H.P. Lovecraft. Dreams in the Witch-House
Dreams in the Witch-House
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written Jan-28 Feb 1932
Published July 1933 in Weird Tales, Vol. 22, No. 1, 86-111.
Whether the dreams brought on the fever or the fever brought on the dreams
Walter Gilman did not know. Behind everything crouched the brooding,
festering horror of the ancient town, and of the mouldy, unhallowed garret
gable where he wrote and studied and wrestled with flgures and formulae
when he was not tossing on the meagre iron bed. His ears were growing
sensitive to a preternatural and intolerable degree, and he had long ago
stopped the cheap mantel clock whose ticking had come to seem like a
thunder of artillery. At night the subtle stirring of the black city
outside, the sinister scurrying of rats in the wormy partitions, and the
creaking of hidden timbers in the centuried house, were enough to give him
a sense of strident pandemonium. The darkness always teemed with
unexplained sound - and yet he sometimes shook with fear lest the noises
he heard should subside and allow him to hear certain other fainter noises
which he suspected were lurking behind them.
He was in the changeless, legend-haunted city of Arkham, with its
clustering gambrel roofs that sway and sag over attics where witches hid
from the King's men in the dark, olden years of the Province. Nor was any
spot in that city more steeped in macabre memory than the gable room which
harboured him - for it was this house and this room which had likewise
harboured old Keziah Mason, whose flight from Salem Gaol at the last no
one was ever able to explain. That was in 1692 - the gaoler had gone mad
and babbled of a small white-fanged furry thing which scuttled out of
Keziah's cell, and not even Cotton Mather could explain the curves and
angles smeared on the grey stone walls with some red, sticky fluid.
Possibly Gilman ought not to have studied so hard. Non-Euclidean calculus
and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain, and when one mixes
them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of
multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales
and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be
wholly free from mental tension. Gilman came from Haverhill, but it was
only after he had entered college in Arkham that he began to connect his
mathematics with the fantastic legends of elder magic. Something in the
air of the hoary town worked obscurely on his imagination. The professors
at Miskatonic had urged him to slacken up, and had voluntarily cut down
his course at several points. Moreover, they had stopped him from
consulting the dubious old books on forbidden secrets that were kept under
lock and key in a vault at the university library. But all these
precautions came late in the day, so that Gilman had some terrible hints
from the dreaded Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, the fragmentary Book of
Eibon, and the suppressed Unaussprechlicken Kulten of von Junzt to
correlate with his abstract formulae on the properties of space and the
linkage of dimensions known and unknown.
He knew his room was in the old Witch-House - that, indeed, was why he had
taken it. There was much in the Essex County records about Keziah Mason's
trial, and what she had admitted under pressure to the Court of Oyer and
Terminer had fascinated Gilman beyond all reason. She had told Judge
Hathorne of lines and curves that could be made to point out directions
leading through the walls of space to other spaces beyond, and had implied
that such lines and curves were frequently used at certain midnight
meetings in the dark valley of the white stone beyond Meadow Hill and on
the unpeopled island in the river. She had spoken also of the Black Man,
of her oath, and of her new secret name of Nahab. Then she had drawn those
devices on the walls of her cell and vanished.
Gilman believed strange things about Keziah, and had felt a queer thrill
on learning that her dwelling was still standing after more than two
hundred and thirty-five years. When he heard the hushed Arkham whispers
about Keziah's persistent presence in the old house and the narrow
streets, about the irregular human tooth-marks left on certain sleepers in
that and other houses, about the childish cries heard near May-Eve, and
Hallowmass, about the stench often noted in the old house's attic just
after those dreaded seasons, and about the small, furry, sharp-toothed
thing which haunted the mouldering structure and the town and nuzzled
people curiously in the black hours before dawn, he resolved to live in
the place at any cost. A room was easy to secure, for the house was
unpopular, hard to rent, and long given over to cheap lodgings. Gilman
could not have told what he expected to find there, but he knew he wanted
to be in the building where some circumstance had more or less suddenly
given a mediocre old woman of the Seventeenth Century an insight into
mathematical depths perhaps beyond the utmost modern delvings of Planck,
Heisenberg, Einstein, and de Sitter.
He studied the timber and plaster walls for traces of cryptic designs at
every accessible spot where the paper had peeled, and within a week
managed to get the eastern attic room where Keziah was held to have
practised her spells. It had been vacant from the first - for no one had
ever been willing to stay there long - but the Polish landlord had grown
wary about renting it. Yet nothing whatever happened to Gilman till about
the time of the fever. No ghostly Keziah flitted through the sombre halls
and chambers, no small furry thing crept into his dismal eyrie to nuzzle
him, and no record of the witch's incantations rewarded his constant
search. Sometimes he would take walks through shadowy tangles of unpaved
musty-smelling lanes where eldritch brown houses of unknown age leaned and
tottered and leered mockingly through narrow, small-paned windows. Here he
knew strange things had happened once, and there was a faint suggestion
behind the surface that everything of that monstrous past might not - at
least in the darkest, narrowest, and most intricately crooked alleys -
have utterly perished. He also rowed out twice to the ill-regarded island
in the river, and made a sketch of the singular angles described by the
moss-grown rows of grey standing stones whose origin was so obscure and
immemorial.
Gilman's room was of good size but queerly irregular shape; the north wall
slating perceptibly inward from the outer to the inner end, while the low
ceiling slanted gently downward in the same direction. Aside from an
obvious rat-hole and the signs of other stopped-up ones, there was no
access - nor any appearance of a former avenue of access - to the space
which must have existed between the slanting wall and the straight outer
wall on the house's north side, though a view from the exterior showed
where a window had heen boarded up at a very remote date. The loft above
the ceiling - which must have had a slanting floor - was likewise
inaccessible. When Gilman climbed up a ladder to the cob-webbed level loft
above the rest of the attic he found vestiges of a bygone aperture tightly
and heavily covered with ancient planking and secured by the stout wooden
pegs common in Colonial carpentry. No amount of persuasion, however, could
induce the stolid landlord to let him investigate either of these two
closed spaces.
As time wore along, his absorption in the irregular wall and ceiling of
his room increased; for he began to read into the odd angles a
mathematical significance which seemed to offer vague clues regarding
their pnrpose. Old Keziah, he reflected, might have had excellent reasons
for living in a room with peculiar angles; for was it not through certain
angles that she claimed to have gone outside the boundaries of the world
of space we know? His interest gradually veered away from the unplumbed
voids beyond the slanting surfaces, since it now appeared that the purpose
of those surfaces concerned the side he was on.
