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The Diary of Alonzo Typer

by H. P. Lovecraft and William Lumley

Written October 1935

Published February 1938 in Weird Tales, 31, No. 2, 152-66.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Alonzo Hasbrouch Typer of Kingston, New York, was last seen
and recognized on April 17, 1908, around noon, at the Hotel Richmond in
Batavia. He was the only survivor of an ancient Ulster Country family, and
was fifty-three years old at the time of his disapperance.

Mr. Typer was educated privately and at Columbia and Heidelberg
universities. All his life was spent as a student, the field of his
researches including many obscure and generally feared borderlands of
human knowledge. His papers on vampirism, ghouls and poltergeist phenomena
were privately printed after rejection by many publishers. He resigned
from the Society for Psychical Research in 1900 after a series of
peculiarly bitter controversies.

At various times Mr. Typer traveled extensively, sometimes dropping out of
site for long periods. He is known to have visited obscure spots in Nepal,
India, Tibet, and Indo-China, and passed most of the year 1899 on
mysterious Easter Island. The extensive search for Mr. Typer after his
disappeaance yielded no results, and his estate was divided among distant
cousins in New York City.

The diary herewith presented was allegedly found in the ruins of a large
country house near Attica, N.Y., which had borne a curiously sinister
reputation for generations before its collapse. The edifice was very old,
antedating the general white settlement of the region, and had formed the
home of a strange and secretive family named van der Heyl, which had
migrated from Albany in 1746 under a curious cloud of witchcraft
suspicion. The structure probably dated from about 1760.

Of the history of the van der Heyls very little is known. They remained
entirely aloof from their normal neighbors, employed negro servants
brought directly from Africa and speaking little English, and educated
their children privately and at European colleges. Those of them who went
out into the world were soon lost to sight, though not before gaining evil
repute for association with Black Mass groups and cults of even darker
significance.

Around the dreaded house a straggling village arose, populated by Indians
and later by renegades from the surrounding contry, which bore the dubious
name of Chorazin. Of the singular hereditary strains which afterward
appeared in the mixed Chorazin villagers, several monographs have been
written by ethnologists. Just behind the village, and in sight of the van
der Heyl house, is a steep hill crowned with a peculiar ring of ancient
standing stones which the Iroquois always regarded with fear and loathing.
The origin and nature of the stones, whose date, according to
archeological and climatalogical evidence, must be fabulously early, is a
problem still unsolved.

From about 1795 onward, the legends of the incoming pioneers and later
population have much to say about strange cries and chants proceeding at
certain seaons from Chorazin and from the great house and hill of standing
stones; though there is reason to suppose that the noises ceased about
1872, when the entire van der Heyl household - servants and all - suddenly
and simultaneously disappeared.

Thenceforward the house was deserted; for other disastrous events -
including three unexplained deaths, five disappearances, and four cases of
sudden insanity - occurred when later owners and interested visitors
attempted to stay in it. The house, village, and extensive rural areas on
all sides reverted to the state and were auctioned off in the absence of
discoverable van der Heyl heirs. Since about 1890 the owners (successively
the late Charles A. Shields and his son Oscar S. Shields, of Buffalo) have
left the entire property in a state of absolute neglect, and have warned
all inquirers not to visit the region.

Of those known to have approached the house during the last forty years,
most were occult students, police officers, newspaper men, and odd
characters from abroad. Among the latter was a mysterious Eurasian,
probably from Chochin-China, whose later appearance with blank mind and
bizarre mutilations excited wide press notice in 1903.

Mr. Typer's diary - a book about 6 x 3 1/2 inches in size, with tough
paper and an oddly durable binding of thin sheet metal - was discovered in
the possession of one of the decadent Chorazin villagers on November 16,
1935, by a state policeman sent to investigate the rumored collapse of the
deserted van der Heyl mansion. The house had indeed fallen, obviously from
sheer age and decrepitude, in the severe gale of November 12.
Disintergration was peculiarly complete, and no thorough search of the
ruins could be made for several weeks. John Eagle, the swarthy,
simian-faced, Indian-like villager who had the diary, said that he found
the book quite near the surface of the debris, in what must have been an
upper front room.

Very little of the contents of the house could be identified, though an
enormous and astonishingly solid brick vault in the cellar (whose ancient
iron door had to be blasted open because of the strangely figured and
perversely tenacious lock) remained intact and presented several puzzling
features. For one thing, the walls were covered with still undeciphered
hieroglyphs roughly incised in the brickwork. Another peculiarity was a
huge circular aperture in the rear of the vault, blocked by a cave-in
evidently caused by the collapse of the house.

But strangest of all was the apparently recent deposit of some fetid,
slimy, pitch-black substance on the flagstoned floor, extending in a
yardbroad, irregular line with one end at the blocked circular aperture.
Those who first opened the vault declared that the place smelled like the
snake-house at a zoo.

