Acolytes of Cthulhu

THE CELLAR ROOM

BY STEFFAN B. ALETTI

I AM WRITING THIS IN AN EFFORT TO THROW SOME LIGHT ON the recent chain of appalling murders. I have no real evidence to offer, nothing more than prior knowledge of the existence of a dangerous creature loose in London, and a reluctant familiarity with its habits.

There have been to date seven murders. Four victims were women, two of them elderly, two fairly young; of the other three, one was a nondescript businessman, the second a tradesman, the third an officer investigating the screams of one of these victims. All of these crimes occurred in early evening or at night, in particularly dark places such as blind alleys, closes or residential courts off the streets; and all were within a short distance of 12 Cannington Lane, Chelsea.

These crimes do not seem to have sexual overtones; they are unique and traceable to a single source purely because of the appalling ferocity. In each case the victim was ripped apart, though absence of toothmarks would seem to suggest that the monster is a human one. I say humanoid. It is no madman ranging the streets at night, acting out his sexual fantasies as was the celebrated ripper of a generation ago. I feel sure that it is a species of creature that lies just beyond the measure of human existence and knowledge. The police will not give me the hearing that I desire; after the “multiple murders” of Sir Harold Wolverton and his manservant, they would rather not hear from me. Had that affair received the press coverage it deserved, I feel that a number of perceptive people would have drawn the same conclusions that I offer you now, but owing to the victim’s importance and the affluence of his heirs, as well as the recent conclusion of the Boer War, journalists completely ignored it.

I had become reasonably famous; I was by no means Britain’s best known or most influential psychical researcher—“ghost hunter” in common parlance—but I had done a good deal of work for the Society for Psychical Research, the College of Psychical Sciences, and the Marylebone Spiritual Society. I had published several monographs, written a book on Spiritualism, and produced a number of pamphlets describing my stays in various so-called haunted houses.

Sir Harold Wolverton had once been the president of the Royal College; at that time he was the most respected of the gentlemen engaging in the pursuit of that not-so-respectable science. His papers were widely held to be the most sane and scientifically accurate to come out of the ranks of the Spiritualists. Indeed, at that time Sir Harold was the only one of the brotherhood well enough thought of to appear in public without being heckled by closed minds unfortunately harnessed to big mouths.

It was about 1885 that a very mysterious tragedy occurred. Sir Harold, then not yet knighted, had been about to marry a young lady of good birth, by name Jessica Turner—a relative, as a matter of fact, of the artist. She died under most mysterious circumstances, and Sir Harold disbanded his group, the Chelsea Spiritualist Society, and retired from public life. As that was a very exciting time of Empire, the news did not long dwell on the affair, and, in time, all was forgotten.

Last week, however, I received, to my great surprise, a letter from Sir Harold inviting me to his residence at Cannington Lane. I lost no time in answering, and found myself a short time later in a carriage threading its way through the winding streets of Chelsea.

I was shocked to see Sir Harold. Naturally, we are all familiar with the photographs of him in his prime: heavy-chested, his great shock of red hair flowing over his ears and joining his bristly mustache, and puffing majestically on a massive Oom Paul. He looked the very essence of the British gentleman. I was perfectly aware, of course, that these photographs had been taken about twenty years earlier, but I did not expect the course of time to have exacted so many ravages. His face was bare, and his head had a sparse tonsure of wispy white. He sat in a wheelchair, a shawl wrapped around his knees. His thick hands, obviously once very powerful, shook with palsy; and his eyes, in his youth and middle age his most commanding feature, were vacant and rheumy. He was forty years old at the time of his fiancée’s tragic death; he could now be no more than in his late fifties. He looked like a man of eighty.

“I have decided,” he said, watching his servant back out of the room, closing the partition doors behind him, “to publish my diaries for the years 1884 and 1885. They end the night Jessica, my fiancée died. Will you handle the arrangements for me?”

“Of course, Sir Harold,” I replied, “but surely there are others who arrange such things professionally; they would be more clever in these matters than I. I myself work through a literary agent.”

“I have chosen you,” he interrupted, “for several reasons.” He wheeled himself feebly over to the bookcase, impatiently gesturing me down when I stood to offer my help. He took two handsomely bound books from a shelf, and wheeled back to the table, throwing them down. They sent up an impressive quantity of dust, arguing their antiquity.

