Source: Project Gutenberg Lovecraft story files
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Public domain basis: Project Gutenberg public-domain Lovecraft stories.
Coverage: Call of Cthulhu, Dunwich Horror, The Shunned House, Pickman's Model, The Picture in the House, Cool Air, The Festival, The Lurking Fear, The Horror at Red Hook, The Silver Key, He, and The Colour out of Space.

# Project Gutenberg #68283

The CALL of CTHULHU

By H.P. LOVECRAFT

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Weird Tales, February 1928.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


    "Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a
    survival ... a survival of a hugely remote period when ...
    consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long
    since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity ... forms
    of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory
    and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts
    and kinds...."

                                                --_Algernon Blackwood._


[Illustration: "The ring of worshipers moved in endless bacchanale
between the ring of bodies and the ring of fire."][1]

[Footnote 1: Found among the papers of the late Francis Wayland
Thurston, of Boston.]


                       _1. The Horror in Clay._

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the
human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island
of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not
meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its
own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing
together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas
of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either
go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace
and safety of a new dark age.

Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle
wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have
hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if
not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there
came the single glimpse of forbidden eons which chills me when I think
of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread
glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of
separated things--in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of
a dead professor. I hope that no one else will accomplish this piecing
out; certainly, if I live, I shall never knowingly supply a link in
so hideous a chain. I think that the professor, too, intended to keep
silent regarding the part he knew, and that he would have destroyed his
notes had not sudden death seized him.

My knowledge of the thing began in the winter of 1926-27 with the death
of my grand-uncle, George Gammell Angell, Professor Emeritus of Semitic
languages in Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Professor
Angell was widely known as an authority on ancient inscriptions, and
had frequently been resorted to by the heads of prominent museums; so
that his passing at the age of ninety-two may be recalled by many.
Locally, interest was intensified by the obscurity of the cause of
death. The professor had been stricken whilst returning from the
Newport boat; falling suddenly, as witnesses said, after having been
jostled by a nautical-looking negro who had come from one of the queer
dark courts on the precipitous hillside which formed a short cut from
the waterfront to the deceased's home in Williams Street. Physicians
were unable to find any visible disorder, but concluded after perplexed
debate that some obscure lesion of the heart, induced by the brisk
ascent of so steep a hill by so elderly a man, was responsible for
the end. At the time I saw no reason to dissent from this dictum, but
latterly I am inclined to wonder--and more than wonder.

As my granduncle's heir and executor, for he died a childless widower,
I was expected to go over his papers with some thoroughness; and for
that purpose moved his entire set of files and boxes to my quarters in
Boston. Much of the material which I correlated will be later published
by the American Archeological Society, but there was one box which I
found exceedingly puzzling, and which I felt much averse from showing
to other eyes. It had been locked, and I did not find the key till
it occurred to me to examine the personal ring which the professor
carried always in his pocket. Then, indeed, I succeeded in opening it,
but when I did so seemed only to be confronted by a greater and more
closely locked barrier. For what could be the meaning of the queer clay
bas-relief and the disjointed jottings, ramblings, and cuttings which I
found? Had my uncle, in his latter years, become credulous of the most
superficial impostures? I resolved to search out the eccentric sculptor
responsible for this apparent disturbance of an old man's peace of mind.

The bas-relief was a rough rectangle less than an inch thick and about
five by six inches in area; obviously of modern origin. Its designs,
however, were far from modern in atmosphere and suggestion; for,
although the vagaries of cubism and futurism are many and wild, they do
not often reproduce that cryptic regularity which lurks in prehistoric
writing. And writing of some kind the bulk of these designs seemed
certainly to be; though my memory, despite much familiarity with the
papers and collections of my uncle, failed in any way to identify this
particular species, or even hint at its remotest affiliations.

Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evidently pictorial
intent, though its impressionistic execution forbade a very clear
idea of its nature. It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol
representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could
conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded
simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature,
I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy,
tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary
wings; but it was the _general outline_ of the whole which made it most
shockingly frightful. Behind the figure was a vague suggestion of a
Cyclopean architectural background.

The writing accompanying this oddity was, aside from a stack of
press cuttings, in Professor Angell's most recent hand; and made no
pretense to literary style. What seemed to be the main document was
headed "_CTHULHU CULT_" in characters painstakingly printed to avoid
the erroneous reading of a word so unheard-of. This manuscript was
divided into two sections, the first of which was headed "1925--Dream
and Dream Work of H. A. Wilcox, 7 Thomas St., Providence, R. I.," and
the second, "Narrative of Inspector John R. Legrasse, 121 Bienville
St., New Orleans, La., at 1908 A. A. S. Mtg--Notes on Same, & Prof.
Webb's Acct." The other manuscript papers were all brief notes, some
of them accounts of the queer dreams of different persons, some of
them citations from theosophical books and magazines (notably W.
Scott-Eliott's _Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria_), and the rest comments
on long-surviving secret societies and hidden cults, with references
to passages in such mythological and anthropological source-books
as Frazer's _Golden Bough_ and Miss Murray's _Witch-Cult in Western
Europe_. The cuttings largely alluded to outré mental illnesses and
outbreaks of group folly or mania in the spring of 1925.

       *       *       *       *       *

The first half of the principal manuscript told a very peculiar
tale. It appears that on March 1st, 1925, a thin, dark young man of
neurotic and excited aspect had called upon Professor Angell bearing
the singular clay bas-relief, which was then exceedingly damp and
fresh. His card bore the name of Henry Anthony Wilcox, and my uncle
had recognized him as the youngest son of an excellent family slightly
known to him, who had latterly been studying sculpture at the Rhode
Island School of Design and living alone at the Fleur-de-Lys Building
near that institution. Wilcox was a precocious youth of known genius
but great eccentricity, and had from childhood excited attention
through the strange stories and odd dreams he was in the habit of
relating. He called himself "psychically hypersensitive", but the staid
folk of the ancient commercial city dismissed him as merely "queer".
Never mingling much with his kind, he had dropped gradually from social
visibility, and was now known only to a small group of esthetes from
other towns. Even the Providence Art Club, anxious to preserve its
conservatism, had found him quite hopeless.

On the occasion of the visit, ran the professor's manuscript, the
sculptor abruptly asked for the benefit of his host's archeological
knowledge in identifying the hieroglyphics on the bas-relief. He
spoke in a dreamy, stilted manner which suggested pose and alienated
sympathy; and my uncle showed some sharpness in replying, for the
conspicuous freshness of the tablet implied kinship with anything but
archeology. Young Wilcox's rejoinder, which impressed my uncle enough
to make him recall and record it verbatim, was of a fantastically
poetic cast which must have typified his whole conversation, and which
I have since found highly characteristic of him. He said, "It is new,
indeed, for I made it last night in a dream of strange cities; and
dreams are older than brooding Tyre, or the contemplative Sphinx, or
garden-girdled Babylon."

It was then that he began that rambling tale which suddenly played upon
a sleeping memory and won the fevered interest of my uncle. There had
been a slight earthquake tremor the night before, the most considerable
felt in New England for some years; and Wilcox's imagination had been
keenly affected. Upon retiring, he had had an unprecedented dream of
great Cyclopean cities of Titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all
dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror. Hieroglyphics
had covered the walls and pillars, and from some undetermined point
below had come a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which
only fancy could transmute into sound, but which he attempted to render
by the almost unpronounceable jumble of letters, "_Cthulhu fhtagn_".

This verbal jumble was the key to the recollection which excited and
disturbed Professor Angell. He questioned the sculptor with scientific
minuteness; and studied with almost frantic intensity the bas-relief
on which the youth had found himself working, chilled and clad only
in his nightclothes, when waking had stolen bewilderingly over him.
My uncle blamed his old age, Wilcox afterward said, for his slowness
in recognizing both hieroglyphics and pictorial design. Many of his
questions seemed highly out of place to his visitor, especially those
which tried to connect the latter with strange cults or societies;
and Wilcox could not understand the repeated promises of silence
which he was offered in exchange for an admission of membership in
some widespread mystical or paganly religious body. When Professor
Angell became convinced that the sculptor was indeed ignorant of any
cult or system of cryptic lore, he besieged his visitor with demands
for future reports of dreams. This bore regular fruit, for after the
first interview the manuscript records daily calls of the young man,
during which he related startling fragments of nocturnal imagery whose
burden was always some terrible Cyclopean vista of dark and dripping
stone, with a subterrene voice or intelligence shouting monotonously
in enigmatical sense-impacts uninscribable save as gibberish. The two
sounds most frequently repeated are those rendered by the letters
"_Cthulhu_" and "_R'lyeh_".

On March 23rd, the manuscript continued, Wilcox failed to appear; and
inquiries at his quarters revealed that he had been stricken with an
obscure sort of fever and taken to the home of his family in Waterman
Street. He had cried out in the night, arousing several other artists
in the building, and had manifested since then only alternations of
unconsciousness and delirium. My uncle at once telephoned the family,
and from that time forward kept close watch of the case; calling
often at the Thayer Street office of Dr. Tobey, whom he learned to
be in charge. The youth's febrile mind, apparently, was dwelling on
strange things; and the doctor shuddered now and then as he spoke of
them. They included not only a repetition of what he had formerly
dreamed, but touched wildly on a gigantic thing "miles high" which
walked or lumbered about. He at no time fully described this object,
but occasional frantic words, as repeated by Dr. Tobey, convinced the
professor that it must be identical with the nameless monstrosity
he had sought to depict in his dream-sculpture. Reference to this
object, the doctor added, was invariably a prelude to the young man's
subsidence into lethargy. His temperature, oddly enough, was not
greatly above normal; but the whole condition was otherwise such as to
suggest true fever rather than mental disorder.

On April 2nd at about 3 p. m. every trace of Wilcox's malady suddenly
ceased. He sat upright in bed, astonished to find himself at home and
completely ignorant of what had happened in dream or reality since the
night of March 22nd. Pronounced well by his physician, he returned
to his quarters in three days; but to Professor Angell he was of no
further assistance. All traces of strange dreaming had vanished with
his recovery, and my uncle kept no record of his night-thoughts after a
week of pointless and irrelevant accounts of thoroughly usual visions.

       *       *       *       *       *

Here the first part of the manuscript ended, but references to certain
of the scattered notes gave me much material for thought--so much, in
fact, that only the ingrained skepticism then forming my philosophy
can account for my continued distrust of the artist. The notes in
question were those descriptive of the dreams of various persons
covering the same period as that in which young Wilcox had had his
strange visitations. My uncle, it seems, had quickly instituted a
prodigiously far-flung body of inquiries amongst nearly all the friends
whom he could question without impertinence, asking for nightly reports
of their dreams, and the dates of any notable visions for some time
past. The reception of his request seems to have been varied; but
he must, at the very least, have received more responses than any
ordinary man could have handled without a secretary. This original
correspondence was not preserved, but his notes formed a thorough and
really significant digest. Average people in society and business--New
England's traditional "salt of the earth"--gave an almost completely
negative result, though scattered cases of uneasy but formless
nocturnal impressions appear here and there, always between March
23rd and April 2nd--the period of young Wilcox's delirium. Scientific
men were little more affected, though four cases of vague description
suggest fugitive glimpses of strange landscapes, and in one case there
is mentioned a dread of something abnormal.

It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came,
and I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to
compare notes. As it was, lacking their original letters, I half
suspected the compiler of having asked leading questions, or of having
edited the correspondence in corroboration of what he had latently
resolved to see. That is why I continued to feel that Wilcox, somehow
cognizant of the old data which my uncle had possessed, had been
imposing on the veteran scientist. These responses from esthetes told
a disturbing tale. From February 28th to April 2nd a large proportion
of them had dreamed very bizarre things, the intensity of the dreams
being immeasurably the stronger during the period of the sculptor's
delirium. Over a fourth of those who reported anything, reported
scenes and half-sounds not unlike those which Wilcox had described;
and some of the dreamers confessed acute fear of the gigantic nameless
thing visible toward the last. One case, which the note describes with
emphasis, was very sad. The subject, a widely known architect with
leanings toward theosophy and occultism, went violently insane on
the date of young Wilcox's seizure, and expired several months later
after incessant screamings to be saved from some escaped denizen of
hell. Had my uncle referred to these cases by name instead of merely
by number, I should have attempted some corroboration and personal
investigation; but as it was, I succeeded in tracing down only a
few. All of these, however, bore out the notes in full. I have often
wondered if all the objects of the professor's questioning felt as
puzzled as did this fraction. It is well that no explanation shall ever
reach them.

The press cuttings, as I have intimated, touched on cases of panic,
mania, and eccentricity during the given period. Professor Angell
must have employed a cutting bureau, for the number of extracts was
tremendous, and the sources scattered throughout the globe. Here
was a nocturnal suicide in London, where a lone sleeper had leaped
from a window after a shocking cry. Here likewise a rambling letter
to the editor of a paper in South America, where a fanatic deduces
a dire future from visions he has seen. A dispatch from California
describes a theosophist colony as donning white robes en masse for some
"glorious fulfilment" which never arrives, whilst items from India
speak guardedly of serious native unrest toward the end of March.
Voodoo orgies multiply in Haiti, and African outposts report ominous
mutterings. American officers in the Philippines find certain tribes
bothersome about this time, and New York policemen are mobbed by
hysterical Levantines on the night of March 22-23. The west of Ireland,
too, is full of wild rumor and legendry, and a fantastic painter named
Ardois-Bonnot hangs a blasphemous _Dream Landscape_ in the Paris spring
salon of 1926. And so numerous are the recorded troubles in insane
asylums that only a miracle can have stopped the medical fraternity
from noting strange parallelisms and drawing mystified conclusions.
A weird bunch of cuttings, all told; and I can at this date scarcely
envisage the callous rationalism with which I set them aside. But I
was then convinced that young Wilcox had known of the older matters
mentioned by the professor.


                 _2. The Tale of Inspector Legrasse._


The older matters which had made the sculptor's dream and bas-relief so
significant to my uncle formed the subject of the second half of his
long manuscript. Once before, it appears, Professor Angell had seen the
hellish outlines of the nameless monstrosity, puzzled over the unknown
hieroglyphics, and heard the ominous syllables which can be rendered
only as "_Cthulhu_"; and all this in so stirring and horrible a
connection that it is small wonder he pursued young Wilcox with queries
and demands for data.

This earlier experience had come in 1908, seventeen years before,
when the American Archeological Society held its annual meeting in
St. Louis. Professor Angell, as befitted one of his authority and
attainments, had had a prominent part in all the deliberations; and was
one of the first to be approached by the several outsiders who took
advantage of the convocation to offer questions for correct answering
and problems for expert solution.

The chief of these outsiders, and in a short time the focus of interest
for the entire meeting, was a commonplace-looking middle-aged man
who had traveled all the way from New Orleans for certain special
information unobtainable from any local source. His name was John
Raymond Legrasse, and he was by profession an inspector of police. With
him he bore the subject of his visit, a grotesque, repulsive, and
apparently very ancient stone statuette whose origin he was at a loss
to determine.

It must not be fancied that Inspector Legrasse had the least interest
in archeology. On the contrary, his wish for enlightenment was prompted
by purely professional considerations. The statuette, idol, fetish,
or whatever it was, had been captured some months before in the
wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo
meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites connected with
it, that the police could not but realize that they had stumbled on a
dark cult totally unknown to them, and infinitely more diabolic than
even the blackest of the African voodoo circles. Of its origin, apart
from the erratic and unbelievable tales extorted from the captured
members, absolutely nothing was to be discovered; hence the anxiety
of the police for any antiquarian lore which might help them to place
the frightful symbol, and through it track down the cult to its
fountain-head.

Inspector Legrasse was scarcely prepared for the sensation which his
offering created. One sight of the thing had been enough to throw the
assembled men of science into a state of tense excitement, and they
lost no time in crowding around him to gaze at the diminutive figure
whose utter strangeness and air of genuinely abysmal antiquity hinted
so potently at unopened and archaic vistas. No recognized school of
sculpture had animated this terrible object, yet centuries and even
thousands of years seemed recorded in its dim and greenish surface of
unplaceable stone.

The figure, which was finally passed slowly from man to man for close
and careful study, was between seven and eight inches in height, and of
exquisitely artistic workmanship. It represented a monster of vaguely
anthropoid outline, but with an octopuslike head whose face was a mass
of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind
and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed
instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat
bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or
pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips of the wings
touched the back edge of the block, the seat occupied the center,
whilst the long, curved claws of the doubled-up, crouching hind legs
gripped the front edge and extended a quarter of the way down toward
the bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent forward, so
that the ends of the facial feelers brushed the backs of huge forepaws
which clasped the croucher's elevated knees. The aspect of the whole
was abnormally lifelike, and the more subtly fearful because its source
was so totally unknown. Its vast, awesome, and incalculable age was
unmistakable; yet not one link did it show with any known type of art
belonging to civilization's youth--or indeed to any other time.

Totally separate and apart, its very material was a mystery; for the
soapy, greenish-black stone with its golden or iridescent flecks and
striations resembled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy. The
characters along the base were equally baffling; and no member present,
despite a representation of half the world's expert learning in this
field, could form the least notion of even their remotest linguistic
kinship. They, like the subject and material, belonged to something
horribly remote and distinct from mankind as we know it; something
frightfully suggestive of old and unhallowed cycles of life in which
our world and our conceptions have no part.

And yet, as the members severally shook their heads and confessed
defeat at the inspector's problem, there was one man in that gathering
who suspected a touch of bizarre familiarity in the monstrous shape and
writing, and who presently told with some diffidence of the odd trifle
he knew. This person was the late William Channing Webb, professor of
anthropology in Princeton University, and an explorer of no slight note.

Professor Webb had been engaged, forty-eight years before, in a tour
of Greenland and Iceland in search of some Runic inscriptions which
he failed to unearth; and whilst high up on the West Greenland coast
had encountered a singular tribe or cult of degenerate Eskimos whose
religion, a curious form of devil-worship, chilled him with its
deliberate bloodthirstiness and repulsiveness. It was a faith of which
other Eskimos knew little, and which they mentioned only with shudders,
saying that it had come down from horribly ancient eons before ever the
world was made. Besides nameless rites and human sacrifices there were
certain queer hereditary rituals addressed to a supreme elder devil or
_tornasuk_; and of this Professor Webb had taken a careful phonetic
copy from an aged _angekok_ or wizard-priest, expressing the sounds in
Roman letters as best he knew how. But just now of prime significance
was the fetish which this cult had cherished, and around which they
danced when the aurora leaped high over the ice cliffs. It was, the
professor stated, a very crude bas-relief of stone, comprising a
hideous picture and some cryptic writing. And as far as he could tell,
it was a rough parallel in all essential features of the bestial thing
now lying before the meeting.

These data, received with suspense and astonishment by the assembled
members, proved doubly exciting to Inspector Legrasse; and he began at
once to ply his informant with questions. Having noted and copied an
oral ritual among the swamp cult-worshipers his men had arrested, he
besought the professor to remember as best he might the syllables taken
down amongst the diabolist Eskimos. There then followed an exhaustive
comparison of details, and a moment of really awed silence when both
detective and scientist agreed on the virtual identity of the phrase
common to two hellish rituals so many worlds of distance apart. What,
in substance, both the Eskimo wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests
had chanted to their kindred idols was something very like this--the
word-divisions being guessed at from traditional breaks in the phrase
as chanted aloud:

        "_Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn._"

Legrasse had one point in advance of Professor Webb, for several among
his mongrel prisoners had repeated to him what older celebrants had
told them the words meant. This text, as given, ran something like this:

         "In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."

