H.P. Lovecraft - The Very Old Folk

H.P. LOVECRAFT

THE VERY OLD FOLK

Written on November 2, 1927
First published in Scienti-Snaps, Vol.3, No.3, 1940

THE VERY OLD FOLK

It was a flaming sunset or late afternoon in the tiny provincial town of
Pompelo, at the foot of the Pyrenees in Hispania Citerior. The year must have
been in the late republic, for the province was still ruled by a senatorial
proconsul instead of a praetorian legate of Augustus, and the day was the first
before the Kalends of November. The hills rose scarlet and gold to the north of
the little town, and the westering sun shone ruddily and mystically on the
crude new stone and plaster buildings of the dusty forum and the wooden walls
of the circus some distance to the east. Groups of citizens—broad-browed Roman
colonists and coarse-haired Romanized natives, together with obvious hybrids of
the two strains, alike clad in cheap woolen togas— and sprinklings of helmeted
legionaries and coarse-mantled, black-bearded tribesmen of the circumambient
Vascones—all thronged the few paved streets and forum; moved by some vague and
ill-defined uneasiness.

I myself had just alighted from a litter, which the Illyrian bearers seemed to
have brought in some haste from Calagurris, across the Iberus to the southward.
It appeared that I was a provincial quaestor named L. Caelius Rufus, and that I
had been summoned by the proconsul, P. Scribonius Libo, who had come from
Tarraco some days before. The soldiers were the fifth cohort of the XIIth
legion, under the military tribune Sex. Asellius; and the legatus of the whole
region, Cn. Balbutius, had also come from Calagurris, where the permanent
station was.

The cause of the conference was a horror that brooded on the hills. All the
townsfolk were frightened, and had begged the presence of a cohort from
Calagurris. It was the Terrible Season of the autumn, and the wild people in
the mountains were preparing for the frightful ceremonies which only rumor told
of in the towns. They were the very old folk who dwelt higher up in the hills
and spoke a choppy language which the Vascones could not understand. One seldom
saw them; but a few times a year they sent down little yellow, squint-eyed
messengers (who looked like Scythians) to trade with the merchants by means of
gestures, and every spring and autumn they held the infamous rites on the
peaks, their howlings and altar-fires throwing terror into the villages. Always
the same—the night before the Kalends of Maius and the night before the Kalends
of November. Townsfolk would disappear just before these nights, and would
never be heard of again. And there were whispers that the native shepherds and
farmers were not ill-disposed toward the very old folk— that more than one
thatched hut was vacant before midnight on the two hideous Sabbaths.

This year the horror was very great, for the people knew that the wrath of the
very old folk was upon Pompelo. Three months previously five of the little
squint-eyed traders had come down from the hills, and in a market brawl three
of them had been killed. The remaining two had gone back wordlessly to their
mountains—and this autumn not a single villager had disappeared. There was
menace in this immunity. It was not like the very old folk to spare their
victims at the Sabbath. It was too good to be normal, and the villagers were
afraid.

For many nights there had been a hollow drumming on the hills, and at last the
aedile Tib. Annaeus Stilpo (half native in blood) had sent to Balbutius at
Calagurris for a cohort to stamp out the Sabbath on the terrible night.
Balbutius had carelessly refused, on the ground that the villagers' fears were
empty, and that the loathsome rites of hill folk were of no concern to the
Roman People unless our own citizens were menaced.

I, however, who seemed to be a close friend of Balbutius, had disagreed with
him; averring that I had studied deeply in the black forbidden lore, and that I
believed the very old folk capable of visiting almost any nameless doom upon
the town, which after all was a Roman settlement and contained a great number
of our citizens. The complaining aedile's own mother Helvia was a pure Roman,
the daughter of M. Helvius Cinna, who had come over with Scipio's army.
Accordingly I had sent a slave—a nimble little Greek called Antipater —to the
proconsul with letters, and Scribonius had heeded my plea and ordered Balbutius
to send his fifth cohort, under Asellius, to Pompelo; entering the hills at
dusk on the eve of November's Kalends and stamping out whatever nameless orgies
he might find—bringing such prisoners as he might take to Tarraco for the next
propraetor's court. Balbutius, however, had protested, so that more
correspondence had ensued. I had written so much to the proconsul that he had
become gravely interested, and had resolved to make a personal inquiry into the
horror.

