I. Overwhelming evidence notwithstanding, thin and bespectacled Luke Matthews didn't believe in ghosts, werewolves, warlocks, witches, or demons. "To Hell with the Devil" had become a favorite expression of this tall, stooping intellectual, voiced particularly around fellow graduate students, who admired Luke for his abandonment of belief.

To Luke, sitting now in his parent's living room, puffing on his pipe, watching the red glow of the setting sun, and studying the spire of the old Parker House through the leafless trees in the front yard, Hell was a fabrication of the Church and, therefore, a delusion. The views of this thin bespectacled man were reinforced by Neitzche, Marx, and Derrida, whom he claimed in seminar after seminar as his most significant influences. A doctoral student in English, studying at a major university, Luke was finishing a dissertation applying deconstructive principles to Bronte's Wuthering Heights. His parents, now away at a church revival this evening, were proud of him. Sitting on the faded green couch he had slept on as a child, Luke put his pipe to his mouth and reflected: during his college years, he had seen the superstitions of his ancestors uprooted like weeds, each tossed onto the pile of cultural discards that Luke kept in the back of his mind, just in case some day he might need a bit of trivia to impress colleagues and students gathered around him to learn about his most recent publication.

Evening shadows darkening, Luke wondered how he was going to use this weekend. He was glad his parents were gone, because that gave him the freedom he needed. Between semesters and burnt-out from too many books, papers, and seminars, Luke wanted a boost, a thrill. He needed to do something different, he told himself, something that he would remember when he was working on his dissertation in his small attic room just off the campus. In fact, he was tempted to visit the old Parker House, the rickety brick and wooden two story Victorian affair located on the corner of Seventh and Taylor, just a block away. Superstitions aside, the place had a creepy appeal.

Luke had vivid recollections of the place. Even in the light of day during his childhood and adolescence, the old Victorian house had always seemed dark; looking at the place was like gazing through darkly transparent film. For another, throughout his youth, as he had made a point of walking past the deserted place to the local convenience store or to the home of one of his friends, Luke had occasionally heard awful sounds coming from the Parker house, particularly at night. When he was twelve, walking past the place around midnight in late November, he had heard scream after scream, something his father attributed to demonic spirit. Once, when he was sixteen and walking back to his house from his girlfriend's on the darkest night of the year, Luke had seen a light flickering through a corner second story window and a shadow bouncing onto the shade. If Luke were making these stories up, his parents knew, at least the boy's delusions had a solid foundation.

That foundation was his grandfather. During the first eighteen years of his life, Luke had heard stories about the Parker place from his grandfather, a crazy old coot who had lived with the boy and his parents from the time Luke was five and had made it evident, to his dying day, that he despised everyone in the family save Luke.

Routinely, Grandfather Matthews would drag Luke into the family room after a winter meal of steak and mashed potatoes, sit the boy on his lap five feet from the fire, and fill his grandson's head full of Parker house stories. Sometimes, as Luke listened to the old man in the darkly carpeted and paneled room, he could swear that his grandfather was trying to scare him to death.

II. "Take the murder and dismemberment of Cassie Russell over thirty years ago," Luke had told his friends a week before, as over beer at a topless tavern near the university he had tried to explain his warped childhood. "That was one of Grandpa's favorites, one that the old man added a bit more blood to each time he had told it. Cassie was high school student who made extra cash delivering pizzas and made the mistake of knocking on the door of the Parker house on Halloween in 1965. Odd thing was," Luke had remembered with a shiver, "no one had lived in that old house since the early '50's.

Poor little girl. Anyhow, according to Grandpa, that was the last anyone ever saw Cassie alive; a month later, some teenagers found her body, or the remains of it, scattered and decomposing over the basement floor in the old house. 'Stench was unbelievable, Grandson,' the old man growled at me, tobacco stains on his shirt, beard, and teeth. 'An' blood everywhere: on the walls, on the carpet, on the TV, on the dining room table. Even more curious, little Luke: Cassie's eyeballs was gone.' No one ever explained what the boys were doing in the house, which had not been lived in for years. 'Cassie was sure as hell a cute little thing,' Grandpa would conclude, smacking his lips and looking wistfully into the distance."