The diary, which was apparently designed solely to cover an investigation
of the dreaded van der Heyl house, by the vanished Mr. Typer, has been
proved by handwriting experts to be genuine. The script shows signs of
increasing nervous strain as it progresses toward the end, in places
becoming almost illegible. Chorazin villagers - whose stupidity and
taciturnity baffle all students of the region and its secrets - admit no
recollection of Mr. Typer as distinguished from other rash visitors to the
dreaded house.

The text of the diary is here given verbatim and without comment. How to
interpret it, and what, other than the writer's madness, to infer from it,
the reader must decide for himself. Only the future can tell what its
value may be in solving a generation-old mystery. It may be remarked that
genealogists confirm Mr. Typer's belated memory in the matter of Adriaen
Sleght.

THE DIARY

Arrived here about 6 P.M. Had to walk all the way from Attica in the teeth
of an oncoming storm, for no one would rent me a horse or rig, and I can't
run an automobile. This place is even worse than I had expected, and I
dread what is coming, even though I long at the same time to learn the
secret. All too soon will come the night - the old Walpurgis sabbat horror
- and after that time in Wales I know what to look for. Whatever comes, I
shall not flinch. Prodded by some unfathomable urge, I have given my whole
life to the quest of unholy mysteries. I came here for nothing else, and
will not quarrel with fate.

It was very dark when I got here, though the sun had by no means set. The
stormclouds were the densest I had ever seen, and I could not have found
my way but for the lightning-flashes. The village is a hateful little
back-water, and its few inhabitants no better than idiots. One of them
saluted me in a queer way, as if he knew me. I could see very little of
the landscape - just a small, swamp valley of strange brown weedstalks and
dead fungi surrounded by scraggly, evilly twisted trees with bare boughs.
But behind the village is a dismal-looking hill on whose summit is a
circle of great stones with another stone at the center. That, without
question, is the vile primordial thing V - - - told me about the N - - -
estbat.

The great house lies in the midst of a park all overgrown with
curious-looking briars. I could scarcely break through, and when I did the
vast age and decrepitude of the building almost stopped me from entering.
The place looked filthy and diseased, and I wondered how so leprous a
building could hang together. It is wooden; and though its original lines
are hidden by a bewildering tangle of wings added at various dates, I
think it was first built in the square colonial fashion of New England.
Probably that was easier to build than a Dutch stone house - and then,
too, I recall that Dirck van der Heyl's wife was from Salem, a daughter of
the unmentionable Abaddon Corey. There was a small pillared porch, and I
got under it just as the storm burst. It was a fiendish tempest - black as
midnight, with rain in sheets, thunder and lightning like the day of
general dissolution, and a wind that actually clawed at me.

The door was unlocked, so I took out my electric torch and went inside.
Dust was inches thick on floor and furniture, and the place smelled like a
mold-caked tomb. There was a hall reaching all the way through, and a
curving staircase on the right.

I plowed my way upstairs and selected this front room to camp out it. The
whole place seems fully furnished, though most of the furniture is
breaking down. This is written at 8 o'clock, after a cold meal from my
traveling-case. After this the village people will bring me supplies,
though they won't agree to come any closer than the ruins of the park gate
until (as they say) later. I wish I could get rid of an unpleasant feeling
of familiarity with this place.

Later

I am conscious of several presences in this house. One in particular is
decidedly hostile toward me - a malevolent will which is seeking to break
down my own and overcome me. I must not countenance this for an instant,
but must use all my forces to resist it. It is appallingly evil, and
definitely nonhuman. I think it must be allied to powers outside Earth -
powers in the spaces behind time and beyond the universe. It towers like a
colossus, bearing out what is said in the Aklo writings. There is such a
feeling of vast size connected with it that I wonder these chambers can
contain its bulk - and yet it has no visible bulk. Its age must be
unutterably vast - shockingly, indescribably so.

April 18

Slept very little last night. At 3 A.M. a strange, creeping wind began to
pervade the whole region, ever rising until the house rocked as if in a
typhoon. As I went down the staircase to see the rattling front door the
darkness took half-visible forms in my imagination. Just below the landing
I was pushed violently from behind - by the wind, I suppose, though I
could have sworn I saw the dissolving outlines of a gigantic black paw as
I turned quickly about. I did not lose my footing, but safely finished the
descent and shot the heavy bolt of the dangerously shaking door.

I had not meant to explore the house before dawn; yet now, unable to sleep
again, and fired with mixed terror and curiousity, I felt reluctant to
postpone my search. With my powerful torch I plowed through the dust to
the great south parlor, where I knew the portraits would be. There they
were, just as V - - - had said, and as I seemed to know from some obscurer
source as well. Some were so blackened and dustclouded that I could make
little or nothing of them, but from those I could trace I recognized that
they were indeed of the hateful line of the van der Heyls. Some of the
paintings seemed to suggest faces I had known; but just what faces, I
could not recall.

