To be a servant

He who would valiant be ’gainst all disaster,

Let him in constancy follow the Master.

There’s no discouragement shall make him once relent

His first avowed intent to be a servant.

Becoming a servant of one of the Lovecraft deities inevitably(adv.)1 and inexorably(adv.) results in insanity, death or – if you are very, very blessed (damned?) – in both.

In “The Thing on the Doorstep” Edward Pickman Derby was a “…a close correspondent of the notorious Baudelairean poet Justin Geoffrey, who wrote The People of the Monolith and died screaming in a madhouse in 1926 after a visit to a sinister, ill-regarded village in Hungary. Derby was to suffer a death not unlike that of the Wicked Witch of the West.

In “The Call of Cthulhu” during Inspector Legrasse’s attack on the worshippers in the swamp “…Five of the worshippers lay dead, and two severely wounded ones were carried away on improvised stretchers by their fellow-prisoners. The image on the monolith, of course, was carefully removed and carried back by Legrasse.” The uncle of the story’s protagonist, George Gamell Angell, died mysteriously and prematurely, as did the protagonist, Francis Wayland Thurston – both of whom had learned little but too much.

And in “The Other Gods” Barzai the Wise dies due to his crime of hubris.

GOVERNMENT HEALTH WARNING: Servitude kills