I have had nightmares of late. Strange nightmares so vivid they blur my conception of what reality is. I find myself in bed, drifting somewhere between sleep and waking consciousness. And then the melody starts, an eerie yet utterly captivating sound. There are words, of that I am certain, but I cannot understand them. They seem to emanate from a place far away, yet so close that I feel they are being whispered into my ear. It is an ancient tongue beyond my understanding, which hints at old gods and eldritch horrors beyond time itself.

I feel myself leaving the comfort of my covers, creeping down the staircase to the store below. I wander amidst the stacks of tomes and texts that I have so lovingly amassed over the years. They feed this maleficent energy.

The knob of the cellar door twists within my shaking hand. I have no will, no mind of my own. The song envelopes me. And I awake. That is how it began. I write this now in vain hope that someone may read my tale and know the truth, for the last vestiges of sanity will soon have been wrested from my tattered mind.

My name is Michael Evander. I own a small used book store in a rural town on eastern Long Island. The name is not important. I have always prided myself on my vast assortment of librams dating as far back as the eighteenth century. My passion in life has been knowledge and discovery, and thus this profession served to fulfill both my scholarly hunger and my simple human need for sustenance. I made my quarters in the cozy loft atop the establishment, as I could not afford to pay rent elsewhere and it left me alone with the wealth of my collection during off hours. It was a happy arrangement.

The only area that remained largely off limits was the cellar. I am an academic, an intellectual, a man of truth and facts, and thus superstition is often beyond the realm of what I can believe. Yet the cellar seemed to bear a sort of heaviness which I could not place. It made me uneasy, frightened even, despite its innocuous appearance: a bare, simple room of concrete that seemed best suited for storage. Its only irregularity was the well, or at least it looked to be a well. It was a circular stone embankment in the center of the room, with a pit whose measure could not be perceived by human eyes alone. It made my stomach turn to look inside. I tried to plumb its depth with light, with stone, and every other means of ascertaining any information I could about this peculiar installment. My queries were nothing if not unsuccessful.