H.P. Lovecraft apparently visited Charleston in 1930 but then never actually got to use his hand-drawn map, because he died in 1937 without visiting Charleston again. With his vivid imagination, I imagined him walking around those dark, narrow, still streets, imagining what Edgar Allen Poe would imagine. Near Queen & Archdale streets, a woman emerged from a house with her dog on a leash. Was that really a dog or perhaps an alien creature she was secretly keeping captive in her house? Near Tradd & Church, a brick house sat, particularly far-set from the street at the end of an overgrown walkway behind a locked, high iron gate. A boy with a sheltered and stern upbringing, who lived in the almost hidden house, could his body harbor an alien fungus, that was quietly adapting to its human host, unruffled by infrequent and fleeting trips into sunlight by this boy? Hmm.
