Summary
Several years after discovering the contents of Angell's estate and contemplating the existence of the "Cthulu cult," Thurston encounters a peculiar news item while visiting a friend, a curator of a local museum in Paterson, New Jersey. A picture in the article, from the Sydney Bulletin dated April 18th, 1925, contains the same "hideous stone image" as found in Angell's papers. The headline declares that a freighter named Vigilant has towed in a disabled but armed yacht named Alert, with one man found dead and one survivor aboard. Thurston wishes he could undo ever seeing the article, and quotes its contents directly.
The Vigilant left Valparaiso, Chile, on March 25th, and arrived in Darling Harbour, Australia, six days after sighting the Alert near Dunedin, New Zealand. On April 2nd, a significant storm pushed the Vigilant further south than its usual course, causing it to sight the derelict Alert. Authorities question the lone survivor, named Gustav Johansen, who confesses that he found the stone idol in a shrine in one of the Alert's cabins, and provides an account rife with, "piracy and slaughter."
Originally the second mate of a schooner named Emma bound from Auckland, New Zealand, to Callao, Peru, Johansen reports being rerouted southward by a large storm on March 1st, and chancing upon the derelict Alert on March 22nd. After the Emma's chief officer, Captain Collins, ignores the Alert's command to turn back, the Alert fires on the Emma with reinforced cannons. The Emma returns fire but incurs heavy damage in the battle, which kills Captain Collins and the first mate, leaving Johansen in charge. Abandoning the bombarded Emma, Johansen boards the Alert with eight men, killing the remaining crew, and navigating the vessel toward its charted destination. They find a small island, where six of Johansen's men die. Johansen says nothing about the island beyond mentioning a "dark chasm," and although he remembers returning to the Alert with one companion, he confesses to having no knowledge of the circumstances of his partner's death. Local reports in Dunedin confirm the Alert's seedy reputation as an island trading vessel, and that it "set sail in great haste" after the storms and earthquakes on March 1st.
The article prompts Thurston to piece together a timeline of events worldwide: on the night of February 28th, the same night of storms and earth tremors that caused Henry Wilcox to dream of Cyclopean cities also drove the Alert out into the Arctic Sea, as if "imperiously summoned." On March 23rd, the day that the Alert landed on an island where six men died, the fever felt by Wilcox and other artists accelerated into delirium, leading to the death of at least one architect. A second recorded storm, on April 2nd, marks the date when Wilcox and other dreamers' symptoms and restless dreaming ceased. These half-formed correlations intrigue Thurston and compel him to visit Australia to seek out further details about the Alert, but the Alert's current condition as a commercial ship yields little information, and locals have scant recollections (aside from remembering that Johansen's hair turned white). Observing Johansen's geologically-alien stone idol found aboard the Alert in a museum, however, makes Thurston recall Castro's words about how the Great Ones "come from the stars."
Thurston next travels Oslo, Norway, to visit Johansen himself. When he knocks at the door, he finds Johansen's wife cloaked in all black, who tells Thurston that Johansen perished in 1925. The circumstances of Johansen's death, like Angell's, strike Thurston as mysterious: Johansen was struck by a bundle of papers, but died shortly after being helped to his feet by two nearby sailors. The widow tells Thurston that Johansen kept a personal diary in English, so that she would not be able to peruse its contents, and bequeaths it to Thurston, who reads it on the voyage back to London. Thurston expresses relief that Johansen did not comprehend all of what he saw, but worries that "I shall never sleep calmly again."
In the diary, Thurston finds that Johansen told authorities the truth up until the Alert found an island on March 23rd, which was in fact a giant stone monolith—the resting place of Cthulhu. Thurston struggles to imagine the "significant horror" and "cosmic majesty" that such a discovery must have instilled in the hearts of the men. Johansen's descriptions of the gnarled stone surface of the monstrous edifice prompt Thurston to remember Wilcox's comment about the "wrong" geometry of his dreamscapes. At the foot of the monolith, the men find a massive carved door bearing the outline of Cthulhu. After searching the edges for a lever or handle, the men watch as the door retracts and a black, billowing smoke pours out, followed by the enormous, slimy mass of Cthulhu itself. Johansen avers that two men died instantly of fright, three were swept up in Cthulhu's claws, and one slipped while running—only he and one other, named Briden, reached the boat.
