Lovecraft, H P & Lumley, William - The Diary Of Alonzo Typer

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The Diary of Alonzo Typer

by H. P. Lovecraft and William Lumley

Written October 1935

Published February 1938 in Weird Tales, 31, No. 2, 152-66.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Alonzo Hasbrouch Typer of Kingston, New York, was last seen and

recognized on April 17, 1908, around noon, at the Hotel Richmond in Batavia. He was

the only survivor of an ancient Ulster Country family, and was fifty-three years old at the

time of his disapperance.

Mr. Typer was educated privately and at Columbia and Heidelberg universities. All his

life was spent as a student, the field of his researches including many obscure and

generally feared borderlands of human knowledge. His papers on vampirism, ghouls and

poltergeist phenomena were privately printed after rejection by many publishers. He

resigned from the Society for Psychical Research in 1900 after a series of peculiarly bitter

controversies.

At various times Mr. Typer traveled extensively, sometimes dropping out of site for long

periods. He is known to have visited obscure spots in Nepal, India, Tibet, and Indo-

China, and passed most of the year 1899 on mysterious Easter Island. The extensive

search for Mr. Typer after his disappeaance yielded no results, and his estate was divided

among distant cousins in New York City.

The diary herewith presented was allegedly found in the ruins of a large country house

near Attica, N.Y., which had borne a curiously sinister reputation for generations before

its collapse. The edifice was very old, antedating the general white settlement of the

region, and had formed the home of a strange and secretive family named van der Heyl,

which had migrated from Albany in 1746 under a curious cloud of witchcraft suspicion.

The structure probably dated from about 1760.

Of the history of the van der Heyls very little is known. They remained entirely aloof

from their normal neighbors, employed negro servants brought directly from Africa and

speaking little English, and educated their children privately and at European colleges.

Those of them who went out into the world were soon lost to sight, though not before

gaining evil repute for association with Black Mass groups and cults of even darker

significance.

Around the dreaded house a straggling village arose, populated by Indians and later by

renegades from the surrounding contry, which bore the dubious name of Chorazin. Of the

singular hereditary strains which afterward appeared in the mixed Chorazin villagers,

several monographs have been written by ethnologists. Just behind the village, and in

sight of the van der Heyl house, is a steep hill crowned with a peculiar ring of ancient

standing stones which the Iroquois always regarded with fear and loathing. The origin

The Diary of Alonzo Typer

and nature of the stones, whose date, according to archeological and climatalogical

evidence, must be fabulously early, is a problem still unsolved.

From about 1795 onward, the legends of the incoming pioneers and later population have

much to say about strange cries and chants proceeding at certain seaons from Chorazin

and from the great house and hill of standing stones; though there is reason to suppose

that the noises ceased about 1872, when the entire van der Heyl household - servants and

all - suddenly and simultaneously disappeared.

Thenceforward the house was deserted; for other disastrous events - including three

unexplained deaths, five disappearances, and four cases of sudden insanity - occurred

when later owners and interested visitors attempted to stay in it. The house, village, and

extensive rural areas on all sides reverted to the state and were auctioned off in the

absence of discoverable van der Heyl heirs. Since about 1890 the owners (successively

the late Charles A. Shields and his son Oscar S. Shields, of Buffalo) have left the entire

property in a state of absolute neglect, and have warned all inquirers not to visit the

region.

Of those known to have approached the house during the last forty years, most were

occult students, police officers, newspaper men, and odd characters from abroad. Among

the latter was a mysterious Eurasian, probably from Chochin-China, whose later

appearance with blank mind and bizarre mutilations excited wide press notice in 1903.

Mr. Typer's diary - a book about 6 x 3 1/2 inches in size, with tough paper and an oddly

durable binding of thin sheet metal - was discovered in the possession of one of the

decadent Chorazin villagers on November 16, 1935, by a state policeman sent to

investigate the rumored collapse of the deserted van der Heyl mansion. The house had

indeed fallen, obviously from sheer age and decrepitude, in the severe gale of November

12. Disintergration was peculiarly complete, and no thorough search of the ruins could be

made for several weeks. John Eagle, the swarthy, simian-faced, Indian-like villager who

had the diary, said that he found the book quite near the surface of the debris, in what

must have been an upper front room.

Very little of the contents of the house could be identified, though an enormous and

astonishingly solid brick vault in the cellar (whose ancient iron door had to be blasted

open because of the strangely figured and perversely tenacious lock) remained intact and

presented several puzzling features. For one thing, the walls were covered with still

undeciphered hieroglyphs roughly incised in the brickwork. Another peculiarity was a

huge circular aperture in the rear of the vault, blocked by a cave-in evidently caused by

the collapse of the house.

But strangest of all was the apparently recent deposit of some fetid, slimy, pitch-black

substance on the flagstoned floor, extending in a yardbroad, irregular line with one end at

the blocked circular aperture. Those who first opened the vault declared that the place

smelled like the snake-house at a zoo.

The Diary of Alonzo Typer

The diary, which was apparently designed solely to cover an investigation of the dreaded

van der Heyl house, by the vanished Mr. Typer, has been proved by handwriting experts

to be genuine. The script shows signs of increasing nervous strain as it progresses toward

the end, in places becoming almost illegible. Chorazin villagers - whose stupidity and

taciturnity baffle all students of the region and its secrets - admit no recollection of Mr.

Typer as distinguished from other rash visitors to the dreaded house.

