The

                             Shunned House



                           By H. P. LOVECRAFT





 _A posthumous story of immense power, written by a master of weird

   fiction--a tale of a revolting horror in the cellar of an old

                       house in New England_





    Howard Phillips Lovecraft died last March, at the height of his

    career. Though only forty-six years of age, he had built up an

    international reputation by the artistry and impeccable literary

    craftsmanship of his weird tales; and he was regarded on both sides

    of the Atlantic as probably the greatest contemporary master of

    weird fiction. His ability to create and sustain a mood of brooding

    dread and unnamable horror is nowhere better shown than in the

    posthumous tale presented here: "The Shunned House."





From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent. Sometimes it

enters directly into the composition of the events, while sometimes it

relates only to their fortuitous position among persons and places. The

latter sort is splendidly exemplified by a case in the ancient city of

Providence, where in the late forties Edgar Allan Poe used to sojourn

often during his unsuccessful wooing of the gifted poetess, Mrs.

Whitman. Poe generally stopped at the Mansion House in Benefit

Street--the renamed Golden Ball Inn whose roof has sheltered Washington,

Jefferson, and Lafayette--and his favorite walk led northward along the

same street to Mrs. Whitman's home and the neighboring hillside

churchyard of St. John's, whose hidden expanse of Eighteenth Century

gravestones had for him a peculiar fascination.



Now the irony is this. In this walk, so many times repeated, the world's

greatest master of the terrible and the bizarre was obliged to pass a

particular house on the eastern side of the street; a dingy, antiquated

structure perched on the abruptly rising side hill, with a great unkempt

yard dating from a time when the region was partly open country. It does

not appear that he ever wrote or spoke of it, nor is there any evidence

that he even noticed it. And yet that house, to the two persons in

possession of certain information, equals or outranks in horror the

wildest fantasy of the genius who so often passed it unknowingly, and

stands starkly leering as a symbol of all that is unutterably hideous.



The house was--and for that matter still is--of a kind to attract the

attention of the curious. Originally a farm or semi-farm building, it

followed the average New England colonial lines of the middle Eighteenth

Century--the prosperous peaked-roof sort, with two stories and

dormerless attic, and with the Georgian doorway and interior panelling

dictated by the progress of taste at that time. It faced south, with one

gable end buried to the lower windows in the eastward rising hill, and

the other exposed to the foundations toward the street. Its

construction, over a century and a half ago, had followed the grading

and straightening of the road in that especial vicinity; for Benefit

Street--at first called Back Street--was laid out as a lane winding

amongst the graveyards of the first settlers, and straightened only when

the removal of the bodies to the North Burial Ground made it decently

possible to cut through the old family plots.



At the start, the western wall had lain some twenty feet up a

precipitous lawn from the roadway; but a widening of the street at about

the time of the Revolution sheared off most of the intervening space,

exposing the foundations so that a brick basement wall had to be made,

giving the deep cellar a street frontage with door and one window above

ground, close to the new line of public travel. When the sidewalk was

laid out a century ago the last of the intervening space was removed;

and Poe in his walks must have seen only a sheer ascent of dull gray

brick flush with the sidewalk and surmounted at a height of ten feet by

the antique shingled bulk of the house proper.



[Illustration: "That awful door in Benefit Street which I had left

ajar."]



The farm-like ground extended back very deeply up the hill, almost to

Wheaton Street. The space south of the house, abutting on Benefit

Street, was of course greatly above the existing sidewalk level, forming

a terrace bounded by a high bank wall of damp, mossy stone pierced by a

steep flight of narrow steps which led inward between canyon-like

surfaces to the upper region of mangy lawn, rheumy brick walks, and

neglected gardens whose dismantled cement urns, rusted kettles fallen

from tripods of knotty sticks, and similar paraphernalia set off the

weather-beaten front door with its broken fanlight, rotting Ionic

pilasters, and wormy triangular pediment.



       *       *       *       *       *



What I heard in my youth about the shunned house was merely that people

died there in alarmingly great numbers. That, I was told, was why the

original owners had moved out some twenty years after building the

place. It was plainly unhealthy, perhaps because of the dampness and

fungous growths in the cellar, the general sickish smell, the drafts of

the hallways, or the quality of the well and pump water. These things

were bad enough, and these were all that gained belief among the persons

whom I knew. Only the notebooks of my antiquarian uncle, Doctor Elihu

Whipple, revealed to me at length the darker, vaguer surmises which

formed an undercurrent of folklore among old-time servants and humble

folk; surmises which never travelled far, and which were largely

forgotten when Providence grew to be a metropolis with a shifting modern

population.



The general fact is, that the house was never regarded by the solid part

of the community as in any real sense "haunted." There were no

widespread tales of rattling chains, cold currents of air, extinguished

lights, or faces at the window. Extremists sometimes said the house was

"unlucky," but that is as far as even they went. What was really beyond

dispute is that a frightful proportion of persons died there; or more

accurately, _had_ died there, since after some peculiar happenings over

sixty years ago the building had become deserted through the sheer

impossibility of renting it. These persons were not all cut off suddenly

by any one cause; rather did it seem that their vitality was insidiously

sapped, so that each one died the sooner from whatever tendency to

weakness he may have naturally had. And those who did not die displayed

in varying degree a type of anemia or consumption, and sometimes a

decline of the mental faculties, which spoke ill for the salubriousness

of the building. Neighboring houses, it must be added, seemed entirely

free from the noxious quality.



This much I knew before my insistent questioning led my uncle to show me

the notes which finally embarked us both on our hideous investigation.

In my childhood the shunned house was vacant, with barren, gnarled and

terrible old trees, long, queerly pale grass and nightmarishly misshapen

weeds in the high terraced yard where birds never lingered. We boys used

to overrun the place, and I can still recall my youthful terror not only

at the morbid strangeness of this sinister vegetation, but at the

eldritch atmosphere and odor of the dilapidated house, whose unlocked

front door was often entered in quest of shudders. The small-paned

windows were largely broken, and a nameless air of desolation hung round

the precarious panelling, shaky interior shutters, peeling wall-paper,

falling plaster, rickety staircases, and such fragments of battered

furniture as still remained. The dust and cobwebs added their touch of

the fearful; and brave indeed was the boy who would voluntarily ascend

the ladder to the attic, a vast raftered length lighted only by small

blinking windows in the gable ends, and filled with a massed wreckage

of chests, chairs, and spinning-wheels which infinite years of deposit

had shrouded and festooned into monstrous and hellish shapes.



