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 figures 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 days 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
Unaussprechlichen
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 235 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 practiced 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 slanting 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 shewed where a window had been 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 cobwebbed 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 purpose. 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 already 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 hearing 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 felt 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 county 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 Jenkin”—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 bafflingly 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 organisation 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 masses 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, shewing
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 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 phantasies, and that when the touch abated he would be free from
the monstrous visions. Those visions, however, were of abhorrent 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 other
studies 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 trans-galactic 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 specific 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 plane 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 the first of April Gilman worried considerably because his slow fever
did not abate. He was also troubled by what some of his fellow-lodgers said about his sleep-walking.
It seemed 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-scratchings 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 agonisingly 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 loomfixer 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 time 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 a doctor’s office on the 16th 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 imminence 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 maddening 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 in his own
blood the book of Azathoth 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 crystallise 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 stuck more
and more in 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 April 19–20 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 night-clothes, 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
fore paw 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 connexion 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 southeastward 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 realised 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; afternoon found it rising in the southeast, and now it was roughly south
but wheeling 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—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 this 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 harbourage. 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 story
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 southwest,
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 discs 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 polychromatic
sky. Looking upward he saw three stupendous discs 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 of a veined, polished
stone beyond his power to identify, and the tiles were cut in bizarre-angled shapes which struck
him 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 this chaos of mixed effulgences; and their nature utterly defied conjecture.
They represented some ridged, barrel-shaped object 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 oversensitive 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 awakened 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 stumbled 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 centre, 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 loomfixer 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 a 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 outré 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 slanting ceiling he thought he heard a faint scratching and padding,
but he was too disorganised 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 22nd 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 crystallise 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 of form 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 milky, barely luminous 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 curiously environed 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, sprinkle 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 loomfixer 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 both 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 stating 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 shewed 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-story 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 loomfixer were an unnerving influence.

During the next few days Gilman enjoyed an almost perfect immunity from morbid
manifestations. He had, Elwood said, shewed 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 Gilman’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, and the result
is still talked about in college circles. 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 27 a fresh rat-hole 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 aeons; and it was by no means impossible
that Keziah had actually mastered the art of passing through dimensional gates. Tradition emphasises
the uselessness of material barriers in halting a witch’s motions; 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. Success, 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 twilight abysses flashed past him, but in another second he thought he was
in a dark, muddy, unknown alley of foetid odours, 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 grimacing crone started, dragging Gilman after
her by his pajama sleeve. 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 oversensitive 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 29th 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 recognise as his there were some smaller, almost round markings—such
as the legs of a large chair or 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 crucifix 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 anyhow.

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 midnight. They admitted
they had been drunk, but both vowed they had seen a crazily dressed trio furtively entering
the dark passageway. There had, they said, been a huge robed negro, a little old woman in rags,
and a young white man in his night-clothes. The old woman had been dragging the youth, while
around the feet of the negro a tame rat was rubbing and weaving in the brown mud.

Gilman sat in a daze all the afternoon, and Elwood—who had meanwhile
seen the papers and formed terrible conjectures from them—found him thus when he came
home. This time neither could doubt but that something hideously serious was closing in around
them. Between the phantasms of nightmare and the realities of the objective world a monstrous
and unthinkable relationship was crystallising, and only stupendous vigilance could avert still
more direful developments. Gilman must see a specialist sooner or later, but not just now, when
all the papers were full of this kidnapping business.

Just what had really happened was maddeningly obscure, and for a moment both
Gilman and Elwood exchanged whispered theories of the wildest kind. Had Gilman unconsciously
succeeded better than he knew in his studies of space and its dimensions? Had he actually slipped
outside our sphere to points unguessed and unimaginable? Where—if anywhere—had he
been on those nights of daemoniac alienage? The roaring twilight abysses—the green hillside—the
blistering terrace—the pulls from the stars—the ultimate black vortex—the
black man—the muddy alley and the stairs—the old witch and the fanged, furry horror—the
bubble-congeries and the little polyhedron—the strange sunburn—the wrist wound—the
unexplained image—the muddy feet—the throat-marks—the tales and fears of the
superstitious foreigners—what did all this mean? To what extent could the laws of sanity
apply to such a case?

