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HP Lovecraft’s Kirby’s Dreamland
Peering into the mouth of madness.
Of all my crushing revelations, none are to me more unsettling than the helpless understanding that when evening descends into formless black, I am then to be beset by the shapeless screaming face.
I had come to learn of a phantastical realm, beyond the limits of our human perception, when an artist friend, Adeleine, had returned from the Far East with a bounty of curiosities. She directed my attention to a small window ensconced in a grey tablet no larger than a preacher’s bible, wherein I saw visions to confuse the senses and confound the mind. Adeleine divulged that this world rested beyond the veil of sleep, and could be accessed by imbibing a solution one measure laudanum and one measure distillate of Red Cap mushroom. She bade me not to venture, but man’s folly is his heedlessness. Insouciance is the patriarch of madness.
I wandered this Dreamland, passing from region to region as if walking through a chamber door. I saw tropical archipelagos shrouded in eternal darkness that seemed to give way without warning to vast sheets of ice and blustering snow. Impenetrable forests, whose paths and trails seemed to wind and undulate as to become unnavigable, suddenly ceased to reveal a clearing barren and devoid of life, denuding a tower which stretched to the very limits of the…
