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I never arrived at the shack that night; I never entered it. As I walked along that narrow path in the mist I became feverish. (‘Amœbic dysentery,’ pronounced the doctor whom I visited the following day.) The face of Severini appeared at the shack that night, not mine. It was always his face that the others saw on such nights when they came to visit. But I was not there with them; that is, my face was not there. His face was the one they saw as they sat among all the Exhibits from the Imaginary Museum. But it was my face which returned to the city; it was my body which I now fully possessed as an organism that belonged to my face alone. But the others never returned from the shack on the edge of St Alban’s Marsh. I never saw them again after that night, because on that night he took them with him into the nightmare, with the candle flames flickering upon those artworks and the fluctuations of form which to the others appeared as a pool of twisting snakes or a mass of spiderlings newly hatched. He showed them the way into the nightmare, but he could not show them the way out. There is no way out of the nightmare once you have gone so far into its depths. That is where he is lost forever, he and the others he has taken with him.

But he did not take me into the marsh with him to exist as a fungus exists or as a foam of multi-colored slime mold exists. That is how I see it in my new delirious episodes. Only at these times when I suffer from a physical disease or excessive psychic turmoil do I see how he exists now, he and the others. Because I never looked directly into the pools of oozing life when I stopped at the shack on the edge of St Alban’s Marsh. I was on my way out of the city the night I stopped, and I was only there long enough to douse the place in gasoline and set it ablaze. It burned with all the brilliance of the nightmares that were still exhibited inside, casting its illumination upon the marsh and leaving the most obscure image of what was back there — a vast and vague impression of that great black life from which we have all emerged and of which we are all made.

The Shadow, The Darkness

It seemed that Grossvogel was charging us entirely too much money for what he was offering. Some of us — we were about a dozen in all — blamed ourselves and our own idiocy as soon as we arrived in that place which one neatly dressed old gentleman immediately dubbed the ‘nucleus of nowhere.’ This same gentleman, who a few days before had announced to several persons his abandonment of poetry due to the lack of what he considered proper appreciation of his innovative practice of the ‘Hermetic lyric,’ went on to say that such a place as the one in which we found ourselves was exactly what we should have expected, and probably what we idiots and failures deserved. We had no reason to expect anything more, he explained, than to end up in the dead town of Crampton, in a nowhere region of the country, of the world in fact, during a dull season of the year that was pinched between such a lavish and brilliant autumn and what promised to be an equally lavish and brilliant wintertime. We were trapped, he said, completely stranded for all practical purposes, in a region of the country, and of the entire world, where all the manifestations of that bleak time of year, or rather its absence of manifestations, were so evident in the landscape around us, where everything was absolutely stripped to the bone, and where the pathetic emptiness of forms in their unadorned state was so brutally evident. When I pointed out that Grossvogel’s brochure for this excursion, which he deemed a ‘physical-metaphysical excursion,’ did not strictly misrepresent our destination I received only evil looks from several of the others at the table where we sat, as well as from the nearby tables of the small, almost miniature diner in which the whole group of us were now packed, filling it to capacity with the presence of exotic out-of-towners who, when they stopped bickering for a few moments, simply stared with a killing silence out the windows at the empty streets and broken-down buildings of the dead town of Crampton. The town was further maligned as a ‘drab abyss,’ the speaker of this phrase being a skeletal individual who always introduced himself as a ‘defrocked academic.’ This self-designation would usually provoke a query addressed to him as to its meaning, after which he would, in so many words, elaborate on how his failure to skew his thinking to the standards of, as he termed it, the ‘intellectual marketplace,’ along with his failure to conceal his unconventional studies and methodologies, had resulted in his longtime inability to secure a position within a reputable academic institution, or within any sort of institution or place of business whatever. Thus, in his mind, his failure was more or less his ultimate distinction, and in this sense he was typical of those of us who were seated at the few tables and upon stools along the counter of that miniature diner, complaining that Grossvogel had charged us entirely too much money and to some degree misrepresented, in his brochure, the whole value and purpose of the excursion to the dead town of Crampton.

Taking my copy of Grossvogel’s brochure from the back pocket of my trousers, I unfolded its few pages and laid them before the other three people who were seated at the same table as I. Then I removed my fragile reading glasses from the pocket of the old cardigan I was wearing beneath my even older jacket in order to scrutinize these pages once again, confirming the suspicions I had had about their meaning.

‘If you’re looking for the fine print —’ said the man seated to my left, a ‘photographic portraitist’ who often broke into a spate of coughing whenever he began to speak, as he did on this occasion.

‘What I think my friend was going to say,’ said the man seated on my right, ‘was that we have been the victims of a subtle and intricate swindle. I say this on his behalf because this is the direction in which his mind works, am I right?’

‘A metaphysical swindle,’ confirmed the man on my left, who had ceased coughing for the moment.

‘Indeed, a metaphysical swindle,’ repeated the other man somewhat mockingly. ‘I would never have imagined myself being taken in by such a thing, given my experience and special field of knowledge. But this, of course, was such a subtle and intricate operation.’

While I knew that the man on my right was the author of an unpublished philosophical treatise entitled An Investigation into the Conspiracy against the Human Race, I was not sure what he meant by the mention of his ‘experience and special field of knowledge.’ Before I could inquire about this issue, I was brashly interrupted by the woman seated across the table from me.

‘Mr Reiner Grossvogel is a fraud, it’s as simple as that,’ she said loud enough for everyone in the diner to hear. ‘I’ve been aware of his fraudulent character for some time, as you know. Even before his so-called “metamorphic experience,” or whatever he calls it —’