There was no sleep for either of them that night, but next day they both cut
classes and drowsed. This was April 30th, and with the dusk would come the hellish Sabbat-time
which all the foreigners and the superstitious old folk feared. Mazurewicz came home at six
o’clock and said people at the mill were whispering that the Walpurgis-revels would be
held in the dark ravine beyond Meadow Hill where the old white stone stands in a place queerly
void of all plant-life. Some of them had even told the police and advised them to look there
for the missing Wolejko child, but they did not believe anything would be done. Joe insisted
that the poor young gentleman wear his nickel-chained crucifix, and Gilman put it on and dropped
it inside his shirt to humour the fellow.

Late at night the two youths sat drowsing in their chairs, lulled by the rhythmical
praying of the loomfixer on the floor below. Gilman listened as he nodded, his preternaturally
sharpened hearing seeming to strain for some subtle, dreaded murmur beyond the noises in the
ancient house. Unwholesome recollections of things in the
Necronomicon and the Black
Book welled up, and he found himself swaying to infandous rhythms said to pertain to the blackest
ceremonies of the Sabbat and to have an origin outside the time and space we comprehend.

Presently he realised what he was listening for—the hellish chant of
the celebrants in the distant black valley. How did he know so much about what they expected?
How did he know the time when Nahab and her acolyte were due to bear the brimming bowl which
would follow the black cock and the black goat? He saw that Elwood had dropped asleep, and tried
to call out and waken him. Something, however, closed his throat. He was not his own master.
Had he signed the black man’s book after all?

Then his fevered, abnormal hearing caught the distant, windborne notes. Over
miles of hill and field and alley they came, but he recognised them none the less. The fires
must be lit, and the dancers must be starting in. How could he keep himself from going? What
was it that had enmeshed him? Mathematics—folklore—the house—old Keziah—Brown
Jenkin . . . and now he saw that there was a fresh rat-hole in the wall near
his couch. Above the distant chanting and the nearer praying of Joe Mazurewicz came another
sound—a stealthy, determined scratching in the partitions. He hoped the electric lights
would not go out. Then he saw the fanged, bearded little face in the rat-hole—the accursed
little face which he at last realised bore such a shocking, mocking resemblance to old Keziah’s—and
heard the faint fumbling at the door.

The screaming twilight abysses flashed before him, and he felt himself helpless
in the formless grasp of the iridescent bubble-congeries. Ahead raced the small, kaleidoscopic
polyhedron, and all through the churning void there was a heightening and acceleration of the
vague tonal pattern which seemed to foreshadow some unutterable and unendurable climax. He seemed
to know what was coming—the monstrous burst of Walpurgis-rhythm in whose cosmic timbre
would be concentrated all the primal, ultimate space-time seethings which lie behind the massed
spheres of matter and sometimes break forth in measured reverberations that penetrate faintly
to every layer of entity and give hideous significance throughout the worlds to certain dreaded
periods.

But all this vanished in a second. He was again in the cramped, violet-litten
peaked space with the slanting floor, the low cases of ancient books, the bench and table, the
queer objects, and the triangular gulf at one side. On the table lay a small white figure—an
infant boy, unclothed and unconscious—while on the other side stood the monstrous, leering
old woman with a gleaming, grotesque-hafted knife in her right hand, and a queerly proportioned
pale metal bowl covered with curiously chased designs and having delicate lateral handles in
her left. She was intoning some croaking ritual in a language which Gilman could not understand,
but which seemed like something guardedly quoted in the
Necronomicon.

As the scene grew clear he saw the ancient crone bend forward and extend the
empty bowl across the table—and unable to control his own motions, he reached far forward
and took it in both hands, noticing as he did so its comparative lightness. At the same moment
the disgusting form of Brown Jenkin scrambled up over the brink of the triangular black gulf
on his left. The crone now motioned him to hold the bowl in a certain position while she raised
the huge, grotesque knife above the small white victim as high as her right hand could reach.
The fanged, furry thing began tittering a continuation of the unknown ritual, while the witch
croaked loathsome responses. Gilman felt a gnawing, poignant abhorrence shoot through his mental
and emotional paralysis, and the light metal bowl shook in his grasp. A second later the downward
motion of the knife broke the spell completely, and he dropped the bowl with a resounding bell-like
clangour while his hands darted out frantically to stop the monstrous deed.

In an instant he had edged up the slanting floor around the end of the table
and wrenched the knife from the old woman’s claws; sending it clattering over the brink
of the narrow triangular gulf. In another instant, however, matters were reversed; for those
murderous claws had locked themselves tightly around his own throat, while the wrinkled face
was twisted with insane fury. He felt the chain of the cheap crucifix grinding into his neck,
and in his peril wondered how the sight of the object itself would affect the evil creature.
Her strength was altogether superhuman, but as she continued her choking he reached feebly in
his shirt and drew out the metal symbol, snapping the chain and pulling it free.

