Hi and welcome back to Nighty Night, bedtime stories to keep you awake.

I'm your host, Rabi Jaudhuri. This week we return to

HP Lovecraft's The Lirking Fear as it continues to spiral into crescendos of terror

until reaching a final horrifying conclusion.

Part 2, a passer in the storm.

For days after that hideous experience in the forest swathed of mansion I lay nervously exhausted in my hotel

room at Leffert's corners. I do not remember exactly how I managed to reach the

motor car, start it, and slip unobserved back to the village, for I retain no distinct impression save of wild-armed Titan trees,

demonic mutterings of thunder, and Charonian shadows wart the low mounds that dotted and streaked the region.

As I shivered and brooded on the casting of that brain-blasting shadow, I knew I had at last

pried out one of Earth's supreme horrors.

One of those nameless blights of outer voids whose faint demon scratchings we sometimes hear

on the farthest rim of space.

Yet from which our own finite vision has given us a merciful immunity.

The shadow I had seen, I hardly dare to analyze or identify.

Something had lain between me and the window that night, but I

shuddered whenever I could not cast off the instinct to classify it. If it had

only snarled or bade or laughed titteringly.

Even that would have relieved the abysmal hideousness.

But it was so silent.

It had rested a heavy arm or foreleg on my chest. Obviously it was organic or had once been organic.

Jan Martens whose room I had invaded was buried in the graveyard near the mansion.

...