       *       *       *       *       *

And now, in response to a general urgent demand, Inspector Legrasse
related as fully as possible his experience with the swamp worshipers;
telling a story to which I could see my uncle attached profound
significance. It savored of the wildest dreams of myth-maker and
theosophist, and disclosed an astonishing degree of cosmic imagination
among such half-castes and pariahs as might be least expected to
possess it.

On November 1st, 1907, there had come to New Orleans police a frantic
summons from the swamp and lagoon country to the south. The squatters
there, mostly primitive but good-natured descendants of Lafitte's men,
were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which had stolen
upon them in the night. It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a more
terrible sort than they had ever known; and some of their women and
children had disappeared since the malevolent tom-tom had begun its
incessant beating far within the black haunted woods where no dweller
ventured. There were insane shouts and harrowing screams, soul-chilling
chants and dancing devil-flames; and, the frightened messenger added,
the people could stand it no more.

So a body of twenty police, filling two carriages and an automobile,
had set out in the late afternoon with the shivering squatter as a
guide. At the end of the passable road they alighted, and for miles
splashed on in silence through the terrible cypress woods where day
never came. Ugly roots and malignant hanging nooses of Spanish moss
beset them, and now and then a pile of dank stones or fragments of a
rotting wall intensified by its hint of morbid habitation a depression
which every malformed tree and every fungous islet combined to create.
At length the squatter settlement, a miserable huddle of huts, hove in
sight; and hysterical dwellers ran out to cluster around the group of
bobbing lanterns. The muffled beat of tom-toms was now faintly audible
far, far ahead; and a curdling shriek came at infrequent intervals
when the wind shifted. A reddish glare, too, seemed to filter through
the pale undergrowth beyond endless avenues of forest night. Reluctant
even to be left alone again, each one of the cowed squatters refused
point-blank to advance another inch toward the scene of unholy
worship, so Inspector Legrasse and his nineteen colleagues plunged on
unguided into black arcades of horror that none of them had ever trod
before.

The region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil
repute, substantially unknown and untraversed by white men. There were
legends of a hidden lake unglimpsed by mortal sight, in which dwelt a
huge, formless white polypous thing with luminous eyes; and squatters
whispered that bat-winged devils flew up out of caverns in inner
earth to worship it at midnight. They said it had been there before
D'Iberville, before La Salle, before the Indians, and before even the
wholesome beasts and birds of the woods. It was nightmare itself, and
to see it was to die. But it made men dream, and so they knew enough to
keep away. The present voodoo orgy was, indeed, on the merest fringe
of this abhorred area, but that location was bad enough; hence perhaps
the very place of the worship had terrified the squatters more than the
shocking sounds and incidents.

Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard by
Legrasse's men as they plowed on through the black morass toward the
red glare and the muffled tom-toms. There are vocal qualities peculiar
to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible
to hear the one when the source should yield the other. Animal fury
and orgiastic license here whipped themselves to demoniac heights by
howls and squawking ecstasies that tore and reverberated through those
nighted woods like pestilential tempests from the gulfs of hell. Now
and then the less organized ululations would cease, and from what
seemed a well-drilled chorus of hoarse voices would rise in singsong
chant that hideous phrase or ritual:

        "_Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn._"

Then the men, having reached a spot where the trees were thinner, came
suddenly in sight of the spectacle itself. Four of them reeled, one
fainted, and two were shaken into a frantic cry which the mad cacophony
of the orgy fortunately deadened. Legrasse dashed swamp water on the
face of the fainting man, and all stood trembling and nearly hypnotized
with horror.

In a natural glade of the swamp stood a grassy island of perhaps an
acre's extent, clear of trees and tolerably dry. On this now leaped and
twisted a more indescribable horde of human abnormality than any but a
Sime or an Angarola could paint. Void of clothing, this hybrid spawn
were braying, bellowing and writhing about a monstrous ring-shaped
bonfire; in the center of which, revealed by occasional rifts in the
curtain of flame, stood a great granite monolith some eight feet in
height; on top of which, incongruous in its diminutiveness, rested the
noxious carven statuette. From a wide circle of ten scaffolds set up
at regular intervals with the flame-girt monolith as a center hung,
head downward, the oddly marred bodies of the helpless squatters who
had disappeared. It was inside this circle that the ring of worshipers
jumped and roared, the general direction of the mass motion being from
left to right in endless bacchanale between the ring of bodies and the
ring of fire.

It may have been only imagination and it may have been only echoes
which induced one of the men, an excitable Spaniard, to fancy he heard
antiphonal responses to the ritual from some far and unillumined spot
deeper within the wood of ancient legendry and horror. This man, Joseph
D. Galvez, I later met and questioned; and he proved distractingly
imaginative. He indeed went so far as to hint of the faint beating of
great wings, and of a glimpse of shining eyes and a mountainous white
bulk beyond the remotest trees--but I suppose he had been hearing too
much native superstition.

Actually, the horrified pause of the men was of comparatively brief
duration. Duty came first; and although there must have been nearly a
hundred mongrel celebrants in the throng, the police relied on their
firearms and plunged determinedly into the nauseous rout. For five
minutes the resultant din and chaos were beyond description. Wild
blows were struck, shots were fired, and escapes were made; but in
the end Legrasse was able to count some forty-seven sullen prisoners,
whom he forced to dress in haste and fall into line between two rows
of policemen. Five of the worshipers lay dead, and two severely
wounded ones were carried away on improvised stretchers by their
fellow-prisoners. The image on the monolith, of course, was carefully
removed and carried back by Legrasse.

Examined at headquarters after a trip of intense strain and weariness,
the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and
mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes
and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape
Verde Islands, gave a coloring of voodooism to the heterogeneous cult.
But before many questions were asked, it became manifest that something
far deeper and older than negro fetishism was involved. Degraded and
ignorant as they were, the creatures held with surprizing consistency
to the central idea of their loathsome faith.

They worshiped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before
there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky.
Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but
their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first man,
who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the
prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in
distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when
the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of
R'lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath
his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the
secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.

Meanwhile no more must be told. There was a secret which even torture
could not extract. Mankind was not absolutely alone among the conscious
things of earth, for shapes came out of the dark to visit the faithful
few. But these were not the Great Old Ones. No man had ever seen the
Old Ones. The carven idol was great Cthulhu, but none might say whether
or not the others were precisely like him. No one could read the old
writing now, but things were told by word of mouth. The chanted ritual
was not the secret--that was never spoken aloud, only whispered. The
chant meant only this: "In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits
dreaming."

       *       *       *       *       *

Only two of the prisoners were found sane enough to be hanged, and
the rest were committed to various institutions. All denied a part
in the ritual murders, and averred that the killing had been done
by Black-winged Ones which had come to them from their immemorial
meeting-place in the haunted wood. But of those mysterious allies no
coherent account could ever be gained. What the police did extract
came mainly from an immensely aged mestizo named Castro, who claimed
to have sailed to strange ports and talked with undying leaders of the
cult in the mountains of China.

Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the
speculations of theosophists and made man and the world seem recent
and transient indeed. There had been eons when other Things ruled on
the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the
deathless Chinamen had told him, were still to be found as Cyclopean
stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time
before man came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the
stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of
eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought
Their images with Them.

These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether
of flesh and blood. They had shape--for did not this star-fashioned
image prove it?--but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars
were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky;
but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They
no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone
houses in Their great city of R'lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty
Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might
once more be ready for Them. But at that time some force from outside
must serve to liberate Their bodies. The spells that preserved Them
intact likewise prevented Them from making an initial move, and They
could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions
of years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe,
for Their mode of speech was transmitted thought. Even now They talked
in Their tombs. When, after infinities of chaos, the first men came,
the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by molding their
dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of
mammals.

Then, whispered Castro, those first men formed the cult around small
idols which the Great Ones showed them; idols brought in dim eras
from dark stars. That cult would never die till the stars came right
again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb
to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would
be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old
Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals
thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy. Then
the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill
and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a
holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate
rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow
forth the prophecy of their return.

In the elder time chosen men had talked with the entombed Old Ones in
dreams, but then something had happened. The great stone city R'lyeh,
with its monoliths and sepulchers, had sunk beneath the waves; and the
deep waters, full of the one primal mystery through which not even
thought can pass, had cut off the spectral intercourse. But memory
never died, and high priests said that the city would rise again when
the stars were right. Then came out of the earth the black spirits of
earth, moldy and shadowy, and full of dim rumors picked up in caverns
beneath forgotten sea-bottoms. But of them old Castro dared not speak
much. He cut himself off hurriedly, and no amount of persuasion or
subtlety could elicit more in this direction. The _size_ of the Old
Ones, too, he curiously declined to mention. Of the cult, he said that
he thought the center lay amid the pathless deserts of Arabia, where
Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched. It was not
allied to the European witch-cult, and was virtually unknown beyond its
members. No book had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless
Chinamen said that there were double meanings in the _Necronomicon_
of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as they
chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:

    "That is not dead which can eternal lie,
    And with strange eons even death may die."

Legrasse, deeply impressed and not a little bewildered, had inquired
in vain concerning the historic affiliations of the cult. Castro,
apparently, had told the truth when he said that it was wholly
secret. The authorities at Tulane University could shed no light upon
either cult or image, and now the detective had come to the highest
authorities in the country and met with no more than the Greenland tale
of Professor Webb.

       *       *       *       *       *

The feverish interest aroused at the meeting by Legrasse's tale,
corroborated as it was by the statuette, is echoed in the subsequent
correspondence of those who attended, although scant mention occurs in
the formal publication of the society. Caution is the first care of
those accustomed to face occasional charlatanry and imposture. Legrasse
for some time lent the image to Professor Webb, but at the latter's
death it was returned to him and remains in his possession, where I
viewed it not long ago. It is truly a terrible thing, and unmistakably
akin to the dream-sculpture of young Wilcox.

That my uncle was excited by the tale of the sculptor I did not
wonder, for what thoughts must arise upon hearing, after a knowledge
of what Legrasse had learned of the cult, of a sensitive young man
who had _dreamed_ not only the figure and exact hieroglyphics of the
swamp-found image and the Greenland devil tablet, but had come _in his
dreams_ upon at least three of the precise words of the formula uttered
alike by Eskimo diabolists and mongrel Louisianans? Professor Angell's
instant start on an investigation of the utmost thoroughness was
eminently natural; though privately I suspected young Wilcox of having
heard of the cult in some indirect way, and of having invented a series
of dreams to heighten and continue the mystery at my uncle's expense.
The dream-narratives and cuttings collected by the professor were, of
course, strong corroboration; but the rationalism of my mind and the
extravagance of the whole subject led me to adopt what I thought the
most sensible conclusions. So, after thoroughly studying the manuscript
again and correlating the theosophical and anthropological notes with
the cult narrative of Legrasse, I made a trip to Providence to see
the sculptor and give him the rebuke I thought proper for so boldly
imposing upon a learned and aged man.

Wilcox still lived alone in the Fleur-de-Lys Building in Thomas
Street, a hideous Victorian imitation of Seventeenth Century Breton
architecture which flaunts its stuccoed front amidst the lovely
Colonial houses on the ancient hill, and under the very shadow of the
finest Georgian steeple in America. I found him at work in his rooms,
and at once conceded from the specimens scattered about that his genius
is indeed profound and authentic. He will, I believe, be heard from
sometime as one of the great decadents; for he has crystallized in clay
and will one day mirror in marble those nightmares and fantasies which
Arthur Machen evokes in prose, and Clark Ashton Smith makes visible in
verse and in painting.

Dark, frail, and somewhat unkempt in aspect, he turned languidly at my
knock and asked me my business without rising. When I told him who I
was, he displayed some interest; for my uncle had excited his curiosity
in probing his strange dreams, yet had never explained the reason for
the study. I did not enlarge his knowledge in this regard, but sought
with some subtlety to draw him out.

In a short time I became convinced of his absolute sincerity, for he
spoke of the dreams in a manner none could mistake. They and their
subconscious residuum had influenced his art profoundly, and he showed
me a morbid statue whose contours almost made me shake with the potency
of its black suggestion. He could not recall having seen the original
of this thing except in his own dream bas-relief, but the outlines had
formed themselves insensibly under his hands. It was, no doubt, the
giant shape he had raved of in delirium. That he really knew nothing of
the hidden cult, save from what my uncle's relentless catechism had let
fall, he soon made clear; and again I strove to think of some way in
which he could possibly have received the weird impressions.

He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me
see with terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean city of slimy green
stone--whose _geometry_, he oddly said, was _all wrong_--and hear
with frightened expectancy the ceaseless, half-mental calling from
underground: "_Cthulhu fhtagn_," "_Cthulhu fhtagn_."

These words had formed part of that dread ritual which told of dead
Cthulhu's dream-vigil in his stone vault at R'lyeh, and I felt deeply
moved despite my rational beliefs. Wilcox, I was sure, had heard of
the cult in some casual way, and had soon forgotten it amidst the mass
of his equally weird reading and imagining. Later, by virtue of its
sheer impressiveness, it had found subconscious expression in dreams,
in the bas-relief, and in the terrible statue I now beheld; so that his
imposture upon my uncle had been a very innocent one. The youth was of
a type, at once slightly affected and slightly ill-mannered, which I
could never like; but I was willing enough now to admit both his genius
and his honesty. I took leave of him amicably, and wish him all the
success his talent promises.

The matter of the cult still remained to fascinate me, and at times
I had visions of personal fame from researches into its origin and
connections. I visited New Orleans, talked with Legrasse and others
of that old-time raiding-party, saw the frightful image, and even
questioned such of the mongrel prisoners as still survived. Old Castro,
unfortunately, had been dead for some years. What I now heard so
graphically at first hand, though it was really no more than a detailed
confirmation of what my uncle had written, excited me afresh; for I
felt sure that I was on the track of a very real, very secret, and
very ancient religion whose discovery would make me an anthropologist
of note. My attitude was still one of absolute materialism, _as I wish
it still were_, and I discounted with almost inexplicable perversity
the coincidence of the dream notes and odd cuttings collected by
Professor Angell.

One thing which I began to suspect, and which I now fear I _know_, is
that my uncle's death was far from natural. He fell on a narrow hill
street leading up from an ancient waterfront swarming with foreign
mongrels, after a careless push from a negro sailor. I did not forget
the mixed blood and marine pursuits of the cult-members in Louisiana,
and would not be surprized to learn of secret methods and poison
needles as ruthless and as anciently known as the cryptic rites and
beliefs. Legrasse and his men, it is true, have been let alone; but in
Norway a certain seaman who saw things is dead. Might not the deeper
inquiries of my uncle after encountering the sculptor's data have come
to sinister ears? I think Professor Angell died because he knew too
much, or because he was likely to learn too much. Whether I shall go as
he did remains to be seen, for I have learned much now.


                    _3. The Madness from the Sea._


If heaven ever wishes to grant me a boon, it will be a total effacing
of the results of a mere chance which fixed my eye on a certain stray
piece of shelf-paper. It was nothing on which I would naturally have
stumbled in the course of my daily round, for it was an old number of
an Australian journal, _Sydney Bulletin_ for April 18, 1925. It had
escaped even the cutting bureau which had at the time of its issuance
been avidly collecting material for my uncle's research.

I had largely given over my inquiries into what Professor Angell called
the "Cthulhu Cult," and was visiting a learned friend of Paterson,
New Jersey, the curator of a local museum and a mineralogist of note.
Examining one day the reserve specimens roughly set on the storage
shelves in a rear room of the museum, my eye was caught by an odd
picture in one of the old papers spread beneath the stones. It was the
_Sydney Bulletin_ I have mentioned, for my friend has wide affiliations
in all conceivable foreign parts; and the picture was a half-tone cut
of a hideous stone image almost identical with that which Legrasse had
found in the swamp.

Eagerly clearing the sheet of its precious contents, I scanned the item
in detail; and was disappointed to find it of only moderate length.
What it suggested, however, was of portentous significance to my
flagging quest; and I carefully tore it out for immediate action. It
read as follows:

                     MYSTERY DERELICT FOUND AT SEA

    _Vigilant_ Arrives With Helpless Armed New Zealand Yacht in Tow.
    One Survivor and Dead Man Found Aboard. Tale of Desperate Battle
    and Deaths at Sea. Rescued Seaman Refuses Particulars of Strange
    Experience. Odd Idol Found in His Possession. Inquiry to Follow.

        *       *       *       *       *

    The Morrison Co.'s freighter _Vigilant_, bound from Valparaiso,
    arrived this morning at its wharf in Darling Harbour, having in tow
    the battled and disabled but heavily armed steam yacht _Alert_ of
    Dunedin, N. Z., which was sighted April 12th in S. Latitude 34° 21',
    W. Longitude 152° 17', with one living and one dead man aboard.

    The _Vigilant_ left Valparaiso March 25th, and on April 2d was
    driven considerably south of her course by exceptionally heavy
    storms and monster waves. On April 12th the derelict was sighted;
    and though apparently deserted, was found upon boarding to contain
    one survivor in a half-delirious condition and one man who had
    evidently been dead for more than a week.

    The living man was clutching a horrible stone idol of unknown
    origin, about a foot in height, regarding whose nature authorities
    at Sydney University, the Royal Society, and the Museum in College
    Street all profess complete bafflement, and which the survivor says
    he found in the cabin of the yacht, in a small carved shrine of
    common pattern.

    This man, after recovering his senses, told an exceedingly strange
    story of piracy and slaughter. He is Gustaf Johansen, a Norwegian
    of some intelligence, and had been second mate of the two-masted
    schooner _Emma_ of Auckland, which sailed for Callao February 20th,
    with a complement of eleven men.

    The _Emma_, he says, was delayed and thrown widely south of her
    course by the great storm of March 1st, and on March 22d, in S.
    Latitude 49° 51´, W. Longitude 128° 34´, encountered the _Alert_,
    manned by a queer and evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes.
    Being ordered peremptorily to turn back, Capt. Collins refused;
    whereupon the strange crew began to fire savagely and without
    warning upon the schooner with a peculiarly heavy battery of brass
    cannon forming part of the yacht's equipment.

    The _Emma's_ men showed fight, says the survivor, and though the
    schooner began to sink from shots beneath the waterline they managed
    to heave alongside their enemy and board her, grappling with the
    savage crew on the yacht's deck, and being forced to kill them all,
    the number being slightly superior, because of their particularly
    abhorrent and desperate though rather clumsy mode of fighting.

    Three of the _Emma's_ men, including Capt. Collins and First Mate
    Green, were killed; and the remaining eight under Second Mate
    Johansen proceeded to navigate the captured yacht, going ahead in
    their original direction to see if any reason for their ordering
    back had existed.

    The next day, it appears, they raised and landed on a small island,
    although none is known to exist in that part of the ocean; and six
    of the men somehow died ashore, though Johansen is queerly reticent
    about this part of his story and speaks only of their falling into
    a rock chasm.

    Later, it seems, he and one companion boarded the yacht and tried
    to manage her, but were beaten about by the storm of April 2nd.

    From that time till his rescue on the 12th, the man remembers
    little, and he does not even recall when William Briden, his
    companion, died. Briden's death reveals no apparent cause, and was
    probably due to excitement or exposure.

