prhyme/resources/lovecraft.txt

  The AlchemistBy H P Lovecraft High up crowning the grassy summit of a swelling mound whose sides are wooded near the base with the gnarled trees of the primeval forest stands the old chateau of my ancestors For centuries its lofty battlements have frowned down upon the wild and rugged countryside about serving as a home and stronghold for the proud house whose honoured line is older even than the moss-grown castle walls These ancient turrets stained by the storms of generations and crumbling under the slow yet mighty pressure of time formed in the ages of feudalism one of the most dreaded and formidable fortresses in all France From its machicolated parapets and mounted battlements Barons Counts and even Kings had been defied yet never had its spacious halls resounded to the footsteps of the invader But since those glorious years all is changed A poverty but little above the level of dire want together with a pride of name that forbids its alleviation by the pursuits of commercial life have prevented the scions of our line from maintaining their estates in pristine splendour and the falling stones of the walls the overgrown vegetation in the parks the dry and dusty moat the ill-paved courtyards and toppling towers without as well as the sagging floors the worm-eaten wainscots and the faded tapestries within all tell a gloomy tale of fallen grandeur As the ages passed first one then another of the four great turrets were left to ruin until at last but a single tower housed the sadly reduced descendants of the once mighty lords of the estate It was in one of the vast and gloomy chambers of this remaining tower that I Antoine last of the unhappy and accursed Comtes de C first saw the light of day ninety long years ago Within these walls and amongst the dark and shadowy forests the wild ravines and grottoes of the hillside below were spent the first years of my troubled life My parents I never knew My father had been killed at the age of thirty-two a month before I was born by the fall of a stone somehow dislodged from one of the deserted parapets of the castle and my mother having died at my birth my care and education devolved solely upon one remaining servitor an old and trusted man of considerable intelligence whose name I remember as Pierre I was an only child and the lack of companionship which this fact entailed upon me was augmented by the strange care exercised by my aged guardian in excluding me from the society of the peasant children whose abodes were scattered here and there upon the plains that surround the base of the hill At the time Pierre said that this restriction was imposed upon me because my noble birth placed me above association with such plebeian company Now I know that its real object was to keep from my ears the idle tales of the dread curse upon our line that were nightly told and magnified by the simple tenantry as they conversed in hushed accents in the glow of their cottage hearths Thus isolated and thrown upon my own resources I spent the hours of my childhood in poring over the ancient tomes that filled the shadow-haunted library of the chateau and in roaming without aim or purpose through the perpetual dusk of the spectral wood that clothes the side of the hill near its foot It was perhaps an effect of such surroundings that my mind early acquired a shade of melancholy Those studies and pursuits which partake of the dark and occult in Nature most strongly claimed my attention Of my own race I was permitted to learn singularly little yet what small knowledge of it I was able to gain seemed to depress me much Perhaps it was at first only the manifest reluctance of my old preceptor to discuss with me my paternal ancestry that gave rise to the terror which I ever felt at the mention of my great house yet as I grew out of childhood I was able to piece together disconnected fragments of discourse let slip from the unwilling tongue which had begun to falter in approaching senility that had a sort of relation to a certain circumstance which I had always deemed strange but which now became dimly t
  AshesBy C M Eddy Jrwith H P Lovecraft Hello Bruce Havent seen you in a dogs age Come in I threw open the door and he followed me into the room His gaunt ungainly figure sprawled awkwardly into the chair I indicated and he twirled his hat between nervous fingers His deepset eyes wore a worried hunted look and he glanced furtively around the room as if searching for a hidden something which might unexpectedly pounce upon him His face was haggard and colorless The corners of his mouth twitched spasmodically Whats the matter old man You look as if youd seen a ghost Brace up I crossed to the buffet and poured a small glass of wine from the decanter Drink this He downed it with a hasty gulp and took to toying with his hat again Thanks PragueI dont feel quite myself tonight You dont look it either Whats wrong Malcolm Bruce shifted uneasily in his chair I eyed him in silence for a moment wondering what could possibly affect the man so strongly I knew Bruce as a man of steady nerves and iron will To find him so visibly upset was in itself unusual I passed cigars and he selected one automatically It was not until the second cigar had been lighted that Bruce broke the silence His nervousness was apparently gone Once more he was the dominant self-reliant figure I knew of old Prague he began Ive just been through the most devilish gruesome experience that ever befell a man I dont know