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- Herausgeber: GAEditori
- Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
This story is about the bizarre dreams of Walter Gilman, a young man from Haverill, a student at Miskatonic University, located in the fictional city of Arkham, Massachusetts. Young Walter, taken from his mathematical studies and the ghostly folklore of the city, rents the room where the old witch, Keziah Mason, lived, who escaped the stake through strange lines drawn with a red liquid, probably blood, on the wall of his cell. in 1692. At the time not even Cotton Mather, the great inquisitor of witch hunts in colonial New England, could interpret these diagrams; on the contrary, Walter assumes that they are the key to travel through space and dimensions, and this is precisely the reason that drives him to undertake mathematical research accompanied by reading books such as the abhorred Necronomicon. At the beginning of the story, the protagonist suffers from a mild cerebral fever, and furthermore his hearing has sharpened disproportionately, so much so that the ticking of the clock seems like a cannon shot. But, behind this apparent patina of normal noises, Walter perceives, barely audible even for his almost magical ability, sounds that disturb him more than the scrabbling of mice in the wall, more deliberate than casual for him. From here starts a story halfway between nightmare and surreal, with Walter at the mercy of the witch Keziah and her familiar, Brown Jenkin, a monstrous hybrid with the body of a mouse and the face and hands of humans, who finally force him to sign a diabolical contract with The Black Man, one of the multiple forms of the god Nyarlathotep. However, these dreams are rather fragmented and confused, and moreover they clash with his seemingly unshakable skepticism. However, his sleepwalking is undeniable, confirmed by the tenants of the condominium where he lives and his dreams coincide horribly with the discoveries of the following day (an alien statuette, a bite on the wrist). The end of the protagonist, after his refusal to sacrifice a child on Walpurgis night, and after killing the witch in the ensuing scuffle, is terrible: Brown Jenkin will devour his heart from the inside, in front of the helpless gaze of his colleague and roommate Elwood. Only two years after her death, the remains of the witch, Brown Jenkin and the numerous children sacrificed over the centuries by the satanic cult will be found in the attic, which in the meantime collapsed due to bad weather.
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H.P. Lovecraft
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Printed in Aug 2022
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 years of the Province. Nor was any spot in that city more steeped in macabre memory than the gable room which harboured him—for it was this house and this room which had likewise harboured old Keziah Mason, whose flight from Salem Gaol at the last no one was ever able to explain. That was in 1692—the gaoler had gone mad and babbled of a small white-fanged furry thing which scuttled out of Keziah’s cell, and not even Cotton Mather could explain the curves and angles smeared on the grey stone walls with some red, sticky fluid.
Possibly Gilman ought not to have studied so hard. Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain, and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension. Gilman came from Haverhill, but it was only after he had entered college in Arkham that he began to connect his mathematics with the fantastic legends of elder magic. Something in the air of the hoary town worked obscurely on his imagination. The professors at Miskatonic had urged him to slacken up, and had voluntarily cut down his course at several points. Moreover, they had stopped him from consulting the dubious old books on forbidden secrets that were kept under lock and key in a vault at the university library. But all these precautions came late in the day, so that Gilman had some terrible hints from the dreaded Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, the fragmentary Book of Eibon, and the suppressed Unaussprechlicken Kulten of von Junzt to correlate with his abstract formulae on the properties of space and the linkage of dimensions known and unknown.
He knew his room was in the old Witch-House—that, indeed, was why he had taken it. There was much in the Essex County records about Keziah Mason’s trial, and what she had admitted under pressure to the Court of Oyer and Terminer had fascinated Gilman beyond all reason. She had told Judge Hathorne of lines and curves that could be made to point out directions leading through the walls of space to other spaces beyond, and had implied that such lines and curves were frequently used at certain midnight meetings in the dark valley of the white stone beyond Meadow Hill and on the unpeopled island in the river. She had spoken also of the Black Man, of her oath, and of her new secret name of Nahab. Then she had drawn those devices on the walls of her cell and vanished.