But after all, the attic was not the most terrible part of the house. It

was the dank, humid cellar which somehow exerted the strongest repulsion

on us, even though it was wholly above ground on the street side, with

only a thin door and window-pierced brick wall to separate it from the

busy sidewalk. We scarcely knew whether to haunt it in spectral

fascination, or to shun it for the sake of our souls and our sanity. For

one thing, the bad odor of the house was strongest there; and for

another thing, we did not like the white fungous growths which

occasionally sprang up in rainy summer weather from the hard earth

floor. Those fungi, grotesquely like the vegetation in the yard outside,

were truly horrible in their outlines; detestable parodies of toadstools

and Indian-pipes, whose like we had never seen in any other situation.

They rotted quickly, and at one stage became slightly phosphorescent; so

that nocturnal passers-by sometimes spoke of witch-fires glowing behind

the broken panes of the fetor-spreading windows.



We never--even in our wildest Halloween moods--visited this cellar

by night, but in some of our daytime visits could detect the

phosphorescence, especially when the day was dark and wet. There was

also a subtler thing we often thought we detected--a very strange thing

which was, however, merely suggestive at most. I refer to a sort of

cloudy whitish pattern on the dirt floor--a vague, shifting deposit of

mold or niter which we sometimes thought we could trace amidst the

sparse fungous growths near the huge fireplace of the basement kitchen.

Once in a while it struck us that this patch bore an uncanny resemblance

to a doubled-up human figure, though generally no such kinship existed,

and often there was no whitish deposit whatever.



On a certain rainy afternoon when this illusion seemed phenomenally

strong, and when, in addition, I had fancied I glimpsed a kind of thin,

yellowish, shimmering exhalation rising from the nitrous pattern toward

the yawning fireplace, I spoke to my uncle about the matter. He smiled

at this odd conceit, but it seemed that his smile was tinged with

reminiscence. Later I heard that a similar notion entered into some of

the wild ancient tales of the common folk--a notion likewise alluding to

ghoulish, wolfish shapes taken by smoke from the great chimney, and

queer contours assumed by certain of the sinuous tree-roots that thrust

their way into the cellar through the loose foundation-stones.





2



Not till my adult years did my uncle set before me the notes and data

which he had collected concerning the shunned house. Doctor Whipple was

a sane, conservative physician of the old school, and for all his

interest in the place was not eager to encourage young thoughts toward

the abnormal. His own view, postulating simply a building and location

of markedly unsanitary qualities, had nothing to do with abnormality;

but he realized that the very picturesqueness which aroused his own

interest would in a boy's fanciful mind take on all manner of gruesome

imaginative associations.



The doctor was a bachelor; a white-haired, clean-shaven, old-fashioned

gentleman, and a local historian of note, who had often broken a lance

with such controversial guardians of tradition as Sidney S. Rider and

Thomas W. Bicknell. He lived with one man-servant in a Georgian

homestead with knocker and iron-railed steps, balanced eerily on the

steep ascent of North Court Street beside the ancient brick court and

colony house where his grandfather--a cousin of that celebrated

privateersman, Captain Whipple, who burnt His Majesty's armed schooner

_Gaspee_ in 1772--had voted in the legislature on May 4, 1776, for the

independence of the Rhode Island Colony. Around him in the damp,

low-ceiled library with the musty white panelling, heavy carved

overmantel and small-paned, vine-shaded windows, were the relics and

records of his ancient family, among which were many dubious allusions

to the shunned house in Benefit Street. That pest spot lies not far

distant--for Benefit runs ledgewise just above the court house along the

precipitous hill up which the first settlement climbed.



When, in the end, my insistent pestering and maturing years evoked from

my uncle the hoarded lore I sought, there lay before me a strange enough

chronicle. Long-winded, statistical, and drearily genealogical as some

of the matter was, there ran through it a continuous thread of brooding,

tenacious horror and preternatural malevolence which impressed me even

more than it had impressed the good doctor. Separate events fitted

together uncannily, and seemingly irrelevant details held mines of

hideous possibilities. A new and burning curiosity grew in me, compared

to which my boyish curiosity was feeble and inchoate.



The first revelation led to an exhaustive research, and finally to that

shuddering quest which proved so disastrous to myself and mine. For at

the last my uncle insisted on joining the search I had commenced, and

after a certain night in that house he did not come away with me. I am

lonely without that gentle soul whose long years were filled only with

honor, virtue, good taste, benevolence, and learning. I have reared a

marble urn to his memory in St. John's churchyard--the place that Poe

loved--the hidden grove of giant willows on the hill, where tombs and

headstones huddle quietly between the hoary bulk of the church and the

houses and bank walls of Benefit Street.



The history of the house, opening amidst a maze of dates, revealed no

trace of the sinister either about its construction or about the

prosperous and honorable family who built it. Yet from the first a taint

of calamity, soon increased to boding significance, was apparent. My

uncle's carefully compiled record began with the building of the

structure in 1763, and followed the theme with an unusual amount of

detail. The shunned house, it seems, was first inhabited by William

Harris and his wife Rhoby Dexter, with their children, Elkanah, born in

1755, Abigail, born in 1757, William, Jr., born in 1759, and Ruth, born

in 1761. Harris was a substantial merchant and seaman in the West India

trade, connected with the firm of Obadiah Brown and his nephews. After

Brown's death in 1761, the new firm of Nicholas Brown & Company made him

master of the brig _Prudence_, Providence-built, of 120 tons, thus

enabling him to erect the new homestead he had desired ever since his

marriage.



The site he had chosen--a recently straightened part of the new and

fashionable Back Street, which ran along the side of the hill above

crowded Cheapside--was all that could be wished, and the building did

justice to the location. It was the best that moderate means could

afford, and Harris hastened to move in before the birth of a fifth child

which the family expected. That child, a boy, came in December; but was

still-born. Nor was any child to be born alive in that house for a

century and a half.



The next April, sickness occurred among the children, and Abigail and

Ruth died before the month was over. Doctor Job Ives diagnosed the

trouble as some infantile fever, though others declared it was more of a

mere wasting-away or decline. It seemed, in any event, to be contagious;

for Hannah Bowen, one of the two servants, died of it in the following

June. Eli Lideason, the other servant, constantly complained of

weakness; and would have returned to his father's farm in Rehoboth but

for a sudden attachment for Mehitabel Pierce, who was hired to succeed

Hannah. He died the next year--a sad year indeed, since it marked the

death of William Harris himself, enfeebled as he was by the climate of

Martinique, where his occupation had kept him for considerable periods

during the preceding decade.