The touch of brain-fever and the dreams began early in February. For some
time, apparently, the curious angles of Gilman's room had been having a
strange, almost hypnotic effect on him; and as the bleak winter advanced
he had found himself staring more and more intently at the corner where
the down-slanting ceiling met the inward-slanting wall. About this period
his inability to concentrate on his formal studies worried him
considerably, his apprehensions about the mid-year examinations being very
acute. But the exaggerated sense of bearing was scarcely less annoying.
Life had become an insistent and almost unendurable cacophony, and there
was that constant, terrifying impression of other sounds - perhaps from
regions beyond life - trembling on the very brink of audibility. So far as
concrete noises went, the rats in the ancient partitions were the worst.
Sometimes their scratching seemed not only furtive but deliberate. When it
came from beyond the slanting north wall it was mixed with a sort of dry
rattling; and when it came from the century-closed loft above the slanting
ceiling Gilman always braced himself as if expecting some horror which
only bided its time before descending to engulf him utterly.
The dreams were wholly beyond the pale of sanity, and Gilman fell that
they must be a result, jointly, of his studies in mathematics and in
folklore. He had been thinking too much about the vague regions which his
formulae told him must lie beyond the three dimensions we know, and about
the possibility that old Keziah Mason - guided by some influence past all
conjecture - had actually found the gate to those regions. The yellowed
country records containing her testimony and that of her accusers were so
damnably suggestive of things beyond human experience - and the
descriptions of the darting little furry object which served as her
familiar were so painfully realistic despite their incredible details.
That object - no larger than a good-sized rat and quaintly called by the
townspeople "Brown Jenkins - seemed to have been the fruit of a remarkable
case of sympathetic herd-delusion, for in 1692 no less than eleven persons
had testified to glimpsing it. There were recent rumours, too, with a
baffling and disconcerting amount of agreement. Witnesses said it had long
hair and the shape of a rat, but that its sharp-toothed, bearded face was
evilly human while its paws were like tiny human hands. It took messages
betwixt old Keziah and the devil, and was nursed on the witch's blood,
which it sucked like a vampire. Its voice was a kind of loathsome titter,
and it could speak all languages. Of all the bizarre monstrosities in
Gilman's dreams, nothing filled him with greater panic and nausea than
this blasphemous and diminutive hybrid, whose image flitted across his
vision in a form a thousandfold more hateful than anything his waking mind
had deduced from the ancient records and the modern whispers.
Gilman's dreams consisted largely in plunges through limitless abysses of
inexplicably coloured twilight and baffingly disordered sound; abysses
whose material and gravitational properties, and whose relation to his own
entity, he could not even begin to explain. He did not walk or climb, fly
or swim, crawl or wriggle; yet always experienced a mode of motion partly
voluntary and partly involuntary. Of his own condition he could not well
judge, for sight of his arms, legs, and torso seemed always cut off by
some odd disarrangement of perspective; but he felt that his physical
organization and faculties were somehow marvellously transmuted and
obliquely projected - though not without a certain grotesque relationship
to his normal proportions and properties.
The abysses were by no means vacant, being crowded with indescribably
angled masses of alien-hued substance, some of which appeared to be
organic while others seemed inorganic. A few of the organic objects tended
to awake vague memories in the back of his mind, though he could form no
conscious idea of what they mockingly resembled or suggested. In the later
dreams he began to distinguish separate categories into which the organic
objects appeared to be divided, and which seemed to involve in each case a
radically different species of conduct-pattern and basic motivation. Of
these categories one seemed to him to include objects slightly less
illogical and irrelevant in their motions than the members of the other
categories.
All the objects - organic and inorganic alike - were totally beyond
description or even comprehension. Gilman sometimes compared the inorganic
matter to prisms, labyrinths, clusters of cubes and planes, and Cyclopean
buildings; and the organic things struck him variously as groups of
bubbles, octopi, centipedes, living Hindoo idols, and intricate arabesques
roused into a kind of ophidian animation. Everything he saw was
unspeakably menacing and horrible; and whenever one of the organic
entities appeared by its motions to be noticing him, he felt a stark,
hideous fright which generally jolted him awake. Of how the organic
entities moved, he could tell no more than of how he moved himself. In
time he observed a further mystery - the tendency of certain entities to
appear suddenly out of empty space, or to disappear totally with equal
suddenness. The shrieking, roaring confusion of sound which permeated the
abysses was past all analysis as to pitch, timbre or rhythm; but seemed to
be synchronous with vague visual changes in all the indefinite objects,
organic and inorganic alike. Gilman had a constant sense of dread that it
might rise to some unbearable degree of intensity during one or another of
its obscure, relentlessly inevitable fluctuations.
But it was not in these vortices of complete alienage that he saw Brown
Jenkin. That shocking little horror was reserved for certain lighter,
sharper dreams which assailed him just before he dropped into the fullest
depths of sleep. He would be lying in the dark fighting to keep awake when
a faint lambent glow would seem to shimmer around the centuried room,
showing in a violet mist the convergence of angled planes which had seized
his brain so insidiously. The horror would appear to pop out of the
rat-hole in the corner and patter toward him over the sagging,
wide-planked floor with evil expectancy in its tiny, bearded human face;
but mercifully, this dream always melted away before the object got close
enough to nuzzle him. It had hellishly long, sharp, canine teeth; Gilman
tried to stop up the rat-hole every day, but each night the real tenants
of the partitions would gnaw away the obstruction, whatever it might be.
Once he had the landlord nail a tin over it, but the next night the rats
gnawed a fresh hole, in making which they pushed or dragged out into the
room a curious little fragment of bone.
Gilman did not report his fever to the doctor, for he knew he could not
pass the examinations if ordered to the college infirmary when every
moment was needed for cramming. As it was, he failed in Calculus D and
Advanced General Psychology, though not without hope of making up lost
ground before the end of the term.
It was in March when the fresh element entered his lighter preliminary
dreaming, and the nightmare shape of Brown Jenkin began to be companioned
by the nebulous blur which grew more and more to resemble a bent old
woman. This addition disturbed him more than he could account for, but
finally he decided that it was like an ancient crone whom he had twice
actually encountered in the dark tangle of lanes near the abandoned
wharves. On those occasions the evil, sardonic, and seemingly unmotivated
stare of the beldame had set him almost shivering - especially the first
time when an overgrown rat darting across the shadowed mouth of a
neighbouring alley had made him think irrationally of Brown Jenkin. Now,
he reflected, those nervous fears were being mirrored in his disordered
dreams. That the influence of the old house was unwholesome he could not
deny, but traces of his early morbid interest still held him there. He
argued that the fever alone was responsible for his nightly fantasies, and
that when the touch abated he would be free from the monstrous visions.
