Alone With the Horrors The Great Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell, 1961-1991

The Tower from Yuggoth I Of late there has been a renewal of interest in cases of inexplicable happenings. From this it seems inevitable that further interest be shown in the case of Edward Wingate Armitage, who was consigned to St Mary's Hospital, Arkham, in early 1929, later to be taken to an institution. His life had always been, by choice, the life of an outcast and recluse; for the greater part of his life outside the institution he had been interested in the occult and forbidden; and his supposed finding of incontrovertible evidence in his research into certain legendary presences outside Arkham, which sent him into that period of insanity from which he never recovered, might therefore have been a seeming triviality, portentous only to his already slightly deranged mind. Certainly there were, and still are, certain Cyclopean geological anomalies in the woods toward Dunwich; but no trace could be found of that which Armitage shudderingly described as set at the highest point of those strange slabs of rock, which admittedly did bear a certain resemblance to titan stair-treads. However, there undoubtedly was something more than the vast steps that Armitage glimpsed, for he had known of their existence for some time, and certain other things connected with the case lead an unbiased outsider to believe that the case is not quite so simple as the doctors would have it believed. Edward Wingate Armitage was born in early 1879 of upper-class parents. As an infant, nothing peculiar may be noted concerning him. He accompanied his parents to their weekly attendance at the Congregationalist church; at home he played, ate, and slept with regularity, and in general acted as a normal child would. However, the house's welfare was naturally attended by servants, most of which, in the manner of servants, had a tendency to talk more to children than the elder Armitages; and so it was that a three-year-old was noted to show unaccountable interest in what fell out of space on the Gardner farm in that year of 1882. The elder Armitages were forced to speak more than once to the servants on the subject of what was fitting for discussion with Edward. A few years later, after a period in which Edward declined to leave the house except for walks with his parents, a change was seen to occur. It was in the summer of 1886 that this became particularly noticeable. He would indeed leave the house, but could not be seen playing anywhere nearby, though servants often saw him leave with a book from the house library under his armthat library which had been partially built up of books from the inherited property of a grandfather. Certain of these books were on subjects occult and morbid, and Edward had been warned not to touch themhis father often considering their destruction, for he was a definite Congregationalist, and disliked such books' being in the house; but never did he put this idea into practice. None of these books appeared to be missing while Edward was away, but the father was unsure quite how many there were; and the boy was never met returning, so that he might have returned whatever books he had taken. He invariably said that he had been "out walking"; but certain newspaper items, dealing with curious signs found scratched in the soil of graveyards, and certain peculiar erections, together with bodies of various wild creatures, found in the woods, gave the parents cause to wonder. It was at this time, also, that the boy began to be avoided by all the children in the vicinity. This inexplicable avoidance began immediately after a young girl had accompanied Edward, or rather followed him, on one of his silent trips. She had seen him enter a grove of trees outside Arkham, where a peculiar arrangement of stones in the centre, somewhat resembling a monolith, caught her eye. Characteristic of the cold-blCampbell, Ramsey is the author of 'Alone With the Horrors The Great Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell, 1961-1991' with ISBN 9780765307682 and ISBN 0765307685.