The Statement of Randolph Carter

Randolph Carter gives his statement to the police, and cannot account for himself except in the one way they will not accept. He and Harley Warren went into an ancient cemetery at night, following a book in a script Carter was not permitted to read, down into a tomb by telephone wire, Warren descending alone into the dark below while Carter waited above with the receiver.

For a time Warren reported what he found. Then another voice came up the line. Carter remembers only what it said, and that he ran. The tale introduces Carter, Lovecraft's recurring dreamer, and does in a few pages what longer horror strains for, the terror of a voice from a place one friend went and the other did not. The Archive holds it to a whisper over the band, the statement of a man no one believes.