originally published Etchings and Odysseys No.5, 1984
Narrator is part of a circle of artists and seekers. He's giving an interview to a reporter from a tabloid, cuz only they are likely to print such a story. They've tried meditations, occult. Narrator wants to try hallucinogenics. Interested in the work of a Dr. Martin Rhadamanthus, and a Dr. Phineas Whitmore. Decides to dose himself. He experiences bizarre visual and auditory hallucinations, and encounters a pair or insect-like entities. He has a strange sense of something having been done to him physically. When he visits a doctor not long after, he's surprised to learn that his blood type has somehow changed from O to A.
His researches lead him to Rhadamanthus, whose own researches have led him to a 17th century work on "organic transposition", which describes the same kind of hallucinations the narrator experienced uder the influence. There is mention of another realm called "Yaddith".
He persuades the group to take mescaline with him. When he comes out of it, he finds his buddies have been dismembered and sewn together into a human lattice structure. He hacks it to pieces with an axe, then flees … knowing that the Yaddithians are still watching him...
Despite my resistance to Price continually publishing his own stories in his anthologies, I won't deny he's a capable writer. Here he seems to be channeling Ligotti - which I'm sure a lot of contemporary HPL fans like. Me, not so much. It's an interesting tale but nothing special.
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