Those visions, however, were of absorbing vividness and convincingness,
and whenever he awaked he retained a vague sense of having undergone much
more than he remembered. He was hideously sure that in unrecalled dreams
he had talked with both Brown Jenkin and the old woman, and that they had
been urging him to go somewhere with them and to meet a third being of
greater potency.
Toward the end of March he began to pick up in his mathematics, though the
other stndies bothered him increasingly. He was getting an intuitive knack
for solving Riemannian equations, and astonished Professor Upham by his
comprehension of fourth-dimensional and other problems which had floored
all the rest of the class. One afternoon there was a discussion of
possible freakish curvatures in space, and of theoretical points of
approach or even contact between our part of the cosmos and various other
regions as distant as the farthest stars or the transgalactic gulfs
themselves - or even as fabulously remote as the tentatively conceivable
cosmic units beyond the whole Einsteinian space-time continuum. Gilman's
handling of this theme filled everyone with admiration, even though some
of his hypothetical illustrations caused an increase in the always
plentiful gossip about his nervous and solitary eccentricity. What made
the students shake their heads was his sober theory that a man might -
given mathematical knowledge admittedly beyond all likelihood of human
acquirement - step deliberately from the earth to any other celestial body
which might lie at one of an infinity of specifc points in the cosmic
pattern.
Such a step, he said, would require only two stages; first, a passage out
of the three-dimensional sphere we know, and second, a passage back to the
three-dimensional sphere at another point, perhaps one of infinite
remoteness. That this could be accomplished without loss of life was in
many cases conceivable. Any being from any part of three-dimensional space
could probably survive in the fourth dimension; and its survival of the
second stage would depend upon what alien part of three-dimensional space
it might select for its re-entry. Denizens of some planets might be able
to live on certain others - even planets belonging to other galaxies, or
to similar dimensional phases of other space-time continua - though of
course there must be vast numbers of mutually uninhabitable even though
mathematically juxtaposed bodies or zones of space.
It was also possible that the inhabitants of a given dimensional realm
could survive entry to many unknown and incomprehensible realms of
additional or indefinitely multiplied dimensions - be they within or
outside the given space-time continuum - and that the converse would be
likewise true. This was a matter for speculation, though one could be
fairly certain that the type of mutation involved in a passage from any
given dimensional plane to the next higher one would not be destructive of
biological integrity as we understand it. Gilman could not be very clear
about his reasons for this last assumption, but his haziness here was more
than overbalanced by his clearness on other complex points. Professor
Upham especially liked his demonstration of the kinship of higher
mathematics to certain phases of magical lore transmitted down the ages
from an ineffable antiquity - human or pre-human - whose knowledge of the
cosmos and its laws was greater than ours.
Around 1 April Gilman worried cosiderably because his slow fever did not
abate. He was also troubled by what some of his fellow lodgers said about
his sleep-walking. It seened that he was often absent from his bed and
that the creaking of his floor at certain hours of the night was remarked
by the man in the room below. This fellow also spoke of hearing the tread
of shod feet in the night; but Gilman was sure he must have been mistaken
in this, since shoes as well as other apparel were always precisely in
place in the morning. One could develop all sorts of aural delusions in
this morbid old house - for did not Gilman himself, even in daylight, now
feel certain that noises other than rat-scratching came from the black
voids beyond the slanting wall and above the slanting ceiling? His
pathologically sensitive ears began to listen for faint footfalls in the
immemorially sealed loft overhead, and sometimes the illusion of such
things was agonizingly realistic.
However, he knew that he had actually become a somnambulist; for twice at
night his room had been found vacant, though with all his clothing in
place. Of this he had been assured by Frank Elwood, the one fellow-student
whose poverty forced him to room in this squalid and unpopular house.
Elwood had been studying in the small hours and had come up for help on a
differential equation, only to find Gilman absent. It had been rather
presumptuous of him to open the unlocked door after knocking had failed to
rouse a response, but he had needed the help very badly and thought that
his host would not mind a gentle prodding awake. On neither occasion,
though, had Gilman been there; and when told of the matter he wondered
where he could have been wandering, barefoot and with only his night
clothes on. He resolved to investigate the matter if reports of his
sleep-walking continued, and thought of sprinkling flour on the floor of
the corridor to see where his footsteps might lead. The door was the only
conceivable egress, for there was no possible foothold outside the narrow
window.
As April advanced, Gilman's fever-sharpened ears were disturbed by the
whining prayers of a superstitious loom-fixer named Joe Mazurewicz who had
a room on the ground floor. Mazurewicz had told long, rambling stories
about the ghost of old Keziah and the furry sharp-fanged, nuzzling thing,
and had said he was so badly haunted at times that only his silver
crucifix - given him for the purpose by Father Iwanicki of St. Stanislaus'
Church - could bring him relief. Now he was praying because the Witches'
Sabbath was drawing near. May Eve was Walpurgis Night, when hell's
blackest evil roamed the earth and all the slaves of Satan gathered for
nameless rites and deeds. It was always a very bad lime in Arkham, even
though the fine folks up in Miskatonic Avenue and High and Saltonstall
Streets pretended to know nothing about it. There would be bad doings, and
a child or two would probably be missing. Joe knew about such things, for
his grandmother in the old country had heard tales from her grandmother.
It was wise to pray and count one's beads at this season. For three months
Keziah and Brown Jenkin had not been near Joe's room, nor near Paul
Choynski's room, nor anywhere else - and it meant no good when they held
off like that. They must be up to something.
Gilman dropped in at the doctor's office on the sixteenth of the month,
and was surprised to find his temperature was not as high as he had
feared. The physician questioned him sharply, and advised him to see a
nerve specialist. On reflection, he was glad he had not consulted the
still more inquisitive college doctor. Old Waldron, who had curtailed his
activities before, would have made him take a rest - an impossible thing
now that he was so close to great results in his equations. He was
certainly near the boundary between the known universe and the fourth
dimension, and who could say how much farther he might go?
But even as these thoughts came to him he wondered at the source of his
strange confidence. Did all of this perilous sense of immininence come
from the formulae on the sheets he covered day by day? The soft, stealthy,
imaginary footsteps in the sealed loft above were unnerving. And now, too,
there was a growing feeling that somebody was constantly persuading him to
do something terrible which he could not do. How about the somnambulism?
