The Moon-Bog

The Moon-Bog
by H. P. Lovecraft

Written March 1921

Published June 1926 in Weird Tales, Vol. 7, No. 6, p. 805-10

Somewhere, to what remote and fearsome region I know not, Denys Barry has gone. I
was with him the last night he lived among men, and heard his screams when the thing
came to him; but all the peasants and police in County Meath could never find him, or the
others, though they searched long and far. And now I shudder when I hear the frogs
piping in swamps, or see the moon in lonely places.

I had known Denys Barry well in America, where he had grown rich, and had
congratulated him when he bought back the old castle by the bog at sleepy Kilderry. It
was from Kilderry that his father had come, and it was there that he wished to enjoy his
wealth among ancestral scenes. Men of his blood had once ruled over Kilderry and built
and dwelt in the castle, but those days were very remote, so that for generations the castle
had been empty and decaying. After he went to Ireland, Barry wrote me often, and told
me how under his care the gray castle was rising tower by tower to its ancient splendor,
how the ivy was climbing slowly over the restored walls as it had climbed so many
centuries ago, and how the peasants blessed him for bringing back the old days with his
gold from over the sea. But in time there came troubles, and the peasants ceased to bless
him, and fled away instead as from a doom. And then he sent a letter and asked me to
visit him, for he was lonely in the castle with no one to speak to save the new servants
and laborers he had brought from the North.

The bog was the cause of all these troubles, as Barry told me the night I came to the
castle. I had reached Kilderry in the summer sunset, as the gold of the sky lighted the
green of the hills and groves and the blue of the bog, where on a far islet a strange olden
ruin glistened spectrally. That sunset was very beautiful, but the peasants at Ballylough
had warned me against it and said that Kilderry had become accursed, so that I almost
shuddered to see the high turrets of the castle gilded with fire. Barry’s motor had met me
at the Ballylough station, for Kilderry is off the railway. The villagers had shunned the
car and the driver from the North, but had whispered to me with pale faces when they
saw I was going to Kilderry. And that night, after our reunion, Barry told me why.

The peasants had gone from Kilderry because Denys Barry was to drain the great bog.
For all his love of Ireland, America had not left him untouched, and he hated the beautiful
wasted space where peat might be cut and land opened up. The legends and superstitions
of Kilderry did not move him, and he laughed when the peasants first refused to help, and
then cursed him and went away to Ballylough with their few belongings as they saw his
determination. In their place he sent for laborers from the North, and when the servants
left he replaced them likewise. But it was lonely among strangers, so Barry had asked me
to come.
 The Moon-Bog

When I heard the fears which had driven the people from Kilderry, I laughed as loudly as
my friend had laughed, for these fears were of the vaguest, wildest, and most absurd
character. They had to do with some preposterous legend of the bog, and a grim guardian
spirit that dwelt in the strange olden ruin on the far islet I had seen in the sunset. There
were tales of dancing lights in the dark of the moon, and of chill winds when the night
was warm; of wraiths in white hovering over the waters, and of an imagined city of stone
deep down below the swampy surface. But foremost among the weird fancies, and alone
in its absolute unanimity, was that of the curse awaiting him who should dare to touch or
drain the vast reddish morass. There were secrets, said the peasants, which must not be
uncovered; secrets that had lain hidden since the plague came to the children of Partholan
in the fabulous years beyond history. In the Book of Invaders it is told that these sons of
the Greeks were all buried at Tallaght, but old men in Kilderry said that one city was
overlooked save by its patron moon-goddess; so that only the wooded hills buried it when
the men of Nemed swept down from Scythia in their thirty ships.

Such were the idle tales which had made the villagers leave Kilderry, and when I heard
them I did not wonder that Denys Barry had refused to listen. He had, however, a great
interest in antiquities, and proposed to explore the bog thoroughly when it was drained.
The white ruins on the islet he had often visited, but though their age was plainly great,
and their contour very little like that of most ruins in Ireland, they were too dilapidated to
tell the days of their glory. Now the work of drainage was ready to begin, and the
laborers from the North were soon to strip the forbidden bog of its green moss and red
heather, and kill the tiny shell-paved streamlets and quiet blue pools fringed with rushes.