The widowed Rhoby Harris never recovered from the shock of her husband's

death, and the passing of her first-born Elkanah two years later was the

final blow to her reason. In 1768 she fell victim to a mild form of

insanity, and was thereafter confined to the upper part of the house;

her elder maiden sister, Mercy Dexter, having moved in to take charge of

the family. Mercy was a plain, raw-boned woman of great strength; but

her health visibly declined from the time of her advent. She was greatly

devoted to her unfortunate sister, and had an especial affection for her

only surviving nephew William, who from a sturdy infant had become a

sickly, spindling lad. In this year the servant Mehitabel died, and the

other servant, Preserved Smith, left without coherent explanation--or at

least, with only some wild tales and a complaint that he disliked the

smell of the place. For a time Mercy could secure no more help, since

the seven deaths and case of madness, all occurring within five years'

space, had begun to set in motion the body of fireside rumor which later

became so bizarre. Ultimately, however, she obtained new servants from

out of town; Ann White, a morose woman from that part of North Kingstown

now set off as the township of Exeter, and a capable Boston man named

Zenas Low.



       *       *       *       *       *



It was Ann White who first gave definite shape to the sinister idle

talk. Mercy should have known better than to hire anyone from the

Nooseneck Hill country, for that remote bit of backwoods was then, as

now, a seat of the most uncomfortable superstitions. As lately as 1892

an Exeter community exhumed a dead body and ceremoniously burnt its

heart in order to prevent certain alleged visitations injurious to the

public health and peace, and one may imagine the point of view of the

same section in 1768. Ann's tongue was perniciously active, and within a

few months Mercy discharged her, filling her place with a faithful and

amiable Amazon from Newport, Maria Robbins.



Meanwhile poor Rhoby Harris, in her madness, gave voice to dreams and

imaginings of the most hideous sort. At times her screams became

insupportable, and for long periods she would utter shrieking horrors

which necessitated her son's temporary residence with his cousin, Peleg

Harris, in Presbyterian Lane near the new college building. The boy

would seem to improve after these visits, and had Mercy been as wise as

she was well-meaning, she would have let him live permanently with

Peleg. Just what Mrs. Harris cried out in her fits of violence,

tradition hesitates to say; or rather, presents such extravagant

accounts that they nullify themselves through sheer absurdity. Certainly

it sounds absurd to hear that a woman educated only in the rudiments of

French often shouted for hours in a coarse and idiomatic form of that

language, or that the same person, alone and guarded, complained wildly

of a staring thing which bit and chewed at her. In 1772 the servant

Zenas died, and when Mrs. Harris heard of it she laughed with a shocking

delight utterly foreign to her. The next year she herself died, and was

laid to rest in the North Burial Ground beside her husband.



Upon the outbreak of trouble with Great Britain in 1775, William Harris,

despite his scant sixteen years and feeble constitution, managed to

enlist in the Army of Observation under General Greene; and from that

time on enjoyed a steady rise in health and prestige. In 1780, as a

captain in the Rhode Island forces in New Jersey under Colonel Angell,

he met and married Phebe Hetfield of Elizabethtown, whom he brought to

Providence upon his honorable discharge in the following year.



The young soldier's return was not a thing of unmitigated happiness. The

house, it is true, was still in good condition; and the street had been

widened and changed in name from Back Street to Benefit Street. But

Mercy Dexter's once robust frame had undergone a sad and curious decay,

so that she was now a stooped and pathetic figure with hollow voice and

disconcerting pallor--qualities shared to a singular degree by the one

remaining servant Maria. In the autumn of 1782 Phebe Harris gave birth

to a still-born daughter, and on the fifteenth of the next May Mercy

Dexter took leave of a useful, austere, and virtuous life.



William Harris, at last thoroughly convinced of the radically

unhealthful nature of his abode, now took steps toward quitting it and

closing it for ever. Securing temporary quarters for himself and his

wife at the newly opened Golden Ball Inn, he arranged for the building

of a new and finer house in Westminster Street, in the growing part of

the town across the Great Bridge. There, in 1785, his son Dutee was

born; and there the family dwelt till the encroachments of commerce

drove them back across the river and over the hill to Angell Street, in

the newer East Side residence district, where the late Archer Harris

built his sumptuous but hideous French-roofed mansion in 1876. William

and Phebe both succumbed to the yellow fever epidemic of 1797, but Dutee

was brought up by his cousin Rathbone Harris, Peleg's son.



Rathbone was a practical man, and rented the Benefit Street house

despite William's wish to keep it vacant. He considered it an obligation

to his ward to make the most of all the boy's property, nor did he

concern himself with the deaths and illnesses which caused so many

changes of tenants, or the steadily growing aversion with which the

house was generally regarded. It is likely that he felt only vexation

when, in 1804, the town council ordered him to fumigate the place with

sulfur, tar, and gum camphor on account of the much-discussed deaths of

four persons, presumably caused by the then diminishing fever epidemic.

They said the place had a febrile smell.



Dutee himself thought little of the house, for he grew up to be a

privateersman, and served with distinction on the _Vigilant_ under

Captain Cahoone in the War of 1812. He returned unharmed, married in

1814, and became a father on that memorable night of September 23, 1815,

when a great gale drove the waters of the bay over half the town, and

floated a tall sloop well up Westminster Street so that its masts almost

tapped the Harris windows in symbolic affirmation that the new boy,

Welcome, was a seaman's son.



Welcome did not survive his father, but lived to perish gloriously at

Fredericksburg in 1862. Neither he nor his son Archer knew of the

shunned house as other than a nuisance almost impossible to

rent--perhaps on account of the mustiness and sickly odor of unkempt old

age. Indeed, it never was rented after a series of deaths culminating in

1861, which the excitement of the war tended to throw into obscurity.

Carrington Harris, last of the male line, knew it only as a deserted and

somewhat picturesque center of legend until I told him my experience. He

had meant to tear it down and build an apartment house on the site, but

after my account decided to let it stand, install plumbing, and rent it.

Nor has he yet had any difficulty in obtaining tenants. The horror has

gone.





3



It may well be imagined how powerfully I was affected by the annals of

the Harrises. In this continuous record there seemed to me to brood a

persistent evil beyond anything in nature as I had known it; an evil

clearly connected with the house and not with the family. This

impression was confirmed by my uncle's less systematic array of

miscellaneous data--legends transcribed from servant gossip, cuttings

from the papers, copies of death certificates by fellow-physicians, and

the like. All of this material I cannot hope to give, for my uncle was a

tireless antiquarian and very deeply interested in the shunned house;

but I may refer to several dominant points which earn notice by their

recurrence through many reports from diverse sources. For example, the

servant gossip was practically unanimous in attributing to the fungous

and malodorous _cellar_ of the house a vast supremacy in evil influence.