At sight of the device the witch seemed struck with panic, and her grip relaxed
long enough to give Gilman a chance to break it entirely. He pulled the steel-like claws from
his neck, and would have dragged the beldame over the edge of the gulf had not the claws received
a fresh access of strength and closed in again. This time he resolved to reply in kind, and
his own hands reached out for the creature’s throat. Before she saw what he was doing
he had the chain of the crucifix twisted about her neck, and a moment later he had tightened
it enough to cut off her breath. During her last struggle he felt something bite at his ankle,
and saw that Brown Jenkin had come to her aid. With one savage kick he sent the morbidity over
the edge of the gulf and heard it whimper on some level far below.

Whether he had killed the ancient crone he did not know, but he let her rest
on the floor where she had fallen. Then, as he turned away, he saw on the table a sight which
nearly snapped the last thread of his reason. Brown Jenkin, tough of sinew and with four tiny
hands of daemoniac dexterity, had been busy while the witch was throttling him, and his efforts
had been in vain. What he had prevented the knife from doing to the victim’s chest, the
yellow fangs of the furry blasphemy had done to a wrist—and the bowl so lately on the
floor stood full beside the small lifeless body.

In his dream-delirium Gilman heard the hellish, alien-rhythmed chant of the
Sabbat coming from an infinite distance, and knew the black man must be there. Confused memories
mixed themselves with his mathematics, and he believed his subconscious mind held the
angles
which he needed to guide him back to the normal world—alone and unaided for the first
time. He felt sure he was in the immemorially sealed loft above his own room, but whether he
could ever escape through the slanting floor or the long-stopped egress he doubted greatly.
Besides, would not an escape from a dream-loft bring him merely into a dream-house—an
abnormal projection of the actual place he sought? He was wholly bewildered as to the relation
betwixt dream and reality in all his experiences.

The passage through the vague abysses would be frightful, for the Walpurgis-rhythm
would be vibrating, and at last he would have to hear that hitherto veiled cosmic pulsing which
he so mortally dreaded. Even now he could detect a low, monstrous shaking whose tempo he suspected
all too well. At Sabbat-time it always mounted and reached through to the worlds to summon the
initiate to nameless rites. Half the chants of the Sabbat were patterned on this faintly overheard
pulsing which no earthly ear could endure in its unveiled spatial fulness. Gilman wondered,
too, whether he could trust his instinct to take him back to the right part of space. How could
he be sure he would not land on that green-litten hillside of a far planet, on the tessellated
terrace above the city of tentacled monsters somewhere beyond the galaxy, or in the spiral black
vortices of that ultimate void of Chaos wherein reigns the mindless daemon-sultan Azathoth?

Just before he made the plunge the violet light went out and left him in utter
blackness. The witch—old Keziah—Nahab—that must have meant her death. And
mixed with the distant chant of the Sabbat and the whimpers of Brown Jenkin in the gulf below
he thought he heard another and wilder whine from unknown depths. Joe Mazurewicz—the prayers
against the Crawling Chaos now turning to an inexplicably triumphant shriek—worlds of
sardonic actuality impinging on vortices of febrile dream—Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The
Goat with a Thousand Young. . . .

They found Gilman on the floor of his queerly angled old garret room long before
dawn, for the terrible cry had brought Desrochers and Choynski and Dombrowski and Mazurewicz
at once, and had even wakened the soundly sleeping Elwood in his chair. He was alive, and with
open, staring eyes, but seemed largely unconscious. On his throat were the marks of murderous
hands, and on his left ankle was a distressing rat-bite. His clothing was badly rumpled, and
Joe’s crucifix was missing. Elwood trembled, afraid even to speculate on what new form
his friend’s sleep-walking had taken. Mazurewicz seemed half-dazed because of a “sign”
he said he had had in response to his prayers, and he crossed himself frantically when the squealing
and whimpering of a rat sounded from beyond the slanting partition.

When the dreamer was settled on his couch in Elwood’s room they sent
for Dr. Malkowski—a local practitioner who would repeat no tales where they might prove
embarrassing—and he gave Gilman two hypodermic injections which caused him to relax in
something like natural drowsiness. During the day the patient regained consciousness at times
and whispered his newest dream disjointedly to Elwood. It was a painful process, and at its
very start brought out a fresh and disconcerting fact.