Cthulhu enters the water and gives chase to Johansen, who frantically pilots the Alert away from the monolith at full speed, as Briden is driven fatally insane by witnessing the beast. Knowing the creature will eventually outpace the ship, Johansen reverses courses and strikes Cthulhu with the prow of the ship, sending a "slushy nastiness" and an "acrid and blinding green cloud" cascading over the deck of the Alert, the particles of which Johansen recalls seeing recombine in the sky. Johansen only remembers the dizzying feeling of being propelled through universes before the second storm on April 2nd, and the discovery of the Alert by the Vigilant. Thurston places Johansen's diary alongside Angell's papers and Wilcox's clay bas-relief, to which he adds his own account, and regrets ever having pieced together knowledge about the Cthulhu cult. He acknowledges that he will likely die soon, and urges his executors not to let anyone read his manuscript. At some point, as the title of the story indicates, Thurston dies.
Analysis
At this point in the plot, Thurston is far from the Ivy League-educated skeptic he once was. Instead, he has only a precarious grasp on all of his previously-held rational beliefs about the world, what he calls his "absolute materialism." By the time he reads Johansen's diary, he testifies that he will never sleep soundly again or make a full spiritual recovery from the set of revelations he has unearthed. By the end of the story, the first-person narration has descended into fear, dread, and abject paranoia, as Thurston assumes he is now a visible target for assassination by the Cthulhu cult for his investigations.
The third section of the story jumps forward a matter of months to a time when Thurston reports having "given over" his Cthulhu cult inquiry. Thurston's trip to visit a curator of a local museum in Paterson, New Jersey, is a reference to Lovecraft's real-life friend James F. Morton, the curator of the Paterson Museum, who was responsible for introducing Lovecraft to the work of Algernon Blackwood. Thurston's chance encounter with a new item at the museum spurs on a series of events that ultimately shred his remaining ties to his sanity and safety, which explains why he prefaces the tale by saying, "If heaven ever wishes to grant me a boon, it will be a total effacing of the results of a mere chance which fixed my eye on a certain [paper]..."
The story's third act—which narrates a thrilling, epic, and gory encounter with an awakened cosmological demon off the coast of New Zealand—is an early literary example of the kind of horror/science-fiction genre fiction that a wave of Hollywood directors would try to perfect a generation later, with such films like John Carpenter's The Thing, James Cameron's The Abyss, and Ridley Scott's Alien. Entitled "The Madness from the Sea," the third part of the story actually collates two documents, the first a newspaper article that Thurston finds in Paterson, and the second a diary that Thurston retrieves from Johansen's widow. The former is especially significant insofar it is the story's only document quoted in full to the reader with no mediation by Thurston. The latter is the story's last of many manuscripts, which finally pushes Thurston past the brink of sanity on which he has been teetering over the course of the plot.
Thurston's mental deterioration hastens as he is able to connect and relate the various fragments and timelines he has assembled over the course of the story under the same cosmological framework, a new and different framework that displaces his rational materialism for good. Lovecraft constantly emphasizes the fatal effects of acts of writing, reading, and witnessing, which are the written and oral channels of memory that mediate all of the story's evidence. Johansen, for instance, is killed when a manuscript literally drops on his head. Thurston, on the other hand, thinks his life might have been spared had he merely not read the Sydney Bulletin article.
The irony of the fatal power of writing and reporting in the story is that its characters mostly fail to successfully describe the things they are seeking. We see this with the various experts' failure to decrypt the alien's written language, and Old Castro's use of non-descriptive oral language like "Things" and "Ones." Johansen cannot even begin to describe witnessing Cthulhu in his otherwise forthright diary: "Poor Johansen's handwriting almost gave out...The Thing cannot be described." Nevertheless, reading Johansen's log and placing it next to Angell's papers in his own estate has convinced Thurston that he has encountered "all that the universe has to hold of horror." The final irony of Lovecraft's tale consists of the fact that Thurston begs his executor not to let his document "meet [any] other eye." The reader is left to contemplate whether, having read Thurston's tale of forbidden knowledge, he or she is now plagued with the curse of the Cthulhu cult.
