In the diary, Thurston finds that Johansen told authorities the truth up until the Alert found an island on March 23rd, which was in fact a giant stone monolith-the resting place of Cthulhu. Thurston expresses relief that Johansen did not comprehend all of what he saw, but worries that "I shall never sleep calmly again." The widow tells Thurston that Johansen kept a personal diary in English, so that she would not be able to peruse its contents, and bequeaths it to Thurston, who reads it on the voyage back to London. The circumstances of Johansen's death, like Angell's, strike Thurston as mysterious: Johansen was struck by a bundle of papers, but died shortly after being helped to his feet by two nearby sailors. When he knocks at the door, he finds Johansen's wife cloaked in all black, who tells Thurston that Johansen perished in 1925. Thurston next travels Oslo, Norway, to visit Johansen himself. Observing Johansen's geologically-alien stone idol found aboard the Alert in a museum, however, makes Thurston recall Castro's words about how the Great Ones "come from the stars." These half-formed correlations intrigue Thurston and compel him to visit Australia to seek out further details about the Alert, but the Alert's current condition as a commercial ship yields little information, and locals have scant recollections (aside from remembering that Johansen's hair turned white). A second recorded storm, on April 2nd, marks the date when Wilcox and other dreamers' symptoms and restless dreaming ceased. The article prompts Thurston to piece together a timeline of events worldwide: on the night of February 28th, the same night of storms and earth tremors that caused Henry Wilcox to dream of Cyclopean cities also drove the Alert out into the Arctic Sea, as if "imperiously summoned." On March 23rd, the day that the Alert landed on an island where six men died, the fever felt by Wilcox and other artists accelerated into delirium, leading to the death of at least one architect. Local reports in Dunedin confirm the Alert's seedy reputation as an island trading vessel, and that it "set sail in great haste" after the storms and earthquakes on March 1st. Johansen says nothing about the island beyond mentioning a "dark chasm," and although he remembers returning to the Alert with one companion, he confesses to having no knowledge of the circumstances of his partner's death. They find a small island, where six of Johansen's men die. Abandoning the bombarded Emma, Johansen boards the Alert with eight men, killing the remaining crew, and navigating the vessel toward its charted destination. The Emma returns fire but incurs heavy damage in the battle, which kills Captain Collins and the first mate, leaving Johansen in charge. After the Emma's chief officer, Captain Collins, ignores the Alert's command to turn back, the Alert fires on the Emma with reinforced cannons. Originally the second mate of a schooner named Emma bound from Auckland, New Zealand, to Callao, Peru, Johansen reports being rerouted southward by a large storm on March 1st, and chancing upon the derelict Alert on March 22nd. Authorities question the lone survivor, named Gustav Johansen, who confesses that he found the stone idol in a shrine in one of the Alert's cabins, and provides an account rife with, "piracy and slaughter." On April 2nd, a significant storm pushed the Vigilant further south than its usual course, causing it to sight the derelict Alert. The Vigilant left Valparaiso, Chile, on March 25th, and arrived in Darling Harbour, Australia, six days after sighting the Alert near Dunedin, New Zealand. Thurston wishes he could undo ever seeing the article, and quotes its contents directly. The headline declares that a freighter named Vigilant has towed in a disabled but armed yacht named Alert, with one man found dead and one survivor aboard. A picture in the article, from the Sydney Bulletin dated April 18th, 1925, contains the same "hideous stone image" as found in Angell's papers. Several years after discovering the contents of Angell's estate and contemplating the existence of the "Cthulu cult," Thurston encounters a peculiar news item while visiting a friend, a curator of a local museum in Paterson, New Jersey.
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