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In The Hound hat for the summer of the Baskervilles , a romantic meeting between Sir Henry Baskerville and Miss Stapleton takes place despite Holmes s strict orders that Sir Henry never leave Watson s sight because of the curse of the  fiend dog. Sir Henry insists he must go alone, saying to Watson, in dialogue that was invented for the TV version (with Jeremy Brett as Holmes and Edward Hardwicke as Watson):  You d make a very civil gooseberry, but no I m afraid I have to go alone. Since the scene is recounted in a letter from Watson to Holmes in the original story, this word choice represents a charming piece of faux Victorian English.

Well, he has the name of being a dangerous man. He is about the most daredevil rider in England second in the Grand National a few years back. He is one men's hat for summer of those men who have overshot their true generation. He should have been a buck in the days of the Regency a boxer, an athlete, a plunger on the turf, a lover of fair ladies, and, by all account, so far down Queer Street that he may never find mens hat types his way back again.

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ek, the lamella  indivisible, indestructible, and immortal, an  entity of pure surface& first heard as a shrilling sound, and then [popping] up as a monstrously distorted body  is undead , possessed not of a  sublime spiritual immortality but rather the  obscene immortality of a zombie. It is a creature which cannot die; it recomposes itself in the face of violence and clumsily staggers on. It is unstoppable, a representation of  an uncanny excess of life ; it is the urge to persist beyond the natural cycle of generation ushanka hat and corruption.

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i~
ek memorably compares the lamella to the face hugger in Ridley Scott s Alien , an indestructible creature which multiplies when it is cut into pieces, and whose extra flat body can suddenly fly up and envelop your face:  In it, he writes,  pure evil animality overlaps with machinic blind insistence. Here we might return to that classic ghost story I mentioned at the beginning of the essay:  Oh, Whistle and I ll Come to You, My Lad by M. R. James, a tale with a rather similar uncanny presence.

Is it their father who has come for them? Or is it, as the babysitter suggests, the Specialist? And is this what we find terrifying in the story: the disappearance of the father, his replacement by a simulacrum, almost identical, someone who pretends to love them but who is fundamentally a stranger? Quis est? Perhaps this is part of the terror, but it isn t everything. What leaves us most disturbed, I think, is not their father s transformation into the Specialist but rather their own transformation, facilitated by their interaction with the Specialist s hat  the lamella.

It is represented in white hat a range of literary guises from Poe s maelstrom to the horror at the end of Joseph Conrad s Heart of Darkness to Lovecraft s elder god Cthulhu, a creature who presents such a dangerous vision of the universe that he cannot be seen without causing madness: The Specialist s Hat terrifies us in much the same way that Lovecraft terrifies us: it hints at an encounter with something which is beyond the realm of our experience  death  and yet which is simultaneously so deeply embedded in our own nature that it is always already there .