The Clay Horror

the most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind

correlate everything it contains. We live on a placid island of ignorance amid seas

dark of infinity, and we were not destined to go far.

The sciences, each pulling its own side, have done us little harm so far, but

someday the joining of the pieces of dispersed knowledge will reveal such terrible views of reality and

from our dreadful position within it that we will only have to go mad with the revelation or flee the

deadly illumination for the peace and security of a new dark age.

Theosophists imagined the admirable splendor of the cosmic cycle in which our world and

human race are transitory incidents. They suggested remaining strangers with terms that

they would freeze the blood if they were not masked by mild optimism. But it was not theirs that

came the special glimpse of forbidden ancestral ages that shudders me when I remember and drives me crazy

in dreams. That glimpse, like all the dreadful glimpses of truth, was revealed in an hour

to another with the accidental joining of separate pieces, in this case, an old news item and the

notes from a deceased teacher. I hope no one else puts these pieces together. If I live, never

I will deliberately add a link to that odious chain, for sure. I imagine that the teacher also

intended to keep silent about the part that he knew, and that would have destroyed his notes if the sudden death

had not harvested it

My contact with the subject began in the winter of 1926 to 1927 with the death of my great-grandfather George Gammell Angell, Professor Emeritus of Semitic Languages ​​at Brow University,

Providence, Rhode Island. Professor Angell was widely known as an authority on

old inscriptions and used to be consulted by curators of important museums, so that

many will remember his passing at the age of ninety-two. In the local environment, interest

it was intensified by the obscurity of the cause of death. The teacher had been hit on his way back from

Newport's boat, suddenly falling, according to witnesses, after being hit by a

black with the air of a sailor who came out of one of the dark alleys of the steep slope that served as

shortcut from the pier to the home of the deceased on Williams Street. Doctors failed to detect

no visible disease and concluded, after a confused debate, that the end was due to some

obscure cardiac injury caused by the hurried climb of such a steep slope by such a man

old man. At the time, I didn't have to disagree with that conclusion, but lately I feel inclined to

to wonder ... and more than to wonder.

As heir and testamentary executor to my great uncle, since he died a widower and without

children, I would have to examine their papers with some meticulousness, and to that end I transferred all their

folders and files for my Boston home. Much of the material that I correlated will be in the

future published by the American Archaeological Society, but there was a box that intrigued me