Walter Gilman did not know. Behind everything crouched the brooding, festering
horror of the ancient town, and of the mouldy, unhallowed garret gable where he
wrote and studied and wrestled with flgures and formulae when he was not tossing
on the meagre iron bed. His ears were growing sensitive to a preternatural and
intolerable degree, and he had long ago stopped the cheap mantel clock whose
ticking had come to seem like a thunder of artillery. At night the subtle
stirring of the black city outside, the sinister scurrying of rats in the wormy
partitions, and the creaking of hidden timbers in the centuried house, were
enough to give him a sense of strident pandernonium. The darkness always teemed
with unexplained sound -- and yet he sometimes shook with fear lest the noises
he heard should subside and allow him to hear certain other fainter noises which
he suspected were lurking behind them.
He was in the changeless, legend-haunted city of Arkham, with its clustering
gambrel roofs that sway and sag over attics where witches hid from the King's
men in the dark, olden years of the Province. Nor was any spot in that city more
steeped in macabre memory than the gable room which harboured him -- for it was
this house and this room which had likewise harboured old Keziah Mason, whose
flight from Salem Gaol at the last no one was ever able to explain. That was in
1692 -- the gaoler had gone mad and babbled of a small white-fanged furry thing
which scuttled out of Keziah's cell, and not even Cotton Mather could explain
the curves and angles smeared on the grey stone walls with some red, sticky
fluid.
Possibly Gilman ought not to have studied so hard. Non-Euclidean calculus and
quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain, and when one mixes them with
folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality
behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the
chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension.
Gilman came from Haverhill, but it was only after he had entered college in
Arkham that he began to connect his mathematics with the fantastic legends of
elder magic. Something in the air of the hoary town worked obscurely on his
imagination. The professors at Miskatonic had urged him to slacken up, and had
voluntarily cut down his course at several points. Moreover, they had stopped
him from consulting the dubious old books on forbidden secrets that were kept
under lock and key in a vault at the university library. But all these
precautions came late in the day, so that Gilman had some terrible hints from
the dreaded Necronomicon of Abdul Alhazred, the fragmentary Book of Eibon, and
the suppressed Unaussprechlicken Kulten of von Junzt to correlate with his
abstract formulae on the properties of space and the linkage of dimensions known
and unknown.