The outlines of that frightful hybrid Joris - spawned in 1773 by Dirck's
youngest daughter - were clearest of all, and I could trace the green eyes
and the serpent look in his face. Every time I shut off the flashlight
that face would seem to glow in the dark until I half fancied it shone
with a faint, greenish light of its own. The more I looked, the more evil
it seemed, and I turned away to avoid hallucinations of changing
expression.

But that to which I turned was even worse. The long, dour face, small,
closely set eyes and swine-like features identified it at once, even
though the artist had striven to make the snout look as human as possible.
This was what V - - - had whispered about. As I stared in horror, I
thought the eyes took on a reddish glow, and for a moment the background
seemed replaced by an alien and seemingly irrelevant scene - a lone, bleak
moor beneath a dirty yellow sky, whereon grew a wretched-looking
blackthorn bush. Fearing for my sanity, I rushed from that accursed
gallery to the dust-cleared corner upstairs where I have my "camp."

Later

Decided to explore some more of the labyrinthine wings of the house by
daylight. I cannot be lost, for my footprints are distinct in the
ankle-deep dust, and I can trace other identifying marks when necessary.
It is curious how easily I learn the intricate windings of the corridors.
Followed a long, outflung northerly "ell" to its extremity, and came to a
locked door, which I forced. Beyond was a very small room quite crowded
with furniture, and with the panelling badly worm-eaten. On the outer wall
I spied a black space behind the rotting woodwork, and discovered a narrow
secret passage leading downward to unknown inky depths. It was a steeply
inclined chute or tunnel without steps or handholds, and I wondered what
its use could have been.

Above the fireplace was a moldy painting, which I found on close
inspection to be that of a young woman in the dress of the late Eighteenth
Century. The face is of classic beauty, yet with the most fiendishly evil
expression which I have ever known the human countenance to bear. Not
merely callousness, greed, and cruelty, but some quality hideous beyond
human comprehension seems to sit upon those finely carved features. And as
I looked it seemed to me that the artist - or the slow processes of mold
and decay - had imparted to that pallid complexion a sickly greenish cast,
and the least suggestion of an almost imperceptibly scaly texture. Later I
ascended to the attic, where I found several chests of strange books -
many of utterly alien aspects in letters and in physical form alike. One
contained variants of the Aklo formulae which I had never known to exist.
I have not yet examined the books on the dusty shelves downstairs.

April 19

There are certainly unseen presences here, even though the dust bears no
footprints but my own. Cut a path through the briars yeseterday to the
park gate where my supplies are left, but this morning I found it closed.
Very odd, since the bushes are barely stirring with spring sap. Agin I had
that feeling of something at hand so colossal that the chambers can
scarely contain it. This time I feel more than one of the presences is of
such a size, and I know now that the third Aklo ritual - which I found in
that book in the attic yesterday - would make such being solid and
visible. Whether I shall dare to try this materialization remains to be
seen. The perils are great.

Last night I began to glimpse evanescent shadow-faces and forms in the dim
corners of the halls and chambers - faces and forms so hideous and
loathsome that I dare not describe them. They seemed allied in substance
to that titanic paw which tried to push me down the stairs night before
last, and must of course be phantoms of my disturbed imagination. What I
am seeking would not be quite like these things. I have seen the paw
again, sometimes alone and sometimes with its mate, but I have resolved to
ignore all such phenomena.

Early this afternoon I explored the cellar for the first time, descending
by a ladder found in a store-room, since the wooden steps had rotted away.
The whole place is a mass of nitrous encrustations, with amorphous mounds
marking the spots where various objects have disintegrated. At the farther
end is a narrow passage which seems to extend under the northerly "ell"
where I found the little locked room, and at the end of this is a heavy
brick wall with a locked iron door. Apparently belonging to a vault of
some sort, this wall and door bear evidences of the Eighteenth Century
workmanship and must be contemporary with the oldest additions to the
house - clearly pre-Revolutionary. On the lock, which is obviously older
than the rest of the ironwork, are engraved certain symbols which I cannot
decipher.

V - - - had not told me about this vault. It fills me with a greater
disquiet than anything else I have seen, for every time I approach it I
have an almost irresistible impulse to listen for something. Hitherto no
untoward sounds have marked my stay in this malign place. As I left the
cellar I wished devoutly that the steps were still there; for my progress
up the ladder seemed maddeningly slow. I do not want to go down there
again - and yet some evil genius urges me to try it at night if I would
learn what is to be learned.

April 20

I have sounded the depths of horror - only to be made aware of still lower
depths. Last night the temptation was too strong, and in the black small
hours I descended once more into that nitrous, hellish cellar with my
flashlight, tiptoeing among the amorphous heaps to that terrible brick
wall and locked door. I made no sound, and refrained from whispering any
of the incantations I knew, but I listened with mad intentness.

