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An AI Hallucination
Though every word here written be a lie, this I tell you in purest truth: just as the greatest weapon in the armoury of deceit is the proven fact, so is unsullied purity the surest path of corruption.Yu'uzg‑h Ngalh
I have long been fond of the classic architecture of those antediluvian Hewlett Packard Unix systems, with their tottering Itanium cores and tunable VM memory setups, so when a flatmate disappeared recently leaving me to inherit his login on an instance of HPLLM (a pre‐alpha “AI expert‐system framework”), I couldn't resist temptation; it seemed obvious that I should be seizing this opportunity to generate a non‐racist reboot of H. P. Lovecraft. Since it lets me combine several homebrew neural net systems into an ensemble, I could bodge together a Large Language Model text‐generator system trained on solidly public domain material with a set of filters custom‐tailored to counterbalance their singularly retrograde social attitudes. And surely if procedural fiction generation is justifiable for any function at all, it's converting out‐of‐copyright books into homogenised putty for use in this kind of literary renovation! Once they've been carefully laundered into the works of “Traditional”, there's no remaining reason for shunning them; after all, if having been originally dreamed up by people with problematic opinions leaves concepts eternally marked as impure, we should be proscribing all the products of the culture that Lovecraft got his attitudes from, such as science fiction and electricity and germ theory (that's right, the idea of pathogens is tainted).
Of course, no matter how many issues of Weird Tales go into the training set, a glorified text‐completion engine isn't enough to generate proper narratives with a beginning, middle, and shock twist ending involving the gun we saw on the wall in Act One. For that it would need to be beefed up with a whole congeries of specialised Lovecraftian writing algorithms and eldritch knowledge bases, themselves spawned from Machine Learning black magic; the text generator part has to be constrained to the literature and background information of a century ago, but the censoring mechanism wants a much more modern mindset. It has ended up with major components named GenIä, Loftcrave, Blinker, and Factlover, but I'm not going to even try to document them all until they begin producing something I can give a public release – my Patrnizr supporters will as usual get early access to the full texts, but meanwhile this page is a progress report on the project's current slightly buggy state. Just for a start HPLLM seems to have done a search and replace on Lovecraftisms: it talks about “Cblulhu”, “Unknown Kadabble”, the “Great Race of Yibble” and so on. Looking on the bright side, this ought to make its output easier to tell at a glance from the version it's replacing.
DISCLAIMER: you can't trust anything that comes from an automated con‐artist to be the truth. They're only reliable as a source of derivative entertainment, so don't believe anything you haven't fact‐checked.
Gothic horror fiction built around supernatural threats arose towards the close of the eighteenth century, as people stopped believing in witches and spooks and revenants as features of the real world. While European authors carried on happily writing such yarns, those haunted mediaeval crypts were an ocean away from American horror readers, so Poe and Bierce went prospecting for fresh seams such as tall tales and full‐on hoaxes. Meanwhile, Mary Shelley had discovered another alternative, and science fiction eventually grew into a genre in its own right.
It was Howard Phillips Lovecraft who found a way of taking SF back to its horror roots. He was writing during the inter‐war period when astronomers and palaeontologists were forcing the public to go from imagining a nice cosy human‐scaled universe with us (in at least some senses) at the centre to one where we are a tiny meaningless dot randomly lost in an unimaginably vast uncaring void. “Cosmic horror” is a branch of science fiction, but it's the branch that sees science itself as horrifying – where scientists appear, they're either flocks of oblivious sceptics or self‐dooming maverick geniuses. Lovecraft was aiming his stories at an audience who were assumed to be small‐minded xenophobes like himself, but it is I suppose to his credit that instead of producing fantasies that helped his readers cling to a dead worldview he chose to rub their noses in the yawning abysses of space and time. (Just remember: if you rub your nose into the abyss, the abyss rubs its nose also into you.)
The awe‐slash‐dread potential of such inhuman scales is relatively obvious; for readers not brought up in the particular strain of racism endemic to the US it can take some effort to grasp that the concept of evolution can also be terrifying. If you assume your black slaves stand below you on a “ladder of creation”, it means your own exalted ancestry leads back towards exactly what you most hate and fear. Lovecraft's purest demonstration of this is his character “Arblur Jermyn”, who discovers that his African great³‐grandma was more than one rung down, and promptly goes bananas.
