Lovecraft, H P & Heald, Hazel - The Horror In The Museum

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The Horror in the Museum

by H. P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald

Written October 1932

Published July 1933 in Weird Tales, 22, No. 1, 49-68.

IT WAS languid curiousity which first brought Stephen Jones to Rogers' Museum.

Someone had told him about the queer underground place in Southwark Street across the

river, where waxen things so much more horrible than the worst effigies at Madame

Tussaud's were shown, and he had strolled in one April day to see how disappointing he

would find it. Oddly, he was not disappointed. There was something different and

distinctive here, after all. Of course, the usual gory commonplaces were present--Landru,

Doctor Crippen, Madame Demers, Rizzio, Lady Jane Grey, endless maimed victims of

war and revolution, and monsters like Gilles de Rais and Marquis de Sade--but there

were other things which had made him breathe faster and stay till the ringing of the

closing bell. The man who had fashioned this collection could be no ordinary

mountebank. There was imagination--even a kind of diseased genius--in some of this

stuff.

Later he had learned about George Rogers. The man had been on the Tussaud staff, but

some trouble had developed which led to his discharge. There were aspersions on his

sanity and tales of his crazy forms of secret worship--though latterly his success with his

own basement museum had dulled the edge of some criticisms while sharpening the

insidious point of others. Teratology and the iconography of nightmare were his hobbies,

and even he had had the prudence to screen off some of his worst effigies in a special

alcolve for adults only. It was this alcolve which had fascinated Jones so much. There

were lumpish hybrid things which only fantasy could spawn, molded with devilish skill,

and colored in a horribly life-like fashion.

Some were the figures of well-known myth--gorgons, chimeras. dragons, cyclops, and all

their shuddersome congeners. Others were drawn from darker and more furtively

whispered cycles of subterranean legend--black, formless Tsathoggua, many-tentacled

Cthulhu, proboscidian Chaugnar Faugn, and other rumored blasphemies from forbidden

books like the Necronomicon, the Book of Eibon, or the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von

Junzt. But the worst were wholly original with Rogers, and represented shapes which no

tale of antiquity had ever dared to suggest. Several were hideous parodies on forms of

organic life we know, while others seemed to be taken from feverish dreams of other

planets and galaxies. The wilder painted of Clark Ashton Smith might suggest a few--but

nothing could suggest the effect of poignant, loathsome terror created by their great size

and fiendishly cunning workmanship, and by the diabolically clever lighting conditions

under which they were exhibited.

Stephen Jones, as a leisurely connoisseur of the bizarre in art, had sought out Rogers

himself in the dingy office and workroom behind the vaulted museum chamber--an evil-

The Horror in the Museum

looking crypt lighted dimly by dusty windows set slit-like and horizontal in the brick wall

on a level with the ancient cobblestones of a hidden courtyard. It was here that the

images were repaired--here, too, where some of them had been made. Waxen arms, legs,

heads and torsos lay in grotesque array on various benches, while on high tiers of shelves

matted wigs, ravenous-looking teeth, and glassy, staring eyes were indiscriminately

scattered. Costumes of all sorts hung from hooks, and in one alcove were great piles of

flesh-colored wax-cakes and shelves filled with paint-cans and brushes of every

description. In the center of the room was a large melting-furnace used to prepare the

wax for molding, its fire-box topped by a huge iron container on hinges, with a spout

which permitted the pouring of melted wax with the merest touch of a finger.

Other things in the dismal crypt were less describable--isolated parts of problematical

entities whose assembled forms were the phantoms of delerium. At one end was a door

of heavy plank, fastened by an unusually large padlock and with a very peculiar symbol

painted over it. Jone, who had once had access to the dreaded Necronomicon, shivered

involuntarily as he recognized that symbol. This showman, he reflected, must indeed be

a person of disconcertingly wide scholarship in dark and dubious fields.

Nor did the conversation of Rogers disappoint him. The man was tall, lean, and rather

unkempt, with large black eyes which gazed combustively from a pallid and usually

stubble-covered face. He did not resent Jones' intrusion, but seemed to welcome the

chance of unburdening himself to an interested person. His voice was of singular depth

and resonance, and harbored a sort of repressed intensity bordering on the feverish. Jones

did not wonder that many had thought him mad.

With every successive call--and such calls became a habit as the weeks went by--Jones

had found Rogers more communicative and confidential. From the first there had been

hints of strange faiths and practices on the showman's part, and later on those hints

expanded into tales--despite a few odd corroborative photographs--whose extravagence

was almost comic. It was some time in June, on a night when Jones had brought a bottle

of good whisky and plied his host somewhat freely, that the really demented talk first

appeared. Before that there had been wild enough stories--accounts of mysterious trips to

Tibet, the African interior, the Arabian desert, the Amazon valley, Alaska, and certain

little-known islands of the South Pacific, plus claims of having read such monstrous and

half-fabulous books as the prehistoric Pnakotic fragments and the Dhol chants attributed

to malign and non-human Leng--but nothing in all this had been so unmistakably insane

as what had cropped out that June evening under the spell of the whisky.

