The Unnamable

By; Howard Phillips Lovecraft 1923 - - first published in The Vagrant not  dated.

We were sitting on a dilapidated seventeenth - century tomb in the late  afternoon of an autumn day at the old burying ground in Arkham, and speculating  about the unnamable. Looking toward the giant willow in the cemetery, whose  trunk had nearly engulfed an ancient, illegible slab, I had made a fantastic  remark about the spectral and unmentionable nourishment which the colossal roots  must be sucking from that hoary, charnel earth; when my friend chided me for  such nonsense and told me that since no interments had occurred there for over a  century, nothing could possibly exist to nourish the tree in other than an  ordinary manner, Besides, he added, my constant talk about "unnamable" and  "unmentionable" things was a very puerile device, quite in keeping with my lowly  standing as an author. I was too fond of ending my stories with, sights or  sounds which paralyzed my heroes' faculties and left them without courage,  words, or associations to tell what they had experienced. We know things, he  said, only through our five senses or our intuitions; wherefore it is quite  impossible to refer to any object or spectacle which cannot be clearly depicted  by the solid definitions of fact or the correct doctrines Of theology - -  preferably those of the Congregationalist, with whatever modifications tradition  and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle may supply.

With this fried, Joel Manton, I had often languidly disputed. He was  principal of the East High School, born and bred in Boston and sharing New  England's self - satisfied deafness to the delicate overtones of life, It was  his view that only our normal, objective experiences possess any esthetic  significance, and that it is the province of tile artist not so much to rouse  strong emotion by action, ecstasy, and astonishment, as to maintain a placid  interest and appreciation by accurate, detailed transcripts of everyday affairs.  Especially did he object to my preoccupation with the mystical and the  unexplained; for although believing in the supernatural much more fully than I,  he would not admit that it is sufficiently commonplace for literary treatment  That a mind can find its greatest pleasure in escapes from the daily treadmill,  and in original and dramatic recombinations of images usually thrown by habit  and fatigue into the hackneyed patterns of actual existence, was something  virtually incredible to his clear, practical, and logical intellect With him all  things and feelings had fixed dimensions, properties, causes, and effects; and  although he vaguely knew that the mind sometimes holds visions and sensations of  far less geometrical, classifiable, and workable nature, he believed himself  justified in drawing an arbitrary line and ruling out of court all that cannot  be experienced and understood by the average citizen. Besides, he was almost  sure that nothing can be really "unnamable." It didn't sound sensible to  him.

Though I well realized the futility of imaginative and metaphysical arguments  against the complacency of an orthodox sun-dweller, something in the scene of  this afternoon colloquy moved me to more than usual contentiousness. The  crumbling slate slabs, the patriarchal trees, and the centuries gambrel roofs of  the witch-haunted old town that stretched around, all combined to rouse my  spirit in defense of my work; and I was soon carrying my thrusts into the  enemy's own country. It was not, indeed, difficult to begin a counter-attack,  for I knew that Joel Manton actually half clung to many old-wives' superstitions  which sophisticated people had long outgrown; beliefs in the appearance of dying  persons at distant places, and in the impressions left by old faces on the  windows through which they had gazed all their lives. To credit these  whisperings of rural grandmothers, I now insisted, argued a faith in the  existence of spectral substances on the earth apart from and subsequent to their  material counterparts. It argued a capability of believing in phenomena beyond  all normal notions; for if a dead man can transmit his visible or tangible image  half across the world, or down the stretch of the centuries, how can it be  absurd to suppose that deserted houses are full of queer sentient things, or  that old graveyards teem with the terrible, unbodied intelligence of  generations? And since spirit, in order to cause all the manifestations  attributed to it, cannot be limited by any of the laws of matter; why is it  extravagant to imagine psychically living dead things in shapes - or absences of  shapes - which must for human spectators be utterly and appallingly "unnamable"?  "Common sense" in reflecting on these subjects, I assured my friend with some  warmth, is merely a stupid absence of imagination and mental flexibility.

Twilight had now approached, but neither of us felt any wish to cease  speaking. Manton seemed unimpressed by my arguments, and eager to refute them,  having that confidence in his own Opinions which had doubtless caused his  success as a teacher; whilst I was too sure of my ground to fear defeat. The  dusk fell, and lights faintly gleamed in some of the distant windows, but we did  not move. Our seat on the tomb was very comfortable, and I knew that my prosaic  friend would not mind the cavernous rift in the ancient, root-disturbed  brickwork close behind us, or the utter blackness of the spot brought by the  intervention of a tottering, deserted seventeenth - century house between us and  the nearest lighted road. There in the dark, upon that riven tomb by the  deserted house, we talked on about the "unnamable," and after my friend had  finished his scoffing I told him of the awful evidence behind the story at which  he had scoffed the most.