There had been servants--Ann White especially--who would not use the

cellar kitchen, and at least three well-defined legends bore upon the

queer quasi-human or diabolic outlines assumed by tree-roots and patches

of mold in that region. These latter narratives interested me

profoundly, on account of what I had seen in my boyhood, but I felt that

most of the significance had in each case been largely obscured by

additions from the common stock of local ghost lore.



Ann White, with her Exeter superstition, had promulgated the most

extravagant and at the same time most consistent tale; alleging that

there must lie buried beneath the house one of those vampires--the dead

who retain their bodily form and live on the blood or breath of the

living--whose hideous legions send their preying shapes or spirits

abroad by night. To destroy a vampire one must, the grandmothers say,

exhume it and burn its heart, or at least drive a stake through that

organ; and Ann's dogged insistence on a search under the cellar had been

prominent in bringing about her discharge.



Her tales, however, commanded a wide audience, and were the more readily

accepted because the house indeed stood on land once used for burial

purposes. To me their interest depended less on this circumstance than

on the peculiarly appropriate way in which they dovetailed with certain

other things--the complaint of the departing servant Preserved Smith,

who had preceded Ann and never heard of her, that something "sucked his

breath" at night; the death-certificates of the fever victims of 1804,

issued by Doctor Chad Hopkins, and showing the four deceased persons all

unaccountably lacking in blood; and the obscure passages of poor Rhoby

Harris's ravings, where she complained of the sharp teeth of a

glassy-eyed, half-visible presence.



Free from unwarranted superstition though I am, these things produced in

me an odd sensation, which was intensified by a pair of widely separated

newspaper cuttings relating to deaths in the shunned house--one from the

_Providence Gazette and Country-Journal_ of April 12, 1815, and the

other from the _Daily Transcript and Chronicle_ of October 27,

1845--each of which detailed an appallingly grisly circumstance whose

duplication was remarkable. It seems that in both instances the dying

person, in 1815 a gentle old lady named Stafford and in 1845 a

schoolteacher of middle age named Eleazar Durfee, became transfigured in

a horrible way, glaring glassily and attempting to bite the throat of

the attending physician. Even more puzzling, though, was the final case

which put an end to the renting of the house--a series of anemia deaths

preceded by progressive madnesses wherein the patient would craftily

attempt the lives of his relatives by incisions in the neck or wrist.



This was in 1860 and 1861, when my uncle had just begun his medical

practise; and before leaving for the front he heard much of it from his

elder professional colleagues. The really inexplicable thing was the way

in which the victims--ignorant people, for the ill-smelling and widely

shunned house could now be rented to no others--would babble

maledictions in French, a language they could not possibly have studied

to any extent. It made one think of poor Rhoby Harris nearly a century

before, and so moved my uncle that he commenced collecting historical

data on the house after listening, some time subsequent to his return

from the war, to the first-hand account of Doctors Chase and Whitmarsh.

Indeed, I could see that my uncle had thought deeply on the subject, and

that he was glad of my own interest--an open-minded and sympathetic

interest which enabled him to discuss with me matters at which others

would merely have laughed. His fancy had not gone so far as mine, but he

felt that the place was rare in its imaginative potentialities, and

worthy of note as an inspiration in the field of the grotesque and

macabre.



For my part, I was disposed to take the whole subject with profound

seriousness, and began at once not only to review the evidence, but to

accumulate as much more as I could. I talked with the elderly Archer

Harris, then owner of the house, many times before his death in 1916;

and obtained from him and his still surviving maiden sister Alice an

authentic corroboration of all the family data my uncle had collected.

When, however, I asked them what connection with France or its language

the house could have, they confessed themselves as frankly baffled and

ignorant as I. Archer knew nothing, and all that Miss Harris could say

was that an old allusion her grandfather, Dutee Harris, had heard of

might have shed a little light. The old seaman, who had survived his son

Welcome's death in battle by two years, had not himself known the

legend, but recalled that his earliest nurse, the ancient Maria Robbins,

seemed darkly aware of something that might have lent a weird

significance to the French raving of Rhoby Harris, which she had so

often heard during the last days of that hapless woman. Maria had been

at the shunned house from 1769 till the removal of the family in 1783,

and had seen Mercy Dexter die. Once she hinted to the child Dutee of a

somewhat peculiar circumstance in Mercy's last moments, but he had soon

forgotten all about it save that it was something peculiar. The

granddaughter, moreover, recalled even this much with difficulty. She

and her brother were not so much interested in the house as was Archer's

son Carrington, the present owner, with whom I talked after my

experience.



       *       *       *       *       *



Having exhausted the Harris family of all the information it could

furnish, I turned my attention to early town records and deeds with a

zeal more penetrating than that which my uncle had occasionally shown in

the same work. What I wished was a comprehensive history of the site

from its very settlement in 1636--or even before, if any Narragansett

Indian legend could be unearthed to supply the data. I found, at the

start, that the land had been part of the long strip of home lot granted

originally to John Throckmorton; one of many similar strips beginning at

the Town Street beside the river and extending up over the hill to a

line roughly corresponding with the modern Hope Street. The Throckmorton

lot had later, of course, been much subdivided; and I became very

assiduous in tracing that section through which Back or Benefit Street

was later run. It had, as rumor indeed said, been the Throckmorton

graveyard; but as I examined the records more carefully, I found that

the graves had all been transferred at an early date to the North Burial

Ground on the Pawtucket West Road.



Then suddenly I came--by a rare piece of chance, since it was not in the

main body of records and might easily have been missed--upon something

which aroused my keenest eagerness, fitting in as it did with several of

the queerest phases of the affair. It was the record of a lease, in

1697, of a small tract of ground to an Etienne Roulet and wife. At last

the French element had appeared--that, and another deeper element of

horror which the name conjured up from the darkest recesses of my weird

and heterogeneous reading--and I feverishly studied the platting of the

locality as it had been before the cutting through and partial

straightening of Back Street between 1747 and 1758. I found what I had

half expected, that where the shunned house now stood the Roulets had

laid out their graveyard behind a one-story and attic cottage, and that

no record of any transfer of graves existed. The document, indeed, ended

in much confusion; and I was forced to ransack both the Rhode Island

Historical Society and Shepley Library before I could find a local door

which the name of Etienne Roulet would unlock. In the end I did find

something; something of such vague but monstrous import that I set about

at once to examine the cellar of the shunned house itself with a new and

excited minuteness.