After Barry had told me these things I was very drowsy, for the travels of the day had
been wearying and my host had talked late into the night. A man-servant showed me to
my room, which was in a remote tower overlooking the village and the plain at the edge
of the bog, and the bog itself; so that I could see from my windows in the moonlight the
silent roofs from which the peasants had fled and which now sheltered the laborers from
the North, and too, the parish church with its antique spire, and far out across the
brooding bog the remote olden ruin on the islet gleaming white and spectral. Just as I
dropped to sleep I fancied I heard faint sounds from the distance; sounds that were wild
and half musical, and stirred me with a weird excitement which colored my dreams. But
when I awaked next morning I felt it had all been a dream, for the visions I had seen were
more wonderful than any sound of wild pipes in the night. Influenced by the legends that
Barry had related, my mind had in slumber hovered around a stately city in a green
valley, where marble streets and statues, villas and temples, carvings and inscriptions, all
spoke in certain tones the glory that was Greece. When I told this dream to Barry we had
both laughed; but I laughed the louder, because he was perplexed about his laborers from
the North. For the sixth time they had all overslept, waking very slowly and dazedly, and
acting as if they had not rested, although they were known to have gone early to bed the
night before.

That morning and afternoon I wandered alone through the sun-gilded village and talked
now and then with idle laborers, for Barry was busy with the final plans for beginning his
work of drainage. The laborers were not as happy as they might have been, for most of
 The Moon-Bog

them seemed uneasy over some dream which they had had, yet which they tried in vain to
remember. I told them of my dream, but they were not interested till I spoke of the weird
sounds I thought I had heard. Then they looked oddly at me, and said that they seemed to
remember weird sounds, too.

In the evening Barry dined with me and announced that he would begin the drainage in
two days. I was glad, for although I disliked to see the moss and the heather and the little
streams and lakes depart, I had a growing wish to discern the ancient secrets the deep-
matted peat might hide. And that night my dreams of piping flutes and marble peristyles
came to a sudden and disquieting end; for upon the city in the valley I saw a pestilence
descend, and then a frightful avalanche of wooded slopes that covered the dead bodies in
the streets and left unburied only the temple of Artemis on the high peak, where the aged
moon-priestess Cleis lay cold and silent with a crown of ivory on her silver head.

I have said that I awaked suddenly and in alarm. For some time I could not tell whether I
was waking or sleeping, for the sound of flutes still rang shrilly in my ears; but when I
saw on the floor the icy moonbeams and the outlines of a latticed gothic window, I
decided I must be awake and in the castle of Kilderry. Then I heard a clock from some
remote landing below strike the hour of two, and knew I was awake. Yet still there came
that monstrous piping from afar; wild, weird airs that made me think of some dance of
fauns on distant Maenalus. It would not let me sleep, and in impatience I sprang up and
paced the floor. Only by chance did I go to the north window and look out upon the silent
village and the plain at the edge of the bog. I had no wish to gaze abroad, for I wanted to
sleep; but the flutes tormented me, and I had to do or see something. How could I have
suspected the thing I was to behold?

There in the moonlight that flooded the spacious plain was a spectacle which no mortal,
having seen it, could ever forget. To the sound of reedy pipes that echoed over the bog
there glided silently and eerily a mixed throng of swaying figures, reeling through such a
revel as the Sicilians may have danced to Demeter in the old days under the harvest moon
beside the Cyane. The wide plain, the golden moonlight, the shadowy moving forms, and
above all the shrill monotonous piping, produced an effect which almost paralyzed me;
yet I noted amidst my fear that half of these tireless mechanical dancers were the laborers
whom I had thought asleep, whilst the other half were strange airy beings in white, half-
indeterminate in nature, but suggesting pale wistful naiads from the haunted fountains of
the bog. I do not know how long I gazed at this sight from the lonely turret window
before I dropped suddenly in a dreamless swoon, out of which the high sun of morning
aroused me.

