[Instrumental]

[17 October: 1893]

Such grim musings as have been occupying my mind
of late unfortunately seem

to suggest a possible link to the fate of my
learned friend and colleague

Doctor Ignatius Stone. That brilliant researcher
was last seen in command

of all his faculties whilst on an expedition to
the ruins of the Sumerian

city of Ur, an undertaking which preceded my own
work there by some eighteen

months. Stone was a gifted archaeologist who also
dabbled, perhaps unwisely,

in certain areas of the occult, particularly
involving the various

grotesqueries once worshipped as Cthonic deities
by the ancient denizens of Ur.

Mere days before he ventured into the ziggurats
of that foreboding,

mystery-haunted site, he had dispatched a letter
to me claiming that he was

on the verge of a truly staggering arcane
discovery at Ur which would

simultaneously prove the cyclical nature of human
civilisation as well as

immediately render redundant all previous
theories on the origin of man.

Whatever misfortune befell him within those
aeons-old tombs robbed him

irrevocably of his sanity, for when his
attendants finally managed to prise

open the stone door of the vast central catacomb,
which had, I'm told,

inexplicably shut fast behind his three-man
torch-bearing party, they found

two of the regularly stalwart men had seemingly
expired of pure fright,

while Stone was slumped against the north wall,
staring vacantly into the

gloom, gibbering about visitations by beings so
terrible that the very

contemplation of their existence would sunder a
man's tenuous hold on the

reins of sanity.

When I later visited him at the sanatorium in
England, I found him to be a

tragic shell of the man I once knew, a man beset
by imagined terrors and

ever wary of the immemorial horrors which he
claimed lurked at the periphery

of humanity's perceptions. Indeed, I was glad I
had taken a journal into

which I could transcribe his delusional rants,
for he had a great deal to

tell me about The Dreamer In The Catacombs Of Ur: