(and Elvis)
1.
An easy seven minute walk takes me to the great silver maple which comes back to life as the winter solstice looms. By the time of this eldritch rebirth, the autumnal winds and the boreal cold have carried away all the leaves, but the trunk and branches remain wrapped all year in wires which carry thousands of tiny lights. When the power surges on, it looks like a glowing monster reaching for its long-lost transgalactic home. On nights when the snow writhes around the tree in spectral shapes, I see a huge luminous sea creature, with a dozen tentacles, emerging into the upper airy world.
For eleven months of the year the strings of lights are dead, barely noticeable on the furrowed scaly bark of the oldest silver maple on Seneca Road. Then, as the longest night draws near, it comes alive in all its garish glory.
The guy who lives there has a boom truck, so he’s able to get up higher and farther out each year. I’ve only spoken with him once, though I’ve been walking down his street for decades. I told him how much I admire his tree, but not the real reason why. Even if he were to listen closely and truly wanted to understand, I’m not sure I could explain why the tree matters so much to me.
I have named it the Tree of Cthulhu, after H. P. Lovecraft’s ancient outerspace god who lurks in oceanic slime-depths, deasd, yet waiting and dreaming through the eons. The tree isn’t an oak, sacred to the Druids. It’s not a Tannenbaum, a symbol of everlasting life for my pagan Germanic ancestors. Nor is it one of the twenty-seven gnarled and thick-boled sycamores that line Seneca Road, all of them linked and communicating via subterreanean root systems. It’s an ordinary maple made extraordinary by some ordinary guy’s skewed idea of Christmas cheer. It’s supposed to be festive, but it evokes in me what Lovecraft might have called a fulgurous sensation: full of secret lightning, half dread and half wonder. Driving home at night, I go widdershins around the traffic circle and there it is, glowing again, shimmering tentacles beckoning me to give up my disbelief.
According to the legends Lovecraft concocted, Cthulhu has lain hidden under the sea since time immemorial, though dead yet still dreaming, waiting for the right moment to erupt into world of humans. Like so many made-up monsters, Cthulhu is a sloppy anthropoid mix-and-match mess, its head like an octopus, with a face comprising a mass of feelers. There are also vestigial wings and claws on hind and fore feet. Just as horrific, for its creator, is the monster’s overpowering oceanic stench.
2.
Other writers, his “disciples” and “acolytes” (words used by his followers without a trace of irony), codified the so-called Cthulhu Mythos, attempting to make rational the profoundly irrational, as Saint Paul wrangled the words and deeds of Jesus into rigid doctrine.
In Lovecraft’s urtext, “The Call of Cthulhu,” he makes the claim that some humans can progress to become deities, identical to the profoundly alien monstrosities which haunt his writings. Devotees (usually dark-skinned, poor, and filthy) worship these hideous entities from outer space. And some of them are transformed into unspeakable, horrific gods.
The story features an immensely aged man of mixed Indian and European ancestry, who claims to have gained his secret knowledge in the mountains of China. There will come a time, he claims, when “mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy, Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.”
Another canonical story, “Arthur Jermyn,” culminates with fiery self-destruction. It begins with one of Lovecraft’s most famous statements: “Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it, peer daemonical hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous.”
“Arthur Jermyn” concludes with a scene of grisly suicide. The protagonist, discovering that one his ancestors was an ape, is seen “glistening from head to foot with oil and redolent of that fluid, to steal furtively out and vanish on the black moor surrounding the house. Then, in an exaltation of supreme horror, everyone saw the end. A spark appeared on the moor, a flame arose, and a pillar of human fire reached to the heavens.”
Likewise, an eldritch specter haunted another paragon of cultish American kitsch – Elvis. Some say that the first words of “Burning Love” – a cry of “Lord Almighty!” – are self-referential. Behold the Man – Behold the One and Only – Behold the King. With its obsessive chanting chorus (“hunka hunka burnin’ love”) and Elvis’s frantic “my brain is flaming!” it conjures up a grisly rite of self-immolation, or fiery exaltation. “Burning through my soul,” he sings, “Burning a hole where I lay.” This might seem to be Hell, or hellish lust, or the fever of some unspoken disease. But the song also rhymes “sweet song of a choir” with “higher and higher.” There is torment in his soul, and at the same time he is self-glorified, rising to a fiery celestial realm.