My first impulse on awaking was to communicate all my fears and observations to Denys
Barry, but as I saw the sunlight glowing through the latticed east window I became sure
that there was no reality in what I thought I had seen. I am given to strange fantasms, yet
am never weak enough to believe in them; so on this occasion contented myself with
questioning the laborers, who slept very late and recalled nothing of the previous night
save misty dreams of shrill sounds. This matter of the spectral piping harassed me
greatly, and I wondered if the crickets of autumn had come before their time to vex the
 The Moon-Bog

night and haunt the visions of men. Later in the day I watched Barry in the library poring
over his plans for the great work which was to begin on the morrow, and for the first time
felt a touch of the same kind of fear that had driven the peasants away. For some
unknown reason I dreaded the thought of disturbing the ancient bog and its sunless
secrets, and pictured terrible sights lying black under the unmeasured depth of age-old
peat. That these secrets should be brought to light seemed injudicious, and I began to
wish for an excuse to leave the castle and the village. I went so far as to talk casually to
Barry on the subject, but did not dare continue after he gave his resounding laugh. So I
was silent when the sun set fulgently over the far hills, and Kilderry blazed all red and
gold in a flame that seemed a portent.

Whether the events of that night were of reality or illusion I shall never ascertain.
Certainly they transcend anything we dream of in nature and the universe; yet in no
normal fashion can I explain those disappearances which were known to all men after it
was over. I retired early and full of dread, and for a long time could not sleep in the
uncanny silence of the tower. It was very dark, for although the sky was clear the moon
was now well in the wane, and would not rise till the small hours. I thought as I lay there
of Denys Barry, and of what would befall that bog when the day came, and found myself
almost frantic with an impulse to rush out into the night, take Barry’s car, and drive
madly to Ballylough out of the menaced lands. But before my fears could crystallize into
action I had fallen asleep, and gazed in dreams upon the city in the valley, cold and dead
under a shroud of hideous shadow.

Probably it was the shrill piping that awaked me, yet that piping was not what I noticed
first when I opened my eyes. I was lying with my back to the east window overlooking
the bog, where the waning moon would rise, and therefore expected to see light cast on
the opposite wall before me; but I had not looked for such a sight as now appeared. Light
indeed glowed on the panels ahead, but it was not any light that the moon gives. Terrible
and piercing was the shaft of ruddy refulgence that streamed through the gothic window,
and the whole chamber was brilliant with a splendor intense and unearthly. My
immediate actions were peculiar for such a situation, but it is only in tales that a man does
the dramatic and foreseen thing. Instead of looking out across the bog toward the source
of the new light, I kept my eyes from the window in panic fear, and clumsily drew on my
clothing with some dazed idea of escape. I remember seizing my revolver and hat, but
before it was over I had lost them both without firing the one or donning the other. After
a time the fascination of the red radiance overcame my fright, and I crept to the east
window and looked out whilst the maddening, incessant piping whined and reverberated
through the castle and over all the village.

Over the bog was a deluge of flaring light, scarlet and sinister, and pouring from the
strange olden ruin on the far islet. The aspect of that ruin I can not describe - I must have
been mad, for it seemed to rise majestic and undecayed, splendid and column-cinctured,
the flame-reflecting marble of its entablature piercing the sky like the apex of a temple on
a mountain-top. Flutes shrieked and drums began to beat, and as I watched in awe and
terror I thought I saw dark saltant forms silhouetted grotesquely against the vision of
marble and effulgence. The effect was titanic - altogether unthinkable - and I might have
 The Moon-Bog

stared indefinitely had not the sound of the piping seemed to grow stronger at my left.
Trembling with a terror oddly mixed with ecstasy, I crossed the circular room to the north
window from which I could see the village and the plain at the edge of the bog. There my
eyes dilated again with a wild wonder as great as if I had not just turned from a scene
beyond the pale of nature, for on the ghastly red-litten plain was moving a procession of
beings in such a manner as none ever saw before save in nightmares.