At last I heard the sounds from beyond those barred plates of sheet iron,
the menacing padding and muttering as of gigantic night-things within.
Then, too, there was a damnable slithering, as of a vast serpent or
sea-beast dragging its monstrous folds over a paved floor. Nearly
paralyzed with firght, I glanced at the huge rusty lock, and at the alien,
cryptic hieroglyphs graven upon it. They were signs I could not recognize,
and something in their vaguely Mongoloid technique hinted at a blasphemous
and indescribable antiquity. At times I fancied I could see them glowing
with a greenish light.

I turned to flee, but found that vision of the titan paws before me, the
great talons seeming to swell and become more tangible as I gazed. Out of
the cellar's evil blackness they stretched, with shadowy hints of scaly
wrists beyond them, and with a waxing, malignant will guiding their
horrible gropings. Then I heard from behind me - within that abominable
vault - a fresh burst of muffled reverberations which seemed to echo from
far horizons like distant thunder. Impelled by this greater fear, I
advanced toward the shadowy paws with my flashlight and saw them vanish
before the full force of the electric beam. Then up the ladder I raced,
torch between my teeth, nor did I rest till I had regained my upstairs
"camp."

What is to be my ultimate end, I dare not imagine. I came as a seeker, but
now I know that something is seeking me. I could not leave if I wished.
This morning I tried to go to the gate for my supplies, but found the
briars twisted tightly in my path. It was the same in every direction -
behind and on all sides of the house. In places the brown, barbed vines
had uncurled to astonishing heights, forming a steel-like hedge against my
egress. The villagers are connected with all this. When I went indoors I
found my supplies in the great front hall, though without any clue as to
how they came there. I am sorry now that I swept the dust away. I shall
scatter some more and see what prints are left.

This afternoon I read some of the books in the great shadowy library at
the rear of the ground floor, and formed certain suspicions which I cannot
bear to mention. I had never seen the text of the Pnakotic Manuscripts or
of the Eltdown Shards before, and would not have come here had I known
what they contain. I believe it is too late now - for the awful Sabbat is
only ten days away. It is for that night of horror that they are saving
me.

April 21

I have been studying the portraits again. Some have names attached, and I
noticed one - of an evil-faced woman, painted some two centuries ago -
which puzzled me. It bore the name of Trintje van der Heyl Sleght, and I
have a distinct impression that I once met the name of Sleght before, in
some significant connection. It was not horrible then, though it becomes
so now. I must rack my brain for the clue.

The eyes of the pictures haunt me. Is it possible that some of them are
emerging more distinctly from their shrouds of dust and decay and mold?
The serpent-faced and swine-faced warlocks stare horribly at me from their
blackened frames, and a score of other hybrid faces are beginning to peer
out of shadowy backgrounds. There is a hideous look of family resemblance
in them all, and that which is human is more horrible than that which is
non-human. I wish they reminded me less of other faces - faces I have
known in the past. They were an accursed line, and Cornelis of Leydon was
the worst of them. It was he who broke down the barrier after his father
had found that other key. I am sure that V - - - knows only a fragment of
the horrible truth, so that I am indeed unprepared and defenseless. What
of the line before old Class? What he did in 1591 could never have been
done without generations of evil heritage, or some link with the outside.
And what of the branches this monstrous line has sent forth? Are they
scattered over the world, all awaiting their common heritage of horror? I
must recall the place where I once so particularly noticed the name of
Sleght.

I wish I could be sure that those pictures stay always in their frames.
For several hours now I have been seeing momentary presences like the
earlier paws and shadow-faces and forms, but closely duplicating some of
the ancient portraits. Somehow I can never glimpse a presence and the
portrait it resembles at the same time - the light is always wrong for one
or the other, or else the presence and the portrait are in different
rooms.

Perhaps, as I have hoped, the presences are mere figments of imagination,
but I cannot be sure now. Some are female, and of the same helling beauty
as the picture in the little locked room. Some are like no portrait I have
seen, yet make me feel that their painted features lurk unrecognized
beneath the mold and soot of canvases I cannot decipher. A few, I
desperately fear, have approached materialization in solid or semi-solid
form - and some have a dreaded and unexplained familiarity.

There is one woman who in full loveliness excels all the rest. Her
poisonous charms are like a honeyed flower growing on the brink of hell.
When I look at her closely she vanishes, only to reappear later. Her face
has a greenish cast, and now and then I fancy I can spy a suspicion of the
squamous in its smooth texture. Who is she? Is she that being who dwelt in
the little locked room a century and more ago?

My supplies were again left in the front hall - that, clearly, is to be
the custom. I had sprinkled dust about to catch footprints, but this
morning the whole hall was swept clean by some unknown agency.