My tale had been called The Attic Window, and appeared in the January, 1922,  issue of Whispers. In a good many places, especially the South and the Pacific  coast, they took the magazines off the stands at the complaints of silly  milk-sops; but New England didn't get the thrill and merely shrugged its  shoulders at my extravagance. The thing, it was averred, was biologically  impossible to start with; merely another of those crazy country mutterings which  Cotton Mather had been gullible enough to dump into his chaotic Magnalia Christi  Americana, and so poorly authenticated that even he had not ventured to name the  locality where the horror occurred. And as to the way I amplified the bare  jotting of the old mystic - - that was quite impossible, and characteristic of a  flighty and notional scribbler! Mather had indeed told of the thing as being  born, but nobody but a cheap sensationalist would think of having it grow up,  look into people's windows at night, and be hidden in the attic of a house, in  flesh and in spirit, till someone saw it at the window centuries later and  couldn't describe what it was that turned his hair gray. All this was flagrant  trashiness, and my friend Manton was not slow to insist on that fact Then I told  him what I had found in an old diary kept between 1706 and 1723, unearthed among  family papers not a mile from where we were sitting; that, and the certain  reality of the scars On my ancestor's chest and back which the diary described.  I told him, too, of the tears of others in that region' and how they were  whispered down for generations; and how no mythical madness came to the boy who  in 1793 entered an abandoned house to examine certain traces suspected to be  there.

It had been an eldritch thing - - no wonder sensitive students shudder at the  Puritan age In Massachusetts. So little is known of what went on beneath the  surface - - so little, yet such a ghastly festering as it bubbles up  putrescently in occasional ghoulish glimpses. The witchcraft terror is a  horrible ray of light on what was stewing in men's crushed brains, but even that  is a trifle. There was no beauty: no freedom - - we can see that from the  architectural and household remains, and the poisonous sermons of the cramped  divines. And in side that rusted iron straitjacket lurked gibbering hideousness,  perversion, and diabolism. Here, truly, was the apotheosis of the unnamable.

Cotton Mather, in that demoniac sixth book which no one should read after  dark, minced no words as he flung forth his anathema. Stern as a Jewish prophit,  and laconically un-amazed as none since his day could be, he told of the beast  that had brought forth what was more than beast but less than man - - the thing  with the blemished eye - - and of the screaming drunken wretch that hanged for  having such an eye. This much he baldly told, yet without a hint of what came  after. Perhaps he did not know, or perhaps he knew and did not dare to tell.  Other: knew, but did not dare to tell - - there is no public hint of why they  whispered about the lock on the door to the attic stair: in the house of a  childless, broken, embittered old man who had put up a blank slate slab by an  avoided grave, although one may trace enough evasive legends to curdle the  thinnest blood.

It is all in that ancestral diary I found; all the hushed innuendoes and  furtive tales of things with a blemished eye seen at windows in the night or in  deserted meadows near the woods. Something had caught my ancestor on a dark  valley road, leaving him with marks of horns on his chest and of apelike claws  on his back; and when they looked for prints in the trampled dust they found the  mixed marks of split hooves and vaguely anthropoid paws. Once a post-rider said  he saw an old man chasing and calling to a frightful loping, nameless thing on  Meadow Hill in the thinly moonlit hours before dawn, and many believed him.  Certainly, there was strange talk one night in 1710 when the childless, broken  old man was buried in the crypt behind his own house in sight of the blank slate  slab. They never unlocked that attic door, but left the whole house as it was,  dreaded and deserted. When noises came from it, they whispered and shivered; and  hoped that the lock on that attic door was strong. Then they stopped hoping when  the horror occurred at the parsonage, leaving not a soul alive or in one piece.  With the years the legends take on a spectral character - - I suppose the thing,  if it was a living thing, must have died. The memory had lingered hideously -  -all the more hideous because it was so secret.

During this narration my friend Manton had become very silent, and I saw that  my words had impressed him. He did not laugh as I paused, but asked quite  seriously about the boy who went mad in 1793, and who had presumably been the  hero of my fiction. I told him why the boy had gone to that shunned, deserted  house, and remarked that he ought to be interested, since he believed that  windows latent images of those who had sat at them. The boy had gone to look at  the windows of that horrible attic, because of tales of things seen behind them,  and had come back screaming maniacally.

