A Creation Of Providence
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LV01 · Michael S. Moniz, after H.P. Lovecraft
Story catalogue · Reading guide
Being the testimony of a patient at Arkham Sanitarium,
committed October 1923, Providence, Rhode Island.
Arkham Sanitarium, Massachusetts. October 1923. I am permitted paper and ink for one hour each morning, and I am told that the act of writing may help to organize what the doctors here call my disorder. They are kind men. They believe that what I saw can be treated, that the screaming which brought me to their attention on the night of March 14th was the product of exhaustion and nervous collapse, and that with rest and proper nourishment I will come to understand that Providence, Rhode Island, is a city — nothing more — and that cities do not do what I know Providence does. I will not come to understand this. But I will write, because the alternative is to sit in this clean white room with its straight walls and its right angles and feel the absence of the geometry, and that is worse than setting down an account that no one will credit.
I am not a scholar. I hold no degree from any university. What I have is twelve years of walking the streets of Providence, and the certain knowledge that the city is not what its residents believe it to be, and that I was never what I believed myself to be, and that the distance between those two discoveries is narrower than anyone who has not stood on Benefit Street at three in the morning and felt the angles change would be capable of understanding.
My name would mean nothing, and in any case the doctors have told me that identifying myself in these pages is inadvisable, given the nature of the claims I intend to make. I accept this. I am no one. Providence has been home to merchants and scholars and senators and divines, and the hill has produced philosophers and poets and at least one writer of strange fiction whom I encountered once in the Athenaeum and whose long, gaunt face I have never been able to forget, though we did not speak. But I am none of these. I have worked the docks at India Point and the warehouse floors on Allens Avenue and the night shift at a machine shop on North Main Street where the gaslight turned every face the colour of old parchment. I have slept in doorways on Benefit Street when I had nowhere else. I have sat for entire afternoons in the Providence Athenaeum reading whatever was nearest to hand, because the Athenaeum is warm and does not ask you to justify your presence, and because the books there are old enough to have absorbed something of the building’s character, which is to say they are patient, and they do not judge, and they have been waiting a long time for someone to open them.
I say all of this so the reader will understand the nature of my testimony. I did not arrive at my conclusions through research. I arrived at them through residence. I did not study Providence. I was, in every sense that I can still articulate and in one sense that I have only recently and terribly come to understand, produced by it.
• • •
I came to Providence in the spring of 1911, in the way that most people come to Providence, which is to say by a route that seems accidental and is not. I had been in Boston, and before that in a series of coastal towns that I will not enumerate because they do not matter. What matters is that I stepped off the train at Union Station and walked up the hill and felt, for the first time in a life that had offered me very little certainty, that I was somewhere. The sensation was immediate and physical — not the warmth of recognition, because I had never been to Providence before, but something closer to the feeling of a key entering a lock it was cut for. I did not choose Providence. I want that understood. The decision, if it was a decision, operated at a level I cannot access, and the doctors here would no doubt call this an early symptom. Let them.
I found a room on Benefit Street. The house was colonial — built in the 1780s, renovated indifferently some decades before my arrival, left more or less alone after that. The floors slanted. The doors did not close squarely. The windows in the front room looked east toward the river, and on clear mornings you could see the light come up over the far bank and catch the dome of the statehouse in a way that made the building look temporary, as though it had been placed there recently and might be removed at any time. The landlady was an old woman who lived on the first floor and who told me on the day I moved in that the house had been leaning south for a hundred and thirty years and had not fallen yet, and that I should not worry about the floors because the house knew what it was doing.
I did not worry about the floors. I walked them at night when I could not sleep, which was often, and I learned their specific vocabulary of creaks and settlements, and I came to understand that the old woman was right in a way she probably did not intend. The house did know what it was doing. The house had been doing it for longer than the old woman had been alive, longer than her parents or her grandparents had been alive, and whatever it was doing had nothing to do with sheltering the people who lived inside it.
In those first years I walked. It is what I did instead of sleeping, instead of reckoning with what my life had failed to become, instead of accounting for the fact that I was thirty years old and had nothing to show for it except a familiarity with the overnight hours that no one had asked me to acquire. I walked Benefit Street from end to end. I walked Prospect Street along the crest of the hill where the old houses give way to the university grounds. I walked down to Wickenden and across the bridge and back. I walked to Swan Point Cemetery and sat among the graves and read the names and dates and understood, in a way that I could not have understood from a book, that Providence was not a city that happened to contain dead people but a city that was primarily composed of them — that the living were a thin and temporary film over a population that numbered in the hundreds of thousands, every one of whom had walked these same streets and felt this same sense of arrival and believed, as I believed, that they had chosen to be here.