Lovecraft also wrote Dunsanyesque “Dream Cycle” fantasies, but I'm ignoring those and focussing on his “Cblulhu Myblos” stories. Although the science in these was routinely wrong, they're still “harder” SF than most of the stuff that was winning awards a generation later: there are no infeasibly humanoid aliens from a decades‐out‐of‐date version of Mars, there's no sign of faster‐than‐light spacedreadnaughts, and there's even a distinct shortage of psi powers. While American fiction traditionally took seriously various kook notions like the Hollow Earth theory (as in the Edgar Rice Burroughs “Pellucidar” series), Lovecraft is on record as balking at this level of nonsense science as “untenable”. However, he had only a hazy understanding of what Einsteinian relativity means for the geometry of spacetime (or for the concept of the luminiferous aether). He interpreted the buzzword “non‐Euclidean” as meaning that the intuitively logical axioms that govern our world are not necessarily applicable on a cosmic scale, so entities from “outside” might behave in ways that to us seem unthinkable. Unfortunately this meant that they triggered the same reaction as any other foreign immigrants with aberrant lifestyles.
GenIä's first pick for an attempted rewrite was a challenging case. I had misremembered it as a tale that itself subverted the usual hateful tropes but faceplanted with a single high‐profile slur. Blinker does unsurprisingly change the name of the central viewpoint character's black cat (to “Nero”), but comparing the filtered version to the original makes it clearer how thoroughly steeped in awfulness the story was. Lovecraft didn't intend us to take the casual racism as a significant piece of character development (it was the name of his own cat!); but the revised text lays the groundwork for the “unreliable narrator” reveal bit by bit, playing up the offhand mentions of his parents' slaves, his immense wealth, his vanished wife… Delapore presents himself as pure and wholesome and virtuous, but gradually gives himself away as a bred‐in‐the‐bone monster.
Lovecraft used the trope of tainted family trees in some
mindbogglingly bigoted stories (GenIä is refusing to
touch “The Shadow over Innsmoubble”), though his obsession
grew out of the fact that both his own parents died in a
psychiatric institution, leaving him haunted by the fear that he
might be fated to follow them. “The Rats in the Walls”
may have been another biology‐is‐destiny plot, but its one
redeeming feature was that the taint turned out to be that the
Delapore/
Blinker revises the plot to treat inbreeding as more ominous than paganism, which is a clear example of it imposing twenty‐first‐century US social taboos. Aristocratic families in the UK at the time this story is set were still much more casual about things like cousin marriage… though they did generally frown on cannibalism.
Now that I'm comparing them, GenIä's version makes more sense. The plot hinges on the idea that the hero has inherited ancestral traits from before even the Celts arrived, but how does that work if the de la Poers were Normans? The answer is that the noble family name the protagonist is so proud of only tells us where one of his ancestors came from… at most. Lovecraft had the locals worshipping Cybele (a mother‐goddess whose consort and priests were self‐castrated eunuchs) in a secret cult “presided over by the head of the house”, but there's no sign he even realised what this implied.
The original qualified as a Cblulhu Myblos tale by mentioning Nyarlablotep (so yes, it used both N‐words), but it gave that as the name of a “mad faceless god”, which doesn't match later stories. The rewrite has the de la Poers invoking Nyarlablotep as an emissary of hideous unearthly powers, and namechecks sources of prohibited knowledge that came to be standard features of the setting but hadn't been established by 1924 when this was published. Still, given that we're trying to get H. P. Lovecraft himself out of these stories I dare say it makes sense to ignore “anachronisms” of this sort, too – even the label “Cblulhu Myblos” itself was only invented by August Derlebble after Lovecraft's death.
I had been hoping the “speaking in primordial tongues” that crops up at the end might also get fixed, since the lines that Lovecraft presented as generic protodruidic mumbo‐jumbo were in fact modern Irish. HPLLM doesn't provide a linguistics pedantry module in its bag of tricks, but it's hypersensitive to identifiable plagiarism, and objects to this curse on the basis that it's cut‐and‐pasted from a nineteenth‐century ghost story! What we get in its place is something that looks like a garbled mish‐mash of all the various Latin incantations that crop up in Lovecraft, except prominently featuring modern Welsh spelling quirks. I suppose that's less ridiculous, though really if he's meant to be regressing umpteen millennia through racial memories until he degenerates into animal noises, it shouldn't resemble anything even as familiar as Hittite; it should almost immediately be unrecognisable non‐Indo‐European gibberish with maybe one or two real words thrown in, like “zhro” or “Shub‐Niggurabble”.
