IN a desultory fashion, over the next three months or so, I worked my way through the various notes and documents. One by one the pieces in this puzzle began to fall into place.
This Demon Trinity, and its dread Sire, interested Copeland most because the Pacific was the area of their greatest power. Obviously, in his explorations, researches and excavations, he had come across this cult or its remains, which had led him on and on through the mazes of this weird and horrible mythology.
As for the name wherewith he had labeled the cult material, the derivation was obvious. “Xothic”, because the legends centered around three devil gods engendered by Cthulhu upon an entity who dwelt upon or near the double star the cultists knew as Xoth. Ghatanothoa and Yrhogtha and Zoth-Ommog, and perhaps Cthulhu and his monstrous mate, Idh-yaa, as well, had come down from space to this world in the dawn ages and their empire had covered that primal Pacific civilization known to the occultists as Mu. When Mu broke up and submerged—oh, I have dipped into the wild pages of Colonel Churchward, too!—their worship and their legends lingered on among certain degenerate cult survivals of the most staggering antiquity.
It was to the task of chronicling this dread, prehistoric empire (which reputable scientists, needless to say, shrug off as mere legend-mongering), that Copeland had devoted the labor of his final years. Among the miscellaneous papers of the bequest was a vast, untidy bundle of manuscript, in length the size of a weighty tome, which thankfully was left still unfinished at the Professor’s death. I say "thankfully left unfinished", because I have—to the considerable detriment of my wholesome slumber—actually dared to glance into the chaotic pages of screaming lunacy which comprise this monumental work—the spewings of a mad brain, a diseased intelligence—the wild ravings of a once-brilliant mind sadly gone teetering over the brink of cataclysmic insanity.
Few eyes, I think, save for my own, will ever have peered into this final production of a blighted, once productive, career. This particular work, to which the Professor affixed the title of The Civilization of Mu: A Reconstruction in the Light of Recent Discoveries, with A Synoptic Comparison of the R'lyeh Text and the Ponape Scripture—this manuscript, I say, for all that it is an incoherent jumble of hideous blasphemy and nightmarish cosmic speculation, yet traces the rise and decay and destruction of a civilization which, however imaginary, however purely mythical, does at least provide a seemingly viable hypothesis whereby to account for the puzzling and cyclopean masonry wherewith so very many of the jungle-clad Pacific islands are mysteriously and unaccountably encumbered.
The collapse of this primal or prehuman race, and the destruction of the so-called "Lost Continent" which some even now conjecture to have been its cradle, was (in poor Copeland’s view) survived by obscure, shadowy cults which worshiped with decadent rites these Xothic demon gods.
This mysterious survival, his documents reiterate again and again, was simply because the Demon Trinity and their Sire had not perished after all in the destruction of Mu, indeed, could not of their very nature die or be slain, but somehow lived on eternally under the trance-state forced upon them by their adversaries, the Elder Gods. In this supernal trance-state, they live forever but are impotent to act: except that in dreams they could somehow sway and infect with madness the minds of men. Those men whose mental natures were somehow susceptible to their insidious influence, whether drawn thereto by scholarly curiosity, the lust for unholy power, or a certain artistic sensitivity amounting almost to innate instability, they could pervert to their worship ... like Faust, tempted from the study of Divinity by desire for the promised powers of black magic.
It was a hideously suggestive premise, and weirdly persuasive. But something about it bothered me, like the missing piece to a jigsaw puzzle. Some fact was lacking from the mosaic which Harold Hadley Copeland had so ingeniously constructed—why did the sleeping devil-gods even need human converts?
That was the unanswered question that baffled me and stuck in my craw. Of what conceivable use were fragile, ephemeral, mortal men to such as the Xothic Triad and their Sire?
The answer came to me quite suddenly, in a flash of recollection that left me oddly uneasy. It had been lurking in my mind all the while ... suggested by that first interminable quotation from the blasphemous and shocking Necronomicon, a passage which I have already copied out at length into this journal, but will repeat here: "Yet ever the Minions of the Old Ones gathered and planned and sought ways whereby to free their Masters, and lingered whilst Men came to search into the Secret and Forbidden Places and fumble at the Gates."
I understood it at once—the Elder Sign, whatever it was, was a material thing, some sort of talisman or sigil, imbued with psychic force which repelled both the Old Ones and their unhuman Minions—but did not repulse men. It was men and men alone who could open the "Gates” and set the Old Ones free!
VERY much of Copeland’s research had been geographical, trying to pin down the location of the imprisoned Old Ones in the Pacific area. There was quite a sheaf of newspaper clippings—inexplicable to me when I first leafed through them, though now they took on an ominous and sinister meaning.
These clippings were fastened together with a paperclip in three bundles, tagged "R'lyeh", "Yhe", and "Z-O; Ponape." The bundle marked "R'lyeh" was by far the bulkiest and must have contained thirty or more news items, going as far back as 1879. The most recent clipping was from the Sydney Bulletin for April 18, 1925. Under the headline "Mystery Derelict Found at Sea" were details of a confused and seemingly innocuous maritime tragedy concerning a two-masted schooner, the Emma, which sailed into the unknown from Auckland on February 20th, three years ago; on the twelfth day of the following month, a lone survivor was rescued from the waves by the Morrison Company freighter Vigilant. This man, a Norwegian named Gustaf Johansen, told of encountering a ship manned by villainous Kanakas and half-castes, of a battle at sea, followed by the discovery of an unknown island not found on any chart. To this yellowed newspaper clipping were attached some typewritten papers—the text of a sort of diary by the sailor Johansen—obtained, surprisingly enough, by the grand-nephew of one of my old teachers, George Gammell Angell, Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages at Brown University; both Gammell and his grand-nephew had, it seemed, interested themselves in much the same sort of borderline studies as had formed Professor Copeland’s chief preoccupation. I shall not go into the text of the Johansen narrative in any length—he describes their sightings of the unmapped island at about S. Latitude 47°9′, W. Longitude 126°43'—their landing on a coastline of mingled mud, ooze, and weed-grown blocks of enormous stone masonry—a confused and nightmarish struggle with enormous things he shudderingly refuses to describe.
This reference to latitude and longitude Copeland underscored heavily with his fountain pen.
Turning back to the earliest clipping, a yellowed scrap of newsprint from the Boston Register, dated November 15, 1879. I read that certain articles from a prehistoric tomb were to be on public display in the Cabot Museum. Boston; these articles had been found on May 11, 1878, by crewmen from the freighter Eridanus, bound from Wellington, New Zealand, to Valparaiso, Chile, which had sighted "a new island unmarked on any chart and evidently of volcanic origin." The newspaper article gave latitude and longitude readings identical with those the Sydney Bulletin printed in its story about the schooner Emma—forty-seven years later!