“First,” he continued, “you are presumably a researcher. As a scientist, you must see that these are published as records of scientific experiments. They must not be thought of as fiction or romance. They are serious and not to be taken lightly. Second, I presume that you are a gentleman. There are obviously, as in any diary, allusions to certain private matters that are to be deleted before publication. You will, I trust, see to it?”

“You may be sure,” I replied; “but why, if I may ask, have you delayed the release of these diaries for so many years if they contain valuable scientific matter?”

Sir Harold remained silent for a few moments. At length, when the silence had begun to be painful, he spoke. “You are getting too close. You fellows think that what you are doing is new and exciting, but let me assure you that we here at the Chelsea Society had done it all fifteen years ago. We, too, were scientists; and like you, we toyed with things we were not properly equipped to handle. And you people are about to make the same mistakes that we did.”

“Mistakes!” I protested. “I beg to differ. We are indeed on the verge of bridging the gap between the living and the dead, of piercing the veil.” I could hear my voice mounting with excitement. “But be sure, Sir Harold, we are doing so with the most modern scientific methods and all possible precautions.”

“Balderdash!” he shouted with a ferocity I wouldn’t have expected from such a fragile-looking old man. “Don’t prattle to me about your ‘scientific methods’. If you go to the Pole to explore, you take along an overcoat and a bottle of brandy. That’s scientific! If you go digging about in Egypt, you take along a fan and a bottle of gin. That’s scientific! But what, sir, what possible precautions can you take against the unseen and the totally unknown? Don’t you realize the tremendous power and raw forces of evil you can invoke by accident? What precautions do you take against these, sir? A raincoat? A gun? Or a cross? Believe me, sir, if there is a God, He waits until you are dead before he enters the picture. The devil is not so polite!”

I had stood during that tirade, for no man can speak to me in that manner. It was no longer the Nineteenth Century! He spoke again as I picked up my cane.

“Please sit down, sir; I’m sorry to have shouted.” He once again appeared to be a docile, harmless old man. It was a complete physical change.

“Very well,” I returned, assuming an air of wounded dignity. “But you’ll have to explain the entire business before I continue. I feel that our experiments have proven that we have nothing to fear from the darkness beyond the grave save our own superstitions and physical limitations. What I have learned through mediums is that the spirits beyond us want to help us, to teach us that we need not fear death, but should consider it as the parting of a curtain that has obscured our eyes during our earthly life.” I sat down, pleased with my pretty speech, and rested my walking stick between my knees. The light was now waning, as it was mid-winter, and with the oncoming dark came a palpable chill.

“Very well,” said Sir Harold. He wheeled himself to the liquor cabinet and withdrew two sherry glasses. After pouring a rather large measure of the amber liquid into each of them, he offered me the larger portion. I took it and began to sip it, observing a connoisseur’s silence, a respectful pause before commenting on the wine.

“Excellent sherry,” I said, falling short of poetry, anxious for Sir Harold to begin his story.

“Yes,” he answered, staring at his glass absentmindedly. “It’s old.” He turned it around in his hand for a few moments, watching the light catch its color.

“In December, 1884,” he began quietly, “the Chelsea Spiritualist Society was formed. It consisted of Jessica, my fiancée; Thomas Walters, a novelist; Dr. Edmund Vaughan, a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, and myself. At first we simply tracked down local Spiritualists and bade them come to my house; we had the cellar arranged with a large table and five chairs. The mediums, famous for remarkable feats within their own houses, provided very little of interest when taken away from their rigs, pulleys, and secret compartments. No ghosts, no spirits, no disembodied trumpets floating about in the air. But some of these so-called Spiritualists did seem to possess a certain kind of… sensitivity, shall we call it? They seemed to feel something in the cellar—and what is more remarkable, most of them expressed it in the same way: They felt a malignancy, a dark, angry thing that lived, or perhaps I should say, existed in the cellar.

“At first we felt nothing, simply darkness. But as we conducted these seances, most of us—Walters being the sole exception—began to feel a physical oppression that could not be attributed to simple fear of the dark or, for that matter, the power of suggestion.

“Once, just before we lost Jessica, Vaughan and I were trying automatic writing when the lamp suddenly went out. There had been no wind; the door is heavy oak, bolted shut, so there could have been no draft moving through the room. Afterward, we found the lamp easily three-quarters full, and the wick in perfect condition. But the lamp went out, and we sat in that total blackness before the eye accustoms itself to the shadows. I felt almost immediately a sense of overwhelming blackness—not darkness, mind you, but blackness, and worse, a sense of hate. There was something in the room that was projecting a furious driving hate, aimed possibly at me or Vaughan or both of us, but I felt at humanity—the living in general.

