There is an old tomb nearby amid the rocks. Under what ancient stars now dim was it carved is more than I know. It is well hidden by time, and I first learned of it long ago as a child chasing a beetle. I had read as a child in my uncle’s books of a certain bug of interesting properties: its green sheen, as described, had haunted my dreams, and the promise to those who can hunt it down to its burrow—
So I pushed my way through some thick evergreens which I doubt my present corpulent frame will ever pass through again. I did not find the beetle again either on the other side.
I found myself in a cave with a steeply sloping floor. What thrilling darkness! I continued undaunted after the bug. Soon, though, the passage led to a door. I do not know how deep I had gone by that point, only that all reason had been consumed in pursuit of the scurrying beetle I longed to capture.
The echoes of my steps died in the shadows as I stood before that impassable door. Mighty, iron bands crossed it, red with a bleeding rust running down the thickset timber blackened by scorching fire. A knocker, I did not dare to sound it, a simple ring of shining brass—a knocker or a handle. I pulled, but the door was locked.
You have asked me, now, how I have learned the things I have learned. I learned them as a child, as a spy; I learned them by bending down and placing my eye against a keyhole. Such things as beetles were thrown out of my mind, then; they said I was out of my mind when I returned.
Such things as I saw beyond that door are not for the living to know. A few, a few children, whose less brittle minds can take on shocks that the adult mind finds ruinous—a child’s mind has not yet built up notions which it cannot still knock down—learn of other worlds. Some see heaven, or pass into a fairytale, but the dreadful world I saw through that keyhole was an instantaneous education.
Such hungry faces!
That was a kernel of knowledge, and it has grown in me. It has led my researches. It has helped me judge truth from falsehood. The things that are buried in that tomb are dead, dead in a truer sense of the word than those restful corpses you fear. These are things, you see, that were never alive, things of death. I know who locked them away, and by what means he did it; I know too, now, or have guessed, the dreadful secret of the key. The shape is bored into my mind.
Our enemy claims to read minds, and now I know how dreadful my knowledge is. Which is why I must die before he finds me.
