Many a night I spent in my study, searching for Dr. Hugo’s mysterious tome, the stagnant air heavy with that unmistakable scent of aged leather and hoary paper, mixed with the thick smoke of my customary evening cigar.


    I searched for weeks, through books both academic and fantastical. Evidently, as the Professor had delved deeper into her research, she had been led down ever increasingly distasteful and shadowy avenues. Amongst others, I found copies of the dread Black Book of Babylon, the discredited Dollhouse Manifesto, and the supposed autobiography of the Whitechapel Killer.


    These were queer nights: my oil-lamp flung strange shadows over the pallid busts and sculptures that adorned my study, twisting the marble figures into cruel and otherworldly shapes.


    At other times a log or errant coal would shift in the fireplace, and the flames would flutter sinisterly, giving rise to fantastic visions of dancing demons and tormented souls.


    Even the soft rustling of my curtains began to fill me with dread, moved as they were by the chill air of the New England autumn seeping softly through the cracks in my window-frame.


    More than once I rushed to my window, certain that someone was leering in from the darkness outside – only to discover it was only a trick of the waning light, or the wind shaking the branches of the oak that grew crooked outside my study’s solitary window.


    It was around this time I began to be haunted by strange and unpleasant dreams, visions that found me as I lay drowsing at my desk, pushing me from the precipice of consciousness to the dark underworld of sleep. These dreams were often jumbled, or confused, filled with vague and unsettling imagery, but I still recall the first in vivid detail:This novel''s true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.


    I found myself underground, evidently an ancient cave used for burials, for the cavern was populated by countless rows of mummified figures, arms folded in death, all resting upon cold, stone plinths. The cavernous rock walls of that subterranean crypt were slimy to the touch, and dripping with an ominous phosphorescence, and the air was thick with the smell of decay.


    Nothing moved save I in that Stygian tomb, yet more disturbing than the dead was the horrid sensation of being perceived by some unseen but malicious spectre – a sensation that persisted for some time even after I woke.


    Such was my unease that, upon waking, I performed a thorough investigation of my estate, thinking perhaps some burglar or intruder had snuck inside during the night, and this, subconsciously, was the source of my ill feeling.


    Of course, I found nothing.


    Then, one day, after setting aside a soiled collection of Antikytheran funeral verse, I unwrapped a worn muslin cloth from around a strange book, and knew at once I held in my hand the very tome the late Professor had alluded to in her letters:


    A singular book of strange origin, bound in curiously taut leather, a curt examination of the tome’s yellowing, crumbling pages revealing blasphemous rituals in a curious script I later discovered to be derived from an ancient Sumerian cuneiform.


    At once I was struck by an overwhelming sense of dread. Horror clawed darkly at my trembling psyche, warning me of untold and nameless truths that human minds – in their banal placidity – were not meant to comprehend.


    My first shameful impulse was to destroy the book, to throw the tome into a fire and do service to mankind with its destruction. I started towards the fireplace, but hesitated at the brink. I was a man of science; books were my domain. To reject the knowledge within would be to reject all that I valued and loved of the world.


    Trembling, I returned to my desk and continued to peruse the tome, which now seemed thick with an almost tangible malice and maligned portent.


    The scenes depicted within were gruesome beyond belief, and I grew faint as I poured over illustration after illustration of ritualistic sacrifice, necromancy, cannibalism, and the offering up of condemned souls to nameless dead gods, who lay writhing in the dark hidden places beyond time and space.


    Was this the Professor’s discovery? Her legacy?