“I was not alarmed at first. Indeed, my initial reaction was of amplified delight because I took the evidence before me to signify an unusually thoughtful gift. I believed Loveman had conspired with some regional Indian artist to mold the features of this particular Kachina to his specifications thereby to provide me with an amusing distraction in the guise of a folk artifact.
“You can imagine, then, that it was with genuine eagerness that I unfolded the accompanying missive and began devouring its contents. Loveman is a pleasant and lively correspondent, always full of news and good cheer, so it was with profound alarm that I read the terse and tense lines of his letter. I cannot quote them to you, for I had occasion only to glance at them once with a haste born of urgency, but the gist of Loveman’s note was that the Kachina had, in fact, been delivered to him by a mysterious messenger who had mistaken him to be me. There was some confusion at first, owing to the fact that the messenger had mangled my surname into Loveman’s. But there was no mistaking the first two initials, HP, or the messenger’s particular knowledge of my weird writings, although he seemed to have read them in some other ghastly language.
“Loveman wrote that this messenger’s master, a man even more mysterious, had possessed the artifact. for decades, suffering tragedy upon tragedy owing to its evil influence. The unholy thing had plagued him so with misfortune and otherworldly nightmares that now, suspecting that some creature from one of those very nightmare realms had manifested itself in the flesh to stalk him from the shadows, and thus threaten not only his sanity but his very life, he had forwarded it to me, knowing that I, of all mortals, would know the proper means of its disposal. Moreover, this master wanted dearly to meet the author of the weird Cthulhuvian fantasies in the flesh to discuss some arcane lore about the Kachina’s miraculous healing properties, about which he hoped I would be able to illuminate him.
“Of course, Loveman took this man to be another of the many crackpots who mistakenly believe my tales to be true, but there was something sinister about the messenger that made Loveman take the man more seriously. Loveman did not divulge to him my whereabouts, he said, for concern over my safety or at least to protect me from unwanted annoyance. But, he said, the messenger told him that his master was intent upon visiting me in the wee hours of August 8. Why this particular date was a mystery to him, but Loveman thought I should be made aware, just in case some lunatic took it upon himself to make good on the promise. He believed the man who portrayed himself as the messenger was, in fact, the master of whom he spoke-since this style of disingenuousness is common among irrational admirers of the weird bards-so he believed the man’s need for direct intercourse with me had been met through association, through him, and yet the lingering unease had compelled him to write to me. That was all.
“Of the Kachina, I must tell you something else. It was a mere foot in height, depicting a figure in the midst of some unholy dance like contortion, and its head, or its headdress, was cylindrical, with a smaller cylindrical protrusion that served as a nose, holes for eyes or perhaps only the sockets of eyes, and a stylized collar of jagged scalloping. The painting on its face had been meticulously handled in red, black, and white.
“I was, by turns, amused, repelled, and troubled by Loveman’s letter, but in the end I must say the amusement won out, leaving me to believe it all the melodramatic product, and perhaps the twisted generosity, of some obviously deluded reader. I placed the Kachina upon the mantel, betwixt a few like artifacts, some of them being the ones I mentioned, and returned again to one of my tedious revising chores for my pestilent and inarticulate client, de Castro, whose bad writing, I’m afraid, haunts me more annoyingly than any ghost. Even the troubling date of August 8 eventually dissolved from my consciousness by the end of the evening.
“In the following three days I endured most vivid nightmares, far more disturbing than any I have ever suffered before-and as you well know, I have both enjoyed and suffered the most unearthly of dreams.
These were singularly unique in that they seemed to correlate directly with the arrival of the Kachina, which now rested in a sinister light above my fireplace. I need not belabor a description of these nightmares, because you already know them well from my Cthuluvian tales.
“Near twilight of the third day, as I was taking my customary stroll in the lengthening shadows of the trees that line the streets of my neighborhood, the subtle but persistent intuition came upon me that I was being watched by the unseen eyes of strangers. Several times I quickly turned my head and managed a half glimpse of some persons or some sinister beings peering at me from around the comers of buildings or around the trunks of the more ancient trees. I retreated in haste back to my home, and later, as I peeked nervously from behind the drapes of my bedroom window, I found my anxiety quickly overshadowing my rationality. I was certain, dead certain, beyond the palest shadow of a doubt, that the entities stalking me were connected to the presence of that blasphemous Kachina doll. I decided that even if it was a mere paranoiac fancy guiding me, I had endured more than enough. Quickly,. I approached the Kachina and lifted its unnatural weight with the intention of banishing it from my house. I learned, soon enough, that the material of the Kachina’s head was terra-cotta because, in my anxious state, I fumbled and dropped the unlucky thing upon the floor. It cracked neatly in two, almost as if it had had a seam, and when I bent to pick up the pieces, I perceived the raw coloring and texture of the inner surface.
“But it was not the Kachina, ultimately, that drove me here, Bob. When I picked up the doll to make an attempt at reassembly, I noticed it was markedly lighter, as if something were missing. The balance of the missing weight might have been made up if the doll’s head had been filled with fine sand of the type the Hopi use in their ritual sand paintings or perhaps something even weightier, like pellets of buckshot. I curiously surveyed the floor to see if anything had fallen out, looking hither and thither, and just on the point of giving up, I let out a gasp of horror at the obscene thing I saw before me. It was nearly invisible upon the floor, for the light in my room was dim, but also because it was remarkably small and seemed, additionally, to have taken on both the coloring and the contours of the floor itself. At first, I pried at it with my thumbnail, thinking it had adhered to the wood, but then I quickly realized it was its deadweight that made it so. The Artifact, as I will call it, was a rounded triangle, exceptionally flat and only the diameter of a shirt button, but for its dimensions it was more massive than anything in this world has a right to be. As I weighed it in my palm, the thing became the color of my flesh and even mimicked the fine filaments of the lines on my skin. It was slightly warm to the touch. I lifted it closer to my eyes to examine its surface, and that is when I realized, with dire certainty, that dark and dangerous things were ahead.