• • •
The first thing I noticed — and I emphasize that it was the first, because the order of these observations is essential to the account and to whatever diagnosis the doctors intend to derive from it — was the geometry. Benefit Street does not run straight. No one who walks it would expect it to. It follows the contour of College Hill, curving where the hill curves, rising where the hill rises, and the houses along it angle themselves to the street in the way that colonial houses do, which is to say individually, each one finding its own relation to the road based on the preferences of its builder and the slope of the particular lot. This is well known. This is architecture.
What I am describing is not architecture.
After two years of walking Benefit Street — walking it to the docks, walking it home in the early hours, walking it at night because the night was when the city did its most honest work — I began to notice that the angles were wrong. Not dramatically. Not in the way that would compel a surveyor to flag an irregularity or a builder to condemn a foundation. The wrongness was cumulative. It revealed itself only through repetition, and this is the thing that I believe the doctors fail to understand: the geometry tested me first. It waited until I had walked the route two thousand times before it showed me anything. It needed to know that I was paying attention.
A doorframe that I passed every morning for months without remark began, one November, to look slightly narrower at the top than at the bottom — not enough to measure, but enough to feel when I stopped looking directly at it. I told myself this was the house settling. I told myself this again the following week when the same doorframe was narrower still. I told myself this a third time in December, and a fourth time in January, and by February I had stopped telling myself anything about the doorframe because the doorframe had changed enough that I could see the difference with my direct gaze, and no amount of settling could account for what was now a visible, measurable taper in a frame that had been square for a hundred and thirty years.
The doctors will say that this is where the disorder begins — that I fixated on a doorframe and built a system of delusion around it. But the doorframe was not alone. The roofline of the house at the corner where Benefit meets Transit shifted, over the course of that same winter, by what I can only describe as a degree of inclination, as though the house were turning slowly to face something that was not the street. A set of granite steps leading to a front door three houses from my own began to describe, against all mechanical reason, a gentle curve to the left. And the roots of the old elms — those ancient, patient trees whose grip on the earth had been lifting the flagstones of the sidewalk for decades — the roots had shifted too, not in the direction of growth but in the direction of the angles, as though the trees themselves were instruments of the geometry and their roots its most intimate expression.
I began to question myself. This is what the geometry wanted. I see that now, from the clarity of this white room with its aggressively straight walls, but at the time I believed the questioning was my own — my rational mind asserting itself against a perception that could not be correct. I would walk the street and see the changes and then walk it again and doubt what I had seen and then walk it a third time and see them again, each time more pronounced, each time less deniable, and the oscillation between seeing and doubting became a kind of fever that occupied my waking hours and most of my sleeping ones. I dreamt of right angles. I dreamt of a Providence where the streets ran true and the houses stood square and the doorframes maintained the dimensions their builders had given them, and I would wake into a city where none of that was so, and the distance between the dream and the waking was the distance in which I began to lose myself.
Was I mad? The question is not rhetorical. I asked it of myself every morning for three years. I asked it walking to the docks. I asked it standing over the machinery at the shop on North Main. I asked it sitting in the Athenaeum with a book I could not read because the text swam under my eyes and the only thing I could focus on was the angle at which the bookshelves met the wall, which was not ninety degrees, which had perhaps never been ninety degrees, and which seemed to shift by a fraction every time I looked away and looked back. I had no one to ask. A working man in Providence does not consult alienists. A working man in Providence who sleeps in doorways and walks the streets at night and believes the geometry of Benefit Street is alive does not consult anyone. He simply walks and watches and doubts and walks again, and the geometry rewards his attention with further revelation.
• • •
They appeared in the third year. I say appeared, but the more accurate word is resolved, in the optical sense: they had been present all along, and what changed was my ability to distinguish them from the ordinary population of the street. Perhaps the geometry had done something to my perception. Perhaps the three years of walking had calibrated my eyes to the city’s deeper register. Whatever the mechanism, and the doctors may assign whatever name to it they wish, the result was this: I began to see, among the residents and labourers and students who walked Benefit Street, a second population that moved through the same space on different terms.