The Roulets, it seemed, had come in 1696 from East Greenwich, down the

west shore of Narragansett Bay. They were Huguenots from Caude, and had

encountered much opposition before the Providence selectmen allowed them

to settle in the town. Unpopularity had dogged them in East Greenwich,

whither they had come in 1686, after the revocation of the Edict of

Nantes, and rumor said that the cause of dislike extended beyond mere

racial and national prejudice, or the land disputes which involved other

French settlers with the English in rivalries which not even Governor

Andros could quell. But their ardent Protestantism--too ardent, some

whispered--and their evident distress when virtually driven from the

village down the bay, had moved the sympathy of the town fathers. Here

the strangers had been granted a haven; and the swarthy Etienne Roulet,

less apt at agriculture than at reading queer books and drawing queer

diagrams, was given a clerical post in the warehouse at Pardon

Tillinghast's wharf, far south in Town Street. There had, however, been

a riot of some sort later on--perhaps forty years later, after old

Roulet's death--and no one seemed to hear of the family after that.



For a century and more, it appeared, the Roulets had been well

remembered and frequently discussed as vivid incidents in the quiet

life of a New England seaport. Etienne's son Paul, a surly fellow whose

erratic conduct had probably provoked the riot which wiped out the

family, was particularly a source of speculation; and though Providence

never shared the witchcraft panics of her Puritan neighbors, it was

freely intimated by old wives that his prayers were neither uttered at

the proper time nor directed toward the proper object. All this had

undoubtedly formed the basis of the legend known by old Maria Robbins.

What relation it had to the French ravings of Rhoby Harris and other

inhabitants of the shunned house, imagination or future discovery alone

could determine. I wondered how many of those who had known the legends

realized that additional link with the terrible which my wider reading

had given me; that ominous item in the annals of morbid horror which

tells of the creature _Jacques Roulet, of Caude_, who in 1598 was

condemned to death as a demoniac but afterward saved from the stake by

the Paris parliament and shut in a madhouse. He had been found covered

with blood and shreds of flesh in a wood, shortly after the killing and

rending of a boy by a pair of wolves. One wolf was seen to lope away

unhurt. Surely a pretty hearthside tale, with a queer significance as to

name and place; but I decided that the Providence gossips could not have

generally known of it. Had they known, the coincidence of names would

have brought some drastic and frightened action--indeed, might not its

limited whispering have precipitated the final riot which erased the

Roulets from the town?



       *       *       *       *       *



I now visited the accursed place with increased frequency; studying the

unwholesome vegetation of the garden, examining all the walls of the

building, and poring over every inch of the earthen cellar floor.

Finally, with Carrington Harris's permission, I fitted a key to the

disused door opening from the cellar directly upon Benefit Street,

preferring to have a more immediate access to the outside world than the

dark stairs, ground-floor hall, and front door could give. There, where

morbidity lurked most thickly, I searched and poked during long

afternoons when the sunlight filtered in through the cobwebbed

above-ground windows, and a sense of security glowed from the unlocked

door which placed me only a few feet from the placid sidewalk outside.

Nothing new rewarded my efforts--only the same depressing mustiness and

faint suggestions of noxious odors and nitrous outlines on the

floor--and I fancy that many pedestrians must have watched me curiously

through the broken panes.



At length, upon a suggestion of my uncle's, I decided to try the spot

nocturnally; and one stormy midnight ran the beams of an electric torch

over the moldy floor with its uncanny shapes and distorted,

half-phosphorescent fungi. The place had dispirited me curiously that

evening, and I was almost prepared when I saw--or thought I saw--amidst

the whitish deposits a particularly sharp definition of the "huddled

form" I had suspected from boyhood. Its clearness was astonishing and

unprecedented--and as I watched I seemed to see again the thin,

yellowish, shimmering exhalation which had startled me on that rainy

afternoon so many years before.



Above the anthropomorphic patch of mold by the fireplace it rose; a

subtle, sickish, almost luminous vapor which as it hung trembling in the

dampness seemed to develop vague and shocking suggestions of form,

gradually trailing off into nebulous decay and passing up into the

blackness of the great chimney with a fetor in its wake. It was truly

horrible, and the more so to me because of what I knew of the spot.

Refusing to flee, I watched it fade--and as I watched I felt that it was

in turn watching me greedily with eyes more imaginable than visible.

When I told my uncle about it he was greatly aroused; and after a tense

hour of reflection, arrived at a definite and drastic decision. Weighing

in his mind the importance of the matter, and the significance of our

relation to it, he insisted that we both test--and if possible

destroy--the horror of the house by a joint night or nights of

aggressive vigil in that musty and fungus-cursed cellar.





4



On Wednesday, June 25, 1919, after a proper notification of Carrington

Harris which did not include surmises as to what we expected to find, my

uncle and I conveyed to the shunned house two camp chairs and a folding

camp cot, together with some scientific mechanism of greater weight and

intricacy. These we placed in the cellar during the day, screening the

windows with paper and planning to return in the evening for our first

vigil. We had locked the door from the cellar to the ground floor; and

having a key to the outside cellar door, were prepared to leave our

expensive and delicate apparatus--which we had obtained secretly and at

great cost--as many days as our vigils might be protracted. It was our

design to sit up together till very late, and then watch singly till

dawn in two-hour stretches, myself first and then my companion; the

inactive member resting on the cot.



The natural leadership with which my uncle procured the instruments from

the laboratories of Brown University and the Cranston Street Armory, and

instinctively assumed direction of our venture, was a marvelous

commentary on the potential vitality and resilience of a man of

eighty-one. Elihu Whipple had lived according to the hygienic laws he

had preached as a physician, and but for what happened later would be

here in full vigor today. Only two persons suspected what did

happen--Carrington Harris and myself. I had to tell Harris because he

owned the house and deserved to know what had gone out of it. Then too,

we had spoken to him in advance of our quest; and I felt after my

uncle's going that he would understand and assist me in some vitally

necessary public explanations. He turned very pale, but agreed to help

me, and decided that it would now be safe to rent the house.



To declare that we were not nervous on that rainy night of watching

would be an exaggeration both gross and ridiculous. We were not, as I

have said, in any sense childishly superstitious, but scientific study

and reflection had taught us that the known universe of three dimensions

embraces the merest fraction of the whole cosmos of substance and

energy. In this case an overwhelming preponderance of evidence from

numerous authentic sources pointed to the tenacious existence of certain

forces of great power and, so far as the human point of view is

concerned, exceptional malignancy. To say that we actually believed in

vampires or werewolves would be a carelessly inclusive statement. Rather

must it be said that we were not prepared to deny the possibility of

certain unfamiliar and unclassified modifications of vital force and

attenuated matter; existing very infrequently in three-dimensional space

because of its more intimate connection with other spatial units, yet

close enough to the boundary of our own to furnish us occasional

manifestations which we, for lack of a proper vantage-point, may never

hope to understand.



