Despite his Falstaffian appearance he was a hard and ruthless man. His piggish eyes were filled with greed; his fleshy mouth was lustful; his only natural smile was one of avarice.
It was dismal sitting there on rickety boxes in the pitchy darkness, but we smoked pipes and occasionally flashed our pocket lamps about.
Copp’s Hill Burying Ground, which could not be many blocks away from this very house, was a favourite scene.
There was a study called ‘Subway Accident,’ in which a flock of the vile things were clambering up from some unknown catacomb through a crack in the floor of the Boston Street subway and attacking a crowd of people on the platform. Another showed a dance on Copp’s Hill among the tombs with the background of today.
Masson disliked and respected the ferocious little rodents, for he knew the danger that lurked in their flashing, needle-sharp fangs;.
There is, I reflected tritely, an infinite deal of pathos in the state of an eminent person who has come down in the world.
He led me out of that tangle of alleys in another direction, it seems, for when we sighted a lamp-post we were in a half-familiar street with monotonous rows of mingled tenement blocks and old houses. Charter Street, it turned out to be, but I was too flustered to notice just where we hit.
In such surroundings the mind loses its perspective; time and space become trivial and unreal, and echoes of a forgotten prehistoric past beat insistently upon the enthralled consciousness.
We were too late for the elevated, and walked back downtown through Hanover Street. I remember that wall. We switched from Tremont up Beacon, and Pickman left me at the corner of Joy, where I turned off. I never spoke to him again.
It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred the mad poet dreamed on the night before he sang his unexplained couplet: “That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.
History had led me to this archaic grave. History, indeed, was all I had after everything else ended in mocking Satanism.
It was morning when I saw it, but shadow lurked always there. The trees grew too thickly, and their trunks were too big for any healthy New England wood. There was too much silence in the dim alleys between them, and the floor was too soft with the dank moss and mattings of infinite years of decay.
I don’t believe that there is any fourth dimension, and I emphatically do not believe in Tao.
They were the makers and enslavers of that life, and above all doubt the originals of the fiendish elder myths.
Carter did not wish to meet a bhole, so.
I hate the moon – I am afraid of it – for when it shines on certain scenes familiar and loved it sometimes makes them unfamiliar and hideous. It.
It is only in the terrible phantasms of drugs or delirium that any other man can have such a descent as mine.
The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.
It is no news to me that tales of hidden races are as old as all mankind.
I was quite unbalanced with that instinct for the strange and the unknown which had made me a wanderer upon earth and a haunter of far, ancient, and forbidden places.