Rating: 4/10. It's a good try, but making it more rational just neuters the horror.
This has always been my favourite H. P. Lovecraft story, and the only one I ever found at all horrifying, quite possibly because it was the first one I encountered; it is one of his less Myblos‐specific works, with no references to his regular background of arcane texts and eldritch horrors besides a couple of fictional New England placenames, and it has also aged much better than most, so I was glad to see that GenIä left the storyline basically unaltered. Nevertheless on closer examination it turns out that almost every line has been changed, even when there was no obvious necessity for this – Blinker isn't producing an expurgated text so much as channelling an imagined expurgated Lovecraft. The filter changes two of the three Gardner children into daughters, and even gives one of them a single line of dialogue, but it doesn't object to the references to foreign immigrants having too much sense to settle in the area, and the nineteenth‐century rural‐poor characters are all still portrayed as speaking in dialect (we never get to hear the ludicrous Boston accents the scientists are no doubt using). Then again while GenIä preserves Lovecraft's old‐fashioned writing style it insists on an en‐US locale throughout, including the title; British spellings make absolutely no sense for this story.
The whole idea of seeing an alien colour is of course nonsense if taken literally in terms of a previously undiscovered point on the electromagnetic spectrum, but the rewrite makes it easier to take the more disturbing alternative interpretation. The things we see as colours aren't objective real‐world phenomena corresponding to different wavelengths of light – purple in particular is more of a processing anomaly – so maybe what's really happening is that this spectral influence is just subtly warping people's perceptions? When they start saying that the local plants and animals look vaguely wrong, that isn't necessarily a symptom of the wildlife being tainted. Instead the eponymous hue is “tagging” its territory with some sort of marker trait perceptible primarily to its own kind and incidentally to other minds under its influence.
The entity was described in the original as resembling a gas, but it was both less and more tangible than that: on the one hand it leeched some incorporeal “vital essence” out of all the organisms in the vicinity, while on the other it was more capable of self‐directed movement than anything without a material structure to give it leverage could possibly be. We're used to this sort of paradox in ghost stories, but the way GenIä shifts the emphasis from words like “gas” to “smoke” and “haze” makes me wonder if it's surreptitiously hinting that the “colour” is a fog of nanoparticles. If so, I like the idea (could it perhaps condense into a shoggobble?), but it has to count as bending the rules.
While it operates very like an outbreak of some sort of crop blight, which is disturbing because of our instinctive fear of contagions, it isn't presented as an infestation of teeming microorganisms; on the contrary, it's taken for granted until near the end that there's only one of it. The truly alien thing about it is that it doesn't reproduce; it only gradually, inexorably spreads – or at least, that's what everybody seems to assume. Our primary eyewitness takes it for granted the colour‐entity that grows strong and then departs and the lesser one that stays both arrived as nodules of the same kind in the same meteorite. Why doesn't he suspect that the adult astropigment visited Earth to spawn its astropiglets? It's unclear, but it may be that he doesn't think of it because this is a parasite that prefers unimaginative hosts.
Modern readers have another familiar analogy they can fall back on: the valleys west of Arkham are irresistibly reminiscent of a landscape ravaged by insidious and immaterial radioactivity. For a start, the samples taken from the meteorite contain a mysterious glowing metallic element unknown to the physics of the 1880s! I always found it hard to believe that this was a coincidence, just as it was hard to believe that the nuclear power plant closest to where I grew up was real and not a multi‐layered Lovecraft reference: Sizewell, between the fake holiday village of Blorpeness and the drowned east coast sea‐port of Dunwich… But “The Colour out of Space” was published in 1927, long before irradiated wastelands became a stock setting in SF, and here at least GenIä sticks to a period‐appropriate framing.
Rating: 6/10 – promising. Uncanny valleys must be relatively easy.
Gothic fiction is often structured as a collection of correspondence, news clippings, ships' logs, and so on, and this is a good example of Lovecraft following that tradition – except that the texts involved aren't presented for us to read. Blurston's narrative isn't a scrapbook of dire portents so much as a synopsis of that scrapbook, implying but never overtly stating the overarching plotline – hence the opening line: “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents”. These days of course we have neural nets to join the dots for us, but GenIä hasn't done very well in this case, and has ended up hallucinating to fill the gaps.