Where did he go sometimes in the night? And what was that faint suggestion
of sound which once in a while seemed to trickle through the confusion of
identifiable sounds even in broad daylight and full wakefulness? Its
rhythm did not correspond to anything on earth, unless perhaps to the
cadence of one or two unmentionable Sabbat-chants, and sometimes he feared
it corresponded to certain attributes of the vague shrieking or roaring in
those wholly alien abysses of dream.
The dreams were meanwhile getting to be atrocious. In the lighter
preliminary phase the evil old woman was now of fiendish distinctness, and
Gilman knew she was the one who had frightened him in the slums. Her bent
back, long nose, and shrivelled chin were unmistakable, and her shapeless
brown garments were like those he remembered. The expression on her face
was one of hideous malevolence and exultation, and when he awaked he could
recall a croaking voice that persuaded and threatened. He must meet the
Black Man and go with them all to the throne of Azathoth at the centre of
ultimate chaos. That was what she said. He must sign the book of Azathoth
in his own blood and take a new secret name now that his independent
delvings had gone so far. What kept him from going with her and Brown
Jenkin and the other to the throne of Chaos where the thin flutes pipe
mindlessly was the fact that he had seen the name "Azathoth" in the
Necronomicon, and knew it stood for a primal evil too horrible for
description.
The old woman always appeared out of thin air near the corner where the
downward slant met the inward slant. She seemed to crystallize at a point
closer to the ceiling than to the floor, and every night she was a little
nearer and more distinct before the dream shifted. Brown Jenkin, too was
always a little nearer at the last, and its yellowish-white fangs
glistened shockingly in that unearthly violet phosphorescence. Its shrill
loathsome tittering struck more and more into Gilman's head, and he could
remember in the morning how it had pronounced the words "Azathoth" and
"Nyarlathotep".
In the deeper dreams everything was likewise more distinct, and Gilman
felt that the twilight abysses around him were those of the fourth
dimension. Those organic entities whose motions seemed least flagrantly
irrelevant and unmotivated were probably projections of life-forms from
our own planet, including human beings. What the others were in their own
dimensional sphere or spheres he dared not try to think. Two of the less
irrelevantly moving things - a rather large congeries of iridescent,
prolately spheroidal bubbles and a very much smaller polyhedron of unknown
colours and rapidly shifting surface angles - seemed to take notice of him
and follow him about or float ahead as he changed position among the titan
prisms, labyrinths, cube-and-plane clusters and quasi-buildings; and all
the while the vague shrieking and roaring waxed louder and louder, as if
approaching some monstrous climax of utterly unendurable intensity.
During the night of 19-20 April the new development occurred. Gilman was
half involuntarily moving about in the twilight abysses with the
bubble-mass and the small polyhedron floating ahead when he noticed the
peculiarly regular angles formed by the edges of some gigantic
neighbouring prism-clusters. In another second he was out of the abyss and
standing tremulously on a rocky hillside bathed in intense, diffused green
light. He was barefooted and in his nightclothes. and when he tried to
walk discovered that he could scarcely lift his feet. A swirling vapour
hid everything but the immediate sloping terrain from sight, and he shrank
from the thought of the sounds, that might surge out of that vapour.
Then he saw the two shapes laboriously crawling toward him - the old woman
and the little furry thing. The crone strained up to her knees and managed
to cross her arms in a singular fashion, while Brown Jenkin pointed in a
certain direction with a horribly anthropoid forepaw which it raised with
evident difficulty. Spurred by an impulse he did not originate, Gilman
dragged himself forward along a course determined by the angle of the old
woman's arms and the direction of the small monstrosity's paw, and before
he had shuffled three steps he was back in the twilight abysses.
Geometrical shapes seethed around him, and he fell dizzily and
interminably. At last he woke in his bed in the crazily angled garret of
the eldritch old house.
He was good for nothing that morning, and stayed away from all his
classes. Some unknown attraction was pulling his eyes in a seemingly
irrelevant direction, for he could not help staring at a certain vacant
spot on the floor. As the day advanced, the focus of his unseeing eyes
changed position, and by noon he had conquered the impulse to stare at
vacancy. About two o'clock he went out for lunch and as he threaded the
narrow lanes of the city he found himself turning always to the southeast.
Only an effort halted him at a cafeteria in Church Street, and after the
meal he felt the unknown pull still more strongly.
He would have to consult a nerve specialist after all - perhaps there was
a connection with his somnambulism - but meanwhile he might at least try
to break the morbid spell himself. Undoubtedly he could still manage to
walk away from the pull, so with great resolution he headed against it and
dragged himself deliberately north along Garrison Street. By the time he
had reached the bridge over the Miskatonic he was in a cold perspiration,
and he clutched at the iron railing as he gazed upstream at the
ill-regarded island whose regular lines of ancient standing stones brooded
sullenly in the afternoon sunlight.
Then he gave a start. For there was a clearly visible living figure on
that desolate island, and a second glance told him it was certainly the
strange old woman whose sinister aspect had worked itself so disastrously
into his dreams. The tall grass near her was moving, too, as if some other
living thing were crawling close to the ground. When the old woman began
to turn toward him he fled precipitately off the bridge and into the
shelter of the town's labyrinthine waterfront alleys. Distant though the
island was, he felt that a monstrous and invincible evil could flow from
the sardonic stare of that bent, ancient figure in brown.
The southeastwards pull still held, and only with tremendous resolution
could Gilman drag himself into the old house and up the rickety stairs.
For hours he sat silent and aimless, with his eyes shifting gradually
westward. About six o'clock his sharpened ears caught the whining prayers
of Joe Mazurewicz two floors below, and in desperation he seized his hat
and walked out into the sunset-golden streets, letting the now directly
southward pull carry him where it might. An hour later darkness found him
in the open fields beyond Hangman's Brook, with the glimmering spring
stars shining ahead. The urge to walk was gradually changing to an urge to
leap mystically into space, and suddenly he realized just where the source
of the pull lay.
It was in the sky. A definite point among the stars had a claim on him and
was calling him. Apparently it was a point somewhere between Hydra and
Argo Navis, and he knew that he had been urged toward it ever since he had
awaked soon after dawn. In the morning it had been underfoot, and now it
was roughly south but stealing toward the west. What was the meaning of
this new thing? Was he going mad? How long would it last? Again mustering
his resolution, Gilman turned and dragged himself back to the sinister old
house.
