A thing, a bubbling blasphemous shape from lunacy's most hellish nightmare, was squeezing its flabby pulp out through the frame of the mirror into my room — and it wore a face where no face ever should have been.
I do not recall moving — opening my desk drawer and snatching out that which lay within — yet it seems I must have done so. I remember only the deafening blasts of sound from the bucking, silver-plated revolver in my clammy hand; and above the rattle of sudden thunder, the whine of flying fragments and the shivering of glass as the hell-forged bronze frame buckled and leapt from the wall.
I remember, too, picking up the strangely twisted silver bullets from my Boukhara rug. And then I must have fainted.
The next morning I dropped the shattered fragments of the mirror's glass overboard from the rail of the Thames Ferry and I melted down the frame to a solid blob and buried it deep in my garden. I burned the diary and scattered its ashes to the wind. Finally, I saw my doctor and had him prescribe a sleeping-draft for me. I knew I was going to need it.
I have said the thing had a face.
Indeed, atop the glistening, bubbling mass of that hell-dweller's bulk there was a face. A composite face of which the two halves did not agree! For one of them was the immaculately cruel visage of an ancient Queen of Egypt; and the other was easily recognizable — from photographs I had seen in the newspapers — as the now anguished and lunatic features of a certain lately vanished explorer!
AN ITEM OF SUPPORTING EVIDENCE
THE NEXT TWO stories were shorts written expressly for August Derleth's Arkham Collector. This slim magazine or 'house journal' didn't have room for long pieces, so Derleth liked to keep stories short and to the point.
But let's go back to a- time twenty years earlier:
My father was a coal miner in a colliery an England's northeast coast, and he was also a very well-read, fascinating man with a keen and ever-thirsting mind. Museums drew him like a nail to a magnet, and some of his love of ancient civilizations and strange antiquities — his love of knowledge in general — naturally rubbed off on me. Sunderland had a fine museum, which we used to visit fairly regularly. And not far away, there stood Hadrian's Wall. I think we met Titus Crow there once, when we were walking under the wall.
Come to think of it that might even have been the same day he stumbled across
An Item of Supporting Evidence.
It was the contents of a letter from Chandler Davies, the weird-artist, commenting upon the negative effect which my short story Yegg-ha's Realm had had on him, which determined me to invite him round to Blowne House. Not that I grieved to any great extent over Mr Davies' adverse comments - you can never please everyone - but I definitely disagreed with his expounded argument. He had had it that Mythological-Fantasy was 'out'; that the Cthulhu Mythos' fabled lands and creatures and Cimmeria's scintillating citadels and dark demons should have been allowed to die a sad but certain death along with their respective originators, and that constant culling from those tales - the brain children of my own, not to mention many another author's, literary progenitors - was weakening the impact of the original works. Nor, apparently, had my story - admittedly a Lovecraftian piece; set during the time of Rome's rule over England and involving the worship of an 'outside God' - irritated him in this respect alone. What seemed to have annoyed Mr Davies especially was the fact that I had portrayed 'so thoroughly unbelievable a God' as existing in such a well-known period of England's history that even an average student of our country's antiquities could hardly miss the obvious impossibility of my tale.
I was pleased that Mr Davies had written directly to me and not to the letters section of Grotesque, in which magazine my tale had originally appeared, for then I would have been forced to take retaliatory measures which would undoubtedly have caused great tidal-waves of unwanted activity on many a scientific beach. Obviously the artist was not aware that all my stories have at least a tenuous basis in established fact, some more definitely than others, and that I have never chronicled anything which I believe could not possibly have happened or which has not, in some way or other, directly involved myself.
Anyway, Mr. Davies accepted my invitation and braved the curious aura of foreboding which surrounds Blowne House to visit me one Sunday afternoon some weeks ago. It was the first time he had ever set foot inside my abode and I noted with satisfaction the way in which his eyes roved enviously over the contents of my amply stocked book-shelves.
Briefly fingering the spine of an original copy of Geoffrey's People of the Monolith, he remarked upon my extreme good fortune at owning so many scarce volumes and read off some of their titles as he scanned them. His, short monologue included Feery's Original Notes on the Necronomicon, the abhorrent Cthaat Aquadingen, a literally priceless Cultes des Goules and many other similarly outre works including such anthropological source books as The Golden Bough and Miss Murray's Witch Cult. I made a point of bringing to his attention the fact that "I also owned a translated copy of Lollius Urbicus' little known Frontier Garrison, circa AD 138, and took the book down from its shelf before pouring my guest a welcoming brandy.
'I take it that book contains the item of supporting evidence which you mentioned in your letter, Mr Crow?
That being the case I think it's only fair to warn you from the beginning that I can't put much stock in anything Urbicus says; though I'll admit that his description of the temple to Mithras at Barrburgh was pretty accurate.'
Appreciating the way in which my obviously erudite critic was shaping up, I countered his exploratory thrust by smiling and telling him: 'No, the book merely contains a few additional fragments of interest in connection with my actual evidence — which is of an entirely different nature.'
'I don't want you to get me wrong, Mr Crow,' he answered, taking out a cigarette and settling himself more comfortably in his chair in preparation for the more strenuous battle to come, 'as an entertainment your story was very good — excellent — and any casual reader of such tales must surely have experienced a definite shudder at some of the "shock" paragraphs which you so successfully employed; but to have set the thing in a period of which we're so historically and archaeologically "sure" — the same period, I note, in which old Urbicus scribbled his notes for that book of yours — was a mistake the story could well have done without. You see, I'm a collector — a gourmet of such tales, you could say — and while I don't wish to be offensive I must admit that blunders like yours irk me considerably . . .' He sipped at his brandy.
While Mr Davies had been speaking, I had carefully opened Frontier Garrison to a previously marked page and as soon as he was done I turned the book around and slid it over the table separating us so that he could read the selected paragraph. Smiling, he did so, though I thought his smile was just a trifle too sarcastic; and sure enough, when he was through, he closed the book with a flourish which indicated complete rejection.
'I have also read Plato on Atlantis and Borellus on, er, revivication? — No, Mr Crow, Lollius Urbicus' account of the death of Yegg-ha at the swords of a centuria of fear-frenzied Roman soldiers doesn't impress me at all. I'm sorry'