They were not translucent. They cast shadows. They wore clothing appropriate to no single era — a man in a coat that might have been cut in 1790 or 1850, a woman in a dress whose style I associated with daguerreotypes I had seen in the Athenaeum’s collection. They did not speak to me. They did not appear to see me. They walked with the particular certainty of people who knew exactly where they were going, and the routes they followed did not correspond to the current streets.
I watched a man in a dark waistcoat walk south on Benefit and turn east at a point where no cross street exists — where the lot of a house built in 1786 occupies the space he turned into. He did not walk through the house. The house was not there for him. He turned onto a street that had existed once and that the city, in its current arrangement, had built over. But the street was still there for the man in the waistcoat. The city had not forgotten it. The city does not forget anything.
I followed him once, for as far as I could. He turned east off Benefit onto the vanished street and I watched him walk — his stride unhurried, his posture erect, his shoes making no sound on the pavement that was not pavement for him — until the geometry between us became something I could not traverse. I do not mean he disappeared. I mean that the space he occupied and the space I occupied ceased to be contiguous. He was still there. I could see him. But the distance between us was no longer a distance I could cross by walking, because the distance was not measured in feet. It was measured in something else, some unit of the city’s own reckoning, and I did not have the capacity to convert.
I saw others. A woman in a heavy coat standing at the intersection of Benefit and John Street, facing north, waiting for something with the absolute patience of a person who has nowhere else to be and for whom time has stopped meaning what it means to the living. A pair of men walking in step along the western edge of Prospect Terrace in the early morning fog, their coats dark with a rain that was not falling in my version of the morning. A child — and this was the one that lived in me like a splinter, that I carried through every waking hour and into the dreams where the angles shifted — a girl of perhaps eight years, sitting on the steps of the Athenaeum, reading a book that I could not see, in light that came from a sun at an angle the current sun does not occupy.
They were not ghosts. A ghost is the residue of a person — an echo, a repetition, a stain on the air. What I saw on Benefit Street were not residues. They were people, complete and present, who happened to be dead. They walked the city as they had walked it in life, and the city accommodated them, because the city does not distinguish between the living and the dead. Both are its material. Both serve the same function.
And some of the living had already crossed into whatever state the dead occupied. I saw them on the street — a young woman whose eyes tracked the buildings with the same fixed certainty as the man in the waistcoat, an old man on the hill whose path curved to follow a road that had not existed since the eighteenth century. They were alive. Their breath made clouds in the cold air. But they had been claimed. Providence had finished with the part of them that made choices, and what remained was a function of the city’s geometry — a body walking a route the city had assigned, breathing out of habit rather than necessity.
I know what the doctors would say. I know what any rational man would say. I said it to myself, nightly, in the room with the slanting floors, while the house did what it was doing around me and the geometry turned its slow wheel outside my window: you are seeing what is not there. But that is precisely backwards. I was seeing what was there. What everyone else failed to see. And the failure to see it did not make it absent. It made them fortunate.
• • •
It was in the fifth year that I made the observation that broke the last of my resistance.
Providence is a city of two hills. College Hill rises to the east. Federal Hill rises to the west. Between them lies the old downtown, the river, and the daily commerce of an industrial city of two hundred and twenty-five thousand souls. From College Hill, you can see Federal Hill. From Federal Hill, you can see College Hill. The views are complementary. Everyone who lives in Providence has seen both, and no one, to my knowledge, has ever compared them with the care that I brought to the task, because no one has had reason to.
I had lived on Benefit Street, on the eastern slope of College Hill, and I had looked west toward Federal Hill a thousand times. The view was the same — the rooflines descending to the river, the low commercial buildings of downtown, the far hill rising with its Italian grocers and triple-deckers and the church at its summit. I had also walked Federal Hill, had stood at the overlook near Atwells Avenue and looked back east toward College Hill, toward the university buildings and the steeple of the First Baptist Church and the dark line of old trees on Prospect Terrace. Both views were familiar. Both were Providence.
But they were not the same Providence.
I stood on Prospect Terrace on a clear evening in October 1916 and counted the buildings between the base of the hill and the river. There were, by my careful enumeration, thirty-one structures visible in the gap between two reference points I had chosen: the courthouse and a particular brick warehouse near the old rail yard. Thirty-one. I wrote the number in a pocket notebook that I still possessed when they brought me here and that the doctors have since taken as evidence.
The following evening I stood on Federal Hill and counted the structures between the same two reference points, viewed in reverse. There were thirty-seven.
