The statute of limitations has run out.  What I stole from Miskatonic University, they still want back.  They want to hide the truth.  
     The theft of what the news media called the “Alchemist’s Papers” was made public in January of 1984 but the cover-up that followed, and the failed attempt to retrieve them, left the story only half told.  The truth is about a fold in the soft and otherwise smooth surface of time.  It is a harbinger of an evil so destructive that the current state of the world, plagued with terrorism and economic chaos, would only be a footnote in history by comparison.
     The tabloids had a heyday with the story, claiming apocalyptic doom, while the mainstream media labeled it as another crackpot interpretation of the “Book of Revelations.”  Neither were accurate.  Miskatonic University of Arkham, Massachusetts had done an effective job of discrediting the papers and me, and until now, no one would publish them. 
    The one piece of information that they were unable to keep from the public was the existence of a covert organization within the university itself.  We were a group of select scholars that investigated what appeared to be supernatural occurrences all over the world.  It was alleged that during some of these investigations the group had acted like vigilantes, taking the law into their own hands, passing out judgment where they saw fit. 
    My name is Thomas Ironwood.  I was a resident professor at Miskatonic and head of the Physics Department.  I was a member of the group, known then, to only a few, as the “Mythos Department.”  My confessions to the press were not out of remorse for any wrong doing, rather as a revolt against my colleagues who were becoming dangerously lax in their retaliatory measures. 
    I believed then, and believe even more today, that the individual stories of Faren and Janet Church, and Faren’s great Uncle Heinrich Todesfall, constitute a warning to an already endangered world and should not be suppressed.  The rampant ignorance in the world has left me no alternative but to come out of hiding and go public with the documents. 
    The plausibility of our planet being threatened by an ageless horror may automatically arouse suspicion to the authenticity of the following chronicles and possibly create a back-lash from the more serious elites in the media.  How Miskatonic acquired the papers may be questioned.  Why hide them if they are only a hoax?  
     The chronicles are authentic.  They required some editing to clarify the time lines.  The accounts original forms were as a journal, a diary and a series of tape recordings.  They have been edited into separate narratives subsequently breaking the work down into four parts. 
    With the help of my publisher, we have struck out redundancies which often occur in personal journals and eliminated digressions which the elderly Todesfall was guilty of doing when his mind would stray from the story and wander unchecked into the intervening years.  Faren Church’s was the least polished of the narratives, because his was a hasty account left on tape and required more extensive editing. 
    For the remainder, we have left well enough alone.  The chronicles accurately tell the whole story without additional enhancement.

By Byron Craft
Several years ago I took a break from my daily routine and hid in the second story of my uncle’s barn.  In the loft was an old bentwood chair next to a short stack of hay bales.  The hay served as a first-rate ottoman and on other occasions a makeshift desk.  I wasn’t there to work that day, but to escape.

I made myself comfortable in the bentwood and to sustain my vigil I brought along a bag of Fritos, a bottle of Pepsi and a copy of H.P. Lovecraft’s, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.  If you are not familiar with the work, it is one of HPL’s Cthulhu mythos masterpieces.  It is a short novel, around 51,000 words, set in Lovecraft’s hometown of Providence, RI.

The novel tells the story of young Charles Dexter Ward, who becomes embroiled in the past, due to his fascination with the history of his wizard ancestor, Joseph Curwen.  Ward physically resembles Curwen, and attempts to duplicate his ancestor's alchemical feats, eventually locating Curwen’s remains and resurrecting him.  The soul of the dead relative reached out of its grave of two centuries and fastens itself on the flesh of Charles Dexter Ward.  Joseph Curwen murders and replaces his modern descendant so he can resume his evil activities.

I was engrossed in the story.  There was no electricity in the old structure but, it was around noon, and the ambient light was sufficient to read by.  Behind me, located in the gable end of the barn, was a plywood door about three feet wide by six feet tall.  My uncle would use it to load farming supplies through it like a second story loading dock.  The door had been left open.  A cool spring breeze blew in.

My imagination was totally absorbed in the narrative when the resurrected Joseph Curwen eerily first appears behind the main protagonist of the tale.  At that precise moment, in my reading, the wind picked up outside and the plywood door behind me slammed shut with a loud bang.  The Fritos, the Pepsi and I became airborne.  Like Joseph Curwen, Howard Phillips Lovecraft had reached up from his grave and scared the living crap out of me.