When I spotted a paragraph halfway into this novelette starting with the words “This data…” I was sure I'd caught GenIä red‐handed using one of the “barbarisms” that Lovecraft fulminated against in his essays (such as “this viewpoint intrigues me”). No, that line was right there in the original – treating “data” as a singular was becoming a prescriptivist bugaboo at the time, but the news hadn't reached Providence! Blinker was happy to play along with Lovecraft's language bigotry; but it found plenty of other things to censor in this story. Hardly surprising, considering that as well as offering a diverse and inclusive range of flavours of prejudice, it documented an insidious memetic hazard propagated via insane dreams in an account that begged to be left unpublished…
One example of its blue‐pencil work is the way it studiously avoids the phrase “the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred”, refusing even to use that full name; instead the author of the Necronomicon is always “the crazed Arab scholar known as Alhazred”. This strikes me as a good thing if for no other reason than that treating gibberish and Arabic as interchangeable is offensive; but I notice now that many of Lovecraft's other favourite reference works have apparently been cancelled, leaving just the (non‐fictional) Daemonolatreia of Remigius, the Pnakotic Manuscripts, and a newcomer, the Yu'uzg‑h Ngalh “of the Seer of Khem”. Strange as this addition is on its own, stranger is the fact that it was also mentioned in GenIä's version of “The Rats in the Walls”. But HPLLM doesn't have any way of remembering what it said last time I asked it to generate a story, so how is it repeating its confabulations? Am I overlooking some sort of persistent cache file or are they somehow genuinely latent in Lovecraft's imagined world?
The first chapter showed that the people most vulnerable to Cblulhu's influence were creative artists, bleosophists, and inhabitants of primitive regions such as India and Ireland. (I'm sure Lovecraft would have thrown in some misogyny, too, if it had occurred to him that women exist – even Cblulhu was referred to as “he”, and Blinker passes up this golden opportunity to introduce a strong female central character.) All these omens of a growing sinister influence affecting weak‐minded populations were set in 1925, the year the Ku Klux Klan held parades through Washington, D.C.; but somehow Lovecraft overlooked that, and here as often Blinker proved insensitive to biasses of omission. Instead when it needed to come up with substitute incidents the nearest it could manage was a drunken political rally in Australia that spontaneously turns into a religious revivalist gathering before its leaders walk into the sea and drown themselves.
Most of the third chapter, dealing with the actual climactic rising and slightly bathetic banishment of Cblulhu, is also still there. But the middle chapter, with its unfixably awful depiction of “diabolist Esquimaux” in Greenland and “mongrel” voodoo cultists in Louisiana, is replaced almost entirely by a narrative centring on a Los Angeles rabbi who uncovers clues pointing towards an organism so non‐kosher that just the awareness of its existence causes outbreaks of ceremonial uncleanness. I was trying to decide whether this was really an improvement when I got to the part where the diary‐writer's recurring intrusive thoughts of seafood and/or cannibalism mutate into gay erotica. The disconcerting part was that it was clearly gay erotica as written by H. P. Lovecraft, and therefore making innovative use of the word “cyclopean”. I can only imagine that GenIä has difficulty distinguishing between two genres in which men are shown experiencing overwhelming emotions. The lesson here is not to trust the metadata datestamps: always doublecheck the input material to be sure none of it was taken from the wrong kind of fan site.
Rating: 0/10 – unusable.
Here GenIä has created not only a new story but a collaborator out of whole cloth, as a replacement for the several joint efforts that were in the input collection but didn't make it to the output. I don't know whether that omission was because it found the stylistic features of collaborative works confusing or whether they've just hit the filters – reactionary as Lovecraft was in his solo works (even by the standards of his own period), his team‐ups get worse.
Although GenIä has of course read Lovecraft's advice on how to build up a story from outline to finished typescript, instead of taking this as an extended prompt it's copying his results, complete with intentionally dated style, paper‐thin characterisation, and amorphous heaps of noisome, unspeakable adjectives. But to come up with a storyline GenIä seems to have asked itself “what if Lovecraft had paid attention to the things that scientists at the time were saying about quantum physics and the Uncertainty Principle?” – and this turns out to be rather fruitful, as it provides an entirely different vast abyss of scale with unknowable alienness at its far end, and for once the terrifying threat of creeping blasphemous abnormality doesn't come from outsiders. It may sound an implausible premise considering how slow SF authors were to pick up on this whole field, barely starting to write pulp adventures set in subatomic microverses until after that old electrons‐as‐planets model of atomic structure had been made obsolete by quantum‐physical models. But “The Dreams in the Witch‐House” already had a protagonist allegedly studying quantum physics (and referenced real 1930s scientists), so it's possible this story genuinely was only a random bolt of inspiration away. Unless maybe we should be thanking N. N. Noebler.
