The Dreams in the Witch House recap

Miskatonic University student Walter Gilman rents an attic in Arkham's Witch House, hoping its abnormal geometry will support his theories about dimensions. Fever dreams carry him through angular voids while the long-vanished witch Keziah Mason and her ratlike familiar Brown Jenkin draw closer. Physical marks and an object brought back from another world convince him that the journeys are not merely dreams. Keziah and a figure called the Black Man force him toward a supernatural pact and prepare him for a May Eve child sacrifice. Protected by a crucifix, Gilman fights back and kills Keziah, but Brown Jenkin murders the child and escapes. Days later the familiar kills Gilman by tearing through his body. When the decaying house is finally demolished, workers find Keziah's remains, evidence of numerous child sacrifices, occult objects, and Brown Jenkin's inhuman skeleton, confirming the physical core of the horrors Gilman experienced.

Walter Gilman, a gifted Miskatonic University student, studies mathematics and physics alongside Arkham's occult traditions. He deliberately rents the oddly angled attic room once occupied by Keziah Mason, an accused witch who vanished from jail in 1692 after drawing inexplicable geometrical figures. The house is also linked to Brown Jenkin, her ratlike familiar. Gilman believes that the right mathematical understanding could permit travel beyond the familiar three dimensions. Living in the room coincides with fever, sleepwalking, and dreams of moving through a limitless region defined by alien shapes and colors. His roommate Frank Elwood and his professor Upham become concerned, while sounds inside the walls echo the local stories. Gilman begins to perceive Keziah and Brown Jenkin within the dreams, making it harder to dismiss them as products of illness.

Walter Gilman rents the former room of the vanished witch Keziah Mason because its abnormal geometry seems connected to his theories of higher dimensions. Feverish dreams carry him through angular spaces, and the figures of Keziah and her ratlike familiar Brown Jenkin become increasingly distinct. The experiences begin leaving physical traces, including wounds and unexplained mud. In one journey he reaches an alien landscape inhabited by strange life and later finds that he has brought a small manufactured object back to Arkham. Professor Upham cannot identify its material, strengthening Gilman's fear that his mathematical speculations have become actual travel. Elwood watches his health deteriorate, while Joe Mazurewicz, another resident, interprets the nighttime sounds and Gilman's condition through the house's religious and supernatural lore.

Gilman's experiments and fever dreams in the Witch House turn into physical journeys, one of which leaves him with an object from an alien world. Keziah Mason and Brown Jenkin take him through dimensional passages to the presence of a commanding figure called the Black Man, who tries to bind him by having him sign a book. As May Eve approaches, Mazurewicz gives Gilman a crucifix and warns him of imminent danger. Gilman is drawn into a ritual involving a kidnapped child. He finally resists: the crucifix disrupts Keziah, and he strangles the witch with its chain. Brown Jenkin nevertheless attacks the child and completes the killing before escaping. Gilman returns from the ordeal alive, but the disappearance and death associated with the ritual leave him unable to treat what happened as a dream.

Walter Gilman's attempt to use the Witch House's angles for dimensional research entangles him with Keziah Mason, Brown Jenkin, and the Black Man. Though Gilman kills Keziah during a May Eve rite, Brown Jenkin murders the abducted child and escapes. Soon afterward, the familiar enters Gilman's room and kills him by burrowing through his body while Elwood and other tenants hear the attack. The house declines, is abandoned, and is eventually opened during demolition after storm damage. Workers find Keziah's skeleton, the bones of many children, ritual objects, and the remains of a rat-sized being with partly human anatomy. Brown Jenkin's skeleton matches the old descriptions closely enough to validate the house's legends and the immediate cause of Gilman's death. The discoveries do not explain the other worlds or geometrical passages, but they show that his experiences were not only fever dreams.

During the May Eve rite, Gilman resists Keziah and strangles her with the chain of Mazurewicz's crucifix, but Brown Jenkin kills the kidnapped child before escaping. Gilman returns to his room physically shaken and unable to prove the full experience. Soon afterward, Brown Jenkin attacks him in bed and burrows through his body, killing him while Elwood and the other residents hear the struggle. The Witch House is eventually abandoned and later damaged by a storm. When it is demolished, workers discover Keziah's bones, the remains of many sacrificed children, occult objects, and the skeleton of a creature whose anatomy matches the legends of Brown Jenkin. Those findings confirm that material evidence lay behind at least part of Gilman's supposedly fevered experiences, even though the dimensional reaches he witnessed remain beyond ordinary explanation.