Again we ventured to look back, and saw the elastic monster, whose legs had now lengthened till it towered above us, and whose maw was wide enough to have swallowed us both at a mouthful. It followed us with an effortless glide, with a surety of motion and intention too horrible, too cynical to be borne. We ran into the temple of Tsathoggua, whose door was still open just as we had left it, and closing the door behind us with a fearful immediacy, we contrived, in the superhuman strength of our desperation, to shoot one of the rusty bolts.

Now, while the chill drearness of the dawn fell down in narrow shafts through the windows high in the wall, we tried with a truly heroic resignation to compose ourselves, and waited for whatever our destiny should bring. And while we waited, the god Tsathoggua peered upon us with an even more imbecile squatness and vileness and bestiality than he had shown in the torchlight.

I think I have said that the lintel of the door had crumbled and splintered away in several places. In fact, the beginning process of ruin had made three apertures, through which the daylight now filtered, and which were large enough to have permitted the passage of small animals or sizable serpents. For some reason, our eyes were drawn to these apertures.

We had not gazed long, when the light was suddenly intercepted in all three openings, and then a black material began to pour through them and ran down the door in a triple stream to the flagstones, where it re-united and resumed the form of the thing that had followed us.

“Farewell, Tirouv Ompallios,” I cried, with such remaining breath as I could summon. Then I ran and concealed myself behind the image of Tsathoggua, which was large enough to screen me from view, but, unfortunately, was too small to serve this purpose for more than one person. Tirouv Ompallios would have preceded me with the same laudable idea of self-preservation, but I was the quicker. And seeing that there was not room for both of us to the rearward of Tsathoggua, he returned my valediction and climbed into the great bronze basin, which alone could now afford a moment’s concealment in the bareness of the fane.

Peering from behind that execrable god, whose one merit was the width of his abdomen and his haunches, I observed the actions of the monster. No sooner had Tirouv Ompallios crouched down in the three-legged bowl, when the nameless enormity reared itself up like a sooty pillar and approached the basin. The head had now changed in form and position, till it was no more than a vague imprint of features on the middle of a body without arms, legs or neck. The thing loomed above the brim for an instant, gathering all its bulk in an imminent mass on a sort of tapering tail, and then like a lapsing wave it fell into the bowl upon Tirouv Ompallios. Its whole body seemed to open and form an immense mouth as it sank down from sight.

Hardly able to breathe in my horror, I waited, but no sound and no movement came from the basin—not even a groan from Tirouv Ompallios. Finally, with infinite slowness and trepidation and caution, I ventured to emerge from behind Tsathoggua, and passing the bowl on tip-toe, I managed to reach the door.

Now, in order to win my freedom, it would be necessary to draw back the bolt and open the door. And this I greatly feared to do because of the inevitable noise. I felt that it would be highly injudicious to disturb the entity in the bowl while it was digesting Tirouv Ompallios; but there seemed to be no other way if I was ever to leave that abominable fane.

Even as I shot back the bolt, a single tentacle sprang out with infernal rapidity from the basin, and, elongating itself across the whole room, it encircled my right wrist in a lethal clutch. It was unlike anything I have ever touched, it was indescribably viscid and slimy and cold, it was loathsomely soft like the foul mire of a bog and mordantly sharp as an edged metal, with an agonizing suction and constriction that made me scream aloud as the clutch tightened upon my flesh, cutting into me like a vise of knife-blades. In my struggles to free myself, I drew the door open, and fell forward on the sill. A moment of awful pain, and then I became aware that I had broken away from my captor. But looking down, I saw that my hand was gone, leaving a strangely withered stump from which little blood issued. Then, gazing behind me into the shrine, I saw the tentacle recoil and shorten till it passed from view behind the rim of the basin, bearing my lost hand to join whatever now remained of Tirouv Ompallios.

THE MONSTER OF THE PROPHECY

Foreword

The disappearance of an unknown and presumably minor poet, no matter how insoluble or obscure the circumstances, would not ordinarily resolve itself into a theme of much popular interest and discussion. But the case whose inner details I am now about to relate, was far from ordinary even in its mundane sequel: the publication of Theophilus Alvor’s “Ode to Antares” in The Contemporary Muse, the praise it elicited from certain influential critics, and the unavailing efforts of the editor and these critics to find Alvor or to learn what had become of him, ended by turning the matter into a seven days’ newspaper sensation, during which the front page head-lines waxed and waned in their typographical proportions, and many divergent theories were advanced by reporters, editorial writers and the police, as well as by Alvor’s new-won admirers and his land-lady. Also, among other results, a publisher was found for the three volumes of hitherto unmarketable verse and the no less unmarketable collection of prose tales which the poet had left in his lodgings; and a modest but growing fame was assured for him even after the newspapers had turned their attention to fresher mysteries.

Very little was ascertainable by anyone concerning what could have happened to Alvor, and this little afforded room for almost any amount of permissible conjecture. The poet was a new-comer in Brooklyn and had made no friends and few acquaintances there; and his land-lady was the only person who could bring forward anything of the least illuminative value or significance. She testified that Alvor had been unable to pay his room-rent for two weeks prior to his disappearance, and that he was in a state of obvious depression at the time and had looked increasingly pale, dilapidated and ill-fed. She herself, out of a certain motherly kindness aroused by his refinement and forlorn aspect, had forborne to press him for her money and had even given him several meals at her own table. The most popular and plausible theory advanced was that of suicide; but none of the divers anonymous bodies found in Brooklyn or dragged from East River at that time could be identified as Alvor; also, it could not be learned that anyone resembling him had purchased a revolver or a bottle of poison. Other theories propounded were, that he had stowed away on some trans-oceanic vessel, had been shanghaied, or had simply walked out of Brooklyn or ridden away on a freight train to try his fortune elsewhere. Rumors sprang up that he had been seen in remote places, in New Orleans, Mobile, Chicago, San Francisco, and even Mexico City; and there were those who purported to have authentic information that he had gone to Peru, with the idea of collecting material for a long narrative poem dealing with the Incas. None of these reports, however, was verifiable, and since the poet himself never returned to enjoy the profits of his spreading fame, and no word came from him, his disappearance remained an unsolvable mystery.

Indeed, in all the world there was no one who could have thrown the least light on this mystery. The truth of what had happened to Theophilus Alvor was known only to the people of a far-off planet, whose communications with the races of this earth are infrequent and obscure.