From Beyond by HP Lovecraft, Red by Mike Bennett.

Horrible beyond conception was the change which had taken place in my best friend, Crawford Tillingast.

I had not seen him since that day, two months and a half before, when he told me toward

what goal his physical and metaphysical researchers were leading,

when he had answered my awed and almost frightened remonstrances

by driving me from his laboratory and his house in a burst of fanatical rage.

I had known that he now remained mostly shut in the attic laboratory with that

a cursed electrical machine, eating little and excluding even the servants, but I had not thought

that a brief period of ten weeks could so alter and disfigure any human creature.

It is not pleasant to see a stout man suddenly grown thin, and it is even worse when the

baggy skin becomes yellowed or grayed. The eyes sunken, circled and uncannally glowing. The forehead,

veined and corrugated, and the hands tremulous and twitching. And if added to this there be a

repellent unkemptness, a wild disorder of dress, a bushiness of dark hair, white at the roots, and an unchecked growth of white beard

on a face once clean-shaven.

The cumulative effect is quite shocking, but such was the aspect of Crawford Tillingast

on the night his half coherent message brought me to his door after my weeks of exile. Such was the spectre that trembled as it admitted me, candle in hand, and

glanced furtively over its shoulder as if fearful of unseen things in the ancient lonely house set back from

benevolent street. That Crawford Tillingaurs should ever have studied science and

philosophy was a mistake. These things should be left to the

frigid and impersonal investigator, for they offer two equally tragic alternatives to the man of feeling and action, despair, if he fail

in his quest, and terrors unutterable and unimaginable if he succeed.

Tillingast had once been the prey of failure, solitary and melancholy,

...