Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (67 page)

But there were literally dozens—eventually hundreds—of less important items that fitted the pattern. The marine creature that dragged away a trout fisherman in Loch Eilt led to several newspaper articles about “prehistoric survivals”; but the Glasgow edition of the
Daily Express
(May 18, 1968) printed a story of a witch cult and their worship of a sea-devil with an overpowering smell of decay that recalled Lovecraft’s Innsmouth. An item about the Melksham strangler led me to spend some days there, and I have a signed statement by Detective Sergeant Bradley agreeing that the words the killer used repeatedly before he died were “Ghatanothoa,” “Nug” (another elemental described in Lovecraft), and “Rantegoz.” (Rhan-Tegoth, the beast god, also mentioned in Lovecraft?) Robbins (the strangler) claimed that he was possessed by a “power from underground” when he killed the three women and amputated their feet.

It would be pointless to continue this list. We hope to have a
number of selected items from it—some five hundred in all—published in a volume that will be sent to every member of Congress and every member of the British House of Commons.

There are certain items that will not be published in this volume, and which are perhaps the most disturbing of all. At 7:45 on December 7th, 1967, a small private aircraft piloted by R. D. Jones of Kingston, Jamaica, left Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for Kingston. There were three passengers aboard. The journey of about five hundred kilometres should have taken two hours. By ten o’clock, Jones’s wife, waiting at the airfield, became alarmed and suggested a search. All attempts at radio contact failed. The search began during the morning. At 1:15, Jones radioed the field for permission to land, apparently unaware of the anxiety he was causing. When asked where he had been, he looked puzzled, and said, “Flying, of course.” When told the time, he was amazed.
His own watch showed 10:15
. He said he had been flying in low cloud most of the way, but that he had no cause for alarm. Weather reports showed that it was an exceptionally clear day for December, and that he should have encountered no cloud. (
Gleaner
, Dec. 8th, 1967.)

The other four cases of which we possess details are similar to this first one, except that one case, the
Jeannie
, concerned a coast guard vessel off the west coast of Scotland, not an aeroplane. In this instance, the three men on board had encountered heavy “fog,” discovered their radio was not working, and that, for some reason, their watches had stopped. They assumed that it was some odd magnetic disturbance. However, the vessel’s other instruments worked well enough, and in due course, the boat reached Stornoway on Lewis—having been missing for twenty-two hours instead of the three or four assumed by the crew. The naval training plane
Blackjack
, off the Baja peninsula, Southern California, holds the record; it was missing for three days and five hours. The crew thought it had been away from base for seven hours or so.

We have been unable to discover what explanation was advanced by the navy for this curious episode, or by the coast guard of Great Britain for the
Jeannie
interlude. It was probably assumed that the crew got drunk at sea and fell asleep. But there is one thing we soon learned beyond all doubt: human beings do not wish to know about things that threaten their feeling of security and “normality.” This was also a discovery made by the late Charles Fort; he devoted his life to analysing it. And I suppose the books of Fort present classic instances of what William James called “a certain blindness in human beings.” For he invariably gives newspaper references for the incredible events he cites. Why had no one ever taken the trouble to check his references—or some of them—and then write a statement admitting his honesty or
denouncing him as a fraud? Mr. Tiffany Thayer once told me that critical readers take the view that there was some “special circumstance” in each case Fort quotes which invalidates it—an unreliable witness here, an inventive reporter there, and so on. And it never strikes anyone that to use this explanation to cover a thousand pages full of carefully assembled facts amounts to pure self-delusion.

Like most people, I have always made the assumption that my fellow human beings are relatively honest, relatively open-minded, relatively curious. If anything were needed to reassure me about the curiosity about the apparently inexplicable, I would only have to glance at any airport bookstall, with its dozen or so paperbacks by Frank Edwards, et al., all bearing titles like
World of the Weird, A Hundred Events Stranger than Fiction
, and so on. It comes as a shock to discover that all this is not proof of a genuine open-mindedness about the “supernatural” but only of a desire to be titillated and shocked. These books are a kind of occult pornography, part of a game of “let’s make believe the world is far less dull than it actually is.”

On August 19th, 1968, Urquart and myself invited twelve “friends” to the rooms we had taken at 83 Gower Street—the house in which Darwin lived immediately after his marriage. We felt the Darwin association was appropriate, for we had no doubt that the date would long be remembered by everyone present. I shall not go into detail except to say that there were four professors—three from London, one from Cambridge—two journalists, both from respectable newspapers, and several members of the professions, including a doctor.

Urquart introduced me, and I read from a prepared statement, elaborating where I felt it to be necessary. After ten minutes, the Cambridge professor cleared his throat, said “Excuse me,” and hurried out of the room. I discovered later that he thought he had been the victim of a practical joke. The others listened to the end, and for a great deal of the time, I was aware that they were also wondering whether this was all a joke. When they realised that it was not, they became definitely hostile. One of the journalists, a young man just down from the university, kept interrupting with: “Are we to understand.…” One of the ladies got up and left, although I heard later that this was less from disbelief than because she suddenly noticed that there were now thirteen people in the room and thought it unlucky. The young journalist was carrying two of Urquart’s books on Mu, and he quoted from these with deadly effect. Urquart is certainly no master of the English language, and there was a time when I would have seen in them mainly an excuse for witty sarcasm.

But what was amazing to me was that no one present seemed to accept our “lecture” as a
warning
. They argued about it as though it were an interesting theory, or perhaps an unusual short story. Finally,
after an hour of quibbling about various newspaper cuttings, a solicitor stood up and made a speech that obviously conveyed the general feeling, beginning: “I think Mr. Hough (the journalist) has expressed the misgivings we all feel.…” His main point, which he kept repeating, was that there was no
definite evidence
. The Llandalffen explosion could have been due to nitroglycerine or even the impact of a shower of meteors. Poor Urquart’s books were treated in a manner that would have made me wince even in my most sceptical days.

There was no point in going on. We tape-recorded the whole meeting, and had it typed and duplicated, hoping that one day it will be regarded as almost unbelievable evidence of human blindness and stupidity. And then nothing more happened. The two newspapers decided not to print even a critical account of our arguments. A number of people got wind of the meeting and came to see us—bosomy ladies with ouija boards, a thin man who thought the Loch Ness monster was a Russian submarine, and a number of assorted cranks. This was the point where we decided to move to America. We still entertained some absurd hope that Americans would prove more open-minded than the English.

It did not take long to disillusion us—although it is true that we found one or two people who were at least willing to suspend judgment on our sanity. But on the whole, the results were negative. We spent an interesting day at the almost defunct fishing village of Cohasset—Lovecraft’s Innsmouth; long enough to discover that it is as active a centre of Lloigor activity as Llandalffen, perhaps more so, and that we would be in extreme danger if we remained there. But we managed to locate Joseph Cullen Marsh, grandson of Lovecraft’s Captain Marsh, who now lived in Popasquash. He told us that his grandfather had died insane, and believed that he had possessed certain “occult” books and manuscripts, which had been destroyed by his widow. This may have been where Lovecraft actually saw the
Necronomicon
. He also mentioned that Captain Marsh referred to the ancient Old Ones as “the Masters of Time”—an interesting comment in view of the case of the
Jeannie
, the
Blackjack
, and the rest.

Urquart is convinced that the manuscripts were not destroyed—on the curious grounds that such ancient works have a character of their own, and tend to avoid destruction. He is conducting an enormous correspondence with Captain Marsh’s heirs, and his family solicitors, in an attempt to pick up the trail of the
Necronomicon
.