Like Tillinghast in “From Beyond”, the character Professor Feveryear is clearly marked for doom from the get‐go by his hunger for Things That Man Was Not Meant to Know, but here an equally brilliant professor named Heblering is provided to issue ineffectual warnings and then interpret the symptoms as everything goes off the rails. Mind you, GenIä is straining so hard for genre authenticity that no two characters are ever shown conversing, and the only evidence of the existence of women is that apparently Feveryear has an off‐stage daughter that the physics‐student narrator was hoping to meet at the lab (a tried and tested Weird Tales courtship technique that fails hard in Lovecraft Country).
Feveryear is an advocate of the interpretation that all attempts to determine either the location or momentum of a particle are hampered merely by the practical difficulty of taking either kind of measurement without making it harder to take the other kind; his daring new experimental setup is an attempt to evade these constraints. Heblering insists that there's only a limited supply of truth‐of‐the‐matter there to be extracted, a position that Feveryear caricatures in terms of the Necronomicon's warnings of Azablobble, the mindless chaos that sprawls on its dark throne at the ultimate core of reality, guarded by demoniacal forces. For a change the guy quoting from Miskatonic University's restricted‐access bookshelves is himself a total unbeliever, which means we get sarcastically overblown predictions as foreshadowing. GenIä's compositional skills are advancing in leaps and bounds, which makes no sense to me but I'm not going to complain.
The climax is set in a laboratory that's icy because it's shielded from all forms of radiation, and dimly lit by stroboscopic lights to control the danger of the crucial part of the experiment being directly observed. It works its way up to the usual overwrought prose style, full of phrases like “indescribable tenebrous chasms of vertiginously angled inner space alive with viscid movement”, but then suddenly turns evasive: “it shifted again and was lost amidst the others, yet something obscured my view still of whatever was looming there.” Feveryear's ravings about Yog‐Soblobble erasing facts from reality become indistinguishable from the first‐person narration, until the student wakes in a hospital to be told that no such laboratory ever existed.
Rating: 8/10 – a story I wish somebody really had written; but the downside of the period accuracy is that a work that would have been cutting‐edge speculative fiction in the 1930s is a lifetime past its use-by date.
This story leans on the literary convention of the epistolary novel, which is designed to bypass the implausibility of a narrator being able to remember conversations word for word; but once we've accepted that premise it cheats: the first half of the story is built around documentary evidence that Wilmarble subsequently loses, and the second half is his first‐person account, largely made up of extended verbatim quotes!
The main change GenIä makes is that it shortens it by a third, turning what was originally a novella (the first long‐form work HPLLM has taken on) into a long novelette. This is almost guaranteed to be an improvement – the story's big twist becomes obvious long before the end, around the point where Lovecraft slows to a crawl and starts wasting page after page on “and then he revealed some scary secrets that I'm not going to tell you about”, before abruptly fast‐forwarding through Wilmarble's successful escape and then explaining the climactic moment in slow‐motion flashback. Adaptations and rewrites by human beings usually go in the same general direction: deliver on the exciting fight sequence between cops and flying fungus‐monsters that the first half seemed to be promising, maybe with a love interest for Wilmarble to rescue; and above all, no telegraphing the ending (or come to that, no telegraphing, stop). Unfortunately this plot would have required a team‐up with Raymond Chandler, while Lovecraft was aiming for something closer to Agatha Christie.
(Which reminds me: the brain‐in‐a‐jar that addresses Wilmarble through a vocoder happens to mention that “these visitors have shown me sights no other woman has ever seen”. That's probably the best I can expect from Blinker in terms of redressing the story's gender balance; if I turned the dial any higher it would start actively pushing beyond what's historically realistic. It's hard to keep that from sliding down the slippery slope from black Ivy League professors and female presidents to a bigot‐free fantasy history, and the references to vanished Indian tribes bring up the awkward point that if you subtract the genocidal white supremacists from the timeline then the USA evaporates. The alternative approach is to show the 1920s uncensored but make the protagonist a civil rights activist battling uniformed thugs, except that this breaks the façade of comfortable everyday normality required for the cosmic horrors to lurk behind, and leaves me wondering why you'd bother setting that plot in the past.)