The text of the diary is here given verbatim and without comment. How to interpret it,

and what, other than the writer's madness, to infer from it, the reader must decide for

himself. Only the future can tell what its value may be in solving a generation-old

mystery. It may be remarked that genealogists confirm Mr. Typer's belated memory in

the matter of Adriaen Sleght.

THE DIARY

Arrived here about 6 P.M. Had to walk all the way from Attica in the teeth of an

oncoming storm, for no one would rent me a horse or rig, and I can't run an automobile.

This place is even worse than I had expected, and I dread what is coming, even though I

long at the same time to learn the secret. All too soon will come the night - the old

Walpurgis sabbat horror - and after that time in Wales I know what to look for. Whatever

comes, I shall not flinch. Prodded by some unfathomable urge, I have given my whole

life to the quest of unholy mysteries. I came here for nothing else, and will not quarrel

with fate.

It was very dark when I got here, though the sun had by no means set. The stormclouds

were the densest I had ever seen, and I could not have found my way but for the

lightning-flashes. The village is a hateful little back-water, and its few inhabitants no

better than idiots. One of them saluted me in a queer way, as if he knew me. I could see

very little of the landscape - just a small, swamp valley of strange brown weedstalks and

dead fungi surrounded by scraggly, evilly twisted trees with bare boughs. But behind the

village is a dismal-looking hill on whose summit is a circle of great stones with another

stone at the center. That, without question, is the vile primordial thing V - - - told me

about the N - - - estbat.

The great house lies in the midst of a park all overgrown with curious-looking briars. I

could scarcely break through, and when I did the vast age and decrepitude of the building

almost stopped me from entering. The place looked filthy and diseased, and I wondered

how so leprous a building could hang together. It is wooden; and though its original lines

are hidden by a bewildering tangle of wings added at various dates, I think it was first

built in the square colonial fashion of New England. Probably that was easier to build

than a Dutch stone house - and then, too, I recall that Dirck van der Heyl's wife was from

Salem, a daughter of the unmentionable Abaddon Corey. There was a small pillared

porch, and I got under it just as the storm burst. It was a fiendish tempest - black as

midnight, with rain in sheets, thunder and lightning like the day of general dissolution,

and a wind that actually clawed at me.

The Diary of Alonzo Typer

The door was unlocked, so I took out my electric torch and went inside. Dust was inches

thick on floor and furniture, and the place smelled like a mold-caked tomb. There was a

hall reaching all the way through, and a curving staircase on the right.

I plowed my way upstairs and selected this front room to camp out it. The whole place

seems fully furnished, though most of the furniture is breaking down. This is written at 8

o'clock, after a cold meal from my traveling-case. After this the village people will bring

me supplies, though they won't agree to come any closer than the ruins of the park gate

until (as they say) later. I wish I could get rid of an unpleasant feeling of familiarity with

this place.

Later

I am conscious of several presences in this house. One in particular is decidedly hostile

toward me - a malevolent will which is seeking to break down my own and overcome

me. I must not countenance this for an instant, but must use all my forces to resist it. It is

appallingly evil, and definitely nonhuman. I think it must be allied to powers outside

Earth - powers in the spaces behind time and beyond the universe. It towers like a

colossus, bearing out what is said in the Aklo writings. There is such a feeling of vast size

connected with it that I wonder these chambers can contain its bulk - and yet it has no

visible bulk. Its age must be unutterably vast - shockingly, indescribably so.

April 18

Slept very little last night. At 3 A.M. a strange, creeping wind began to pervade the whole

region, ever rising until the house rocked as if in a typhoon. As I went down the staircase

to see the rattling front door the darkness took half-visible forms in my imagination. Just

below the landing I was pushed violently from behind - by the wind, I suppose, though I

could have sworn I saw the dissolving outlines of a gigantic black paw as I turned quickly

about. I did not lose my footing, but safely finished the descent and shot the heavy bolt of

the dangerously shaking door.

I had not meant to explore the house before dawn; yet now, unable to sleep again, and

fired with mixed terror and curiousity, I felt reluctant to postpone my search. With my

powerful torch I plowed through the dust to the great south parlor, where I knew the

portraits would be. There they were, just as V - - - had said, and as I seemed to know

from some obscurer source as well. Some were so blackened and dustclouded that I could

make little or nothing of them, but from those I could trace I recognized that they were

indeed of the hateful line of the van der Heyls. Some of the paintings seemed to suggest

faces I had known; but just what faces, I could not recall.

The outlines of that frightful hybrid Joris - spawned in 1773 by Dirck's youngest daughter

- were clearest of all, and I could trace the green eyes and the serpent look in his face.

Every time I shut off the flashlight that face would seem to glow in the dark until I half

fancied it shone with a faint, greenish light of its own. The more I looked, the more evil it

seemed, and I turned away to avoid hallucinations of changing expression.

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摘要：

TheDiaryofAlonzoTyperTheDiaryofAlonzoTyperbyH.P.LovecraftandWilliamLumleyWrittenOctober1935PublishedFebruary1938inWeirdTales,31,No.2,152-66.EDITOR'SNOTE:AlonzoHasbrouchTyperofKingston,NewYork,waslastseenandrecognizedonApril17,1908,aroundnoon,attheHotelRichmondinBatavia.Hewastheonlysurvivorofanancien...

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Lovecraft, H P & Lumley, William - The Diary Of Alonzo Typer

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