“Certainly, there was Noth’g butt ye liveliest Awfullness in That which H. rais’d upp from What he cou’d gather onlie a Part of.”
Then, horribly supplementing rather than displacing this image, there came a recollection of those ancient lingering rumors anent the burned and twisted thing found in the fields a week after the Curwen raid. Charles Ward had once told the doctor what old Slocum said of that object; that it was neither thoroughly human, nor wholly allied to any animal which Pawtuxet folk had ever seen or read about.
These words hummed in the doctor’s mind as he rocked to and fro, squatting on the nitrous stone floor. He tried to drive them out, and repeated the Lord’s Prayer to himself; eventually trailing off into a mnemonic hodgepodge like the modernistic “Waste Land” of Mr. T. S. Eliot and finally reverting to the oft-repeated dual formula he had lately found in Ward’s underground library: “ Yʻai ʻngʻngah, Yog-Sothoth ,” and so on till the final underlined “ Zhro .” It seemed to soothe him and he staggered to his feet after a time; lamenting bitterly his fright-lost torch and looking wildly about for any gleam of light in the clutching inkiness of the chilly air. Think he would not; but he strained his eyes in every direction for some faint glint or reflection of the bright illumination he had left in the library. After awhile he thought he detected a suspicion of a glow infinitely far away, and toward this he crawled in agonized caution on hands and knees amidst the stench and howling, always feeling ahead lest he collide with the numerous great pillars or stumble into the abominable pit he had uncovered.
Once his shaking fingers touched something which he knew must be the steps leading to the hellish altar, and from this spot he recoiled in