3.
Why does the Tree of Cthulhu, a monument of cheesy Christmas cheer, call me back, again and again?
Especially during the holiday season, my Lovecraftian impulses rise like a foetid, turgid tide. Perhaps it’s caused by the deepening, lengthening of the night. I celebrate the winter solstice with both sadness and joy. The longest night of the year is something to be savored, though with that comes the nagging knowledge that the days, in tiny increments will now be growing longer. Pagan Yule, Christian nativity, and Jewish Hanukkah are all celebrated with light, as the earth above the equator is enveloped in a darkness that Lovecraft called variously sepulchral, inky, pharaonic, ebony, stygian, and Nilotic.
But instead of diving directly into the shadowy solstice depths this year I went in what seemed to be the opposite direction, toward the golden calf of American kitsch.
Elvis and the baby Jesus — Elvis the son of the Blessed Virgin Gladys —Elvis, those two syllables evoking the face of god. When the name is pulled apart, the secret becomes clear. The Hebrew word “El” means God (or power). “Elohim” – a common term for the God of the Jews – is the plural of El. “Immanu-El” means God with us. The word “vis” (as in: vision, visor and vis-à-vis) means “face.” So, to enter the presence of Elvis is to see God. (Though which God – Cthulhu or Jahweh, Mormo or goat-eyed Pan – has never been determined.)
That Elvis claimed supernatural status gets less play than his astronaut suits and lacquered helmet of crow-black hair. But Elvis saw signs of his messiah-nature everywhere: from a cross-shaped crease in his palm to his uncanny resemblance to the faces of saints in renaissance paintings. Red West – his friend, flunky, and bodyguard – knew the Big E as few others did. In Elvis, What Happened?, he reveals his boss’s UFO encounters and tells the fans, “He genuinely believes that he is a prophet. For many years, with real seriousness, he called us his disciples.” The family name too points in the direction of prophethood, changing as Elvis’ ancestors made their way into the heart of America. His great great great grandfather was named Priestly, not Presley.
Even his conception had a mystic quality. Vernon Presley told his son that he’d known the exact instant when he’d come into being because at that moment, Vernon had lost consciousness. Though there is a more common explanation for such an event, Elvis took this orgasmic blackout as an absolute sign that at the moment of conception his father had become possessed by a higher power, God himself. Thus exalted, Elvis embraced the notion that Vernon – ex-con and paint-huffer – was not his true “daddy.” On the night of Elvis’s nativity, Vernon walked into the backyard and saw the heavens suffused with a divine blue light. Elvis made this story part of his mythos, as he’d long associated the color blue with his own supernatural power, and with his fate as the “One.”
He poured his passion into hymns, recording entire albums of corn-fueled gospel tunes. “I Believe in the Man in the Sky” appears to be just another schlock gospel tune, but a decade before Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven,” Elvis sang of a “stairway to a star,” making it clear that “the Man in the Sky” was not just a hokey euphemism for God. Even more suggestive is “I’m Gonna Walk on that Milky White Way.” There, he assures us, he’ll meet God, not in the traditional puffy-cloud heaven but on a luminous swath in outer space. And there he’ll “sit down and tell Him my troubles about the world I just came from.”
For a man who gave the impression of good-ole-boy Christian faith, he carried a heavy load of esoteric secrets, obsessed with astrology, psychic healing, UFOs, pyramids, and reincarnation. He never composed a song, let alone an entire book; like Jesus, he left behind not a single extant page. He may not have been a writer, but he most certainly was an avid reader, able to quote scripture and discuss esoteric topics with men of God.
Wherever he traveled, Elvis always had his servants bring along his personal library of over two hundred books of esoteric lore, including the Dead Sea Scrolls, Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, The King of Kings Holy Bible, Bible Mystery and Bible Meaning, The Little Prince, The Mystic Bible, countless karate and football books, and The Impersonal Life, which Elvis bought hundreds of copies of and freely gave away.
He took his occult researches all the way to the end. Legend has it that he died on the toilet reading The Search for the Face of Jesus, a book about the Shroud of Turin. In fact, the King was perusing Sex and Psychic Energy, a book of astro-quasi-porn with pictures that show the best positions for various celestial-erotic combinations.
