imomus

This hideous animal, denizen of some ghastly species hinterland between hare and deer, has long been dead. It "lives", stuffed, in a neglected vitrine at the Royal Museum, Chambers Street, Edinburgh and it was there, last month, that I exposed my photographic plate, steadying my apparatus against the cold glass pane lest terror should render the beast's visage even less supportable to my weakening constitution. Ghosting, red eye, shake or motion blur would, I confess, have induced in me an uncanny shudder even more unsettling than the clammy hand which was at that moment gripping my innermost being even as a body-trafficker grips the chill wrist of a half-decayed corpse.

It is rumoured that anyone who gazes too long upon this foul colt, even in photographic form, will be so possessed by the intense spirit of evil lurking in its yellow, ferine eyes that they must needs suffer night sweats and tormented dreams. Some even whisper that the creature's image is cursed; impossible, once seen, to banish from the inner chambers of the mind. That would indeed be unfortunate, for it is further advanced that those who cannot, after precisely forty nights of tossing, neurasthenic fever, squeeze the creature's likeness from their ken must--but no, I cannot credit it, but I will, I must mention it--perish in agony, burnt to death in a mysterious fire of spontaneous origin!

The nocturnal ringing of an infernal telephone! The scabrous scythes of Hades! Hieronymous Rabbit! A wall-eyed imbecile fumbling at the door! The spattered blubber of the murders at the Greyfriars kirkyard! Forgive me, dear reader, for a moment I lost my composure. But not my reason! Being a man of science I must discount all such rumours as the tittle-tattle of the frothing farmhand and the harlot-frisky bickerwench. And yet... and yet... this sinister will'o'thewisp, this vile flibbertigibbet haunts me still and will not leave my mind! The sprite has crept through my dreams for thirty-nine nights now, and will not leave... Even in this drowse which descends upon me, I feel its breath close upon my neck... close and cold... [Here the journal ends. The author was discovered, his corpse a ghastly scorched log, the following morning.]