Half gliding, half floating in the air, the white-clad bog-wraiths were slowly retreating
toward the still waters and the island ruin in fantastic formations suggesting some ancient
and solemn ceremonial dance. Their waving translucent arms, guided by the detestable
piping of those unseen flutes, beckoned in uncanny rhythm to a throng of lurching
laborers who followed doglike with blind, brainless, floundering steps as if dragged by a
clumsy but resistless demon-will. As the naiads neared the bog, without altering their
course, a new line of stumbling stragglers zigzagged drunkenly out of the castle from
some door far below my window, groped sightiessly across the courtyard and through the
intervening bit of village, and joined the floundering column of laborers on the plain.
Despite their distance below me I at once knew they were the servants brought from the
North, for I recognized the ugly and unwieldy form of the cook, whose very absurdness
had now become unutterably tragic. The flutes piped horribly, and again I heard the
beating of the drums from the direction of the island ruin. Then silently and gracefully the
naiads reached the water and melted one by one into the ancient bog; while the line of
followers, never checking their speed, splashed awkwardly after them and vanished
amidst a tiny vortex of unwholesome bubbles which I could barely see in the scarlet light.
And as the last pathetic straggler, the fat cook, sank heavily out of sight in that sullen
pool, the flutes and the drums grew silent, and the blinding red rays from the ruins
snapped instantaneously out, leaving the village of doom lone and desolate in the wan
beams of a new-risen moon.

My condition was now one of indescribable chaos. Not knowing whether I was mad or
sane, sleeping or waking, I was saved only by a merciful numbness. I believe I did
ridiculous things such as offering prayers to Artemis, Latona, Demeter, Persephone, and
Plouton. All that I recalled of a classic youth came to my lips as the horrors of the
situation roused my deepest superstitions. I felt that I had witnessed the death of a whole
village, and knew I was alone in the castle with Denys Barry, whose boldness had
brought down a doom. As I thought of him, new terrors convulsed me, and I fell to the
floor; not fainting, but physically helpless. Then I felt the icy blast from the east window
where the moon had risen, and began to hear the shrieks in the castle far below me. Soon
those shrieks had attained a magnitude and quality which can not be written of, and
which makes me faint as I think of them. All I can say is that they came from something I
had known as a friend.

At some time during this shocking period the cold wind and the screaming must have
roused me, for my next impression is of racing madly through inky rooms and corridors
and out across the courtyard into the hideous night. They found me at dawn wandering
mindless near Ballylough, but what unhinged me utterly was not any of the horrors I had
seen or heard before. What I muttered about as I came slowly out of the shadows was a
 The Moon-Bog

pair of fantastic incidents which occurred in my flight: incidents of no significance, yet

As I fled from that accursed castle along the bog’s edge I heard a new sound: common,
yet unlike any I had heard before at Kilderry. The stagnant waters, lately quite devoid of
animal life, now teemed with a horde of slimy enormous frogs which piped shrilly and
incessantly in tones strangely out of keeping with their size. They glistened bloated and
green in the moonbeams, and seemed to gaze up at the fount of light. I followed the gaze
of one very fat and ugly frog, and saw the second of the things which drove my senses
away.

Stretching directly from the strange olden ruin on the far islet to the waning moon, my
eyes seemed to trace a beam of faint quivering radiance having no reflection in the waters
of the bog. And upward along that pallid path my fevered fancy pictured a thin shadow
slowly writhing; a vague contorted shadow struggling as if drawn by unseen demons.
Crazed as I was, I saw in that awful shadow a monstrous resemblance - a nauseous,
unbelievable caricature - a blasphemous effigy of him who had been Denys Barry.

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