“I was overwhelmed, suffocated by this malignancy—now coupled with a mounting terror in myself. I tried to move, but found it wholly impossible and in desperation, trying to sound perfectly normal, I told Vaughan to light the lamp. He whispered, or I should rather say that he gasped that he could not. It was at this point that we both realized that we were in danger—just what kind of danger we were not sure then. And we just sat there all night, the two of us huddled together, shivering from terror and the cold. At length, as dawn began to penetrate the opaque glass of the cellar windows, we both found the strength to stir; as the sun began to warm the air outside, we burst out of the room, red-eyed and thoroughly frightened.

“Vaughan and I made our trembling way upstairs, and he resigned from the Society over a stiff glass of brandy.

“I think it was then that I first realized that I had some sort of mediumistic talent in me—or that Vaughan or I or both of us possessed such ability.

“Despite the fright it gave me, I continued my work, and the Chelsea Society’s work. We investigated, held seances, table taps and whatnot, with a moderate amount of success, but never with anything like the results that night with Vaughan. Then I held my last seance.

“We had decided to hold a seance just before Christmas. It was an icy cold night, and I distinctly remember that the icicles hanging in front of the cellar windows cast irregular striped shadows that looked like prison bars on the floor and table. It was late, perhaps 11:30 or 12:00, and all was deathly still—complete silence, broken now and then by a horse’s trot or a tinkling sleigh bell.

“There were five of us that night: Jessica, whom I was to marry just after the new year, Walters, and two of our new members, one a student—Cambridge, I think—named Wilson, who was home for the holiday, and a young scientist of sorts named Tice. Something to do with hydraulics, I believe. Just before the seance began, we all had a drink to toast the new year, since this was expected to be the last time we would see each other for several weeks. It was, I believe, the last happy moment I have had in my life. I remember especially Jessica, sitting directly across the table from me. Her blonde hair was done up in a bun, and she wore a topaz choker I had just given her as an early Christmas present. She was so beautiful… “Sir Harold paused as he seemed to gaze directly into the past. “Then young Wilson blew out the light and we began.

“Almost immediately, the room began to take on a stuffy feeling, as if it were getting somehow smaller and closer. I experienced a kind of dizzy sensation, and I began to think that I had had perhaps a swallow too many of the sherry we used for the toast. But I quickly realized that it wasn’t a simple inebriate dizziness, because my senses were all fully acute. I let my head fall back, and allowed my neck to rest on the back of the chair while I began to perspire. After a few minutes I heard a few gasps and I opened my eyes. To my indescribable horror I saw that I was partially illuminated by a bright substance which seemed to be smeared over my face. My first thought, of course, was to wipe it away, but I found myself once again powerless to move. I simply sat there while this substance—presumably ectoplasm—dripped all over me, flowing, I was told later, out of my mouth. It felt sticky, and with each moment I felt weaker.

“The room was, of course, getting brighter as the glow of this infernal material got stronger; eventually the stuff began to float in the air, slowly, I fancied, assuming a shape. At first it was indistinct, just a round mass; then it gradually began to—how shall I describe it—fall together, brighter and darker areas falling together to create a face—a large, round face. It hung in the air for what seemed like several minutes—probably not much more than a couple of seconds, really—until it had become perfectly clear. It was round and hairless, with great closed eyes. It seemed like a corpse laid out on view, pale and serene, yet there was something about the structure of the face that suggested something less than human. Its nose was flat with wide nostrils, and its lips—if it had any—were drawn back to reveal great, craggy teeth, wholly unpleasant to see.

“As we watched it hover above us, the gelatinous white substance began to form something of a body—long, gaunt, yet somehow suggestive of great power. Then, slowly, the lids began to raise, revealing, God help me, great green eyes, pupiless, malevolent and terrifying. We could not be sure that it saw anything, whether it looked upon us or not, but I—and I was later to find out, the rest of them as well—felt that it did indeed behold us. Then, all at once, the horrible mouth opened and the room was filled with a great whispering sound like a distant waterfall. Gradually the sound grew, until its intensity was deafening. It was at that point that I fainted.

