Hello, gentle listener, and welcome to nocturnal transmissions, the fortnightly podcast that brings you dark tales both old and new, performed by voice artist, Kristen Holland.

Now, last week we promised you another tale of Eldritch existential wretchedness from the master of the very same, Mr. H. P. Lovecraft.

Well, dear listener, we now make good on that promise with a story which first appeared in

weird tales in 1926 and proved to be one of the most popular stories ever printed within that hallowed periodical.

Nocturnal Transmissions is proud to present H.P. Lovecrafts.

The Outsider. crafts. The outsider.

Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.

Wretched is he who looks back upon lone hours in vast and

dismal chambers with brown hangings and maddening rows of antique books, or upon awed watches

in twilight groves of grotesque, gigantic and vine-encumbered trees that silently wave twisted

branches far aloft.

Such a lot the gods gave to me, to me, the dazed, that disappointed, the barren and broken.

And yet, I am strangely content, and cling desperately to those seer memories memories when my mind momentarily threatens to reach beyond to the other.

I know not where I was born, save that my castle was infinitely old and infinitely horrible, full of dark passages and having high ceilings where the eye could find only cobwebs

and shadows. The stones in the crumbling corridors seemed always hideously damp, and there was an

accursed smell everywhere, as of the piled upup corpses of dead generations.

It was never light, so that I used sometimes to light candles,

and gaze steadily at them for relief.

Nor was there any sun outdoors, since the terrible trees grew high above the topmost accessible tower.

There was one black tower which reached above the trees into the unknown outer sky,

but that was partly ruined and could not be ascended save by a well-nigh impossible climb up the sheer wall,

stone by stone.

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