The Dark Boatman: Tales of Horror and the Cthulhu Mythos by John Glasby Page B

made me feel distinctly uneasy. I knew I had never seen it before, either in real life or in a picture, nor had I heard my uncle speak of it in any of his lectures or on the few occasions when we had met in Cambridge. Yet the feeling that I knew it intimately persisted during the rest of the drive to the village.
    My guide dropped me off in front of my uncle’s house but made no attempt to alight himself, saying that he still had some urgent business to do in the village, and that if my uncle had not yet arrived home, I would be sure to find the door open. I watched as he drove on into the village and then made my way slowly along the carefully-tended path to the house. As the other had said, the front door opened to my touch and I went inside, setting down my two suitcases after receiving no answer to my call.
    When my uncle arrived twenty minutes later, I was shocked and surprised at the haggardness of his expression. There were deep purple circles under his eyes and he looked as though he had not slept for several nights. In response to my enquiries, he would say little more than that there had been certain odd occurrences in the village over the past few months, and in his role of the local doctor he had been helping the police with their investigations. It was with a trace of genuine dread and concern that I tried to question him further, for it was utterly out of character for him to take things so seriously, but he refused to go into more detail until we had eaten.
    We ate the meal in silence, an uneasy silence which began to eat at my nerves, and when we eventually settled down in the easy chairs in front of the fire in the parlour, smoking our pipes, I waited for him to explain the situation with a growing sense of alarm. When he spoke, it was evident he was more overwrought than I had expected.
    “To begin with, Ernest, I have a confession to make to you. This dreadful affair has been going on now for more than six months, and my main reason for asking you to come and stay with me was not so much to provide you with a place of comparative solitude where you could finish your book in peace and quiet as to provide me with both moral and intellectual support in this hideous matter. Things are pretty bad, and I think the climax is near in spite of everything we have been able to do. You have some kind of experience of these nightmare happenings on an indirect, if not direct, level and most of all you will not be inclined to scoff at my ideas, nor are you so steeped in superstition as to be mortally afraid as the rest of the folk are hereabouts. But I must begin at the very beginning. No doubt you noticed the old Carter place on your way here, about a quarter of a mile or so outside the village. It’s been empty now for more than five years, just an empty shell of a place since Henry Carter died, but even before we found him stiff and cold at the foot of the stairs there had been a lot of unwholesome talk about the place.”
    “What kind of talk?” I asked.
    My uncle shrugged, plainly ill at ease. “The usual sort. Strange blue lights in the windows at night, terrible sounds whenever the moon was full, and a frightful odour about the place. It only needs someone to begin a rumour such as that and the place becomes haunted, the home of ghosts and untold horrors even when there is, in all probability, quite a logical and scientific explanation for the happenings. You will probably call what I am going to tell you raving at first, Ernest, but in time, if you decide to stay, you will appreciate that your knowledge is on a totally different plane to that which exists here. Anyway, once Carter was dead, the horror came to East Wisterton with a vengeance. No one from the village would dare to go anywhere near that house, especially after dark. Those of us who had hoped that these idiotic myths concerning the place would die a natural death were doomed to disappointment. If anything, they got worse, much worse. The most