The Festival

By H. P. Lovecraft

Author of “Dagon,” “The Rats in the Walls,” etc.


    “Efficiunt daemones, ut quae non sunt, sic tamen quasi
    sint, conspicienda hominibus exhibeant.”--Lactantius.


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, which 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, 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 chimneypots, 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
gray wings over winter-whitened gables and gambrel roofs. And against
the rotting wharves the sea pounded; the secretive, immemorial sea out
of which the people had come in the elder time.

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,
but 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. I was
glad I had chosen to walk. 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 story, 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 overhanging 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, candlelit room with massive exposed rafters
and dark, stiff, sparse furniture of the seventeenth century. The past
was vivid there, for not an attribute 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 infinite dampness seemed upon
the place, and I marveled 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 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 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 moldy, and that they included old Morryster’s wild “Marvels of
Science,” the terrible “Saducismus Triumphatus” of Joseph Glanvil,
published in 1681, the shocking “Daemonolatreia” 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 father’s 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
11 o’clock 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 up 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 signs and antediluvian gables, the thatched roofs and the
diamond-paned windows; threading precipitous lanes where decaying
houses overlapped and crumbled together, gliding across open courts
and churchyards where the bobbing lanterns 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 travelers were converging as they flowed near a sort
of focus of crazy alleys at the top of a high hill in the center 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 harbor,
though the town was invisible in the dark. Only once in a while a
lantern 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. Then finally I went, the sinister man
and the old spinning woman before me. Crossing the threshold into that
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 eye
that they bore no mark of passing feet, not even mine.

The church was scarce lighted by all the lanterns that had entered it,
for most of the throng had already vanished. They had streamed up the
aisle between the high white pews to the trapdoor of the vaults which
yawned loathsomely open just before the pulpit, and were now squirming
noiselessly in. I followed dumbly down the footworn steps and into the
dank, 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 chiseled out
of the solid rock. What mainly troubled me was that the myriad
footfalls made no sound and set up no echoes. After more eons 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 odor of decay grew quite unbearable. I knew
we must have passed down through the mountain and 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 that 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 fetid darkness where I could not see. But what
frightened me most was that flaming column; spouting volcanically from
depths profound and inconceivable, casting no shadows as healthy flame
should, and coating the nitrous stone above 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 semicircle he
faced. At certain stages of the ritual they did groveling 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 signal 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 nor 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 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
Harbor 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
deducted from prints found in the snow. There was nothing I could say,
because everything was wrong. Everything was wrong, with the broad
window 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 broadminded, 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 that I had better get my
harassing obsessions off my mind.

So I read again 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.

“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
Schacabac say that happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and
happy the town at night whose wizards are all in ashes. For it is of
old rumor 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.”

[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the January 1925 issue of
Weird Tales Magazine.]