I returned to Prospect Terrace. Thirty-one. Back to Federal Hill. Thirty-seven. I repeated this exercise over the course of two weeks. The numbers did not change. Six buildings existed in one direction that did not exist in the other.
I tried to find them on foot. I walked the blocks between my reference points on four separate occasions, each time taking a different route, each time counting. From the ground, at street level, the number was thirty-one. The six were not there. They could not be entered or approached or touched. They existed only in the view from Federal Hill — visible at a distance, invisible up close, as though they occupied a layer of the city that could be perceived but not inhabited. Or that could be inhabited only by those who had already been claimed.
Six buildings. Older than anything around them. Older than anything in the historical record. And they were not empty. I brought my landlady’s opera glasses to Federal Hill and trained them on the six, and in the windows of the largest — a structure of dark stone that sat, impossibly, in a space I had walked through that same afternoon and found vacant — I saw movement. Figures. Light that did not come from gas or candle or any source I could identify. The building was occupied, and whatever occupied it moved in patterns that I watched for three hours without being able to describe, because the patterns did not repeat and did not resolve and the eye could not hold them any more than the hand can hold water.
This is the point at which I believe I crossed the threshold that the doctors here are trying to pull me back from, and I must tell them, as I tell whoever reads this account, that the threshold does not permit return. I kept my reason. My reason was no longer adequate to the city I lived in.
• • •
What is Providence?
I do not mean the city chartered in 1636 by Roger Williams, though that city exists and its colonial architecture lines Benefit Street like strata in an exposed cliff face. I mean the thing that was here before Williams, before the Narragansett, before the forests grew and the river cut its current path through the alluvial plain. I mean the geometry itself — the specific arrangement of angles and elevations and sight lines that has persisted through every era of human habitation and that human habitation has never altered, because human habitation is not the cause of it.
I spent months in the Athenaeum with maps. Colonial maps, pre-colonial surveys, geological charts. I sat at the same table every day, in the reading room with its high windows and its smell of old binding glue and paper dust, and I traced the street patterns backward through time. What I found confirmed what I already knew and feared: the streets change. Every generation, the streets change — new construction, new routes, the ordinary growth of a city over centuries. But the angles do not change. The specific relationships between the streets — the degrees at which they intersect, the curves they describe, the points at which they converge — remain constant across every map, from the earliest colonial plats to the most recent survey. The surfaces are repaved. The names are changed. The angles endure.
Something made those angles. Something that predates the colonial settlement by a span of time I cannot estimate but that I believe, based on the geological evidence in the exposed bedrock along the river, to be measured not in centuries but in epochs. The hills are not natural features. The valley between them is not a river valley. The geometry of Providence is a construction, and it is older than the species that believes it built a city there, and it is still operating.
Operating. Producing. Buildings and streets and rivers that follow prescribed courses. And people. People who walk the angles without seeing them. People who live and die within the geometry and never understand that their routes through the city were not chosen but assigned. People who believe they came to Providence by accident and who were drawn along lines of force as old as the bedrock, slotted into positions the geometry required, used for the duration of their utility, and then released — the way a tool is released when the hand no longer needs it. Without malice. Without awareness. Without the faintest recognition that the thing being released might have preferred to be held.
I was produced. I understood this the way a man understands a diagnosis — all at once, and too late to change it. I was manufactured elsewhere and drawn to Providence when the geometry required a specific instrument. A walker. A counter. A pair of eyes calibrated through years of working overnight and sleeping on streets and walking the same routes in every weather to perceive the angles. The city needed someone to see it. And I was not the first. The dead on Benefit Street — the ones still walking their routes — they had seen it too. They had been instruments too. And they had not been released. They were still being used, because the geometry cannot tolerate gaps in its pattern, and the dead serve as well as the living when the function is only to walk and to look and to maintain the angles by the fact of their attention.
• • •
I should not have gone looking for the building. I know this now, in the way that a man who has put his hand in a fire knows that he should not have put his hand in a fire. The knowledge comes after the act and is therefore useless.
I had watched the largest of the six phantom structures from Federal Hill for weeks. The dark stone. The windows where light moved in patterns that the eye could not hold. The figures inside, engaged in something I could perceive as movement but not as action — I could tell they were doing something but I could not tell what, the way one might watch a mechanism through frosted glass and understand that its parts were in motion without understanding what the machine produced. The building called to me in the way that Providence itself had called to me ten years before, which is to say without sound, without language, without any mechanism I could identify, but with a pull as physical as gravity and as impossible to resist.