whether I dare tell it or not for fear youll think Ive gone crazyand I wouldnt blame you if you did But its true every word of it He paused dramatically and blew a few rings of smoke in the air I smiled Many a weird tale I had listened to over that self-same table There must have been some kink in my personality that inspired confidence for I had been told stories that some men would have given years of their life to have heard And yet despite my love of the bizarre and the dangerous and my longing to explore far reaches of little-known lands I had been doomed to a life of prosaic flat uneventful business Do you happen to have heard of Professor Van Allister asked Bruce You dont mean Arthur Van Allister The same Then you know him I should say so Known him for years Ever since he resigned as Professor of Chemistry at the College so he could have more time for his experiments Why I even helped him choose the plans for that sound-proof laboratory of his on the top floor of his home Then he got so busy with his confounded experiments he couldnt find time to be chummy You may recall Prague that when we were in college together I used to dabble quite a bit in chemistry I nodded and Bruce continued About four months ago I found myself out of a job Van Allister advertised for an assistant and I answered He remembered me from college days and I managed to convince him I knew enough about chemistry to warrant a trial He had a young lady doing his secretarial worka Miss Marjorie Purdy She was one of these strict-attention-to-business types and as good-looking as she was efficient She had been helping Van Allister a bit in his laboratory and I soon discovered she took a genuine interest in puttering around making experiments of her own Indeed she spent nearly all her spare time with us in the laboratory It was only natural that such companionship should result in a close friendship and it wasnt long before I began to depend on her to help me in difficult experiments when the Professor was busy I never could seem to stump her That girl took to chemistry as a duck takes to water About two months ago Van Allister had the laboratory partitioned off and made a separate workroom for himself He told us that he was about to enter upon a series of experiments which if successful would bring him everlasting fame He flatly refused to make us his confidants in any way shape or manner From that time on Miss Purdy and I were left alone more and more For days at a time the Professor would retire to the seclusion of his new workshop sometimes not even appearing for his meals That meant too that we had more spare time on our hands Our friendship ripened I felt a growing admirati
  At the Mountains of MadnessBy H P Lovecraft I I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarcticwith its vast fossil-hunt and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice-capand I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain Doubt of the real facts as I must reveal them is inevitable yet if I suppressed what will seem extravagant and incredible there would be nothing left The hitherto withheld photographs both ordinary and arial will count in my favour for they are damnably vivid and graphic Still they will be doubted because of the great lengths to which clever fakery can be carried The ink drawings of course will be jeered at as obvious impostures notwithstanding a strangeness of technique which art experts ought to remark and puzzle over In the end I must rely on the judgment and standing of the few scientific leaders who have on the one hand sufficient independence of thought to weigh my data on its own hideously convincing merits or in the light of certain primordial and highly baffling myth-cycles and on the other hand sufficient influence to deter the exploring world in general from any rash and overambitious programme in the region of those mountains of madness It is an unfortunate fact that relatively obscure men like myself and my associates connected only with a small university have little chance of making an impression where matters of a wildly bizarre or highly controversial nature are concerned It is further against us that we are not in the strictest sense specialists in the fields which came primarily to be concerned As a geologist my object in leading the Miskatonic University Expedition was wholly that of securing deep-level specimens of rock and soil from various parts of the antarctic continent aided by the remarkable drill devised by Prof Frank H Pabodie of our engineering department I had no wish to be a pioneer in any other field than this but I did hope that the use of this new mechanical appliance at different points along previously explored paths would bring to light materials of a sort hitherto unreached by the ordinary methods of collection Pabodies drilling apparatus as the public already knows from our reports was unique and radical in its lightness portability and capacity to combine the ordinary artesian drill principle with the principle of the small circular rock drill in such a way as to cope quickly with strata of varying hardness Steel head jointed rods gasoline motor collapsible wooden derrick dynamiting paraphernalia cording rubbish-removal auger and sectional piping for bores five inches wide and up to  feet deep all formed with needed accessories no greater load than three seven-dog sledges could carry this being made possible by the clever aluminum alloy of which most of the metal objects were fashioned Four large Dornier aroplanes designed especially for the tremendous altitude flying necessary on the antarctic plateau and with added fuel-warming and quick-starting devices worked out by Pabodie could transport our entire expedition from a base at the edge of the great ice barrier to various suitable inland points and from these points a sufficient quota of dogs would serve us We planned to cover as great an area as one antarctic seasonor longer if absolutely necessarywould permit operating mostly in the mountain-ranges and on the plateau south of Ross Sea regions explored in varying degree by Shackleton Amundsen Scott and Byrd With frequent changes of camp made by aroplane and involving distances great enough to be of geological significance we expected to unearth a quite unprecedented amount of material especially in the pre-Cambrian strata of which so narrow a range of antarctic specimens had previously been secured We wished also to obtain as great as possible a variety of the upper fossiliferous rocks since the primal life-history of this bleak realm of ice and death is of the highest importan
  AzathothBy H P Lovecraft When age fell upon the world and wonder went out of the minds of men when grey cities reared to smoky skies tall towers grim and ugly in whose shadow none might dream of the sun or of springs flowering meads when learning stripped earth of her mantle of beauty and poets sang no more save of twisted phantoms seen with bleared and inward-looking eyes when these things had come to pass and childish hopes had gone away forever there was a man who travelled out of life on a quest into the spaces whither the worlds dreams had fled Of the name and abode of this man but little is written for they were of the waking world only yet it is said that both were obscure It is enough to know that he dwelt in a city of high walls where sterile twilight reigned and that he toiled all day among shadow and turmoil coming home at evening to a room whose one window opened not on the fields and groves but on a dim court where other windows stared in dull despair From that casement one might see only walls and windows except sometimes when one leaned far out and peered aloft at the small stars that passed And because mere walls and windows must soon drive to madness a man who dreams and reads much the dweller in that room used night after night to lean out and peer aloft to glimpse some fragment of things beyond the waking world and the greyness of tall cities After years he began to call the slow-sailing stars by name and to follow them in fancy when they glided regretfully out of sight till at length his vision opened to many secret vistas whose existence no common eye suspects And one night a mighty gulf was bridged and the dream-haunted skies swelled down to the lonely watchers window to merge with the close air of his room and make him a part of their fabulous wonder There came to that room wild streams of violet midnight glittering with dust of gold vortices of dust and fire swirling out of the ultimate spaces and heavy with perfumes from beyond the worlds Opiate oceans poured there litten by suns that the eye may never behold and having in their whirlpools strange dolphins and sea-nymphs of unrememberable deeps Noiseless infinity eddied around the dreamer and wafted him away without even touching the body that leaned stiffly from the lonely window and for days not counted in mens calendars the tides of far spheres bare him gently to join the dreams for which he longed the dreams that men have lost And in the course of many cycles they tenderly left him sleeping on a green sunrise shore a green shore fragrant with lotus-blossoms and starred by red camalotes 
  The Battle that Ended the CenturyMS Found in a Time MachineBy R H Barlowwith H P Lovecraft Note Barlows contributions are in brackets On the eve of the year  a vast crowd of interested spectators were present amidst the romantic ruins of Cohens Garage on the former site of New York to witness a fistic encounter between two renowned champions of the strange-story firmamentTwo-Gun Bob the Terror of the Plains and Knockout Bernie the Wild Wolf of West Shokan The Wolf was fresh from his correspondence course in physical training sold to him by Mr Arthur Leeds Before the battle the auguries were determined by the venerated Thibetan Lama Bill Lum Li who evoked the primal serpent-god of Valusia and found unmistakable signs of victory for both sides Cream-puffs were inattentively vended by Wladislaw Brenrykthe partakers being treated by the official surgeons Drs D H Killer and M Gin Brewery The gong was sounded at  oclock after which the air grew red with the gore of battle lavishly flung about by the mighty Texas slaughterer Very shortly the first actual damage occurredthe loosening of several teeth in both participants One bouncing out from the Wolfs mouth after a casual tap from Two-Gun described a parabola toward Yucatan being retrieved in a hasty expedition by Messrs A Hijacked Barrell and G A Scotland This incident was used by the eminent sociologist and ex-poet Frank Chimesleep Short Jr as the basis of a ballad of proletarian propaganda with three intentionally defective lines Meanwhile a potentate from a neighbouring kingdom the Effjay of Akkamin also known to himself as an amateur critic expressed his frenzied disgust at the technique of the combatants at the same time peddling photographs of the fighters with himself in the foreground at five cents each In round