I am old, very old, and it is time for my afternoon nap.

…

Dr Johnson always despaired of my afternoon naps which even then, being an old man (though nonetheless younger than I am now), I took frequently. A descent into barbarism, he called them, and a bastardization of all that made development and human self-attainment possible. What exactly he meant by this, is hard to say – a man who writes a dictionary is oft, I found, more concerned with the words themselves than any meaning to which they may point.

Regardless, Dr Johnson hated my naps, so it is with a kind of perverse charm that I take them now, in dire hopes that his Spectre now floats in judgement above my sheets…

This very thought brings to mind… No, I should sleep – but…

It was ten years to the day – 13 December, 1794 – after Dr Johnson had died (even now I struggle to write the words; away tears, away!) when It came to my house which was, then, on the corner of Cornmarket Street where there is now a rotten new Public House. Sleep came fitfully then not at all for the frightful face of my dear lost friend bounced around my head like a dream, nay, a nightmare –

It is worth mentioning, I think, that of all the deaths I have surpassed in my centuries, it was only that of Dr Johnson which elicited some sleeplessness in my person, perhaps because of his worth or because of the humour we so often shared… I know not whether it is of great import –

And so I lay in bed, awake and thinking, but thinking of sad things, of death, not of the intellectual curiosities which had so oft kept me awake when Dr Johnson had been alive. It is the same now. Then, of a sudden, my windows, so often tightly battened shut, slammed open with a force which could only have been mustered by An Otherworldly Being. I slipped from my coverlets to the floor, eliciting a sound louder even than the haunted shrieks that emanated from the thing that stood – nay, floated! – in front of my fallen form.

Dare I express its form? Nay, can I express its form?

It was not Dr Johnson, of that I was sure from the first, though this spectral creation did possess the dear Doctor’s broken-in face – that crooked nose, I was sure it was his! – it did convulsively roll its head just as the Doctor had once done, it did wear those ragged garments that the Doctor, in mock pretention, had always called his working clothes, yet –

The creature’s mouth was wide enough to encompass a small oblivion, its eyes stared into and poked around the deep galaxies of my soul until it seemed that my very being was strapped down on a medical table for its gratuitous appraisal; indeed, as I lay frozen to the wooden floor of that house on the corner of Cornmarket Street, it did not seem that this was the case, it truly was! The ghoul (no word, not even those contained in Dr Johnson’s tome, can fully encompass its tremendousness) came closer to my now-weeping face and looked closely and I could see the universes of inky blackness which hid in its eyes, the inverted rainbows which coloured its otherwise-colourless form, and the –

This will do no favours for my sleep, but –

And the images of birth-life-death which danced in the place its brain might’ve been, the birth-life-death of Dr Johnson, of the others in THE LITERARY CLUB, even of myself. For below the pantheonic majesty of this thing even I – a man who has proudly walked this fragile dome for two centuries and more – become nothing more than a mote of earthly dust, a crude biological specimen not long derived from the fish-men, the swamp-creatures from whom we so often and so proudly distance ourselves and whose secrets only that great man Darwin could discover in later years. My grandiosity became a mere pin-prick in the fabric of creation, not even – dare I add – an especially large pinprick.

Which is why I know this thing – be in Spectre, Ghoul, Daemon, or God… – was not in fact the remnants of my long-lost companion Dr Johnson, for even had he the power, I refuse to believe that he would strip me naked and humiliated in the eyes of Creation to such a degree.

Even now, two centuries and more after the events of that night, I feel small. Perhaps, I sometimes think, my mask of verbosity and self-worth which I put on to write this self-fulfilling memoir is not a means of conveying my true self but of hiding my true self. Perhaps my night-time parley with the thing affected me so deeply that only the longest words found at the rear end of each section of Dr Johnson’s tome can best express my horror at the infinitesimal worth each creature – young and old – possesses in the face of the things which watch over us, day and night.

I know not the answer, truly, but it’s something which never escapes my mind as I descend – or, try to descend – into the self-deluded slumber of a wordless afternoon nap.

**

Hope you enjoyed my mere mortal attempt to come close to the transcendental Godhead epitomised in the Being Of Lovecraft (!!)…

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