When his friends(all doctoral candidates) refused to believe this, but waited for more in breathless anticipation, Luke had lit his pipe and hit them with another Grandpa Matthews story. "Okay. So listen to this. Five years after the discovery of Cassie Russell, the dead and disemboweled bodies of two of these teenagers-a boy and a girl-were found hanging by their necks from a rafter in the attic of the old Parker house. The murderer had tied black nylon chord five times around the neck of each victim. An autopsy report showed the boy and the girl had been disemboweled before the time of their deaths. 'Eyes of the boy and girl was missin', just like Cassie,' the old man told me. 'Maybe the mice ate 'em, the eyes, that is, heheheh,' the old man had chuckled. Jesus, what a mean old bastard.

"Then Grandpa would carry me over to the family room window and point with a crooked and trembling finger in the direction of the Parker house, just visible in evening light through the trees. 'House got some evil in it, boy.' the old man had wheezed, always struggling for air. 'People stupid enough to try to tear the thing down generally died.' The mean old man, actually smiling at me, always followed this up with accountings of some of the 'accidents': the body of city councilman Ed Jeffries, his heart cut out and stuffed into his mouth, had been found on the bloodied kitchen floor; the mangled eye-less body of Susan Thompson, had been discovered dangling upside down from a ceiling fan in the master bedroom on the second floor."

III. Of course, Luke thought to himself as he sat in his parents' family room in Boise, his friends had thought he was making the stories up. No self-respecting Ph. D., one of Luke's friends had remarked, would ever take those stories seriously; doing so was equivalent to believing in the devil, a character now regarded in intellectual circles as nothing more than a harmful fiction, capable of nonetheless inspiring incredibly dark deeds.

Now a young man on the verge of getting his Ph. D. in English, Luke actually missed the old man(who had died of congestive heart failure four years ago) and wondered as he sat puffing his pipe and gazing out the window, waiting for the darkness, how any sane individual could possibly believe the old man's stories let alone the explanation the community accepted: that the house was haunted. Indeed, to prove to himself that there was no basis for any superstitions regarding the old house, Luke had called a former girl friend last night and asked her to spend part of the next evening with him in the old mansion. "Consider it a cheap thrill," he had commented, smugly. "Sure, Luke," Misty had quickly responded, "I like cheap thrills," and Luke remembered then that in high school Misty had been one of those promiscuous beauties that would do anything for a thrill.

IV. Luke met Misty in front of the store on seventh and Main, six blocks from the old mansion. A gorgeous brunette with a figure that would give the Pope ideas, Misty wore a blue sweater, blue jeans, and boots. Luke had worn his frayed green tweed jacket, leather patches on the elbows, faded jeans, and red tennis shoes. From there, full moon overhead, they walked hand-in-hand into the center of town, where they dined at Angel Fong's, an over-priced Chinese restaurant situated in the basement of one of the city's banks.

Misty sat across the table from Luke in the darkened dining room and sighed as she remembered the old Parker place. "Me and my friends usually stayed the hell away from that place, let me tell you, except for once, " Misty droned on, dipping bread in her soup. "Once, Shelly and me threw rocks at the house when we seen someone inside. Shelly's rock went through one of the front windows. That was kinda spooky, the sound that breaking glass made. Kind of a cheap thrill, I guess."

Glancing around the room to make sure no one had heard the Misty, Luke remembered the story. It had been on a night after a local high school football game that Misty and Shelly, drunken sluts, had decided to drive by the old Parker place and spend an hour or two just throwing rocks at the house. The broken window had become legendary in the high schools, Shelly a local hero, when suddenly, one day after Halloween night Shelly's nude body had been found in the foothills just overlooking the town, her beautiful body impaled on a sharp post, her eyes ripped out of their sockets.

"Sometimes," began Misty, taking a noisy sip from her wine glass and looking at Luke, "sometimes, late at night, I get this creepy feeling, like something watching me, like, Jesus, these eyes that I know come from that old house. Then I think about Shelly, about how they found her. No eyes and all. Jesus, sometimes I sit up in bed and cry I get so scared, and Jesus that's when Mom comes in to tell me that it's all right and to shut the hell up. 'You shut the hell up, Misty Jean!!' she'd yell. 'Me an' your old man's tyrin' to sleep.' "

Studying Misty, who at twenty-four was more beautiful and more stupid than he had remembered, Luke slowly chewed his raw steak, savoring the juices. Between bites, he asked her if she still wanted to go to the Parker mansion. "Just a cheap thrill," Luke said.