Manton remained thoughtful as I said this, but gradually reverted to his  analytical mood. He granted for the sake of argument that some unnatural monster  had really existed, but reminded me that even the most morbid perversion of  nature need not be unnamable or scientifically indescribable. I admired his  clearness and persistence, and added some further revelations I had collected  among the old people. Those later spectral legends, I made plain, related to  monstrous apparitions more frightful than anything organic could be; apparitions  of gigantic bestial forms sometimes visible and sometimes only tangible, which  floated about on moonless nights and haunted the old house, the crypt behind it,  and the grave where a sapling had sprouted beside an illegible slab. Whether or  not such apparitions had ever gored or smothered people to death, as told in  uncorroborated traditions, they had produced a strong and consistent impression;  and were yet darkly feared by very aged natives, though largely forgotten by the  last two generation - - perhaps dying for lack of being thought about. Moreover,  so far as esthetic theory was involved, if the psychic emanations of human  creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express  or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulosity as the specter of a malign,  chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against nature? Molded by the dead  brain of a hybrid night-mare, would not such a vaporous terror constitute in all  loathsome truth the exquisitely, the shriekingly unnamable?

The hour must now have grown very late. A singularly noiseless bat brushed by  me, and I believe it touched Manton also, for although I could not see him I  felt him raise his ann. Presently he spoke.

"But is that house with the attic window still standing and deserted?"

"Yes," I answered, "I have seen it."

"And did you find anything there - - in the attic or anywhere else?"

"There were some bones up under the eaves. They may have been what that boy  saw - - if he was sensitive he wouldn't have needed anything in the window-glass  to unhinge him. If they all came from the same object it must have been an  hysterical, delirious monstrosity. It would have been blasphemous to leave such  bones in the world, so I went back with a sack and took them to the tomb behind  the house. There was an opening where I could dump them in. Don't think I was a  fool - - you ought to have seen that skull. It had four-inch horns, but a face  and jaw something like yours and mine."

At last I could feel a real shiver run through Manton, who had moved very  near. But his curiosity was undeterred.

"And what about the window-panes?"

"They were all gone. One window had lost its entire frame, and in all the  others there was not a trace of glass in the little diamond apertures. They were  that kind - - the old lattice windows that went out of use before 1700. I don't  believe they've had any glass for a hundred years or more - - maybe the boy  broke 'em if he got that far; the legend doesn't say."

Manton. was reflecting again.

"I'd like to see that house, Carter. Where is it? Glass or no glass, I must  explore ft a little. And the tomb where you put those bones, and the other grave  without an inscription - - the whole thing must be a bit terrible."

"You did see it - - until it got dark."

My friend was more wrought upon than I had suspected, for at this touch of  harmless theatricalism he started neurotically away from me and actually cried  out with a sort of gulping gasp which released a strain of previous repression.  It was an odd cry, and all the more terrible because it was answered. For as it  was still echoing, I heard a creaking sound through the pitchy blackness, and  knew that a lattice window was opening in that accursed old house beside us. And  because all the other frames were long since fallen, I knew that it was the  grisly glassless frame of that demoniac attic window.

Then came a noxious rush of noisome, frigid air from that same dreaded  direction, followed by a piercing shriek just beside me on that shocking rifted  tomb of man and monster. In another instant I was knocked from my gruesome bench  by the devilish threshing of some unseen entity of titanic size but undetermined  nature; knocked sprawling on the root-clutched mold of that abhorrent graveyard,  while from the tomb came such a stifled uproar of gasping and whirring that my  fancy peopled the rayless gloom with Miltonic legions of the misshapen damned.  There was a vortex of withering, ice-cold wind, and then the rattle of loose  bricks and plaster; but I had mercifully fainted before I could learn what it  meant.

Manton, though smaller than I, is more resilient; for we opened our eyes at  almost the same instant, despite his greater injuries. Our couches were side by  side, and we knew in a few seconds that we were in St. Mary's Hospital.  Attendants were grouped about in tense curiosity, eager to aid our memory by  telling us how we came there, and we soon heard of the farmer who had found us  at noon in a lonely field beyond Meadow Hill, a mile from the old burying  ground, on a spot where an ancient slaughterhouse is reputed to have stood.  Manton had two malignant wounds in the chest, and some less severe cuts or  gougings in the back. I was not so seriously hurt, but was covered with welts  and contusions of the most bewildering character, including the print of a split  hoof. It was plain that Manton knew more than I, but he told nothing to the  puzzled and interested physicians till he had learned what our injuries were.  Then he said we were the victims of a vicious bull - - though the animal was a  difficult thing to place and account for.

After the doctors and nurses had left, I whispered an awe struck  question:

"Good God, Manton, but what was it? Those scars - - was It like that?"

And I was too dazed to exult when he whispered back a thing I had half  expected - -

"No - - it wasn't that way at all. It was everywhere - - a gelatin - - a  slime yet it had Shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory. There  were eyes - - and a blemish. It was the pit - - the maelstrom - - the ultimate  abomination. Carter, it was the unnamable!"