Mazurewicz was waiting for him at the door, and seemed both anxious and
reluctant to whisper some fresh bit of superstition. It was about the
witch-light. Joe had been out celebrating the night before - and it was
Patriots' Day in Massachusetts - and had come home after midnight. Looking
up at the house from outside, he had thought at first that Gilman's window
was dark, but then he had seen the faint violet glow within. He wanted to
warn the gentleman about that glow, for everybody in Arkham knew it was
Keziah's witch-light which played near Brown Jenkin and the ghost of the
old crone herself. He had not mentioned this before, but now he must tell
about it because it meant that Keziah and her long-toothed familiar were
haunting the young gentleman. Sometimes he and Paul Choynski and Landlord
Dombrowski thought they saw that light seeping out of cracks in the sealed
loft above the young gentleman's room, but they had all agreed not to talk
about that. However, it would be better for the gentleman to take another
room and get a crucifix from some good priest like Father Iwanicki.
As the man rambled on, Gilman felt a nameless panic clutch at his throat.
He knew that Joe must have been half drunk when he came home the night
before; yet the mention of a violet light in the garret window was of
frightful import. It was a lambent glow of this sort which always played
about the old woman and the small furry thing in those lighter, sharper
dreams which prefaced his plunge into unknown abysses, and the thought
that a wakeful second person could see the dream-luminance was utterly
beyond sane harborage. Yet where had the fellow got such an odd notion?
Had he himself talked as well as walked around the house in his sleep? No,
Joe said, he had not - but he must check up on this. Perhaps Frank Elwood
could tell him something, though he hated to ask.
Fever - wild dreams - somnambulism - illusions of sounds - a pull toward a
point in the sky - and now a suspicion of insane sleep-talking! He must
stop studying, see a nerve specialist, and take himself in hand. When he
climbed to the second storey he paused at Elwood's door but saw that the
other youth was out. Reluctantly he continued up to his garret room and
sat down in the dark. His gaze was still pulled to the southward, but he
also found himself listening intently for some sound in the closed loft
above, and half imagining that an evil violet light seeped down through an
infinitesimal crack in the low, slanting ceiling.
That night as Gilman slept, the violet light broke upon him with
heightened intensity, and the old witch and small furry thing, getting
closer than ever before, mocked him with inhuman squeals and devilish
gestures. He was glad to sink into the vaguely roaring twilight abysses,
though the pursuit of that iridescent bubble-congeries and that
kaleidoscopic little polyhedron was menacing and irritating. Then came the
shift as vast converging planes of a slippery-looking substance loomed
above and below him - a shift which ended in a flash of delirium and a
blaze of unknown, alien light in which yellow, carmine, and indigo were
madly and inextricably blended.
He was half lying on a high, fantastically balustraded terrace above a
boundless jungle of outlandish, incredible peaks, balanced planes, domes,
minarets, horizontal disks poised on pinnacles, and numberless forms of
still greater wildness - some of stone and some of metal - which glittered
gorgeously in the mixed, almost blistering glare from a poly-chromatic
sky. Looking upward he saw three stupendous disks of flame, each of a
different hue, and at a different height above an infinitely distant
curving horizon of low mountains. Behind him tiers of higher terraces
towered aloft as far as he could see. The city below stretched away to the
limits of vision, and he hoped that no sound would well up from it.
The pavement from which he easily raised himself was a veined polished
stone beyond his power to identify, and the tiles were cut in
bizarre-angled shapes which struck himm as less asymmetrical than based on
some unearthly symmetry whose laws he could not comprehend. The balustrade
was chest-high, delicate, and fantastically wrought, while along the rail
were ranged at short intervals little figures of grotesque design and
exquisite workmanship. They, like the whole balustrade, seemed to be made
of some sort of shining metal whose colour could not be guessed in the
chaos of mixed effulgences, and their nature utterly defied conjecture.
They represented some ridged barrel-shaped objects with thin horizontal
arms radiating spoke-like from a central ring and with vertical knobs or
bulbs projecting from the head and base of the barrel. Each of these knobs
was the hub of a system of five long, flat, triangularly tapering arms
arranged around it like the arms of a starfish - nearly horizontal, but
curving slightly away from the central barrel. The base of the bottom knob
was fused to the long railing with so delicate a point of contact that
several figures had been broken off and were missing. The figures were
about four and a half inches in height, while the spiky arms gave them a
maximum diameter of about two and a half inches.
When Gilman stood up, the tiles felt hot to his bare feet. He was wholly
alone, and his first act was to walk to the balustrade and look dizzily
down at the endless, Cyclopean city almost two thousand feet below. As he
listened he thought a rhythmic confusion of faint musical pipings covering
a wide tonal range welled up from the narrow streets beneath, and he
wished he might discern the denizens of the place. The sight turned him
giddy after a while, so that he would have fallen to the pavement had he
not clutched instinctively at the lustrous balustrade. His right hand fell
on one of the projecting figures, the touch seeming to steady him
slightly. It was too much, however, for the exotic delicacy of the
metal-work, and the spiky figure snapped off under his grasp. Still half
dazed, he continued to clutch it as his other hand seized a vacant space
on the smooth railing.
But now his over-sensitive ears caught something behind him, and he looked
back across the level terrace. Approaching him softly though without
apparent furtiveness were five figures, two of which were the sinister old
woman and the fanged, furry little animal. The other three were what sent
him unconscious; for they were living entities about eight feet high,
shaped precisely like the spiky images on the balustrade, and propelling
themselves by a spider-like wriggling of their lower set of starfish-arms.
Gilman awoke in his bed, drenched by a cold perspiration and with a
smarting sensation in his face, hands and feet. Springing to the floor, he
washed and dressed in frantic haste, as if it were necessary for him to
get out of the house as quickly as possible. He did not know where he
wished to go, but felt that once more he would have to sacrifice his
classes. The odd pull toward that spot in the sky between Hydra and Argo
had abated, but another of even greater strength had taken its place. Now
he felt that he must go north - infinitely north. He dreaded to cross the
bridge that gave a view of the desolate island in the Miskatonic, so went
over the Peabody Avenue bridge. Very often he stumbled, for his eyes and
ears were chained to an extremely lofty point in the blank blue sky.
After about an hour he got himself under better control, and saw that he
was far from the city. All around him stretched the bleak emptiness of
salt marshes, while the narrow road ahead led to Innsmouth - that ancient,
half-deserted town which Arkham people were so curiously unwilling to
visit. Though the northward pull had not diminished, he resisted it as he
had resisted the other pull, and finally found that he could almost
balance the one against the other. Plodding back to town and getting some
coffee at a soda fountain, he dragged himself into the public library and
browsed aimlessly among the lighter magazines. Once he met some friends
who remarked how oddly sunburned he looked, but he did not tell them of
his walk. At three o'clock he took some lunch at a restaurant, noting
meanwhile that the pull had either lessened or divided itself. After that
he killed the time at a cheap cinema show, seeing the inane performance
over and over again without paying any attention to it.