"Oh, hell yes, I do!" exclaimed Misty, loud enough for the elderly couple at the next table to overhear and stare at the loud young woman. "I don't believe that crap. No one believes it." She drained her wine glass and gesture to Luke that she wanted a refill. Then, turning to the old couple, Misty asked, "You folks still believe those stories?"

V. Later that night, they entered the house easily enough, climbing a tree and jumping onto the roof, breaking a window, and getting in through what must have been a guest bedroom. Luke had brought a flashlight, which he flipped on as soon as he and Misty were inside.

The dark pine dresser and wall shelves, Luke noticed, flashing his beam around the room, were immaculate, an unusual touch for an abandoned place. He saw no dust anywhere. Too, the frame, Victorian-styled bed looked freshly made. The only unusual item was the smell: The air was saturated by a thickly metallic odor that made Luke think of blood. Hanging from the ceiling was a chandelier, and when Luke tried the light switch the room lit up in a reddish glow, like a bonfire.

"Daaaamn," exclaimed Misty, almost breathless, , what a place."

"Sure is some place," responded Nick, still surprised by the cleanliness.

"Wanna go on?" asked Misty, anxiously.

Immediately, as he nodded, Luke saw a mental image of a corpse dangling bloodily from a full moon and sensed that something was terribly wrong with the house. Sworn, however, to resist impulses predicated on superstitions, Luke looked at the girl. "hell yeah," he said, feeling a slight tremble in his voice, "let's see this place."

And so Misty and Luke explored the mansion, turning on the chandelier lights in the long hall way outside the bedroom, then creeping down the hallway and entering the rooms upstairs one by one. They found the huge master bedroom, saw the ceiling fan and a dressing table stacked with very old photos of people that Luke assumed has once lived in the place. The people in the photos looked cold and sullen.

Next, they crept downstairs into the darkness, flicked on the light switch at the bottom, and walked into the largest and most grandiose living room either one of them had ever seen, filled with padded nineteenth century high-backed chairs, three couches with wooden and bending backs, a grandfather clock that, oddly, was still ticking and keeping the correct time. From there, they walked to the dining room, which was more of a hall, and looked at the long oaken table ringed with old wooden chairs, all of which looked brand new to Luke.

When they walked through the kitchen in the back of the house and noticed an open door seemingly inviting the intruders down into the cellar darkness, Misty stopped in her tracks.

"What's the matter?" asked Luke, who had grown bolder and bolder the longer they stayed in the house.

"Ain't goin' down there, boy friend," said Misty, pointing to the open door.

"Why?" asked Luke. "Can't be a thing down there." As he said the word, Luke felt chilled, sensed something huge and dark passing inches from him, saw in his mind's eye two red eyes blazing directly at him. His heart jumping into his throat, Luke reminded himself that what he had seen was superstition.

"Oh, babe," Luke responded, shaken but imitating a cockiness which his fellow grad students had come to admire, "then I'll go myself." Luke started towards the door, sensing still that he was moving into danger.

"Luke, Luke, , honey, please," whined Misty.

"Please, what?"

"Please don't go into that dark hole. I got a bad feeling about this, Luke. Somethin' not right here. Like those eyes I told you about I dream about."

Instead of seeing in Misty's fear evidence confirming his own suspicions, Luke pushed onward. He had to go down the dark stairs now. Besides, he needed the rush.

"I'll be back in a minute," Luke said, approaching the entrance. "Anyway, to Hell with the Devil."

"That's a cute thing to say, Luke, but what the hell about me?" Misty whimpered, and Luke wondered if she were attempting to make him feel sorry for her or if she were frightened. He decided this was an emotional ploy on her part.

"You'll be all right, sugar pie," he assured her. "And it won't be totally dark. The moon is full tonight and even without the flashlight," and here he turned his light off, "you can see just about everything."

Luke was right. In the light of the moon, everything in the old kitchen was visible: the linoleum floor, the old refrigerator in the corner, the shelves, the huge sink, everything.

"Ok, Luke. . OK, " Misty said, signed. "But hurry back."

