The Castle in the Window

"The Castle in the Window" is a fantasy short story by Steffan B. Aletti, set in the Cthulhu Mythos. It was originally published in the July 1968 issue of the Magazine of Horror.
==Synopsis==
The narrator, a British artist, visits an old bookstore and notices the diary of an early 19th century alchemist, Dr. Michael Gwynn, complete with references to extremely rare tomes such as the Necronomicon and the Song of Yste. They buy the diary as a gift to their roommate, Colin Black, who is himself an occultist and antiquarian. Black is fascinated by it, as the diary tells of how Gwynn made a glass window baptized "with the terrible rites of R'lyeh", and claimed that by looking through the window, he could see the past. Specifically, he saw a castle on the landscape that he knew hadn't been there for centuries. Gwynn never allowed anyone else to see the window, and was deemed insane by his physicians, who forced him to leave the house in 1807. Before doing so, he covered the window with paint and plaster.
Black is intent on finding this magic window, and convinces the narrator to accompany him on a trip to Cornwall. There, he successfully locates the house that once belonged to Gwynn, and obtains permission from the owner to look inside. Finding the window, the two carefully break the plaster and remove the paint. Sure enough, looking through the window reveals a medieval castle that has been destroyed centuries ago. Black is mesmerised, just like Gwynn before him, and the narrator finds him on the next day, still staring at the castle, wondering about a way to pass through the glass window and travel to the past.
The narrator tries to reason with him, but Black leans heavily on the window, and the glass breaks under his weight, causing him to plummet through. The narrator looks down, but sees nothing on the ground below, and can't find any sign of Black anywhere else. Later on, when researching about the castle in the local library, they come across the story of a man wearing strange clothes who appeared in the year 1243, speaking an unknown variety of English, and claiming to be from the future. The man was burned as a sorcerer.
Category:Expanded Mythos Works
Category:Steffan B. Aletti works