The Festival

Lovecraft, Howard Phillips

Published: 1925
Categorie(s): Fiction, Short Stories
Source: http://en.wikisource.org
1
About Lovecraft:
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an American author of fantasy, horror
and science fiction. He is notable for blending elements of science fiction
and horror; and for popularizing "cosmic horror": the notion that some
concepts, entities or experiences are barely comprehensible to human
minds, and those who delve into such risk their sanity. Lovecraft has be-
come a cult figure in the horror genre and is noted as creator of the
"Cthulhu Mythos," a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a
"pantheon" of nonhuman creatures, as well as the famed Necronomicon,
a grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. His works typically had a
tone of "cosmic pessimism," regarding mankind as insignificant and
powerless in the universe. Lovecraft's readership was limited during his
life, and his works, particularly early in his career, have been criticized as
occasionally ponderous, and for their uneven quality. Nevertheless,
Lovecrafts reputation has grown tremendously over the decades, and he
is now commonly regarded as one of the most important horror writers
of the 20th Century, exerting an influence that is widespread, though of-
ten indirect. Source: Wikipedia
2
Efficiut Daemones, ut quae non sunt, sic tamen quasi sint, conspi-
cienda hominibus exhibeant.
- Lacantius
(Devils so work that things which are not appear to men as if they
were real.)
I was far from home, and the spell of the eastern sea was upon me. In
the twilight I heard it pounding on the rocks, and I knew it lay just over
the hill where the twisting willows writhed against the clearing sky and
the first stars of evening. And because my fathers had called me to the
old town beyond, I pushed on through the shallow, new-fallen snow
along the road that soared lonely up to where Aldebaran twinkled
among the trees; on toward the very ancient town I had never seen but
often dreamed of.
It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their
hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and
mankind. It was the Yuletide, and I had come at last to the ancient sea
town where my people had dwelt and kept festival in the elder time
when festival was forbidden; where also they had commanded their sons
to keep festival once every century, that the memory of primal secrets
might not be forgotten. Mine were an old people, and were old even
when this land was settled three hundred years before. And they were
strange, because they had come as dark furtive folk from opiate southern
gardens of orchids, and spoken another tongue before they learnt the
tongue of the blue-eyed fishers. And now they were scattered, and
shared only the rituals of mysteries that none living could understand. I
was the only one who came back that night to the old fishing town as le-
gend bade, for only the poor and the lonely remember.
Then beyond the hill's crest I saw Kingsport outspread frostily in the
gloaming; snowy Kingsport with its ancient vanes and steeples, ridge-
poles and chimney-pots, wharves and small bridges, willow-trees and
graveyards; endless labyrinths of steep, narrow, crooked streets, and
dizzy church-crowned central peak that time durst not touch; ceaseless
mazes of colonial houses piled and scattered at all angles and levels like
a child's disordered blocks; antiquity hovering on grey wings over
winter-whitened gables and gambrel roofs; fanlights and small-paned
windows one by one gleaming out in the cold dusk to join Orion and the
archaic stars. And against the rotting wharves the sea pounded; the se-
cretive, immemorial sea out of which the people had come in the elder
time.
3
Beside the road at its crest a still higher summit rose, bleak and
windswept, and I saw that it was a burying-ground where black grave-
stones stuck ghoulishly through the snow like the decayed fingernails of
a gigantic corpse. The printless road was very lonely, and sometimes I
thought I heard a distant horrible creaking as of a gibbet in the wind.
They had hanged four kinsmen of mine for witchcraft in 1692, but I did
not know just where.
As the road wound down the seaward slope I listened for the merry
sounds of a village at evening, but did not hear them. Then I thought of
the season, and felt that these old Puritan folk might well have Christ-
mas customs strange to me, and full of silent hearthside prayer. So after
that I did not listen for merriment or look for wayfarers, kept on down
past the hushed lighted farmhouses and shadowy stone walls to where
the signs of ancient shops and sea taverns creaked in the salt breeze, and
the grotesque knockers of pillared doorways glistened along deserted
unpaved lanes in the light of little, curtained windows.
I had seen maps of the town, and knew where to find the home of my
people. It was told that I should be known and welcomed, for village le-
gend lives long; so I hastened through Back Street to Circle Court, and
across the fresh snow on the one full flagstone pavement in the town, to
where Green Lane leads off behind the Market House. The old maps still
held good, and I had no trouble; though at Arkham they must have lied
when they said the trolleys ran to this place, since I saw not a wire over-
head. Snow would have hid the rails in any case. I was glad I had chosen
to walk, for the white village had seemed very beautiful from the hill;
and now I was eager to knock at the door of my people, the seventh
house on the left in Green Lane, with an ancient peaked roof and jutting
second storey, all built before 1650.