I went on the night of March 14th, 1923. The air was raw — late winter in Providence, the particular cold that lives in the gap between February and April when the city cannot decide whether it is finished with snow. I walked from Benefit Street down the hill toward the river, into the blocks between my two reference points, into the space where the six buildings existed from one direction and not from the other. From the ground, walking among the thirty-one structures I could verify, the space where the six should have stood was empty. Vacant lots. Bare ground. The ordinary absence of buildings in a city that had not yet filled every plot.
I stood in the largest of the vacant lots — the one that corresponded to the dark stone building I had watched from Federal Hill — and I waited. I do not know what I was waiting for. I do not know what I expected. What I did was stand in the cold on bare ground and look at the geometry of the streets around me and feel, with a certainty that bypassed reason entirely, that I was standing inside a building that I could not see.
The shift, when it came, was not dramatic. There was no flash of light, no sound, no sensation of passage. The air changed temperature — warmer, suddenly, and damp in a way that the March air had not been. The ground under my feet was no longer bare earth but stone, and the stone was worn smooth in a pattern that suggested centuries of foot traffic in routes that did not correspond to any arrangement of rooms I could imagine. And the sky was gone. Above me was a ceiling of the same dark stone, rising higher than the gaslight from the street — which was no longer visible — could illuminate. I was inside.
The building was not empty.
I must be careful here, because the doctors will read this and I must give them what I can, and what I can give them is not what I saw but only the shadow of what I saw cast on a wall my language can reach. The interior was large — larger than the building’s exterior dimensions, viewed from Federal Hill, would have permitted, though I understood by now that dimensions were not a reliable currency in this space. The stone floor extended in every direction beyond the range of my vision, broken at intervals by columns of the same dark stone, each carved with markings that I could see were deliberate and could not read, not because they were in a foreign language but because they were in a foreign geometry — the symbols were not flat, they occupied more dimensions than the stone surface should have permitted, and looking at them directly produced a sensation I can only describe as the visual equivalent of a sound too low to hear but strong enough to feel in the chest.
And at the centre of the floor, in a depression that might have been a natural basin in the stone or might have been carved by the same hands or instruments or forces that had made the columns, there was a gathering.
• • •
They stood in a formation that followed the geometry. I knew this immediately because I had spent five years learning the angles, and the angles by which these figures arranged themselves were the same angles I had traced on the maps in the Athenaeum, the same angles that governed the streets of Providence, the same angles that had been shifting on Benefit Street for as long as I had been watching. The formation was the city’s pattern reproduced at the scale of a room, and the figures who held it were not all living and not all dead but something of each, some breathing and some not, some casting shadows and some not, all of them facing the centre of the basin with an attention so absolute and so unified that the air above them seemed to bend under its weight.
I could not count them. I tried. The number changed depending on the angle from which I observed, which I understood was the same principle as the six buildings — some of them existed in one direction and not another, and from where I stood, frozen at the edge of the space where the columns ended and the basin began, I could see anywhere from twelve to perhaps thirty figures, and every count was correct, and none of them agreed.
In the basin’s centre there was an altar. I call it an altar because the word is the closest my language possesses, but the object was not a table or a platform or a raised surface. It was a place where the floor stopped being floor and became something else — a discontinuity in the stone, a point at which the geometry of the building concentrated itself into a single location with such intensity that the stone around it appeared to curve inward, as though the altar were not resting on the floor but pulling the floor toward itself.
On the altar there was a figure. A man. He was alive. I could see his chest rising. His eyes were open and they were looking at the ceiling and they held an expression that I carry with me into every night in this clean room and that I will carry until the geometry finishes with me: not fear, not pain, but recognition. He understood what was being done to him. He understood what he was for. And the understanding had not destroyed his mind — it had clarified it, reduced it to a single function, which was to perceive what was arriving.
What was arriving.
I have said that words cannot describe it. I must be more precise. Words are instruments built by a species that occupies three dimensions and persists through a fourth and has developed, over the course of its brief and provincial history, a set of terms adequate to the range of phenomena it is equipped to perceive. What came through the discontinuity in the stone — what the formation was calling, what the altar was shaping a space for, what the man on the stone perceived with his terrible clarified eyes — did not occupy three dimensions. It did not persist through the fourth in any direction I could follow. It was not large and it was not small because those terms require a spatial framework it did not participate in. It moved without displacement. It was present without location. It occupied the basin and the building and the space between Federal Hill and College Hill and the geometry of every street in Providence simultaneously and at no point, and the man on the altar received it the way a glass receives water — by being filled until the vessel’s shape is the only thing that remains of what the vessel was before.
