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The Descendant
Lovecraft, Howard Phillips
Published:
1938
Categorie(s):
Fiction, Horror, Short Stories
Source:
http://www.gutenberg.org
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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,
Lovecraft’s 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
Also available on Feedbooks for Lovecraft:
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(1926)
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(1931)
•
(1928)
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(1934)
•
(1931)
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(1936)
•
(1930)
•
(1927)
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(1938)
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(1932)
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Writing on what my doctor tells me is my deathbed, my most hideous
fear is that the man is wrong. I suppose I shall seem to be buried next
week, but…
In London there is a man who screams when the church bells ring. He
lives all alone with his streaked cat in Gray's Inn, and people call him
harmlessly mad. His room is filled with books of the tamest and most
puerile kind, and hour after hour he tries to lose himself in their feeble
pages. All he seeks from life is not to think. For some reason thought is
very horrible to him, and anything which stirs the imagination he flees as
a plague. He is very thin and grey and wrinkled, but there are those who
declare he is not nearly so old as he looks. Fear has its grisly claws upon
him, and a sound will make him start with staring eyes and sweat-
beaded forehead. Friends and companions he shuns, for he wishes to an-
swer no questions. Those who once knew him as scholar and aesthete
say it is very pitiful to see him now. He dropped them all years ago, and
no one feels sure whether he left the country or merely sank from sight
in some hidden byway. It is a decade now since he moved into Gray's
Inn, and of where he had been he would say nothing till the night young
Williams bought the Necronomicon.
Williams was a dreamer, and only twenty-three, and when he moved
into the ancient house he felt a strangeness and a breath of cosmic wind
about the grey wizened man in the next room. He forced his friendship
where old friends dared not force theirs, and marvelled at the fright that
sat upon this gaunt, haggard watcher and listener. For that the man al-
ways watched and listened no one could doubt. He watched and
listened with his mind more than with his eyes and ears, and strove
every moment to drown something in his ceaseless poring over gay, in-
sipid novels. And when the church bells rang he would stop his ears and
scream, and the grey cat that dwelt with him would howl in unison till
the last peal died reverberantly away.
But try as Williams would, he could not make his neighbour speak of
anything profound or hidden. The old man would not live up to his as-
pect and manner, but would feign a smile and a light tone and prattle fe-
verishly and frantically of cheerful trifles; his voice every moment rising
and thickening till at last it would split in a piping and incoherent fal-
setto. That his learning was deep and thorough, his most trivial remarks
made abundantly clear; and Williams was not surprised to hear that he
had been to Harrow and Oxford. Later it developed that he was none
other than Lord Northam, of whose ancient hereditary castle on the
Yorkshire coast so many odd things were told; but when Williams tried
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to talk of the castle, and of its reputed Roman origin, he refused to admit
that there was anything unusual about it. He even tittered shrilly when
the subject of the supposed under crypts, hewn out of the solid crag that
frowns on the North Sea, was brought up.
So matters went till that night when Williams brought home the in-
famous Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. He had known
of the dreaded volume since his sixteenth year, when his dawning love
of the bizarre had led him to ask queer questions of a bent old bookseller
in Chandos Street; and he had always wondered why men paled when
they spoke of it. The old bookseller had told him that only five copies
were known to have survived the shocked edicts of the priests and law-
givers against it and that all of these were locked up with frightened care
by custodians who had ventured to begin a reading of the hateful black-
letter. But now, at last, he had not only found an accessible copy but had
made it his own at a ludicrously low figure. It was at a Jew's shop in the
squalid precincts of Clare Market, where he had often bought strange
things before, and he almost fancied the gnarled old Levite smiled
amidst tangles of beard as the great discovery was made. The bulky
leather cover with the brass clasp had been so prominently visible, and
the price was so absurdly slight.
The one glimpse he had had of the title was enough to send him into
transports, and some of the diagrams set in the vague Latin text excited
the tensest and most disquieting recollections in his brain. He felt it was
highly necessary to get the ponderous thing home and begin deciphering
it, and bore it out of the shop with such precipitate haste that the old Jew
chuckled disturbingly behind him. But when at last it was safe in his
room he found the combination of black-letter and debased idiom too
much for his powers as a linguist, and reluctantly called on his strange,
frightened friend for help with the twisted, mediaeval Latin. Lord
Northam was simpering inanities to his streaked cat, and started viol-
ently when the young man entered. Then he saw the volume and
shuddered wildly, and fainted altogether when Williams uttered the
title. It was when he regained his senses that he told his story; told his
fantastic figment of madness in frantic whispers, lest his friend be not
quick to burn the accursed book and give wide scattering to its ashes.
* * * *
There must, Lord Northam whispered, have been something wrong at
the start; but it would never have come to a head if he had not explored
too far. He was the nineteenth Baron of a line whose beginings went un-
comfortably far back into the past- unbelievably far, if vague tradition
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could be heeded, for there were family tales of a descent from pre-Saxon
times, when a certain Lunaeus Gabinius Capito, military tribune in the
Third Augustan Legion then stationed at Lindum in Roman Britain, had
been summarily expelled from his command for participation in certain
rites unconnected with any known religion. Gabinius had, the rumour
ran, come upon a cliffside cavern where strange folk met together and
made the Elder Sign in the dark; strange folk whom the Britons knew not
save in fear, and who were the last to survive from a great land in the
west that had sunk, leaving only the islands with the roths and circles
and shrines of which Stonehenge was the greatest. There was no cer-
tainty, of course, in the legend that Gabinius had built an impregnable
fortress over the forbidden cave and founded a line which Pict and Sax-
on, Dane and Norman were powerless to obliterate; or in the tacit as-
sumption that from this line sprang the bold companion and lieutenant
of the Black Prince whom Edward Third created Baron of Northam.
These things were not certain, yet they were often told; and in truth the
stonework of Northam Keep did look alarmingly like the masonry of
Hadrian's Wall. As a child Lord Northam had had peculiar dreams when
sleeping in the older parts of the castle, and had acquired a constant
habit of looking back through his memory for half-amorphous scenes
and patterns and impressions which formed no part of his waking exper-
ience. He became a dreamer who found life tame and unsatisfying; a
searcher for strange realms and relationships once familiar, yet lying
nowhere in the visible regions of earth.
Filled with a feeling that our tangible world is only an atom in a fabric
vast and ominous, and that unknown demesnes press on and permeate
the sphere of the known at every point, Northam in youth and young
manhood drained in turn the founts of formal religion and occult mys-
tery. Nowhere, however, could he find ease and content; and as he grew
older the staleness and limitations of life became more and more mad-
dening to him. During the 'nineties he dabbled in Satanism, and at all
times he devoured avidly any doctrine or theory which seemed to prom-
ise escape from the close vistas of science and the dully unvarying laws
of Nature. Books like Ignatius Donnelly's commerical account of Atlantis
he absorbed with zest, and a dozen obscure precursors of Charles Fort
enthralled him with their vagaries. He would travel leagues to follow up
a furtive village tale of abnormal wonder, and once went into the desert
of Araby to seek a Nameless City of faint report, which no man has ever
beheld. There rose within him the tantalising faith that somewhere an
easy gate existed, which if one found would admit him freely to those
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