There were lights inside the house when I came upon it, and I saw
from the diamond window-panes that it must have been kept very close
to its antique state. The upper part overhung the narrow grass-grown
street and nearly met the over-hanging part of the house opposite, so
that I was almost in a tunnel, with the low stone doorstep wholly free
from snow. There was no sidewalk, but many houses had high doors
reached by double flights of steps with iron railings. It was an odd scene,
and because I was strange to New England I had never known its like
before. Though it pleased me, I would have relished it better if there had
been footprints in the snow, and people in the streets, and a few win-
dows without drawn curtains.
4
When I sounded the archaic iron knocker I was half afraid. Some fear
had been gathering in me, perhaps because of the strangeness of my her-
itage, and the bleakness of the evening, and the queerness of the silence
in that aged town of curious customs. And when my knock was
answered I was fully afraid, because I had not heard any footsteps before
the door creaked open. But I was not afraid long, for the gowned,
slippered old man in the doorway had a bland face that reassured me;
and though he made signs that he was dumb, he wrote a quaint and an-
cient welcome with the stylus and wax tablet he carried.
He beckoned me into a low, candle-lit room with massive exposed
rafters and dark, stiff, sparse furniture of the seventeenth century. The
past was vivid there, for not an attribute was missing. There was a cav-
ernous fireplace and a spinning-wheel at which a bent old woman in
loose wrapper and deep poke-bonnet sat back toward me, silently spin-
ning despite the festive season. An indefinite dampness seemed upon
the place, and I marvelled that no fire should be blazing. The high-
backed settle faced the row of curtained windows at the left, and seemed
to be occupied, though I was not sure. I did not like everything about
what I saw, and felt again the fear I had had. This fear grew stronger
from what had before lessened it, for the more I looked at the old man's
bland face the more its very blandness terrified me. The eyes never
moved, and the skin was too much like wax. Finally I was sure it was not
a face at all, but a fiendishly cunning mask. But the flabby hands, curi-
ously gloved, wrote genially on the tablet and told me I must wait a
while before I could be led to the place of the festival.
Pointing to a chair, table, and pile of books, the old man now left the
room; and when I sat down to read I saw that the books were hoary and
mouldy, and that they included old Morryster's wild Marvels of Science,
the terrible Saducismus Triumphatus of Joseph Glanvil, published in
1681, the shocking Daemonolatreja of Remigius, printed in 1595 at Ly-
ons, and worst of all, the unmentionable Necronomicon of the mad Arab
Abdul Alhazred, in Olaus Wormius' forbidden Latin translation; a book
which I had never seen, but of which I had heard monstrous things
whispered. No one spoke to me, but I could hear the creaking of signs in
the wind outside, and the whir of the wheel as the bonneted old woman
continued her silent spinning, spinning. I thought the room and the
books and the people very morbid and disquieting, but because an old
tradition of my fathers had summoned me to strange feastings, I re-
solved to expect queer things. So I tried to read, and soon became trem-
blingly absorbed by something I found in that accursed Necronomicon; a
5
thought and a legend too hideous for sanity or consciousness, but I dis-
liked it when I fancied I heard the closing of one of the windows that the
settle faced, as if it had been stealthily opened. It had seemed to follow a
whirring that was not of the old woman's spinning-wheel. This was not
much, though, for the old woman was spinning very hard, and the aged
clock had been striking. After that I lost the feeling that there were per-
sons on the settle, and was reading intently and shudderingly when the
old man came back booted and dressed in a loose antique costume, and
sat down on that very bench, so that I could not see him. It was certainly
nervous waiting, and the blasphemous book in my hands made it
doubly so. When eleven struck, however, the old man stood up, glided
to a massive carved chest in a corner, and got two hooded cloaks; one of
which he donned, and the other of which he draped round the old wo-
man, who was ceasing her monotonous spinning. Then they both started
for the outer door; the woman lamely creeping, and the old man, after
picking up the very book I had been reading, beckoning me as he drew
his hood over that unmoving face or mask.
We went out into the moonless and tortuous network of that incred-
ibly ancient town; went out as the lights in the curtained windows disap-
peared one by one, and the Dog Star leered at the throng of cowled,
cloaked figures that poured silently from every doorway and formed
monstrous processions up this street and that, past the creaking sigus
and antediluvian gables, the thatched roofs and diamond-paned win-
dows; threading precipitous lanes where decaying houses overlapped
and crumbled together; gliding across open courts and churchyards
where the bobbing lanthorns made eldritch drunken constellations.
