And perhaps, too, over the years, a very real curse has loomed up large and monstrous over the McGilchrists. Do souls have a flavour, I wonder, a distinctive texture of their own? Is it possible that the pool-thing has developed an appetite, a taste for the souls of McGilchrists? If so, then it will surely seek me out; and yet here I am detained in this institute for the insane.
Or could it be that I am now in all truth mad? Perhaps the things I have experienced and know to be true have driven me mad, and the music I hear exists only in my mind. That is what the nurses tell me and dear God, I pray that it is so! But if not—if not…
For there is that other thing, which I have not mentioned until now. When I carried Carl from his studio after the pool-thing left him, I saw his finished painting. Not the whole painting but merely a part of it, for when it met my eyes they saw only one thing: the finished face which Carl had painted on the dweller.
This is the nightmare which haunts me worse than any other, the question I ask myself over and over in the dead of night, when the moonlight falls upon my high, barred window and the music floods into my padded celclass="underline"
If they should bring me my breakfast one morning and find me dead—will my face really look like that?
Table of Contents
Copyright
Introduction
The Horror at Oakdeene
Born of the Winds
The Fairground Horror
The Taint
Rising with Surtsey
Lord of the Worms
The House of the Temple
Table of Contents
Copyright
Introduction
The Horror at Oakdeene
Born of the Winds
The Fairground Horror
The Taint
Rising with Surtsey
Lord of the Worms
The House of the Temple