at all with a brushed iron ring that marked a trapdoor - no doubt intended to blend in seamlessly with the stonework about it, but carelessly replaced, showing its position quite obviously. “Amateurs!” I condescended, hefting the thin stone plate up to reveal a rope ladder leading to a network of catacombs occluded deep below Abney Park cemetery. And such it was that I began my descent.
Reflecting upon the journey through the catacombs now, a few days later, it seems to make little sense to my sense of distance and time. Endless seeming passages, first well-maintained and constructed in the same dark brickwork as the chapel above, were the background to my expedition, but as I descended deeper into the earth (at first ten feet, twenty, but it just kept going down! I estimate I delved at least 200 feet in the first hour alone) the passage gradually seemed older and of unidentified composition. At first occasional reminders of the world outside were visible, such as a tree root breaking through a wall, or a squeaking rat blinking timidly in the glow of my candle, but soon things began to seem more alien. Strange crystalline deposits began to emanate from the walls, projecting a dull throbbing glow of a colour I feel unable now to give a name to. And throwing my mind back, I must have only been down there for a few hours, but at the time it seemed literally as days picking through the stygian caverns deep below Old Stoke Newington Village. And what is most bizarre is that the soles of the shoes I was wearing - a brand new set of fine brown leather I had purchased from a cobbler on Charlotte Street only a few days before - are now heavily worn down, and the stiff toes completely broken in. It is as if I had been walking constantly in them for ten times the amount I must have done.
I’m sure the reader must now be doubting the veracity of my account, but I can only offer my most fevered assurances that I am telling the exact and unaltered truth. In that hellish abyss deep, deep below the slumbering London town above, untouched by any sun for hundreds of thousands of years, lit only by unearthly minerals and silence permanently broken by a weird rumbling hum that was deeper than any sound I had ever heard before, I spent hours, days, weeks - searching, probing, desperately pursuing.
And then, when my throat was dry as sandpaper, my stomach empty and aching and my legs just minutes away from giving in and collapsing beneath me, I discovered my destination. Again, no doubt the reader is wiping tears of amusement from his eyes and labelling me a mad crank, but this was a perfectly cubic chamber of around 200 feet on all sides - like a great cathedral built not to God, but to something like a god - its walls of perfect ebony black, with no fissures or visible definition between bricks and mortar to be discerned and lit from a great spherical extrusion in the very centre of the floor. I recall the light to be organic and pulsing, and of a colour that seemed to contains hints of orange and green, but to have truly been of a spectrum entirely apart from our earthly one.
And standing at the centre - my quarry; or perhaps, my prey. For they were all there, and they were all facing the passage from which I stumbled exhaustedly: The Portuguese, the robed figures from the chapel so far above, the sigils on their foreheads still extant and - my heart sank - my heroine, my Matilda; the pale and beautiful creature who had seemed so innocent and perfect but had no doubt led me here to my oblivion. It is a difficult task to use Latin characters to detail the debauched chant that they sang, so loud it pierced my very essence, but after much correction and reevaluation I would render it thus: Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
I stood transfixed at the inhuman emanations, all strength having departed me utterly. I saw a strange pale orgonal energy bursting from each of the figures in turn and then finally from my own body all around me. All this power conjoined above us and poured into the sphere with an effect very much like the louching of a glass of fine absinthe. And then it began - a truly non-terrestrial sound, an abhorrent slithering of ancient skin upon ancient skin and I saw it bursting forth from the ceiling of the chamber. Impossibly massive and infinite in size, of angles and colours I simply cannot begin to describe - all tentacles and beaks and scales, all ichor and eyes and vicious teeth - it was breaking through into our world from whatever eldritch demesne it had slept for millennia. The old one had been awoken. I can recall the fear on the faces of even the cultists; even they had been unable to comprehend the indescribable horror of the ancient god that they themselves had quickened.
Trying to recall more than the fragments I have set to paper sets an involuntary shiver throughout my very being even now. I am sure that the only reason I retain some fragments of sanity is that I immediately turned and ran as fast as I could without daring to ever turn my head like some foolish Orpheus. The last impressions that remain scratched upon the surface of my recall are strange fractured images as I fled from the chapel. It was as if I was seeing things that had happened long ago, and things that will happen, and things that never would. I saw a barren lava-scorched surface, I saw strange worm like creatures twisting into abominable shapes, I saw so many graves I could not count, I saw a memorial to millions of young men, I saw intoxicated black-garbed figures cavorting upon it, I heard the unearthly distorted music of the Floodlands, I saw too many things to set to paper or indeed keep within my mind at all.
And so this is the truth of what happened to me in my foolish pursuit of forbidden knowledge, and I only pray that I may be able to return safely to Arkham to more accurately analyse what took place on that frozen Christmas Eve. It is now four days later as I sit in my room above the Rochester Castle and commit these final thoughts to manuscript. I wish to be out of London before New Year’s Eve for I fear the coming of the new century. In 1900 all shall be revoked and begun anew, and I wish to be as far away from the crawling tentacled horror that I perceived breaking through into our world. The only thing that keeps me sane is the knowledge that the thing I saw is some weird aberration of sorcery that is created and ruled by man, and thus that something in the great archive of Miskatonic University will help us banish from this plane of existence and return things to the state they were and have always been.
And so it is that I conclude my account - I shall head down to Southampton tomorrow to get upon the next ship across the Atlantic, however comfortable the cabin may be; I shall return. But oh - I note just now a sealed envelope upon my desk, evidently placed by the landlord for me to read. It is a message in what is no doubt Treadwell’s hand, though with less confidence than I remember; fragmentary exhortations in a trembling scrawl. I shall reproduce it word for word here:
Farewell -,
Have taken the easy way out. Please forgive me. Translated the last pages. Was not meant to be read by men. We are not the creators. We inherited. We are not the creation of God. We are birthed of ancient rites. The great one is coming. Will take back what is his. Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
Farewell.
And then nothing. I must hurry - I shall bundle up these notes to be delivered to Arkham immediately, and hopefully they shall reach home before I do. Please do not disregard these words as the ravings of a madman - I shall deliver the grimoire soon enough and we will find a way to stop this.
But what is that? The sound I hear below - footsteps upon the stairs. It cannot be! Feet ascending the creaking boards up to my room and - oh, that inhuman slithering! Preserve me!