About nine at night he drifted homeward and shuffled into the ancient
house. Joe Mazurewicz was whining unintelligible prayers, and Gilman
hastened up to his own garret chamber without pausing to see if Elwood was
in. It was when he turned on the feeble electric light that the shock
came. At once he saw there was something on the table which did not belong
there, and a second look left no room for doubt. Lying on its side - for
it could not stand up alone - was the exotic spiky figure which in his
monstrous dream he had broken off the fantastic balustrade. No detail was
missing. The ridged, barrel-shaped center, the thin radiating arms, the
knobs at each end, and the flat, slightly outward-curving starfish-arms
spreading from those knobs - all were there. In the electric light the
colour seemed to be a kind of iridescent grey veined with green; and
Gilman could see amidst his horror and bewilderment that one of the knobs
ended in a jagged break, corresponding to its former point of attachment
to the dream-railing.
Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming
aloud. This fusion of dream and reality was too much to bear. Still dazed,
he clutched at the spiky thing and staggered downstairs to Landlord
Dombrowski's quarters. The whining prayers of the superstitious loom-fixer
were still sounding through the mouldy halls, but Gilman did not mind them
now. The landlord was in, and greeted him pleasantly. No, he had not seen
that thing before and did not know anything about it. But his wife had
said she found a funny tin thing in one of the beds when she fixed the
rooms at noon, and maybe that was it. Dombrowski called her, and she
waddled in. Yes, that was the thing. She had found it in the young
gentleman's bed - on the side next the wall. It had looked very queer to
her, but of course the young gentleman had lots of queer things in his
room - books and curios and pictures and markings on paper. She certainly
knew nothing about it.
So Gilman climbed upstairs again in mental turmoil, convinced that he was
either still dreaming or that his somnambulism had run to incredible
extremes and led him to depredations in unknown places. Where had he got
this outre thing? He did not recall seeing it in any museum in Arkham. It
must have been somewhere, though; and the sight of it as he snatched it in
his sleep must have caused the odd dream-picture of the balustraded
terrace. Next day he would make some very guarded inquiries - and perhaps
see the nerve specialist.
Meanwhile he would try to keep track of his somnambulism. As he went
upstairs and across the garret hall he sprinkled about some flour which he
had borrowed - with a frank admission as to its purpose - from the
landlord. He had stopped at Elwood's door on the way, but had found all
dark within. Entering his room, he placed the spiky thing on the table,
and lay down in complete mental and physical exhaustion without pausing to
undress. From the closed loft above the slating ceiling he thought he
heard a faint scratching and padding, but he was too disorganized even to
mind it. That cryptical pull from the north was getting very strong again,
though it seemed now to come from a lower place in the sky.
In the dazzling violet light of dream the old woman and the fanged, furry
thing came again and with a greater distinctness than on any former
occasion. This time they actually reached him, and he felt the crone's
withered claws clutching at him. He was pulled out of bed and into empty
space, and for a moment he heard a rhythmic roaring and saw the twilight
amorphousness of the vague abysses seething around him. But that moment
was very brief, for presently he was in a crude, windowless little space
with rough beams and planks rising to a peak just above his head, and with
a curious slanting floor underfoot. Propped level on that floor were low
cases full of books of every degree of antiquity and disintegration, and
in the centre were a table and bench, both apparently fastened in place.
Small objects of unknown shape and nature were ranged on the tops of the
cases, and in the flaming violet light Gilman thought he saw a counterpart
of the spiky image which had puzzled him so horribly. On the left the
floor fell abruptly away, leaving a black triangular gulf out of which,
after a second's dry rattling, there presently climbed the hateful little
furry thing with the yellow fangs and bearded human face.
The evilly-grinning beldame still clutched him, and beyond the table stood
a figure he had never seen before - a tall, lean man of dead black
colouration but without the slightest sign of negroid features: wholly
devoid of either hair or beard, and wearing as his only garment a
shapeless robe of some heavy black fabric. His feet were indistinguishable
because of the table and bench, but he must have been shod, since there
was a clicking whenever he changed position. The man did not speak, and
bore no trace of expression on his small, regular features. He merely
pointed to a book of prodigious size which lay open on the table, while
the beldame thrust a huge grey quill into Gilman's right hand. Over
everything was a pall of intensely maddening fear, and the climax was
reached when the furry thing ran up the dreamer's clothing to his
shoulders and then down his left arm, finally biting him sharply in the
wrist just below his cuff. As the blood spurted from this wound Gilman
lapsed into a faint.
He awaked on the morning of the twenty-second with a pain in his left
wrist, and saw that his cuff was brown with dried blood. His recollections
were very confused, but the scene with the black man in the unknown space
stood out vividly. The rats must have bitten him as he slept, giving rise
to the climax of that frightful dream. Opening the door, he saw that the
flour on the corridor floor was undisturbed except for the huge prints of
the loutish fellow who roomed at the other end of the garret. So he had
not been sleep-walking this time. But something would have to be done
about those rats. He would speak to the landlord about them. Again he
tried to stop up the hole at the base of the slanting wall, wedging in a
candlestick which seemed of about the right size. His ears were ringing
horribly, as if with the residual echoes of some horrible noise heard in
dreams.
As he bathed and changed clothes he tried to recall what he had dreamed
after the scene in the violet-litten space, but nothing definite would
crystallize in his mind. That scene itself must have corresponded to the
sealed loft overhead, which had begun to attack his imagination so
violently, but later impressions were faint and hazy. There were
suggestions of the vague, twilight abysses, and of still vaster, blacker
abysses beyond them - abysses in which all fixed suggestions were absent.
He had been taken there by the bubble-congeries and the little polyhedron
which always dogged him; but they, like himself, had changed to wisps of
mist in this farther void of ultimate blackness. Something else had gone
on ahead - a larger wisp which now and then condensed into nameless
approximations of form - and he thought that their progress had not been
in a straight line, but rather along the alien curves and spirals of some
ethereal vortex which obeyed laws unknown to the physics and mathematics
of any conceivable cosmos. Eventually there had been a hint of vast,
leaping shadows, of a monstrous, half-acoustic pulsing, and of the thin,
monotonous piping of an unseen flute - but that was all. Gilman decided he
had picked up that last conception from what he had read in the
Necronomicon about the mindless entity Azathoth, which rules all time and
space from a black throne at the centre of Chaos.