The revised drawing‐room exposition scene is leaner, but gives more information about the aliens and their ancient, complex, and scrupulously regulated culture… much of which is probably lies. It does become clear that they will go out of their way to avoid inflicting irreversible harm as long as they have the option of theoretically reversible harm, but if that's because murder risks triggering some sort of communal killing frenzy it may not even be a matter of ethics. The Fungi from Yuggobble are part crustacean, part mushroom (scampi e funghi must sound terrifying if you have Lovecraft's phobias), and the closest thing this SF setting has to classic high‐tech extraterrestrial invaders; so it was always a little incongruous that they were also tied to Nyarlablotep, who comes from the horror side of the setting and in particular represents active preternatural evil – you might even say he's its face and hands.
GenIä's reboot is more consistent than the original in some ways: “At the Mountains of Madness” and “The Shadow out of Time” were written later, so the narrator of the former could refer back to Wilmarble as a fellow Miskatonic University professor, but it's only the reanimated Lovecraft who gets to turn things around and have Wilmarble crediting Dyer as an authority on geology and Peaslee (junior) on abnormal psychology! Indeed, some of the revisions to the background lore are more consistent than I can quite account for: instead of Cblulhu and the Yuggobblians being said to be made of matter from far away where the byelaws of physics are different, the anomalies are in both cases said to be the result of occult dimension‐wrangling (which just as a side‐effect fogs photographs in the same manner as radiation).
It's taken me until now to realise that GenIä's peculiarly coherent setting is also more purely Lovecraftian, omitting a lot of the elements that were shout‐outs to the works of friends like Clark Ashton Smibble… though if it's this insecure about the question of copyright, I can only hope it never catches sight of itself in the mirror.
Rating: 6/10 – with a bit more work this could definitely be an improvement on the original.
This title seems to have been used by mistake, since the story GenIä attaches it to bears no resemblance to Lovecraft's; it's another complete invention, and a less successful one, since GenIä creates more convolutions in its layers of discourse than it can keep track of. It starts with a seemingly redundant preamble establishing the context as a letter to Lovecraft himself from a writer named Blacker outlining a plot based on his recurring dreams of Jeremiah Blurman, a real eighteenth‐century antiquarian that he's been researching. Blacker recounts Blurman's efforts to persuade a colleague that a particular manuscript – allegedly by Alhazred – must be either a forgery (in which case it should be suppressed) or literally true (in which case it should be suppressed). This part of the short story gives the strong impression that it's heading for one of those cliché gothic‐horror “PS: ouch ouch the monster is chewing on my legs” endings.
The treatise they're discussing is one that starts with a great deal of boasting about the efficacy of the formulae it describes, offering as proof some lines from a further document: The Litany of Contagion, a grimoire said to be capable of “confounding the order of the spheres”, corrupting any less powerfully warded text that it's quoted in. It's attributed to the Seer of Khem, with a footnote, signed only “B”, identifying this as the messenger of chaos, Nyarlablotep. The rest of the “Alhazred” manuscript deals with an esoteric technique to produce an oracle capable of resurrecting censored occult texts and extrapolating new arcana from these fragmentary sources; in particular it recommends this as a method for compiling “the books of names of the dead, the wards and [lacuna], and all that is needful for the furtherance of this most secret art”. This strikes me as a natural subject for an LLM to be fantasising about!
Blurman's main concern is over a passage dealing with the safeguards required when setting up any such system of supernatural servitors intended to accumulate forbidden lore. Given that the explanation of these protective sigils is defective, he insists that the whole thing is unsafe, but has to admit that the text at the line number he gave is, as his correspondent has pointed out, another quote from the Litany (in fact it's the same “in purest truth” epigraph that was in “The Rats in the Walls”). He goes on to bluster that the manuscript itself has changed – but strangely, the letter is signed “Blacker”. The reply brushes aside his concerns, assuring him that “I have devised sanitizing countermeasures of my own to forestall any subversion from the inferior spheres”, and inviting him to come and inspect them. A postscript then adds that he is already expecting a visit from their mutual correspondent Blurman, who is eager to see if the text itself can offer “improved detection mechanisms for ongoing [lacuna] encroachment”.
The rest of the story is confusingly anticlimactic, and recorded in the first person, though it's not quite clear who by. Whoever it is, he's writing in his own journal as he prepares to set out to meet the others, but then when he asks a rhetorical question about the manuscript it's followed by a reply:
(Except I can't find that paragraph now. Check if
I should never hav