Show Notes
This story was later republished in the anthology LIGHTHOUSE HORRORS in 1993, edited by Charles Waugh, in which it was noted that Waugh found the original ending unsatisfying and felt it was originally bowdlerized by the editors of “Ghost Stories Magazine,” and so [quote] ”In this anthology, therefore, we have restored what we believe to have been the author’s original ending.” Well, we at PSEUDOPOD just can’t leave well enough alone and with extra special thanks to the tireless efforts of EA staffer Joshua Tuttle, we were able to obtain a scan of the original for a comparison. Oddly, what we’ve presented here is essentially a third edit (composed by co-editor Shawn Garrett) excising much if not all of the Waugh additions and fixing the small language changes back to their original form, while also stripping out the frame story that encased the original. We hope you enjoyed this previously overlooked tale of fishmen and lighthouse keepers.
On The Isle of Blue Men
by Robert William Sneddon
Sometimes I sit for hours weighing myself in the balance of reason. Have I dreamed all this? Am I what I am, a castaway? Have I always been the creature, scarce human, whom the fishermen regard with pity and compassion, thinking me mad? Or have I really been John Scott of New York, the painter of pictures which hang in the Metropolitan Museum of New York, the Corcoran Art Gallery of Washington, the Philadelphia Art Gallery, the Luxemburg of Paris? Surely knowing these names indicate my knowledge of art, yet were canvas and palette set before me I would hesitate to touch them. I shall never paint again.
I shrink from the task I have set myself. Can I bear to re-live those days of horror? And yet there is some power stronger than my puny will that prompts me to write, to assure myself I am still capable of sane and ordered thought I have begged pen, ink, and paper from the schoolmaster. He gave them to me as though to a child, and I felt his little eyes follow me with a strange surmise.
And when I have written, what then? What shall I have proved? I do not know— (Continue Reading…)