When the blood was washed away the wrist wound proved very slight, and
Gilman puzzled over the location of the two tiny punctures. It occurred to
him that there was no blood on the bedspread where he had lain - which was
very curious in view of the amount on his skin and cuff. Had he been
sleep-walking within his room, and had the rat bitten him as he sat in
some chair or paused in some less rational position? He looked in every
corner for brownish drops or stains, but did not find any. He had better,
he thought, spinkle flour within the room as well as outside the door -
though after all no further proof of his sleep-walking was needed. He knew
he did walk and the thing to do now was to stop it. He must ask Frank
Elwood for help. This morning the strange pulls from space seemed
lessened, though they were replaced by another sensation even more
inexplicable. It was a vague, insistent impulse to fly away from his
present situation, but held not a hint of the specific direction in which
he wished to fly. As he picked up the strange spiky image on the table he
thought the older northward pull grew a trifle stronger; but even so, it
was wholly overruled by the newer and more bewildering urge.
He took the spiky image down to Elwood's room, steeling himself against
the whines of the loom-fixer which welled up from the ground floor. Elwood
was in, thank heaven, and appeared to be stirring about. There was time
for a little conversation before leaving for breakfast and college, so
Gilman hurriedly poured forth an account of his recent dreams and fears.
His host was very sympathetic, and agreed that something ought to be done.
He was shocked by his guest's drawn, haggard aspect, and noticed the
queer, abnormal-looking sunburn which others had remarked during the past
week.
There was not much, though, that he could say. He had not seen Gilman on
any sleep-walking expedition, and had no idea what the curious image could
be. He had, though, heard the French-Canadian who lodged just under Gilman
talking to Mazurewicz one evening. They were telling each other how badly
they dreaded the coming of Walpurgis Night, now only a few days off; and
were exchanging pitying comments about the poor, doomed young gentleman.
Desrochers, the fellow under Gilman's room, had spoken of nocturnal
footsteps shod and unshod, and of the violet light he saw one night when
he had stolen fearfully up to peer through Gilman's keyhole. He had not
dared to peer, he told Mazurewicz, after he had glimpsed that light
through the cracks around the door. There had been soft talking, too - and
as he began to describe it his voice had sunk to an inaudible whisper.
Elwood could not imagine what had set these superstitious creatures
gossiping, but supposed their imaginations had been roused by Gilman's
late hours and somnolent walking and talking on the one hand, and by the
nearness of traditionally-feared May Eve on the other hand. That Gilman
talked in his sleep was plain, and it was obviously from Desrochers'
keyhole listenings that the delusive notion of the violet dream-light had
got abroad. These simple people were quick to imagine they had seen any
odd thing they had heard about. As for a plan of action - Gilman had
better move down to Elwood's room and avoid sleeping alone. Elwood would,
if awake, rouse him whenever he began to talk or rise in his sleep. Very
soon, too, he must see the specialist. Meanwhile they would take the spiky
image around to the various museums and to certain professors; seeking
identification and slating that it had been found in a public rubbish-can.
Also, Dombrowski must attend to the poisoning of those rats in the walls.
Braced up by Elwood's companionship, Gilman attended classes that day.
Strange urges still tugged at him, but he could sidetrack them with
considerable success. During a free period he showed the queer image to
several professors, all of whom were intensely interested, though none of
them could shed any light upon its nature or origin. That night he slept
on a couch which Elwood had had the landlord bring to the second-storey
room, and for the first time in weeks was wholly free from disquieting
dreams. But the feverishness still hung on, and the whines of the
loom-fixer were an unnerving influence.
During the next few days Gilman enjoyed an almost perfect immunity from
morbid manifestations. He had, Elwood said, showed no tendency to talk or
rise in his sleep; and meanwhile the landlord was putting rat-poison
everywhere. The only disturbing element was the talk among the
superstitious foreigners, whose imaginations had become highly excited.
Mazurewicz was always trying to make him get a crucifix, and finally
forced one upon him which he said had been blessed by the good Father
Iwanicki. Desrochers, too, had something to say; in fact, he insisted that
cautious steps had sounded in the now vacant room above him on the first
and second nights of Gilinan's absence from it. Paul Choynski thought he
heard sounds in the halls and on the stairs at night, and claimed that his
door had been softly tried, while Mrs. Dombrowski vowed she had seen Brown
Jenkin for the first time since All-Hallows. But such naive reports could
mean very little, and Gilman let the cheap metal crucifix hang idly from a
knob on his host's dresser.
For three days Gilman and Elwood canvassed the local museums in an effort
to identify the strange spiky image, but always without success. In every
quarter, however, interest was intense; for the utter alienage of the
thing was a tremendous challenge to scientific curiosity. One of the small
radiating arms was broken off and subjected to chemical analysis.
Professor Ellery found platinum, iron and tellurium in the strange alloy;
but mixed with these were at least three other apparent elements of high
atomic weight which chemistry was absolutely powerless to classify. Not
only did they fail to correspond with any known element, but they did not
even fit the vacant places reserved for probable elements in the periodic
system. The mystery remains unsolved to this day, though the image is on
exhibition at the museum of Miskatonic University.
On the morning of April twenty-seventh a fresh rat-bole appeared in the
room where Gilman was a guest, but Dombrowski tinned it up during the day.
The poison was not having much effect, for scratchings and scurryings in
the walls were virtually undiminished.
Elwood was out late that night, and Gilman waited up for him. He did not
wish to go to sleep in a room alone - especially since he thought he had
glimpsed in the evening twilight the repellent old woman whose image had
become so horribly transferred to his dreams. He wondered who she was, and
what had been near her rattling the tin can in a rubbish-heap at the mouth
of a squalid courtyard. The crone had seemed to notice him and leer evilly
at him - though perhaps this was merely his imagination.
The next day both youths felt very tired, and knew they would sleep like
logs when night came. In the evening they drowsily discussed the
mathematical studies which had so completely and perhaps harmfully
engrossed Gilman, and speculated about the linkage with ancient magic and
folklore which seemed so darkly probable. They spoke of old Keziah Mason,
and Elwood agreed that Gilman had good scientific grounds for thinking she
might have stumbled on strange and significant information. The hidden
cults to which these witches belonged often guarded and handed down
surprising secrets from elder, forgotten eons; and it was by no means
impossible that Keziah had actually mastered the art of passing through
dimensional gates. Tradition emphasizes the uselessness of material
barriers in halting a witch's notions, and who can say what underlies the
old tales of broomstick rides through the night?
