"The Festival"

 

by H.P. Lovecraft

originally published Weird Tales, January 1925

For Xmas, instead of watching It's A Wonderful Life for the 1,000th time being as it wasn't invented in 1925, Our Narrator books out to Kingspor, MA, where his scattered familial remains, by tradition, gather once a century for some kind of festival "that the memory of primal secrets might not be forgotten."

The town seems like a relic of another time, and more than a bit surreal.  And all but deserted.  He finds his relatives' house - and they're even weirder than you might expect.  They sit him down and provide a copy of the Necronomicon for light reading.

At 11, he's led outside where cloaked and cowled folks pour into the streets.  He follows the crowd to a church on a hill in the center of the town.  From there its into a crypt, and from there into a tunnel below, eventually leading to an underground chamber lit by glowing fungus and containing an underground river.  Strange flute music fills the air.  A bunch of icky flying beasties arrive and people mount up.  O.N. is shown proof that he belongs there, but, freaking out, he jumps into the river.

He turns up in Kingsport Harbor and is taken to the hospital.  While recovering, he finds an unsettling passage in the Necronomicon suggesting his experience was no dream.

This is minor stuff but it gets by by being long on atmosphere and dreamy feel.  Some of Lovecraft's weaknesses still show (re: his description of the flying things by comparing them to practically everything under the sun), but it works more often than not, and the last line is chilling.