—Lin Carter
Miskatonic University Ackham, Mass. 01970
I. REMEMBRANCES
I am New England born, and home to me
Is ancient Kingsport on the Harbour side.
When I was very young my Father died
And so I came to Arkham by the sea
Where Uncle Zorad and his servant, Jones,
Lived in the old house. He, my guardian,
Was a strange, silent, melancholy man
Given to dark old books and carven stones.
It was from him at last I understood
Why Kingsport people shunned our family.
“Our grandsires came in 1693,"
He said. "And even here they hate our blood.
We came from the old country co survive.
There, we were witches, to be burnt alive."
II. ARKHAM
How much I loved the city's ancient ways.
Quaint cobbled streets, fanlights above the door;
Arkham preserved a softer, gentler lore
In this day’s turmoil, from lost nobler days.
I loved the crooked alleys, narrow, grey,
And gabled houses leaning all awry ...
But even then it had begun to die;
The very air was noisome with decay.
The river-mist, rank with a rotten smell,
The crowded houses, slumped, ramshackle, thin;
Arkham was like a corpse whose outward shell
Preserved a lifelike semblance, while within
Worm, mould, and maggot, in a wriggling slime
Bear witness co the leprous touch of time.
III. THE FESTIVAL
It was that month when red Aldebaran
Burned in the solstice skies arisen late.
With cryptic starry signs enconstellate,
Spelling some occult lore unguessed by man.
The shifting starlight made strange shadows flit
Among the sliding coils of mist that flowed
From the dark Miskatonic past the road.
And every night the Dagon Hall was lit.
It was a sort of church. Old malformed oaks
Grew up around it in a kind of ring.
I overheard the servant say, "The folks
Wonder, ye keep the lad from Worshipping;
Tonight is Festival." I bent to hear
My Uncle say, "He’s young. Another year ..."
IV. THE OLD WOOD
Northwards from Arkham up along the coast,
The ancient woods that climb the hills around
Grow oddly thick for such unhealthy ground.
And on the hill-tops, where they grow the most,
All seem deformed and strangely overgrown
As if their roots, deep down within the earth,
Fed on the rank putrescence of some Birth
Malformed and monstrous, and best left unknown.
Even the grass grows mouldy, and a smell
Hangs in the air as though something was dead.
While bloated fungi spread their stench as well.
I asked my Uncle’s servant once. He said,
"Sure, I can tell ye"—would he had nor talked!
"—That is the Wood where once the Black Goat
walked."
V THE LOCKED ATTIC
He always kept it locked, the attic room,
And ordered me to keep away from there.
I wondered why, and one day climbed the stair
And broke the lock. A place of airless gloom
With walk and rafters that leaned oddly wrong
And crazy angles that were hard to see,
As in some alien geometry
With more dimensions than to ours belong.
But nothing frightened me, until I tried
To open up the window for some air
And found it opened from the other side,
I wiped the dusty pane, and saw out there—
What should not be! I screamed, and somehow knew
What awful worlds chat window opened to.
VI. THE SHUNNED CHURCH
"It’s been abandoned quite a spell" he said,
"That old church on the hill in back o' Hunt's,
When we was kids, we thought 'twas haunted. Once
I found out why its still untenanted ....
One night I heard 'em talk about the place,
How it were closed on 'count of what were done
In there each Roodmass, and how there was one
Never come out, who went inside. They chased
The preacher feller our o' town, I think
One night the kids dared me to go inside.
It were all dark and dusty, with a stink
All through th' air, like somethin' that had died.
—I screamed and run, soon as I understood
Whose image there on the Black Altar stood!”
VII THE LAST RITUAL
The night he died the Demon Star was high.
It hung above the house against the dark
A cold, arcane, malign and watching spark
Like some green, burning and Cycloptic eye.
They locked me in my room, but I could see
My Uncle take down that abhorrent book
At whose mad page I was forbade to look,
Gorscadt's grim volume of Necrolatry.
I heard them chanting (they had closed the blind),
And smelled some burning reek ophidian ...
Then all was silence ... till the screams began.
At dawn the neighbors broke the door, to find
Jones gibbering and mad, Uncle was dead.
They found his body. All except the head.
VIII. THE LIBRARY
When I was young they never let me look
Into that room kept under lock and key,
But when he died my Uncle left to me
His strange collection. Almost every book
Was old and crumbling, curiously bound
In serpent-skin, and with a rotten smell
As of some tainted and abandoned well,
Or some dead thing long buried underground.
I looked in one. And, though my blood ran cold,
I read it, page by page. The nightwind blew
About the eaves, and when red morning rolled
Up from the east, I finished. And I knew
Those old, old books were not meant to be read
By sane men. They were better burnt instead.
IX. BLACK THIRST
The yellowed pages, rotten with decay.
Crawling with loathsome symbols, fill my brain
With wild, tumultuous visions. Were I sane
I'd rise and hurl the leprous books away,
Yet I read on, half thrilled, half in disgust,
Rapt with sick fascination to explore
The vile corruption of forbidden lore,
That leaves me weak and soiled with nameless lust.
I rise with dawn and scrub my shaking hands
And gulp strong brandy down, and try to pray,
And vow to burn these books ... another day ....
But I am like one trapped in sinking sands,
Who strayed apart far from the paths of men.
The night will come. And I will read again ...