The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

by H.P. Lovecraft

but still the Pole Star leers down from the same place in the black vault, winking hideously like an insane watching eye which strives to convey some strange message, yet recalls nothing save that it once had a message to convey.

I did not tell the older physicians of these things, for middle age is sceptical, cynical, and disinclined to accept new ideas.

and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.

“That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.”

That night something of youth and beauty died in the elder world.

they accuse me of a hideous thing, but they must know that I did not do it. They must know it was the rats; the slithering, scurrying rats whose scampering will never let me sleep; the daemon rats that race behind the padding in this room and beckon me down to greater horrors than I have ever known; the rats they can never hear; the rats, the rats in the walls.

Some secrets of inner earth are not good for mankind, and this seemed to me one of them.