“I was revived later by Tice. I was lying on the cellar steps, my clothes torn. Tice was bloody and bruised, and Walters had gone to get an ambulance. Jessica and young Wilson were dead.

“Later, in hospital, I was told by Walters that the thing had begun to move—awkwardly at first, with sort of a swaying motion—then with agility and finally speed. First it simply ranged about the room—Tice described it as looking as if it were trying to get out—then, as the roaring increased, a great wind began to whirl about, knocking over the ash trays and unlit lamp on the table. By this time, everyone was up out of his seat and trying to get out of the room, though Tice said that Jessica tried to reach me through the maelstrom. The last that both Tice and Walters remembered was that creature actually grabbing at them. They managed to get the door open, and, with what must have been superb bravery, repeatedly went back to pull the rest of us out. They both concurred that after dragging me out, they could not find Wilson, and Jessica was obviously beyond help.

“Wilson was later found, crushed under the marble table which had been literally flipped across the room to land legs up in the opposite corner from which it had stood. Jessica was crushed beyond recognition. I obtained leave from hospital to attend her funeral; after the service, I prevailed upon the undertaker to open the closed casket for one more look at my lovely Jessica. There hasn’t been one moment since then that I haven’t regretted that request; she was smashed to a pulp—nothing but a mass of bruises and lacerations; all semblance of facial bone structure had entirely disappeared. The sight so shocked me that I fainted, and was taken to hospital again, this time for a stay of several months.”

The old man finished his drink with a gulp, and stared down at his lap. “The Chelsea Society was disbanded, of course; and the cellar room shut. I never really regained my health. Some part of me, some vitality had been drained; and for all I know, that vital force may still be down there in the cellar room, waiting for release.”

Sir Harold sat back in his wheelchair, apparently exhausted with the effort of dredging up such horrible memories and relating them, perhaps for the first time, to another human being. I moved in my seat sluggishly; it was completely dark outside now, and the room was quite chilly.

“My dear Sir Harold,” I murmured, trying to console the old gentleman, “that is a frightful tale.” I did not really believe the story, yet I did not doubt his sincerity; I believed that he believed it. I began to question tactfully.

“Perhaps a good deal of this was a… subjective occurrence—that is a hallucination of sorts rather than a literal, physical event?”

Sir Harold jolted upright in his seat, eyeing me with a hot ferocity again out of character with his physical weakness. “You doubt my story?”

“Oh, not at all,” I hastened to assure him. “But you yourself admit that you were unconscious during most of the physical activity. Possibly Tice and Walters…”

“Tice and Walters were gentlemen,” he interrupted. “I do not doubt their testimony. It was sworn later at a private inquest. Tice is now dead, and Walters left for South America about a decade ago, and is out of touch.” He looked directly at me in an unmistakable challenge. “Is it proof you want?”

I cleared my throat. “Well, I should like to be positive that the material that I’m to release to the public is valid. I imagine that a man of your reputation would be of the same mind. Look at it from a point of law; the evidence you present is really no more than hearsay.” I warmed to my argument. “Without Walters or Tice to corroborate your story, critics both within and without the Spiritualist camp would make a laughingstock of you.” I stopped, afraid I’d gone a bit too far. The old man’s temper was still healthy.

“What do you want as proof at this rather late date?” he asked.

“A seance,” I replied. “We must prove to the world that there is a daemonic force in the cellar. Let me get a group of Spiritualists from the Marylebone Society here. We’ll hold a controlled seance, and the results will either prove or disprove…”

“No. No groups,” he said calmly. “You want the proof, and I can furnish it. There need be no more than the two of us. I want no repetition of the last debacle. Two deaths per seance is enough.”

“But I did not mean to suggest that you conduct it, Sir Harold,” I said, astonished that the old man would be willing to relive that experience. “You must consider your age and health.”

“Neither is important to me. Besides, I am the agent of the creature; I think that it needs me to manifest itself. It got half of me last time; this time it can have the rest, or give me back that part that it has. Either way, I’ll be satisfied.”

I don’t know why I agreed to it; curiosity, for the most part, though, not to my credit, I must admit that the thought of the impending notoriety—whatever the outcome—excited me. I really did believe that little or nothing would happen, and that the great neurotic burden with which Sir Harold had lived might be lifted when he realized that it had all been his imagination or the fancy of Tice and Walters. I forgot to consider the deaths of Jessica and the student. At any rate, we decided to hold the seance that night.

