Who Is Brown Jenkin?

Brown Jenkin is a rat-sized creature with a small, bearded, human face and clutching human hands where a rat's forepaws would be. The dossier files it as a familiar and hybrid daemon of regional threat, bound to the witch Keziah Mason and attached to a garret room in the Witch House at Arkham, Massachusetts. It speaks in a small human voice, and the account records that it moves through walls and across centuries with equal ease.

What the record gives

The chronicle is The Dreams in the Witch House. The witness is a Miskatonic University student, Walter Gilman, who takes the garret room that Keziah Mason is said to have used. The room has a history. Keziah Mason was held in the gaol at Salem in 1692 on a charge of witchcraft and escaped it, by a method the Archive's dossier describes as geometry and not magic in the traditional sense: she exploited angles in the walls of her cell that did not obey ordinary space. She named Brown Jenkin, among others, in her testimony.

What it does

It acts as her messenger and does the least pleasant parts of her errands. Gilman meets it in his dreams, as he meets her, and then in the room. At the end Gilman is found dead in the room, and the account ties his death to the creature. The Archive's dossier records Keziah as active, in the sense that she goes on working from the other side of the wall and uses the old garret as a recruiting ground for new servants.

On the screen

The account was filmed in 2022 as Dreams in the Witch House. The production keeps Gilman, Keziah, Brown Jenkin and the house and builds a plot of its own around them, including a twin sister abducted years before. None of that is in the chronicle, and the Archive's stamp for it is UNACCOUNTED.