"The wind gibbers with Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness. They bend the forest and crush the city, yet may not forest or city behold the hand that smites."

Lovecraft

"In a Sequester’d Providence Churchyard
Where Once Poe Walk’d"

Eternal brood the shadows on this ground,
Dreaming of centuries that have gone before;
Great elms rise solemnly by slab and mound,
Arch’d high above a hidden world of yore.
Round all the scene a light of memory plays,
And dead leaves whisper of departed days,
Longing for sights and sounds that are no more.

Lonely and sad, a spectre glides along
Aisles where of old his living footsteps fell;
No common glance discerns him, tho’ his song
Peals down thro’ time with a mysterious spell:
Only the few who sorcery’s secret know
Espy amidst these tombs the shade of Poe. *

Lovecraft

The Genie that haunts the moonbeams spake to the Daemon of the Valley, saying, “I am old, and forget much. Tell me the deeds and aspect and name of them who built these things of stone.” And the Daemon replied, “I am Memory, and am wise in lore of the past, but I too am old. These beings were like the waters of the river Than, not to be understood. Their deeds I recall not, for they were but of the moment. Their aspect I recall dimly, for it was like to that of the little apes in the trees. Their name I recall clearly, for it rhymed with that of the river. These beings of yesterday were called Man.”
So the Genie flew back to the thin horned moon, and the Daemon looked intently at a little ape in a tree that grew in a crumbling courtyard.

Lovecraft, 1919

This is one two photographs I had ever taken of my friend William Moore. The exposure was made in the cellar pool room of Leduc’s Variety, a massive 19th century brick structure once housing the town meeting hall of Oakland R.I., now converted into the single mercantile establishment of this once thriving New England community. At the dawn of the Industrial Age, the village was alive with proud and prosperous old Yankee families and hopeful immigrant families with their dreams and expectations close within reach. Now, after generations of decline, the few remaining citizens had become as decayed and decadent as their mold eaten mansions and their long crumbling mill buildings. Being barely eighteen and unsure of my place in the world. I was unaware of horror lurking in this photograph, lurking within the very emulsion itself, a horror that in three years would change the direction of my life, suddenly changed like the cue striking the rack. A horror soon to fully manifest within the personage of, my friend, William Curtis Moore.

Dennis James Laux

To Be Continued.