[instrumental]
[17 october: 1893]
such grim musings as have been occupying my mind of late unfortunately seem
to suggest a possible link to the fate of my learned friend and colleague
doctor ignatius stone. that brilliant researcher was last seen in command
of all his faculties whilst on an expedition to the ruins of the sumerian
city of ur, an undertaking which preceded my own work there by some eighteen
months. stone was a gifted archaeologist who also dabbled, perhaps unwisely,
in certain areas of the occult, particularly involving the various
grotesqueries once worshipped as cthonic deities by the ancient denizens of ur.
mere days before he ventured into the ziggurats of that foreboding,
mystery-haunted site, he had dispatched a letter to me claiming that he was
on the verge of a truly staggering arcane discovery at ur which would
simultaneously prove the cyclical nature of human civilisation as well as
immediately render redundant all previous theories on the origin of man.
whatever misfortune befell him within those aeons-old tombs robbed him
irrevocably of his sanity, for when his attendants finally managed to prise
open the stone door of the vast central catacomb, which had, i'm told,
inexplicably shut fast behind his three-man torch-bearing party, they found
two of the regularly stalwart men had seemingly expired of pure fright,
while stone was slumped against the north wall, staring vacantly into the
gloom, gibbering about visitations by beings so terrible that the very
contemplation of their existence would sunder a man's tenuous hold on the
reins of sanity.
when i later visited him at the sanatorium in england, i found him to be a
tragic shell of the man i once knew, a man beset by imagined terrors and
ever wary of the immemorial horrors which he claimed lurked at the periphery
of humanity's perceptions. indeed, i was glad i had taken a journal into
which i could transcribe his delusional rants, for he had a great deal to
tell me about the dreamer in the catacombs of ur: