I went to visit my uncle late in the evening, as it was my custom to do once every fortnight. As I knocked on the door to his flat, the landlady approached me and expressed no little concern that he had not come out in some 48 hours, but as he enjoyed his privacy, and was annoyed at any breach in it, she had not deigned to enter herself. Upon hearing this, I hurriedly took a spare key from her and opened the door. The room was a mess, completely torn up, and the bedroom door was locked. On the floor I noticed a crumpled piece of paper with a short narrative written on it in a most unsteady hand:

"It was yesterday evening when I first lifted my hand to my face and felt the sore. It didn't surprise me, though I don't know why. It was as if I knew it would be there all along, but how I do not know. I remember I was reading something at the time, and I put it down and got up to look in the mirror. What I saw horrified and repulsed me, but the horror was an old one, a familiar one. The sore did not hurt at all, except to the touch. After staring at it for some moments I retired to bed, resolved in my mind that it would be gone in the morning.

"I awoke in the middle of the night, with my whole head aching. I turned on a light and looked again in the mirror. The sore had doubled in size and had developed a sort of cracked crust upon it. I lifted a hand to feel it, and the pain that resulted was agonizing. It must have knocked me unconscious, for I remember nothing from then until I awoke the next morning on the floor, my head throbbing violently. All around the furniture was broken up and generally ransacked. At first I was utterly at a loss, but then I remembered the sore, and the pain flooded over me like a tide. I got up groggily and was shocked at the monster staring back at me in the mirror. The sore had engulfed my whole face, and out of the crust's many fissures erupted rivulets of blood and puss. Looking at my hands, I noticed that my fingernails were caked with blood, and I realized that I had been clawing my face in the night. What else I had done that night I do not know, though it must have been I that to
re up my own flat.

"All day long it has been growing upon my body, and now... now I feel it in my mind. It interrupts my thoughts and runs them together. It is a fog, a twilight of confusion, and I feel I can bear it no longer. Even-" [here the manuscript becomes unintelligible]

Upon reading this I became alarmed and forced open the bedroom door. Lying on the floor in a most awkward position was my uncle, quite dead. He had been stabbed with a long letter opener by his own hand, but this is not what made me start, but his face, a face twisted into an expression of pure agony, a face unmarked, save for a few fingernail scratches.

written from Alberta, Canada