The Festival15:57 Dec 11 2007
Times Read: 865
As I have promised to my friends in CFF and out of CFF, here is another LOVEcraft story.
An remember: "life itself is an illusion, a Dionysian celebration of masked and anonymous revels"(Cortazar).
The Festival
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written Oct 1923
Published January 1925 in Weird Tales, Vol 5, No. 1, p. 169-74.
Efficiut Daemones, ut quae non sunt, sic tamen quasi sint, conspicienda
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 legend 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, ridgepoles 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
secretive, immemorial sea out of which the people had come in the elder time.
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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 gravestones 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 Christmas 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 legend 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 overhead. 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
windows without drawn curtains.
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 heritage, 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 ancient 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
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was missing. There was a cavernous fireplace and a spinning-wheel at which a bent old
woman in loose wrapper and deep poke-bonnet sat back toward me, silently spinning
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, curiously 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
Lyons, 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 resolved to expect queer things. So I tried to read,
and soon became tremblingly absorbed by something I found in that accursed
Necronomicon; a thought and a legend too hideous for sanity or consciousness, but I
disliked 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 persons 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 woman, who was ceasing her
monotonous spinning. Then they both started for the outer door; the woman lamely
creeping, and the old man, after picking lip 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 incredibly ancient town;
went out as the lights in the curtained windows disappeared 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 windows; threading
precipitous lanes where decaying houses overlapped and crumbled together; gliding
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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
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 lanthorn 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 determined 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 noiselessly 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 spiral 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 observed 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
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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 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 volcanically from depths
profound and inconceivable, casfing no shadows as healthy flame should, and coating the
nitrous stone with a nasty, venomous 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, especially 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 another 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 recall. They flopped
limply along, half with their webbed feet and half with their membranous wings; and as
they reached the throng of celebrants the cowled figures seized and mounted them, and
The Festival
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 staircase 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 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.
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"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 instructs 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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