The Outsider by H.P. Lovecraft, read by Mike Bannett. That night the Baron dreamt of many a woe and all his warrior guests with shade and form of which, and demon and large coffin worm,

were long be night mad.

Keats.

Unhappy is he,

unhappy as 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 d days, the disappointed, the barren, the broken. And yet I am strangely content

and cling desperately to these seer memories when my mind momentarily

threatens to reach beyond to the other.

I know not where I was born, save that the 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 up 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 top most 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.

I must have lived years in this place, but I cannot measure the time.

Beings must have cared for my needs, yet I cannot recall any person except myself, or anything alive but the noiseless

...