Зов Ктулху

Howard Phillips LOVECRAFT

THE CALL  

OF CTHULCHU

HORROR STORY

УДК  372.8 
ББК  81.2 Англ-93 
 
Л13

ISBN 978-5-9925-1668-5

Лавкрафт, Говард Филлипс.

Л13       Зов Ктулху / Г. Ф. Лавкрафт : книга для чтения на ан
глийском языке. — Санкт-Петербург : КАРО, 2023. — 
288 с. — (Horror Story).

ISBN 978-5-9925-1668-5.

Перед вами сборник коротких рассказов знаменитого пи
сателя-мистика Говарда Филлипса Лавкрафта. Эти истории 
положили начало целой литературной вселенной, названной 
«Мифами Ктулху». Огромная и загадочная вселенная Лавкрафта, нашедшая столько ярых поклонников и почитателей 
по всему миру, захватывает и очаровывает всех любителей 
мистики и фантастики. Последователи писателя дополняют 
«Мифы Ктулху» новыми книгами, фильмами и компьютерными играми. Вселенная ужасов Лавкрафта — жемчужина мировой культуры и актуальный мейнстрим нового века.

Неадаптированный текст рассказов печатается без со
кращений и подойдет всем, кто изучает английский язык.

УДК 372.8

ББК 81.2 Англ-93

© КАРО, 2023
Все права защищены

The Call of Cthulhu

"Of such great powers or beings there may be 

conceivably a survival ... a survival of a hugely remote period when ... consciousness was manifested, 
perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn 
before the tide of advancing humanity ... forms of 
which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying 
memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical 
beings of all sorts and kinds ..."

―Algernon Blackwood.

1. The Horror in Clay

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the 

inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. 
We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of 
black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we 
should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own 
direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day 
the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open 
up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful 
position therein, that we shall either go mad from the 
revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace 
and safety of a new dark age.

Theosophists have guessed at the awesome gran
deur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at 
strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood 
if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from 
them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden 
eons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me 
when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses 
of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together 
of separated things―in this case an old newspaper item 
and the notes of a dead professor. I hope that no one 
else will accomplish this piecing out; certainly, if I live, 
I shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a 
chain. I think that the professor, too, intended to keep silent regarding the part he knew, and that he would have 
destroyed his notes had not sudden death seized him.

My knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 

1926-27 with the death of my grand-uncle, George Gammell Angell, Professor Emeritus of Semitic languages in 
Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Professor 
Angell was widely known as an authority on ancient inscriptions, and had frequently been resorted to by the 
heads of prominent museums; so that his passing at the 
age of ninety-two may be recalled by many. Locally, interest was intensified by the obscurity of the cause of 
death. The professor had been stricken whilst returning 
from the Newport boat; falling suddenly, as witnesses 
said, after having been jostled by a nautical-looking ne

gro who had come from one of the queer dark courts 
on the precipitous hillside which formed a short cut 
from the waterfront to the deceased's home in Williams 
Street. Physicians were unable to find any visible disorder, but concluded after perplexed debate that some 
obscure lesion of the heart, induced by the brisk ascent 
of so steep a hill by so elderly a man, was responsible 
for the end. At the time I saw no reason to dissent from 
this dictum, but latterly I am inclined to wonder―and 
more than wonder.

As my granduncle's heir and executor, for he died 

a childless widower, I was expected to go over his papers with some thoroughness; and for that purpose 
moved his entire set of files and boxes to my quarters 
in Boston. Much of the material which I correlated will 
be later published by the American Archeological Society, but there was one box which I found exceedingly 
puzzling, and which I felt much averse from showing 
to other eyes. It had been locked, and I did not find 
the key till it occurred to me to examine the personal 
ring which the professor carried always in his pocket. 
Then, indeed, I succeeded in opening it, but when I did 
so seemed only to be confronted by a greater and more 
closely locked barrier. For what could be the meaning 
of the queer clay bas-relief and the disjointed jottings, 
ramblings, and cuttings which I found? Had my uncle, 
in his latter years, become credulous of the most superficial impostures? I resolved to search out the eccentric 

sculptor responsible for this apparent disturbance of 
an old man's peace of mind.

The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an 

inch thick and about five by six inches in area; obviously 
of modern origin. Its designs, however, were far from 
modern in atmosphere and suggestion; for, although the 
vagaries of cubism and futurism are many and wild, they 
do not often reproduce that cryptic regularity which 
lurks in prehistoric writing. And writing of some kind 
the bulk of these designs seemed certainly to be; though 
my memory, despite much familiarity with the papers 
and collections of my uncle, failed in any way to identify 
this particular species, or even hint at its remotest affiliations.

Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure 

of evidently pictorial intent, though its impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its nature. It 
seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy 
could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant 
imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be 
unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled 
head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the 
whole which made it most shockingly frightful. Behind 
the figure was a vague suggestion of a Cyclopean architectural background.