Amid these hushed throngs I followed my voiceless guides; jostled by
elbows that seemed preternaturally soft, and pressed by chests and
stomachs that seemed abnormally pulpy; but seeing never a face and
hearing never a word. Up, up, up, the eery columns slithered, and I saw
that all the travellers were converging as they flowed near a sort of focus
of crazy alleys at the top of a high hill in the centre of the town, where
perched a great white church. I had seen it from the road's crest when I
looked at Kingsport in the new dusk, and it had made me shiver because
Aldebaran had seemed to balance itself a moment on the ghostly spire.
There was an open space around the church; partly a churchyard with
spectral shafts, and partly a half-paved square swept nearly bare of snow
by the wind, and lined with unwholesomely archaic houses having
peaked roofs and overhanging gables. Death-fires danced over the
tombs, revealing gruesome vistas, though queerly failing to cast any
6
shadows. Past the churchyard, where there were no houses, I could see
over the hill's summit and watch the glimmer of stars on the harbour,
though the town was invisible in the dark. Only once in a while a lantern
bobbed horribly through serpentine alleys on its way to overtake the
throng that was now slipping speechlessly into the church. I waited till
the crowd had oozed into the black doorway, and till all the stragglers
had followed. The old man was pulling at my sleeve, but I was determ-
ined to be the last. Crossing the threshold into the swarming temple of
unknown darkness, I turned once to look at the outside world as the
churchyard phosphorescence cast a sickly glow on the hilltop pavement.
And as I did so I shuddered. For though the wind had not left much
snow, a few patches did remain on the path near the door; and in that
fleeting backward look it seemed to my troubled eyes that they bore no
mark of passing feet, not even mine.
The church was scarce lighted by all the lanthorns that had entered it,
for most of the throng had already vanished. They had streamed up the
aisle between the high pews to the trap-door of the vaults which yawned
loathsomely open just before the pulpit, and were now squinning noise-
lessly in. I followed dumbly down the foot-worn steps and into the dark,
suffocating crypt. The tail of that sinuous line of night-marchers seemed
very horrible, and as I saw them wriggling into a venerable tomb they
seemed more horrible still. Then I noticed that the tomb's floor had an
aperture down which the throng was sliding, and in a moment we were
all descending an ominous staircase of rough-hewn stone; a narrow spir-
al staircase damp and peculiarly odorous, that wound endlessly down
into the bowels of the hill past monotonous walls of dripping stone
blocks and crumbling mortar. It was a silent, shocking descent, and I ob-
served after a horrible interval that the walls and steps were changing in
nature, as if chiselled out of the solid rock. What mainly troubled me was
that the myriad footfalls made no sound and set up no echoes. After
more aeons of descent I saw some side passages or burrows leading from
unknown recesses of blackness to this shaft of nighted mystery. Soon
they became excessively numerous, like impious catacombs of nameless
menace; and their pungent odour of decay grew quite unbearable. I
knew we must have passed down through the mountain and beneath the
earth of Kingsport itself, and I shivered that a town should be so aged
and maggoty with subterraneous evil.
Then I saw the lurid shimmering of pale light, and heard the insidious
lapping of sunless waters. Again I shivered, for I did not like the things
that the night had brought, and wished bitterly that no forefather had
7
summoned me to this primal rite. As the steps and the passage grew
broader, I heard another sound, the thin, whining mockery of a feeble
flute; and suddenly there spread out before me the boundless vista of an
inner world- a vast fungous shore litten by a belching column of sick
greenish flame and washed by a wide oily river that flowed from abysses
frightful and unsuspected to join the blackest gulfs of immemorial ocean.
Fainting and gasping, I looked at that unhallowed Erebus of titan
toadstools, leprous fire and slimy water, and saw the cloaked throngs
forming a semicircle around the blazing pillar. It was the Yule-rite, older
than man and fated to survive him; the primal rite of the solstice and of
spring's promise beyond the snows; the rite of fire and evergreen, light
and music. And in the stygian grotto I saw them do the rite, and adore
the sick pillar of flame, and throw into the water handfuls gouged out of
the viscous vegetation which glittered green in the chlorotic glare. I saw
this, and I saw something amorphously squatted far away from the light,
piping noisomely on a flute; and as the thing piped I thought I heard
noxious muffled flutterings in the foetid darkness where I could not see.
But what frightened me most was that flaming column; spouting volcan-
ically from depths profound and inconceivable, casting no shadows as
healthy flame should, and coating the nitrous stone with a nasty, venom-
ous verdigris. For in all that seething combustion no warmth lay, but
only the clamminess of death and corruption.