Not surprising, the works of Erich Von Däniken traveled with Elvis wherever he went. The Chariots of the Gods and its endless sequels, gave him much to contemplate and a foundation on which to build his star-spawn mythos. Von Däniken had gotten rich off of his books, which claim that extraterrestrials were responsible for most of ancient history, everything from the pyramids and Stonehenge to the giant heads on Easter Island. Though these books reek with sloppy pseudoscience, their blatant absurdity did not dissuade Elvis from taking them seriously. Von Däniken’s first book, published in English as Chariots of the Gods?, was originally titled Erinnerungen an die Zukunft: “Memories of the Future.” His second book too was repackaged for American readers, coming out as Gods from Outer Space. In German, the title is much more evocative, meaning Return to the Stars.
Yes —return. Back to the heavens. Extraterrestrials had visited earth countless millennia before, then returned to the stars they called home, leaving behind mysterious traces of their presence here. Babylonian legends, Inca carvings, Nordic sagas, Chinese myths, and hints of Cthulhu’s presence: Von Däniken is the not-so-secret link between Lovecraft and Elvis. His understanding of modern physics and astronomy was less sophisticated than that of a fairly bright high schooler. His use of quotes and sources would have gotten him an F in freshman composition. Yet Von Däniken (a convicted embezzler and swindler) sold tens of millions of books and gave hope to his countless followers (including the Big E) that beings from far-distant galaxies once came to earth, and may come again.
4.
My favorite element in the Christian nativity story is the visitation of the three star-gazing kings, who offered rare gifts and then vanished. In fact, the kings were “magians” – astrologers who saw signs in the heavens and felt compelled to travel into foreign lands, carrying treasure: golden baubles to delight the Christ child; myrrh for the embalming of the dead; and frankincense to make perfumed smoke in the innermost recesses of a temple.
Besides his fifty-three gold records, displayed in his trophy room like fifty-three radiant suns, Elvis veneration also includes his gold lamé suit seen on the cover of the 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can’t be Wrong album. He was embalmed, though which Holyland spices were used has never been revealed. (A photo of him preserved in his coffin was secretly taken by his cousin and sold to the National Enquirer for $18,000.) And what of frankincense? Graceland itself was a tomb for the living-dead God King, even if the smells of burnt bacon, banana puddling, and smoking machine guns were a more common fragrance than the incense brought to lay at the feet of the new-born king.
5.
Music, for Lovecraft, was far more baleful than beautiful. His stories are filled with demonic violins, the “mad cacophony of the orgy,” “howls and squawking ecstasies,” wheezing, grunting, and ululation. His narrators bleat and croak as they slide into madness. And in at least a dozen places, “piping” and “whistling” are the signs that some unspeakable evil is approaching.
In the eighteenth-century, the era that Lovecraft so fetishized and longed to return to, drunken celebrants roved the streets as Christmas loomed nearer, with drums and rattles; shouts, groans, and catcalls; blowing horns and whistles, beating on tin pans and kettles. These rowdies were called callithump bands, and the name has never been successfully explained. As soon as I stumbled onto this word, however, the name Cthulhu jumped out at me. Remove and rearrange a few letters and there it is: the most dreaded alien entity in Lovecraft’s mythos. Callithump to Cthulhu: did he know of this nearly-lost tradition? With the slaughtering of animals done, the harvest all in, the beer brewing done, little work to be done on these shortest of days, the lower classes of England had a whole month to make merry, or in some cases run riot. As a devoted antiquarian, longing to live in an earlier century, as a self-described “subject” of the British crown, Lovecraft could very well have come across references to this popular outbreak of chaos during the solstice season.
Since then, Christmas music has lost almost all of its wildness and power, dissolving into a gummy puddle of sentimental glop. There is a distant hint of the old pagan celebration in Elvis Sings the Wonderful World of Christmas. Given that “rock and roll” was originally a not very subtle euphemism for sex, “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” calls to mind orgiastic release, naked bodies spangled with flickering festive lights.