April 22

This has been a day of horrible discovery. I explored the cobwebbed attic
again, and found a carved, crumbling chest - plainly from Holland - full
of blasphemous books and papers far older than any hitherto encountered
here. There was a Greek Necronomicon, a Norman-French Livre d'Eibon, and a
first edition of old Ludvig Prinn's De Vermis Mysteriis. But the old bound
manuscript was the worst. It was in low Latin, and full of the strange,
crabbed handwriting of Claes van der Heyl, being evidently the diary or
notebook kept by him between 1560 and 1580. When I unfastened the
blackened silver clasp and opened the yellowed leaves a colored drawing
fluttered out - the likeness of a monstrous creature resembling nothing so
much as a squid, beaked and tentacled, with great yellow eyes, and with
certain abominable approximations to the human form in its contours.

I had never before seen so utterly loathsome and nightmarish a form. On
the paws, feet, and head-tentacles were curious claws - reminding me of
the colossal shadow-shapes which had groped so horribly in my path - while
the entity as a whole sat upon a great throne-like pedastal inscribed with
unknown hieroglyphs of vaguely Chinese cast. About both writing and image
there hung an air of sinister evil so profound and pervasive that I could
not think it the product of any one world or age. Rather must that
monstrous shape be a focus for all the evil in unbounded space, throughout
the eons past and to come - and those eldritch symbols be vile sentitent
ikons endows with a morbid life of their own and ready to wrest themselves
from the parchment for the reader's destruction. To the meaning of that
monster and of those hieroglpyhs I had no clue, but I knew that both had
been traced with a hellish precision and for no namable purpose. As I
studdied the leering characters, their kinship to the symbols on that
ominous lock in the cellar became more and more manifest. I left the
picture in the attic, for never could sleep come to me with such a thing
near by.

All the afternoon and evening I read in the manuscript book of old Claes
van der Heyl; and what I read will cloud and make horrible whatever period
of life lies ahead of me. The genesis of the world, and of previous
worlds, unfolded itself before my eyes. I learned of the city Shamballah,
built by the Lemurians fifty million years ago, yet inviolate still behind
its wall of psychic force in the eastern dester. I learned of the Book of
Dzyan, whose first six chapters antedate the Earth, and which was old when
the lords of Venus came through space in their ships to civilize our
planet. And I saw recorded in writing for the first time that name which
others had spoken to me in whispers, and which I had known in a closer and
more horrible way - the shunned and dread name of Yian-Ho.

In several places I was help up by passages requiring a key. Eventually,
from various allusions, I gathered that old Claes had not dared to embody
all his knowledge in one book, but had left certain points for another.
Neither volume can be wholly intelligible without its fellow; hence I have
resolved to find the second one if it lies anywhere within this accursed
house. Though plainly a prisoner, I have not lost my lifelong zeal for the
unknown; and am determined to probe the cosmos as deeply as possible
before doom comes.

April 23

Searched all the morning for the second diary, and found it about noon in
a desk in the little locked room. Like the first, it is in Claes van der
Heyl's barbarous Latin, and it seems to consist of disjointed notes
referring to various sections of the other. Glancing through the leaves, I
spied at once the abhorred name of Yian-Ho - of Yian-Ho, that lost and
hidden city wherein brood eon-old secrets, and of which dim memories older
than the body lurk behind the minds of all men. It was repeated many
times, and the text around it was strewn with crudely-drawn hieroglyphs
plainly akin to those on the pedestal in that hellish drawing I had seen.
Here, clearly, lay the key to that monstrous tentacled shape and its
forbidden message. With this knowledge I ascended the creaking stairs to
the attic of cobwebs and horror.

When I tried to open the attic door it stuck as never before. Several
times it resisted every effort to open it, and when at last it gave way I
had a distinct feeling that some colossal unseen shape had suddenly
released it - a shape that soared away on non-material but audibly beating
wings. When I found the horrible drawing I felt that it was not precisely
where I left it. Applying the key in the other book, I soon saw that the
latter was no instant guide to the secret. It was only a clue - a clue to
a secret too black to be left lightly guarded. It would take hours -
perhaps days - to extract the awful message.

Shall I live long enough to learn the secret? The shadowy black arms and
paws haunt my vision more and more now, and seem even more titanic than at
first. Nor am I ever long free from those vague, unhuman presences whose
nebulous bulk seems too vast for the chambers to contain. And now and then
the grotesque, evanescent faces and forms, and the mocking
portrait-shapes, troop before me in bewildering confusion.

Truly, there are terrible primal arcana of Earth which had better be left
unknown and unevoked; dread secrets which have nothing to do with man, and
which man may learn only in exchange for peace and sanity; cryptic truths
which make the knower evermore an alien among his kind, and cause him to
walk alone on Earth. Likewise there are dread survivals of things older
and more potent than man; things that have blasphemously straggled down
through the eons to ages never ment for them; monstrous entities that have
lain sleeping endlessly in incredible crypts and remote caverns, outside
the laws of reason and causation, and ready to be waked by such
blasphemers as shall know their dark forbidden signs and furtive
passwords.

April 24

Studied the picture and the key all day in the attic. At sunset I heard
strange sounds, of a sort not encountered before and seeming to come from
far away. Listening, I realized that they must flow from that queer abrupt
hill with the circle of standing stones, which lies behind the village and
some distance north of the house. I had heard that there was a path from
the house leading up that hill to the primal cromlech, and had suspected
that at certain seasons the van der Heyls had much occasion to use it; but
the whole matter had hitherto lain latent in my consciousness. The present
sounds consisted of a shrill piping intermingled with a peculiar and
hideous sort of hissing or whistling, a bizarre, alien kind of music, like
nothing which the annals of Earth describe. It was very faint, and soon
faded, but the matter has set met thinking. It is toward the hill that the
long, northerly "ell" with the secret chute, and the locked brick vault
under it, extend. Can there be any connection which has so far eluded me?

April 25

I have made a peculiar and disturbing discovery about the nature of my
imprisonment. Drawn toward the hill by a sinsiter fascination, I found the
briars giving way before me, but in that direction only. There is a ruined
gate, and beneath the bushes the traces of an old path no doubt exist. The
briars extend part-way up and all around the hill, though the summit with
the standing stones bears only a curious growth of moss and stunted grass.
I climbed the hill and spent several hours there, noticing a strange wind
which seems always to sweep around the forbidding monoliths and which
sometimes seems to whisper in an oddly articulate though darkly cryptic
fashion.

These stones, both in color and texture, resemble nothing I have seen
elsewhere. They are neither brown nor gray, but rather of a dirty yellow
merging into an evil green and having a suggestion of chameleon-like
variability. Their texture is queerly like that of a scaled serpent, and
is inexplicably nauseous to the touch - being as cold and clammy as the
skin of a toad or other reptile. Near the central menhir is a singular
stone-rimmed hollow which I cannot explain, but which may possibly form
the entrance to a long-choked well or tunnel. When I sought to descend the
hill at points away from the house I found the briars intercepting me as
before, though the path toward the house was easily retraceable.

April 26

Up on the hill again this evening, and found that windy whispering much
more distinct. The almost angry humming came close to actual speech, of a
vague, sibilant sort, and reminded me of the strange piping chant I had
heard from a far. After sunset there came a curious flash of premature
summer lightning on the northern horizon, followed almost at once by a
queer detonation high in the fading sky. Something about this phenomenon
disturbed me greatly, and I could not escape the impression that the noise
ended in a kind of unhuman hissing speech which trailed off into guttural
cosmic laughter. Is my mind tottering at last, or has my unwarranted
curiousity evoked unheard-of horrors from the twilight spaces? The Sabbat
is close at hand now. What will be the end?

April 27

At last my dreams are to be realized! Whether or not my life or spirit or
body will be claimed, I shall enter the gateway! Progress in deciphering
those crucial hieroglpyhs in the picture has been slow, but this afternoon
I hit upon the final clue. By evening I knew their meaning - and that
meaning can apply in only one way to the things I have encountered in this
house.

There is beneath this house - sepulchered I know not where - an Ancient
One Who will show me the gateway I would enter, and give me the lost signs
and words I shall need. How long It has lain buried here, forgotten save
by those who reared the stone on the hill, and by those who later sought
out this place and built this house, I cannot conjecture. It was in search
of this Thing, beyond question, that Hendrik van der Heyl came to
New-Netherland in 1638. Men of this Earth know It not, save in the secret
whispers of the fear-shaken few who have found or inherited the key. No
human eye has even yet glimpsed It - unless, perhaps, the vanished wizards
of this house delved farther than has been guessed.

With knowledge of the symbols came likewise a mastery of the Seven Lost
Signs of Terror, and a tacit recognition of the hideous and unutterable
Words of Fear. All that remains for me to accomplish is the Chant which
will transfigure that Forgotten One Who is Guardian of the Ancient
Gateway. I marvel much at the Chant. It is composed of strange and
repellent gutturals and disturbing sibilants resembling no language I have
ever encountered, even in the blackest chapters of the Livre d'Eibon. When
I visited the hill at sunset I tried to read it aloud, but evoked in
response only a vague, sinister rumbling on the far horizon, and a thin
cloud of elemental dust that writhed and whirld like some evil living
thing. Perhaps I do not pronounce the alien syllables correctly, or
perhaps it is only on the Sabbat - that hellish Sabbat for which the
Powers in this house are without question holding me - that the great
Transfiguration can occur.

Had an odd spell of fright this morning. I thought for a moment that I
recalled where I had seen that baffling name of Sleght before, and the
prospect of realization filled me with unutterable horror.

April 28

Today dark ominous clouds have hovered intermittently over the circle on
this hill. I have noticed such clouds several times before, but their
contours and arrangements now hold a fresh significance. They are
snake-like and fantastic, and curiously like the evil shadow-shapes I have
seen in the house. They float in a circle around the primal cromlech,
revolving repeatedly as though endowed with a sinister life and purpose. I
could swear that they give forth an angry murmering. After some fifteen
minutes they sail slowly away, ever to the eastward, like the units of a
straggling batallion. Are they indeed those dread Ones whom Solomon knew
of old - those giant black beings whose number is legion and whose tread
doth shake the earth?