In short, it seemed to my uncle and me that an incontrovertible array

of facts pointed to some lingering influence in the shunned house;

traceable to one or another of the ill-favored French settlers of two

centuries before, and still operative through rare and unknown laws of

atomic and electronic motion. That the family of Roulet had possessed an

abnormal affinity for outer circles of entity--dark spheres which for

normal folk hold only repulsion and terror--their recorded history

seemed to prove. Had not, then, the riots of those bygone

seventeen-thirties set moving certain kinetic patterns in the morbid

brain of one or more of them--notably the sinister Paul Roulet--which

obscurely survived the bodies murdered and buried by the mob, and

continued to function in some multiple-dimensioned space along the

original lines of force determined by a frantic hatred of the

encroaching community?



Such a thing was surely not a physical or biochemical impossibility in

the light of a newer science which includes the theories of relativity

and intra-atomic action. One might easily imagine an alien nucleus of

substance or energy, formless or otherwise, kept alive by imperceptible

or immaterial subtractions from the life-force or bodily tissue and

fluids of other and more palpably living things into which it penetrates

and with whose fabric it sometimes completely merges itself. It might be

actively hostile, or it might be dictated merely by blind motives of

self-preservation. In any case such a monster must of necessity be in

our scheme of things an anomaly and an intruder, whose extirpation forms

a primary duty with every man not an enemy to the world's life, health,

and sanity.



What baffled us was our utter ignorance of the aspect in which we might

encounter the thing. No sane person had ever seen it, and few had ever

felt it definitely. It might be pure energy--a form ethereal and outside

the realm of substance--or it might be partly material; some unknown and

equivocal mass of plasticity, capable of changing at will to nebulous

approximations of the solid, liquid, gaseous, or tenuously unparticled

states. The anthropomorphic patch of mold on the floor, the form of the

yellowish vapor, and the curvature of the tree-roots in some of the old

tales, all argued at least a remote and reminiscent connection with the

human shape; but how representative or permanent that similarity might

be, none could say with any kind of certainty.



       *       *       *       *       *



We had devised two weapons to fight it; a large and specially fitted

Crookes tube operated by powerful storage batteries and provided with

peculiar screens and reflectors, in case it proved intangible and

opposable only by vigorously destructive ether radiations, and a pair of

military flame-throwers of the sort used in the World War, in case it

proved partly material and susceptible of mechanical destruction--for

like the superstitious Exeter rustics, we were prepared to burn the

thing's heart out if heart existed to burn. All this aggressive

mechanism we set in the cellar in positions carefully arranged with

reference to the cot and chairs, and to the spot before the fireplace

where the mold had taken strange shapes. That suggestive patch, by the

way, was only faintly visible when we placed our furniture and

instruments, and when we returned that evening for the actual vigil. For

a moment I half doubted that I had ever seen it in the more definitely

limned form--but then I thought of the legends.



Our cellar vigil began at ten p. m., daylight saving time, and as it

continued we found no promise of pertinent developments. A weak,

filtered glow from the rain-harassed street-lamps outside, and a feeble

phosphorescence from the detestable fungi within, showed the dripping

stone of the walls, from which all traces of whitewash had vanished; the

dank, fetid and mildew-tainted hard earth floor with its obscene fungi;

the rotting remains of what had been stools, chairs, and tables, and

other more shapeless furniture; the heavy planks and massive beams of

the ground floor overhead; the decrepit plank door leading to bins and

chambers beneath other parts of the house; the crumbling stone staircase

with ruined wooden hand-rail; and the crude and cavernous fireplace of

blackened brick where rusted iron fragments revealed the past presence

of hooks, andirons, spit, crane, and a door to the Dutch oven--these

things, and our austere cot and camp chairs, and the heavy and intricate

destructive machinery we had brought.



We had, as in my own former explorations, left the door to the street

unlocked; so that a direct and practical path of escape might lie open

in case of manifestations beyond our power to deal with. It was our idea

that our continued nocturnal presence would call forth whatever malign

entity lurked there; and that being prepared, we could dispose of the

thing with one or the other of our provided means as soon as we had

recognized and observed it sufficiently. How long it might require to

evoke and extinguish the thing, we had no notion. It occurred to us,

too, that our venture was far from safe; for in what strength the thing

might appear no one could tell. But we deemed the game worth the hazard,

and embarked on it alone and unhesitatingly; conscious that the seeking

of outside aid would only expose us to ridicule and perhaps defeat our

entire purpose. Such was our frame of mind as we talked--far into the

night, till my uncle's growing drowsiness made me remind him to lie down

for his two-hour sleep.



Something like fear chilled me as I sat there in the small hours

alone--I say alone, for one who sits by a sleeper is indeed alone;

perhaps more alone than he can realize. My uncle breathed heavily, his

deep inhalations and exhalations accompanied by the rain outside, and

punctuated by another nerve-racking sound of distant dripping water

within--for the house was repulsively damp even in dry weather, and in

this storm positively swamp-like. I studied the loose, antique masonry

of the walls in the fungus-light and the feeble rays which stole in from

the street through the screened window; and once, when the noisome

atmosphere of the place seemed about to sicken me, I opened the door and

looked up and down the street, feasting my eyes on familiar sights and

my nostrils on wholesome air. Still nothing occurred to reward my

watching; and I yawned repeatedly, fatigue getting the better of

apprehension.



Then the stirring of my uncle in his sleep attracted my notice. He had

turned restlessly on the cot several times during the latter half of the

first hour, but now he was breathing with unusual irregularity,

occasionally heaving a sigh which held more than a few of the qualities

of a choking moan.



I turned my electric flashlight on him and found his face averted; so

rising and crossing to the other side of the cot, I again flashed the

light to see if he seemed in any pain. What I saw unnerved me most

surprisingly, considering its relative triviality. It must have been

merely the association of any odd circumstance with the sinister nature

of our location and mission, for surely the circumstance was not in

itself frightful or unnatural. It was merely that my uncle's facial

expression, disturbed no doubt by the strange dreams which our

situation prompted, betrayed considerable agitation, and seemed not at

all characteristic of him. His habitual expression was one of kindly and

well-bred calm, whereas now a variety of emotions seemed struggling

within him. I think, on the whole, that it was this _variety_ which

chiefly disturbed me. My uncle, as he gasped and tossed in increasing

perturbation and with eyes that had now started open, seemed not one but

many men, and suggested a curious quality of alienage from himself.



       *       *       *       *       *



All at once he commenced to mutter, and I did not like the look of his

mouth and teeth as he spoke. The words were at first indistinguishable,

and then--with a tremendous start--I recognized something about them

which filled me with icy fear till I recalled the breadth of my uncle's

education and the interminable translations he had made from

anthropological and antiquarian articles in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_.