To be plain, Rogers began making vauge boasts of having found certain things in nature

that no one had found before, and of having brought back tangible evidences of such

discoveries. According to his bibulous harangue, he had gone farther than anyone else in

interpreting the obscure and primal books he studied, and had been directed by them to

certain remote places where strange survivals are hidden--survivals of æons and life-

cycles earlier than mankind, and in some case connected with other dimensions and other

worlds, communication with which was frequent in the forgotten pre-human days. Jones

marvelled at the fancy which could conjure up such notions, and wondered just what

The Horror in the Museum

Rogers' mental history had been. Had his work amidst the morbid grotesequeries of

Madame Tussaud's been the start of his imaginative flights, or was the tendency innate,

so that his choice of occupation was merely one of its manifestations? At any rate, the

man's work was merely[?] very closely linked with his notions. Even now there was no

mistaking the trend of his blackest hints about the nightmare monstrosities in the

screened-off "Adults only" alcove. Heedless of ridicule, he was trying to imply that not

all of these demoniac abnormalities were artificial.

It was Jones' frank scepticism and amusement at these irresponsible claims which broke

up the growing cordiality. Rogers, it was clear, took himself very seriously; for he now

became morose and resentful, continuing to tolerate Jones only through a dogged urge to

break down his wall of urbane and complacent incredulity. Wild tales and suggestions of

rites and sacrifices to nameless elder gods continued, and now and then Rogers would

lead his guest to one of the hideous blashphemies in the screen-off alcolve and point out

features difficult to reconcile with even the finest human craftsmanship. Jones continued

his visits through sheer fascination, though he knew he had forfeited his host's regards.

At times he would humor Rogers with pretended assent to some mad hint or assertion,

but the gaunt showman was seldom to be deceived by such tactics.

The tension came to a head later in September. Jones had casually dropped into the

museum one afternoon, and was wandering through the dim corridors whose horror were

now so familiar, when he heard a very peculiar sound from the general direction of

Rogers' workroom. Others heard it too, and started nervously as the echoes reverberated

through the great vaulted basement. The three attendants exchanged odd glances; and

one of them, a dark, taciturn, foreign-looking fellow who always served Rogers as a

repairer and assistant designer, smiled in a way which seemed to puzzle his colleagues

and which grated very harshly on some facet of Jones' sensibilities. It was the yelp or

scream of a dog, and was such a sound as could be made only under conditions of the

utmost fright and agony combined. Its stark, anguised frenzy was appalling to hear, and

in this setting of grotesque abnormality it held a double hideousness. Jones remembered

that no dogs were allowed in the museum.

He was about to go to the door leading into the workroom, when the dark attendant

stopped him with a word and a gesture. Mr. Rogers, the man said in a soft, somewhat

accented voice at once apologetic and vaguely sardonic, was out, and there were standing

orders to admit no one to the workroom during his absence. As for that yelp, it was

undoubtedly something out in the courtyard behind the museum. This neighborhood was

full of stray mongrels, and their fights were sometimes shockingly noisy. There were no

dogs in any part of the museum. But if Mr. Jones wished to see Mr. Rogers he might find

him just before closing-time.

After this Jones climbed the old stone steps to the street outside and examined the squalid

neighborhood curiously. The leaning, decrepit buildings--once dwellings but now largely

shops and warehouses--were very ancient indeed. Some of them were of a gabled type

seeming to go back to Tudor times, and a faint miasmatic stench hung subtly about the

whole region. Beside the dingy house whose basement held the museum was a low

The Horror in the Museum

archway pierced by a dark cobbled alley, and this Jones entered in a vague wish to find

the courtyard behind the workroom and settle the affair of the dog comfortably in his

mind. The courtyard was dim in the late afternoon light, hemmed in by rear walls even

uglier and more intangibly menacing than the crumbling facades of the evil old houses.

Not a dog was in sight, and Jones wondered how the aftermath of such a frantic turmoil

could have completely vanished so soon.

Despite the assistant's statement that no dog had been in the museum, Jones glanced

nervously at the three small windows of the basement workroom--narrow, horizontal

rectangles close to the grass-grown pavement, with grimy panes that stared repulsively

and incuriously like the eyes of dead fish. To their left a worn flight of stairs led to an

opaque and heavily bolted door. Some impulse urged him to crouch low on the damp,

broken cobblestones and peer in, on the chance that the thick green shades, worked by

long cords that hung down to a reachable level, might not be drawn. The outer surfaces

were thick with dirt, but as he rubbed them with his handkerchief he saw there was no

obscuring curtain in the way of his vision.

So shadowed was the cellar from the inside that not much could be made out, but the

grotesque working paraphernalia now and then loomed up spectrally as Jones tried each

of the windows in turn. It seemed evident at first that no one was within; yet when he

peered through the extreme right-hand window--the one nearest the entrance alley--he

saw a glow of light at the farther end of the apartment which made him pause in

bewilderment. There was no reason why any light should be there. It was an inner side

of the room, and he could not recall any gas or electric fixture near that point. Another

look defined the glow as a large vertical rectangle, and a though occurred to him. It was

in that direction that he had always noticed the heavy plank door with the abnormally

large padlock--the door which was never opened, and above which was crudely smeared

that hideous cryptic symbol from the fragmentary records of forbidden elder magic. It

must be open now--and there was a light inside. All his former speculation as to where

that door led, and as to what lay behind it, were now renewed with trebly disquieting

force.

Jones wandered aimlessly around the dismal locality till close to six o'clock, when he

returned to the museum to make the call on Rogers. He could hardly tell why he wished

so especially to see the man just then, but there must have been some subconscious

misgivings about that terribly unplaceable canine scream of the afternnon, and about the

glow of light in that disturbing and usually unopened inner doorway with the heavy

padlock. The attendants were leaving as he arrived, and he thought that Orabona--the

dark foreign-looking assistant--eyed him with something like sly, repressed amusement.

He did not relish that look--even though he had seen the fellow turn it on his employer

many times.

The vaulted exhibition room was ghoulish in its desertion, but he strode quickly through

it and rapped at the door of the office and workroom. Response was slow in coming,

though there were footsteps inside. Finally, in response to a second knock, the lock

rattled, and the ancient six-panelled portal creaked reluctantly open to reveal the

The Horror in the Museum

slouching, feverish-eyed form of George Rogers. From the first it was clear that the

showman was in an unusual mood. There was a curious mixture of reluctance and actual

gloating in his welcome, and his talk at once veered to extravagances of the most hideous

and incredible sort.

Surviving elder gods--nameless sacrifices--the other than artificial nature of some of the

alcove horrors--all the usual boasts, but uttered in a tone of peculiarly increasing

confidence. Obviously, Jones reflected, the poor fellow's madness was gaining on him.

From time to time Rogers would send furtive glances toward the heavy, padlocked inner

door at the end of the room, or toward a piece of coarse burlap on the floor not far from

it, beneath which some small object appeared to be lying. Jones grew more nervous as

the moments passed, and began to feel as hesitant about mentioning the afternoon's

oddities as he had formerly been anxious to do so.

Rogers' sepulchrally resonant bass almost cracked under the excitement of his fevered

rambling.

"Do you remember," he shouted, "what I told you about that ruined city in Indo-China

where the Tcho-Tchos lived? You had to admit I'd been there when you saw the

photographs, even if you did think I made that oblong swimmer in darkness out of wax.

If you'd seen it writhing in the underground pools as I did. . . .

"Well, this is bigger still. I never told you about this, because I wanted to work out the

later parts before making any claim. When you see the snapshots you'll know the

geography couldn't have been faked, and I fancy I have another way of proving It isn't

any waxed concoction of mine. You've never seen it, for the experiments wouldn't let me

keep It on exhibition."

The showman glanced queerly at the padlocked door.

"It all comes from that long ritual in the eighth Pnakotic fragment. When I got it figured

out I saw it could only have one meaning. There were things in the north before the land

of Lomar--before mankind existed--and this was one of them. It took us all the way to

Alaska, and up the Nootak from Fort Morton, but the thing was there as we knew it

would be. Great cyclopean ruins, acres of them. There was less left than we had hoped

for, but after three million years what could one expect? And weren't the Eskimo legends

all in the right direction? We couldn't get one of the beggars to go with us, and had to

sledge all the way back to Nome for Americans. Orabona was no good up in that

climate--it made him sullen and hateful.

"I'll tell you later how we found It. When we got the ice blasted out of the pylons of the

central ruin the stairway was just as we knew it would be. Some carvings still there, and

it was no trouble keeping the Yankees from following us in. Orabona shivered like a

leaf--you'd never think it from the damned insolent way he struts around here. He knew

enough of the Elder Lore to be properly afraid. The eternal light was gone, but our

torches showed enough. We saw the bones of others who had been before us-æons ago,

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TheHorrorintheMuseumTheHorrorintheMuseumbyH.P.LovecraftandHazelHealdWrittenOctober1932PublishedJuly1933inWeirdTales,22,No.1,49-68.ITWASlanguidcuriousitywhichfirstbroughtStephenJonestoRogers'Museum.SomeonehadtoldhimaboutthequeerundergroundplaceinSouthwarkStreetacrosstheriver,wherewaxenthingssomuchmor...

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Lovecraft, H P & Heald, Hazel - The Horror In The Museum

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