I have been rehearsing the Chant that will transfigure the Nameless Thing;
yet strange fears assail me even when I utter the syllables under my
breath. Piercing all evidence together, I have now discovered that the
only way to It is throught the locked cellar vault. That vault was built
with a hellish purpose, and must cover the hidden burrow leading to the
Immemorial Lair. What guardians live endlessly within, flourishing from
century to century on an unknown nourishment, only the mad may conjecture.
The warlocks of this house, who called them out of inner Earth, have known
them only too well, as the shocking portraits and memories of the place
reveal.

What troubles me most is the limited nature of the Chant. It evokes the
Nameless One, yet provides no method for the control of That Which is
evoked. There are, of course, the general signs and gestures, but whether
they will prove effective toward such an One remains to be seen. Still,
the rewards are great enough to justify any danger, and I could not
retreat if I would, since an unknown force plainly urges me on.

I have discovered one more obstacle. Since the locked cellar vault must be
traversed, the key to that place must be found. The lock is far too strong
for forcing. That the key is somewhere hereabouts cannot be doubted, but
the time before the Sabbat is very short. I must search diligently and
thoroughly. It will take courage to unlock that iron door, for what
prisoned horrors may not lurk within?

Later

I have been shunning the cellar for the past day or two, but late this
afternoon I again descended to those forbidding precincts.

At first all was silent, but within five minutes the menacing padding and
muttering began once more beyond the iron door. This time it was loud and
more terrifying than on any previous occasion, and I likewise recognized
the slithering that bespoke some monstrous sea-beast - now swifter and
nervously intensified, as if the thing were striving to force its way
through the portal where I stood.

As the pacing grew louder, more restless, and more sinister, there began
to pound through it those hellish and more unidentifiable reverberations
which I had heard on my second visit to the cellar - those muffled
reverberations which seemed to echo from far horizons like distant
thunder. Now, however, their volume was magnified an hundredfold, and
their timbre freighted with new and terrifying implications. I can compare
the sound to nothing more aptly than the roar of some dread monster of the
vanished saurian age, when primal horrors roamed the Earth, and Valusia's
serpent-men laid the foundation-stones of evil magic. To such a roar - but
swelled to deafening heights reached by no known organic throat - was this
shocking sound akin. Dare I unlock the door and face the onslaught of what
lies beyond?

April 29

The key to the vault is found. I came upon it this noon in the little
locked room - buried beneath rubbish in a drawer of the ancient desk, as
if some belated effort to conceal it had been made. It was wrapped in a
crumbling newspaper dated October 31, 1872; but there was an inner
wrapping of dried skin - evidently the hide of some unknown reptile -
which bore a Low Latin message in the same crabbed writing as that of the
notebooks I found. As I had thought, the lock and key were vastly older
than the vault. Old Claes van der Heyl had them ready for something he or
his descendants meant to do - and how much older than he they were I could
not estimate. Deciphering the Latin message, I trembled in a fresh access
of clutching terror and nameless awe.

"The secrets of the monstrous primal Ones;" ran the crabbed text, "whose
cryptic words relate the hidden things that were before man; the things no
one of Earth should learn, lest peace be for ever forfeited; shall be me
never suffer revelation. To Yian-Ho, that lost and forbidden city of
countless eons whose place may not be told, I have been in the veritable
flesh of this body, as none other among the living has been. Therein have
I found, and thence have I borne away, that knowledge which I would glady
lose, though I may not. I have learnt to bridge a gap that should not be
bridged, and must call out of the Earth That Which should not be waked nor
called. And what is sent to follow me will not sleep till I or those after
me have found and done what is to be found and done.

"That which I have awaked and borne away with me, I may not part with
again. So it is written in the Book of Hidden Things. That which I have
willed to be has twined its dreadful shape around me, and - if I live not
to do its bidding - around those children born and unborn who shall come
after me, until the bidding be done. Strange may be their joinings, and
awful the aid they may summon till the end be reached. Into lands unknown
and dim must the seeking go, and a house must be built for the outer
guardians.

"This is the key to that lock which was given me in the dreadful, eon-old
and forbidden city of Yian-Ho; the lock which I or mine must place upon
the vestibule of That Which is to be found. And may the Lords of Yaddith
succor me - or him - who must set that lock in place or turn the key
thereof."

Such was the message - a message which, once I had read it, I seemed to
have known before. Now, as I write these words, the key is before me. I
gaze on it with mixed dread and longing, and cannot find words to describe
its aspect. It is of the same unknown, subtly greenish frosted metal as
the lock; a metal best compared to brass tarnished with verdigris. Its
design is alien and fantastic, and the coffin-shaped end of the ponderous
bulk leaves no doubt of the lock it was meant to fit. The handle roughly
forms a strange, nonhuman image, whose exact outlines and identity cannot
now be traced. Upon holding it for any length of time I seem to feel an
alien, anomalous life in the cold metal - a quickening or pulsing too
feeble for ordinary recognition.