Gilman—whose ears had so lately possessed an abnormal sensitiveness—was
now stone deaf. Dr. Malkowski, summoned again in haste, told Elwood that both ear-drums were
ruptured, as if by the impact of some stupendous sound intense beyond all human conception or
endurance. How such a sound could have been heard in the last few hours without arousing all
the Miskatonic Valley was more than the honest physician could say.

Elwood wrote his part of the colloquy on paper, so that a fairly easy communication
was maintained. Neither knew what to make of the whole chaotic business, and decided it would
be better if they thought as little as possible about it. Both, though, agreed that they must
leave this ancient and accursed house as soon as it could be arranged. Evening papers spoke
of a police raid on some curious revellers in a ravine beyond Meadow Hill just before dawn,
and mentioned that the white stone there was an object of age-long superstitious regard. Nobody
had been caught, but among the scattering fugitives had been glimpsed a huge negro. In another
column it was stated that no trace of the missing child Ladislas Wolejko had been found.

The crowning horror came that very night. Elwood will never forget it, and
was forced to stay out of college the rest of the term because of the resulting nervous breakdown.
He had thought he heard rats in the partitions all the evening, but paid little attention to
them. Then, long after both he and Gilman had retired, the atrocious shrieking began. Elwood
jumped up, turned on the lights, and rushed over to his guest’s couch. The occupant was
emitting sounds of veritably inhuman nature, as if racked by some torment beyond description.
He was writhing under the bedclothes, and a great red stain was beginning to appear on the blankets.

Elwood scarcely dared to touch him, but gradually the screaming and writhing
subsided. By this time Dombrowski, Choynski, Desrochers, Mazurewicz, and the top-floor lodger
were all crowding into the doorway, and the landlord had sent his wife back to telephone for
Dr. Malkowski. Everybody shrieked when a large rat-like form suddenly jumped out from beneath
the ensanguined bedclothes and scuttled across the floor to a fresh, open hole close by. When
the doctor arrived and began to pull down those frightful covers Walter Gilman was dead.

It would be barbarous to do more than suggest what had killed Gilman. There
had been virtually a tunnel through his body—something had eaten his heart out. Dombrowski,
frantic at the failure of his constant rat-poisoning efforts, cast aside all thought of his
lease and within a week had moved with all his older lodgers to a dingy but less ancient house
in Walnut Street. The worst thing for a while was keeping Joe Mazurewicz quiet; for the brooding
loomfixer would never stay sober, and was constantly whining and muttering about spectral and
terrible things.

It seems that on that last hideous night Joe had stooped to look at the crimson
rat-tracks which led from Gilman’s couch to the nearby hole. On the carpet they were very
indistinct, but a piece of open flooring intervened between the carpet’s edge and the
base-board. There Mazurewicz had found something monstrous—or thought he had, for no one
else could quite agree with him despite the undeniable queerness of the prints. The tracks on
the flooring were certainly vastly unlike the average prints of a rat, but even Choynski and
Desrochers would not admit that they were like the prints of four tiny human hands.

The house was never rented again. As soon as Dombrowski left it the pall of
its final desolation began to descend, for people shunned it both on account of its old reputation
and because of the new foetid odour. Perhaps the ex-landlord’s rat-poison had worked after
all, for not long after his departure the place became a neighbourhood nuisance. Health officials
traced the smell to the closed spaces above and beside the eastern garret room, and agreed that
the number of dead rats must be enormous. They decided, however, that it was not worth their
while to hew open and disinfect the long-sealed spaces; for the foetor would soon be over, and
the locality was not one which encouraged fastidious standards. Indeed, there were always vague
local tales of unexplained stenches upstairs in the Witch House just after May-Eve and Hallowmass.
The neighbours grumblingly acquiesced in the inertia—but the foetor none the less formed
an additional count against the place. Toward the last the house was condemned as an habitation
by the building inspector.

Gilman’s dreams and their attendant circumstances have never been explained.
Elwood, whose thoughts on the entire episode are sometimes almost maddening, came back to college
the next autumn and graduated in the following June. He found the spectral gossip of the town
much diminished, and it is indeed a fact that—notwithstanding certain reports of a ghostly
tittering in the deserted house which lasted almost as long as that edifice itself—no
fresh appearances either of old Keziah or of Brown Jenkin have been muttered of since Gilman’s
death. It is rather fortunate that Elwood was not in Arkham in that later year when certain
events abruptly renewed the local whispers about elder horrors. Of course he heard about the
matter afterward and suffered untold torments of black and bewildered speculation; but even
that was not as bad as actual nearness and several possible sights would have been.

