Prologue

             It seems that these may be my final words and I fear I’ve not long to write them.  I never should have come back to this house, this accursed and blighted place, but to have believed the stories and rumors without the knowledge I’ve so recently acquired would have been laughable.  There is a curse on this place and on my family as well, a great and terrible curse that has only grown stronger over the generations.   I had known of my family’s involvement in the slave trade during the early settlement of this country, and of course was properly ashamed of it.  But the horrible truth of it all, a truth writ in blood and bile on parchment of skin and sinew, is far too much for a mind to bear. 

I found the books in my father’s study, an entire hidden library of them.  A collection of tomes within which were countless black rites and rituals all written in dark ink and expressed in full, sickening, detail.   At first I discounted them as mere fiction; a perversion of my father’s feed by dementia or some other sickness of the mind that had gripped him in the years prior to his death.  Despite this I read them and as I did I more and more felt drawn to them much like a moth to flame and as such I was rightfully burned.  It is difficult to make sense of this compulsion as I had always thought myself a man of science, of logic and reason, but that all ended the week before last. 

            I was in the main library, sitting in one of the overstuffed chairs arranged before the fireplace, looking very much the detached academic with my face buried in an ancient text.  This book was perhaps the most disturbing of all, its author, who was an Arabic prince and poet form the 15^th century, seemed both madman and prophet.  The book told of dark and immense beings that not only existed in and around our perceivable dimensions, but were also older than time itself which he referred to as the ‘Great Old Ones’.  It was this section that had given me pause as it seemed strangely familiar to something that an old friend of mine from my college days at Miskatonic University named Adieus Blackmore.  Blackmore with his hawkish face and long gaunt frame was particularly enthralled by the paranormal and the occult despite his intellectual acumen for the more ‘grounded’ sciences.    He would spend hours prattling on about fairy tales and obscure folklore to the point that some began to shun and avoid him, but not me.  While I didn’t agree with his obsessions he was a good friend and a true genius with an uncanny knack for being able to deconstruct problems and discover interesting approaches to solving them and his presence here would certainty have been helpful.  I had been lost in recollections and memories when from behind me I felt a sudden and dreadfully cold burst of air strike my neck.  I turned in the direction the wind had come from and could have sworn to here a soft murmuring behind me.  I leapt from the chair and spun on my heels to find the source, but there was nothing there.  I turned and picked the book that had fallen up off of the floor and saw that the words and pictures on the page were moving.  Frozen with shock and disbelief, I merely stood there and watched in horrified fascination as the letters and lines danced about the page.  The wonderment end when the ink blurred together into the form as a smile demonic visage appeared and from within my own mine I heard a dark laughter.  Suddenly the words reformed into their original configuration and spill off of the pages, onto my hands and began crawling up my arms.  Loudly I shrieked in pure terror, hurling the book at the ground, and started wildly scraping at my arms in an attempt to wipe away the words to little avail.  I felt them reach my neck and began thrashing violently and ran to the bathroom hoping to wash the darkness away, but as I left the room I knew that the presence was gone.  I looked at my hands and arms and saw that they were clear.  Fighting my urge to run away I returned to the library, picked up the book, and threw it into the roaring fire.  I stood there watching it burn away and was determined to leave this place and never return, but as I turned to make my exit I found my path impeded.  Standing in the doorway was Martin Moresby, a butler who had been employed by the family for as a long as I could remember.  He asked if I were okay, to which I said that I was not and that I would be taking my leave from here immediately and for him to call a car.  But he didn’t move an inch, he just looked at me with sorrowful eyes and said that he would not be doing that and took a step forward.  I repeated my request and was about to follow with force, but then it struck me.  Moresby had worked for my family for as long as I could remember, some thirty plus years, and it was just at this moment when I noticed that he looked not a day older than when I first left home for University which was more than a decade ago.  He seemed to have been reading my mind because smiled wickedly and everything went dark.  I awoke and found that I was in my bedroom and I knew I would never step foot outside the estate again.

            And so that is when I began to compile as much information as possible, all under the watchful eye of Moresby, and secreting them away in journals and notebooks.  Everything about my family and the terrible evil that has been done on the property has been collected and hidden so that should some else come here they might be able to stop them.  If you read this final note of mine please I implore you to stop them and if not run.  Run far and fast until your heart pounds and your veins boil.  Run and never return here or better yet burn this place to the ground, but be careful.  I don’t rightly know if the rest of the staff are complicit, but the house has eyes and ears.  There are shadows here and they have teeth and mouths and whisper things no mortal being should ever hear.   

May god forgive me,

Arthur P. Davenport