    Cable advices from Dunedin report that the _Alert_ was well known
    there as an island trader, and bore an evil reputation along the
    waterfront. It was owned by a curious group of half-castes whose
    frequent meetings and night trips to the woods attracted no little
    curiosity; and it had set sail in great haste just after the storm
    and earth tremors of March 1st.

    Our Auckland correspondent gives the _Emma_ and her crew an
    excellent reputation, and Johansen is described as a sober and
    worthy man.

    The admiralty will institute an inquiry on the whole matter
    beginning tomorrow, at which every effort will be made to induce
    Johansen to speak more freely than he has done hitherto.

       *       *       *       *       *

This was all, together with the picture of the hellish image; but what
a train of ideas it started in my mind! Here were new treasuries of
data on the Cthulhu Cult, and evidence that it had strange interests
at sea as well as on land. What motive prompted the hybrid crew to
order back the _Emma_ as they sailed about with their hideous idol?
What was the unknown island on which six of the _Emma's_ crew had
died, and about which the mate Johansen was so secretive? What had the
vice-admiralty's investigation brought out, and what was known of the
noxious cult in Dunedin? And most marvelous of all, what deep and more
than natural linkage of dates was this which gave a malign and now
undeniable significance to the various turns of events so carefully
noted by my uncle?

March 1st--our February 28th according to the International Date
Line--the earthquake and storm had come. From Dunedin the _Alert_ and
her noisome crew had darted eagerly forth as if imperiously summoned,
and on the other side of the earth poets and artists had begun to
dream of a strange, dank Cyclopean city whilst a young sculptor had
molded in his sleep the form of the dreaded Cthulhu. March 23rd the
crew of the _Emma_ landed on an unknown island and left six men dead;
and on that date the dreams of sensitive men assumed a heightened
vividness and darkened with dread of a giant monster's malign pursuit,
whilst an architect had gone mad and a sculptor had lapsed suddenly
into delirium! And what of this storm of April 2nd--the date on which
all dreams of the dank city ceased, and Wilcox emerged unharmed from
the bondage of strange fever? What of all this--and of those hints of
old Castro about the sunken, star-born Old Ones and their coming reign;
their faithful cult _and their mastery of dreams_? Was I tottering on
the brink of cosmic horrors beyond man's power to bear? If so, they
must be horrors of the mind alone, for in some way the second of April
had put a stop to whatever monstrous menace had begun its siege of
mankind's soul.

       *       *       *       *       *

That evening, after a day of hurried cabling and arranging, I bade my
host adieu and took a train for San Francisco. In less than a month
I was in Dunedin; where, however, I found that little was known of
the strange cult-members who had lingered in the old sea taverns.
Waterfront scum was far too common for special mention; though there
was vague talk about one inland trip these mongrels had made, during
which faint drumming and red flame were noted on the distant hills.

In Auckland I learned that Johansen had returned _with yellow hair
turned white_ after a perfunctory and inconclusive questioning at
Sydney, and had thereafter sold his cottage in West Street and sailed
with his wife to his old home in Oslo. Of his stirring experience
he would tell his friends no more than he had told the admiralty
officials, and all they could do was to give me his Oslo address.

After that I went to Sydney and talked profitlessly with seamen and
members of the vice-admiralty court. I saw the _Alert_, now sold and
in commercial use, at Circular Quay in Sydney Cove, but gained nothing
from its non-committal bulk. The crouching image with its cuttlefish
head, dragon body, scaly wings, and hieroglyphed pedestal, was
preserved in the Museum at Hyde Park; and I studied it long and well,
finding it a thing of balefully exquisite workmanship, and with the
same utter mystery, terrible antiquity, and unearthly strangeness of
material which I had noted in Legrasse's smaller specimen. Geologists,
the curator told me, had found it a monstrous puzzle; for they vowed
that the world held no rock like it. Then I thought with a shudder of
what old Castro had told Legrasse about the primal Great Ones: "They
had come from the stars, and had brought Their images with Them."

Shaken with such a mental revolution as I had never before known, I
now resolved to visit Mate Johansen in Oslo. Sailing for London, I
re-embarked at once for the Norwegian capital; and one autumn day
landed at the trim wharves in the shadow of the Egeberg.

Johansen's address, I discovered, lay in the Old Town of King Harold
Haardrada, which kept alive the name of Oslo during all the centuries
that the greater city masqueraded as "Christiania." I made the brief
trip by taxicab, and knocked with palpitant heart at the door of a neat
and ancient building with plastered front. A sad-faced woman in black
answered my summons, and I was stung with disappointment when she told
me in halting English that Gustaf Johansen was no more.

He had not long survived his return, said his wife, for the doings at
sea in 1925 had broken him. He had told her no more than he had told
the public, but had left a long manuscript--of "technical matters" as
he said--written in English, evidently in order to safeguard her from
the peril of casual perusal. During a walk through a narrow lane near
the Gothenburg dock, a bundle of papers falling from an attic window
had knocked him down. Two Lascar sailors at once helped him to his
feet, but before the ambulance could reach him he was dead. Physicians
found no adequate cause for the end, and laid it to heart trouble and a
weakened constitution.

I now felt gnawing at my vitals that dark terror which will never leave
me till I, too, am at rest; "accidentally" or otherwise. Persuading the
widow that my connection with her husband's "technical matters" was
sufficient to entitle me to his manuscript, I bore the document away
and began to read it on the London boat.

It was a simple, rambling thing--a naive sailor's effort at a
post-facto diary--and strove to recall day by day that last awful
voyage. I can not attempt to transcribe it verbatim in all its
cloudiness and redundance, but I will tell its gist enough to show why
the sound of the water against the vessel's sides became so unendurable
to me that I stopped my ears with cotton.

Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though he saw the
city and the Thing, but I shall never sleep calmly again when I think
of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and in space,
and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream
beneath the sea, known and favored by a nightmare cult ready and eager
to loose them on the world whenever another earthquake shall heave
their monstrous stone city again to the sun and air.

       *       *       *       *       *

Johansen's voyage had begun just as he told it to the vice-admiralty.
The _Emma_, in ballast, had cleared Auckland on February 20th, and had
felt the full force of that earthquake-born tempest which must have
heaved up from the sea-bottom the horrors that filled men's dreams.
Once more under control, the ship was making good progress when held
up by the _Alert_ on March 22nd, and I could feel the mate's regret as
he wrote of her bombardment and sinking. Of the swarthy cult-fiends
on the _Alert_ he speaks with significant horror. There was some
peculiarly abominable quality about them which made their destruction
seem almost a duty, and Johansen shows ingenuous wonder at the charge
of ruthlessness brought against his party during the proceedings of the
court of inquiry. Then, driven ahead by curiosity in their captured
yacht under Johansen's command, the men sight a great stone pillar
sticking out of the sea, and in S. Latitude 47° 9', W. Longitude 126°
43' come upon a coastline of mingled mud, ooze, and weedy Cyclopean
masonry which can be nothing less than the tangible substance of
earth's supreme terror--the nightmare corpse-city of R'lyeh, that
was built in measureless eons behind history by the vast, loathsome
shapes that seeped down from the dark stars. There lay great Cthulhu
and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults and sending out at last,
after cycles incalculable, the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams
of the sensitive and called imperiously to the faithful to come on a
pilgrimage of liberation and restoration. All this Johansen did not
suspect, but God knows he soon saw enough!

I suppose that only a single mountain-top, the hideous monolith-crowned
citadel whereon great Cthulhu was buried, actually emerged from the
waters. When I think of the _extent_ of all that may be brooding down
there I almost wish to kill myself forthwith. Johansen and his men were
awed by the cosmic majesty of this dripping Babylon of elder demons,
and must have guessed without guidance that it was nothing of this or
of any sane planet. Awe at the unbelievable size of the greenish stone
blocks, at the dizzying height of the great carven monolith, and at the
stupefying identity of the colossal statues and bas-reliefs with the
queer image found in the shrine on the _Alert_, is poignantly visible
in every line of the mate's frightened description.

Without knowing what futurism is like, Johansen achieved something
very close to it when he spoke of the city; for instead of describing
any definite structure or building, he dwells only on the broad
impressions of vast angles and stone surfaces--surfaces too great to
belong to anything right or proper for this earth, and impious with
horrible images and hieroglyphs. I mention his talk about _angles_
because it suggests something Wilcox had told me of his awful dreams.
He had said that the _geometry_ of the dream-place he saw was abnormal,
non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart
from ours. Now an unlettered seaman felt the same thing whilst gazing
at the terrible reality.

Johansen and his men landed at a sloping mud-bank on this monstrous
Acropolis, and clambered slipperily up over titan oozy blocks which
could have been no mortal staircase. The very sun of heaven seemed
distorted when viewed through the polarizing miasma welling out from
this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked
leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second
glance showed concavity after the first showed convexity.

Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before
anything more definite than rock and ooze and weed was seen. Each
would have fled had he not feared the scorn of the others, and it was
only half-heartedly that they searched--vainly, as it proved--for some
portable souvenir to bear away.

It was Rodriguez the Portuguese who climbed up the foot of the monolith
and shouted of what he had found. The rest followed him, and looked
curiously at the immense carved door with the now familiar squid-dragon
bas-relief. It was, Johansen said, like a great barn-door; and they all
felt that it was a door because of the ornate lintel, threshold, and
jambs around it, though they could not decide whether it lay flat like
a trap-door or slantwise like an outside cellar-door. As Wilcox would
have said, the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be
sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative
position of everything else seemed fantasmally variable.

Briden pushed at the stone in several places without result. Then
Donovan felt over it delicately around the edge, pressing each point
separately as he went. He climbed interminably along the grotesque
stone molding--that is, one would call it climbing if the thing was not
after all horizontal--and the men wondered how any door in the universe
could be so vast. Then, very softly and slowly, the acre-great panel
began to give inward at the top; and they saw that it was balanced.

Donovan slid or somehow propelled himself down or along the jamb and
rejoined his fellows, and everyone watched the queer recession of the
monstrously carven portal. In this fantasy of prismatic distortion it
moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter
and perspective seemed upset.

The aperture was black with a darkness almost material. That
tenebrousness was indeed a _positive quality_; for it obscured such
parts of the inner walls as ought to have been revealed, and actually
burst forth like smoke from its eon-long imprisonment, visibly
darkening the sun as it slunk away into the shrunken and gibbous sky
on flapping membranous wings. The odor arising from the newly opened
depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought
he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and
everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight
and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black
doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness.

Poor Johansen's handwriting almost gave out when he wrote of this. Of
the six men who never reached the ship, he thinks two perished of pure
fright in that accursed instant. The Thing can not be described--there
is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy,
such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order.
A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What wonder that across the earth
a great architect went mad, and poor Wilcox raved with fever in that
telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of
the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and
what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent
sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great
Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.

Three men were swept up by the flabby claws before anybody turned. God
rest them, if there be any rest in the universe. They were Donovan,
Guerrera and Angstrom. Parker slipped as the other three were plunging
frenziedly over endless vistas of green-crusted rock to the boat,
and Johansen swears he was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which
shouldn't have been there; an angle which was acute, but behaved as
if it were obtuse. So only Briden and Johansen reached the boat, and
pulled desperately for the _Alert_ as the mountainous monstrosity
flopped down the slimy stones and hesitated floundering at the edge of
the water.

Steam had not been suffered to go down entirely, despite the departure
of all hands for the shore; and it was the work of only a few moments
of feverish rushing up and down between wheels and engines to get
the _Alert_ under way. Slowly, amidst the distorted horrors of that
indescribable scene, she began to churn the lethal waters; whilst on
the masonry of that charnel shore that was not of earth the titan Thing
from the stars slavered and gibbered like Polypheme cursing the fleeing
ship of Odysseus. Then, bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu
slid greasily into the water and began to pursue with vast wave-raising
strokes of cosmic potency. Briden looked back and went mad, laughing
shrilly as he kept on laughing at intervals till death found him one
night in the cabin whilst Johansen was wandering deliriously.

But Johansen had not given out yet. Knowing that the Thing could
surely overtake the _Alert_ until steam was fully up, he resolved
on a desperate chance; and, setting the engine for full speed, ran
lightning-like on deck and reversed the wheel. There was a mighty
eddying and foaming in the noisome brine, and as the steam mounted
higher and higher the brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against
the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern
of a demon galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came
nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on
relentlessly.

There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness
as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and
a sound that the chronicler would not put on paper. For an instant
the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then
there was only a venomous seething astern; where--God in heaven!--the
scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously
_recombining_ in its hateful original form, whilst its distance widened
every second as the _Alert_ gained impetus from its mounting steam.

       *       *       *       *       *

That was all. After that Johansen only brooded over the idol in the
cabin and attended to a few matters of food for himself and the
laughing maniac by his side. He did not try to navigate after the first
bold flight, for the reaction had taken something out of his soul. Then
came the storm of April 2nd, and a gathering of the clouds about his
consciousness. There is a sense of spectral whirling through liquid
gulfs of infinity, of dizzying rides through reeling universes on a
comet's tail, and of hysterical plunges from the pit to the moon and
from the moon back again to the pit, all livened by a cachinnating
chorus of the distorted, hilarious elder gods and the green, bat-winged
mocking imps of Tartarus.

Out of that dream came rescue--the _Vigilant_, the vice-admiralty
court, the streets of Dunedin, and the long voyage back home to the
old house by the Egeberg. He could not tell--they would think him mad.
He would write of what he knew before death came, but his wife must not
guess. Death would be a boon if only it could blot out the memories.

That was the document I read, and now I have placed it in the tin box
beside the bas-relief and the papers of Professor Angell. With it shall
go this record of mine--this test of my own sanity, wherein is pieced
together that which I hope may never be pieced together again. I have
looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the
skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison
to me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my uncle went, as
poor Johansen went, so I shall go. I know too much, and the cult still
lives.

Cthulhu still lives, too, I suppose, again in that chasm of stone
which has shielded him since the sun was young. His accursed city is
sunken once more, for the _Vigilant_ sailed over the spot after the
April storm; but his ministers on earth still bellow and prance and
slay around idol-capped monoliths in lonely places. He must have been
trapped by the sinking whilst within his black abyss, or else the world
would by now be screaming with fright and frenzy. Who knows the end?
What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness
waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering
cities of men. A time will come--but I must not and can not think! Let
me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put
caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.



# Project Gutenberg #50133

[Transcriber's note: This etext was produced from Weird Tales April
1929. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed.]


                       _The_ Dunwich Horror

                        by H. P. LOVECRAFT


     "Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimeras--dire stories of Celæno and
     the Harpies--may reproduce themselves in the brain of
     superstition--_but they were there before_. They are transcripts,
     types--the archetypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the
     recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come
     to affect us at all? Is it that we naturally conceive terror from
     such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to
     inflict upon us bodily injury? Oh, least of all! _These terrors
     are of older standing. They date beyond body_--or without the
     body, they would have been the same.... That the kind of fear here
     treated is purely spiritual--that it is strong in proportion as it
     is objectless on earth, that it predominates in the period of our
     sinless infancy--are difficulties the solution of which might
     afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and
     a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence."--Charles
     Lamb: _Witches and Other Night-Fears_.


1

When a traveler in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork
at the junction of the Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean's Corners he
comes upon a lonely and curious country. The ground gets higher, and
the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts
of the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent forest belts
seem too large, and the wild weeds, brambles, and grasses attain a
luxuriance not often found in settled regions. At the same time the
planted fields appear singularly few and barren; while the sparsely
scattered houses wear a surprizing uniform aspect of age, squalor, and
dilapidation. Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions
from the gnarled, solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling
doorsteps or in the sloping, rock-strewn meadows. Those figures are
so silent and furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden
things, with which it would be better to have nothing to do. When a
rise in the road brings the mountains in view above the deep woods,
the feeling of strange uneasiness is increased. The summits are too
rounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and
sometimes the sky silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circles
of tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned.

Gorges and ravines of problematical depth intersect the way, and the
crude wooden bridges always seem of dubious safety. When the road
dips again there are stretches of marshland that one instinctively
dislikes, and indeed almost fears at evening when unseen whippoorwills
chatter and the fireflies come out in abnormal profusion to dance to
the raucous, creepily insistent rhythms of stridently piping bullfrogs.
The thin, shining line of the Miskatonic's upper reaches has an oddly
serpentlike suggestion as it winds close to the feet of the domed hills
among which it rises.

As the hills draw nearer, one heeds their wooded sides more than their
stone-crowned tops. Those sides loom up so darkly and precipitously
that one wishes they would keep their distance, but there is no road by
which to escape them. Across a covered bridge one sees a small village
huddled between the stream and the vertical slope of Round Mountain,
and wonders at the cluster of rotting gambrel roofs bespeaking an
earlier architectural period than that of the neighboring region. It
is not reassuring to see, on a closer glance, that most of the houses
are deserted and falling to ruin, and that the broken-steepled church
now harbors the one slovenly mercantile establishment of the hamlet.
One dreads to trust the tenebrous tunnel of the bridge, yet there is no
way to avoid it. Once across, it is hard to prevent the impression of a
faint, malign odor about the village street, as of the massed mold and
decay of centuries. It is always a relief to get clear of the place,
and to follow the narrow road around the base of the hills and across
the level country beyond till it rejoins the Aylesbury pike. Afterward
one sometimes learns that one has been through Dunwich.

Outsiders visit Dunwich as seldom as possible, and since a certain
season of horror all the signboards pointing toward it have been taken
down. The scenery, judged by any ordinary esthetic canon, is more
than commonly beautiful; yet there is no influx of artists or summer
tourists. Two centuries ago, when talk of witch-blood, Satan-worship,
and strange forest presences was not laughed at, it was the custom to
give reasons for avoiding the locality. In our sensible age--since
the Dunwich horror of 1928 was hushed up by those who had the town's
and the world's welfare at heart--people shun it without knowing
exactly why. Perhaps one reason--though it can not apply to uninformed
strangers--is that the natives are now repellently decadent, having
gone far along that path of retrogression so common in many New England
backwaters. They have come to form a race by themselves, with the
well-defined mental and physical stigmata of degeneracy and inbreeding.
The average of their intelligence is wofully low, whilst their annals
reek of overt viciousness and of half-hidden murders, incests, and
deeds of almost unnamable violence and perversity. The old gentry,
representing the two or three armigerous families which came from
Salem in 1692, have kept somewhat above the general level of decay;
though many branches are sunk into the sordid populace so deeply that
only their names remain as a key to the origin they disgrace. Some of
the Whateleys and Bishops still send their eldest sons to Harvard and
Miskatonic, though those sons seldom return to the moldering gambrel
roofs under which they and their ancestors were born.

No one, even those who have the facts concerning the recent horror,
can say just what is the matter with Dunwich; though old legends speak
of unhallowed rites and conclaves of the Indians, amidst which they
called forbidden shapes of shadow out of the great rounded hills, and
made wild orgiastic prayers that were answered by loud crackings and
rumblings from the ground below. In 1747 the Reverend Abijah Hoadley,
newly come to the Congregational Church at Dunwich Village, preached a
memorable sermon on the close presence of Satan and his imps, in which
he said:

     It must be allow'd that these Blasphemies of an infernall Train
     of Dæmons are Matters of too common Knowledge to be deny'd; the
     cursed Voices of _Azazel_ and _Buzrael_, of _Beelzebub_ and
     _Belial_, being heard from under Ground by above a Score of
     credible Witnesses now living. I myself did not more than a
     Fortnight ago catch a very plain Discourse of evill Powers in the
     Hill behind my House; wherein there were a Rattling and Rolling,
     Groaning, Screeching, and Hissing, such as no Things of this Earth
     cou'd raise up, and which must needs have come from those Caves
     that only black Magick can discover, and only the Divell unlock.