For the venerable Elihu Whipple was muttering _in French_, and the few

phrases I could distinguish seemed connected with the darkest myths he

had ever adapted from the famous Paris magazine.



Suddenly a perspiration broke out on the sleeper's forehead, and he

leaped abruptly up, half awake. The jumble of French changed to a cry in

English, and the hoarse voice shouted excitedly, "My breath, my breath!"

Then the awakening became complete, and with a subsidence of facial

expression to the normal state my uncle seized my hand and began to

relate a dream whose nucleus of significance I could only surmise with a

kind of awe.



He had, he said, floated off from a very ordinary series of

dream-pictures into a scene whose strangeness was related to nothing he

had ever read. It was of this world, and yet not of it--a shadowy

geometrical confusion in which could be seen elements of familiar things

in most unfamiliar and perturbing combinations. There was a suggestion

of queerly disordered pictures superimposed one upon another; an

arrangement in which the essentials of time as well as of space seemed

dissolved and mixed in the most illogical fashion. In this kaleidoscopic

vortex of phantasmal images were occasional snap-shots, if one might use

the term, of singular clearness but unaccountable heterogeneity.



Once my uncle thought he lay in a carelessly dug open pit, with a crowd

of angry faces framed by straggling locks and three-cornered hats

frowning down on him. Again he seemed to be in the interior of a

house--an old house, apparently--but the details and inhabitants were

constantly changing, and he could never be certain of the faces or the

furniture, or even of the room itself, since doors and windows seemed in

just as great a state of flux as the presumably more mobile objects. It

was queer--damnably queer--and my uncle spoke almost sheepishly, as if

half expecting not to be believed, when he declared that of the strange

faces many had unmistakably borne the features of the Harris family. And

all the while there was a personal sensation of choking, as if some

pervasive presence had spread itself through his body and sought to

possess itself of his vital processes.



I shuddered at the thought of those vital processes, worn as they were

by eighty-one years of continuous functioning, in conflict with unknown

forces of which the youngest and strongest system might well be afraid;

but in another moment reflected that dreams are only dreams, and that

these uncomfortable visions could be, at most, no more than my uncle's

reaction to the investigations and expectations which had lately filled

our minds to the exclusion of all else.



Conversation, also, soon tended to dispel my sense of strangeness; and

in time I yielded to my yawns and took my turn at slumber. My uncle

seemed now very wakeful, and welcomed his period of watching even though

the nightmare had aroused him far ahead of his allotted two hours.



Sleep seized me quickly, and I was at once haunted with dreams of the

most disturbing kind. I felt, in my visions, a cosmic and abysmal

loneness; with hostility surging from all sides upon some prison where I

lay confined. I seemed bound and gagged, and taunted by the echoing

yells of distant multitudes who thirsted for my blood. My uncle's face

came to me with less pleasant association than in waking hours, and I

recall many futile struggles and attempts to scream. It was not a

pleasant sleep, and for a second I was not sorry for the echoing shriek

which clove through the barriers of dream and flung me to a sharp and

startled awakeness in which every actual object before my eyes stood out

with more than natural clearness and reality.





5



I had been lying with my face away from my uncle's chair, so that in

this sudden flash of awakening I saw only the door to the street, the

window, and the wall and floor and ceiling toward the north of the room,

all photographed with morbid vividness on my brain in a light brighter

than the glow of the fungi or the rays from the street outside. It was

not a strong or even a fairly strong light; certainly not nearly strong

enough to read an average book by. But it cast a shadow of myself and

the cot on the floor, and had a yellowish, penetrating force that hinted

at things more potent than luminosity. This I perceived with unhealthy

sharpness despite the fact that two of my other senses were violently

assailed. For on my ears rang the reverberations of that shocking

scream, while my nostrils revolted at the stench which filled the place.

My mind, as alert as my senses, recognized the gravely unusual; and

almost automatically I leaped up and turned about to grasp the

destructive instruments which we had left trained on the moldy spot

before the fireplace. As I turned, I dreaded what I was to see; for the

scream had been in my uncle's voice, and I knew not against what menace

I should have to defend him and myself.



Yet after all, the sight was worse than I had dreaded. There are horrors

beyond horrors, and this was one of those nuclei of all dreamable

hideousness which the cosmos saves to blast an accursed and unhappy few.

Out of the fungus-ridden earth steamed up a vaporous corpse-light,

yellow and diseased, which bubbled and lapped to a gigantic height in

vague outlines half human and half monstrous, through which I could see

the chimney and fireplace beyond. It was all eyes--wolfish and

mocking--and the rugose insect-like head dissolved at the top to a thin

stream of mist which curled putridly about and finally vanished up the

chimney. I say that I saw this thing, but it is only in conscious

retrospection that I ever definitely traced its damnable approach to

form. At the time, it was to me only a seething, dimly phosphorescent

cloud of fungous loathsomeness, enveloping and dissolving to an

abhorrent plasticity the one object on which all my attention was

focussed. That object was my uncle--the venerable Elihu Whipple--who

with blackening and decaying features leered and gibbered at me, and

reached out dripping claws to rend me in the fury which this horror had

brought.



It was a sense of routine which kept me from going mad. I had drilled

myself in preparation for the crucial moment, and blind training saved

me. Recognizing the bubbling evil as no substance reachable by matter or

material chemistry, and therefore ignoring the flame-thrower which

loomed on my left, I threw on the current of the Crookes tube apparatus,

and focussed toward that scene of immortal blasphemousness the strongest

ether radiations which man's art can arouse from the spaces and fluids

of nature. There was a bluish haze and a frenzied sputtering, and the

yellowish phosphorescence grew dimmer to my eyes. But I saw the dimness

was only that of contrast, and that the waves from the machine had no

effect whatever.



Then, in the midst of that demoniac spectacle, I saw a fresh horror

which brought cries to my lips and sent me fumbling and staggering

toward that unlocked door to the quiet street, careless of what abnormal

terrors I loosed upon the world, or what thoughts or judgments of men I

brought down upon my head. In that dim blend of blue and yellow the form

of my uncle had commenced a nauseous liquefaction whose essence eludes

all description, and in which there played across his vanishing face

such changes of identity as only madness can conceive. He was at once a

devil and a multitude, a charnel-house and a pageant. Lit by the mixed

and uncertain beams, that gelatinous face assumed a dozen--a score--a

hundred--aspects; grinning, as it sank to the ground on a body that

melted like tallow, in the caricatured likeness of legions strange and

yet not strange.



