Edgar Jepson

“ I was disposed to make more allowance for the flights of the imagination. It seemed to me that my impression of a hideous, shapeless beast might very well be a mere fancy. But even so, something must have given it to me; there had been something in the garden of No. 19, to inspire that horror into me. Of that I was sure. It clung to me still; all day the memory of it kept interfering with my work; and I came home that night realizing that I had a new interest in life, to discover the cause of that horror. ”

“ The garden of No. 19 shimmered peacefully in the sunlight, or was very still, its silence unbroken by a rustle, in the moonlight. The escape of the beast from its cage, or its pen, or its lair, or from the Abyss had been an accident. It was an accident unlikely to happen again now that my neighbor had had his warning. My own garden remained quite pleasant to read in; no sense of horror troubled its air; no sickly stench poisoned it; the sparrows went their busy ways about it, unscared. ”

“ I began to keep a watch on the garden of No. 19. In the morning after I had dressed, in the evening when I returned from the office, and at night before going to bed I went to the window of the top room at the back of my house and examined my neighbor's garden carefully. Sometimes at night I would watch it for a quarter of an hour or twenty minutes at a time. In the bottom of my heart I wanted to see a beast, a real beast no matter how hideous or loathsome, a beast that you could touch. It was that, the possibility that it was a beast of another world, an intangible horror, which harassed me. ”