He had at length proceeded to Pompelo with his lictors and attendants; there
hearing enough rumors to be greatly impressed and disturbed, and standing
firmly by his order for the Sabbath's extirpation. Desirous of conferring with
one who had studied the subject, he ordered me to accompany Asellius' cohort
—and Balbutius had also come along to press his adverse advice, for he honestly
believed that drastic military action would stir up a dangerous sentiment of
unrest amongst the Vascones both tribal and settled.

So here we all were in the mystic sunset of the autumn hills—old Scribonius
Libo in his toga praetexta, the golden light glancing on his shiny bald head
and wrinkled hawk face, Balbutius with his gleaming helmet and breastplate,
blue-shaven lips compressed in conscientiously dogged opposition, young
Asellius with his polished greaves and superior sneer, and the curious throng
of townsfolk, legionaries, tribesmen, peasants, lictors, slaves, and
attendants. I myself seemed to wear a common toga, and to have no especially
distinguishing characteristic. And everywhere horror brooded. The town and
country folk scarcely dared speak aloud, and the men of Libo's entourage, who
had been there nearly a week, seemed to have caught something of the nameless
dread. Old Scribonius himself looked very grave, and the sharp voices of us
later comers seemed to hold something of curious inappropriateness, as in a
place of death or the temple of some mystic God.

We entered the praetorium and held grave converse. Balbutius pressed his
objections, and was sustained by Asellius, who appeared to hold all the natives
in extreme contempt while at the same time deeming it inadvisable to excite
them. Both soldiers maintained that we could better afford to antagonize the
minority of colonists and civilized natives by inaction, than to antagonize a
probable majority of tribesmen and cottagers by stamping out the dread rites.

I, on the other hand, renewed my demand for action, and offered to accompany
the cohort on any expedition it might undertake. I pointed out that the
barbarous Vascones were at best turbulent and uncertain, so that skirmishes
with them were inevitable sooner or later whichever course we might take; that
they had not in the past proved dangerous adversaries to our legions, and that
it would ill become the representatives of the Roman People to suffer
barbarians to interfere with a course which the justice and prestige of the
Republic demanded. That, on the other hand, the successful administration of a
province depended primarily upon the safety and good-will of the civilized
element in whose hands the local machinery of commerce and prosperity reposed,
and in whose veins a large mixture of our own Italian blood coursed. These,
though in numbers they might form a minority, were the stable element whose
constancy might be relied on, and whose cooperation would most firmly bind the
province to the Imperium of the Senate and the Roman People.

It was at once a duty and an advantage to afford them the protection due to
Roman citizens; even (and here I shot a sarcastic look at Balbutius and
Asellius) at the expense of a little trouble and activity, and of a slight
interruption of the draught-playing and cock-fighting at the camp in
Calagurris. That the danger to the town and inhabitants of Pompelo was a real
one, I could not from my studies doubt. I had read many scrolls out of Syria
and Aegyptus, and the cryptic towns of Etruria, and had talked at length with
the bloodthirsty priest of Diana Aricina in his temple in the woods bordering
Lacus Nemorensis.

There were shocking dooms that might be called out of the hills on the
Sabbaths; dooms which ought not to exist within the territories of the Roman
People; and to permit orgies of the kind known to prevail at Sabbaths would be
but little in consonance with the customs of those whose forefathers, A.
Postumius being consul, had executed so many Roman citizens for the practice of
the Bacchanalia—a matter kept ever in memory by the Senatus Consultum de
Bacchanalibus, graven upon bronze and set open to every eye.

Checked in time, before the progress of the rites might evoke anything with
which the iron of a Roman pilum might not be able to deal, the Sabbath would
not be too much for the powers of a single cohort. Only participants need be
apprehended, and the sparing of a great number of mere spectators would
considerably lessen the resentment which any of the sympathizing country folk
might feel. In short, both principle and policy demanded stern action; and I
could not doubt but that Publius Scribonius, bearing in mind the dignity and
obligations of the Roman People, would adhere to his plan of despatching the
cohort, me accompanying, despite such objections as Balbutius and Asellius
—speaking indeed more like provincials than Romans—might see fit to offer and
multiply.