Giving Misty a kiss on the cheek, Luke turned the flashlight on and bounded down the stairs, wondering what he would find when he reached the bottom.

It was when Luke stepped onto the cold concrete of the cellar floor that he knew that he had made a fatal error. The revelation hit like and shovel against the side of the head. Panicked, he flashed the light across the walls of the cellar just as the door at the top of the stairs slammed shut.

He waited, breathless, heard the blood pounding in his brain. Then, he heard footsteps lumbering over the floor above him in the direction of Misty, heard Misty scream. Luke made out unmistakable sounds of a struggle, rapid footsteps indicating Misty was running to escape, heavier footsteps of her pursuer. Then, he heard her shout for him, heard her scream again and again, was reminded of the sounds of a huge animal caught in a trap. As if awakened from a dark dream, he rushed up the stairs, three steps at a time, and threw himself against the cellar door.

The door, made of hard, thick wood, did not budge, so he threw himself against the door again and again, frantic, as Misty's screams suddenly stopped. Wondering if his girl were dead, Luke bounded back down the stairs, searched the cellar frantically with his flashlight, passing the beam over walls and floor again and again, nearly giving up hope when he saw something glittering in the darkness in the back of the cellar. Luke ran towards the object, light revealing that he had found a huge ax whose wooden handle seemed as fresh as it would have been had Luke purchased the tool that very day.

Luke rushed back up the stairs, flashlight in one hand and ax in another and, two steps before the door, lay down his light so that the beam shone on the door, raised his ax and swung. At the first chance, the blade struck in the wood, but Luke easily pulled the weapon free. Luke swung again, and again, and again, finally piercing through the wooden door. With several more swings, Luke created a rectangular opening through which, as he dropped his ax, he could reach the door handle and unlock and open the door.

The door opened, and feeling himself exhausted, Luke called out, "Misty!! Misty! Where are you? Where are you? Say something!"

He listened and behind the silence he heard something, a rhythmic panting which grew louder and louder, like two great beasts fighting each other to exhaustion. Terrified, Luke dropped his ax and walked in the direction of the sound, walked up the stairs, down the hall, and finally into a room right next to the one through which he and Misty had first gained entrance to the mansion. Nearly crazed by terror, Luke pointed the flashlight in front of him, thought he saw something large in the middle of the very small dark room, listened for Misty, and then shining the light directly in front of him again realized what it was that he was looking at. He had found Misty.

VI. In the brilliant moonlight, he could see her arms and legs were bound by rope and tied to steel rings protruding from each of the four walls. Misty was suspended horizontally in the dark space, three feet or so off the floor, her nude body in a spread-eagle position. The rope that bound her arms and legs had been pulled so tight that Misty could not move. Her face was turned away from him. The figure looked grotesque, seeming to float in the air.

Breaking into a cold sweat, paralyzed, heart thumping wildly, Luke felt himself go numb, wondered what he was doing in this room on this night. For several minutes, unmoving, he stood and tried not to look towards the face, certain the eyes had been removed, sure that he was going to get sick or pass out. Then, he heard a voice he did not recognize rasp, "Hey, can you believe this crap?", and knew the girl had turned her head towards him. Glancing up and down her body, avoiding her eyes, he saw that her wrists and ankles bore red burn marks from where the rope had rubbed against the flesh, could actually feel the girl's pain as she weakly struggled to get loose.

Then, with morbid fascination, he watched the blood trickling down her left arm from the rope and in the direction of her bare breast and wondered what he should do about it. Misty's breasts and flat stomach bore scratches that suggested a struggle.

Mesmerized, stupidly almost, Luke stared at the body dangling spread-eagle in front of him, had trouble acknowledging that bound before him was a girl he had known since grade school. Feeling immersed in something so dark and dreadful that it was almost palpable. Summoning courage, he slowly looked up, towards her face, noticed that Misty's cheek and forehead bore deep cuts, realized she was bleeding slightly from the nose and mouth, and then forced himself to look at her eyes. With a tremendous sigh of relief, he realized that Misty still had her sight but he could read only emptiness there, as if something had scooped out her soul.

He looked at the girl, felt delirious, actually thought of running his hand over her breasts, lightly touching her.. he heard her whisper, mockingly, "Hey, little man, hey, little man; he's here. He's here. He's here. And you are dead, dead, dead." This couldn't be Misty, he told himself, struggling to stay rational. This wasn't her voice. She sounded diabolical.

