I started this blogging endeavor as a way to collect and gather my thoughts as I undertake this terrifying odyssey. I deliberately decided not to make it private, to put it out on the Internet at large so that it may outlive me should the unthinkable happen to me. God forbid, I hope that the information I provide may be of use in my lateness.
And when it comes to information, I've provided precious little of it to you my readers in terms of background--either regarding my own travails, or regarding the history of Cthulhu and the cult that worships him and bears his name. I've learned much about the latter during the course of the former. I started this blog after I realized that I was being watched and pursued and started running. I have limited time and ability to write blog entries, so the information I publish here lags reality by about two weeks. This is the reason I feel comfortable describing my travels, because by the time I write that I've been to a place, I have long since taken my leave of it.
When I realized that I could no longer stay in Marquette, the first place I ran to was Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan. I felt the need to do more research to find out what I was up against, what I had stumbled upon to. As a student at Northern Michigan, I would have access to the library at U of M, and I knew I would have a place to stay in Ann Arbor. I knew I could not stay in one place long, at least not so close to home, but managed two days of productive research before I had to flee again. What I uncovered during those two days forms the basis everything I now know and believe about the threats to myself and to America.
The Cult of Cthulhu is not powerful or omnipresent like the Masons or the Illuminati are supposed to be. Recorded encounters with confirmed Cult members, while rare, have generally revealed them to be poor people who take their living from the sea. Fishermen, workers in the shipping industry, and to a lesser extent those that serve on naval vessels are the most frequent worshipers. The Cult is widespread, reported to be in America, Europe, and Asia according to my research, and groups in other locations are likely. It is also terrifying, ancient, and somehow yet more terrifying because of how long it has survived.
According to Cult lore, the Elder Ones (among whom Cthulhu is the most powerful priest) came to Earth from space when the planet was young and died eons before Man was born. From their tombs in the sunken city of R'lyeh, their minds whispered their secrets to our earliest ancestors. This sunken city plays a pivotal role in the prophecies the Cult seeks to fulfull. When it resurfaces from the depths of the ocean, that will be when Cthulhu reawakens to devour us all.
This is all written in the Necronomicon and is common knowledge to all those who worship Cthulhu and the other Old Ones. It is the basic mythology of the Cult of Cthulhu. My research at U of M mostly had to do with events during the last hundred years that have to do with the Cult and its practitioners. Though stories about the Cult are few and far between, there have been stories published in newspapers and journals that are unmistakably accounts of Cult rituals. The most detailed account of actual rituals I was able to find was from the early 1900s, and took place in New Orleans. It's largely taken from the reports of one Inspector Legrasse, who led the investigation.
The New Orleans police department was alerted to strange activities which led to kidnappings in the bayous of southern Louisiana. The group engaged in these activities was said to be quite large, ferocious, and guilty of unspeakable atrocities. Taking no chances, Inspector Legrasse led a party of nearly two dozen armed men into the woods where the rituals were said to be taking place. It should be pointed out that the area of the bayou the party entered had a reputation as a place where evil was known to lurk. The newspaper article I read printed matter-of-fact descriptions of creatures bearing a strong resemblance to certain Elder Ones (as well as common descriptions of the Jersey Devil) that were likely fomented by Cult members.
Legrasse's party came upon a horrible scene in the clearing where they found the ritual being practiced. Around a massive bonfire and an altar, up which sat a small carving of Cthulhu himself, men were frantically chanting, dancing, and bellowing in a heathen tongue that none of the assembled officers could understand. This description of the ritual is nearly identical to what was reported from the Hawaiian man my friend treated, a resemblance which to me lends both accounts more credibility. That they happened nearly a century apart and halfway around the world from each other simply goes to show that the Cult has been around for quite some time, and the rituals are largely the same from place to place.
The rituals practiced by the Cult are more terrifying and gruesome than I had imagined. Though the Necronomicon calls for human sacrifice, I was not prepared to read about it in a police officer's sober report in a century-old newspaper article. Though the officers in New Orleans found no bodies, there was blood and clothing from the kidnapped on the altar where Cthulhu's likeness rested. The worshipers told mad tales of the victims being carried off by the Old Ones that haunted the woods. The officers surmised that they had been sacrificed and burned as part of the terrible rituals. In the ensuing raid, the officers took a few prisoners. Most of the Cult members escaped into the woods or were killed in the struggle.
The same paper would later print the account of one cult member, called only Castro, who was willing to speak with the officers who captured him. He filled the officers in on many of the details about the history of the cult that I have told you, and are corroborated by the Necronomicon. This makes me certain that these are indeed the same cult. The stranger accounts of the Cult come from the mid 1920s, when a madness seemed to seize much of New England all at once. Newspaper stories from this time period abound with strange stories of people having terrible dreams and hallucinations. One individual afflicted with particularly vivid hallucinations (who was also a sculptor) made a clay tablet with a likeness of Cthulhu. I know this because it was photographed for the work of a professor at Brown University who studied this unexplainable rash of strange afflictions.
At least, it seemed unexplainable to the professor at the time, and to me when I read it. Truly now, I wonder what the real reasons behind it all might be. I cannot believe in the terrors that I spend my days reading about and my nights dreading as I try to sleep. But this terrible mythology, and the cult that surrounds it has endured seemingly forever. I know more now than I did then, and many of the things I've come to understand seem to be explainable only by the unseen hand of some terrible consciousness, a will that reaches out from places unseen to twist the thoughts and will of men.
Knowing that I needed to get out of Michigan, lest my pursuers pick up my trail a scant several hours from where I last left them, I set out for Rhode Island and Brown. I sought answers for the questions that had been raised by the things I had learned in the last month. I would find only more terrifying questions, and more fodder for the nightmares that continue to torment me even today.
