The Call of Cthulhu, E-bok

The story is presented as a manuscript found among the papers of the late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston . In the text, Thurston recounts his discovery of notes left behind by his granduncle, George Gammell Angell, a prominent Professor of Semitic languages at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who died suddenly in the winter of 1926–27 after being jostled by a nautical-looking negro . The first chapter, The Horror in Clay, concerns a small bas-relief sculpture found among the papers, which the narrator describes: My somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature.... A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings. The sculpture is the work of Henry Anthony Wilcox, a student at the Rhode Island School of Design who based the work on his delirious dreams of great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror. Wilcox frequently references the terms Cthulhu and R lyeh, and Angell also discovers reports of outre mental illnesses and outbreaks of group folly or mania around the world (in New York City, hysterical Levantines mob police in California, a Theosophist colony dons white robes to await a glorious fulfillment ). The second chapter, The Tale of Inspector Legrasse, discusses the first time the Professor had heard the word Cthulhu and seen a similar image. At the 1908 meeting of the American Archaeological Society in St. Louis, Missouri, aNew Orleans police official named John Raymond Legrasse asked the assembled antiquarians to identify a statuette composed of an unidentifiable greenish-black stone, that had been captured some months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting. The idol resembles the Wilcox sculpture, and represented a ...thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters . On November 1, 1907, Legrasse had led a party of policemen in search of several women and children who disappeared from a squatter community. The police found the victims oddly marred bodies being used in a ritual that centered around the statuette: almost 100 men — all of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type — were braying, bellowing, and writhing and repeatedly chanting the phrase, Ph nglui mglw nafh Cthulhu R lyeh wgah nagl fhtagn . After killing five of the participants and arresting 47 others, Legrasse interrogated the prisoners and learned the central idea of their loathsome faith : They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men...and...formed a cult which had never died...hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty...

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