The writing accompanying this oddity was, aside 

from a stack of press cuttings, in Professor Angell's most 
recent hand; and made no pretense to literary style. 
What seemed to be the main document was headed 
"CTHULHU CULT" in characters painstakingly printed 
to avoid the erroneous reading of a word so unheard-of. 
This manuscript was divided into two sections, the first 
of which was headed "1925―Dreamand Dream Work 
of H. A. Wilcox, 7 Thomas St., Providence, R. I.," and the 
second, "Narrative of Inspector John R. Legrasse, 121 Bienville St., New Orleans, La., at 1908 A. A. S. Mtg―Notes 
on Same, & Prof. Webb's Acct." The other manuscript 
papers were all brief notes, some of them accounts of 
the queer dreams of different persons, some of them 
citations from theosophical books and magazines (notably W. Scott-Eliott's Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria), 
and the rest comments on long-surviving secret societies and hidden cults, with references to passages in 
such mythological and anthropological source-books 
as Frazer's Golden Bough and Miss Murray's Witch-Cult 
in Western Europe. The cuttings largely alluded to outré 
mental illnesses and outbreaks of group folly or mania 
in the spring of 1925.

*  *  *

The first half of the principal manuscript told a 

very peculiar tale. It appears that on March 1st, 1925, 
a thin, dark young man of neurotic and excited aspect 

had called upon Professor Angell bearing the singular 
clay bas-relief, which was then exceedingly damp and 
fresh. His card bore the name of Henry Anthony Wilcox, 
and my uncle had recognized him as the youngest son 
of an excellent family slightly known to him, who had 
latterly been studying sculpture at the Rhode Island 
School of Design and living alone at the Fleur-de-Lys 
Building near that institution. Wilcox was a precocious 
youth of known genius but great eccentricity, and had 
from childhood excited attention through the strange 
stories and odd dreams he was in the habit of relating. 
He called himself "psychically hypersensitive", but the 
staid folk of the ancient commercial city dismissed him 
as merely "queer". Never mingling much with his kind, 
he had dropped gradually from social visibility, and was 
now known only to a small group of esthetes from other 
towns. Even the Providence Art Club, anxious to preserve its conservatism, had found him quite hopeless.

On the occasion of the visit, ran the professor's man
uscript, the sculptor abruptly asked for the benefit of his 
host's archeological knowledge in identifying the hieroglyphics on the bas-relief. He spoke in a dreamy, stilted 
manner which suggested pose and alienated sympathy; 
and my uncle showed some sharpness in replying, for 
the conspicuous freshness of the tablet implied kinship 
with anything but archeology. Young Wilcox's rejoinder, 
which impressed my uncle enough to make him recall 
and record it verbatim, was of a fantastically poetic cast 

which must have typified his whole conversation, and 
which I have since found highly characteristic of him. 
He said, "It is new, indeed, for I made it last night in 
a dream of strange cities; and dreams are older than 
brooding Tyre, or the contemplative Sphinx, or gardengirdled Babylon."

It was then that he began that rambling tale which 

suddenly played upon a sleeping memory and won the 
fevered interest of my uncle. There had been a slight 
earthquake tremor the night before, the most considerable felt in New England for some years; and Wilcox's 
imagination had been keenly affected. Upon retiring, he 
had had an unprecedented dream of great Cyclopean 
cities of Titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror. Hieroglyphics had covered the walls and pillars, and from 
some undetermined point below had come a voice that 
was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which only fancy 
could transmute into sound, but which he attempted to 
render by the almost unpronounceable jumble of letters, 
"Cthulhu fhtagn".

This verbal jumble was the key to the recollection 

which excited and disturbed Professor Angell. He questioned the sculptor with scientific minuteness; and studied with almost frantic intensity the bas-relief on which 
the youth had found himself working, chilled and clad 
only in his nightclothes, when waking had stolen bewilderingly over him. My uncle blamed his old age, Wilcox 

afterward said, for his slowness in recognizing both hieroglyphics and pictorial design. Many of his questions 
seemed highly out of place to his visitor, especially those 
which tried to connect the latter with strange cults or 
societies; and Wilcox could not understand the repeated 
promises of silence which he was offered in exchange 
for an admission of membership in some widespread 
mystical or paganly religious body. When Professor Angell became convinced that the sculptor was indeed ignorant of any cult or system of cryptic lore, he besieged 
his visitor with demands for future reports of dreams. 
This bore regular fruit, for after the first interview the 
manuscript records daily calls of the young man, during 
which he related startling fragments of nocturnal imagery whose burden was always some terrible Cyclopean 
vista of dark and dripping stone, with a subterrene voice 
or intelligence shouting monotonously in enigmatical 
sense-impacts uninscribable save as gibberish. The two 
sounds most frequently repeated are those rendered by 
the letters "Cthulhu" and "R'lyeh".

On March 23rd, the manuscript continued, Wilcox 

failed to appear; and inquiries at his quarters revealed 
that he had been stricken with an obscure sort of fever 
and taken to the home of his family in Waterman Street. 
He had cried out in the night, arousing several other 
artists in the building, and had manifested since then 
only alternations of unconsciousness and delirium. My 
uncle at once telephoned the family, and from that time