Mr. Hoadley disappeared soon after delivering this sermon; but the
text, printed in Springfield, is still extant. Noises in the hills
continued to be reported from year to year, and still form a puzzle to
geologists and physiographers.

Other traditions tell of foul odors near the hill-crowning circles of
stone pillars, and of rushing airy presences to be heard faintly at
certain hours from stated points at the bottom of the great ravines;
while still others try to explain the Devil's Hop Yard--a bleak,
blasted hillside where no tree, shrub, or grass-blade will grow. Then,
too, the natives are mortally afraid of the numerous whippoorwills
which grow vocal on warm nights. It is vowed that the birds are
psychopomps lying in wait for the souls of the dying, and that they
time their eery cries in unison with the sufferer's struggling breath.
If they can catch the fleeing soul when it leaves the body, they
instantly flutter away chittering in demoniac laughter; but if they
fail, they subside gradually into a disappointed silence.

These tales, of course, are obsolete and ridiculous; because they come
down from very old times. Dunwich is indeed ridiculously old--older by
far than any of the communities within thirty miles of it. South of the
village one may still spy the cellar walls and chimney of the ancient
Bishop house, which was built before 1700; whilst the ruins of the mill
at the falls, built in 1806, form the most modern piece of architecture
to be seen. Industry did not flourish here, and the Nineteenth Century
factory movement proved short-lived. Oldest of all are the great
rings of rough-hewn stone columns on the hilltops, but these are more
generally attributed to the Indians than to the settlers. Deposits of
skulls and bones, found within these circles and around the sizable
table-like rock on Sentinel Hill, sustain the popular belief that such
spots were once the burial-places of the Pocumtucks; even though many
ethnologists, disregarding the absurd improbability of such a theory,
persist in believing the remains Caucasian.


2

It was in the township of Dunwich, in a large and partly inhabited
farmhouse set against a hillside four miles from the village and a mile
and a half from any other dwelling, that Wilbur Whateley was born at 5
a. m. on Sunday, the second of February, 1913. This date was recalled
because it was Candlemas, which people in Dunwich curiously observe
under another name; and because the noises in the hills had sounded,
and all the dogs of the countryside had barked persistently, throughout
the night before. Less worthy of notice was the fact that the mother
was one of the decadent Whateleys, a somewhat deformed, unattractive
albino woman of 35, living with an aged and half-insane father
about whom the most frightful tales of wizardry had been whispered
in his youth. Lavinia Whateley had no known husband, but according
to the custom of the region made no attempt to disavow the child;
concerning the other side of whose ancestry the country folk might--and
did--speculate as widely as they chose. On the contrary, she seemed
strangely proud of the dark, goatish-looking infant who formed such a
contrast to her own sickly and pink-eyed albinism, and was heard to
mutter many curious prophecies about its unusual powers and tremendous
future.

Lavinia was one who would be apt to mutter such things, for she was a
lone creature given to wandering amidst thunderstorms in the hills and
trying to read the great odorous books which her father had inherited
through two centuries of Whateleys, and which were fast falling to
pieces with age and worm-holes. She had never been to school, but was
filled with disjointed scraps of ancient lore that Old Whateley had
taught her. The remote farmhouse had always been feared because of Old
Whateley's reputation for black magic, and the unexplained death by
violence of Mrs. Whateley when Lavinia was twelve years old had not
helped to make the place popular. Isolated among strange influences,
Lavinia was fond of wild and grandiose daydreams and singular
occupations; nor was her leisure much taken up by household cares in a
home from which all standards of order and cleanliness had long since
disappeared.

There was a hideous screaming which echoed above even the hill noises
and the dogs' barking on the night Wilbur was born, but no known doctor
or midwife presided at his coming. Neighbors knew nothing of him till
a week afterward, when Old Whateley drove his sleigh through the snow
into Dunwich Village and discoursed incoherently to the group of
loungers at Osborn's general store. There seemed to be a change in the
old man--an added element of furtiveness in the clouded brain which
subtly transformed him from an object to a subject of fear--though he
was not one to be perturbed by any common family event. Amidst it all
he showed some trace of the pride later noticed in his daughter, and
what he said of the child's paternity was remembered by many of his
hearers years afterward.

"I dun't keer what folks think--ef Lavinny's boy looked like his pa, he
wouldn't look like nothin' ye expeck. Ye needn't think the only folks
is the folks hereabouts. Lavinny's read some, an' has seed some things
the most o' ye only tell abaout. I calc'late her man is as good a
husban' as ye kin find this side of Aylesbury; an' ef ye knowed as much
abaout the hills as I dew, ye wouldn't ast no better church weddin' nor
her'n. Let me tell ye suthin'--_some day yew folks'll hear a child o'
Lavinny's a-callin' its father's name on the top o' Sentinel Hill!_"

The only persons who saw Wilbur during the first month of his life
were old Zechariah Whateley, of the undecayed Whateleys, and Earl
Sawyer's common-law wife, Mamie Bishop. Mamie's visit was frankly one
of curiosity, and her subsequent tales did justice to her observations;
but Zechariah came to lead a pair of Alderney cows which Old Whateley
had bought of his son Curtis. This marked the beginning of a course of
cattle-buying on the part of small Wilbur's family which ended only
in 1928, when the Dunwich horror came and went; yet at no time did
the ramshackle Whateley barn seem over-crowded with livestock. There
came a period when people were curious enough to steal up and count
the herd that grazed precariously on the steep hillside above the old
farmhouse, and they could never find more than ten or twelve anemic,
bloodless-looking specimens. Evidently some blight or distemper,
perhaps sprung from the unwholesome pasturage or the diseased fungi
and timbers of the filthy barn, caused a heavy mortality amongst the
Whateley animals. Odd wounds or sores, having something of the aspect
of incisions, seemed to afflict the visible cattle; and once or twice
during the earlier months certain callers fancied they could discern
similar sores about the throats of the gray, unshaven old man and his
slatternly, crinkly-haired albino daughter.

In the spring after Wilbur's birth Lavinia resumed her customary
rambles in the hills, bearing in her misproportioned arms the swarthy
child. Public interest in the Whateleys subsided after most of the
country folk had seen the baby, and no one bothered to comment on the
swift development which that newcomer seemed every day to exhibit.
Wilbur's growth was indeed phenomenal, for within three months of his
birth he had attained a size and muscular power not usually found in
infants under a full year of age. His motions and even his vocal sounds
showed a restraint and deliberateness highly peculiar in an infant,
and no one was really unprepared when, at seven months, he began to
walk unassisted, with falterings which another month was sufficient to
remove.

It was somewhat after this time--on Hallowe'en--that a great blaze was
seen at midnight on the top of Sentinel Hill where the old table-like
stone stands amidst its tumulus of ancient bones. Considerable talk
was started when Silas Bishop--of the undecayed Bishops--mentioned
having seen the boy running sturdily up that hill ahead of his mother
about an hour before the blaze was remarked. Silas was rounding up a
stray heifer, but he nearly forgot his mission when he fleetingly spied
the two figures in the dim light of his lantern. They darted almost
noiselessly through the underbrush, and the astonished watcher seemed
to think they were entirely unclothed. Afterward he could not be sure
about the boy, who may have had some kind of a fringed belt and a pair
of dark blue trunks or trousers on. Wilbur was never subsequently seen
alive and conscious without complete and tightly buttoned attire, the
disarrangement or threatened disarrangement of which always seemed to
fill him with anger and alarm. His contrast with his squalid mother and
grandfather in this respect was thought very notable until the horror
of 1928 suggested the most valid of reasons.

The next January gossips were mildly interested in the fact that
"Lavinny's black brat" had commenced to talk, and at the age of only
eleven months. His speech was somewhat remarkable both because of its
difference from the ordinary accents of the region, and because it
displayed a freedom from infantile lisping of which many children of
three or four might well be proud. The boy was not talkative, yet when
he spoke he seemed to reflect some elusive element wholly unpossessed
by Dunwich and its denizens. The strangeness did not reside in what he
said, or even in the simple idioms he used; but seemed vaguely linked
with his intonation or with the internal organs that produced the
spoken sounds. His facial aspect, too, was remarkable for its maturity;
for though he shared his mother's and grandfather's chinlessness, his
firm and precociously shaped nose united with the expression on his
large, dark, almost Latin eyes to give him an air of quasi-adulthood
and well-nigh preternatural intelligence. He was, however, exceedingly
ugly despite his appearance of brilliancy; there being something almost
goatish or animalistic about his thick lips, large-pored, yellowish
skin, coarse crinkly hair, and oddly elongated ears. He was soon
disliked even more decidedly than his mother and grandsire, and all
conjectures about him were spiced with references to the bygone magic
of Old Whateley, and how the hills once shook when he shrieked the
dreadful name of _Yog-Sothoth_ in the midst of a circle of stones with
a great book open in his arms before him. Dogs abhorred the boy, and
he was always obliged to take various defensive measures against their
barking menace.


3

Meanwhile Old Whateley continued to buy cattle without measurably
increasing the size of his herd. He also cut timber and began to
repair the unused parts of his house--a spacious, peaked-roofed affair
whose rear end was buried entirely in the rocky hillside, and whose
three least-ruined ground-floor rooms had always been sufficient for
himself and his daughter. There must have been prodigious reserves
of strength in the old man to enable him to accomplish so much hard
labor; and though he still babbled dementedly at times, his carpentry
seemed to show the effects of sound calculation. It had really begun
as soon as Wilbur was born, when one of the many tool-sheds had been
put suddenly in order, clapboarded, and fitted with a stout fresh lock.
Now, in restoring the abandoned upper story of the house, he was a no
less thorough craftsman. His mania showed itself only in his tight
boarding-up of all the windows in the reclaimed section--though many
declared that it was a crazy thing to bother with the reclamation at
all. Less inexplicable was his fitting-up of another downstairs room
for his new grandson--a room which several callers saw, though no one
was ever admitted to the closely-boarded upper story. This chamber
he lined with tall, firm shelving; along which he began gradually to
arrange, in apparently careful order, all the rotting ancient books and
parts of books which during his own day had been heaped promiscuously
in odd corners of the various rooms.

"I made some use of 'em," he would say as he tried to mend a torn
black-letter page with paste prepared on the rusty kitchen stove, "but
the boy's fitten to make better use of 'em. He'd orter hev 'em as well
sot as he kin for they're goin' to be all of his larnin'."

When Wilbur was a year and seven months old--in September of 1914--his
size and accomplishments were almost alarming. He had grown as large as
a child of four, and was a fluent and incredibly intelligent talker.
He ran freely about the fields and hills, and accompanied his mother
on all her wanderings. At home he would pore diligently over the queer
pictures and charts in his grandfather's books, while Old Whateley
would instruct and catechize him through long, hushed afternoons. By
this time the restoration of the house was finished, and those who
watched it wondered why one of the upper windows had been made into a
solid plank door. It was a window in the rear of the east gable end,
close against the hill; and no one could imagine why a cleated wooden
runway was built up to it from the ground. About the period of this
work's completion people noticed that the old tool-house, tightly
locked and windowlessly clapboarded since Wilbur's birth, had been
abandoned again. The door swung listlessly open, and when Earl Sawyer
once stepped within after a cattle-selling call on Old Whateley he was
quite discomposed by the singular odor he encountered--such a stench,
he averred, as he had never before smelt in all his life except near
the Indian circles on the hills, and which could not come from anything
sane or of this earth. But then, the homes and sheds of Dunwich folk
have never been remarkable for olfactory immaculateness.

The following months were void of visible events, save that everyone
swore to a slow but steady increase in the mysterious hill noises. On
May Eve of 1915 there were tremors which even the Aylesbury people
felt, whilst the following Hallowe'en produced an underground rumbling
queerly synchronized with bursts of flame--"them witch Whateleys'
doin's"--from the summit of Sentinel Hill. Wilbur was growing up
uncannily, so that he looked like a boy of ten as he entered his
fourth year. He read avidly by himself now; but talked much less than
formerly. A settled taciturnity was absorbing him, and for the first
time people began to speak specifically of the dawning look of evil in
his goatish face. He would sometimes mutter an unfamiliar jargon, and
chant in bizarre rhythms which chilled the listener with a sense of
unexplainable terror. The aversion displayed toward him by dogs had now
become a matter of wide remark, and he was obliged to carry a pistol
in order to traverse the countryside in safety. His occasional use of
the weapon did not enhance his popularity amongst the owners of canine
guardians.

The few callers at the house would often find Lavinia alone on the
ground floor, while odd cries and footsteps resounded in the boarded-up
second story. She would never tell what her father and the boy were
doing up there, though once she turned pale and displayed an abnormal
degree of fear when a jocose fish-peddler tried the locked door leading
to the stairway. That peddler told the store loungers at Dunwich
Village that he thought he heard a horse stamping on that floor above.
The loungers reflected, thinking of the door and runway, and of
the cattle that so swiftly disappeared. Then they shuddered as they
recalled tales of Old Whateley's youth, and of the strange things that
are called out of the earth when a bullock is sacrificed at the proper
time to certain heathen gods. It had for some time been noticed that
dogs had begun to hate and fear the whole Whateley place as violently
as they hated and feared young Wilbur personally.

In 1917 the war came, and Squire Sawyer Whateley, as chairman of the
local draft board, had hard work finding a quota of young Dunwich men
fit even to be sent to a development camp. The government, alarmed at
such signs of wholesale regional decadence, sent several officers and
medical experts to investigate; conducting a survey which New England
newspaper readers may still recall. It was the publicity attending this
investigation which set reporters on the track of the Whateleys, and
caused the _Boston Globe_ and _Arkham Advertiser_ to print flamboyant
Sunday stories of young Wilbur's precociousness, Old Whateley's black
magic, the shelves of strange books, the sealed second story of the
ancient farmhouse, and the weirdness of the whole region and its hill
noises. Wilbur was four and a half then, and looked like a lad of
fifteen. His lip and cheek were fuzzy with a coarse dark down, and his
voice had begun to break. Earl Sawyer went out to the Whateley place
with both sets of reporters and camera men, and called their attention
to the queer stench which now seemed to trickle down from the sealed
upper spaces. It was, he said, exactly like a smell he had found in the
tool-shed abandoned when the house was finally repaired, and like the
faint odors which he sometimes thought he caught near the stone circles
on the mountains. Dunwich folk read the stories when they appeared, and
grinned over the obvious mistakes. They wondered, too, why the writers
made so much of the fact that Old Whateley always paid for his cattle
in gold pieces of extremely ancient date. The Whateleys had received
their visitors with ill-concealed distaste, though they did not dare
court further publicity by a violent resistance or refusal to talk.


4

For a decade the annals of the Whateleys sink indistinguishably into
the general life of a morbid community used to their queer ways and
hardened to their May Eve and All-Hallow orgies. Twice a year they
would light fires on the top of Sentinel Hill, at which times the
mountain rumblings would recur with greater and greater violence; while
at all seasons there were strange and portentous doings at the lonely
farmhouse. In the course of time callers professed to hear sounds
in the sealed upper story even when all the family were downstairs,
and they wondered how swiftly or how lingeringly a cow or bullock
was usually sacrificed. There was talk of a complaint to the Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; but nothing ever came of
it, since Dunwich folk are never anxious to call the outside world's
attention to themselves.

About 1923, when Wilbur was a boy of ten whose mind, voice, stature,
and bearded face gave all the impressions of maturity, a second great
siege of carpentry went on at the old house. It was all inside the
sealed upper part, and from bits of discarded lumber people concluded
that the youth and his grandfather had knocked out all the partitions
and even removed the attic floor, leaving only one vast open void
between the ground story and the peaked roof. They had torn down the
great central chimney, too, and fitted the rusty range with a flimsy
outside tin stove-pipe.

In the spring after this event Old Whateley noticed the growing number
of whippoorwills that would come out of Cold Spring Glen to chirp under
his window at night. He seemed to regard the circumstance as one of
great significance, and told the loungers at Osborn's that he thought
his time had almost come.

"They whistle jest in tune with my breathin' naow," he said, "an' I
guess they're gittin' ready to ketch my soul. They know it's a-goin'
aout, an' dun't calc'late to miss it. Yew'll know, boys, arter I'm
gone, whether they git me er not. Ef they dew, they'll keep up
a-singin' an' laffin' till break o' day. Ef they dun't, they'll kinder
quiet daown like. I expeck them an' the souls they hunts fer hev some
pretty tough tussles sometimes."

On Lammas Night, 1924, Dr. Houghton of Aylesbury was hastily summoned
by Wilbur Whateley, who had lashed his one remaining horse through the
darkness and telephoned from Osborn's in the village. He found Old
Whateley in a very grave state, with a cardiac action and stertorous
breathing that told of an end not far off. The shapeless albino
daughter and oddly bearded grandson stood by the bedside, whilst from
the vacant abyss overhead there came a disquieting suggestion of
rhythmical surging or lapping, as of the waves on some level beach. The
doctor, though, was chiefly disturbed by the chattering night birds
outside; a seemingly limitless legion of whippoorwills that cried their
endless message in repetitions timed diabolically to the wheezing gasps
of the dying man. It was uncanny and unnatural--too much, thought Dr.
Houghton, like the whole of the region he had entered so reluctantly in
response to the urgent call.

Toward 1 o'clock Old Whateley gained consciousness, and interrupted his
wheezing to choke out a few words to his grandson.

"More space, Willy, more space soon. Yew grows--an' _that_ grows
faster. It'll be ready to sarve ye soon, boy. Open up the gates to
Yog-Sothoth with the long chant that ye'll find on page 751 _of the
complete edition_, an' _then_ put a match to the prison. Fire from
airth can't burn it nohaow!"

He was obviously quite mad. After a pause, during which the flock of
whippoorwills outside adjusted their cries to the altered tempo while
some indications of the strange hill noises came from afar off, he
added another sentence or two.

"Feed it reg'lar, Willy, an' mind the quantity; but dun't let it grow
too fast fer the place, fer ef it busts quarters or gits aout afore ye
opens to Yog-Sothoth, it's all over an' no use. Only them from beyont
kin make it multiply an' work.... Only them, the old uns as wants to
come back...."

But speech gave place to gasps again, and Lavinia screamed at the
way the whippoorwills followed the change. It was the same for more
than an hour, when the final throaty rattle came. Dr. Houghton drew
shrunken lids over the glazing gray eyes as the tumult of birds faded
imperceptibly to silence. Lavinia sobbed, but Wilbur only chuckled
whilst the hill noises rumbled faintly.

"They didn't git him," he muttered in his heavy bass voice.

Wilbur was by this time a scholar of really tremendous erudition in
his one-sided way, and was quietly known by correspondence to many
librarians in distant places where rare and forbidden books of old days
are kept. He was more and more hated and dreaded around Dunwich because
of certain youthful disappearances which suspicion laid vaguely at his
door; but was always able to silence inquiry through fear or through
use of that fund of old-time gold which still, as in his grandfather's
time, went forth regularly and increasingly for cattle-buying. He
was now tremendously mature of aspect, and his height, having reached
the normal adult limit, seemed inclined to wax beyond that figure. In
1925, when a scholarly correspondent from Miskatonic University called
upon him one day and departed pale and puzzled, he was fully six and
three-quarters feet tall.