"What?" Luke asked, stunned. "What are you saying?" It occurred to him that this girl, grotesquely suspended, felt no pain.

"I said," the girl growled, guttural, her voice coming from deep within her, "he's here, you stupid miserable xxxxxx xxxxxx. Somewhere in the house,. And, you baby boy blue, Mr. To-Hell-With-the-Devil, he's gonna eat you alive." At this, Misty smacked her lips; she actually seemed to enjoy this moment.

Luke stepped back, looked at the body before him, glanced at the room around him, felt the room beginning to spin, and desperately struggled to focus on the task at hand.

"Who's here?" Luke asked, terror sweeping through him, weakening him. "Who, who, who are you talking about?"

"Who do you think?," she said slowly, laughing, looking at Luke through glazed animal eyes. "Nick paused, yet repelled.

"Dazed, he looked at her, her mouth open, her face bloodied, then said, "What the hell is going on here? What is this? What the hell has happened to you?" Even as he spoke, he wondered why he had asked, felt a mixture of fear and knew that something was watching him, zeroing in on him.

Slowly, almost unable to move, he turned, looked into the darkness, illuminated by the moonlight, searched for whatever it was that had locked him in the basement and raped this girl. While he could see no one, he sensed darkness passing through the house, a cold dark breeze looking for him, felt the eyes of evil boring into him, knew that whatever it was had the power to take to the pit of Hell.

Panicked, wanting to run, he knew he had to free Misty. It was imperative that he do so. So he turned back to her, reached into his pocket, took out his Swiss army knife, opened it, and put the blade of to the straps binding her legs. Frantically as he worked and she giggled, regardless of the pressure he put on his knife, he could not cut the rope.

"Jesus Christ," Luke whispered, falling to his knees, knowing the situation was hopeless. "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus."

"He won't help you now, little man," said Misty, slowly turning her face towards him and staring maliciously. "Go ahead, little man: C'mon. Gimme that thrill you promised me."

The rustling behind him, like the wind in the tree outside his parents' house, made his heart stop, the hairs lining the back of his neck bristle, turned his nose, ears, arms and legs ice-cube cold. He shivered, hoped this night would soon be over, felt something brush his shoulder, knew something large and dark and scaly was passing behind him, put his head down and took a deep breath, then stood up, turned and walked through the door into the hallway.

VII. It happened so fast that Luke didn't have time to react: a sharp hook arcing perfectly toward him and cutting into and through his stomach; the sensation of being lifted off the ground; the searing, darkening pain; the sound of someone screaming like a beast; the sudden nausea as the sharp thing ripped into his stomach; the stench of his own blood; finally, the sensation that he was gliding out of his own body, leaving his own bloodied and mutilated form, on the verge of beginning something new and indescribably horrible.

Suspended in the hallway at a point near the ceiling, he looked below, saw his own body limp and bleeding, pierced by an enormous hook; the hook in turn was connected to a chain that dangled from the ceiling. He wondered if somehow he had come under Divine Judgment for believing the wrong things, knew he had been given over to a darkness so vast that it stretched forever beyond his imagination, knew for the first time that evil was a tangible mass.

Floating, he studied his corpse, swinging on the chain, blood dripping onto the carpet, felt incredibly light, felt no pain, thought of Misty in the next room, somehow willed himself into the room where he looked down on the nude body, realized that Misty had died seconds before and then looked into the blazing red eyes of an enormous dark mass hovering before him, thought for an instant of his grandfather, then felt himself gripped by a force whose strength he had never known, saw the massive dark wings of this thing.

He felt himself moving at light speed down an endless dark corridor, heard the screams of millions who had suffered the same condemnation in previous centuries, saw the glow of the Lake of Fire at the end of the dark corridor, sensed Misty was waiting for him, and knew he would travel this corridor for eternity.

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The Incident

 wanted to take this opportunity to tell you about an incident that happened to me back when I was a teen-ager... I grew up near xxxxxx City.... and several friends and I used to go to a place a long the river to have a good time and be together... this place was located about 15 minutes south of xxxx City... I can't remember what the name of the place was.... but it was a pretty primitive area... Only an out house and no lights in the little park at all.

