I awoke with the oddest feeling of pleasure, and a vague but palpable suffusion of disappointment for having been dragged from such an enjoyable slumber. It was as if something sublime and otherworldly had visited me in the night. It was curious that I felt wetly, though. Commonly when I wake up in a sweat, it is because of some terrifying dream, either the imaginings of a mind spent too long on the study of the insane and horriffic, or the effects of an encounter with some ancient and mind-twisting creature. This was an interesting dilemma. My brain strained back in time and began to pore over what tattered memories it could of rifling through the arcanest of tomes found in that library back in Massachusetts. What manner of incongruous oddity would cause such a contradictory and unusual juxstaposition of mental and physical states?

As I shifted in bed, my wonder swiftly dissolved into horror. I realized that my nightgown was only soaked near my pelvis. Oh, how embarrassing -- it was not a sweat at all! What would the housekeeper think? Such humiliation, to be reduced to the state of a young child, and for no clear reason. In the course of the many oddities and frights I have witnessed, to lose control of one's bladder in the relative saftey and comfort of one's own bed is a singularly unmanning happenstance. It must have been relief and not pleasure that I had felt upon first waking, and the disappointment in actuality an unconscious sense of guilt for my self-inflicted ignominy.

I threw back the bedclothes to survey the damage and had yet another shock in as many lurid moments. For lo -- it was not urine at all, but some other substance, viscous and sinister, of unidentifiable origin! I had indeed been visited by some infernal presence. What manner of creature could possibly have done this? What hideous eldritch horror would suckle on a man's most private makeup, would violate a man's sleeping carcass in such a degenerate fashion, draining him of some energy not yet known or understood, leaving behind such a vile and chthonic slime where its mouth (was it even a mouth? or perhaps some unthinkable organ far more fearsome in its strangeness?) had been? The contemplation of such was too strenuous for my mind after so many surprises riding swiftly one on the tail of another, and I lapsed into a swoon.