Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre (69 page)
I do not know. If that abyss and what it held were real, there is no hope. Then, all too truly, there lies upon this world of man a mocking and incredible shadow out of time. But, mercifully there is no proof that these things are other than fresh phases of my myth-born dreams. I did not bring back the metal case that would have been a proof, and so far those subterrene corridors have not been found.
If the laws of the universe are kind, they will never be found. But I must tell my son what I saw or thought I saw, and let him use his judgment as a psychologist in gauging the reality of my experience, and communicating this account to others.
I have said that the awful truth behind my tortured years of dreaming hinges absolutely upon the actuality of what I thought I saw in those cyclopean, buried ruins. It has been hard for me, literally, to set down that crucial revelation, though no reader can have failed to guess it. Of course, it lay in that book within the metal case—the case which I pried out of its lair amidst the dust of a million centuries.
No eye had seen, no hand had touched that book since the advent of man to this planet. And yet, when I flashed my torch upon it in that frightful abyss, I saw that the queerly pigmented letters on the brittle, aeon-browned cellulose pages were not indeed any nameless hieroglyphs of earth’s youth. They were, instead, the letters of our familiar alphabet, spelling out the words of the English language in my own handwriting.
Endnotes
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*Robert Bloch was a teenage protégé of H. P. Lovecraft. He since has become one of the masters of modern horror fiction. Bloch is perhaps best known for his novel
Psycho
, on which the popular film was based. After an interval of twenty-two years, Bloch returned to the world of Norman Bates, and
Psycho II
was published in September 1982.
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*(Found among the papers of the late Francis Wayland Thurston, of Boston.)
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The H.P. Lovecraft editions
from Del Rey Books
The Best of H. P. Lovecraft:
BLOODCURDLING TALES OF HORROR AND THE MACABRE
The Dream Cycle of H. P. Lovecraft:
DREAMS OF TERROR AND DEATH
The Transition of H. P. Lovecraft:
THE ROAD TO MADNESS
At the Mountains of Madness
AND OTHER TALES OF TERROR
The Tomb
AND OTHER TALES
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
The Lurking Fear
AND OTHER STORIES
The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath
The Doom that Came to Sarnath
AND OTHER STORIES
Other Lovecraftian Collections:
SHADOWS OVER INNSMOUTH
THE CHILDREN OF CTHULHU
CTHULHU 2000
TALES OF THE CTHULHU MYTHOS
A Del Rey
®
Book
Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group
Copyright © 1963 by August Derleth
Published by arrangement with Arkham House Publishers, Inc.
Introduction copyright © 1982 by Robert Bloch
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
http://www.randomhouse.com/delrey/
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 82-90468
eISBN: 978-0-345-46329-6
v3.0