THE READING RHEUM: "THE STATEMENT OF RANDOLPH CARTER" (1920)

 Unlike DAGON, STATEMENT is a story with a clear beginning, middle and end. Though the narrator Randolph Carter begins much like the unnamed DAGON protagonist, by relating a story that will end with a dire revelation, HPL doesn't execute Carter at story's end, and he went on to use the character in three later stories. 

In STATEMENT the calamity befalls Carter's boon friend Harley Warren, who is clearly the initiator of "terrible researches into the unknown." Warren drags Carter to a cemetery at night so that Carter can help Warren break into a sealed sepulchre. Warren tells Carter than his researches indicate that some strange entities may abide in the tomb, but he doesn't want Carter to go down into the sepulchre because Carter has "frail nerves." But while he descends, Warren calls up "color commentary" on what he's experiencing to Carter. Warren doesn't describe what he sees, but he suddenly yells for Carter to replace the sepulchre slab and run away. Carter doesn't leave, but he also can't force himself down into the tomb, and then he passes out when a strange voice from the tomb announces that "Warren is dead." Carter apparently passes out and is later found by police, who are probably the persons listening to Carter at the story's outset. Carter's last sight is of "amorphous, necrophagous shadows" dancing beneath "an accursed waning moon," but whether or not these are literal monsters or not is never clear.