Free Through Dark Angles: Works Inspired by H. P. Lovecraft by Don Webb Page A

returned. The newspapers treated it as a major crisis—for two days. A legal notice of her being declared dead appeared seven years later; three years after that Lovecraft died of intestinal cancer. Mr. Joshi suggests that Lovecraft, having taken an interest in the case because of two articles in the Brown Daily Herald, had contacted the director of the institution. Perhaps a lack of interest or sense of shame on the part of Julia’s family had made them uninterested in the notebook. Perhaps the notebook had merely been lent to Lovecraft and he failed to return it.
    In addition to the change of narrative voice in the last section of the diary, the handwriting becomes bolder. Some of the margins are decorated with little glyphs of stylized fish reminiscent of the Rongorongo glyphs of Easter Island. The theology and cosmology of the piece seem to be a mixture of native Australian religion and a good deal of Lovecraftian musings. Since Julia’s background would seem to suggest no clear method of knowing the former, and Weird Tales was an unlikely reading material for Butler Hospital, the passages are striking.
    Here are the final words of Julia Phillips. Where Lovecraft has erased her words and written in his own we will indicate with italics:
    In the changeable world of land something dire is happening. The humans are learning to kill themselves, which is good I think, and learning to kill the seas, which would mean death to the world. The seas taste of their oil and trash. The beautiful mother-of-pearl walls of our new home Devil’s Reef is stained black. I hate this place, the waters are much too cold, and the fishing is poor. Our new home has no name, the Great Cthulhu has not dreamed of it yet. We had great hopes as He reached out to us and our weakened descendants the humans two orbits ago. He tries to bring Thought to all life here, that is why He came to this watery globe from the green star in my great-great-grandmother’s time. He is such a suffering god. The humans have recast Him as one of their own. They think He brings salvation instead of Thought. All will think here, even the plants and the fungi, if the humans do not hurt the water too much. He rose briefly two orbits ago. He will stir in a few days, but not rise. We have learned how he tosses and turns. I am not hopeful for the humans; they are too degenerate from us. Even those we have crossbred with can live only a few hundred orbits. No wonder they kill this world; they do not stay here long enough to love it. It seems wrong to me to bring self-awareness to such a species.
    The hope of Ra-natha-alene to save the human race by intermarrying with them is not held by many of us. It did not work in my youth and it does not work now. The humans are greedy for gold, so it was easy to make a deal with Marsh, but they do not profit by our Teaching. In the spiral towers of their cells we help them find the way back, we make them more beautiful, but it is not enough. On the land they hide away when their Beauty starts to show. They wear our crowns, but they do not Think, or if they Think it is as something minor—an artist or a magician. No architects. No mathematicians. No biologists.
    There was a storm recently; much cold water was disturbed to the north of our new home. We had not controlled it by Dreaming. It is not in the Dreamtime, and the hateful aurora wind from space keeps Deep Thoughts from hatching in our brains. The storm affected me badly, scattering some of my mind into human bodies. I will have to gather myself together. I hate their world with its right angles that turn thinking into sleeping. There were deaths in Canada, a cold white land. Not enough deaths I think.
    The humans of Innsmouth have learned a little about Dreaming in their Swirl, they spill blood and sexual fluids to Father Dagon and Mother Hydra, but they think in animal terms, they are too much of the life of this world . They have taken the animal needs and called them Sex and