seven o'clock in the morning. That was an hour after I left him at his door.

I told Hegstrom plain out that I wouldn't work that night shift anymore for love or money. He said he'd have me transferred but would I stay one more night until he got a new man? Like a fool, I agreed.

It was three a.m. that next night that I turned the dial to where the China Station should come in that had failed once. I sat petrified for five seconds while I listened to a muffled voice that spoke in hisses and sharp consonants.

Then I tore the earphones off my head, smashed them against the panel with all my strength, and dashed out of the room. I remembered seeing the other operator—the one who had taken my calls—popping his eyes out. Then I was out in the cool air, panting like I had been running for hours.

So it is that I wonder if I shouldn't escape it all—tossing nights, cold sweats of stark terror, a tortured, fevered brain? It would be so easy: a dark night, real dark, you know, so no one would see me and try to stop me, then the cool water to moisten my feverish brow—nice cool water, inviting water—just one little splash, not a noisy one—no one would know—no one would care—no one would understand—just one splash—and then peace.

My friends tell me not to take on so over the death of my one and only pal. They do not know the story. I have told no one. My friends, they tell me there is a haunted look in my eyes, that lines are deepening in my face. They tell me to buck up, to face life squarely.

But I can't. I simply can't. I'll tell you why. After that night when I ripped out the earphones and blew a fuse in the station by short-circuiting a switch on the panel (I found that out later) I went back in answer to a call from Hegstrom. He was very kind and sympathetic. Wanted to know what had caused me to act so strangely the night before—also wanted to know what had caused Ross's suicide. Hegstrom is sharp. He saw the connection. But I clamped my jaws together and refused to say anything.

Then Hegstrom asked if the thing he held in his hand had anything to do with Ross. I took the paper. Then I think I gasped or screamed or something. It was a paper filled with some of that balderdash that Ross had written that night. He must have filled two sheets, and I only destroyed one.

I left Hegstrom as mystified as ever, but I had that paper in my pocket. I had a plan to save my sanity. I took the paper to a professor at a college—a professor famous as a language specialist, ancient and modern. I gave him the paper and one hundred dollars (he afterwards returned the money) and asked him to find out from what country or place it came from.

I got my answer a week later.

There was no such language in either the modern or recorded ancient times!

SUPERNATURAL HORROR IN LITERATURE

Part Seven

by H. P. Lovecraft

(Copyright 1927 by W. Paul Cook)

III. The Early Gothic Novel

The shadow-haunted landscapes of Ossian, the chaotic visions of William Blake, the grotesque witch-dances in Burns's Tam O' Shanter, the sinister daemonism of Coleridge's Christabel and Ancient Mariner, the ghostly charm of James Hogg's Kilmeny, and the more restrained approaches to cosmic horror in Lamia and many of Keats's other poems, are typical British illustrations of the advent of the weird to formal literature. Our Teutonic cousins of the continent were equally receptive to the rising flood, and Burger's Wild Huntsman and the even more famous daemon-bridegroom ballad of Lenore—both imitated in English by Scott, whose respect for the supernatural was always great—are only a taste of the eerie wealth which German song had commenced to provide. Thomas Moore adapted from such sources the legend of the ghoulish statue-bride (later used by Prosper Merimee in The Venus of Ille, and traceable back to great antiquity) which echoes so shiveringly in his ballad of The Ring; whilst Goethe's deathless masterpiece Faust, crossing from mere balladry into the classic, cosmic tragedy of the ages, may be held as the ultimate height to which this German poetic impulse arose.

But it remained for a very sprightly and worldly Englishman—none other than Horace Walpole himself—to give the growing impulse definite shape and become the actual founder of the literary horror-story as a permanent form. Fond of mediaeval romance and mystery as a dilettante's diversion, and with a quaintly imitated Gothic castle as his abode at Strawberry Hill, Walpole in 1764 published The Castle of Otranto, a tale of the supernatural which, though thoroughly unconvincing and mediocre in itself, was destined to exert an almost unparallelled influence on the literature of the weird. First venturing it only as a 'translation' by one "William Marshal, Gent." from the Italian of a mythical "Onuphrio Muralto," the author later acknowledged his connection with the book and took pleasure in its wide and instantaneous popularity—a popularity which extended to many editions, early dramatizations, and wholesale imitation both in England and in Germany.

The story—tedious, artificial, and melodramatic—is further impaired by a brisk and prosaic style whose urbane sprightliness nowhere permits the creation of a truly weird atmosphere. It tells of Manfred, an unscrupulous and usurping prince determined to found a line, who after the mysterious sudden death of his only son, Conrad, on the latter's bridal morn, attempts to put away his wife Hippolita and wed the lady destined for the unfortunate youth—the lad, by the way, having been crushed by the preternatural fall of a gigantic helmet in the castle courtyard. Isabella, the widowed bride, flees from this design; and encounters in subterranean crypts beneath the castle a noble young preserver, Theodore, who seems to be a peasant yet strangely resembles the old lord Alfonso who ruled the domain before Manfred's times. Shortly thereafter supernatural phenomena assail the castle in divers ways; fragments of gigantic armour being discovered here and there, a portrait walking out of its frame, a thunderclap destroying the edifice, and a colossal armoured spectre of Alfonso rising out of the ruins to ascend through parting clouds to the bosom of St. Nicholas. Theodore, having wooed through death—for she is slain by her father by mistake—is discovered to be the son of Alfonso and rightful heir to the estate. He concludes the tale by wedding Isabella and preparing to live happily ever after whilst Manfred, whose usurpation was the cause of his son's death and his own supernatural harassings, retires to a monastery for penitence; his saddened wife seeking asylum in a neighboring convent.

Such is the tale; flat, stilted, and altogether devoid of the true cosmic horror which makes weird literature. Yet such was the thirst of the age for those touches of strangeness and spectral antiquity it reflects, that it was seriously received by the soundest readers and raised in spite of its intrinsic ineptness to a pedestal of lofty importance in literary history. What it did above all else was to create a novel type of scene, puppet-characters, and incidents; which, handled to better advantage by writers more naturally adapted to weird creation, stimulated the growth of an imitative Gothic school which in turn inspired the real weavers of cosmic terror—the line