Through all the years Wilbur had treated his half-deformed albino
mother with a growing contempt, finally forbidding her to go to the
hills with him on May Eve and Hallowmass; and in 1926 the poor creature
complained to Mamie Bishop of being afraid of him.

"They's more abaout him as I knows than I kin tell ye, Mamie," she
said, "an' naowadays they's more nor what I know myself. I vaow afur
Gawd, I dun't know what he wants nor what he's a-tryin' to dew."

That Hallowe'en the hill noises sounded louder than ever, and fire
burned on Sentinel Hill as usual, but people paid more attention
to the rhythmical screaming of vast flocks of unnaturally belated
whippoorwills which seemed to be assembled near the unlighted Whateley
farmhouse. After midnight their shrill notes burst into a kind of
pandemoniac cachinnation which filled all the countryside, and not
until dawn did they finally quiet down. Then they vanished, hurrying
southward where they were fully a month overdue. What this meant, no
one could quite be certain till later. None of the countryfolk seemed
to have died--but poor Lavinia Whateley, the twisted albino, was never
seen again.

In the summer of 1927 Wilbur repaired two sheds in the farmyard and
began moving his books and effects out to them. Soon afterward Earl
Sawyer told the loungers at Osborn's that more carpentry was going on
in the Whateley farmhouse. Wilbur was closing all the doors and windows
on the ground floor, and seemed to be taking out partitions as he and
his grandfather had done upstairs four years before. He was living
in one of the sheds, and Sawyer thought he seemed unusually worried
and tremulous. People generally suspected him of knowing something
about his mother's disappearance, and very few ever approached his
neighborhood now. His height had increased to more than seven feet, and
showed no signs of ceasing its development.


5

The following winter brought an event no less strange than Wilbur's
first trip outside the Dunwich region. Correspondence with the Widener
Library at Harvard, the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, the British
Museum, the University of Buenos Aires, and the Library of Miskatonic
University at Arkham had failed to get him the loan of a book he
desperately wanted; so at length he set out in person, shabby, dirty,
bearded, and uncouth of dialect, to consult the copy at Miskatonic,
which was the nearest to him geographically. Almost eight feet tall,
and carrying a cheap new valise from Osborn's general store, this
dark and goatish gargoyle appeared one day in Arkham in quest of the
dreaded volume kept under lock and key at the college library--the
hideous _Necronomicon_ of the mad Arab Alhazred in Olaus Wormius' Latin
version, as printed in Spain in the Seventeenth Century. He had never
seen a city before, but had no thought save to find his way to the
university grounds; where, indeed, he passed heedlessly by the great
white-fanged watchdog that barked with unnatural fury and enmity, and
tugged frantically at its stout chain.

Wilbur had with him the priceless but imperfect copy of Dr. Dee's
English version which his grandfather had bequeathed him, and upon
receiving access to the Latin copy he at once began to collate the two
texts with the aim of discovering a certain passage which would have
come on the 751st page of his own defective volume. This much he could
not civilly refrain from telling the librarian--the same erudite Henry
Armitage (A. M. Miskatonic, Ph. D. Princeton, Litt. D. Johns Hopkins)
who had once called at the farm, and who now politely plied him with
questions. He was looking, he had to admit, for a kind of formula or
incantation containing the frightful name _Yog-Sothoth_, and it puzzled
him to find discrepancies, duplications, and ambiguities which made
the matter of determination far from easy. As he copied the formula
he finally chose, Dr. Armitage looked involuntarily over his shoulder
at the open pages; the left-hand one of which, in the Latin version,
contained such monstrous threats to the peace and sanity of the world.

    Nor is it to be thought [ran the text as Armitage mentally
    translated it] that man is either the oldest or the last of earth's
    masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone.
    The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not
    in the spaces we know, but _between_ them. They walk serene and
    primal, undimensioned and to us unseen. _Yog-Sothoth_ knows the
    gate. _Yog-Sothoth_ is the gate. _Yog-Sothoth_ is the key and
    guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in
    _Yog-Sothoth_. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old,
    and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have
    trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no
    one can behold Them as They tread. By Their smell can men sometimes
    know Them near, but of Their semblance can no man know, _saving
    only in the features of those They have begotten on mankind_; and
    of those are there many sorts, differing in likeness from man's
    truest eidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is
    _They_. They walk unseen and foul in lonely places where the Words
    have been spoken and the Rites howled through at their Seasons.
    The wind gibbers with Their voices, and the earth mutters with
    Their consciousness. They bend the forest and crush the city, yet
    may not forest or city behold the hand that smites. Kadath in the
    cold waste hath known Them, and what man knows Kadath? The ice
    desert of the South and the sunken isles of Ocean hold stones
    whereon Their seal is engraven, but who hath seen the deep frozen
    city or the sealed tower long garlanded with seaweed and barnacles?
    Great Cthulhu is Their cousin, yet can he spy Them only dimly. _Iä
    Shub-Niggurath!_ As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their hand is at
    your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one
    with your guarded threshold. _Yog-Sothoth_ is the key to the gate,
    whereby the spheres meet. Man rules now where They ruled once; They
    shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, and
    after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall
    They reign again.

Dr. Armitage, associating what he was reading with what he had heard
of Dunwich and its brooding presences, and of Wilbur Whateley and his
dim, hideous aura that stretched from a dubious birth to a cloud of
probable matricide, felt a wave of fright as tangible as a draft of the
tomb's cold clamminess. The bent, goatish giant before him seemed like
the spawn of another planet or dimension; like something only partly of
mankind, and linked to black gulfs of essence and entity that stretch
like titan fantasms beyond all spheres of force and matter, space and
time.

Presently Wilbur raised his head and began speaking in that strange,
resonant fashion which hinted at sound-producing organs unlike the run
of mankind's.

"Mr. Armitage," he said, "I calc'late I've got to take that book home.
They's things in it I've got to try under sarten conditions that I
can't git here, an' it 'ud be a mortal sin to let a red-tape rule hold
me up. Let me take it along, sir, an' I'll swar they wun't nobody know
the difference. I dun't need to tell ye I'll take good keer of it. It
wa'n't me that put this Dee copy in the shape it is...."

He stopped as he saw firm denial on the librarian's face, and his own
goatish features grew crafty. Armitage, half ready to tell him he might
make a copy of what parts he needed, thought suddenly of the possible
consequences and checked himself. There was too much responsibility
in giving such a being the key to such blasphemous outer spheres.
Whateley saw how things stood, and tried to answer lightly.

"Wal, all right, ef ye feel that way abaout it. Maybe Harvard wun't be
so fussy as yew be." And without saying more he rose and strode out of
the building, stooping at each doorway.

Armitage heard the savage yelping of the great watchdog, and studied
Whateley's gorilla-like lope as he crossed the bit of campus visible
from the window. He thought of the wild tales he had heard, and
recalled the old Sunday stories in the _Advertiser_; these things, and
the lore he had picked up from Dunwich rustics and villagers during
his one visit there. Unseen things not of earth--or at least not of
tri-dimensional earth--rushed fetid and horrible through New England's
glens, and brooded obscenely on the mountain tops. Of this he had
long felt certain. Now he seemed to sense the close presence of some
terrible part of the intruding horror, and to glimpse a hellish advance
in the black dominion of the ancient and once passive nightmare. He
locked away the _Necronomicon_ with a shudder of disgust, but the room
still reeked with an unholy and unidentifiable stench. "As a foulness
shall ye know them," he quoted. Yes--the odor was the same as that
which had sickened him at the Whateley farmhouse less than three years
before. He thought of Wilbur, goatish and ominous, once again, and
laughed mockingly at the village rumors of his parentage.

"Inbreeding?" Armitage muttered half aloud to himself. "Great God, what
simpletons! Show them Arthur Machen's _Great God Pan_ and they'll think
it a common Dunwich scandal! But what thing--what cursed shapeless
influence on or off this three-dimensioned earth--was Wilbur Whateley's
father? Born on Candlemas--nine months after May Eve of 1912, when the
talk about the queer earth noises reached clear to Arkham--what walked
on the mountains that May Night? What Roodmas horror fastened itself on
the world in half-human flesh and blood?"

During the ensuing weeks Dr. Armitage set about to collect all possible
data on Wilbur Whateley and the formless presences around Dunwich. He
got in communication with Dr. Houghton of Aylesbury, who had attended
Old Whateley in his last illness, and found much to ponder over in the
grandfather's last words as quoted by the physician. A visit to Dunwich
Village failed to bring out much that was new; but a close survey of
the _Necronomicon_, in those parts which Wilbur had sought so avidly,
seemed to supply new and terrible clues to the nature, methods, and
desires of the strange evil so vaguely threatening this planet. Talks
with several students of archaic lore in Boston, and letters to many
others elsewhere, gave him a growing amazement which passed slowly
through varied degrees of alarm to a state of really acute spiritual
fear. As the summer drew on he felt dimly that something ought to be
done about the lurking terrors of the upper Miskatonic valley, and
about the monstrous being known to the human world as Wilbur Whateley.


6

The Dunwich horror itself came between Lammas and the equinox in 1928,
and Dr. Armitage was among those who witnessed its monstrous prologue.
He had heard, meanwhile, of Whateley's grotesque trip to Cambridge,
and of his frantic efforts to borrow or copy from the _Necronomicon_
at the Widener Library. Those efforts had been in vain, since Armitage
had issued warnings of the keenest intensity to all librarians having
charge of the dreaded volume. Wilbur had been shockingly nervous at
Cambridge; anxious for the book, yet almost equally anxious to get
home again, as if he feared the results of being away long.

Early in August the half-expected outcome developed, and in the small
hours of the third Dr. Armitage was awakened suddenly by the wild,
fierce cries of the savage watchdog on the college campus. Deep and
terrible, the snarling, half-mad growls and barks continued; always
in mounting volume, but with hideously significant pauses. Then there
rang out a scream from a wholly different throat--such a scream as
roused half the sleepers of Arkham and haunted their dreams ever
afterward--such a scream as could come from no being born of earth, or
wholly of earth.

Armitage hastened into some clothing and rushed across the street and
lawn to the college buildings, saw that others were ahead of him; and
heard the echoes of a burglar-alarm still shrilling from the library.
An open window showed black and gaping in the moonlight. What had come
had indeed completed its entrance; for the barking and the screaming,
now fast fading into a mixed low growling and moaning, proceeded
unmistakably from within. Some instinct warned Armitage that what was
taking place was not a thing for unfortified eyes to see, so he brushed
back the crowd with authority as he unlocked the vestibule door. Among
the others he saw Professor Warren Rice and Dr. Francis Morgan, men to
whom he had told some of his conjectures and misgivings; and these two
he motioned to accompany him inside. The inward sounds, except for a
watchful, droning whine from the dog, had by this time quite subsided;
but Armitage now perceived with a sudden start that a loud chorus of
whippoorwills among the shrubbery had commenced a damnably rhythmical
piping, as if in unison with the last breath of a dying man.

The building was full of a frightful stench which Dr. Armitage knew
too well, and the three men rushed across the hall to the small
genealogical reading-room whence the low whining came. For a second
nobody dared to turn on the light; then Armitage summoned up his
courage and snapped the switch. One of the three--it is not certain
which--shrieked aloud at what sprawled before them among disordered
tables and overturned chairs. Professor Rice declares that he wholly
lost consciousness for an instant, though he did not stumble or fall.

The thing that lay half-bent on its side in a fetid pool of
greenish-yellow ichor and tarry stickiness was almost nine feet tall,
and the dog had torn off all the clothing and some of the skin. It
was not quite dead, but twitched silently and spasmodically while its
chest heaved in monstrous unison with the mad piping of the expectant
whippoorwills outside. Bits of shoe-leather and fragments of apparel
were scattered about the room, and just inside the window an empty
canvas sack lay where it had evidently been thrown. Near the central
desk a revolver had fallen, a dented but undischarged cartridge later
explaining why it had not been fired. The thing itself, however,
crowded out all other images at the time. It would be trite and not
wholly accurate to say that no human pen could describe it, but one may
properly say that it could not be vividly visualized by anyone whose
ideas of aspect and contour are too closely bound up with the common
life-forms of this planet and of the three known dimensions. It was
partly human, beyond a doubt, with very manlike hands and head, and the
goatish, chinless face had the stamp of the Whateleys upon it. But the
torso and lower parts of the body were teratologically fabulous, so
that only generous clothing could ever have enabled it to walk on earth
unchallenged or uneradicated.

Above the waist it was semi-anthropomorphic; though its chest, where
the dog's rending paws still rested watchfully, had the leathery,
reticulated hide of a crocodile or alligator. The back was piebald
with yellow and black, and dimly suggested the squamous covering of
certain snakes. Below the waist, though, it was the worst; for here
all human resemblance left off and sheer fantasy began. The skin was
thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdomen a score of
long greenish-gray tentacles with red sucking mouths protruded limply.
Their arrangement was odd, and seemed to follow the symmetries of some
cosmic geometry unknown to earth or the solar system. On each of the
hips, deep set in a kind of pinkish, ciliated orbit, was what seemed to
be a rudimentary eye; whilst in lieu of a tail there depended a kind of
trunk or feeler with purple annular markings, and with many evidences
of being an undeveloped mouth or throat. The limbs, save for their
black fur, roughly resembled the hind legs of prehistoric earth's giant
saurians; and terminated in ridgy-veined pads that were neither hooves
nor claws. When the thing breathed, its tail and tentacles rhythmically
changed color, as if from some circulatory cause normal to the
non-human side of its ancestry. In the tentacles this was observable as
a deepening of the greenish tinge, whilst in the tail it was manifest
as a yellowish appearance which alternated with a sickly grayish-white
in the spaces between the purple rings. Of genuine blood there was
none; only the fetid greenish-yellow ichor which trickled along the
painted floor beyond the radius of the stickiness, and left a curious
discoloration behind it.

As the presence of the three men seemed to rouse the dying thing, it
began to mumble without turning or raising its head. Dr. Armitage
made no written record of its mouthings, but asserts confidently that
nothing in English was uttered. At first the syllables defied all
correlation with any speech of earth, but toward the last there came
some disjointed fragments evidently taken from the _Necronomicon_,
that monstrous blasphemy in quest of which the thing had perished.
Those fragments, as Armitage recalls them, ran something like "_N'gai,
n'gha'ghaa, bugg-shoggog, y'hah; Yog-Sothoth, Yog-Sothoth...._"
They trailed off into nothingness as the whippoorwills shrieked in
rhythmical crescendoes of unholy anticipation.

Then came a halt in the gasping, and the dog raised his head in a long,
lugubrious howl. A change came over the yellow, goatish face of the
prostrate thing, and the great black eyes fell in appallingly. Outside
the window the shrilling of the whippoorwills had suddenly ceased, and
above the murmurs of the gathering crowd there came the sound of a
panic-struck whirring and fluttering. Against the moon vast clouds of
feathery watchers rose and raced from sight, frantic at that which they
had sought for prey.

All at once the dog started up abruptly, gave a frightened bark, and
leaped nervously out the window by which it had entered. A cry rose
from the crowd, and Dr. Armitage shouted to the men outside that no
one must be admitted till the police or medical examiner came. He was
thankful that the windows were just too high to permit of peering
in, and drew the dark curtains carefully down over each one. By this
time two policemen had arrived; and Dr. Morgan, meeting them in the
vestibule, was urging them for their own sakes to postpone entrance to
the stench-filled reading-room till the examiner came and the prostrate
thing could be covered up.

Meanwhile frightful changes were taking place on the floor. One need
not describe the _kind_ and _rate_ of shrinkage and disintegration that
occurred before the eyes of Dr. Armitage and Professor Rice; but it is
permissible to say that, aside from the external appearance of face
and hands, the really human elements in Wilbur Whateley must have been
very small. When the medical examiner came, there was only a sticky
whitish mass on the painted boards, and the monstrous odor had nearly
disappeared. Apparently Whateley had had no skull or bony skeleton; at
least, in any true or stable sense. He had taken somewhat after his
unknown father.


7

Yet all this was only the prologue of the actual Dunwich horror.
Formalities were gone through by bewildered officials, abnormal details
were duly kept from press and public, and men were sent to Dunwich
and Aylesbury to look up property and notify any who might be heirs
of the late Wilbur Whateley. They found the countryside in great
agitation, both because of the growing rumblings beneath the domed
hills, and because of the unwonted stench and the surging, lapping
sounds which came increasingly from the great empty shell formed by
Whateley's boarded-up farmhouse. Earl Sawyer, who tended the horse and
cattle during Wilbur's absence, had developed a wofully acute case
of nerves. The officials devised excuses not to enter the noisome
boarded place; and were glad to confine their survey of the deceased's
living quarters, the newly mended sheds, to a single visit. They filed
a ponderous report at the court-house in Aylesbury, and litigations
concerning heirship are said to be still in progress amongst the
innumerable Whateleys, decayed and undecayed, of the upper Miskatonic
valley.

An almost interminable manuscript in strange characters, written in a
huge ledger and adjudged a sort of diary because of the spacing and
the variations in ink and penmanship, presented a baffling puzzle to
those who found it on the old bureau which served as its owner's
desk. After a week of debate it was sent to Miskatonic University,
together with the deceased's collection of strange books, for study
and possible translation; but even the best linguists soon saw that it
was not likely to be unriddled with ease. No trace of the ancient gold
with which Wilbur and Old Whateley always paid their debts has yet been
discovered.

It was in the dark of September ninth that the horror broke loose.
The hill noises had been very pronounced during the evening, and dogs
barked frantically all night. Early risers on the tenth noticed a
peculiar stench in the air. About 7 o'clock Luther Brown, the hired boy
at George Corey's, between Cold Spring Glen and the village, rushed
frenziedly back from his morning trip to Ten-Acre Meadow with the cows.
He was almost convulsed with fright as he stumbled into the kitchen;
and in the yard outside the no less frightened herd were pawing and
lowing pitifully, having followed the boy back in the panic they shared
with him. Between gasps Luther tried to stammer out his tale to Mrs.
Corey.

"Up thar in the rud beyont the glen, Mis' Corey--they's suthin' ben
thar! It smells like thunder, an' all the bushes an' little trees is
pushed back from the rud like they'd a haouse ben moved along of it.
An' that ain't the wust, nuther. They's _prints_ in the rud, Mis'
Corey--great raound prints as big as barrel-heads, all sunk daown deep
like a elephant had ben along, _only they's a sight more nor four feet
could make_. I looked at one or two afore I run, an' I see every one
was covered with lines spreadin' aout from one place, like as if big
palm-leaf fans--twict or three times as big as any they is--hed of ben
paounded daown into the rud. An' the smell was awful, like what it is
araound Wizard Whateley's ol' haouse...."

Here he faltered, and seemed to shiver afresh with the fright that had
sent him flying home. Mrs. Corey, unable to extract more information,
began telephoning the neighbors; thus starting on its rounds the
overture of panic that heralded the major terrors. When she got Sally
Sawyer, housekeeper at Seth Bishop's, the nearest place to Whateley's,
it became her turn to listen instead of transmit; for Sally's boy
Chauncey, who slept poorly, had been up on the hill toward Whateley's,
and had dashed back in terror after one look at the place, and at the
pasturage where Mr. Bishop's cows had been left out all night.

