“Who amongst us carries the seed to transcend the mundane? Which of us has the potential to transform into something wondrous or terrible? What price to learn the mysterious forces that change men into gods and monsters?”
—Robert Harrison Blake
Prologue
That I was arrested on four counts of murder is well known. That I was responsible for the deaths of four men, I have confessed to the authorities. So I am sure that it came as a shock to many when on the advice of my doctors, the district attorney chose not to press charges, satisfied revoking my license to practice medicine. Some say that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has suffered enough of late, the city of Arkham, indeed the whole of the Miskatonic Valley is tired of tragedy and scandal. The federal government has cast a long dark shadow over Innsmouth, and a strange catastrophe has plunged the Dunwich area into a horror unmatched in our history.
I am grateful for such events, for they served to draw the faculty and students of the university away, leaving the grounds nearly empty. Had the campus not been all but deserted, the malignancy that had festered amongst the citizenry of Arkham might never have been contained. Even now if the events of that night were publicly known, the residents of this city would likely rise up to form a mob intent on slaughtering fully a tenth of their neighbors, and I would likely be the first victim. I know this because while the terror came to light in October of 1929, it began long before then. I was there in 1905 when it was born, and it is I who have nurtured and directed its cancerous growth for the last two and a half decades!