The Descendant by H. P. LovecraftThe Descendant
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written 1926 
Published 1938 in Leaves, Vol. 2, p. 107-10. 
In London there is a man who screams when the church bells ring. He lives all 
alone with his streaked cat in Gray's Inn, and people call him harmlessly mad. 
His room is filled with books of the tamest and most puerile kind, and hour 
after hour he tries to lose himself in their feeble pages. All he seeks from 
life is not to think. For some reason thought is very horrible to him, and 
anything which stirs the imagination he flees as a plague. He is very thin and 
grey and wrinkled, hut there are those who declare he is not nearly so old as he 
looks. Fear has its grisly claws upon him, and a sound will make him start with 
staring eyes and sweat-beaded forehead. Friends and companions he shuns, for he 
wishes to answer no questions. Those who once knew him as scholar and aesthete 
say it is very pitiful to see him now. He dropped them all years ago, and no one 
feels sure whether he left the country or merely sank from sight in some hidden 
byway. It is a decade now since he moved into Gray's Inn, and of where he had 
been he would say nothing till the night young Williams bought the Necronomicon. 

Williams was a dreamer, and only twenty-three, and when he moved into the 
ancient house he felt a strangeness and a breath of cosmic wind about the grey 
wizened man in the next room. He forced his friendship where old friends dared 
not force theirs, and marvelled at the fright that sat upon this gaunt, haggard 
watcher and listener. For that the man always watched and listened no one could 
doubt. He watched and listened with his mind more than with his eyes and ears, 
and strove every moment to drown something in his ceaseless poring over gay, 
insipid novels. And when the church bells rang he would stop his ears and 
scream, and the grey cat that dwelt with him would howl in unison till the last 
peal died reverberantly away. 
But try as Williams would, he could not make his neighbour speak of anything 
profound or hidden. The old man would not live up to his aspect and manner, but 
would feign a smile and a light tone and prattle feverishly and frantically of 
cheerful trifles; his voice every moment rising and thickening till at last it 
would split in a piping and incoherent falsetto. That his learning was deep and 
thorough, his most trivial remarks made abundantly clear; and Williams was not 
surprised to hear that he had been to Harrow and Oxford. Later it developed that 
he was none other than Lord Northam, of whose ancient hereditary castle on the 
Yorkshire coast so many odd things were told; but when Williams tried to talk of 
the castle, and of its reputed Roman origin, he refused to admit that there was 
anything unusual about it. He even tittered shrilly when the subject of the 
supposed under crypts, hewn out of the solid crag that frowns on the North Sea, 
was brought up. 
So matters went till that night when Williams brought home the infamous 
Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. He had known of the dreaded volume 
since his sixteenth year, when his dawning love of the bizarre had led him to 
ask queer questions of a bent old bookseller in Chandos Street; and he had 
always wondered why men paled when they spoke of it. The old bookseller had told 
him that only five copies were known to have survived the shocked edicts of the 
priests and lawgivers against it and that all of these were locked up with 
frightened care by custodians who had ventured to begin a reading of the hateful 
black-letter. But now, at last, he had not only found an accessible copy but had 
made it his own at a ludicrously low figure. It was at a Jew's shop in the 
squalid precincts of Glare Market, where he had often bought strange things 
before, and he almost fancied the gnarled 'old Levite smiled amidst tangles of 
beard as the great discovery was made. The bulky leather cover with the brass 
clasp had been so prominently visible, and the price was so absurdly slight. 
The one glimpse he had had of the title was enough to send him into transports, 
and some of the diagrams set in the vague Latin text excited the tensest and 
most disquieting recollections in his brain. He felt it was highly necessary to 
get the ponderous thing home and begin deciphering it, and bore it out of the 
shop with such precipitate haste that the old Jew chuckled disturbingly behind 
him But when at last it was safe in his room he found the combination of 
black-letter and debased idiom too much for his powers as a linguist, and 
reluctantly called on his strange, frightened friend for help with the twisted, 
mediaeval Latin. Lord Northam was simpering inanities to his streaked cat, and 
started violently when the young man entered. Then he saw the volume and 
shuddered wildly, and fainted altogether when Williams uttered the title. It was 
when he regained his senses that he told his story; told his fantastic figment 
of madness in frantic whispers, lest his friend be not quick to burn the 
accursed book and give wide scattering to its ashes. 
*  *  *  * 
There must, Lord Northam whispered, have been something wrong at the start; but 
it would never have come to a head if he had not explored too far. He was the 
nineteenth Baron of a line whose beginings went uncomfortiblly far back into the 
past- unbelievably far, if vague tradition could be heeded, for there were 
familytales of a descent from pre-Saxon times, when a certain Cnaeus Gabinius 
Capito, military tribune in the Third Augustan Legion then stationed at Lindum 
in Roman Britain, had been summarily expelled from his command for participation 
in Certain rites unconnected with any known religion. Gabinius had, the rumour 
ran, come upon a cliffside cavern where strange folk met together and made the 
Elder Sign in the dark; strange folk whom the Britons knew not save in fear, and 
who were the last to survive from a great land in the west that had sunk, 
leaving only the islands with the raths and circles and shrines of which 
Stonehenge was the greatest. There was no certainty, of course, in the legend 
that Gabinius had built an impregnable fortress over the forbidden cave and 
founded a line which Pict and Saxon, Dane and Norman were powerless to 
obliterate; or in the tacit assumption that from this line sprang the bold 
companion and lieutenant of the Black Prince whom Edward Third created Baron of 
Northam. These things were not certain, yet they were often told; and in truth 
the stonework of Northam Keep did look alarmingly like the masonry of Hadrian's 
Wall. As a child Lord Northam had had peculiar dreams when sleeping in the older 
parts of the castle, and had acquired a constant habit of looking back through 
his memory for half-amorphous scenes and patterns and impressions which formed 
no part of his waking experience. He became a dreamer who found life tame and 
unsatisfying; a searcher for strange realms and relationships once familiar, yet 
lying nowhere in the visible regions of earth. 
Filled with a feeling that our tangible world is only an atom in a fabric vast 
and ominous, and that unknown demesnes press on and permeate the sphere of the 
known at every point, Northam in youth and young manhood drained in turn the 
founts of formal religion and occult mystery. Nowhere, however, could he find 
ease and content; and as he grew older the staleness and limitations of life 
became more and more maddening to him. During the 'nineties he dabbled in 
Satanism, and at all times he devoured avidly any doctrine or theory which 
seemed to promise escape from the dose vistas of science and the dully unvarying 
laws of Nature. Books like Ignatius Donnelly's chimerical account of Atlantis he 
absorbed with zest, and a dozen obscure precursors of Charles Fort enthralled 
him with their vagaries. He would travel leagues to follow up a furtive village 
tale of abnormal wonder, and once went into the desert of Araby to seek a 
Nameless City of faint report, which no man has ever beheld. There rose within 
him the tantalising faith that somewhere an easy gate existed, which if one 
found would admit him freely to those outer deeps whose echoes rattled so dimly 
at the back of his memory. It might be in the visible world, yet it might be 
only in his mind and soul. Perhaps he held within his own half-explored brain 
that cryptic link which would awaken him to elder and future lives in forgotten 
dimensions; which would bind him to the stars, and to the infinities and 
eternities beyond them. 



The Lovecraft Library wishes to extend its gratitude to Eulogio García Recalde 
for transcribing this text. 



Document modified: 02/23/2000 16:38:40 
