The Thing in the Moonlight

Today marks the eighth turning of my grandson’s mortal years, a span which, to my faltering perception, has fled as swiftly and as strangely as a dream at dawn. How brief the procession of time seems, for it was but yesterday, or so my disordered senses insist, that I stood beside his crib in that sterile chamber of the hospital, gazing in wonder at the small, unknown creature whose soul had only just crossed the threshold of this tenuous world. Even then, I fancied some inscrutable destiny lay before him, as though the cosmos itself paused to regard what manner of being had entered its fold.

This day we shall commemorate his arrival upon Earth by venturing to that vast menagerie men call the San Diego Safari Park, place wherein creatures of all climes and epochs dwell together in strange mockery of the wild order Nature first ordained. The boy speaks with bright fervor of the cheetah, that lithe feline of motion whose speed defies the eye and stirs ancestral memories of pursuit and peril. I cannot but admire his innocent anticipation, though in the darker chambers of thought I sense how fleeting are the joys of youth before the encroaching immensities of time.

Before we set forth, I chanced to read one of H. P. Lovecraft’s lesser-known works, “The Thing in the Moonlight”, a brief yet dreadful whisper from those shadowed gulfs that yawn beyond the veil of sleep. Its spectral visions linger in my mind, twining with the day’s more wholesome expectations, until I scarcely know where reverence ends and dread begins. Thus do love and terror commingle, as they ever have, in the frail heart of man.

Morgan, our protagonist, though unlettered and ignorant of the written art, was seized by an impulse beyond mortal reckoning, and with trembling hand inscribed words not his own. What issued forth was the dream-chronicle of one Howard Phillips, who averred that since the dread night of November 24, 1927, he had slumbered without awakening. In his endless dream he roamed a noisome marsh, its cliffs riddled with cavernous mouths that seemed to gape with silent hunger. Ever did he return to the spectral railway car of yellow hue, numbered as of an age long dead. Within lurked shapes too vile for sanity, one slinking to all fours like a beast, the other bearing a visage no human skull could frame: a pallid cone tapering hideously to a scarlet, questing tentacle. Though Phillips knew the phantasm to be but a dream, no dawn could rouse him, and he fled night upon night before that eldritch horror. Morgan himself trembled at what such testimony implied, and dared not set foot near Phillips’ Providence abode, lest truth outstrip dream.

“The Thing in the Moonlight” (1941), wrought by J. Chapman Miske from a letter Lovecraft penned to Donald Wandrei in 1927, enshrines this nightmare in fuller tale. Miske, in places, echoed so well the cadence of Lovecraft that the voice of the dreamer seemed to throb again from beyond, its first printing appearing in the haunted pages of Bizarre magazine.