We had several different strange happenings at different times we were there... like hearing noises coming from the woods... sounded like the scream of a woman... or once in a while looked like some kind of a glow in the wooded area... but we had one trip that I will never forget... and I vowed to never again go back to that little park in the woods. It has been nearly 20 years since that night and I have not been back.

 Let me tell you a little about the park area... the entrance to the park is on the top of the hill... off a gravel road...the driveway going into the park is gravel but full of ruts... deep ruts... most likely from the heavy rains or the snow thaw in the spring... The drive way is kind of curvy... And finally turns to the left past a lot of trees on both sides of the road... and turns into a circle drive near the river... I think there is a boat landing or something there... There is also a large pillar... looks like maybe at one time there could have been a bridge there...There are no lights in this park... I think there were a couple of picnic tables.... but not really much of anything in this park... Nothing that would attract a person... very rarely did we ever see anyone come into the park when we were there... and after that night I think I know why...

A group of about 6 of us decided we were going to go down there on a Friday night... usually we would just stay for a couple hours... but this particular early summer night... we decided we would take a couple tents, some food, and make it a night...

We heard a few hair raising screeches through the night... but didn't think much of it... We had taken an ax with us this night to make getting some wood for the fire a little easier. We were all sitting around the campfire... it is not quite mid night... there was a heavy fog on the river... this fog was so thick you could cut it with a knife... in a manner of speaking.... The sky was very dark.... we had no moon to guide us...the stars by this time had seemed to just disappear... not lost in the clouds.... just gone in the dark.

 We were all quiet at this time... getting a little tired.... and enjoying a few smores by the fire... When we heard a whimper coming from the trees behind us... everyone just froze... trying to get a bearing on exactly where it was coming from and what it was... it sounded like a woman crying... but there was no one in the park but our group of 6... and we had not seen any one else come into the park the entire time we had been there... we immediately took a head count to make sure everyone was accounted for.

We all agreed that we should see what or who it was... Someone could need help... One of my buddies decides it is a good idea to take the ax with us.... just incase it is a rabid animal or something... but the ax was no where to be found in the camp... He swore he left it on the log... but it wasn't there.

 so each of us grabbing a weapon of some kind... flash light... long stick what ever we could grab quick... we headed out to the woods... walking towards the sound in the dark.... seemed like it took us a while to get closer to the sound... we walked deeper into the woods.

The deeper we got into the woods the farther away the whimpers got... We were all beginning to get a little spooked now... and decided we would be safer back at camp... When suddenly we began hearing strange noises... couldn't tell exactly where they were coming from... twigs breaking not far from us... loud screams in a distance.

 We all agreed that we had a feeling that someone was watching... at one point we even thought we might have seen a figure not more than a 100 yards from us... We decided to get back to camp as fast as we could...As we were on our way our flash light caught our attention to the glimmer of something in the trunk of the tree; all of us a little leery of what it might be, decided to take a closer look...and to our surprise it was our very own ax... with a small puddle of what looked to us like blood.

 We very quickly... very quietly... but all together in a small huddle... went back to where we had made camp... As we approached our camp, we all saw what looked to be someone standing in our camp. As we got closer the figure of a person standing in our camp disappeared. He/it didn't walk or run away. It just was gone.

 Extremely scared by now. We all decided that the best thing to do was to pack up our camp and get the hell out of there... So that’s what we did... But when we jumped into our vehicles we couldn't get either one to start... But instead the lights kept flickering on and off... and even the horn went off... We were so scared all we could think of to do was to pray to God for our safety... and at that moment both cars started.

 We slammed the vehicles in drive and very quickly headed for the only way out of this park... As we were approaching the top of the hill... We seen a very large figure.... nothing like I had ever seen in my life... this shadowy looking dark figure had to have stood 12 ft tall... it seemed to take up the entire exit... but it was shaped like a man... a man carrying a large ax... to afraid to stop we just kept our cars moving as fast as they would move, practically bumper to bumper up the steep bumpy hill...As we got closer to the figure it looked bigger than ever.... it looked like it could inhale both cars. We just kept the cars moving... and right at the moment that it looked like we were going to total our car against this huge figure......... it was gone.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 outré thing?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 unabl

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