The man who had brought me now squirmed to a point directly beside
the hideous flame, and made stiff ceremonial motions to the semi-circle
he faced. At certain stages of the ritual they did grovelling obeisance, es-
pecially when he held above his head that abhorrent Necronomicon he
had taken with him; and I shared all the obeisances because I had been
summoned to this festival by the writings of my forefathers. Then the old
man made a sigual to the half-seen flute-player in the darkness, which
player thereupon changed its feeble drone to a scarce louder drone in an-
other key; precipitating as it did so a horror unthinkable and unexpected.
At this horror I sank nearly to the lichened earth, transfixed with a dread
not of this or any world, but only of the mad spaces between the stars.
Out of the unimaginable blackness beyond the gangrenous glare of
that cold flame, out of the tartarean leagues through which that oily river
rolled uncanny, unheard, and unsuspected, there flopped rhythmically a
horde of tame, trained, hybrid winged things that no sound eye could
ever wholly grasp, or sound brain ever wholly remember. They were not
altogether crows, nor moles, nor buzzards, nor ants, nor vampire bats,
nor decomposed human beings; but something I cannot and must not
8
recall. They flopped limply along, half with their webbed feet and half
with their membranous wings; and as they reached the throng of celeb-
rants the cowled figures seized and mounted them, and rode off one by
one along the reaches of that unlighted river, into pits and galleries of
panic where poison springs feed frightful and undiscoverable cataracts.
The old spinning woman had gone with the throng, and the old man
remained only because I had refused when he motioned me to seize an
animal and ride like the rest. I saw when I staggered to my feet that the
amorphous flute-player had rolled out of sight, but that two of the beasts
were patiently standing by. As I hung back, the old man produced his
stylus and tablet and wrote that he was the true deputy of my fathers
who had founded the Yule worship in this ancient place; that it had been
decreed I should come back, and that the most secret mysteries were yet
to be performed. He wrote this in a very ancient hand, and when I still
hesitated he pulled from his loose robe a seal ring and a watch, both with
my family arms, to prove that he was what he said. But it was a hideous
proof, because I knew from old papers that that watch had been buried
with my great-great-great-great-grandfather in 1698.
Presently the old man drew back his hood and pointed to the family
resemblance in his face, but I only shuddered, because I was sure that the
face was merely a devilish waxen mask. The flopping animals were now
scratching restlessly at the lichens, and I saw that the old man was nearly
as restless himself. When one of the things began to waddle and edge
away, he turned quickly to stop it; so that the suddenness of his motion
dislodged the waxen mask from what should have been his head. And
then, because that nightmare's position barred me from the stone stair-
case down which we had come, I flung myself into the oily underground
river that bubbled somewhere to the caves of the sea; flung myself into
that putrescent juice of earth's inner horrors before the madness of my
screams could bring down upon me all the charnel legions these pest-
gulfs might conceal.
At the hospital they told me I had been found half-frozen in Kingsport
Harbour at dawn, clinging to the drifting spar that accident sent to save
me. They told me I had taken the wrong fork of the hill road the night
before, and fallen over the cliffs at Orange Point; a thing they deduced
from prints found in the snow. There was nothing I could say, because
everything was wrong. Everything was wrong, with the broad windows
showing a sea of roofs in which only about one in five was ancient, and
the sound of trolleys and motors in the streets below. They insisted that
this was Kingsport, and I could not deny it. When I went delirious at
9
hearing that the hospital stood near the old churchyard on Central Hill,
they sent me to St Mary's Hospital in Arkham, where I could have better
care. I liked it there, for the doctors were broad-minded, and even lent
me their influence in obtaining the carefully sheltered copy of Alhazred's
objectionable Necronomicon from the library of Miskatonic University.
They said something about a "psychosis" and agreed I had better get any
harassing obsessions off my mind.
So I read that hideous chapter, and shuddered doubly because it was
indeed not new to me. I had seen it before, let footprints tell what they
might; and where it was I had seen it were best forgotten. There was no
one- in waking hours- who could remind me of it; but my dreams are
filled with terror, because of phrases I dare not quote. I dare quote only
one paragraph, put into such English as I can make from the awkward
Low Latin.
"The nethermost caverns," wrote the mad Arab, "are not for the
fathoming of eyes that see; for their marvels are strange and terrific.
Cursed the ground where dead thoughts live new and oddly bodied,
and evil the mind that is held by no head. Wisely did Ibn Schacabao say,
that happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy the town
at night whose wizards are all ashes. For it is of old rumour that the soul
of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and in-
structs the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life
springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell
monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where earth's
pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to
crawl."
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