Writing on what my doctor tells me is my deathbed, my most hideous fear is that the man iswrong. I suppose I shall seem to be buried next week, but...In London there is a man who screams when the church bells ring. He lives all alone with hisstreaked cat in Gray's Inn, and people call him harmlessly mad. His room is filled with books of thetamest and most puerile kind, and hour after hour he tries to lose himself in their feeble pages. Allhe seeks from life is not to think. For some reason thought is very horrible to him, and anythingwhich stirs the imagination he flees as a plague. He is very thin and grey and wrinkled, but thereare those who declare he is not nearly so old as he looks. Fear has its grisly claws upon him, and asound will make him start with staring eyes and sweat-beaded forehead. Friends and companionshe shuns, for he wishes to answer no questions. Those who once knew him as scholar and aesthetesay it is very pitiful to see him now. He dropped them all years ago, and no one feels sure whetherhe left the country or merely sank from sight in some hidden byway. It is a decade now since hemoved into Gray's Inn, and of where he had been he would say nothing till the night youngWilliams bought the Necronomicon.