Horror tales; New England -- Fiction; Short stories
At the hospital they told me I had been found half-frozen in Kingsport
Harbor at dawn, clinging to the drifting spar that accident sent to
save me. They told me I had taken the wrong fork of the hill road the
night before, and fallen over the cliffs at Orange Point--a thing they
deducted from prints found in the snow. There was nothing I could say,
because everything was wrong. Everything was wrong, with the broad
window showing a sea of roofs in which only about one in five was
ancient, and the sound of trolleys and motors in the streets below.
They insisted that this was Kingsport, and I could not deny it.
When I went delirious at hearing that the hospital stood near the old
churchyard on Central Hill, they sent me to St. Mary’s Hospital in
Arkham, where I could have better care. I liked it there, for the
doctors were broadminded, and even lent me their influence in
obtaining the carefully sheltered copy of Alhazred’s objectionable
“Necronomicon” from the library of Miskatonic University. They said
something about a “psychosis,” and agreed that I had better get my
harassing obsessions off my mind.
So I read again that hideous chapter, and shuddered doubly because it
was indeed not new to me. I had seen it before, let footprints tell
what they might; and where it was I had seen it were best forgotten.
There was no one--in waking hours--who could remind me of it; but my
dreams are filled with terror, because of phrases I dare not quote. I
dare quote only one paragraph, put into such English as I can make
from the awkward Low Latin.
“The nethermost caverns,” wrote the mad Arab, “are not for the
fathoming of eyes that see; for their marvels are strange and
terrific. Cursed the ground where dead thoughts live new and oddly
bodied, and evil the mind that is held by no head. Wisely did Ibn
Schacabac say that happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and
happy the town at night whose wizards are all in ashes. For it is of
old rumor that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his
charnel clay, but fats and instructs _the very worm that gnaws_; till
out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of
earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great
holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and
things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.”
[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the January 1925 issue of
Weird Tales Magazine.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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