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                               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!"