[Instrumental]
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[17 October: 1893]
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Such grim musings as have been occupying my mind of late unfortunately seem
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to suggest a possible link to the fate of my learned friend and colleague
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Doctor Ignatius Stone. That brilliant researcher was last seen in command
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of all his faculties whilst on an expedition to the ruins of the Sumerian
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city of Ur, an undertaking which preceded my own work there by some eighteen
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months. Stone was a gifted archaeologist who also dabbled, perhaps unwisely,
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in certain areas of the occult, particularly involving the various
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grotesqueries once worshipped as Cthonic deities by the ancient denizens of Ur.
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Mere days before he ventured into the ziggurats of that foreboding,
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mystery-haunted site, he had dispatched a letter to me claiming that he was
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on the verge of a truly staggering arcane discovery at Ur which would
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simultaneously prove the cyclical nature of human civilisation as well as
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immediately render redundant all previous theories on the origin of man.
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Whatever misfortune befell him within those aeons-old tombs robbed him
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irrevocably of his sanity, for when his attendants finally managed to prise
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open the stone door of the vast central catacomb, which had, I'm told,
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inexplicably shut fast behind his three-man torch-bearing party, they found
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two of the regularly stalwart men had seemingly expired of pure fright,
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while Stone was slumped against the north wall, staring vacantly into the
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gloom, gibbering about visitations by beings so terrible that the very
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contemplation of their existence would sunder a man's tenuous hold on the
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reins of sanity.
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When I later visited him at the sanatorium in England, I found him to be a
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tragic shell of the man I once knew, a man beset by imagined terrors and
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ever wary of the immemorial horrors which he claimed lurked at the periphery
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of humanity's perceptions. Indeed, I was glad I had taken a journal into
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which I could transcribe his delusional rants, for he had a great deal to
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tell me about The Dreamer In The Catacombs Of Ur:
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The Ghosts of Angkor Wat
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| Bal-sagoth |
