Shall I ever forget the terrible thing I saw there? The horror, the dread, the madness seemed too much for the human mind to bear. I flicked the light off at once, and, closing the door, fled screaming out into the street. Well it was that a raging fire broke out immediately afterward and burned that accursed house to the ground. Well — for such a damnable thing must not be, must never be on this world.
If man but knew the screaming madness that lurks in the bowels of the land and the depths of the ocean, if he but caught one glimpse of the things that await in the vast empty depths of the
hideous cosmos! If he knew the secret significance of the flickering of the stars! If the discovery of Pluto had struck him as the omen it was!
If man knew, I think that knowledge would burn out the brains of every man, woman, and child on the face of the Earth. Such things must never be known. Such unspeakable, unfathomable evil must never be allowed to seep into the mentalities of men lest all go up in chaos and madness.
How am I to say what I saw in the room of that cursed house?
To Arkham and the Stars
FRITZ LEIBER
Early on the evening of September 14th last I stepped down onto the venerable brick platform of the Arkham station of the Boston and Maine Railroad. I could have flown in, arriving at the fine new Arkham Airport north of town, where I am told a suburb of quite tasteful Modern Colonial homes now covers most of Meadow Hill, but I found the older conveyance convenient and congenial.
Since I was carrying only a small valise and a flat square cardboard box of trifling weight, I elected to walk the three blocks to the Arkham House. Midway across the old Garrison Street Bridge, which repaired and re- surfaced only ten years ago spans the rushing Miska- tonic there, I paused to survey the city from that modest eminence, setting down my valise and resting my hand on the old iron railing while an occasional dinner-time car rumbled past close beside me.
To my right, just this side of the West Street Bridge where the Miskatonic begins its northward swing, there crouched in the rapid current the ill-regarded little island of gray standing stones, where as I had read in The
French Hill above Powder Mill Street, providing rapid access to the missile-component, machine-tool, and chemical plants southeast of the city. My gaze dropping down and swinging south searched for a moment for the old Witch-House before I remembered it had been razed as long ago as 1931 and the then moldering tenements of the Polish Quarter have largely been replaced by a modest housing development in Colonial urban style, while the newest “foreigners” to crowd the city are the Puerto Ricans and the Negroes.
Taking up my valise, I descended the bridge and continued across River Street, past the rosily mellowed red-brick slant-roofed stout old warehouses which have happily escaped demolition. At the Arkham I confirmed my reservation and checked my valise with the pleasant elderly desk clerk, but, since I had dined early in Boston, I pressed on at once south on Garrison across Church to the University, continuing to carry my cardboard box.
The first academic edifices to interrupt my gaze were the new Administration Building and beyond it the Pickman Nuclear Laboratory, where Miskatonic has expanded east across Garrison, though of course without disturbing the Burying Ground at Lich and Parsonage. Both additions to the University struck me as magnificent structures, wholly compatible with the old quadrangle, and I gave silent thanks to the architect who had been so mindful of tradition.
It was full twilight now and several windows glowed in the nearer edifice, where faculty members must be carrying on the increasing paper work of the University. But before proceeding toward the room, behind one of the windows, which was my immediate destination, I took thoughtful note of the orderly student antisegregation demonstration that was being carried on at the edge of campus in sympathy with similar demonstrations in southern cities.
I observed that one of the placards read “Mazurewicz and Desrochers for Selectmen,” showing me that the students must be taking a close interest in the government of the University city and making me wonder if those candidates were sons of the barely literate individuals innocently mixed up in the Witch-House case. Tempora mutantur!
Inside the pleasant corridors of the Administration Building I quickly found the sanctum of the Chairman of the Department of Literature. The slender silver-haired Professor Albert Wilmarth, hardly looking his more than seventy years, greeted me warmly though with that mocking sardonic note which has caused some to call him “unpleasantly” rather than simply “very” erudite. Before winding up his work, he courteously explained its nature.
“I have been getting off a refutation of some whippersnapper’s claim that the late Young Gentleman of Providence who recorded so well so many of the weirder doings around Arkham was a ‘horrifying figure’ whose ‘closest relation is with Peter Kurten, the Diisseldorf murderer, who admitted that his days in solitary confinement were spent conjuring up sexual-sadistic fantasies.’ Great God, doesn’t the sapless youngster know that all normal men have sexual-sadistic fantasies? Even supposing that the literary fantasies of the late Young Gentleman had a deliberate sexual element and were indeed fantasies!” Turning from me with a somewhat sinister chuckle, he said to his attractive secretary, “Now remember, Miss Tilton, that goes to Colin Wilson, not Edmund — I took care of Edmund very thoroughly in an earlier letter! Carbon copies to Avram Davidson and Damon Knight. And while you’re at it, see that they go out from the Hangman’s Hill sub-station — I’d like them to carry that postmark!”
Getting his hat and a light topcoat and hesitating a moment at a mirror to assure himself that his high collar was spotless, the venerable yet sprightly Wilmarth led me out of the Administration Building back across Garrison to the old quadrangle, ignoring the traffic which dodged around us. On the way he replied in answer to a remark of mine, “Yes, the architecture is damned good. Both it and the Pickman Lab — and the new Polish Quarter apartment development, too — were designed by Daniel Upton, who as you probably know has had a distinguished career ever since he was given a clean bill of mental health and discharged with a verdict of ‘justified homicide’ after he shot Asenath or rather old Ephraim Waite in the body of his friend Edward Derby. For a time that verdict got us almost as much criticism as the Lizzie Borden acquittal got Fall River, but it was well worth it!
“Young Danforth’s another who’s returned to us from the asylum — and permanently too, now that Morgan’s research in mescaline and LSD has turned up those clever anti-hallucinogens,” my conductor continued as we passed between the museum and the library where a successor of the great watchdog that had destroyed Wilbur Whateley clinked his chain as he paced in the shadows. “Young Danforth — Gad, he’s nearly as old as I! — you know, the brilliant graduate assistant who survived with old Dyer the worst with which the Antarctic could face them back in ’30 and ’31. Dan- forth’s gone into psychology, like Peaslee’s Wingate and old Peaslee himself — it’s a therapeutic vocation. Just now he’s deep in a paper on Asenath Waite, showing she’s quite as much an Anima- figure — that is, devouring witch-mother and glamorous fatal witch-girl — as Carl Jung maintained Haggard’s Ayesha and William Sloane’s Selena were.”
“But surely there’s a difference there,” I objected somewhat hesitatingly. “Sloane’s and Haggard’s women were fictional. You can’t be implying, can you, that Asenath was a figment of the imagination of the Young Gentleman who wrote The Thing on the Doorstep? — or rather fictionalized Upton’s rough account. Besides, it wasn’t really Asenath but Ephraim, as you pointed out yourself a moment ago.”
“Of course, of course,” Wilmarth quickly replied with another of those sinister and — yes, I must confess it — unpleasant chuckles. He added blandly, “But old Ephraim lends just the proper fierce male component to the
