The Novel of the White Powder

A worried sister watches her studious brother transformed. Overworked and ill, Francis is prescribed a simple powder by an old chemist, and at first it is a cure. He grows merry, goes out, comes alive. Then the change turns. He shuts himself in his room, a stain spreads beneath his door, and what the household finally breaks in upon is no longer a man but a dissolving horror.

For the powder was not what the prescription intended. Age and damp had turned it into the Vinum Sabbati, the wine of the witches' sabbath, and it has unmade him back into the primal slime. Drawn from Machen's The Three Impostors, it is a cornerstone of English weird fiction and a clear ancestor of Lovecraft's own dissolutions. The Archive sets the slow ruin to a blues-inflected swing, a cure that becomes a verdict.