two the Shokan Soakers sturdy right crashed through the Texans ribs and became entangled in sundry viscera thereby enabling Two-Gun to get in several telling blows on his opponents unprotected chin Bob was greatly annoyed by the effeminate squeamishness shewn by several onlookers as muscles glands gore and bits of flesh were spattered over the ringside During this round the eminent magazine-cover anatomist Mrs M Blunderage portrayed the battlers as a pair of spirited nudes behind a thin veil of conveniently curling tobacco-smoke while the late Mr C Half-Cent provided a sketch of three Chinamen clad in silk hats and galoshesthis being his own original conception of the affray Among the amateur sketches made was one by Mr Goofy Hooey which later gained fame in the annual Cubist exhibit as Abstraction of an Eradicated Pudding In the third round the fight grew really rough several ears and other appurtenances being wholly or partially detached from the frontier battler by the Shokan Shocker Somewhat irritated Two-Gun countered with some exceptionally sharp blows severing many fragments from his aggressor who continued to fight with all his remaining members At this stage the audience gave signs of much nervous excitementinstances of trampling and goring being frequent The more enthusiastic members were placed in the custody of Mr Harry Brobst of the Butler Hospital for Mental Diseases The entire affair was reported by Mr W Lablache Talcum his copy being revised by Horse Power Hateart Throughout the event notes were taken by M le Comte dErlette for a -volume novel-cycle in the Proustian manner to be entitled Morning in September with illustrations by Mrs Blunderage Mr J Caesar Warts frequently interviewed both battlers and all the more important spectators obtaining as souvenirs after a spirited struggle with the Effjay an autographed quarter-rib of Two-Guns in an excellent state of preservation and three finger-nails from the Wild Wolf Lighting effects were supplied by the Electrical Testing Laboratories under the supervision of H Kanebrake The fourth round was prolonged eight hours at the request of the official artist Mr H Wanderer who wished to put certain shadings of fantasy into his representation of the Wolfs depleted physiognomy which included several sup
  The Beast in the CaveBy H P Lovecraft The horrible conclusion which had been gradually obtruding itself upon my confused and reluctant mind was now an awful certainty I was lost completely hopelessly lost in the vast and labyrinthine recesses of the Mammoth Cave Turn as I might in no direction could my straining vision seize on any object capable of serving as a guidepost to set me on the outward path That nevermore should I behold the blessed light of day or scan the pleasant hills and dales of the beautiful world outside my reason could no longer entertain the slightest unbelief Hope had departed Yet indoctrinated as I was by a life of philosophical study I derived no small measure of satisfaction from my unimpassioned demeanour for although I had frequently read of the wild frenzies into which were thrown the victims of similar situations I experienced none of these but stood quiet as soon as I clearly realised the loss of my bearings Nor did the thought that I had probably wandered beyond the utmost limits of an ordinary search cause me to abandon my composure even for a moment If I must die I reflected then was this terrible yet majestic cavern as welcome a sepulchre as that which any churchyard might afford a conception which carried with it more of tranquility than of despair Starving would prove my ultimate fate of this I was certain Some I knew had gone mad under circumstances such as these but I felt that this end would not be mine My disaster was the result of no fault save my own since unbeknown to the guide I had separated myself from the regular party of sightseers and wandering for over an hour in forbidden avenues of the cave had found myself unable to retrace the devious windings which I had pursued since forsaking my companions Already my torch had begun to expire soon I would be enveloped by the total and almost palpable blackness of the bowels of the earth As I stood in the waning unsteady light I idly wondered over the exact circumstances of my coming end I remembered the accounts which I had heard of the colony of consumptives who taking their residence in this gigantic grotto to find health from the apparently salubrious air of the underground world with its steady uniform temperature pure air and peaceful quiet had found instead death in strange and ghastly form I had seen the sad remains of their ill-made cottages as I passed them by with the party and had wondered what unnatural influence a long sojourn in this immense and silent cavern would exert upon one as healthy and as vigorous as I Now I grimly told myself my opportunity for settling this point had arrived provided that want of food should not bring me too speedy a departure from this life As the last fitful rays of my torch faded into obscurity I resolved to leave no stone unturned no possible means of escape neglected so summoning all the powers possessed by my lungs I set up a series of loud shoutings in the vain hope of attracting the attention of the guide by my clamour Yet as I called I believed in my heart that my cries were to no purpose and that my voice magnified and reflected by the numberless ramparts of the black maze about me fell upon no ears save my own All at once however