But this album drips with woo-woo chorus voices and unctuous strings. Though he covers some standards, it’s the filler – especially “Holly Leaves and Christmas Trees” – that haunts me. The song, co-written by Red West, is far more woeful than “Heartbreak Hotel,” perhaps because West understood the quagmire of drugged despair that his boss had made of his life in Graceland. In “Holly Leaves and Christmas Trees” the singer is not just haunted by lost happiness never to be found again, but isolated in his suffering. He’s homeless and grieved by ghosts of what once was. Who is the “you” he addresses? Is it a woman, family, maybe Santa Claus, or even Jesus? Whoever it is, there’s no hope to reclaim “how it used to be.”
The year keeping turning and “It’s that time” again. When listening in the distant night, he hears bells. Snow is falling and people head homeward. But he’s utterly alone and all the outward signs – pagan, Christian, or simple Nashville schlock – are meaningless to him now.
6.
Though Christmas is the greatest kitsch magnet on the calendar, a few traces of ancient mystery can still be glimpsed. Just as Lovecraft’s fiery suicides and Elvis’s burnin’ love are twisted reflections of countless twinkling holiday lights, the Christmas ghost story is an inversion of the folkloric notion that December is a potent enemy to evil spirits, and a great “Dissolver of Witchcraft.”
Alongside the Christian notion of evil spirits being powerless during December is the deeper pre-Christian folklore which sees the longest nights of the year as not hallowed, but haunted. The Yuletide ghost story, even when slathered with Christmas schmaltz, takes us back to a much earlier time.
Dickens wrote by far the most famous of the tales that link hellish visitations with Christmas, managing the rare feat of mixing horror and sentimentality into a seamless blend. But, as some have noticed, there’s no mention of Jesus, salvation, or anything specific to religion in A Christmas Carol.
M. R. James, a true master of the ghost story, entertained friends with Christmastime candle-light readings of his horror tales. Lovecraft – greatly influenced by James – employs the same concept of lost secrets and forbidden knowledge which can drive a person to madness. Writing in his 1927 essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature, Lovecraft heaps praise on James for his skill, subtlety, and “diabolic power” when telling his “spectral tales at Christmastide.”
But “A Visit From St. Nicholas” (A.K.A. “The Night Before Christmas”) came before Dickens and James, and it casts a ghostly – some have said shamanic – shadow over Christmas Eve. To start with, it’s all a dream, and has all the authority of a nocturnal incursion from the unconscious. A miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer? Comet and Cupid – a dire astronomical omen and the Roman sub-god of love. Donner and Blitzen – thunder and lightning auf Deutsch. They have the strength of a hurricane and are “more rapid than eagles.” Santa himself is an “old elf” dressed all in fur, smudged with ashes and soot. He’s clearly of the lower class: “like a peddler” chomping on the “stump of a pipe.” A shaman who travels the globe via magical herb smoke (yet who speaks “not a word”) he breaks into ordinary reality only once a year, on the night of nights. Cutesy kitsch or esoteric dream-message? Or, as is so often the case, both at the same time?
Santa Claus as shaman: this seems a stretch. But looking at early illustrations – in which he’s depicted as a sly, seedy, old geezer coated in fireplace filth – takes us back to a time when he wasn’t fat and jolly. In early illustrations, he smirks and leers, a dirty old man hopped up on endless pipes of mystery-smoke. His transformation from somber Saint Nicholas in a bishop’s robes to Santa Claus the world-circling wizard is another instance of Christmas as folk magic, opening the doors of time to let the past penetrate the present.
7.
The best film version of Dickens’ Christmas Carol is undoubtably the one staring Alastair Sim, made in 1951 in glorious black and white. I’ve gone back to the movie again and again, but only in recent years have I allowed myself to entertain the notion that the star of the film is in fact Aleister Crowley, not Sim. The two men do share a remarkable resemblance: bald, doughy-faced, cranky, unhinged, with unfortunate teeth and given to strange mutterings. And who better to play the most notorious Christmas-hater in all folklore than the Great Beast himself, the self-described “wickedest man in the world”?