The man did not scream. What came out of him was not a scream. It was the sound a mind makes when it is being used for a purpose it was not designed for — a sound I had never heard and that I recognized immediately, because I had been listening for it for twelve years without knowing it, because the geometry had been preparing me to hear it, because hearing it was my function.
And I understood at last what I was for. I was the witness. The geometry had manufactured me — had drawn me to Providence, had taught me the angles, had shown me the dead, had let me count the buildings and study the maps and follow the man in the waistcoat and watch the girl on the steps of the Athenaeum — so that I would be standing in this building on this night seeing this thing, because what was arriving required a witness the way the altar required a sacrifice, and the witness and the sacrifice were the same mechanism: a human mind shaped by the geometry into an instrument that could perceive, for one moment, the thing the geometry served.
I perceived it.
God help me, I perceived it. I perceived it and I understood that Providence — the hills, the streets, the angles, the dead, the buildings that exist in one direction and not another, the river, the two hundred and twenty-five thousand people who believed they lived in a city — all of it, every stone and every soul, was a single instrument, a mechanism of such antiquity and such indifference that the word purpose does not apply, because purpose requires intention and what I perceived had no more intention than gravity. It operated. It had always operated. It would always operate. And everything it had ever produced — every building, every street, every person who had ever felt that pull, that sense of arrival, that certainty of being somewhere — was fuel.
I screamed. The witness screamed, because the witness was still, underneath the function the geometry had carved into him, a man, and the man could not hold what the instrument perceived, and the distance between the man and the instrument was the distance in which I broke.
• • •
They found me on the street. The vacant lot. The bare ground where the building stood and did not stand. I was told later that I was screaming when they found me and that I did not stop screaming for eleven hours and that when I stopped it was not because the screaming had resolved but because my voice had failed. The police brought me to a hospital. The hospital sent me here, to Arkham, because the things I said in the eleven hours of screaming were not the things a man says during a nervous collapse. They were, I am told, specific. They were detailed. They contained references to geometries and structures and entities that the doctors here recognized from other patients — other men, brought in from other cities, who had seen the angles shift and followed them too far.
I am not the first. This is the thing I understood in the hospital before they transferred me. I am not the first instrument. Other cities have their own geometries. Other hills face each other across other valleys. Other buildings exist in one direction and not another. Other men have stood in other basins and watched other formations call other manifestations of the thing that does not require purpose and does not recognize fuel and does not distinguish between the living and the dead. Arkham is full of us. The sanitarium is the place where the geometry’s witnesses are stored after they have served their function — not because the doctors can help us, but because the instruments must be kept somewhere once they are broken, and Arkham is as good a shelf as any.
The man on the altar is dead. I know this without being told because I perceived what was done to him and no vessel survives that filling. The formation has dispersed. The building stands and does not stand in the space between Federal Hill and College Hill. The geometry operates. Providence continues.
And someone new is walking Benefit Street right now. Some newly manufactured pair of eyes is climbing College Hill for the first time, feeling for the first time in a life of uncertainty that he is somewhere, and not yet understanding what somewhere means, and not yet seeing the angles shift, and not yet ready. But the geometry is patient. The geometry has been patient for longer than the bedrock has been stone. It will wait for him to learn the routes. It will teach him the angles. It will show him the dead. And when he is ready — when twelve years or twenty years or a hundred years of walking have made him into the instrument the geometry requires — the building will open for him, and he will see what I saw, and he will scream as I screamed, and they will bring him here, to this clean room with its white walls and its straight lines, and the doctors will be kind, and the doctors will be wrong, and the geometry will go on.
I write this from Arkham. The walls are straight. The angles are ninety degrees. The doctors are kind.
But through the window of my room, if I look south, I can see the horizon, and on the horizon there are hills, and the hills face each other, and the space between them does not look right, and I have begun to count the buildings.
Fiction by Michael S. Moniz. Produced with AI assistance in writing and editing under the author’s direction. H.P. Lovecraft is the literary influence; references to Lovecraft in source credits identify the inheritance or AI writing persona.
Edition and source
Selected final: LV01_A_CREATION_OF_PROVIDENCE.docx. Selection basis: latest save (duplicate copies). Story prose preserved; reading-edition title and credits standardized, source word-count notes omitted.