1.16.11

His notebook had been utterly destroyed, but a single page had survived, clenched in his hand:

... in time to see him lowering from his lips a half-chewed human leg. (It was his mother's, judging from the tattooing). In the next instant, he had bolted for the treeline.

We pursued him as best we could, back through heavy timber, back to that lone sentinel-like rock I had so often glimpsed from a distance. As we approached it, I could see that every flat surface on the stone was carved with tangled occult symbols and inscriptions. IMAGOLAIRDBARRONJACKSONIMAGOBARRONOKERSTOKERSTOKERACKSON

The clearing beyond was littered with dismembered human remains in all stages of noisome decomposition. A groan rose from us all as we looked in on stark denial. Wilson recoiled from the rock and turned aside, vomiting noisily. It must have been several minutes - but, in such circumstances, what is any reckoning of time worth? - before any of us could really take notice of the Queen Anne table so neatly placed among the charnel fragments.

An immaculate dollhouse perched on top of this table. The canary-yellow walls and white trim, gay red roof and fanciful chimneys, all as clean as if it had been newly made and painted. Opening the hinged sides revealed a meticulously furnished and decorated Edwardian interior, populated by a whole menage of exquisite handmade porcelain miniatures. Their heads gleamed with unbelievably perfect coiffures of real human hair (the donors lay in pieces all about us). Several of the male figures wore waistcoats of silky human fat, and the gowns of the ladies were trimmed in a friable lace that analysis later identified as human cartilage. The faces of the dolls were painted with exacting care; the adults simpered at the rather numerous child figurines, all of whom had flat, neutral expressions, and were strangely configured, more like small adults than children.

Again that nerve-shattering whistle broke upon us and froze us where we stood। And, as before, I lifted my head to confront the cockatrice-gaze of that baleful, solitary eye, frenzied and soulless, that hell-bead of ravening malevolence, wedged in features blank with a malignancy more than daemoniacal, but still surmounting the fabulous incongruency of the gashed white stockings, the battered and mud-smeared patent leather shoes, the ragged pinafore with the dangling hem, still pink where the blackness of innocent blood had not yet stained it ...