My first encounter with Sim was in The Ruling Class, which I saw as a sixteen year old at a soon-to-be-demolished theater in a seedy part of town. Sim plays the wild-haired, dithering, blithering bishop to Peter O’Toole’s 14th Earl of Gurney, a paranoid schizophrenic who begins the film thinking that he is Jesus Christ and ends up as a new incarnation of Jack the Ripper. Sim was near the end of his career in 1972, having specialized in playing deranged or discombomulated characters and drag-hags. He was twenty years younger when he played Scrooge,but Dickens’ story is about layers of time lost and time found, intertwining spirits of past, present, and future. The first line, “Marley was dead: to begin with,” sets the tone for the ghost story to follow, and even with a happy ending, leaves me unsettled. Aleister Crowley was dead too, when they made the 1951 Christmas Carol. Nonetheless, his scabrous ghost haunts my viewing. It’s not just the coincidence of the first names, the similarity of their appearances, their long careers playing with madness. Dickens’ tale is built on an unnerving “what if?” Timelines are tangled and alternate realities interpenetrate. Strange spiritual entities invade the ordinary world and the authority of the dream is supreme.
This year, instead of watching my favorite holiday film, with or without the spectral presence of Aleister Crowley, I got up early on Christmas morning, turned the tree lights on in my living room and all alone, in the shadows of deepest Yule, put a movie into the slot – Clambake, which Elvis himself declared to be the worst film in which he was the star.
By 1967, Elvis’s career in the movies was sinking fast. Clambake was the last movie for which he could demand, and receive, a million dollars. Depressed by the quality of his films, Elvis had gone from 170 pounds to 200. Studio brass demanded that he lose weight fast, thus increasing his daily intake of amphetamines.
As little kids woke and gathered in wonder beneath countless trees, I watched tiresome shots of Elvis’s double driving on highways in a Corvette Stingray, then for no reason at all performing a prince and pauper switch: Elvis becoming a nobody, and a different nobody becoming the pampered son of an oil magnate. The back projection shots are absurdly obvious, the songs are forgettable, the script writers were on auto-pilot, and even buzzed on speed, Elvis has all the vigor of a crustacean floating in formaldehyde.
Yet I watched the whole movie – washed in Christmas glow-hype and wallowing in Elvis’s degradation. He’d played his own double three years before in Kissin’ Cousins: both a dark-haired Air Force Officer and a blond country boy. In Clambake, the charade involves nothing more than a change of clothes.
Why Clambake on Christmas when there is no obvious connection? Elvis had recorded his first album of Christmas songs in 1957, but none of these are featured in the film. Santa Claus, elves, reindeer are nowhere to be seen. Ostensibly set in Florida, there’s not a hint of snow in Clambake.
The What-if? element may be the key. In these lead-heavy one hundred minutes, the viewer sees Elvis give up his princely powers to become ordinary, as Jesus gave up his divine nature to become human. Just by being himself while the camera rolled, Elvis made a million dollars in a few weeks by taking on the persona of a guy who’d soon fade into oblivion.
8.
Some sneer at Lovecraft, calling Cthulhu a mere “invisible whistling octopus.” But four hundred miles from home, I did see huge roiling specters of steam and hear the brain-blasting sound of Cthulhu’s Christmas Eve cacophony.
Glen Rock is a small town hidden in a misty vale near the Pennsylvania-Maryland state line. What brings me here is the chorus of male singers who dress in Victorian get-ups and once a year march around the town from midnight until dawn, singing lost English Christmas songs passed down, generation to generation for over a hundred years. Someone literally has to die in order for a new fellow to join this quasi-secret musical society. Their repertoire is charming, though small. The top hats and frock coats give the singers the look of Victorian ghosts escaping for just one night from the prison of the past.
However, what really hits me on this night of oh holy nights, is the lady playing the organ before the singers gather beneath the street lamp in the center of town. She’s a prehistoric fertility goddess – reborn as a corpulent housewife, then plopped down in church and making the pipes roar and wail.
She’s beautiful and terrible, amoeboid and humanoid, talented and enthusiastic enough to rock the Christmas crowd till the singers form up and let loose at midnight. She throws herself at the keyboards with manic primal vigor and her vast buttocks slosh like two great bags of royal bee-jelly. It’s sexy, obscene, highly distressing and very entertaining – a rich kitsch stew. No “Little Town of Bethlehem” or “Silent Night.” Nothing gentle for this Christmas Eve organ orgy.