my attention was fixed with a start as I fancied that I heard the sound of soft approaching steps on the rocky floor of the cavern Was my deliverance about to be accomplished so soon Had then all my horrible apprehensions been for naught and was the guide having marked my unwarranted absence from the party following my course and seeking me out in this limestone labyrinth Whilst these joyful queries arose in my brain I was on the point of renewing my cries in order that my discovery might come the sooner when in an instant my delight was turned to horror as I listened for my ever acute ear now sharpened in even greater degree by the complete silence of the cave bore to my benumbed understanding the unexpected and dreadful knowledge that these footfalls were not like those of any mortal man In the unearthly stillness of this subterranean region the tre
  Beyond the Wall of SleepBy H P Lovecraft I have an exposition of sleep come upon me Shakespeare I have frequently wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon the occasionally titanic significance of dreams and of the obscure world to which they belong Whilst the greater number of our nocturnal visions are perhaps no more than faint and fantastic reflections of our waking experiencesFreud to the contrary with his puerile symbolismthere are still a certain remainder whose immundane and ethereal character permits of no ordinary interpretation and whose vaguely exciting and disquieting effect suggests possible minute glimpses into a sphere of mental existence no less important than physical life yet separated from that life by an all but impassable barrier From my experience I cannot doubt but that man when lost to terrestrial consciousness is indeed sojourning in another and uncorporeal life of far different nature from the life we know and of which only the slightest and most indistinct memories linger after waking From those blurred and fragmentary memories we may infer much yet prove little We may guess that in dreams life matter and vitality as the earth knows such things are not necessarily constant and that time and space do not exist as our waking selves comprehend them Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon It was from a youthful reverie filled with speculations of this sort that I arose one afternoon in the winter of  when to the state psychopathic institution in which I served as an interne was brought the man whose case has ever since haunted me so unceasingly His name as given on the records was Joe Slater or Slaader and his appearance was that of the typical denizen of the Catskill Mountain region one of those strange repellent scions of a primitive colonial peasant stock whose isolation for nearly three centuries in the hilly fastnesses of a little-travelled countryside has caused them to sink to a kind of barbaric degeneracy rather than advance with their more fortunately placed brethren of the thickly settled districts Among these odd folk who correspond exactly to the decadent element of white trash in the South law and morals are non-existent and their general mental status is probably below that of any other section of the native American people Joe Slater who came to the institution in the vigilant custody of four state policemen and who was described as a highly dangerous character certainly presented no evidence of his perilous disposition when first I beheld him Though well above the middle stature and of somewhat brawny frame he was given an absurd appearance of harmless stupidity by the pale sleepy blueness of his small watery eyes the scantiness of his neglected and never-shaven growth of yellow beard and the listless drooping of his heavy nether lip His age was unknown since among his kind neither family records nor permanent family ties exist but from the baldness of his head in front and from the decayed condition of his teeth the head surgeon wrote him down as a man of about forty From the medical and court documents we learned all that could be gathered of his case This man a vagabond hunter and trapper had always been strange in the eyes of his primitive associates He had habitually slept at night beyond the ordinary time and upon waking would often talk of unknown things in a manner so bizarre as to inspire fear even in the hearts of an unimaginative populace Not that his form of language was at all unusual for he never spoke save in the debased patois of his environment but the tone and tenor of his utterances were of such mysterious wildness that none might listen without apprehension He himself was generally as terrified and baffled as his auditors and within an hour after awakening would forget all that he had said or at least all that had caused him to say what he did relapsing into a bovine half-amiable normality like that of the oth