I saw the features of the Harris line, masculine and feminine, adult and

infantile, and other features old and young, coarse and refined,

familiar and unfamiliar. For a second there flashed a degraded

counterfeit of a miniature of poor mad Rhoby Harris that I had seen in

the School of Design museum, and another time I thought I caught the

raw-boned image of Mercy Dexter as I recalled her from a painting in

Carrington Harris's house. It was frightful beyond conception; toward

the last, when a curious blend of servant and baby visages flickered

close to the fungous floor where a pool of greenish grease was

spreading, it seemed as though the shifting features fought against

themselves and strove to form contours like those of my uncle's kindly

face. I like to think that he existed at that moment, and that he tried

to bid me farewell. It seems to me I hiccupped a farewell from my own

parched throat as I lurched out into the street; a thin stream of grease

following me through the door to the rain-drenched sidewalk.



       *       *       *       *       *



The rest is shadowy and monstrous. There was no one in the soaking

street, and in all the world there was no one I dared tell. I walked

aimlessly south past College Hill and the AthenĂ¦um, down Hopkins Street,

and over the bridge to the business section where tall buildings seemed

to guard me as modern material things guard the world from ancient and

unwholesome wonder. Then gray dawn unfolded wetly from the east,

silhouetting the archaic hill and its venerable steeples, and beckoning

me to the place where my terrible work was still unfinished. And in the

end I went, wet, hatless, and dazed in the morning light, and entered

that awful door in Benefit Street which I had left ajar, and which still

swung cryptically in full sight of the early householders to whom I

dared not speak.



The grease was gone, for the moldy floor was porous. And in front of the

fireplace was no vestige of the giant doubled-up form traced in niter.

I looked at the cot, the chairs, the instruments, my neglected hat, and

the yellowed straw hat of my uncle. Dazedness was uppermost, and I could

scarcely recall what was dream and what was reality. Then thought

trickled back, and I knew that I had witnessed things more horrible than

I had dreamed.



Sitting down, I tried to conjecture as nearly as sanity would let me

just what had happened, and how I might end the horror, if indeed it had

been real. Matter it seemed not to be, nor ether, nor anything else

conceivable by mortal mind. What, then, but some exotic _emanation_;

some vampirish vapor such as Exeter rustics tell of as lurking over

certain churchyards? This I felt was the clue, and again I looked at the

floor before the fireplace where the mold and niter had taken strange

forms.



In ten minutes my mind was made up, and taking my hat I set out for

home, where I bathed, ate, and gave by telephone an order for a pickax,

a spade, a military gas-mask, and six carboys of sulfuric acid, all to

be delivered the next morning at the cellar door of the shunned house in

Benefit Street. After that I tried to sleep; and failing, passed the

hours in reading and in the composition of inane verses to counteract my

mood.



At eleven a. m. the next day I commenced digging. It was sunny weather,

and I was glad of that. I was still alone, for as much as I feared the

unknown horror I sought, there was more fear in the thought of telling

anybody. Later I told Harris only through sheer necessity, and because

he had heard odd tales from old people which disposed him ever so little

toward belief. As I turned up the stinking black earth in front of the

fireplace, my spade causing a viscous yellow ichor to ooze from the

white fungi which it severed, I trembled at the dubious thoughts of what

I might uncover. Some secrets of inner earth are not good for mankind,

and this seemed to me one of them.



My hand shook perceptibly, but still I delved; after a while standing in

the large hole I had made. With the deepening of the hole, which was

about six feet square, the evil smell increased; and I lost all doubt of

my imminent contact with the hellish thing whose emanations had cursed

the house for over a century and a half. I wondered what it would look

like--what its form and substance would be, and how big it might have

waxed through long ages of life-sucking. At length I climbed out of the

hole and dispersed the heaped-up dirt, then arranging the great carboys

of acid around and near two sides, so that when necessary I might empty

them all down the aperture in quick succession. After that I dumped

earth only along the other two sides; working more slowly and donning my

gas-mask as the smell grew. I was nearly unnerved at my proximity to a

nameless thing at the bottom of a pit.



Suddenly my spade struck something softer than earth. I shuddered, and

made a motion as if to climb out of the hole, which was now as deep as

my neck. Then courage returned, and I scraped away more dirt in the

light of the electric torch I had provided. The surface I uncovered was

fishy and glassy--a kind of semi-putrid congealed jelly with suggestions

of translucency. I scraped further, and saw that it had form. There was

a rift where a part of the substance was folded over. The exposed area

was huge and roughly cylindrical; like a mammoth soft blue-white

stovepipe doubled in two, its largest part some two feet in diameter.

Still more I scraped, and then abruptly I leaped out of the hole and

away from the filthy thing; frantically unstopping and tilting the heavy

carboys, and precipitating their corrosive contents one after another

down that charnel gulf and upon the unthinkable abnormality whose titan

_elbow_ I had seen.



       *       *       *       *       *



The blinding maelstrom of greenish-yellow vapor which surged

tempestuously up from that hole as the floods of acid descended, will

never leave my memory. All along the hill people tell of the yellow day,

when virulent and horrible fumes arose from the factory waste dumped in

the Providence River, but I know how mistaken they are as to the source.

They tell, too, of the hideous roar which at the same time came from

some disordered water-pipe or gas main underground--but again I could

correct them if I dared. It was unspeakably shocking, and I do not see

how I lived through it. I did faint after emptying the fourth carboy,

which I had to handle after the fumes had begun to penetrate my mask;

but when I recovered I saw that the hole was emitting no fresh vapors.



The two remaining carboys I emptied down without particular result, and

after a time I felt it safe to shovel the earth back into the pit. It

was twilight before I was done, but fear had gone out of the place. The

dampness was less fetid, and all the strange fungi had withered to a

kind of harmless grayish powder which blew ash-like along the floor. One

of earth's nethermost terrors had perished for ever; and if there be a

hell, it had received at last the demon soul of an unhallowed thing. And

as I patted down the last spadeful of mold, I shed the first of the many

tears with which I have paid unaffected tribute to my beloved uncle's

memory.



The next spring no more pale grass and strange weeds came up in the

shunned house's terraced garden, and shortly afterward Carrington Harris

rented the place. It is still spectral, but its strangeness fascinates

me, and I shall find mixed with my relief a queer regret when it is torn

down to make way for a tawdry shop or vulgar apartment building. The

barren old trees in the yard have begun to bear small, sweet apples, and

last year the birds nested in their gnarled boughs.





[Illustration]









Transcriber's Note:



    This etext was produced from _Weird Tales_ October 1937. Extensive

    research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on

    this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical

    errors have been corrected without note.