51. The Horror in the Museum
52. The Nameless City
53. The Night Ocean
54. Old Bugs
55. The Very Old Folk
56. The Other Gods
57. The Outsider
58. Pickman's Model
59. The Picture in the House
60. The Poe-et's Nightmare
The Horror in the Museum
by H. P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald
Written October 1932
Published July 1933 in Weird Tales, 22, No. 1, 49-68.
IT WAS languid curiousity which first brought Stephen Jones to Rogers'
Museum. Someone had told him about the queer underground place in
Southwark Street across the river, where waxen things so much more
horrible than the worst effigies at Madame Tussaud's were shown, and he
had strolled in one April day to see how disappointing he would find it.
Oddly, he was not disappointed. There was something different and
distinctive here, after all. Of course, the usual gory commonplaces were
present--Landru, Doctor Crippen, Madame Demers, Rizzio, Lady Jane Grey,
endless maimed victims of war and revolution, and monsters like Gilles de
Rais and Marquis de Sade--but there were other things which had made him
breathe faster and stay till the ringing of the closing bell. The man who
had fashioned this collection could be no ordinary mountebank. There was
imagination--even a kind of diseased genius--in some of this stuff.
Later he had learned about George Rogers. The man had been on the Tussaud
staff, but some trouble had developed which led to his discharge. There
were aspersions on his sanity and tales of his crazy forms of secret
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