"Yes, Mis' Corey," came Sally's tremulous voice over the party wire,
"Cha'ncey he just come back a-post-in', and couldn't haff talk fer
bein' scairt! He says Ol' Whateley's haouse is all blowed up, with
the timbers scattered raound like they'd ben dynamite inside; only
the bottom floor ain't through, but is all covered with a kind o'
tarlike stuff that smells awful an' drips daown offen the aidges onto
the graoun' whar the side timbers is blowed away. An' they's awful
kinder marks in the yard, tew--great raound marks bigger raound than a
hogshead, an' all sticky with stuff like is on the blowed-up haouse.
Cha'ncey he says they leads off into the medders, whar a great swath
wider'n a barn is matted daown, an' all the stun walls tumbled every
which way wherever it goes.

"An' he says, says he, Mis' Corey, as haow he sot to look fer Seth's
caows, frighted ez he was; an' faound 'em in the upper pasture nigh the
Devil's Hop Yard in an awful shape. Haff on 'em's clean gone, an' nigh
haff o' them that's left is sucked most dry o' blood, with sores on 'em
like they's ben on Whateley's cattle ever senct Lavinny's black brat
was born. Seth he's gone aout naow to look at 'em, though I'll vaow he
wun't keer ter git very nigh Wizard Whateley's! Cha'ncey didn't look
keerful ter see whar the big matted-daown swath led arter it leff the
pasturage, but he says he thinks it p'inted towards the glen rud to the
village.

"I tell ye, Mis' Corey, they's suthin' abroad as hadn't orter be
abroad, an' I fer one think that black Wilbur Whateley, as come to
the bad eend he desarved, is at the bottom of the breedin' of it. He
wa'n't all human hisself, I allus says to everybody; an' I think he an'
Ol' Whateley must a raised suthin' in that there nailed-up haouse as
ain't even so human as he was. They's allus ben unseen things araound
Dunwich--livin' things--as ain't human an' ain't good fer human folks.

"The graoun' was a'talkin' lass night, an' towards mornin' Cha'ncey
he heerd the whippoorwills so laoud in Col' Spring Glen he couldn't
sleep none. Then he thought he heerd another faintlike saound over
towards Wizard Whateley's--a kinder rippin' or tearin' o' wood, like
some big box or crate was bein' opened fur off. What with this an'
that, he didn't git to sleep at all till sunup, an' no sooner was he
up this mornin', but he's got to go over to Whateley's an' see what's
the matter. He see enough, I tell ye, Mis' Corey! This dun't mean no
good, an' I think as all the men-folks ought to git up a party an'
do suthin'. I know suthin' awful's abaout, an' feel my time is nigh,
though only Gawd knows jest what it is.

"Did your Luther take accaount o' whar them big tracks led tew? No?
Wal, Mis' Corey, ef they was on the glen rud this side o' the glen,
an' ain't got to your haouse yet, I calc'late they must go into the
glen itself. They would do that. I allus says Col' Spring Glen ain't no
healthy nor decent place. The whippoorwills an' fireflies there never
did act like they was creaters o' Gawd, an' they's them as says ye kin
hear strange things a-rushin' an' a-talkin' in the air daown thar ef ye
stand in the right place, atween the rock falls an' Bear's Den."

       *       *       *       *       *

By that noon fully three-quarters of the men and boys of Dunwich were
trooping over the roads and meadows between the new-made Whateley ruins
and Cold Spring Glen; examining in horror the vast, monstrous prints,
the maimed Bishop cattle, the strange, noisome wreck of the farmhouse,
and the bruised, matted vegetation of the fields and road-sides.
Whatever had burst loose upon the world had assuredly gone down into
the great sinister ravine; for all the trees on the banks were bent and
broken, and a great avenue had been gouged in the precipice-hanging
underbrush. It was as though a house, launched by an avalanche, had
slid down through the tangled growths of the almost vertical slope.
From below no sound came, but only a distant, undefinable fetor; and
it is not to be wondered at that the men preferred to stay on the edge
and argue, rather than descend and beard the unknown Cyclopean horror
in its lair. Three dogs that were with the party had barked furiously
at first, but seemed cowed and reluctant when near the glen. Someone
telephoned the news to the _Aylesbury Transcript_; but the editor,
accustomed to wild tales from Dunwich, did no more than concoct a
humorous paragraph about it; an item soon afterward reproduced by the
Associated Press.

That night everyone went home, and every house and barn was barricaded
as stoutly as possible. Needless to say, no cattle were allowed to
remain in open pasturage. About 2 in the morning a frightful stench and
the savage barking of the dogs awakened the household at Elmer Frye's,
on the eastern edge of Cold Spring Glen, and all agreed that they
could hear a sort of muffled swishing or lapping sound from somewhere
outside. Mrs. Frye proposed telephoning the neighbors, and Elmer was
about to agree when the noise of splintering wood burst in upon their
deliberations. It came, apparently, from the barn; and was quickly
followed by a hideous screaming and stamping amongst the cattle. The
dogs slavered and crouched close to the feet of the fear-numbed family.
Frye lit a lantern through force of habit, but knew it would be death
to go out into that black farmyard. The children and the women-folk
whimpered, kept from screaming by some obscure, vestigial instinct
of defense which told them their lives depended on silence. At last
the noise of the cattle subsided to a pitiful moaning, and a great
snapping, crashing, and crackling ensued. The Fryes, huddled together
in the sitting-room, did not dare to move until the last echoes died
away far down in Cold Spring Glen. Then, amidst the dismal moans from
the stable and the demoniac piping of late whippoorwills in the glen,
Selina Frye tottered to the telephone and spread what news she could of
the second phase of the horror.

The next day all the countryside was in a panic; and cowed,
uncommunicative groups came and went where the fiendish thing had
occurred. Two titan swaths of destruction stretched from the glen
to the Frye farmyard, monstrous prints covered the bare patches of
ground, and one side of the old red barn had completely caved in. Of
the cattle, only about a quarter could be found and identified. Some of
these were in curious fragments, and all that survived had to be shot.
Earl Sawyer suggested that help be asked from Aylesbury or Arkham, but
others maintained it would be of no use. Old Zebulon Whateley, of a
branch that hovered about half-way between soundness and decadence,
made darkly wild suggestions about rites that ought to be practised on
the hilltops. He came of a line where tradition ran strong, and his
memories of chantings in the great stone circles were not altogether
connected with Wilbur and his grandfather.

Darkness fell upon a stricken countryside too passive to organize
for real defense. In a few cases closely related families would band
together and watch in the gloom under one roof; but, in general there
was only a repetition of the barricading of the night before, and a
futile, ineffective gesture of loading muskets and setting pitchforks
handily about. Nothing, however, occurred except some hill noises; and
when the day came there were many who hoped that the new horror had
gone as swiftly as it had come. There were even bold souls who proposed
an offensive expedition down in the glen, though they did not venture
to set an actual example to the still reluctant majority.

When night came again the barricading was repeated, though there was
less huddling together of families. In the morning both the Frye and
the Seth Bishop households reported excitement among the dogs and vague
sounds and stenches from afar, while early explorers noted with horror
a fresh set of the monstrous tracks in the road skirting Sentinel Hill.
As before, the sides of the road showed a bruising indicative of the
blasphemously stupendous bulk of the horror; whilst the conformation
of the tracks seemed to argue a passage in two directions, as if the
moving mountain had come from Cold Spring Glen and returned to it along
the same path. At the base of the hill a thirty-foot swath of crushed
shrubbery and saplings led steeply upward, and the seekers gasped when
they saw that even the most perpendicular places did not deflect the
inexorable trail. Whatever the horror was, it could scale a sheer stony
cliff of almost complete verticality; and as the investigators climbed
around to the hill's summit by safer routes they saw that the trail
ended--or rather, reversed--there.

It was here that the Whateleys used to build their hellish fires and
chant their hellish rituals by the table-like stone on May Eve and
Hallowmass. Now that very stone formed the center of a vast space
thrashed around by the mountainous horror, whilst upon its slightly
concave surface was a thick fetid deposit of the same tarry stickiness
observed on the floor of the ruined Whateley farmhouse when the horror
escaped. Men looked at one another and muttered. Then they looked down
the hill. Apparently the horror had descended by a route much the same
as that of its ascent. To speculate was futile. Reason, logic, and
normal ideas of motivation stood confounded. Only old Zebulon, who
was not with the group, could have done justice to the situation or
suggested a plausible explanation.

Thursday night began much like the others, but it ended less happily.
The whippoorwills in the glen had screamed with such unusual
persistence that many could not sleep, and about 3 a. m. all the party
telephones rang tremulously. Those who took down their receivers
heard a fright-mad voice shriek out, "Help, oh, my Gawd!..." and some
thought a crashing sound followed the breaking off of the exclamation.
There was nothing more. No one dared do anything, and no one knew
till morning whence the call came. Then those who had heard it called
everyone on the line, and found that only the Fryes did not reply. The
truth appeared an hour later, when a hastily assembled group of armed
men trudged out to the Frye place at the head of the glen. It was
horrible, yet hardly a surprize. There were more swaths and monstrous
prints, but there was no longer any house. It had caved in like an
egg-shell, and amongst the ruins nothing living or dead could be
discovered--only a stench and a tarry stickiness. The Elmer Fryes had
been erased from Dunwich.


8

In the meantime a quieter yet even more spiritually poignant phase of
the horror had been blackly unwinding itself behind the closed door of
a shelf-lined room in Arkham. The curious manuscript record or diary of
Wilbur Whateley, delivered to Miskatonic University for translation,
had caused much worry and bafflement among the experts in languages
both ancient and modern; its very alphabet, notwithstanding a general
resemblance to the heavily shaded Arabic used in Mesopotamia, being
absolutely unknown to any available authority. The final conclusion of
the linguists was that the text represented an artificial alphabet,
giving the effect of a cipher; though none of the usual methods of
cryptographic solution seemed to furnish any clue, even when applied
on the basis of every tongue the writer might conceivably have used.
The ancient books taken from Whateley's quarters, while absorbingly
interesting and in several cases promising to open up new and terrible
lines of research among philosophers and men of science, were of no
assistance whatever in this matter. One of them, a heavy tome with
an iron clasp, was in another unknown alphabet--this one of a very
different cast, and resembling Sanskrit more than anything else. The
old ledger was at length given wholly into the charge of Dr. Armitage,
both because of his peculiar interest in the Whateley matter, and
because of his wide linguistic learning and skill in the mystical
formulæ of antiquity and the Middle Ages.

Armitage had an idea that the alphabet might be something esoterically
used by certain forbidden cults which have come down from old times,
and which have inherited many forms and traditions from the wizards of
the Saracenic world. That question, however, he did not deem vital;
since it would be unnecessary to know the origin of the symbols if,
as he suspected, they were used as a cipher in a modern language. It
was his belief that, considering the great amount of text involved, the
writer would scarcely have wished the trouble of using another speech
than his own, save perhaps in certain special formulæ and incantations.
Accordingly he attacked the manuscript with the preliminary assumption
that the bulk of it was in English.

Dr. Armitage knew, from the repeated failures of his colleagues, that
the riddle was a deep and complex one, and that no simple mode of
solution could merit even a trial. All through late August he fortified
himself with the massed lore of cryptography, drawing upon the fullest
resources of his own library, and wading night after night amidst the
arcana of Trithemius' _Poligraphia_, Giambattista Porta's _De Furtivis
Literarum Notis_, De Vigenere's _Traité des Chiffres_, Falconer's
_Cryptomenysis Patefacta_, Davys' and Thicknesse's Eighteenth Century
treatises, and such fairly modern authorities as Blair, von Marten,
and Klüber's _Kryptographik_. He interspersed his study of the books
with attacks on the manuscript itself, and in time became convinced
that he had to deal with one of those subtlest and most ingenious of
cryptograms, in which many separate lists of corresponding letters are
arranged like the multiplication table, and the message built up with
arbitrary key-words known only to the initiated. The older authorities
seemed rather more helpful than the newer ones, and Armitage concluded
that the code of the manuscript was one of great antiquity, no doubt
handed down through a long line of mystical experimenters. Several
times he seemed near daylight, only to be set back by some unforeseen
obstacle. Then, as September approached, the clouds began to clear.
Certain letters, as used in certain parts of the manuscript, emerged
definitely and unmistakably; and it became obvious that the text was
indeed in English.

On the evening of September second the last major barrier gave way, and
Dr. Armitage read for the first time a continuous passage of Wilbur
Whateley's annals. It was in truth a diary, as all had thought; and
it was couched in a style clearly showing the mixed occult erudition
and general illiteracy of the strange being who wrote it. Almost the
first long passage that Armitage deciphered, an entry dated November
26, 1916, proved highly startling and disquieting. It was written, he
remembered, by a child of three and a half who looked like a lad of
twelve or thirteen.

    Today learned the Aklo for the Sabaoth, [it ran] which did not
    like, it being answerable from the hill and not from the air. That
    upstairs more ahead of me than I had thought it would be, and is
    not like to have much earth brain. Shot Elam Hutchins's collie
    Jack when he went to bite me, and Elam says he would kill me if he
    dast. I guess he won't. Grandfather kept me saying the Dho formula
    last night, and I think I saw the inner city at the 2 magnetic
    poles. I shall go to those poles when the earth is cleared off, if
    I can't break through with the Dho-Hna formula when I commit it.
    They from the air told me at Sabbat that it will be years before I
    can clear off the earth, and I guess Grandfather will be dead then,
    so I shall have to learn all the angles of the planes and all the
    formulas between the Yr and the Nhhngr. They from outside will
    help, but they can not take body without human blood. That upstairs
    looks it will have the right cast. I can see it a little when I
    make the Yoorish sign or blow the power of Ibn Ghazi at it, and it
    is near like them at May Eve on the Hill. The other face may wear
    off some. I wonder how I shall look when the earth is cleared and
    there are no earth beings on it. He that came with the Aklo Sabaoth
    said I may be transfigured, there being much of outside to work on.

Morning found Dr. Armitage in a cold sweat of terror and a frenzy of
wakeful concentration. He had not left the manuscript all night, but
sat at his table under the electric light turning page after page
with shaking hands as fast as he could decipher the cryptic text. He
had nervously telephoned his wife he would not be home, and when she
brought him a breakfast from the house he could scarcely dispose of a
mouthful. All that day he read on, now and then halted maddeningly as
a reapplication of the complex key became necessary. Lunch and dinner
were brought him, but he ate only the smallest fraction of either.
Toward the middle of the next night he drowsed off in his chair, but
soon woke out of a tangle of nightmares almost as hideous as the truths
and menaces to man's existence that he had uncovered.

On the morning of September fourth Professor Rice and Dr. Morgan
insisted on seeing him for a while, and departed trembling and
ashen-gray. That evening he went to bed, but slept only fitfully.
Wednesday--the next day--he was back at the manuscript, and began to
take copious notes both from the current sections and from those he had
already deciphered. In the small hours of that night he slept a little
in an easy-chair in his office, but was at the manuscript again before
dawn. Some time before noon his physician, Dr. Hartwell, called to see
him and insisted that he cease work. He refused, intimating that it was
of the most vital importance for him to complete the reading of the
diary, and promising an explanation in due course of time.

That evening, just as twilight fell, he finished his terrible perusal
and sank back exhausted. His wife, bringing his dinner, found him in a
half-comatose state; but he was conscious enough to warn her off with
a sharp cry when he saw her eyes wander toward the notes he had taken.
Weakly rising, he gathered up the scribbled papers and sealed them all
in a great envelope, which he immediately placed in his inside coat
pocket. He had sufficient strength to get home, but was so clearly in
need of medical aid that Dr. Hartwell was summoned at once. As the
doctor put him to bed he could only mutter over and over again, "_But
what, in God's name, can we do?_"

Dr. Armitage slept, but was partly delirious the next day. He made
no explanations to Hartwell, but in his calmer moments spoke of the
imperative need of a long conference with Rice and Morgan. His wilder
wanderings were very startling indeed, including frantic appeals
that something in a boarded-up farmhouse be destroyed, and fantastic
references to some plan for the extirpation of the entire human race
and all animal and vegetable life from the earth by some terrible elder
race of beings from another dimension. He would shout that the world
was in danger, since the Elder Things wished to strip it and drag it
away from the solar system and cosmos of matter into some other plane
or phase of entity from which it had once fallen, vigintillions of eons
ago. At other times he would call for the dreaded _Necronomicon_ and
the _Dæmonolatreia_ of Remigius, in which he seemed hopeful of finding
some formula to check the peril he conjured up.

"Stop them, stop them!" he would shout. "Those Whateleys meant to let
them in, and the worst of all is left! Tell Rice and Morgan we must do
something--it's a blind business, but I know how to make the powder....
It hasn't been fed since the second of August, when Wilbur came here to
his death, and at that rate...."

But Armitage had a sound physique despite his seventy-three years, and
slept off his disorder that night without developing any real fever. He
woke late Friday, clear of head, though sober, with a gnawing fear and
tremendous sense of responsibility. Saturday afternoon he felt able to
go over to the library and summon Rice and Morgan for a conference, and
the rest of that day and evening the three men tortured their brains
in the wildest speculation and the most desperate debate. Strange and
terrible books were drawn voluminously from the stack shelves and from
secure places of storage, and diagrams and formulæ were copied with
feverish haste and in bewildering abundance. Of skepticism there was
none. All three had seen the body of Wilbur Whateley as it lay on the
floor in a room of that very building, and after that not one of them
could feel even slightly inclined to treat the diary as a madman's
raving.

Opinions were divided as to notifying the Massachusetts State Police,
and the negative finally won. There were things involved which simply
could not be believed by those who had not seen a sample, as indeed was
made clear during certain subsequent investigations. Late at night the
conference disbanded without having developed a definite plan, but all
day Sunday Armitage was busy comparing formulæ and mixing chemicals
obtained from the college laboratory. The more he reflected on the
hellish diary, the more he was inclined to doubt the efficacy of any
material agent in stamping out the entity which Wilbur Whateley had
left behind him--the earth-threatening entity which, unknown to him,
was to burst forth in a few hours and become the memorable Dunwich
horror.

Monday was a repetition of Sunday with Dr. Armitage, for the task
in hand required an infinity of research and experiment. Further
consultations of the monstrous diary brought about various changes of
plan, and he knew that even in the end a large amount of uncertainty
must remain. By Tuesday he had a definite line of action mapped out,
and believed he would try a trip to Dunwich within a week. Then, on
Wednesday, the great shock came. Tucked obscurely away in a corner of
the _Arkham Advertiser_ was a facetious little item from the Associated
Press, telling what a record-breaking monster the bootleg whisky of
Dunwich had raised up. Armitage, half stunned, could only telephone
for Rice and Morgan. Far into the night they discussed, and the next
day was a whirlwind of preparation on the part of them all. Armitage
knew he would be meddling with terrible powers, yet saw that there was
no other way to annul the deeper and more malign meddling which others
had done before him.


9

Friday morning Armitage, Rice and Morgan set out by motor for Dunwich,
arriving at the village about 1 in the afternoon. The day was pleasant,
but even in the brightest sunlight a kind of quiet dread and portent
seemed to hover about the strangely domed hills and the deep, shadowy
ravines of the stricken region. Now and then on some mountain top a
gaunt circle of stones could be glimpsed against the sky. From the
air of hushed fright at Osborn's store they knew something hideous
had happened, and soon learned of the annihilation of the Elmer Frye
house and family. Throughout that afternoon they rode around Dunwich,
questioning the natives concerning all that had occurred, and seeing
for themselves with rising pangs of horror the drear Frye ruins with
their lingering traces of the tarry stickiness, the blasphemous tracks
in the Frye yard, the wounded Seth Bishop cattle, and the enormous
swaths of disturbed vegetation in various places. The trail up and down
Sentinel Hill seemed to Armitage of almost cataclysmic significance,
and he looked long at the sinister altarlike stone on the summit.