Sir Harold lit another lamp and beckoned me to begin pushing. Slowly and laboriously, for it is not an easy thing to let a man in a wheelchair gently down a flight of stairs, we began to make our way, the lamp throwing a dancing light down the mahogany paneling of the walls. The immense silence was broken by the dissonance of the large, hard rubber wheels of the clumsy chair.

At length we arrived at the bottom of the steps. The first part of Wolverton’s story was clearly true. There had been no one down these steps for a very long time, for, glancing back, I could clearly see my footprints and the wheelchair’s odd, snaking lines in the dust.

I took the lamp from Sir Harold and held it at the cellar door. It was bolted and nailed shut with large boards crossed over it, the way they bar access to condemned buildings. The wood of the door had split where the nails had entered, so it was no difficult matter to pull the boards off and pull open the bolt.

Once inside the cellar room, I wheeled Sir Harold to the far end of the table. It was, indeed, a large heavy table; it and the room were laden with dust. Clearly no one had been in that room for a long time. Other than the accumulated dust, the room had a perfectly normal appearance, though two chairs were lying on their sides by the windows. Without speaking, Sir Harold placed the lamp on the table and leaned back, signaling for me to begin. I made myself as comfortable as possible, after using my handkerchief to wipe away the dust on the seat and arms of my chair. I sat back and asked once more whether he was sure that we should go ahead.

“Positive,” he said.

I blew out the light. In the resulting darkness I saw nothing, though after a few minutes I could barely make out the bent figure across the table. Sir Harold let his head fall back, his neck resting against the wicker back of the wheelchair. His mouth slowly sagged open, exposing a set of teeth complete but misshapen and tobacco-stained; his eyes remained open, but with a chillingly sightless aspect. I sat facing him for what must have been close to forty-five minutes until I noticed that his breathing had apparently stopped. I immediately feared for the old man’s life; the terrible memories—real to him—might have given him a heart seizure. Then, in the dim cellar light, he began to exude an odd pale yellow glow. I looked behind me to see opaque windows; the glow was not coming from them. I began to feel an overwhelming fear. I had sat through numberless seances given by the most reputable mediums in the world, yet I never got so much as a tingle of fear. Now I was streaming with perspiration, my eyes nailed to the strange, bent form in front of me.

As I looked at him, I perceived a milky-white, viscous substance formlessly building up like mucous in his nostrils and mouth. Fascinated, I watched as it began to flow noiselessly out of his nose and mouth and down his lips and chin. It gave off its own glow, a rhythmically pulsating light, the quality of which was similar to lights seen from a great distance underwater. As the ectoplasmic substance glowed, I noticed that rather than lighting the room, it seemed to have darkened it. Whereas certain objects, especially the broken chairs under the window, had been quite clear, even bright, they now darkened to the point where the only visible things in the room were Sir Harold’s face and shoulders, neck and shirt front, and a few inches of the table.

By now I fully regretted the entire affair. Whereas in the light, with sherry in hand, stories of great green monsters are absolutely ridiculous, they begin to get less and less amusing as the light wanes. I have seen many a seance break down with the turning out of the light; but I am a professional and, presumably, used to such things.

Yet I had never felt a room to be so laden with evil, and with the tension of something terrible imminent. It must be very similar to the feeling experienced by a soldier awaiting a bombardment he knows is to come momentarily.

The darkness now lay on me palpably, a damp blanket that caused the windows, chilled with the cold night air, to run with moisture. Sir Harold remained the only visible thing in the room. His eyes were still open, sightless it would seem. Though he appeared unconscious, I could see his hands wringing furiously in his lap. He was undoubtedly awake, and terrified at reliving that experience that had resulted in several deaths and his retirement from public life.

The viscous substance exuding from his nostrils and mouth was now joining and producing a mass of sizeable bulk that lay directly between the two of us; and as I watched it, very unpleasantly thrilled, it began to form a roughly spheroid shape, a shape that I was fervently hoping would not become a head. As, however, it began to do so, I began to marshal my efforts to shake off the fascination that bound me to my seat. I realized now that Sir Harold’s story was true, and that I had best do all in my power to prevent a full repetition of the affair.

