those nuclei of all dreamable
hideousness which the cosmos saves to blast an accursed and unhappy few.
Out of the fungus-ridden earth steamed up a vaporous corpse-light,
yellow and diseased, which bubbled and lapped to a gigantic height in
vague outlines half human and half monstrous, through which I could see
the chimney and fireplace beyond. It was all eyes--wolfish and
mocking--and the rugose insect-like head dissolved at the top to a thin
stream of mist which curled putridly about and finally vanished up the
chimney. I say that I saw this thing, but it is only in conscious
retrospection that I ever definitely traced its damnable approach to
form. At the time, it was to me only a seething, dimly phosphorescent
cloud of fungous loathsomeness, enveloping and dissolving to an
abhorrent plasticity the one object on which all my attention was
focussed. That object was my uncle--the venerable Elihu Whipple--who
with blackening and decaying features leered and gibbered at me, and
reached out dripping claws to rend me in the fury which this horror had
brought.

It was a sense of routine which kept me from going mad. I had drilled
myself in preparation for the crucial moment, and blind training saved
me. Recognizing the bubbling evil as no substance reachable by matter or
material chemistry, and therefore ignoring the flame-thrower which
loomed on my left, I threw on the current of the Crookes tube apparatus,
and focussed toward that scene of immortal blasphemousness the strongest
ether radiations which man's art can arouse from the spaces and fluids
of nature. There was a bluish haze and a frenzied sputtering, and the
yellowish phosphorescence grew dimmer to my eyes. But I saw the dimness
was only that of contrast, and that the waves from the machine had no
effect whatever.

Then, in the midst of that demoniac spectacle, I saw a fresh horror
which brought cries to my lips and sent me fumbling and staggering
toward that unlocked door to the quiet street, careless of what abnormal
terrors I loosed upon the world, or what thoughts or judgments of men I
brought down upon my head. In that dim blend of blue and yellow the form
of my uncle had commenced a nauseous liquefaction whose essence eludes
all description, and in which there played across his vanishing face
such changes of identity as only madness can conceive. He was at once a
devil and a multitude, a charnel-house and a pageant. Lit by the mixed
and uncertain beams, tha