In the present stage …

Editor’s Note
. The above words were written by my uncle a few minutes before he received the telegram from Senator James R. Pinckney of Virginia, an old school-friend, and probably one of those my uncle
mentions as being “willing to suspend judgment on his sanity.” The telegram read:
COME TO WASHINGTON AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, BRING CUTTINGS, CONTACT ME AT MY HOME, PINCKNEY
. Senator Pinckney has confirmed to me that the Secretary for Defense had agreed to spend some time with my uncle, and that, if impressed, he might conceivably have arranged an interview with the President himself.

My uncle and Colonel Urquart were unable to get on the three-fifteen flight from Charlottesville to Washington; they went to the airport on a “stand-by” basis, hoping for cancellations. There was only one cancellation, and after some argument, Colonel Urquart agreed with my uncle that they should stick together rather than go to Washington by different routes. At this point, Captain Harvey Nichols agreed to fly them to Washington in a Cessna 311 of which he was one-quarter owner.

The plane took off from a side runway at 3:43 on February 19, 1969; the sky was perfectly clear, and weather reports were excellent. Ten minutes later, the airfield received the mystifying signal “running into low cloud.” He should have been by then somewhere in the area of Gordonsville, and the weather over this area was exceptionally clear. Subsequent attempts to contact the plane by radio failed. At five o’clock, I was informed that radio contact had been lost. But during the next few hours, hope revived as widespread enquiries failed to discover any reports of a crash. By midnight, we all assumed that it would only be a matter of time before the wreck was reported.

It has never been reported. In the two months that have elapsed since then, nothing further has been heard of my uncle or of the plane. It is my own opinion—supported by many people of wide experience in flying—that the plane had an instrument failure, and somehow flew out over the Atlantic, where it crashed.

My uncle had already arranged for the publication of this book of selections from his press-cutting albums with the Black Cockerell Press of Charlottesville, and it seems appropriate that these notes of his should be used as an introduction.

In the newspaper stories that have appeared about my uncle in the past two months, it has often been assumed that he was insane, or at least, suffering from delusions. This is not my own view. I met Colonel Urquart on a great many occasions, and it is my own opinion that he was thoroughly untrustworthy. My mother described him to me as “an extremely shifty character.” Even my uncle’s account of him—at their first meeting—bears this out. It would be charitable to assume that Urquart believed everything he wrote in his books, but I find this hard to accept. They are cheap and sensational, and in parts obviously pure invention. (For example, he never mentions the name of the Hindu monastery—or even its location—where he made his
amazing “finds” about Mu; neither does he mention the name of the priest who is supposed to have taught him to read the language of the inscriptions.)

My uncle was a simple and easy-going man, almost a caricature of the absent-minded professor. This is revealed in his naive account of the meeting at 83 Gower Street, and the reaction of his audience. He had no notion of the possibilities of human duplicity that are, in my opinion, revealed in the writings of Colonel Urquart. And typically, my uncle does not mention that it was he who paid for the Colonel’s passage across the Atlantic, and for the rooms at 83 Gower Street. The Colonel’s income was extremely small, while my uncle was, I suppose, comparatively well-off.

And yet there is, I think, another possibility that must be taken into account—suggested by my uncle’s friend Foster Damon. My uncle was loved by his students and colleagues for his sense of dry humour, and has been many times compared to Mark Twain. And the resemblance did not end there; he also shared Twain’s deep vein of pessimism about the human race.

I knew my uncle well in the last years of his life, and saw much of him even in the last months. He knew I did not believe his stories about the “Lloigor,” and that I thought Urquart a charlatan. A fanatic would have tried to convince me, and perhaps refused to speak to me when I declined to be convinced. My uncle continued to treat me with the same good humour as ever, and my mother and I both noticed that his eyes often twinkled as he looked at me. Was he congratulating himself on having a nephew who was too pragmatic to be taken in by his elaborate joke?

I like to think so. For he was a good and sincere man, and is mourned by innumerable friends.

—Julian F. Lang. 1969.