Perhaps you have had dreams in which you were in danger, a danger usually not specified, but somehow assumed by you to be mortal; yet you find movement is impossible. Often this same physical paralysis attends psychic phenomena—and so it did with me, and, I assume, Sir Harold. We were bound by some agent either within or outside us, to sit and watch as that creature slowly flowed out of Sir Harold’s body, or perhaps his mind, and begin to take form.

In any case, the head was now forming; it was large, about twice the size of a human head, I should say, while very melon-shaped. It was supported by a column of pulsating ectoplasm, under which was beginning to appear the rudiments of a body—a long tubular shape with what seemed to be long, thin arms and legs. In all, the form was humanoid, but quite definitely not human, not in shape, and not in intent.

The face was now forming. It was perfectly smooth, unstamped by any of the expression lines that mark creatures of thought or feeling. It was clearly not a ghost in the conventional sense; it was indeed a spirit—that is a creature that exists on a plane other than our own—but in this case a spirit that never was human; it was an elemental, a spirit that perhaps populated Earth before humanity, and that resents us as usurpers.

With a tremendous effort I succeeded in pushing my chair back slightly from the table. It squeaked over the dirty floor, and the sound enabled me to shake off some of the stupor that unnerved me.

“Sir Harold,” I managed to whisper, “Sir Harold, you must move.”

He made a visible effort to move—I could see his hands rise to the table and feebly push against it, without effect. He then made a sort of shrugging movement with his shoulders and shook his hands in a gesture of futility.

Dripping with sweat, I began to lean across the table in an effort to get at the lamp and light it. It was too far away, and, as leaning forward brought me closer to the thing hovering now almost fully formed above the table, I shrank back in my seat. It would only be a matter of moments before it would break away from Sir Harold with a malevolent life of its own. I knew that we needed light. I reached into my vest pocket and withdrew my matchbox. Fumbling, I dropped one or two matches before I succeeded in lighting one. I held it up as it flared, bringing the room briefly into view. The creature seemed to dissipate, and the features that had been strongly apparent began to melt back into the mass of ectoplasm. As the match began to flicker the creature once more began to fill out. I realized then that the matches did not throw enough light to destroy it, merely to stave off its complete formation. And I could not have had more than five or so matches left. As the match went out, I immediately lit another, with the same effect. I was only putting off the inevitable. In a desperate gamble, I decided to light all at once inside the box; during the longer brighter flame, I would try to get to the door.

Lighting the match in my hand, I put it inside the box, letting it rest against its corner. As the box itself began to burn, I pushed it carefully under the writhing mid-air figure, which knew now, if it commanded any intelligence at all, that there were agents working for its destruction.

As the matches remaining in the box flared, I found my legs and bolted for the door, unlocked it, and flew upstairs. At the landing I shouted for the old servant, who came running out of the back in a dressing gown.

“Good Heavens, what is it, sir?” he asked, no doubt shocked at my appearance and the desperate manner in which I had called him.

“Light a lamp quickly, man, and come with me!” He did so, admirably quickly, I must say, for a man his age.

We both ran downstairs, I at the quicker pace. As I reached the bottom, the light carried by the servant was already spilling into the darkened room. I could not resist peering in—it was quite dark, though I could make out Sir Harold, still seated at the head of the table, in the same position I had left him. There was no ectoplasm to be seen. I breathed with relief; we had beaten it!

At length the old servant ambled up to me with the lamp. We both entered the room, I first, setting the lamp on the table.

I shall never forget the sight of Sir Harold. Despite the subsequent controversy, I never doubted that it was other than Sir Harold; at first the police believed me only because of the total lack of anything else that could be Sir Harold.

What sat before me was barely more than a skeleton. Its skin was stretched tightly to the bones, and its eyes were shrunken out of sight into their sockets. Sir Harold’s clothes hung loosely on his frame, and the hands that I had seen writhing in that lap only minutes before, were now inert, bony extremities that would belong under normal circumstances only to the long dead.

I involuntarily stepped back in horror, bumping into the servant who was muttering. “It can’t be, it can’t be,” he whispered, largely to himself.

I realized now that the demon had been able to materialize, but only at Sir Harold’s expense, and that it took sustenance not only from his mind and spirit, but from his body as well; every drop of ectoplasm that flowed from Sir Harold was a drop of his own life’s substance flowing out from him. That would explain why he was a shattered man after the first materialization, though his wounds were not so great as to account for such physical deterioration. But now, facing Sir Harold’s skeletal remains, I realized that his death could mean only one thing: the creature’s life!

