An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

A mathematics student at Miskatonic University named Walter Gilman who lives in a peculiarly angled room in the old Witch House in Arkham begins having bizarre dreams filled with sights, sounds, and shapes of an utterly indescribable cast; other dreams, much more realistic in nature, reveal a huge rat with human hands named Brown Jenkin, apparently the familiar of the witch Keziah Mason, who once dwelt in the Witch House. Meanwhile Gilman, in his classwork, begins to display a remarkable intuitive grasp of hyperspace, or the fourth dimension. But then his dreams take an even weirder turn, and there are indications that he is sleepwalking. Keziah seems to be urging him on in some nameless errand (“He must meet the Black Man, and go with them all to the throne of Azathoth at the centre of ultimate Chaos”). Then in one very clear dream he sees himself “half lying on a high, fantastically balustraded terrace above a boundless jungle of outlandish, incredible peaks, balanced planes, domes, minarets, horizontal discs poisoned on pinnacles, and numberless forms of still greater wildness.” The balustrade is decorated with designs representing ridged, barrel-shaped entities (i.e., the Old Ones from At the Mountains of Madness); but Gilman wakes screaming when he sees the living barrel-shaped entities coming toward him. The next morning the barrel-shaped ornament—which he had broken off the balustrade in the dream—is found in his bed. Things seem rapidly to be reaching some hideous culmination. A baby is kidnapped and cannot be found. Then, in a dream, Gilman finds himself in a strangely angled room with Keziah, Brown Jenkin, and the baby. Keziah is going to sacrifice the child, but Gilman knocks the knife from her hand. He and Keziah engage in a fight, and he manages to frighten her momentarily by dis

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playing a crucifix given to him by a fellow tenant; when Brown Jenkin comes to her aid, he kicks the familiar down an abyss, but not before it has made some sort of sacrificial offering with the baby’s blood. The next night Gilman’s friend Frank Elwood sees a ratlike creature eat its way through Gilman’s body to his heart. The Witch House is rented no more, and years later, when it is razed, an enormous pile of human bones going back centuries is discovered, along with the bones of a huge ratlike entity.