Free The Watchers Out of Time by H.P. Lovecraft Page A

workingmen came back to the architect, I would be able to deny the truth of them, though for this report I was destined to wait in vain, for the fear-ridden Poles never revealed to the architect a word of their real reason for deserting their job.
    I did not wait to learn this from the architect, who was bound eventually to find someone who would undertake such alterations as I wished made, but, guided by an instinct I did not know I possessed, I made my way to the hidden room, carrying a powerful flashlight, determined to subject it to the most painstaking examination. Almost at once upon entering it, however, I made a spine-chilling discovery; though the marks the architect and I had made in our brief foray into the room were still identifiably evident, there were other, more recent marks which suggested that someone—or something—had been in this room since I had last entered it. The marks were plain to be seen—of a man, bare of foot, and, equally unmistakably, the prints of a cat. But these were not the most terrifying evidences of some sinister occupation—they began out of the northeast corner of the curiously-angled room, at a point where it was impossible for a man to stand, and scarcely high enough for a cat; yet it was here that they materialized in the room, and from this point that they came forward, proceeding in the direction of the black desk—where there was something far worse, though I did not notice it until I was almost upon the desk in following the footsteps.
    The desk had been freshly stained. A small pool of some viscous fluid lay there, as if it had boiled up out of the wood—scarcely more than three inches in diameter, next to a mark in the dust as if the cat or a doll or a bundle of some kind had lain there. I stared at it, trying to determine what it might be in the glow of my flashlight, sending my light ceilingward to detect; if possible, any opening through which rain might have come, until I remembered that there had been no rainfall since my first and only visit to this strange secret room. Then I touched my index finger to the pool and held it in the light. The color was red—the color of blood—and simultaneously I knew without being told that this was what it was. Of how it came there I dared not think.
    By this time the most terrifying conclusions were crowding to mind, but without any logic. I backed away from the desk, pausing only long enough to snatch up some of the leather-bound books, and the manuscript which reposed there; and with these in my possession, I retreated from the room into the more prosaic surroundings outside—where the rooms were not constructed of seemingly impossible angles, suggesting dimensions beyond the knowledge of mankind. I hastened almost guiltily to my quarters below, hugging the books carefully to my bosom.
    Curiously, as soon as I opened the books, I had an uncanny conviction that I knew their contents. Yet I had never seen them before, nor, to the best of my knowledge, had I ever encountered such titles as
Malleus Maleficarum
and the
Daemonialitas
of Sinistrari. They dealt with witch-lore and wizardry, with all manner of spells and legends, with the destruction of witches and warlocks by fire, with their methods of travel—“Among their chief operations are being bodily transported from place to place…seduced by the illusions and phantasms of devils, do actually, as they believe and profess, ride in the night-time on certain beasts…or simply walk upon the air out of the openings built for them and for none other. Satan himself deludes in dreams the mind which he holds captive, leading it through devious ways…They take the unguent, which they make at the devil’s instruction from the limbs of children, particularly of those whom they have killed, and anoint with it a chair or a broomstick; whereupon they are immediately carried up into the air, either by day or by night, and either visibly or, if they wish, invisibly…” But I read no