Summary
Thurston admits he only recently became aware of the fact that Wilcox never had any knowledge of the "older" matters that made his dream fascinating to Professor Angell. These matters comprise the subject of the second part of the "CTHULHU" manuscript, which reveals that Angell had encountered the "hellish outlines" reflected by Wilcox's clay bas-relief at least once before. Thurston begins to recount this second part in detail, entitled "The Tale of Inspector Legrasse." In 1908 in St. Louis, at a meeting of the American Archaeological Society, Angell remembers being present for a Q&A session where a man named John Raymond Legrasse presented an old, grotesque statuette. Legrasse tells Angell and others it was acquired in the swamplands of southern Louisiana in a raid on a "voodoo meeting." The experts conclude the idol is "infinitely more diabolical" than anything they have seen before.
Angell's describe the notes of terror Legrasse's object instilled, "a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline," with a "mass of feelers," clustered around its "octopus-like" face, crouched in a defensive position. Its remoteness to various fields of study make it even more frightening to the men, though one man named William Channing Webb, Professor of Anthropology in Princeton University, reports having encountered the outline before—forty-eight years prior, on the West Greenland coast, where Webb once spent time transcribing the oral rituals of an Inuit priest. The discovery of Webb's phonetic transcriptions exhilarate Legrasse, who recorded similar notations of the oral rituals from the swamplands of Louisiana. A comparative analysis reveals a gibberish phrase that Legrasse remembers a swamp cult-member translating as, "In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming." Inspector Legrasse then launches into a full account of how he came about the object as a policeman in New Orleans the previous year.
On November 1st, 1907, the police received a summons from an area in rural Louisiana populated by descendants of the pirate Jean Lafitte, who alleged that a malevolent spirit was stealing women and children. Twenty policemen travel to the outpost, into the depths of the marshlands, which have a reputation for being "nightmare itself," following the sounds of tom-toms and chanting voices. Legrasse reports hearing the phrase decrypted from Webb's notes being chanted. As they arrive, they see a mass ritual: a large bonfire around an eight-foot effigy of the same beast depicted in Legrasse and Wilcox's sculptures. A horrified Legrasse remembers seeing a ring of charred human remains set up in a perimeter around the fire, inside which the celebrants danced and chanted. He also mentions that another policeman, named Joseph D. Galvez, reported hearing the sound of gigantic wings beating out in the forest.
The police raid the gathering, killing five, injuring two, and capturing forty-seven. Legrasse recalls that many prisoners had ancestral origins in West African and Caribbean island countries, in particular the Cape Verde Islands and the West Indies, and that they as a cult worshipped entities known as "the Great Old Ones." "Those Old Ones" are creatures that preceded humanity, and which have since receded, "hidden in distant wastes and dark places," waiting for the call of a secret cult to resurrect them. The cult members acknowledge that mankind has never glimpsed these "Old Ones," and that their translations of Runic phrases are slivers of oral memory, as no one alive can translate the writing. The cult members also distinguish between the meaning of the chanted phrase, and the cult's true secret, which is never spoken above a whisper.
Deeming most of the captured to be clinically insane, the local police hang two and institutionalize the rest, who all claim that entities known as the "Black Winged Ones" urged them to commit the crimes. Legrasse remembers that the most lucid account came from an elderly man named Castro, who related an ancient Chinese legend wherein "Things" resided in "great cities" that have since been reduced to "Cyclopean" ruins. These "Things" did not resemble organic life on earth, and were capable of interstellar travel. According to Castro, Cthulhu enchanted the great city of R'lyeh with a spell priming the "Old Ones" for a resurrection at a future point in time, to be activated by the stars and by "transmitting thought" to sensitive dreamers. Castro imagines the activation of the Old Ones as initiating a violent anarchy worldwide: "a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom."
Legrasse tells the men that Castro reported that these great cities and creatures will one day rise from beneath the oceans, and guessed that their earthly center lies in the deserts of Arabia, as reflected in the book "Necronomicon" written by an Arab mystic named Abdul Alhazred. No more about the historical affiliations of the cult, Legrasse explains, is known. Thurston marvels at how his grand-uncle must have felt upon later hearing the tale of Wilcox's dream, which matched perfectly with Legrasse and Webb's testimonies. Regaining his skepticism, Thurston suspects that Wilcox manufactured his dream tale to "continue the mystery at my uncle's expense," and goes so far as to visit Wilcox in Providence, who has since matured into a successful sculptor.
Thurston finds that the imagery from Wilcox's dreams has profoundly influenced his decadent sculptures, which Wilcox attempts to describe as "damp," "slimy," and "all wrong." Although Wilcox again spontaneously repeats the phrase "Cthulhu fhtagn," Thurston reassures himself by figuring that Wilcox must have merely once heard rumors of the cult, which later found "subconscious expression" in his dreams. However, Thurston admits he also visited Legrasse in New Orleans, where he questioned the surviving prisoners captured in Legrasse's raid, whose testimonies finally convinced him that a "very real, very secret, and very ancient religion," genuinely exists among a global network of worshippers. Thurston once again ponders the mysterious circumstances of his grand-uncle's death, who may have been murdered for knowing too much about the cult, and wonders whether he himself will suffer a similar fate.
Analysis
Like Wilcox, Thurston initially had no framework or reference with which to interpret the content of the dreams of Wilcox and other artists. However, in the many years that elapse between discovering Angell's secret manuscripts and drafting the present tale, Thurston assembles the various pieces of the Cthulhu myth, just as Angell attempts to do during his lifetime. The gnawing human desire to learn the undeniably horrifying secrets of the universe is a major theme of the story, and an obsession that dooms several of the story's characters, including Gustav Johansen, Professor Angell, and Thurston himself. Only characters who are content merely to channel half-formed impressions and ephemeral glimpses of these cosmological forms, as Wilcox does with his decadent sculptural practice, are able to avoid their fatal implications.
The account of Inspector Legrasse to Professor Angell is the second major narrative of Lovecraft's tripartite tale. The pulpy, lurid account of a "voodoo orgy" in the marshlands of Louisiana contrasts dramatically with the rarefied, Ivy League setting of Angell's first tale, and endeavors to draw a connection between the syncretic belief systems and ritualistic practices of Caribbean and West African cultures, and the supernatural entities that form the center of the Cthulhu cult. The sub-plot concerning Professor Webb's expeditions on the West Greenland coast gradually expands the known radius of the Cthulhu cult's grasp, which by the end of the story has reached nearly every region of the globe.
The hieroglyphics on Legrasse's statuette and Wilcox's bas-relief are impossibly vexing to the story's forensic anthropologists and linguists, which reflects Lovecraft's desire to invoke the presence of cosmological forces that evade human understanding. Lovecraft intended the phonetic combinations, "Cthulhu," and, "R'lyeh," to indicate the human failure to hear alien speech, which Lovecraft describes hitting the ears as incomprehensible, mysterious "sense impacts." Unlike a typical language or code, which communicates meaning following some kind of interpretive or decrypting strategy, the language of the Old Ones is quite simply inaccessible to human minds, even to the cult's own rune-worshippers.
By a similar token, the outline of the statuette imagined by Wilcox and presented by Legrasse is most notable for having absolutely no aesthetic relation to any preexisting literary, historical, or mythological text. The statuette is an object of fear among the anthropologists in St. Louis precisely because there is no knowledge that they can even begin to infer about its origins. Thurston eventually discovers that this vacuum of knowledge is due to the cabalistic secrecy with which the Cthulhu cult operates. The triply removed testimony of Old Castro—related to Legrasse, repeated to Angell, and interpreted by Thurston—is ironically the nearest to the horrifying truth that any character is able to get, either in speech or writing.
In addition to defying history, anthropology, and linguistics, the "non-Euclidean" forms that Wilcox describes in his dreams also subvert the known laws of mathematics and geometry. Lovecraft compares Wilcox's fictional sculptures to real Welsh writer Arthur Machen and the American writer/illustrator Clark Ashton Smith, attempting to forge a connection between the aesthetic trends of literary and artistic modernism prevailing in the early twentieth century, and the supernatural disturbances pursuant to the resurrection of Cthulhu. After Legrasse's tale prompts Thurston to visit Wilcox and Legrasse himself, Thurston begins to refer to his "absolute materialism" in the past tense, indicating that he has now surrendered to believing in the otherworldly thrall of the Cthulhu mythos.