At length the visitors, apprised of a party of State Police which had
come from Aylesbury that morning in response to the first telephone
reports of the Frye tragedy, decided to seek out the officers and
compare notes as far as practicable. This, however, they found more
easily planned than performed; since no sign of the party could be
found in any direction. There had been five of them in a car, but now
the car stood empty near the ruins in the Frye yard. The natives, all
of whom had talked with the policemen, seemed at first as perplexed as
Armitage and his companions. Then old Sam Hutchins thought of something
and turned pale, nudging Fred Farr and pointing to the dank, deep
hollow that yawned close by.

"Gawd," he gasped, "I telled 'em not ter go daown into the glen, an' I
never thought nobody'd dew it with them tracks an' that smell an' the
whippoorwills a-screechin' daown thar in the dark o' noonday...."

A cold shudder ran through natives and visitors alike, and every ear
seemed strained in a kind of instinctive, unconscious listening.
Armitage, now that he had actually come upon the horror and its
monstrous work, trembled with the responsibility he felt to be
his. Night would soon fall, and it was then that the mountainous
blasphemy lumbered upon its eldritch course. _Negotium perambulans in
tenebris...._ The old librarian rehearsed the formulæ he had memorized,
and clutched the paper containing the alternative ones he had not
memorized. He saw that his electric flashlight was in working order.
Rice, beside him, took from a valise a metal sprayer of the sort used
in combating insects; whilst Morgan uncased the big-game rifle on which
he relied despite his colleague's warnings that no material weapon
would be of help.

Armitage, having read the hideous diary, knew painfully well what kind
of a manifestation to expect, but he did not add to the fright of the
Dunwich people by giving any hints or clues. He hoped that it might
be conquered without any revelation to the world of the monstrous
thing it had escaped. As the shadows gathered, the natives commenced
to disperse homeward, anxious to bar themselves indoors despite the
present evidence that all human locks and bolts were useless before a
force that could bend trees and crush houses when it chose. They shook
their heads at the visitors' plan to stand guard at the Frye ruins near
the glen; and as they left, had little expectancy of ever seeing the
watchers again.

There were rumblings under the hills that night, and the whippoorwills
piped threateningly. Once in a while a wind, sweeping up out of Cold
Spring Glen, would bring a touch of ineffable fetor to the heavy night
air; such a fetor as all three of the watchers had smelled once before,
when they stood above a dying thing that had passed for fifteen years
and a half as a human being. But the looked-for terror did not appear.
Whatever was down there in the glen was biding its time, and Armitage
told his colleagues it would be suicidal to try to attack it in the
dark.

Morning came wanly, and the night-sounds ceased. It was a gray, bleak
day, with now and then a drizzle of rain; and heavier and heavier
clouds seemed to be piling themselves up beyond the hills to the
northwest. The men from Arkham were undecided what to do. Seeking
shelter from the increasing rainfall beneath one of the few undestroyed
Frye outbuildings, they debated the wisdom of waiting, or of taking the
aggressive and going down into the glen in quest of their nameless,
monstrous quarry. The downpour waxed in heaviness, and distant peals of
thunder sounded from far horizons. Sheet lightning shimmered, and then
a forky bolt flashed near at hand, as if descending into the accursed
glen itself. The sky grew very dark, and the watchers hoped that the
storm would prove a short, sharp one followed by clear weather.

It was still gruesomely dark when, not much over an hour later, a
confused babel of voices sounded down the road. Another moment brought
to view a frightened group of more than a dozen men, running, shouting,
and even whimpering hysterically. Someone in the lead began sobbing out
words, and the Arkham men started violently when those words developed
a coherent form.

"Oh, my Gawd, my Gawd!" the voice choked out; "it's a-goin' agin, _an'
this time by day_! It's aout--it's aout an' a-movin' this very minute,
an' only the Lord knows when it'll be on us all!"

The speaker panted into silence, but another took up his message.

"Nigh on a haour ago Zeb Whateley here heerd the 'phone a-ringin', an'
it was Mis' Corey, George's wife that lives daown by the junction.
She says the hired boy Luther was aout drivin' in the caows from the
storm arter the big bolt, when he see all the trees a-bendin' at the
maouth o' the glen--opposite side ter this--an' smelt the same awful
smell like he smelt when he faound the big tracks las' Monday mornin'.
An' she says he says they was a swishin', lappin' saound, more nor
what the bendin' trees an' bushes could make, an' all on a suddent the
trees along the rud begun ter git pushed one side, an' they was a awful
stompin' an' splashin' in the mud. But mind ye, Luther he didn't see
nothin' at all, only jest the bendin' trees an' underbrush.

"Then fur ahead where Bishop's Brook goes under the rud he heerd a
awful creakin' an' strainin' on the bridge, an' says he could tell the
saound o' wood a-startin' to crack an' split. An' all the whiles he
never see a thing, only them trees an' bushes a-bendin'. An' when the
swishin' saound got very fur off--on the rud towards Wizard Whateley's
an' Sentinel Hill--Luther he had the guts ter step up whar he'd heerd
it fust an' look at the graound. It was all mud an' water, an' the sky
was dark, an' the rain was wipin' aout all tracks abaout as fast as
could be; but beginnin' at the glen maouth, whar the trees bed moved,
they was still some o' them awful prints big as bar'ls like he seen
Monday."

At this point the first excited speaker interrupted.

"But _that_ ain't the trouble naow--that was only the start. Zeb here
was callin' folks up an' everybody was a-listenin' in when a call from
Seth Bishop's cut in. His haousekeeper Sally was carryin' on fit ter
kill--she'd jest seed the trees a-bendin' beside the rud, an' says
they was a kind o' mushy saound, like a elephant puffin' an' treadin',
a-headin' fer the haouse. Then she up an' spoke suddent of a fearful
smell, an' says her boy Cha'ncey was a-screamin' as haow it was jest
like what he smelt up to the Whateley rewins Monday mornin'. An' the
dogs was all barkin' an' whinin' awful.

"An' then she let aout a turrible yell, an' says the shed daown the
rud hed jest caved in like the storm hed blowed it over, only the wind
wa'n't strong enough to dew that. Everybody was a-listenin', an' ye
could hear lots o' folks on the wire a-gaspin'. All to onct Sally she
yelled agin, an' says the front yard picket fence bed jest crumpled up,
though they wa'n't no sign o' what done it. Then everybody on the line
could hear Cha'ncey an' ol' Seth Bishop a-yellin', tew, an' Sally was
shriekin' aout that suthin' heavy hed struck the haouse--not lightnin'
nor nothin', but suthin' heavy agin' the front, that kep' a-launchin'
itself agin an' agin, though ye couldn't see nuthin' aout the front
winders. An' then ... an' then...."

Lines of fright deepened on every face; and Armitage, shaken as he was,
had barely poise enough to prompt the speaker.

"An' then ... Sally she yelled aout, 'O help, the haouse is a-cavin'
in' ... an' on the wire we could hoar a turrible crashin', an' a hull
flock o' screamin' ... jest like when Elmer Frye's place was took, only
wuss...."

The man paused, and another of the crowd spoke.

"That's all--not a saound nor squeak over the 'phone arter that. Jest
still-like. We that heerd it got aout Fords an' wagons an' raounded
up as many able-bodied men-folks as we could get, at Corey's place,
an' come up here ter see what yew thought best ter dew. Not but what I
think it's the Lord's judgment fer our iniquities, that no mortal kin
ever set aside."

Armitage saw that the time for positive action had come, and spoke
decisively to the faltering group of frightened rustics.

"We must follow it, boys." He made his voice as reassuring as possible.
"I believe there's a chance of putting it out of business. You men
know that those Whateleys were wizards--well, this thing is a thing
of wizardry, and must be put down by the same means. I've seen Wilbur
Whateley's diary and read some of the strange old books he used to
read, and I think I know the right kind of a spell to recite to make
the thing fade away. Of course, one can't be sure, but we can always
take a chance. It's invisible--I knew it would be--but there's a powder
in this long-distance sprayer that might make it show up for a second.
Later on we'll try it. It's a frightful thing to have alive, but it
isn't as bad as what Wilbur would have let in if he'd lived longer.
You'll never know what the world has escaped. Now we've only this one
thing to fight, and it can't multiply. It can, though, do a lot of
harm; so we mustn't hesitate to rid the community of it.

"We must follow it--and the way to begin is to go to the place that has
just been wrecked. Let somebody lead the way--I don't know your roads
very well, but I've an idea there might be a shorter cut across lots.
How about it?"

The men shuffled about a moment, and then Earl Sawyer spoke softly,
pointing with a grimy finger through the steadily lessening rain.

"I guess ye kin git to Seth Bishop's quickest by cuttin' acrost the
lower medder here, wadin' the brook at the low place, an' climbin'
through Carrier's mowin' an' the timber-lot beyont. That comes aout on
the upper rud mighty nigh Seth's--a leetle t'other side."

Armitage, with Rice and Morgan, started to walk in the direction
indicated; and most of the natives followed slowly. The sky was growing
lighter, and there were signs that the storm had worn itself away. When
Armitage inadvertently took a wrong direction, Joe Osborn warned him
and walked ahead to show the right one. Courage and confidence were
mounting; though the twilight of the almost perpendicular wooded hill
which lay toward the end of their short cut, and among whose fantastic
ancient trees they had to scramble as if up a ladder, put these
qualities to a severe test.

At length they emerged on a muddy road to find the sun coming out.
They were a little beyond the Seth Bishop place, but bent trees and
hideously unmistakable tracks showed what had passed by. Only a few
moments were consumed in surveying the ruins just around the bend. It
was the Frye incident all over again, and nothing dead or living was
found in either of the collapsed shells which had been the Bishop house
and barn. No one cared to remain there amidst the stench and the tarry
stickiness, but all turned instinctively to the line of horrible prints
leading on toward the wrecked Whateley farmhouse and the altar-crowned
slopes of Sentinel Hill.

As the men passed the site of Wilbur Whateley's abode they shuddered
visibly, and seemed again to mix hesitancy with their zeal. It was
no joke tracking down something as big as a house that one could not
see, but that had all the vicious malevolence of a demon. Opposite the
base of Sentinel Hill the tracks left the road, and there was a fresh
bending and matting visible along the broad swath marking the monster's
former route to and from the summit.

Armitage produced a pocket telescope of considerable power and scanned
the steep green side of the hill. Then he handed the instrument to
Morgan, whose sight was keener. After a moment of gazing Morgan cried
out sharply, passing the glass to Earl Sawyer and indicating a certain
spot on the slope with his finger. Sawyer, as clumsy as most non-users
of optical devices are, fumbled a while; but eventually focused the
lenses with Armitage's aid. When he did so his cry was less restrained
than Morgan's had been.

"Gawd almighty, the grass an' bushes is a-movin'! It's a-goin'
up--slow-like--creepin' up ter the top this minute, heaven only knows
what fer!"

Then the germ of panic seemed to spread among the seekers. It was one
thing to chase the nameless entity, but quite another to find it.
Spells might be all right--but suppose they weren't? Voices began
questioning Armitage about what he knew of the thing, and no reply
seemed quite to satisfy. Everyone seemed to feel himself in close
proximity to phases of nature and of being utterly forbidden, and
wholly outside the sane experience of mankind.


10

In the end the three men from Arkham--old, white-bearded Dr.
Armitage, stocky, iron-gray Professor Rice, and lean, youngish Dr.
Morgan--ascended the mountain alone. After much patient instruction
regarding its focusing and use, they left the telescope with the
frightened group that remained in the road; and as they climbed they
were watched closely by those among whom the glass was passed around.
It was hard going, and Armitage had to be helped more than once. High
above the toiling group the great swath trembled as its hellish maker
repassed with snail-like deliberateness. Then it was obvious that the
pursuers were gaining.

Curtis Whateley--of the undecayed branch--was holding the telescope
when the Arkham party detoured radically from the swath. He told the
crowd that the men were evidently trying to get to a subordinate peak
which overlooked the swath at a point considerably ahead of where the
shrubbery was now bending. This, indeed, proved to be true; and the
party were seen to gain the minor elevation only a short time after the
invisible blasphemy had passed it.

Then Wesley Corey, who had taken the glass, cried out that Armitage was
adjusting the sprayer which Rice held, and that something must be about
to happen. The crowd stirred uneasily, recalling that this sprayer was
expected to give the unseen horror a moment of visibility. Two or three
men shut their eyes, but Curtis Whateley snatched back the telescope
and strained his vision to the utmost. He saw that Rice, from the
party's point of vantage above and behind the entity, had an excellent
chance of spreading the potent powder with marvelous effect.

Those without the telescope saw only an instant's flash of gray
cloud--a cloud about the size of a moderately large building--near the
top of the mountain. Curtis, who had held the instrument, dropped it
with a piercing shriek into the ankle-deep mud of the road. He reeled,
and would have crumpled to the ground had not two or three others
seized and steadied him. All he could do was moan half-inaudibly:

"Oh, oh, great Gawd ... _that ... that_...."

[Illustration: "Oh, oh, great Gawd ... that ... that."]

There was a pandemonium of questioning, and only Henry Wheeler thought
to rescue the fallen telescope and wipe it clean of mud. Curtis was
past all coherence, and even isolated replies were almost too much for
him.

"Bigger 'n a barn ... all made o' squirmin' ropes ... hull thing sort
o' shaped like a hen's egg bigger'n anything, with dozens o' legs like
hogsheads that haff shut up when they step ... nothin' solid abaout
it--all like jelly, an' made o' sep'rit wrigglin' ropes pushed clost
together ... great bulgin' eyes all over it ... ten or twenty maouths
or trunks a-stickin' aout all along the sides, big as stovepipes, an'
all a-tossin' an' openin' an' shuttin' ... all gray, with kinder blue
or purple rings ... _an' Gawd in Heaven--that haff face on top_!..."

This final memory, whatever it was, proved too much for poor Curtis,
and he collapsed completely before he could say more. Fred Farr and
Will Hutchins carried him to the roadside and laid him on the damp
grass. Henry Wheeler, trembling, turned the rescued telescope on the
mountain to see what he might. Through the lenses were discernible
three tiny figures, apparently running toward the summit as fast as the
steep incline allowed. Only these--nothing more. Then everyone noticed
a strangely unseasonable noise in the deep valley behind, and even in
the underbrush of Sentinel Hill itself. It was the piping of unnumbered
whippoorwills, and in their shrill chorus there seemed to lurk a note
of tense and evil expectancy.

Earl Sawyer now took the telescope and reported the three figures as
standing on the topmost ridge, virtually level with the altar-stone
but at a considerable distance from it. One figure, he said, seemed
to be raising its hands above its head at rhythmic intervals; and
as Sawyer mentioned the circumstance the crowd seemed to hear a
faint, half-musical sound from the distance, as if a loud chant
were accompanying the gestures. The weird silhouette on that
remote peak must have been a spectacle of infinite grotesqueness
and impressiveness, but no observer was in a mood for esthetic
appreciation. "I guess he's sayin' the spell," whispered Wheeler as
he snatched back the telescope. The whippoorwills were piping wildly,
and in a singularly curious irregular rhythm quite unlike that of the
visible ritual.

Suddenly the sunshine seemed to lessen without the intervention of any
discernible cloud. It was a very peculiar phenomenon, and was plainly
marked by all. A rumbling sound seemed brewing beneath the hills, mixed
strangely with a concordant rumbling which clearly came from the sky.
Lightning flashed aloft, and the wondering crowd looked in vain for
the portents of storm. The chanting of the men from Arkham now became
unmistakable, and Wheeler saw through the glass that they were all
raising their arms in the rhythmic incantation. From some farmhouse far
away came the frantic barking of dogs.

The change in the quality of the daylight increased, and the crowd
gazed about the horizon in wonder. A purplish darkness, born of
nothing more than a spectral deepening of the sky's blue, pressed down
upon the rumbling hills. Then the lightning flashed again, somewhat
brighter than before, and the crowd fancied that it had showed a
certain mistiness around the altar-stone on the distant height. No
one, however, had been using the telescope at that instant. The
whippoorwills continued their irregular pulsation, and the men of
Dunwich braced themselves tensely against some imponderable menace with
which the atmosphere seemed surcharged.

Without warning came those deep, cracked, raucous vocal sounds which
will never leave the memory of the stricken group who heard them. Not
from any human throat were they born, for the organs of man can yield
no such acoustic perversions. Rather would one have said they came
from the pit itself, had not their source been so unmistakably the
altar-stone on the peak. It is almost erroneous to call them _sounds_
at all, since so much of their ghastly, infra-bass timbre spoke to
dim seats of consciousness and terror far subtler than the ear; yet
one must do so, since their form was indisputably though vaguely that
of half-articulate _words_. They were loud--loud as the rumblings and
the thunder above which they echoed--yet did they come from no visible
being. And because imagination might suggest a conjectural source in
the world of non-visible beings, the huddled crowd at the mountain's
base huddled still closer, and winced as if in expectation of a blow.

"_Ygnaiih ... ygnaiih ... thflthkh'ngha ... Yog-Sothoth...._" rang the
hideous croaking out of space. "_Y'bthnk ... h'ehye ... n'grkdl'lh...._"

The speaking impulse seemed to falter here, as if some frightful
psychic struggle were going on. Henry Wheeler strained his eye at
the telescope, but saw only the three grotesquely silhouetted human
figures on the peak, all moving their arms furiously in strange
gestures as their incantation drew near its culmination. From what
black wells of Acherontic fear or feeling, from what unplumbed gulfs of
extra-cosmic consciousness or obscure, long-latent heredity, were those
half-articulate thunder-croakings drawn? Presently they began to gather
renewed force and coherence as they grew in stark, utter, ultimate
frenzy.

"_Eh-ya-ya-ya-yahaah ... e'yaya-yayaaaa ... ngh'aaaa ... ngh'aaaa_ ...
h'yuh ... h'yuh ... HELP! HELP! ... _ff--ff--ff_--FATHER! FATHER!
YOG-SOTHOTH!..."

But that was all. The pallid group in the road, still reeling at
the _indisputably English_ syllables that had poured thickly and
thunderously down from the frantic vacancy beside that shocking
altar-stone, were never to hear such syllables again. Instead, they
jumped violently at the terrific report which seemed to rend the hills;
the deafening, cataclysmic peal whose source, be it inner earth or
sky, no hearer was ever able to place. A single lightning bolt shot
from the purple zenith to the altar-stone, and a great tidal wave of
viewless force and indescribable stench swept down from the hill to
all the countryside. Trees, grass, and underbrush were whipped into a
fury; and the frightened crowd at the mountain's base, weakened by the
lethal fetor that seemed about to asphyxiate them, were almost hurled
off their feet. Dogs howled from the distance, green grass and foliage
wilted to a curious, sickly yellow-gray, and over field and forest were
scattered the bodies of dead whippoorwills.

The stench left quickly, but the vegetation never came right again.
To this day there is something queer and unholy about the growths on
and around that fearsome hill. Curtis Whateley was only just regaining
consciousness when the Arkham men came slowly down the mountain in the
beams of a sunlight once more brilliant and untainted. They were grave
and quiet, and seemed shaken by memories and reflections even more
terrible than those which had reduced the group of natives to a state
of cowed quivering. In reply to a jumble of questions they only shook
their heads and reaffirmed one vital fact.

