WIP: Opening paragraph of "Drawings of Patient O.T.", 1st draft

“Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.” So begins “The Picture in the House,” a short story written by H.P. Lovecraft on Dec. 12, 1920. It’s a statement that has resonated with me ever since I first stumbled across it while flipping through the 1985 corrected sixth printing of Arkham House’s The Dunwich Horrors and Others, a book I found on my father’s bookcase when I was a child, a book with a green dust jacket and an Raymond Bayless illustration of Cthulhu emerging from his sunken tomb at R’lyeh. I can think of many people that Lovecraft’s statement could be applied to, people I’ve known in my own life in fact. Years ago, when I was attending high school at the city of Los Diablos, I knew a boy who was utterly obsessed with some old and abandoned chemical factory, an obsession which eventually led to madness and suicide. And after I graduated college and moved back to my hometown, which is the city of Thundermist in northern Rhode Island, I made friends with a gay man my own age who, like my friend from high school, was also haunted by a building, which in this case was an old church called St. Durtal’s. Even I have found myself drawn like a moth to a strange building: Kafka’s Clinic, an old abandoned mental hospital. It was there that I first came across the drawings of Patient O.T.