51. The Horror in the Museum

52. The Nameless City

53. The Night Ocean

54. Old Bugs

55. The Very Old Folk

56. The Other Gods

57. The Outsider

58. Pickman's Model

59. The Picture in the House

60. The Poe-et's Nightmare

The Horror in the Museum

by H. P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald

Written October 1932

Published July 1933 in Weird Tales, 22, No. 1, 49-68.

IT WAS languid curiousity which first brought Stephen Jones to Rogers'

Museum. Someone had told him about the queer underground place in

Southwark Street across the river, where waxen things so much more

horrible than the worst effigies at Madame Tussaud's were shown, and he

had strolled in one April day to see how disappointing he would find it.

Oddly, he was not disappointed. There was something different and

distinctive here, after all. Of course, the usual gory commonplaces were

present--Landru, Doctor Crippen, Madame Demers, Rizzio, Lady Jane Grey,

endless maimed victims of war and revolution, and monsters like Gilles de

Rais and Marquis de Sade--but there were other things which had made him

breathe faster and stay till the ringing of the closing bell. The man who

had fashioned this collection could be no ordinary mountebank. There was

imagination--even a kind of diseased genius--in some of this stuff.

Later he had learned about George Rogers. The man had been on the Tussaud

staff, but some trouble had developed which led to his discharge. There

were aspersions on his sanity and tales of his crazy forms of secret