Opening Statement:
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 centre of the cemetery, whose trunk has 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 in 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 paralysed my heroes’ faculties and left them without courage, words, or associations to tell what they had experienced.What in Brown Jenkin's Name..?
Carter tells his skeptical friend about a creature locked up in an attic. After an apparent encounter with said creature, Carter and his friend settle their differences.Synopsis:
Carter’s friend Joel criticizes him for describing too many things as “unnamable”. Carter recollects his story (“The Attic Window”) which describes a ghoul looking through windows at night. He describes his ancestor's diary and how in ages past his ancestor had been attacked by a clawed, hoofed creature. At the time, a childless, secretive man had seemingly cared for some sort of creature locked in his attic. Later, a parsonage was attacked and its occupants massacred. After the creature seemed to have died off, a boy looked at the windows in the attic, searching for “psychic shadow impressions” and went mad from images seen in them. Carter tells Joel that, since then, he had collected some devil-like skeleton bones and buried them near the old man’s house. Carter tells Joel that they are in fact sitting in the graveyard under discussion. They then hear the sound of the attic window opening. An icy wind blows them onto the ground and they wake up in the hospital. They had been found a mile away from the cemetery at the site of a slaughterhouse, covered with claw and hoof marks. Carter asks Joel what the creature was like, and Joel ironically states that it was “unnamable”.Essential Saltes:
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”?From Dr. Armitage's Notes:
- Randolph Carter ("The Statement of Randolph Carter") presumably, in a tongue-in-cheek fable.
- The theme of an uncommonly revolting child would be revisited to an epic degree in "The Dunwich Horror".
- The "unnamable" creature would later be "named" as a Shoggoth (I guess).
The Horrible Conclusion:
“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:Read it here.
“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!”
Follow'd by "The Festival".
