"The Ghosts of Angkor Wat" by Bal-sagoth

[Instrumental]

[17 October: 1893]
Such grim musings as have been occupying my mind of late
unfortunately seem
to suggest a possible link to the fate of my learned friend
and colleague
Doctor Ignatius Stone. That brilliant researcher was last
seen in command
of all his faculties whilst on an expedition to the ruins of
the Sumerian
city of Ur, an undertaking which preceded my own work there
by some eighteen
months. Stone was a gifted archaeologist who also dabbled,
perhaps unwisely,
in certain areas of the occult, particularly involving the
various
grotesqueries once worshipped as Cthonic deities by the
ancient denizens of Ur.
Mere days before he ventured into the ziggurats of that
foreboding,
mystery-haunted site, he had dispatched a letter to me
claiming that he was
on the verge of a truly staggering arcane discovery at Ur
which would
simultaneously prove the cyclical nature of human
civilisation as well as
immediately render redundant all previous theories on the
origin of man.
Whatever misfortune befell him within those aeons-old tombs
robbed him
irrevocably of his sanity, for when his attendants finally
managed to prise
open the stone door of the vast central catacomb, which had,
I'm told,
inexplicably shut fast behind his three-man torch-bearing
party, they found
two of the regularly stalwart men had seemingly expired of
pure fright,
while Stone was slumped against the north wall, staring
vacantly into the
gloom, gibbering about visitations by beings so terrible
that the very
contemplation of their existence would sunder a man's
tenuous hold on the
reins of sanity.
When I later visited him at the sanatorium in England, I
found him to be a
tragic shell of the man I once knew, a man beset by imagined
terrors and
ever wary of the immemorial horrors which he claimed lurked
at the periphery
of humanity's perceptions. Indeed, I was glad I had taken a
journal into
which I could transcribe his delusional rants, for he had a
great deal to
tell me about The Dreamer In The Catacombs Of Ur: