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what I’m talking about. Plus Les, of course, has studied all this stuff, I know.”
    “So: A Lovecraft notebook?”
    “These photos people are getting, things they call veils, orbs, vortexes. Usually shot outdoors at night or in dim light, I’m not talking about your supposed ‘ghost photos’ of ectoplasm in haunted houses, whatever those turn out to be. Anyway, these things immediately reminded me of Lovecraft’s story ‘From Beyond,’ which he wrote in late 1920.”
    So Worthy had started researching that year in Lovecraft’s life, to see if there might be any evidence that the phenomena he described in ‘From Beyond’ weren’t made up, that they stemmed from something he actually experienced.
    “And what did I find, but a reference in a Lovecraft letter from 1920 that he actually visited my great-uncle, Henry Annesley, to discuss some experiments Uncle Henry was conducting.
    “Not only that, this letter clearly implies he’d taken notes with an eye to developing a story, notes which he referred to as ‘The Miskatonic Notebook’ or ‘The Miskatonic Manuscript.’
    “So, Matthew, I understand you’re in the business of locating rare, lost, hard-to-find books and manuscripts. Everyone’s heard about your million-dollar Sherlock Holmes story, and I knew Les worked with you here, so I asked him for an introduction. What do you think? Can this notebook be found?”
    Matthew was on familiar ground, now. He flipped open a notebook, asked for details.
    “Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a weird duck, from a weird family. Les knows all this; stop me if I’m covering old ground.” The author’s grandfather had made his first fortune with a general store out in the rural Rhode Island town of Foster in the mid-1800s, Worthy explained, which you might presume would have given his descendants some sympathy for the nobility of commerce. But in fact, after his father died the mother and maiden aunts seem to have raised the boy to believe they were part of some natural Providence aristocracy, that it would have been beneath any of them to seek gainful employment, even when the inheritance dwindled to the point where they were living in rented rooms on short rations.
    “All the way up to age 30, Lovecraft was adamant that he would write only for amateur journals, mostly poetry and essays, he certainly was not going to stoop to writing anything aimed at the lowbrow tastes of the vulgar crowd, anything ‘commercial,’” Worthy explained. “As a result he never owned a car or a home, spent most of his life in a rented room living on donuts and coffee and cold canned spaghetti.”
    “We’ll allow a bit of literary license, here.”
    “No, this is by his own written testimony. Am I right, Les?”
    “He was proud that he could live on less than two dollars a week,” Les nodded, “which wasn’t much, even in 1920. He bragged about it. Not a big fan of fresh fruit or vegetables. I can sympathize with him there. But he even hated seafood, reviled it, this from a guy who lived within walking distance of the water all his life.”
    “You’d die on that diet,” Matthew frowned.
    “He did,” Worthy agreed. “It would be unethical for any nutritionist to put a patient on that diet today just to see what would happen, but Howard Phillips Lovecraft, who was never known to smoke or drink alcohol, died in the late 1930s at the age of 47 of cancer of the small intestine, an ailment as unusual as his diet. So if you really need one, he’s your one-man ‘all-processed-food’ control group.”
    “Nasty.”
    “Yes.” Worthy wanted to get back on track. “But we were talking about this idea that ‘Society’ people, no matter how down-at-the-heel, should remain above the degradation of getting involved in actual commerce. Lovecraft married Sonia Greene, during most of their brief marriage he lived in a rented room in New York while she went to Cleveland to find work as a milliner, sending him back a little money to