i will confess even i , who thought daily of running away from the house on harrington lane as fast as his thirteen-year-old legs could carry him , who more than once wished he could be anywhere in the world other than at the side of a monstrumologist before the necropsy table , who nearly every night prayed to the same holy being-about whose efficacy and existence the unholy kearns had scoffed-that he might be delivered , somehow , some way , into a life more like the one that had been snatched from him nearly three years before , even i felt the pull of the box , felt the by now familiar morbid regard for all loathsome things ... the citizens of our nightmares ... the denizens of our darkest dreams .