When I was but a young man, in the dim, shadow-haunted streets of Dorchester, Massachusetts, each October brought with it a ritual most solemn. In the fading light of autumn, I would immerse myself daily in the works of that master of cosmic horror, H. P. Lovecraft. I dwelt then in a creaking, ancient abode, nestled among similarly decrepit houses, where the air itself seemed to whisper of ancestral secrets long buried. My neighbors, peculiar souls themselves—either descendants of families rooted deep in Dorchester’s soil or members of strange communal gatherings—only heightened the otherworldly atmosphere. The very essence of the place lent a deeper terror to the tales of Lovecraft.
Killin’ sheep was kinder more fun—but d’ye know, ’twan’t quite satisfyin’. Queer haow a cravin’ gits a holt on ye— As ye love the Almighty, young man, don’t tell nobody, but I swar ter Gawd thet picter begun ta make me hungry fer victuals I couldn’t raise nor buy—here, set still, what’s ailin’ ye?—I didn’t do nothin’, only I wondered haow ’twud be ef I did— They say meat makes blood an’ flesh, an’ gives ye new life, so I wondered ef ’twudn’t make a man live longer an’ longer ef ’twas more the same—
Now, in this distant city of San Diego, though the house in which I dwell bears its own weight of years, it cannot summon the same dreadful atmosphere. This day, I revisited “The Picture in the House,” wherein a genealogist, fleeing a storm in the accursed Miskatonic Valley, encounters an ancient abode, teeming with pre-Revolutionary relics. Its sinister occupant, a ragged, timeworn figure, reveals an unnatural hunger—a hunger which, despite his denial, is made manifest when blood from some unseen horror above betrays his foul deeds. The house, struck by a bolt of heavenly retribution, is obliterated, but the narrator lives to tell his ghastly tale—a tale which echoes now, across the aeons of dread that bind us to the unfathomable void.