  The BookBy H P Lovecraft My memories are very confused There is even much doubt as to where they begin for at times I feel appalling vistas of years stretching behind me while at other times it seems as if the present moment were an isolated point in a grey formless infinity I am not even certain how I am communicating this message While I know I am speaking I have a vague impression that some strange and perhaps terrible mediation will be needed to bear what I say to the points where I wish to be heard My identity too is bewilderingly cloudy I seem to have suffered a great shockperhaps from some utterly monstrous outgrowth of my cycles of unique incredible experience These cycles of experience of course all stem from that worm-riddled book I remember when I found itin a dimly lighted place near the black oily river where the mists always swirl That place was very old and the ceiling-high shelves full of rotting volumes reached back endlessly through windowless inner rooms and alcoves There were besides great formless heaps of books on the floor and in crude bins and it was in one of these heaps that I found the thing I never learned its title for the early pages were missing but it fell open toward the end and gave me a glimpse of something which sent my senses reeling There was a formulaa sort of list of things to say and dowhich I recognised as something black and forbidden something which I had read of before in furtive paragraphs of mixed abhorrence and fascination penned by those strange ancient delvers into the universes guarded secrets whose decaying texts I loved to absorb It was a keya guideto certain gateways and transitions of which mystics have dreamed and whispered since the race was young and which lead to freedoms and discoveries beyond the three dimensions and realms of life and matter that we know Not for centuries had any man recalled its vital substance or known where to find it but this book was very old indeed No printing-press but the hand of some half-crazed monk had traced these ominous Latin phrases in uncials of awesome antiquity I remember how the old man leered and tittered and made a curious sign with his hand when I bore it away He had refused to take pay for it and only long afterward did I guess why As I hurried home through those narrow winding mist-choked waterfront streets I had a frightful impression of being stealthily followed by softly padding feet The centuried tottering houses on both sides seemed alive with a fresh and morbid malignityas if some hitherto closed channel of evil understanding had abruptly been opened I felt that those walls and overhanging gables of mildewed brick and fungous plaster and timberwith fishy eye-like diamond-paned windows that leeredcould hardly desist from advancing and crushing me    yet I had read only the least fragment of that blasphemous rune before closing the book and bringing it away I remember how I read the book at lastwhite-faced and locked in the attic room that I had long devoted to strange searchings The great house was very still for I had not gone up till after midnight I think I had a family thenthough the details are very uncertainand I know there were many servants Just what the year was I cannot say for since then I have known many ages and dimensions and have had all my notions of time dissolved and refashioned It was by the light of candles that I readI recall the relentless dripping of the waxand there were chimes that came every now and then from distant belfries I seemed to keep track of those chimes with a peculiar intentness as if I feared to hear some very remote intruding note among them Then came the first scratching and fumbling at the dormer window that looked out high above the other roofs of the city It came as I droned aloud the ninth verse of that primal lay and I knew amidst my shudders what it meant For he who passes the gateways always wins a shadow and never again can he be alone I had evokedand the book was indeed all I had suspected That night I passed the gateway to a vortex of twisted time and vision and
  The Call of CthulhuBy H P Lovecraft Found Among the Papers of the LateFrancis Wayland Thurston of Boston Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival    a survival of a hugely remote period when    consciousness was manifested perhaps in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity    forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods monsters mythical beings of all sorts and kinds    Algernon Blackwood IThe Horror in Clay The most merciful thing in the world I think is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity and it was not meant that we should voyage far The sciences each straining in its own direction have hitherto harmed us little but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality and of our frightful position therein that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden aeons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it That glimpse like all dread glimpses of truth flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated thingsin this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor I hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing out certainly if I live I shall never knowingly supply a link in so hideous a chain I think that the professor too intended to keep silent regarding the part he knew and that he would have destroyed his notes had not sudden death seized him My knowledge of the thing began in the winter of  with the death of my grand-uncle George Gammell Angell Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages in Brown University Providence Rhode Island Professor Angell was widely known as an authority on ancient inscriptions and had frequently been resorted to by the heads of prominent museums so that his passing at the age of ninety-two may be recalled by many Locally interest was intensified by the obscurity of the cause of death The professor had been stricken whilst returning from the Newport boat falling suddenly as witnesses said after having been jostled by a nautical-looking negro who had come from one of the queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside which formed a short cut from the waterfront to the deceaseds home in Williams Street Physicians were unable to find any visible disorder but concluded after perplexed debate that some obscure lesion of the heart induced by the brisk ascent of so steep a hill by so elderly a man was responsible for the end At the time I saw no reason to dissent from this dictum but latterly I am inclined to wonderand more than wonder As my grand-uncles heir and executor for he died a childless widower I was expected to go over his papers with some thoroughness and for that purpose moved his entire set of files and boxes to my quarters in Boston Much of the material which I correlated will be later published by the American Archaeological Society but there was one box which I found exceedingly puzzling and which I felt much averse from shewing to other eyes It had been locked and I did not find the key till it occurred to me to examine the personal ring which the professor carried always in his pocket Then indeed I succeeded in opening it but when I did so seemed only to be confronted by a greater and more closely locked barrier For what could be the meaning of the queer clay bas-relief and the disjointed jottings ramblings and cuttings which I found Had my uncle in his latter years become credulous of the most superficial impostures I resolved to search out the eccentric sculptor responsible for this apparent disturba
  The Case of Charles Dexter WardBy H P Lovecraft The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved that an ingenious Man may have the whole Ark of Noah in his own Studie and raise the fine Shape of an Animal out of its Ashes at his Pleasure and by the lyke Method from the essential Saltes of humane Dust a Philosopher may without any criminal Necromancy call up the Shape of any dead Ancestour from the Dust whereinto his Bodie has been incinerated BORELLUS I A Result and a Prologue From a private hospital for the insane near Providence Rhode Island there recently disappeared an exceedingly singular person He bore the name of Charles Dexter Ward and was placed under restraint most reluctantly by the grieving father who had watched his aberration grow from a mere eccentricity to a dark mania involving both a possibility of murderous tendencies and a profound and peculiar change in the apparent contents of his mind Doctors confess themselves quite baffled by his case since it presented oddities of a general physiological as well as psychological character In the first place the patient seemed oddly older than his twenty-six years would warrant Mental disturbance it is true will age one rapidly but the face of this young man had taken on a subtle cast which only the very aged normally acquire In the second place his organic processes shewed a certain queerness of proportion which nothing in medical experience can parallel Respiration and heart action had a baffling lack of symmetry the voice was lost so that no sounds above a whisper were possible digestion was incredibly prolonged and minimised and neural reactions to standard stimuli bore no relation at all to anything heretofore recorded either normal or pathological The skin had a morbid chill and dryness and the cellular structure of the tissue seemed exaggeratedly coarse and loosely knit Even a large olive birthmark on the right hip had disappeared whilst there had formed on the chest a very peculiar mole or blackish spot of which no trace existed before In general all physicians agree that in Ward the processes of metabolism had become retarded to a degree beyond precedent Psychologically too Charles Ward was unique His madness held no affinity to any sort recorded in even the latest and most exhaustive of treatises and was conjoined to a mental force which would have made him a genius or a leader had it not been twisted into strange and grotesque forms Dr Willett who was Wards family physician affirms that the patients gross mental capacity as gauged by his response to matters outside the sphere of his insanity had actually increased since the seizure Ward it is true was always a scholar and an antiquarian but even his most brilliant early work did not shew the prodigious grasp and insight displayed during his last examinations by the alienists It was indeed a difficult matter to obtain a legal commitment to the hospital so powerful and lucid did the youths mind seem and only on the evidence of others and on the strength of many abnormal gaps in his stock of information as distinguished from his intelligence was he finally placed in confinement To the very moment of his vanishment he was an omnivorous reader and as great a conversationalist as his poor voice permitted and shrewd observers failing to foresee his escape freely predicted that he would not be long in gaining his discharge from custody Only Dr Willett who brought Charles Ward into the world and had watched his growth of body and mind ever since seemed frightened at the thought of his future freedom He had had a terrible experience and had made a terrible discovery which he dared not reveal to his sceptical colleagues Willett indeed presents a minor mystery all his own in his connexion with the case He was the last to see the patient before his flight and emerged from that final conversation in a state of mixed horror and relief which several recalled when Wards escape became known three hours later That escape itself is one of the unsolved wonders of Dr Waites hospital A window open above a