Below the eidolon is graven a faint, eon-worn legend in those blasphemous,
Chinese-like hieroglyphs I have come to know so well. I can only make out
the beginning - the words: "My vengeance lurks . . ." - before the text
fades to insistinctness. There is some fatality in this timely finding of
the key - for tomorrow night comes the hellish Sabbat. But strangely
enough, amidst all this hideous expectancy, that question of the Sleght
name bothers me more and more. Why should I dread to find it linked with
the van der Heyls?

Walpurgis-Eve - April 30

The time has come. I waked last night to see the key glowing with a lurid
greenish radiance - that same morbid green which I have seen in the eyes
and skin of certain portraits here, on the shocking lock and key, on the
monstrous menhirs of the hill, and in a thousand other recesses of my
consciousness. There were strident whispers in the air - sibilant
whisperings like those of the wind around that dreadful cromlech.
Something spoke to me out of the frore [?] aether of space, and it said,
"The hour falls." It is an omen, and I laugh at my own fears. Have I not
the dread words and the Seven Lost Signs of Terror - the power coercive of
any Dweller in the cosmos or in the unknown darkened spaces? I will no
longer hesistate.

The heavens are very dark, as if a terrific storm were coming on - a storm
even greater than that of the night when I reached here, nearly a
fortnight ago. From the village, less than a mile away, I hear a queer and
unwonted babbling. It is as I thought - these poor degraded idiots are
within the secret, and keep the awful Sabbat on the hill.

Here in the house the shadows gather densely. In the darkness the sky
before me almost glows with a greenish light of its own. I have no yet
been to the cellar. It is better that I wait, lest the sound of that
muttering and padding - those slitherings and muffled reverberations -
unnerve me before I can unlock the fateful door.

Of what I shall encounter, and what I must do, I have only the most
general idea. Shall I find my task in the vault itself, or must I burrow
deeper into the nighted heart of our planet? There are things I do not yet
understand - or at least, prefer not to understand - despite a dreadful,
increasing and inexplicable sense of bygone familiarity with this fearsome
house. That chute, for instance, leading down from the little locked room.
But I think I know why the wing with the vault extends toward the hill.

6 P.M.

Looking out the north windows, I can see a group of villagers on the hill.
They seem unaware of the lowering sky, and are digging near the great
central menhir. It occurs to me that they are working on that stone-rimmed
hollow place which looks like a long-choked tunnel entrance. What is to
come? How much of the olden Sabbat rites have these people retained? That
key glows horribly - it is not imagination. Dare I use it as it must be
used? Another matter has greatly disturbed me. Glancing nervously through
a book in the library I came upon an ampler form of the name that has
teased my memory so sorely: "Trintje, wife of Adriaen Sleght." The Adriaen
leads me to the very brink of recollection.

Midnight

Horror is unleashed, but I must not weaken. The storm has broken with
pandemoniac fury, and lightning has struck the hill three times, yet the
hybrid, malformed villagers are gathering within the cromlech. I can see
them in the almost constant flashes. The great standing stones loom up
shockingly, and have a dull green luminosity that reveals them even when
the lightning is not there. The peals of thunder are deafening, and every
one seems to be horribly answered from some indeterminate direction. As I
write, the creatures on the hill have begun to chant and howl and scream
in a degraded, half-simian version of the ancient ritual. Rain pours down
like a flood, yet they leap and emit sounds in a kind of diabolic ecstacy.

"Ia: Shub-Niggurath! The Goat With a Thousand Young!"

But the worst thing is within the house. Even at this height, I have begun
to hear sounds from the cellar. It is the padding and muttering and
slithering and muffled reverberations within the vault. . . .

Memories come and go. That name Adriaen Sleght pounds oddly at my
consciousness. Dirck van der Heyl's son-in-law . . . his child old Dirck's
granddaughter and Abaddon Corey's greatgranddaughter. . . .

Later

Merciful God! At last I know where I saw that name. I know, and am
transfixed with horror. All is lost. . .

The key has begun to fell warm as my left hand nervously clutches it. At
times that vague quickening or pulsing is so distinct that I can almost
feel the living metal move. It came from Yian-Ho for a terrible purpose,
and to me - who all too late know the thing stream of van der Heyl blood
that trickles down through the Sleghts into my own lineage - has descended
the hideous task of fulfilling that purpose. . . .

My courage and curiousity wane. I know the horror that lies beyond that
iron door. What if Claes van der Heyl was my ancestor - need I expiate his
nameless sin? I will not - I swear I will not! . . . (the writing here
grows indistinct) . . . too late - cannot help self - black paws
materialize - am dragged away toward the cellar. . . .