In March, 1931, a gale wrecked the roof and great chimney of the vacant Witch
House, so that a chaos of crumbling bricks, blackened, moss-grown shingles, and rotting planks
and timbers crashed down into the loft and broke through the floor beneath. The whole attic
story was choked with debris from above, but no one took the trouble to touch the mess before
the inevitable razing of the decrepit structure. That ultimate step came in the following December,
and it was when Gilman’s old room was cleared out by reluctant, apprehensive workmen that
the gossip began.

Among the rubbish which had crashed through the ancient slanting ceiling were
several things which made the workmen pause and call in the police. Later the police in turn
called in the coroner and several professors from the university. There were bones—badly
crushed and splintered, but clearly recognisable as human—whose manifestly modern date
conflicted puzzlingly with the remote period at which their only possible lurking-place, the
low, slant-floored loft overhead, had supposedly been sealed from all human access. The coroner’s
physician decided that some belonged to a small child, while certain others—found mixed
with shreds of rotten brownish cloth—belonged to a rather undersized, bent female of advanced
years. Careful sifting of debris also disclosed many tiny bones of rats caught in the collapse,
as well as older rat-bones gnawed by small fangs in a fashion now and then highly productive
of controversy and reflection.

Other objects found included the mingled fragments of many books and papers,
together with a yellowish dust left from the total disintegration of still older books and papers.
All, without exception, appeared to deal with black magic in its most advanced and horrible
forms; and the evidently recent date of certain items is still a mystery as unsolved as that
of the modern human bones. An even greater mystery is the absolute homogeneity of the crabbed,
archaic writing found on a wide range of papers whose conditions and watermarks suggest age
differences of at least 150 to 200 years. To some, though, the greatest mystery of all is the
variety of utterly inexplicable objects—objects whose shapes, materials, types of workmanship,
and purposes baffle all conjecture—found scattered amidst the wreckage in evidently diverse
states of injury. One of these things—which excited several Miskatonic professors profoundly—is
a badly damaged monstrosity plainly resembling the strange image which Gilman gave to the college
museum, save that it is larger, wrought of some peculiar bluish stone instead of metal, and
possessed of a singularly angled pedestal with undecipherable hieroglyphics.

Archaeologists and anthropologists are still trying to explain the bizarre
designs chased on a crushed bowl of light metal whose inner side bore ominous brownish stains
when found. Foreigners and credulous grandmothers are equally garrulous about the modern nickel
crucifix with broken chain mixed in the rubbish and shiveringly identified by Joe Mazurewicz
as that which he had given poor Gilman many years before. Some believe this crucifix was dragged
up to the sealed loft by rats, while others think it must have been on the floor in some corner
of Gilman’s old room all the time. Still others, including Joe himself, have theories
too wild and fantastic for sober credence.

When the slanting wall of Gilman’s room was torn out, the once sealed
triangular space between that partition and the house’s north wall was found to contain
much less structural debris, even in proportion to its size, than the room itself; though it
had a ghastly layer of older materials which paralysed the wreckers with horror. In brief, the
floor was a veritable ossuary of the bones of small children—some fairly modern, but others
extending back in infinite gradations to a period so remote that crumbling was almost complete.
On this deep bony layer rested a knife of great size, obvious antiquity, and grotesque, ornate,
and exotic design—above which the debris was piled.

In the midst of this debris, wedged between a fallen plank and a cluster of
cemented bricks from the ruined chimney, was an object destined to cause more bafflement, veiled
fright, and openly superstitious talk in Arkham than anything else discovered in the haunted
and accursed building. This object was the partly crushed skeleton of a huge, diseased rat,
whose abnormalities of form are still a topic of debate and source of singular reticence among
the members of Miskatonic’s department of comparative anatomy. Very little concerning
this skeleton has leaked out, but the workmen who found it whisper in shocked tones about the
long, brownish hairs with which it was associated.

The bones of the tiny paws, it is rumoured, imply prehensile characteristics
more typical of a diminutive monkey than of a rat; while the small skull with its savage yellow
fangs is of the utmost anomalousness, appearing from certain angles like a miniature, monstrously
degraded parody of a human skull. The workmen crossed themselves in fright when they came upon
this blasphemy, but later burned candles of gratitude in St. Stanislaus’ Church because
of the shrill, ghostly tittering they felt they would never hear again.