Lamentations From Carcosa
While researching a novel that I have yet to write, I came across the following incidents which have been haunting me ever since. It is my hope that reporting them here will excise the dread from my imagination.
On page 372 of Dyer’s History of the Occult, we read about the infamous Miskatonic Press and the mysterious disappearance of its founder, Henry West, from a locked prison cell in 1923. The son of a wealthy family and a well-known practitioner of the occult, Mr West had been arrested for a series of gruesome murders in Ambrose, Massachusetts. While awaiting the gallows, he was allowed to work on one last book, the long poem he called Lamentations From Carcosa, which he finished the day before his scheduled execution. However, when the guards checked on Mr West the next morning, they found his locked cell empty but for the completed manuscript placed at the center of a circle drawn on the stone floor in what appeared to be blood. Within the circle and around the stacked pages, a pentagram and several strange glyphs had been inscribed, but the occultist himself had vanished.
Ten decades later, we read in the news about a man who had been tied to his bed and bled to death over the course of several days. The killer had used the man’s blood to draw a large circular design on the oak floor, a design that, from all accounts, was identical to what had been found in Mr West’s cell a hundred years earlier. The primary suspect in the murder is the man’s missing wife, who oversaw the rare book collection at the city library. For evidence the police have the charred remnants of her journal which had been recovered from a smoldering fire pit in the backyard. The few passages that remain legible tell of the librarian’s discovery of the Lamentations From Carcosa in a long forgotten box of books, and of the horrific experiences she suffered after reading it.
In her journal, the librarian described visions of black stars rising over the ruins of an ancient city, dreams of strange glyphs painted in blood, and the torments of terrifying, involuntary metamorphosis. She wrote that her blonde hair grew darker and curly, her limbs thickened, scars appeared where there had once been smooth skin, and that the color of her eyes shifted from blue to grey. With trepidation she noted that her voice had deepened, and that the graceful, feminine angles of her face had become blunter and more crude. One morning she woke to find that she had grown a mustache and that the little finger on her left hand had become a stump, as if it had been cut off years ago. In her final, trembling entry she wrote of horrified revulsion at finding “a new organ” between her legs. Her last scribbled words were “I hear the Mademoiselle of Carcosa singing lamentations for her imprisoned King. She calls to him through time. I am not—” Here the journal abruptly ends.
Returning to Dyer’s History of the Occult, we find on page 373 a reproduction of a portrait of Mr West that still hangs in a back office at Miskatonic Press. The occultist had been a heavy set, severe man, with dark, curly hair, grey eyes, and a thick mustache. In the portrait, his hands rest on the top of an ornate, yellow cane, and we can clearly see that the little finger of his left hand is just a stump.
To this day the murder is unsolved, and the librarian, like the occultist, remains missing. Despite a thorough search, no copy of Lamentations From Carcosa was ever found at the house or library. I implore any who might come across this accursed volume to avert their eyes for only madness and death lurk in its dread pages.