Once more, as the shadows lengthen and the leaves of October begin their slow descent, I have renewed my tradition of reading one eldritch tale each day from the unhallowed works of the master of cosmic horror, H. P. Lovecraft. This ritual, which I first embarked upon as a youth in Dorchester, Massachusetts, was then, as now, intertwined with the ancient, crumbling homes and the morbid beauty of autumn’s twilight that lent Lovecraft’s grotesque visions a curious veracity.
Today’s tale, “The Moon-Bog,” stirs within me a poignant remembrance, harkening back to the fog-shrouded days of my boyhood when I would tread solemnly past the hallowed Cobb Library and along that lonely path dividing the desolate cranberry bogs. The stillness of the place was broken only by the unsettling drone of unseen insects, the occasional plop of a toad’s furtive leap into the murky depths, and the far-off cries of birds whose names I never knew. There, amidst the silence, my mind would conjure images most unnatural—visions of lurking horrors born from the primordial ooze, creatures akin to the monstrous Swamp Thing imagined by Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson, which swayed with the shadows just beyond my sight.
Ah, those days were touched with the eerie glow of forgotten ages when reality and fantasy seemed to blur beneath the crimson sky.
But alas, I digress. It is time to cast aside nostalgia and immerse myself in today’s macabre offering!
Half gliding, half floating in the air, the white-clad bog-wraiths were slowly retreating toward the still waters and the island ruin in fantastic formations suggesting some ancient and solemn ceremonial dance.
In the tale, oir unnamed narrator recounts with shuddering detail the tragic and sinister demise of his once-esteemed companion, Denys Barry, a man of resolute will and American blood, whose ancestral roots had long since entwined themselves with the mist-wreathed soil of Kilderry—a forsaken hamlet, lurking amidst the forgotten depths of Ireland. Against the insistent warnings of the trembling villagers, whose superstitions and whispered dread seemed to rise from the very earth itself, Barry dared to defy the ancient curse that hung over the land like a malignant fog. For it was in his arrogant ambition that he sought to drain the nearby bog, a place whose dark waters concealed mysteries beyond mortal comprehension.
In this grievous transgression, Barry paid no heed to the cryptic legends of old—the half-remembered lore of the Partholonians, the first wanderers to tread upon the accursed shores of Erin. These shadowy figures, it was said, had been scourged from existence by a nameless plague that descended upon them with the swiftness of divine retribution, somewhere in the dim recesses of prehistory, when time itself was young. Though their bones had long since crumbled into dust, their restless shades were rumored to linger in the damp hollows of that ancient land, their wrath undiminished by the passage of millennia.
So too did Barry ignore the persistent whispers of the peasants, who clung fiercely to the notion that their race sprang not from native soil, but from far-off Greece, borne across the wine-dark sea by those same Partholonians—exiles from a forgotten Mediterranean past. In disturbing the foul bog, Barry unknowingly disturbed far more than mere earth and water, but the very spirits of the land itself—spirits whose slumber had been long and whose vengeance would be terrible.
Thus, as the bog was drained and the eldritch forces beneath it were unshackled, the doom of Denys Barry was sealed—a doom that would reverberate in the mind of the narrator like a distant and ghastly echo, long after the cursed estate had been swallowed once more by the encroaching dark.