21. The Descendant
22. The Disinterment
23. The Thing on the Doorstep
24. Dreams in the Witch-House
25. The Dunwich Horror
26. The Music OF Erich Zann
27. The Electic Executioner
28. Sweet Ermengarde
29. Within the Walls of Eryx
30. The Festival
The Descendant
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written 1926
Published 1938 in Leaves, Vol. 2, p. 107-10.
Writing on what my doctor tells me is my deathbed, my most hideous fear is
that the man is wrong. I suppose I shall seem to be buried next week,
but...
In London there is a man who screams when the church bells ring. He lives
all alone with his streaked cat in Gray's Inn, and people call him
harmlessly mad. His room is filled with books of the tamest and most
puerile kind, and hour after hour he tries to lose himself in their feeble
pages. All he seeks from life is not to think. For some reason thought is
very horrible to him, and anything which stirs the imagination he flees as
a plague. He is very thin and grey and wrinkled, but there are those who
declare he is not nearly so old as he looks. Fear has its grisly claws
upon him, and a sound will make him start with staring eyes and
sweat-beaded forehead. Friends and companions he shuns, for he wishes to
answer no questions. Those who once knew him as scholar and aesthete say
it is very pitiful to see him now. He dropped them all years ago, and no
one feels sure whether he left the country or merely sank from sight in
some hidden byway. It is a decade now since he moved into Gray's Inn, and
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