The Dreams in the Witch House by H.P. Lovecraft.

Whether the dreams brought on the fever or the fever brought on the dreams, Walter Gilman did not know.

Behind everything crouched the brooding, festering horror of the ancient town, and of the moldy unhollowed

Garrett Gable where he wrote and studied, and wrestled with figures and formula when he was

not tossing on the meager iron bed. His ears were growing sensitive to a preternatural and

intolerable degree, and he had long ago

stopped the cheap mantle clock whose ticking had come to seem like a thunder of artillery.

At night the subtle stirring of the black city outside, the sinister scurring of rats in

the wormy partitions, and the creaking of hidden

timbers in the centried house, were enough to give him a sense of strident pandemonium.

The darkness always teemed with unexplained sound, and yet he sometimes shook with fear,

lest the noises he heard should subside, and allow him to hear certain other fainter noises, which he suspected were lurking behind them.

He was in the changeless, legend-haunted city of Arkham, with its clustering gambrel roofs that sway

and sag over attics where witches hid from the Kingsmen in the dark olden days of the province.

Nor was any spot in that city more steeped in macabre memory than the Gable room which harbored

him, for it was this house and this room,

which had likewise harbored old Caziah Mason, whose flight from Salem Jail at the last no one was ever

able to explain. That was in 1692. The jailer had gone mad and babbled of a small, white-fangged furry thing which scuttled out of Keziah's cell,

and not even cotton mather could explain the curves and angles smeared on the gray stone walls with some red, sticky fluid.

Possibly Gilman ought not to have studied so hard.

Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain,

and when one mixes them with folklore and tries to trace a strange background of

...