OF my long trip homeward there is little enough to say. Hour by hour, mile by mile, I retraced my way across the breadth of the continent. Again I changed trains in the drafty, echoing Boston terminal; again I stared unseeingly for hours as the monotonous towns and hills, cities and suburbs, fields and plains rushed past my window.
Again, I strove to pass the hours by studying the Unaussprechlichen Kulten. Von Junzt proved to have little light to shed upon the mysteries of the star-shaped stone from elder Mnar, although he discussed it in several places, discoursing learnedly and at tiresome length upon its supposed efficacy against the Alhazredic demons. He seemed to have been principally concerned in settling by scholarly allusion and quotation that the so-called "Elder Sign" and "Sarnath-sigil", as well as the "Sign of Kish", were all terms which referred to the same object, and that object was none other than the star-shaped artifact of unidentified gray stone from immemorial Mnar. Whether the Elder Sign was the star-stone itself, or merely the cartouchelike emblem carved on the larger specimens of the stone, was left unclear.
This emblem or sigil I studied under a small but powerful lens I had brought with me in my case of books and writing materials. It was a curious, archaic symbol, quite unlike any other primitive or prehistoric character or glyph known to me. Under the magnifying glass it proved to be an oval, broken at either end, with something in the middle like a tower or monolith of jagged lines; or perhaps it was supposed to represent a stylized tree. At any rate, the oval cartouche with the vertical tower in its center resembled nothing so much as a cat’s eye, save that the vertical slit pupil was, as I have said, jagged-edged.
I wondered if the symbol was supposed to suggest a burning tower ... and was suddenly reminded of a phrase from that hellish jumble of nonsense in the Necronomicon's most confused and chaotic pages: "They came down Out of the star-spaces unto this Earth, so that They might deal a grim and heavy judgment upon their former servants; and They went to and fro upon the Earth, terrible in Their wrath, like unto mighty Towers of Flame that walked like Men. Yea and verily was it writ of old, Terrible be the Elder Gods in Their wrath in the Hour of Their coming-hence."
Like unto mighty Towers of Flame ... is that what the sigil on the starstones meant? Was it the seal and emblem of the Elder Gods? And did it depict Their very likeness?
My thoughts far from this place and time, I stared sightlessly from the railway carriage, through rain-swept windows blurred with steam, as the clicking wheels are up the miles.
WHILE my journey co Massachusetts had been made in a fairly leisurely manner, schedules and connections having been arranged with comfort and convenience in mind, my trip home was quite another matter. Every factor was sacrificed to speed; it mattered little whether I could connect with a train which afforded sleeping accommodations, or a private compartment, or even a dining car. Time was the one priceless commodity, and every other consideration gave way before its urgency.
As to my state of mind during the long journey home to Southern California, I can only say that it was one of confusion. Against the most lucid and cautious arguments of logic and reason, I more than half accepted the terrible, the dreadful, the transcendent truth behind the grim old myths of Cthulhu and his brethren and his horribly monstrous spawn.
I had always, since my earliest years, been something of a rationalist when it came to the mystical, a materialist when it came to matters of religion, and an agnostic in dealings with the supernatural and the supernormal. Gods, ghosts, devils, magic rites—these (thought I, smugly, to myself in my abysmal but "enlightened" ignorance) belonged to the childhood of the human race. Here in the modern Industrial Age, nearly three decades into the 20th century, we had little time or patience to waste on the mumbo-jumbo of outmoded superstitions and antiquated, dying creeds.
To find men of breeding and education, men of brilliant intellect and great scholastic learning, who cautiously but soberly admitted that such things could be shook the flimsy foundations of my own materialistic assumptions. The fabric of the universe, as envisioned by Newton and Copernicus, Galileo and Einstein, Darwin and Freud, suddenly showed bare and cracked patches, jury-rigged scaffoldings through whose rents and holes and lacunae yawned frightful abysses of eldritch horror and ancient unholy evil. When scholars like Armitage and Lapham—yes, and Blaine and Copeland, too—had been forced to admit the reality of the supernatural, or of the ultra-terrestrial, how could I cling to the shivered fragments of my own scientific faith?
In this mood of dawning comprehension and growing belief in horrors of the primal world unguessed at in even the darkest of myths and superstitions, I retraced my journey across the continent. And at last I approached Santiago.
IT was four o’clock in the morning of March 26th. A gray, overcast morning, wintry, rain-swept, and bleak. Cold and wet were the winds that blew in from the dark Pacific, in whose unknown depths fantastic survivals might lurk from the forgotten past of this ancient planet. My eyes were red from lack of sleep, my head throbbing with fatigue, my body shivering and tense with excitement. I woke a cabman sleeping behind the wheel of his dilapidated Ford, parked in front of the railway station, and bade him drive me to the Sanbourne Institute.
"Don’t open till nine, mister," he grumbled, yawning a jaw-cracking yawn. "Be all closed up at this hour."
I shook my head impatiently, climbing in the back sear and stuffing my luggage in beside me. "I work there, and I have a key. Let’s go!"
"Okay, okay, hold yer horses," he muttered and began fiddling with the choke. The old Ford coughed and gurgled, then woke sluggishly to wheezing, rattling life. We pulled away from the curb and drove through dark streets empty except for a dog, snuffling at garbage cans in front of the Cozy Oak Bar & Grille. And the fog ... the cold, soft, wet fog ... that curled and coiled and floated through the dim streets like the vaporous tentacles of some immense and shadowy sea-thing.
The Institute is built well back from the road at the juncture of Sanchez and Whiteman Streets on the far side of town, an exclusive section of big estate houses called Mar del Vista. Originally, the property and the building itself had been the home of Carlton Sanbourne II, who had inherited a tuna canning fortune from his famous millionaire father. At his death the house and grounds, as well as his own world-famous collection of Pacific antiquities, had been donated to the state under a self-perpetuating foundation which established the nucleus of the present museum.
It must have been half past four in the morning when the old rattletrap of a taxi drew up before the big wrought-iron gate and let me out. I paid the driver, tipped him handsomely, and watched him drive off in a cloud of swirling fog. Then I opened the gate with my key, entered, closed the huge swinging gates behind me, parked my luggage in the gate-keeper's cottage, and went hurriedly down the drive toward the main entrance.
I let myself in by a small, unobtrusive side door used by the staff members. The building was not kept lit by night, and the halls and display rooms were thus drowned in murky gloom from which massive primitive idols bulked monstrously, like the lurking denizens of some shadowy netherworld. Just enough of the thin gray light of pre-dawn came seeping in through the tall windows for me to find my way through the maze of rooms.
I headed directly for the South Gallery where the Copeland collection would be on display. It occurred to me to call out and attract the attention of our night watchman, a Mexican-American named Emiliano Gonzalez, but for some reason I held my tongue. I cannot explain my reason for not attracting his attention. Quite certainly, I had no presentiment of the situation into which I would suddenly enter: but there was something in the very air of the place, a strange tension, an oddly meaningful silence that was tomb-like, which impelled me to caution and silence.