I began to shake again, in the realization that the horrid thing must now be alive in that room. I grabbed the lamp and held it high, peering gingerly into the shadows of the far corners of the room.

The servant apparently gathered what I was about, and made quickly for the door.

“Don’t open it,” I shouted. “You’ll let it out.” I was wrong.

The creature was standing in the hall, just beyond the lip of light cast by the lamp I was holding. It was a sort of mottled yellow colour, perhaps cream—it’s hard to tell in the glow of a lamp—punctuated by blotches of a darker colour. It stood about eight or nine feet in height, and had a perfectly round head with no ears, long spindly arms that looked as if they might be jointed in two or three places, and huge, bony hands a good foot across. But its most arresting features were its eyes—great holes on either side of a dark spot that I assume could be a nose. And, as Sir Harold had said, they did indeed glow green, a dull, angry green mist that suggested a primordial fury that no man could hope to contain.

Before I could shout for the old man to come back into the circle of light, the creature snatched at him with one of those long, spiderly arms, catching him about the middle with a huge hand. The old man gasped once, and then, with an unspeakable crackling sound, the creature literally twisted him apart and then threw his crushed body back into the room at my feet. He lay there, a widening pool of blood issuing from the crumpled and torn body.

The creature eyed me malevolently and began to move closer. I held the lamp in front of me, realizing with a sinking heart that it was only about half full, with only enough oil to last a few hours. And I knew that when the lamp would begin to dim, the creature would move closer and closer until it could reach me and snap me in two with those loathsome arms.

Closer and closer it moved, as the time passed glacially and the light flickered. Occasionally it would reach in and flail at me, withdrawing quickly, as if the light caused it pain. I sat on the edge of the table, eyeing with horror the lamp’s dwindling oil reserve, my ears ringing with the preternatural silence and my head reeling from the terror of what I had been through and the fear of the outcome of my current trial. And the creature stood in the hallway, staring at me, its mouth leering in a wide, craggy grin. But at last, no doubt a matter of minutes before the light was to flicker its last, the dawn began to break, and light began to filter through the cellar room’s windows.

The creature began to move back into the hall, leaving me alone with my two ghastly companions. Knowing that the hall would remain dark throughout the day, I shook off my terror and fatigue and, possessed of the excess energy that we are sometimes blessed with at times of trial, I picked up a chair and hurled it through the windows. Clambering onto the table, I cleared the broken glass from the sill, and hoisted myself over it onto the cold ground.

London never looked so wonderful, and its air has never smelled so sweet. The sun had not yet brought warmth, but even at that early hour, I could see men making their way to work, wrapped in mufflers, their breaths rhythmically condensing into clouds of steam. Despite my light dress and my dampness from perspiration, I ran down the street shouting for help. When it finally arrived, I collapsed.

The police certainly expressed reservations about my story, though my shaken state and the unspeakable condition of the two corpses found in that God-forsaken room argued eloquently in favour of the truth of my story. The coroner stoutly insisted that Sir Harold had been dead many months, but had to admit that identification of rings and physical features as noted by Sir Harold’s physician, proved beyond a doubt that the body was his, and he had been seen as recently as a week earlier by Sir Clive Mathews, Bart., who had stopped by to discuss the sale of some property near Brighton. Moreover, I had in my possession Sir Harold’s letter, dated only a few days before the tragic night.

Furthermore, the old servant, whose name was Tom, was torn brutally limb from limb, and neither the coroner nor the chief of police could imagine what agency would have the power or ferocity to crumple a human being in that savage manner.

So the police reluctantly reported that “Person or persons unknown attacked and murdered Sir Harold Wolverton and his manservant Thomas Cooper for cause unknown.” And there’s an end on it.

But the creature, that living part of Sir Harold, whose full “birth” left that ghastly shell staring at the ceiling of the cellar room, has the run of London, and I am positive that the current wave of murders and maimings can be attributed to it.

I would expect that its quarters are the now empty Wolverton House. It was apparently a simple matter for it to have eluded the police search after the murders; it could have made its way to the attic, or into the wainscoting, or perhaps even underground. Who knows what its powers, capabilities and intelligence are?

Wolverton House is a desirable property in an excellent neighbourhood, but rumours persist about it, and I expect that it shall stand vacant for a long time to come.