With an effort, however, Willett pulled himself together and began studying the formulae chiselled on the walls. From the stained and incrusted letters it was obvious that they were carved in Joseph Curwen’s time, and their text was such as to be vaguely familiar to one who had read much Curwen material or delved extensively into the history of magic. One the doctor clearly recognised as what Mrs Ward heard her son chanting on that ominous Good Friday a year before, and what an authority had told him was a very terrible invocation addressed to secret gods outside the normal spheres. It was not spelled here exactly as Mrs Ward had set it down from memory, nor yet as the authority had shewn it to him in the forbidden pages of ‘Eliphas Levi’; but its identity was unmistakable, and such words as Sabaoth, Metraton, Almonsin and Zariatnatmik sent a shudder of fright through the searcher who had seen and felt so much of cosmic abomination just around the corner.

This was on the left-hand wall as one entered the room. The right-hand wall was no less thickly inscribed, and Willett felt a start of recognition when he came upon the pair of formulae so frequently occurring in the recent notes in the library. They were, roughly speaking, the same, with the ancient symbols of ‘Dragon’s Head’ and ‘Dragon’s Tail’ heading them as in Ward’s scribblings. But the spelling differed quite widely from that of the modern versions, as if old Curwen had had a different way of recording sound, or as if later study had evolved more powerful and perfected variants of the invocations in question. The doctor tried to reconcile the chiselled version with the one which still ran persistently in his head, and found it hard to do. Where the script he had memorised began ‘Y’ai ’ng’ngah, Yog-Sothoth’, this epigraph started out as ‘Aye, cngengah, Yogge-Sothotha’; which to his mind would seriously interfere with the syllabification of the second word.

Ground as the later text was into his consciousness, the discrepancy disturbed him; and he found himself chanting the first of the formulae aloud in an effort to square the sound he conceived with the letters he found carved. Weird and menacing in that abyss of antique blasphemy rang his voice, its accents keyed to a droning singsong either through the spell of the past and the unknown, or through the hellish example of that dull, godless wail from the pits whose inhuman cadences rose and fell rhythmically in the distance through the stench and the darkness.

Y’AI ’NG’NGAH, YOG-SOTHOTH H’EE-L’GEB F’AI ’THRODOG UAAAH!