My hands were trembling as I laboriously copied our this passage, translating it roughly into English; and my brows were beaded with cold globules of perspiration. For I knew I stood on the very threshold of the hidden truth I had come so far to discover. I read on, no longer quite able to dismiss these chaotic passages as the disgusting spewings of a diseased brain:
And there be those that worship the Great Old Ones through their image and likeness, but of this ye must be wary, for such eidola be uncanny, and betimes are known to drink the lives of they that handle them unwisely, or who seek through such images to summon to this sphere Those far-off and better left undisturbed. Neither is it wholly within the knowledge of men to destroy such images, and many there be that sought the destruction thereof, who found their own destruction; but against such images from beyond the stars the Elder Sign hath very great power, although ye must beware lest in the conflict betwixt That which you evoke to destroy and the likeness of That which slumbereth afar, you be not consumed and swallowed up, or be yourself destroyed thereby, and that utterly, even to your immortal soul.
I stared at the words I had hurriedly rendered into English, my mind numb with a haunting surmise.
VII.
IT was some little while after this that Dr. Armitage returned to his office, accompanied as before by Dr. Seneca Lapham, and also by a youngish man of about my own age who was introduced to me as Mr. Winfield Phillips, an assistant of Dr. Lapham’s.
I came slowly out of my trance and fumbled with words, striving to return young Phillips’ amiable greeting in a natural manner. Dr. Armitage observed my bemused condition with one keen glance, and smiled grimly.
“I perceive, young man, that you have taken a bit of a shock. Tush, boy, don’t be ashamed—better men than you or I have been unsettled by things they found in the nightmarish pages of Alhazred! It is a book that should never have been written: having been written, it is a book that deserves burning—and I say this in all solemnity, I, a scholar, a man who loves books and who serves them. But the world is not conducted for our pleasure, young Hodgkins—as the reader of the Necronomicon very soon discovers!"
I regarded the old gentleman in a bemused manner. The implications of his words were, well—frightening. From his sympathetic manner, and the import of his remarks, I deduced that there was after all a certain element of profound and terrible cosmic truth lurking behind these ancient and darkling myths. Already had I half-convinced myself of this in my own mind, for all the apparent madness of the notion; to hear it soberly confirmed from another opened yawning gulfs and fissures in the comfortable pattern of ordinary life wherein I had spent my days heretofore—gulfs whereby one might glimpse gigantic and hideously suggestive Shapes which slithered and crept and hid behind the mask and sham of so-called "reality." The very next words which the librarian uttered proved my half-fears beyond a doubt.
"Yes, young Hodgkins, it is more than merely an old, forgotten, primitive mythology we are dealing with here, but something infinitely more real and ghastly and strong," the old man said soberly. He glanced at Dr. Lapham and the younger man, Phillips. "All of us in this room have had some experience with the terrible truth behind these old superstitions, so we have all come to the juncture at which you now stand; and we understand the feelings which you must be suffering right now. Be at ease, young fellow: You are among friends.”
Dr. Lapham cleared his throat at this point and spoke up in quiet, measured tones.
"You must understand, sir, that exactly how much truth lies behind these chaotic old legends we do not, at present, know. And that the legends themselves, and the books which remain our primary records on this matter, were concocted by superstitious and primitive minds unacquainted with the sophisticated concepts of modern physics and astronomy is evident. We cannot, as yet, take the legendary account seriously, as exact and literal statements of historical or scientific fact. We must look behind the legends, interpreting them according to the light of modern knowledge.”
“Quite right,” Armitage agreed. “We are not dealing with gods or demons or supernatural forces, my boy—clear all that mystical rubbish out of your head! Whatever the so-called Old Ones are, and whatever the nature and extent of their powers, they are neither divine nor infernal. And, surely, there is nothing of supernatural about them. I have found that it helps to conceive of them as extraterrestrial creatures, the former inhabitants of other planets or star systems, who came here ages ago and who now slumber in the far places of the globe in something akin to suspended animation, as with Cthulhu himself, for instance. Alhazred speaks of this monster as 'asleep and dreaming.' This is a decently accurate description of a state of vitality in stasis, when you consider that Alhazred lacked the proper scientific terminology to describe such a condition. And also let me point out that highly intelligent though these creatures undoubtedly are—to have been able to traverse somehow the immense stellar distances—they are not remotely manlike and suffer from none of the limitations of our own fragile and short-lived fleshly habitations. We have considerable evidence to suggest they are not even composed of the same kind of matter as we are, and share few, if any, of our senses. Their normal lifespan, perhaps, is to be measured in geological epochs, rather than in the biblical three score years and ten.”
By this time my mind was whirling with confusion, as you may well imagine. Struggling to conquer my revulsion at these stark and unpalatable facts, and to think clearly, I stammered our some query to the effect of how such creatures might be destroyed. Dr. Armitage looked troubled.
"We have come to the reluctant conclusion, young man, that they cannot in fact be destroyed. If they were capable of death or destruction, doubtless the opposing race, the so-called ‘Elder Gods’, would have slain or destroyed them, rather than imprisoning or banishing them, as all pertinent texts agree was their ultimate disposition. However, incapable of dissolution as they seem to be, the peculiar structure of the unknown types of matter of which they are composed seems to include a built-in defect—an Achilles’ heel, if you will. That is to say, some unknown and immeasurable form of radiation, or fields of force, apparently has the power to inhibit them profoundly. Let me show you."
He went over to a large veneer filing cabinet, such as we used back at the Institute for the storage of small and frangible artifacts, and drew our a flat tray lined with velvet, which he brought back to the desk. A large number of small mineral objects were displayed on the velvet-lined tray; these were bits of dark gray stone or crystalline mineral, each of which was in the shape of a conventional five-pointed star. I could not, at first, make out whether these stone objects were natural or manufactured, but in the center of some of them had been cut an oval symbol or design like an Egyptian cartouche. This carved symbol seemed emblematic of the human eye, or so it looked to the casual glance. The objects, or artifacts, varied in size from starshaped stones so small that you might have covered them with a ten-cent piece, to ones large enough to be the size of the hand with fingers outstretched. Only the larger ones bore the central eye-like cartouche.
“Go ahead, handle them if you like, they are harmless to beings composed of normal terrene matter,” Dr. Armitage urged. I took up one of the stones and hefted it curiously in my palm. To the touch it was slick and smooth and cold, resembling crystal; but the stony substance was opaque, and surprisingly heavy. Heavier, I would say, than flint or ironstone; almost as heavy as a similarly sized piece of lead would have been. To the touch the stone gave off the faintest, almost imperceptible, tingle, as if it were somehow imbued with a slight electrical charge. No geologist, I was baffled at the nature of the composition of the thing.