Indeed, from the simple outline of the myths in this Xothic legend cycle, I would most naturally have considered the entire myth structure an example of notions borrowed from earlier legends; but Copeland’s notes were quite firm on the point that the Cthulhu mythology predated the Indo-European civilizations by vast geological epochs of time, which seemed to me completely incredible.
Then, too, there was the extraterrestrial origin of the Great Old Ones, which was an astonishingly sophisticated notion for primitive island cults to have conceived. The notion of the gods of the Cthulhu pantheon as cosmic demons from distant stars and planets seemed like something drawn from the scientific romances of E. E. Smith or Ray Cummings, such as filled the pages of Mr. Gernsback's new magazine, Amazing Stories, a pulp periodical which I had been occasionally picking up at my local newsstand for the last year or two to beguile my leisure with some casual entertainment.
The Copeland notes, as organized by Dr. Blaine, centered largely about Cthulhu in particular and his Xothic spawn, rather to the neglect of the other members of the pantheon. Copeland drew surprisingly convincing parallels between this tentacled monstrosity, chained in his stone city at the bottom of the sea, and the horribly amorphous god of the ocean depths, the horrible Kon, Lord of the Earthquake, venerated by the pre-Incan tribes of Peru; and also to the repulsive "Devourer", the war god of the Quicha religion, and to the Incan divinity Huitzilopochtli. It was his opinion, reiterated over and over, that Cthulhu was the monster behind these “later” mythical beings—the prototype from which they gradually evolved, after the collapse of the empire of primal Mu, destroyed in some prehistoric cataclysm. This contention, by the way, he supported with a wealth of scholarly data which was, superficially at least, most impressive.
Another element which greatly intrigued me was that despite the obscurity of this cult it had apparently been the object of study by scholars in different parts of the world for a long time. Both Copeland’s original notes and Blaine’s additions thereto mentioned any number of scholarly authorities—the Flemish wizard, Ludvig Prinn, a German scientist named von Junzt, an American professor named Dr. Laban Shrewsbury, a titled European demonologist, the Comte d'Erlette, and others. Scholarly investigation of this Cthulhu mythos had seemingly been going on all over the world for some centuries, but in a secretive and surreptitious manner. And I could not help wondering why the subject was surrounded with such secrecy. The oddest item of all was the book to which Dr. Blaine had attached such prime importance during our brief interview at the Sanitarium—the Necronomicon itself. The title, of course, is Greek, but the book itself, apparently the "Bible" of the Cthulhu Cult, had been written by an Arab writer no less than eleven centuries ago!
There seemed to be no genuine grounds for questioning the extreme antiquity of this mysterious mythos, for I found copious documentation for the dates of some of these scholars in standard reference works. But the lack of open, international discussion of this mythos was completely baffling; for centuries, it seemed, there had existed an enormous conspiracy of silence about Cthulhu, his sons and brethren, and their minions and worshipers. I have to admit I found this mysterious secrecy enigmatic, disturbing, and frightfully suggestive ....
OUT of this mass of material, one portion in particular caught my attention. It was a sheaf of manuscript clipped together under the heading "Ponape Figurine."
The first page, in Copeland’s hand, consisted of data concerning the figurine: weight, specific gravity, measurements, and so on. This was followed by Copeland's notes on the hieroglyphic inscription cut into the base of the image—an inscription he tentatively identified as either "Tsath-yo" or "R'lyehian." I had never heard of either of these languages, if that is what they were supposed to be, bur obviously the term “R'lyehian” was derived from "R’lyeh", which was the name of the submerged stone city in which Cthulhu supposedly lay imprisoned. Copeland tentatively identified the figurine as an image of Zoth-Ommog, the Dweller in the Deeps, one of the three sons of Cthulhu: Copeland’s notation was that the entity was chained beneath the sea in a submarine chasm off the island of Ponape.
There was something disturbingly suggestive in these facts, when mentioned in juxtaposition. The demon-god from the stars, sealed in a chasm beneath the waters off Ponape ... and an image of that same divinity, brought up by a native diver from those identical waters ....
The implications of the coincidence were strangely frightening, so much so that I felt a sudden curious reluctance to read any further in the file that night. The remainder of the papers did not look very inviting, anyway. They consisted of long, meaningless excerpts from books with wild, nightmarish titles like Cultes des Goules, De Vermis Mysteriis, and so on. Some inner urge, like an unheard voice, seemed almost to be warning me to read no further. It was an odd, and a rather unsettling, sensation.
I suddenly realized that I was very sleepy. I could hardly keep my eyes open and my body yearned for the warm, soft oblivion of sleep. I put the sheaf of notes clipped together under the heading of “Ponape Figurine" back in the folder with the rest of the material and, promising to continue my further investigations tomorrow, decided to turn in and call it a day.
My dreams that night were not ... pleasant.
I am not the sort of person who usually pays any attention to dreams, and rarely, upon awakening, can I recall the shape or sequence of my nocturnal visions, but that night one image filled my dreams, making them hideous, and remained horribly fresh in my mind the next morning.
It was ... a face. Again and again, through the tumbling mists of my dream that face leered out at me with cold and evil eyes, intent and watchful.
The face was not remotely human. It bore the stamp of cruel mockery, of vicious gloating, of inhuman and fiendish glee.
It was a face I knew, a face I had seen before. But in my dreams I knew it not; indeed, it was nor until the following day, when I awoke with morning feeling drained and enervated from a night of feverish and chaotic slumber, that I could recall where I had seen that cruel visage of malignant horror before. And when I did in fact remember, a thrill of inexplicable dread went through me.
It was the face of the Ponape figurine.
III.
THAT morning I brought the Blaine/Copeland file back to my office at the Institute so that I could complete my cursory examination of it, once my morning’s work was out of the way.
The first thing I did was to take out the figurine itself. We kept it in the office safe, together with another item from the Copeland bequest we did not intend to put on public display, as its authenticity had not yet been established. This second item was the dubious and controversial Zanthu Tablets, which Professor Copeland had reputedly discovered in the stone comb of a prehistoric shaman in the mountainous territory north of the Tsang plateau region of central Asia during his ill-faced expedition of 1913. It will perhaps be recalled that it was the ill-advised publication of his shocking and chaotic “conjectural translation” of the Tablets in the form of a privately printed brochure in 1916 that had aroused such a public outcry, from press and pulpit alike, as to impair irreparably his scientific reputation. This set of twelve black jade tablets, narrowly incised on both sides with row upon row of minute characters in an unknown language which Copeland's notes refer to as “hieratic Naacal”, we deemed too notoriously dubious to include in our forthcoming display.