Ready for a strange story, that has a curious connection to yesterday's post, about doorways and liminal spaces?
Let's start with H. P. Lovecraft's famous short story "The Call of Cthulhu," written in 1926, which sets up the tale with the discovery on a small island in an archipelago in the South Pacific of a small stone statue that looks like some kind of octopus/human hybrid. Then, when anthropologists go to the island chain to try and find its origins, the natives not only deny knowing anything about the idol, they say the island where it was allegedly found is uninhabited and always has been. Sure enough, when they go to that particular island, it's empty -- but there are some "suspicious traces" that certainly look like there'd been people living there, but who were all mysteriously done away with in the not too recent past. Inquiries are launched, but the people who know something about the idol and where it was discovered all seem to have the unfortunate habit of dying before they can tell anyone about it. The last part of the story describes the landing of a ship called the Emma on an island that had surfaced temporarily "in the open ocean south of the Cook Islands" due to an earthquake. Second Mate Gustaf Johansen and six others go ashore looking for a supply of fresh water and other provisions, and soon enough regret their decision:
Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous acropolis, and clambered slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which could have been no mortal staircase. The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarizing miasma welling out from this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance showed concavity after the first showed convexity.
It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot of the monolith and shouted of what he had found. The rest followed him, and looked curiously at the immense carved door with the now-familiar squid-dragon bas-relief. It was, Johansen said, like a great barn door; and they all felt that it was a door because of the ornate lintel threshold, and jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it lay flat like a trap door or slantwise like an outside cellar door... [T]he geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable.
Then, because any reader with a scrap of common sense is by this time screaming at the characters "DO NOT OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR!", of course one of them opens the fucking door:
Donovan slid or somehow propelled himself down or along the jamb and rejoined his fellows, and everyone watched the queer recession of the monstrously carven portal. In this fantasy of prismatic distortion, it moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset.
The result is that Cthulhu wakes up, most of the sailors are messily devoured, and the survivors are left with some seriously eldritch PTSD.
Despite Lovecraft's regrettable tendency toward purple prose and the fact that he never met an adverb he didn't like, you have to admit the whole thing is pretty damn atmospheric.
What you may not know is that it's based on a true story.
Well, not the evil octopus monster part, at least so far as I know. In 1916, the Polynesian Society of Honolulu printed an account from a sailor who claimed to have years earlier visited an island called Tuanaki, where he lived with the natives for six days. It was, he said, south of Rarotonga, the largest of the Cook Islands; in fact, the Tuanakians ultimately left their home (for unknown reasons, but there were hints of it being something bad) and resettled in Rarotonga, where some of them still lived.
So... explorers set out to find Tuanaki. When they arrived at the point where the island allegedly was, there was nothing there but open ocean.
Off to Rarotonga to interview any Tuanakians who still lived there. You guessed it -- the Rarotongans not only said that no one had emigrated there from other islands within living memory, no one they talked to had ever heard of Tuanaki.
Or so they claimed.
More prosaically, maybe (the explorers suggested) Tuanaki had sunk beneath the waves, either due to an earthquake or erosion or both. One of them recalled that in 1862, some seafarers traveling from Auckland to Rarotonga had hit a submerged shoal near the coordinates supposedly corresponding to Tuanaki's location. The shoal had been named Haymet Rocks in honor of the ship's owner, J. E. Haymet.
But further exploration couldn't find those, either. If the Haymet Rocks were the remnants of Tuanaki, they seemed to have vanished as well.
And just to add an extra weird twist to the whole story, explorer Ernest Shackleton launched an expedition in 1921 with the express purpose of relocating Tuanaki -- then died of an apparent heart attack on South Georgia Island before he could go there.
The upshot of it all is that we still don't know where, or if, Tuanaki existed. Considering the dicey state of navigation in the mid-nineteenth century, it's likely the initial account from the sailor had misidentified the location of the island where he stayed and/or misremembered the name of it.
But the fact remains that it's a very odd story, and you can see why it would have inspired Lovecraft. Even without the oozing cyclopean architecture with impossible geometry, the whole tale is curious, and leaves more questions than answers. After all, even with our modern mapping tools, the Pacific Ocean is a big place; the latitude and longitude Lovecraft quotes as the location of R'lyeh is not far from Point Nemo, the "oceanic pole of inaccessibility" -- the place in the Earth's oceans that is the farthest from any possible landfall.
So not a place anyone is likely to visit. But if you do, and there's an uncharted island there, just remember the cardinal rule:
DO. NOT. OPEN. THE. FUCKING. DOOR.