The slanting sun was now very low, and the whole hushed town seemed draped in
an unreal and malign glamour. Then P. Scribonius the proconsul signified his
approval of my words, and stationed me with the cohort in the provisional
capacity of a centurio primipilus; Balbutius and Asellius assenting, the former
with better grace than the latter. As twilight fell on the wild autumnal
slopes, a measured, hideous beating of strange drums floated down from afar in
terrible rhythm. Some few of the legionarii showed timidity, but sharp commands
brought them into line, and the whole cohort was soon drawn up on the open
plain east of the circus. Libo himself, as well as Balbutius, insisted on
accompanying the cohort; but great difficulty was suffered in getting a native
guide to point out the paths up the mountain. Finally a young man named
Vercellius, the son of pure Roman parents, agreed to take us at least past the
foothills.

We began to march in the new dusk, with the thin silver sickle of a young moon
trembling over the woods on our left. That which disquieted us most was the
fact that the Sabbath was to be held at all. Reports of the coming cohort must
have reached the hills, and even the lack of a final decision could not make
the rumor less alarming—yet there were the sinister drums as of yore, as if the
celebrants had some peculiar reason to be indifferent whether or not the forces
of the Roman People marched against them. The sound grew louder as we entered a
rising gap in the hills, steep wooded banks enclosing us narrowly on either
side, and displaying curiously fantastic tree-trunks in the light of our
bobbing torches.

All were afoot save Libo, Balbutius, Asellius, two or three of the
centuriones, and myself, and at length the way became so steep and narrow that
those who had horses were forced to leave them; a squad of ten men being left
to guard them, though robber bands were not likely to be abroad on such a night
of terror. Once in a while it seemed as though we detected a skulking form in
the woods nearby, and after a half-hour's climb the steepness and narrowness of
the way made the advance of so great a body of men—over 300, all told
—exceedingly cumbrous and difficult. Then with utter and horrifying suddenness
we heard a frightful sound from below. It was from the tethered horses—they had
screamed, not neighed, but screamed... and there was no light down there, nor
the sound of any human thing, to show why they had done so. At the same moment
bonfires blazed out on all the peaks ahead, so that terror seemed to lurk
equally well before and behind us.

Looking for the youth Vercellius, our guide, we found only a crumpled heap
weltering in a pool of blood. In his hand was a short sword snatched from the
belt of D. Vibulanus, a subcenturio, and on his face was such a look of terror
that the stoutest veterans turned pale at the sight. He had killed himself when
the horses screamed... He, who had been born and lived all his life in that
region, and knew what men whispered about the hills. All the torches now began
to dim, and the cries of frightened legionaries mingled with the unceasing
screams of the tethered horses. The air grew perceptibly colder, more suddenly
so than is usual at November's brink, and seemed stirred by terrible
undulations which I could not help connecting with the beating of huge wings.

The whole cohort now remained at a standstill, and as the torches faded I
watched what I thought were fantastic shadows outlined in the sky by the
spectral luminosity of the Via Lactea as it flowed through Perseus, Cassiopeia,
Cepheus, and Cygnus. Then suddenly all the stars were blotted from the sky
—even bright Deneb and Vega ahead, and the lone Altair and Fomalhaut behind us.
And as the torches died out altogether, there remained above the stricken and
shrieking cohort only the noxious and horrible altar-flames on the towering
peaks; hellish and red, and now silhouetting the mad, leaping, and colossal
forms of such nameless beasts as had never a Phrygian priest or Campanian
grandam whispered of in the wildest of furtive tales.

And above the nighted screaming of men and horses that daemonic drumming rose
to louder pitch, whilst an ice-cold wind of shocking sentience and
deliberateness swept down from those forbidden heights and coiled about each
man separately, till all the cohort was struggling and screaming in the dark,
as if acting out the fate of Laocoön and his sons. Only old Scribonius Libo
seemed resigned. He uttered words amidst the screaming, and they echo still in
my ears. "Malitia vetus—malitia vetus est... venit... tandem venit..."1

And then I waked. It was the most vivid dream in years, drawing upon wells of
the subconscious long untouched and forgotten. Of the fate of that cohort no
record exists, but the town at least was saved— for encyclopedias tell of the
survival of Pompelo to this day, under the modern Spanish name of Pompelona...

Yrs for Gothick Supremacy—

C · IVLIVS · VERVS · MAXIMINVS

THE END