Whether a modern student could ever gain similar powers from mathematical
research alone, was still to be seen. Suceess, Gilman added, might lead to
dangerous and unthinkable situations, for who could foretell the
conditions pervading an adjacent but normally inaccessible dimension? On
the other hand, the picturesque possibilities were enormous. Time could
not exist in certain belts of space, and by entering and remaining in such
a belt one might preserve one's life and age indefinitely; never suffering
organic metabolism or deterioration except for slight amounts incurred
during visits to one's own or similar planes. One might, for example, pass
into a timeless dimension and emerge at some remote period of the earth's
history as young as before.
Whether anybody had ever managed to do this, one could hardly conjecture
with any degree of authority. Old legends are hazy and ambiguous, and in
historic times all attempts at crossing forbidden gaps seem complicated by
strange and terrible alliances with beings and messengers from outside.
There was the immemorial figure of the deputy or messenger of hidden and
terrible powers - the "Black Man" of the witch-cult, and the
"Nyarlathotep" of the Necronomicon. There was, too, the baffling problem
of the lesser messengers or intermediaries - the quasi-animals and queer
hybrids which legend depicts as witches' familiars. As Gilman and Elwood
retired, too sleepy to argue further, they heard Joe Mazurewicz reel into
the house half drunk, and shuddered at the desperate wildness of his
whining prayers.
That night Gilman saw the violet light again. In his dream he had heard a
scratching and gnawing in the partitions, and thought that someone fumbled
clumsily at the latch. Then he saw the old woman and the small furry thing
advancing toward him over the carpeted floor. The beldame's face was
alight with inhuman exultation, and the little yellow-toothed morbidity
tittered mockingly as it pointed at the heavily-sleeping form of Elwood on
the other couch across the room. A paralysis of fear stifled all attempts
to cry out. As once before, the hideous crone seized Gilman by the
shoulders, yanking him out of bed and into empty space. Again the
infinitude of the shrieking abysses flashed past him, but in another
second he thought he was in a dark, muddy, unknown alley of foetid odors
with the rotting walls of ancient houses towering up on every hand.
Ahead was the robed black man he had seen in the peaked space in the other
dream, while from a lesser distance the old woman was beckoning and
grimacing imperiously. Brown Jenkin was rubbing itself with a kind of
affectionate playfulness around the ankles of the black man, which the
deep mud largely concealed. There was a dark open doorway on the right, to
which the black man silently pointed. Into this the grinning crone
started, dragging Gilman after her by his pajama sleeves. There were
evil-smelling staircases which creaked ominously, and on which the old
woman seemed to radiate a faint violet light; and finally a door leading
off a landing. The crone fumbled with the latch and pushed the door open,
motioning to Gilman to wait, and disappearing inside the black aperture.
The youth's over-sensitive ears caught a hideous strangled cry, and
presently the beldame came out of the room bearing a small, senseless form
which she thrust at the dreamer as if ordering him to carry it. The sight
of this form, and the expression on its face, broke the spell. Still too
dazed to cry out, he plunged recklessly down the noisome staircase and
into the mud outside, halting only when seized and choked by the waiting
black man. As consciousness departed he heard the faint, shrill tittering
of the fanged, rat-like abnormality.
On the morning of the twenty-ninth Gilman awaked into a maelstrom of
horror. The instant he opened his eyes he knew something was terribly
wrong, for he was back in his old garret room with the slanting wall and
ceiling, sprawled on the now unmade bed. His throat was aching
inexplicably, and as he struggled to a sitting posture he saw with growing
fright that his feet and pajama bottoms were brown with caked mud. For the
moment his recollections were hopelessly hazy, but he knew at least that
he must have been sleep-walking. Elwood had been lost too deeply in
slumber to hear and stop him. On the floor were confused muddy prints, but
oddly enough they did not extend all the way to the door. The more Gilman
looked at them, the more peculiar they seemed; for in addition to those he
could recognize as his there were some smaller, almost round markings -
such as the legs of a large chair or a table might make, except that most
of them tended to be divided into halves. There were also some curious
muddy rat-tracks leading out of a fresh hole and back into it again. Utter
bewilderment and the fear of madness racked Gilman as he staggered to the
door and saw that there were no muddy prints outside. The more he
remembered of his hideous dream the more terrified he felt, and it added
to his desperation to hear Joe Mazurewicz chanting mournfully two floors
below.
Descending to Elwood's room he roused his still-sleeping host and began
telling of how he had found himself, but Elwood could form no idea of what
might really have happened. Where Gilman could have been, how he got back
to his room without making tracks in the hall, and how the muddy,
furniture-like prints came to be mixed with his in the garret chamber,
were wholly beyond conjecture. Then there were those dark, livid marks on
his throat, as if he had tried to strangle himself. He put his hands up to
them, but found that they did not even approximately fit. While they were
talking, Desrochers dropped in to say that he had heard a terrific
clattering overhead in the dark small hours. No, there had been no one on
the stairs after midnight, though just before midnight he had heard faint
footfalls in the garret, and cautiously descending steps he did not like.
It was, he added, a very bad time of year for Arkham. The young gentleman
had better be sure to wear the circifix Joe Mazurewicz had given him. Even
the daytime was not safe, for after dawn there had been strange sounds in
the house - especially a thin, childish wail hastily choked off.
Gilman mechanically attended classes that morning, but was wholly unable
to fix his mind on his studies. A mood of hideous apprehension and
expectancy had seized him, and he seemed to be awaiting the fall of some
annihilating blow. At noon he lunched at the University spa, picking up a
paper from the next seat as he waited for dessert. But he never ate that
dessert; for an item on the paper's first page left him limp, wild-eyed,
and able only to pay his check and stagger back to Elwood's room.
There had been a strange kidnapping the night before in Orne's Gangway,
and the two-year-old child of a clod-like laundry worker named Anastasia
Wolejko had completely vanished from sight. The mother, it appeared, had
feared the event for some time; but the reasons she assigned for her fear
were so grotesque that no one took them seriously. She had, she said, seen
Brown Jenkin about the place now and then ever since early in March, and
knew from its grimaces and titterings that little Ladislas must be marked
for sacrifice at the awful Sabbat on Walpurgis Night. She had asked her
neighbour Mary Czanek to sleep in the room and try to protect the child,
but Mary had not dared. She could not tell the police, for they never
believed such things. Children had been taken that way every year ever
since she could remember. And her friend Pete Stowacki would not help
because he wanted the child out of the way.
But what threw Gilman into a cold perspiration was the report of a pair of
revellers who had been walking past the mouth of the gangway just after
