RICHARD UPTON PICKMAN
"For hours he climbed with aching arms and blistered hands, seeing again the
grey death-fire and Thok’s uncomfortable pinnacles. At last he discerned above him the
projecting edge of the great crag of the ghouls, whose vertical side he could not glimpse; and
hours later he saw a curious face peering over it as a gargoyle peers over a parapet of Notre
Dame. This almost made him lose his hold through faintness, but a moment later he was himself
again; for his vanished friend Richard Pickman had once introduced him to a ghoul, and he knew
well their canine faces and slumping forms and unmentionable idiosyncrasies. So he had himself
well under control when that hideous thing pulled him out of the dizzy emptiness over the edge
of the crag, and did not scream at the partly consumed refuse heaped at one side or at the squatting
circles of ghouls who gnawed and watched curiously."
A greenish elderly ghoul offered to conduct him to Pickman’s
present habitation, so despite a natural loathing he followed the creature into a capacious
burrow and crawled after him for hours in the blackness of rank mould. They emerged on a dim
plain strown with singular relics of earth—old gravestones, broken urns, and grotesque
fragments of monuments—and Carter realised with some emotion that he was probably nearer
the waking world than at any other time since he had gone down the seven hundred steps from
the cavern of flame to the Gate of Deeper Slumber.
There, on a tombstone of 1768 stolen from the Granary Burying Ground in Boston, sat the ghoul which was once the artist Richard Upton Pickman. It was naked and rubbery, and had acquired so much of the ghoulish physiognomy that
its human origin was already obscure.
H.P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest Of Unknown Kadath
Illustration by Nick Gucker
Lovely!
ReplyDelete