Зов Ктулху / The Call of Chulhu - страница 6

[61] who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R’lyeh under the waters, would rise and rule the earth. Some day he will call, when the stars are ready, and the secret cult will always be waiting to liberate him.

Meanwhile no more can be told. There was a secret which could not be extracted. Mankind was not absolutely alone among the conscious things of earth: some shapes came out of the dark to visit the faithful few.[62] But these were not the Great Old Ones. No man had ever seen the Old Ones. The carven idol was great Cthulhu, but nobody might say how the others looked like. No one could read the old writing now, but things were told by word of mouth. The chanted ritual was not the secret – that was never spoken aloud, only whispered. The chant meant only this: “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”

Only two of the prisoners were found sane enough to be hanged, and the rest were taken to various hospitals. All denied ritual murders, and said that the killing had been done by Black Winged Ones[63] which had come to them from their immemorial meeting-place in the haunted wood. And nothing more could be known. What the police learned came mainly from the immensely aged mestizo named Castro,[64] who said that he had sailed to different ports and talked with undying leaders of the cult in the mountains of China.

Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that made man and the world seem recent and transient indeed. There had been ages when other Creatures ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, the deathless Chinamen had told him, could still be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific.[65] They all died long ago before men came, but there were ways which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them.

These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars came round to the right positions, They could travel from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R’lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them. But at that time some force from outside must serve to liberate Their bodies. The spells prevented Them from making an initial move, and They could only lie awake in the dark and think while millions of years passed by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe, for Their mode of speech was transmitted thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds.