Unless the alternative was worse? Look, start at the beginning!Īs I have said before, the weird studies of Harley Warren were well known to me, and to some extent shared by me. Oh well, if you refuse to say any more, then I guess it really is a short story! Oh wait… looks like you changed your mind…Īgain I say, I do not know what has become of Harley Warren though I think-almost hope-that he is in peaceful oblivion, if there be anywhere so blessed a thing. Detain me here forever if you will confine or execute me if you must have a victim to propitiate the illusion you call justice but I can say no more than I have said already. I repeat to you, gentlemen, that your inquisition is fruitless. In this story, the technology is the field telephone, which was portable and so could be taken to all kinds of places… like ancient cemeteries, for instance…

This is another anthology in the British Library’s Tales of the Weird series, and the theme is the various new technologies that were coming into use in the first half of the twentieth century, and how horror writers used them to chilling effect. In the porpy’s opinion, no spooky season would be complete without at least one story from the Master of the Adjective, HP Lovecraft, so he was delighted when this one turned up in The Night Wire. If (('gtm=off') const isAppRedirect = ('appRedirect') Ĭonst isAndroid = /Android/i.test(erAgent) Ĭonst isIphone = /iPhone|iPad|iPod/i.test(erAgent) Finally, after Warren is silent for several minutes, Carter calls to him down the line, only to hear an alien voice telling him that Warren is dead. After several minutes of silence, Warren suddenly begins to make vague, panicked outbursts that culminate in a desperate plea for Carter to flee.

Taking a lantern, he leaves Carter on the surface, and follows the stairs into the darkness, communicating with his companion by a telephone wire.

Upon arriving, Warren locates a particular tomb, and opens it to reveal a staircase that descends into the earth. He encourages Carter to travel with him to the location of one such portal, an ancient graveyard near Big Cypress Swamp. From his mysterious book, Warren apparently deduces that doors or stairways exist between the surface world, and the underworld. Carter mentions that Warren has other 'strange, rare books on forbidden subjects', several of which are in Arabic.

Warren has come into the possession of a book, written in an unknown language, the exact contents of which he never revealed to Carter. In his statement, Carter attempts to explain the disappearance of his companion, the occultist Harley Warren. 'The Statement of Randolph Carter' is the first person testimony of the titular character, who has been found wandering through swampland in an amnesiac shock.

Carter and lovecraft 3