Hour after hour, as my train roared on across the prairies through the gathering darkness, I read ever deeper in this hellish and blasphemous forbidden lore, gripped by a sick fascination I can neither excuse nor explain. Finally I could read no more and turned shudderingly from the hypnotic pages of the old book to seek my bunk, and my feverish and nightmare-ridden dreams.
V.
ARKHAM, Massachusetts is an ancient Colonial town northeast of Boston on the bleak north Atlantic Coast. Back in the dark days of the grim witchcraft hysteria, it had an evil reputation among the sober, God-fearing Puritan divines, and earned a notoriety second only to Salem as a center of the secret witch-covens. Of course, those days have long since passed by, but terrible legends are still whispered of the decaying old seaport and of its neighboring towns, Dunwich and Innsmouth and Kingsport. Back in the great days of the Yankee clipper ships, it was a rich and populous and bustling center of the sea trade; those days, too, have passed by, and today it is a crumbling backwater, slumping into a decay from which it will most likely never rise.
The Boston-Arkham local followed the curse of the Miskatonic River, and we entered Arkham at dusk on March the twentieth when the sky was a smoky crimson conflagration in the west. The town was drowned in a haze, with only the peaked church spires thrusting up against the darkening sky. The transition from sparsely wooded hills and scattered farms to the bleak, red-brick warehouses and commercial buildings along Water Street was quite abrupt. I got off at the B&M Station at the corner of High Lane and Garrison Street, and found a sleepy-eyed porter to carry my bag through the drafty, echoing, cavernous barn of a terminal to a small taxicab stand on the street. The cab was an old rattle-trap of a much-abused Model T, but the driver was a garrulous old character with side whiskers, so talkative as to belie the legend that all backwoods Yankees from this corner of the country were cantankerous and close-mouthed, suspicious of strangers.
Dr. Armitage had been kind enough to arrange rooms for me at the Athenaeum Club, so I asked the cabman to drive me there. We crossed the river by the Garrison Street Bridge to the southern section of town, my driver pointing out the local sights along the way. The Athenaeum Club was on Church Street, two blocks away from the university itself. The wind was raw and cold, the sky leaden, the streets and sidewalks heaped with snow. I shivered through my topcoat, this being my first experience with a New England winter.
My rooms were spacious and elegant; I unpacked swiftly, aware of feeling famished. There had been no dining car on the Boston-Arkham local and I had eaten nothing since lunch. It was too late in the evening for the club dining parlor to be still open, but the gentleman at the desk directed me to an excellent old restaurant at the foot of French Hill, only a brisk walk away. I retired early and, next morning, rose early, for my appointment with Dr. Armitage was to be at ten o’clock. It was a gray, dull day, the wind raw, the air bitterly cold. Gusts of sleet swept the narrow old streets, and the wind that blew off the river pierced my garments like a knife.
Arkham was an old, old town, and the signs and tokens of its Colonial past lay all about me as I strode down Church Street to the university quadrangle. To every side I saw buildings of amazing antiquity—many of them doubtless mansions built by the great 18th-century Arkham merchants, wealthy from the India trade. Some of the houses I passed undoubtedly dated to the Restoration, or even to Charles I. The street was an antiquarian’s dream: rows of dormer windows, occasionally a fine old gambrel roof, peaked and overhanging gables, diamond-paned windows, doors with old brass knockers and fanlights above the lintels, and many of the roofs bore quaint "widows' walks." I passed Christ Church, one of the local landmarks, with its classic Georgian facade and steeple. Some of the alley ways were still cobbled, and I glimpsed gaslight fixtures through one window as I passed. Over all, however, brooded neglect and moldering decay, the tawdry and faded gloom of a city long past its prime.
Miskatonic University occupies an entire block, facing on the main business thoroughfare, Church Street, between West and Garrison. Most of the buildings are Georgian, but were restored sometime in the late 19th century, and badly, by someone with a hideous taste for Victorian Gothic. I entered by the huge wrought-iron front gate, framed between ugly redbrick columns, where a guard directed me to the faculty lounge where I was to meet Dr. Armitage, which lay across the snow-heaped quadrangle.
The faculty lounge was a long room, oak-paneled, with a superb fireplace of Georgian marble, and old, gilt-framed paintings of former deans and presidents frowning down on Florentine marble-topped tables neatly strewn with scholarly journals and on large, comfortable chairs upholstered in dark leather. Dr. Armitage was a large, ruddy-cheeked man with silver hair and keen blue eyes of piercing intensity which could as easily twinkle with good-humored zest its turn frosty with stern reproof. I had looked him up in the academic directories and knew that he had taken his M.A. degree here at Miskatonic and his doctorate at Princeton, and had as well an honorary Litt. D. from Johns Hopkins. Among the several books or pamphlets to his credit was a celebrated monograph titled Notes Toward a Bibliography of World Occultism, Mysticism, and Magic, which the Miskatonic University Press had issued in 1927.
The doctor greeted me warmly, wringing my hand in a firm and virile grip which belied the years evident in his silver locks. In an expansive and genial manner he hastened to introduce me to several of his colleagues, among them a fine-looking older man of ascetic and aristocratic mien who was Dr. Seneca Lapham of the Anthropology Department, Professor William Dyer the geologist, Dr. Ferdinand Ashley of the Department of Ancient History, and a young literature instructor named Wilmarth, an amateur folklorist of some note, as well as a young psychology instructor a year or two older than myself named Peaslee. The name seemed familiar, and before long I realized that he must be the son of Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, former Professor of Political Economy here at Miskatonic, who had suffered a classic attack of amnesia a dozen or so years back, much written up in the newspapers and scientific journals of the day.
I accompanied Armitage and Dr. Lapham to the librarian’s office, after a bracing cup of steaming tea. The university library is a very large red-brick building, situated at the southeast corner of the block, at the corner of Garrison and College Streets. A huge dog is kept chained at the foot of the Italian marble steps leading up to the main entrance—a bull mastiff, I believe. He rose at our approach and regarded us levelly, not exactly in a menacing manner, but warily, as if ascertaining just who we were, with an eye toward inquiring if we had legitimate business here.
"Good boy, Cerberus, that's a good fellow," Armitage greeted him; satisfied, the great dog settled down once again, permitting us to pass. We entered a dim hall whose arched ceiling was adorned with faded frescoes. Marble busts done in the classic manner were placed on pedestals at intervals along the length of the hall, and among them I recognized Thoreau, Longfellow, Washington Irving, Walt Whitman. Whittier, and James Russell Lowell. There was one I did not recognize, a stern-lipped fellow with a stony glare. I inquired as to his identity. Dr. Armitage chuckled, and parted the marble pate as he passed it.
“That staunch old Puritan, Cotton Mather,” he chuckled. "A bit out of place in such literary company, perhaps, but we could hardly do without him—Arkham and Salem were his favorite hunting grounds, in the old witchcraft days’"
We mounted a curving stair with gleaming mahogany banister and superb 18th-century carved posts, and were ushered into the librarian’s office, crowded with filing cabinets and cluttered with books and papers. Armitage cleared off chairs for Dr. Lapham and myself, bade us sit, and seated himself behind a huge cluttered desk. He unlocked the bottom drawer, removing therefrom a large quarto volume, bound in cracked, ancient black leather and sealed with rust-eaten hasps, which he placed on the desk before him. A thrill of tremulous excitement rose within me at the sight of the old book.