As she hunkers at the console, her bare feet hardly reach the pedals. From my place at the altar rail, I have a perfect rear view. I can see every jiggle and waggle of her vast gelatinous buttocks as she stabs her stubby legs at the pedals and slides back and forth on the well-shined bench.
I leave the pew and approach the motherlode of sound, edging up to the ranks of the fattest pipes, from which comes a massive bass, throbbing into me, down my spine and deeper still.
The organist finishes up with a rousing version of “Angels We Have Heard on High.” The signal is given and the crowd streams out to cheer on their weird throw-back wassailing choir which will tour the town until dawn (with plenty of stops where the local folk ply them with kuchens, tarts, cherry bounce, mulled cider, and glühwein – literally “glow wine.”)
An hour later we’re in York: a grim, dingy, postindustrial nowhere town. Well after midnight on Christmas Eve, driving with the windows open, we’re freezing, listening for the distant shriek of the locally-famous, disused factory whistle, built on the same principle as an organ pipe. From far-off, the steam-scream is like whale song. At first a random, atonal sliding sound, but then a pattern can be made out, a rough contour of melody, and “Joy to the World” looms out of the aural murk.
“Stop the car,” I demand, and clamber out to listen. The sound echoes off brick walls, making it difficult to locate the source. But by moving into the middle of the street, I get a better read on the direction.
“That way.” I jump back into the car, pointing and panting, and we take a right turn. Back alleys, streets devoid of all traffic, parking lots piled with dirty snow. All across town, dogs howl back at the steam whistle.
The sound ebbs and swells as we thread our way closer to the source. A suggestion of familiar melodies comes swimming out of the unholy blur. Then silence, and another one starts up, like the cry of some lost and miserable boreal sky-beast. Or was it a manifestation of Cthulhu’s eldritch piping?
Closer now, the sound rises in power. Up ahead there’s a straggling crowd gathered on the sidewalk, and a swirling cloud over an abandoned brick factory. Car horns honk at the end of each tune, like postindustrial creatures cheering their own. By this time, it’s well past midnight, and the people on the street are all numbed, though aware that this is an event, knowing that it has some meaning. But the beer, the cold, and the unhinged melodies have put everyone into a Yuletide trance.
The ritual has been performed here for decades, though rumor has it that this will be the last time. The factory, feeble and ancient, can no longer produce its own steam, and so an eighteen-wheeler has been brought in, hauling a mobile steam engine which is hooked up to the old whistle to keep the tradition alive for one more year.
We pull over and I jump out. I cross the street, follow the icy train tracks a short distance, make my way through the din-dazed crowd, and there it is: the whistle-pipe itself behind a three-story building, an alien god shrouded in his dismal gaseous cloud. In drunken glee, voices join the gasping and hissing of the steam. I sing along my own version of the hymn: “Hark the hairy angels sing, glory to the newborn thing.”
The sound now is painfully loud, though I hold my hands over my ears to protect them. Another tune emerges from the writhing icy mist: “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.” I’m the only one who knows the words. Is this eldritch screeching “the glorious song of old?”
For lo! the days are hastening on
By prophet bards foretold,
When with the ever-circling years
Comes round the age of gold
Does this, a glistening puddle of spilled Yuengling beer, somehow represent the Age of Gold? Were Lovecraft, Elvis, and Erich Von Däniken the prophet bards, who with the ever-circling years, returned yet again, bearing baleful tidings?
I stand for one more song, closer, with my ears now unprotected. “O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” – a tormented wail of Gregorian chant – lances into my brain. Emmanuel: which means God with us.
Then I return to the car and we head out, with the windows open until the last of the eerie cry has faded. As we drive away, I peer into the pages of Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, which I’d bought on the same foray, more than fifty years before, when I’d seen Mad-Jack Jesus in The Ruling Class. The cheap paperback, tattered and Bible-black, still has a quasi-scriptural feel for me. Having read the urtext countless times, I don’t need to see clearly for the words to reach the recesses of my brain. “Theosophy and occultism” . . . “blackest of African voodoo circles” . . . “genuinely abysmal antiquity.”
And from far, far off I hear the Call of Cthulhu.