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The second section of the story, entitled “The Tale of Inspector Legrasse,” begins with Thurston explaining that the latter half of Professor Angell’s manuscript details his first experience with Cthulhu. In 1908 at the American Archeological Society’s meeting in St. Louis, a man named John Raymond Legrasse approaches Professor Angell and presents him with an old stone statuette whose origins he struggled to determine. Inspector Legrasse, a police officer from New Orleans, reveals that he had taken it during a raid on a brutal, unknown cult meeting occurring among the swamps. At eight inches tall, it depicts a somewhat human-shaped monster with an “octopus-like head,” scales, claws, and wings. Every aspect of the sculpture, from its material and location of origin to the undecipherable words inscribed on it, are beyond anything anyone has seen.
Only one man, Professor William Channing Webb of Princeton University, expresses any kind of recognition. He reveals that he had come across a similar statue decades prior when he encountered a strange, human-sacrificing indigenous cult in Greenland. This story excites Inspector Legrasse, and he peppers Professor Webb with questions about the rituals he witnessed and the chants he heard. When they discover that the members of the swamp cult and the indigenous cult were chanting the same basic phrase, loosely translated to “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming,” everyone in attendance is in shock. Inspector Legrasse goes on to tell the full story of his encounter with the swamp cult. He explains that the New Orleans police received panicked calls from people claiming that voodoo had come among them, resulting in women and children disappearing in the night. As the officers made their way into the dark, swampy forest, they began to hear beating drums and animalistic screams. The sight they eventually came upon horrified them as they saw naked people writhing around a ring-shaped bonfire with an eight-foot monolith in the center. On top of the monolith sat the mysterious statuette, and hanging around it were the bodies of all those who had disappeared. The police officers fired shots into the crowd and arrested as many participants as they could.
Legrasse continues telling his story by describing the information that he was able to gather from those in custody. They all testified that they worshipped the Great Old Ones, creatures from the sky who existed before mankind. Although they are long dead, their cult persists and waits for the day when Cthulhu, their leader, rises from the darkness to bring Earth back under its control. This information, however, is essentially all that the police could gather as the cult members refused to divulge too many secrets. Only one old man, Castro, was willing to give more details about who the Great Old Ones were and how the cult developed. Castro told Inspector Legrasse of old legends that suggested other beings once ruled the earth, and these Things would lay dormant in their city of R’lyeh until the stars aligned to allow them to resurrect. Aware of the world but unable to participate in it, the Great Old Ones began communicating with humans in their dreams. The emerging cult would keep their memory alive until they returned, even after the ocean swallowed R’lyeh and cut off communication between worlds.
Having reached the end of Inspector Legrasse’s narrative, Thurston decides to visit Wilcox to confront him about his knowledge of the cult. He believes that Wilcox must have heard of it at some point in order to create the bas-relief that he did. When Thurston questions him, however, he realizes that Wilcox is genuine in his cluelessness. The descriptions he offers of his dreams, including a city whose geometry is askew, moves Thurston, and he becomes even more interested in uncovering the mystery of the Cthulhu cult.