"The thing has gone for ever," Armitage said. "It has been split up
into what it was originally made of, and can never exist again. It was
an impossibility in a normal world. Only the least fraction was really
matter in any sense we know. It was like its father--and most of it has
gone back to him in some vague realm or dimension outside our material
universe; some vague abyss out of which only the most accursed rites of
human blasphemy could ever have called him for a moment on the hills."

There was a brief silence, and in that pause the scattered senses of
poor Curtis Whateley began to knit back into a sort of continuity; so
that he put his hands to his head with a moan. Memory seemed to pick
itself up where it had left off, and the horror of the sight that had
prostrated him burst in upon him again.

"_Oh, oh, my Gawd, that haff face ... that haff face on top of it ...
that face with the red eyes an' crinkly albino hair, an' no chin, like
the Whateleys.... It was a octopus, centipede, spider kind o' thing,
but they was a haff-shaped man's face on top of it, an' it looked like
Wizard Whateley's, only it was yards an' yards acrost...._"

He paused exhausted, as the whole group of natives stared in a
bewilderment not quite crystallized into fresh terror. Only old Zebulon
Whateley, who wanderingly remembered ancient things but who had been
silent heretofore, spoke aloud.

"Fifteen year' gone," he rambled, "I heerd Ol' Whateley say as haow
some day we'd hear a child o' Lavinny's a-callin' its father's name on
the top o' Sentinel Hill...."

But Joe Osborn interrupted him to question the Arkham men anew.

"_What was it, anyhaow_, an' haowever did young Wizard Whateley call it
aout o' the air it come from?"

Armitage chose his words carefully.

"It was--well, it was mostly a kind of force that doesn't belong in our
part of space; a kind of force that acts and grows and shapes itself
by other laws than those of our sort of Nature. We have no business
calling in such things from outside, and only very wicked people
and very wicked cults ever try to. There was some of it in Wilbur
Whateley himself--enough to make a devil and a precocious monster of
him, and to make his passing out a pretty terrible sight. I'm going
to burn his accursed diary, and if you men are wise you'll dynamite
that altar-stone up there, and pull down all the rings of standing
stones on the other hills. Things like that brought down the beings
those Whateleys were so fond of--the beings they were going to let in
tangibly to wipe out the human race and drag the earth off to some
nameless place for some nameless purpose.

"But as to this thing we've just sent back--the Whateleys raised it for
a terrible part in the doings that were to come. It grew fast and big
from the same reason that Wilbur grew fast and big--but it beat him
because it had a greater share of the _outsideness_ in it. You needn't
ask how Wilbur called it out of the air. He didn't call it out. _It was
his twin brother, but it looked more like the father than he did._"



# Project Gutenberg #31469

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 Athenæum, 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.



# Project Gutenberg #79401

Pickman's Model

                          By H. P. Lovecraft

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                      Weird Tales, October 1927.]


You needn't think I'm crazy, Eliot--plenty of others have queerer
prejudices than this. Why don't you laugh at Oliver's grandfather, who
won't ride in a motor? If I don't like that damned subway, it's my own
business; and we got here more quickly anyhow in the taxi. We'd have
had to walk up the hill from Park Street if we'd taken the car.

I know I'm more nervous than I was when you saw me last year, but you
don't need to hold a clinic over it. There's plenty of reason, God
knows, and I fancy I'm lucky to be sane at all. Why the third degree?
You didn't use to be so inquisitive.

Well, if you must hear it, I don't know why you shouldn't. Maybe you
ought to, anyhow, for you kept writing me like a grieved parent when
you heard I'd begun to cut the Art Club and keep away from Pickman. Now
that he's disappeared I go around to the club once in a while, but my
nerves aren't what they were.

No, I don't know what's become of Pickman, and I don't like to guess.
You might have surmised I had some inside information when I dropped
him--and that's why I don't want to think where he's gone. Let the
police find what they can--it won't be much, judging from the fact that
they don't know yet of the old North End place he hired under the name
of Peters. I'm not sure that I could find it again myself--not that I'd
ever try, even in broad daylight! Yes, I do know, or am afraid I know,
why he maintained it. I'm coming to that. And I think you'll understand
before I'm through why I don't tell the police. They would ask me to
guide them, but I couldn't go back there even if I knew the way. There
was something there--and now I can't use the subway or (and you may as
well have your laugh at this, too) go down into cellars any more.

I should think you'd have known I didn't drop Pickman for the same
silly reasons that fussy old women like Dr. Reid or Joe Minot or
Bosworth did. Morbid art doesn't shock me, and when a man has the
genius Pickman had I feel it an honor to know him, no matter what
direction his work takes. Boston never had a greater painter than
Richard Upton Pickman. I said it at first and I say it still, and I
never swerved an inch, either, when he showed that _Ghoul Feeding_.
That, you remember, was when Minot cut him.

You know, it takes profound art and profound insight into nature to
turn out stuff like Pickman's. Any magazine-cover hack can splash
paint around wildly and call it a nightmare or Witches' Sabbath or a
portrait of the devil, but only a great painter can make such a thing
really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the
actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear--the exact
sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts
or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper color contrasts and
lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness. I don't
have to tell you why a Fuseli really brings a shiver while a cheap
ghost-story frontispiece merely makes us laugh. There's something those
fellows catch--beyond life--that they're able to make us catch for
a second. Doré had it. Sime has it. Angarola of Chicago has it. And
Pickman had it as no man ever had it before or--I hope to heaven--ever
will again.

Don't ask me what it is they see. You know, in ordinary art, there's
all the difference in the world between the vital, breathing things
drawn from nature or models and the artificial truck that commercial
small fry reel off in a bare studio by rule. Well, I should say that
the really weird artist has a kind of vision which makes models, or
summons up what amounts to actual scenes from the spectral world
he lives in. Anyhow, he manages to turn out results that differ
from the pretender's mince-pie dreams in just about the same way
that the life painter's results differ from the concoctions of a
correspondence-school cartoonist. If I had ever seen what Pickman
saw--but no! Here, let's have a drink before we get any deeper. Gad, I
wouldn't be alive if I'd ever seen what that man--if he was a man--saw!

You recall that Pickman's forte was faces. I don't believe anybody
since Goya could put so much of sheer hell into a set of features or
a twist of expression. And before Goya you have to go back to the
medieval chaps who did the gargoyles and chimeras on Notre Dame and
Mont Saint-Michel. They believed all sorts of things--and maybe they
saw all sorts of things, too, for the Middle Ages had some curious
phases. I remember your asking Pickman yourself once, the year before
you went away, wherever in thunder he got such ideas and visions.
Wasn't that a nasty laugh he gave you? It was partly because of
that laugh that Reid dropped him. Reid, you know, had just taken up
comparative pathology, and was full of pompous "inside stuff" about
the biological or evolutionary significance of this or that mental or
physical symptom. He said Pickman repelled him more and more every day,
and almost frightened him toward the last--that the fellow's features
and expression were slowly developing in a way he didn't like; in a way
that wasn't human. He had a lot of talk about diet, and said Pickman
must be abnormal and eccentric to the last degree. I suppose you told
Reid, if you and he had any correspondence over it, that he'd let
Pickman's paintings get on his nerves or harrow up his imagination. I
know I told him that myself--then.

But keep in mind that I didn't drop Pickman for anything like this.
On the contrary, my admiration for him kept growing; for that _Ghoul
Feeding_ was a tremendous achievement. As you know, the club wouldn't
exhibit it, and the Museum of Fine Arts wouldn't accept it as a gift;
and I can add that nobody would buy it, so Pickman had it right in his
house till he went. Now his father has it in Salem--you know Pickman
comes of old Salem stock, and had a witch ancestor hanged in 1692.

       *       *       *       *       *

I got into the habit of calling on Pickman quite often, especially
after I began making notes for a monograph on weird art. Probably it
was his work which put the idea into my head, and anyhow, I found him
a mine of data and suggestions when I came to develop it. He showed me
all the paintings and drawings he had about; including some pen-and-ink
sketches that would, I verily believe, have got him kicked out of the
club if, many of the members had seen them. Before long I was pretty
nearly a devotee, and would listen for hours like a school-boy to art
theories and philosophic speculations wild enough to qualify him for
the Danvers asylum. My hero-worship, coupled with the fact that people
generally were commencing to have less and less to do with him, made
him get very confidential with me; and one evening he hinted that if
I were fairly close-mouthed and none too squeamish, he might show me
something rather unusual--something a bit stronger than anything he had
in the house.

"You know," he said, "there are things that won't do for Marlborough
Street--things that are out of place here, and that can't be conceived
here, anyhow. It's my business to catch the overtones of the soul, and
you won't find those in a parvenu set of artificial streets on made
land. Back Bay isn't Boston--it isn't anything yet, because it's had
no time to pick up memories and attract local spirits. If there are
any ghosts here, they're the tame ghosts of a salt marsh and a shallow
cove; and I want human ghosts--the ghosts of beings highly organized
enough to have looked on hell and known the meaning of what they saw.

"The place for an artist to love is the North End. If any esthete
were sincere, he'd put up with the slums for the sake of the massed
traditions. God, man! Don't you realize that places like that weren't
merely _made_, but actually _grew_? Generation after generation lived
and felt and died there, and in days when people weren't afraid to
live and feel and die. Don't you know there was a mill on Copp's
Hill in 1632, and that half the present streets were laid out by
1650? I can show you houses that have stood two centuries and a half
and more; houses that have witnessed what would make a modern house
crumble into powder. What do moderns know of life and the forces
behind it? You call the Salem witchcraft a delusion, but I'll wager my
four-times-great-grandmother could have told you things. They hanged
her on Gallows Hill, with Cotton Mather looking sanctimoniously on.
Mather, damn him, was afraid somebody might succeed in kicking free of
this accursed cage of monotony--I wish someone had laid a spell on him
or sucked his blood in the night!

"I can show you a house he lived in, and I can show you another one he
was afraid to enter in spite of all his fine bold talk. He knew things
he didn't dare put into that stupid _Magnalia_ or that puerile _Wonders
of the Invisible World_. Look here, do you know the whole North End
once had a set of tunnels that kept certain people in touch with each
other's houses, and the burying ground, and the sea? Let them prosecute
and persecute above ground--things went on every day that they couldn't
reach, and voices laughed at night that they couldn't place!

"Why, man, out of ten surviving houses built before 1700 and not
moved since I'll wager that in eight I can show you something queer
in the cellar. There's hardly a month that you don't read of workmen
finding bricked-up arches and wells leading nowhere in this or that
old place as it comes down--you could see one near Henchman Street
from the elevated last year. There were witches and what their spells
summoned; pirates and what they brought in from the sea; smugglers;
privateers--and I tell you, people knew how to live, and how to enlarge
the bounds of life, in the old times! This wasn't the only world a bold
and wise man could know--faugh! And to think of today in contrast,
with such pale-pink brains that even a club of supposed artists gets
shudders and convulsions if a picture goes beyond the feelings of a
Beacon Street tea-table!

"The only saving grace of the present is that it's too damned stupid to
question the past very closely. What do maps and records and guidebooks
really tell of the North End? Bah! At a guess I'll guarantee to lead
you to thirty or forty alleys and networks of alleys north of Prince
Street that aren't suspected by ten living beings outside of the
foreigners that swarm them. And what do those Dagoes know of their
meaning? No, Thurber, these ancient places are dreaming gorgeously and
overflowing with wonder and terror and escapes from the commonplace,
and yet there's not a living soul to understand or profit by them. Or,
rather, there's only one living soul--for I haven't been digging around
in the past for nothing!

"See here, you're interested in this sort of thing. What if I told
you that I've got another studio up there, where I can catch the
night-spirit of antique horror and paint things that I couldn't even
think of in Marlborough Street? Naturally I don't tell those cursed old
maids at the club--with Reid, damn him, whispering even as it is that
I'm a sort of monster bound down the toboggan of reverse evolution.
Yes, Thurber, I decided long ago that one must paint terror as well as
beauty from life, so I did some exploring in places where I had reason
to know terror lives.

"I've got a place that I don't believe three living Nordic men besides
myself have ever seen. It isn't so very far from the elevated as
distance goes, but it's centuries away as the soul goes. I took it
because of the queer old brick well in the cellar--one of the sort I
told you about. The shack's almost tumbling down, so that nobody else
would live there, and I'd hate to tell you how little I pay for it.
The windows are boarded up, but I like that all the better, since I
don't want daylight for what I do. I paint in the cellar, where the
inspiration is thickest, but I've other rooms furnished on the ground
floor. A Sicilian owns it, and I've hired it under the name of Peters.

"Now if you're game, I'll take you there tonight. I think you'd enjoy
the pictures, for as I said, I've let myself go a bit there. It's no
vast tour--I sometimes do it on foot, for I don't want to attract
attention with a taxi in such a place. We can take the shuttle at the
South Station for Battery Street, and after that the walk isn't much."

       *       *       *       *       *

Well, Eliot, there wasn't much for me to do after that harangue but to
keep myself from running instead of walking for the first vacant cab
we could sight. We changed to the elevated at the South Station, and
at about 12 o'clock had climbed down the steps at Battery Street and
struck along the old waterfront past Constitution Wharf. I didn't keep
track of the cross streets, and can't tell you yet which it was we
turned up, but I know it wasn't Greenough Lane.

When we did turn, it was to climb through the deserted length of the
oldest and dirtiest alley I ever saw in my life, with crumbling-looking
gables, broken small-paned windows, and archaic chimneys that stood
out half-disintegrated against the moonlit sky. I don't believe there
were three houses in sight that hadn't been standing in Cotton Mather's
time--certainly I glimpsed at least two with an overhang, and once I
thought I saw a peaked roof-line of the almost forgotten pre-gambrel
type, though antiquarians tell us there are none left in Boston.

From that alley, which had a dim light, we turned to the left into
an equally silent and still narrower alley with no light at all; and
in a minute made what I think was an obtuse-angled bend toward the
right in the dark. Not long after this Pickman produced a flashlight
and revealed an antediluvian ten-paneled door that looked damnably
worm-eaten. Unlocking it, he ushered me into a barren hallway with what
was once splendid dark-oak paneling--simple, of course, but thrillingly
suggestive of the times of Andros and Phips and the Witchcraft. Then he
took me through a door on the left, lighted an oil lamp, and told me to
make myself at home.

Now, Eliot, I'm what the man in the street would call fairly
"hard-boiled," but I'll confess that what I saw on the walls of that
room gave me a bad turn. They were his pictures, you know--the ones he
couldn't paint or even show in Marlborough Street--and he was right
when he said he had "let himself go." Here--have another drink--I need
one anyhow!

There's no use in my trying to tell you what they were like, because
the awful, the blasphemous horror, and the unbelievable loathsomeness
and moral fetor came from simple touches quite beyond the power of
words to classify. There was none of the exotic technique you see in
Sidney Sime, none of the trans-Saturnian landscapes and lunar fungi
that Clark Ashton Smith uses to freeze the blood. The backgrounds were
mostly old churchyards, deep woods, cliffs by the sea, brick tunnels,
ancient paneled rooms, or simple vaults of masonry. Copp's Hill Burying
Ground, which could not be many blocks away from this very house, was a
favorite scene.

The madness and monstrosity lay in the figures in the foreground--for
Pickman's morbid art was preeminently one of demoniac portraiture.
These figures were seldom completely human, but often approached
humanity in varying degrees. Most of the bodies, while roughly bipedal,
had a forward slumping, and a vaguely canine cast. The texture of the
majority was a kind of unpleasant rubberiness. Ugh! I can see them now!
Their occupations--well, don't ask me to be too precise. They were
usually feeding--I won't say on what. They were sometimes shown in
groups in cemeteries or underground passages, and often appeared to be
in battle over their prey--or rather, their treasure-trove. And what
damnable expressiveness Pickman sometimes gave the sightless faces of
this charnel booty! Occasionally the things were shown leaping through
open windows at night, or squatting on the chests of sleepers, worrying
at their throats. One canvas showed a ring of them baying about a
hanged witch on Gallows Hill, whose dead face held a close kinship to
theirs.

But don't get the idea that it was all this hideous business of theme
and setting which struck me faint. I'm not a three-year-old kid, and
I'd seen much like this before. It was the _faces_, Eliot, those
accursed _faces_, that leered and slavered out of the canvas with the
very breath of life! By God, man, I verily believe they were alive!
That nauseous wizard had waked the fires of hell in pigment, and his
brush had been a nightmare-spawning wand. Give me that decanter, Eliot!

There was one thing called _The Lesson_--heaven pity me, that I ever
saw it! Listen--can you fancy a squatting circle of nameless doglike
things in a churchyard teaching a small child how to feed like
themselves? The price of a changeling, I suppose--you know the old myth
about how the weird people leave their spawn in cradles in exchange
for the human babes they steal. Pickman was showing what happens to
those stolen babes--how they grow up--and then I began to see a hideous
relationship in the faces of the human and non-human figures. He was,
in all his gradations of morbidity between the frankly non-human and
the degradedly human, establishing a sardonic linkage and evolution.
The dog-things were developed from mortals!

And no sooner had I wondered what he made of their own young as
left with mankind in the form of changelings, than my eye caught a
picture embodying that very thought. It was that of an ancient Puritan
interior--a heavily beamed room with lattice windows, a settle, and
clumsy Seventeenth Century furniture, with the family sitting about
while the father read from the Scriptures. Every face but one showed
nobility and reverence, but that one reflected the mockery of the
pit. It was that of a young man in years, and no doubt belonged to a
supposed son of that pious father, but in essence it was the kin of the
unclean things. It was their changeling--and in a spirit of supreme
irony Pickman had given the features a very perceptible resemblance to
his own.

By this time Pickman had lighted a lamp in an adjoining room and was
politely holding open the door for me; asking me if I would care to
see his "modern studies", I hadn't been able to give him much of my
opinions--I was too speechless with fright and loathing--but I think he
fully understood and felt highly complimented. And now I want to assure
you again, Eliot, that I'm no mollycoddle to scream at anything which
shows a bit of departure from the usual. I'm middle-aged and decently
sophisticated, and I guess you saw enough of me in France to know I'm
not easily knocked out. Remember, too, that I'd just about recovered my
wind and gotten used to those frightful pictures which turned colonial
New England into a kind of annex of hell. Well, in spite of all this,
that next room forced a real scream out of me, and I had to clutch at
the doorway to keep from keeling over. The other chamber had shown a
pack of ghouls and witches overrunning the world of our fore-fathers,
but this one brought the horror right into our own daily life!

Gad, how that man could paint! There was a study called _Subway
Accident_, in which a flock of the vile things were clambering up from
some unknown catacomb through a crack in the floor of the Boylston
Street subway and attacking a crowd of people on the platform. Another
showed a dance on Copp's hill among the tombs with the background
of today. Then there were any number of cellar views, with monsters
creeping in through holes and rifts in the masonry and grinning as they
squatted behind barrels or furnaces and waited for their first victim
to descend the stairs.

One disgusting canvas seemed to depict a vast cross-section of Beacon
Hill, with antlike armies of the mephitic monsters squeezing themselves
through burrows that honey-combed the ground. Dances in the modern
cemeteries were freely pictured, and another conception somehow shocked
me more than all the rest--a scene in an unknown vault, where scores of
the beasts crowded about one who held a well-known Boston guidebook and
was evidently reading aloud. All were pointing to a certain passage,
and every face seemed so distorted with epileptic and reverberant
laughter that I almost thought I heard the fiendish echoes. The title
of the picture was, _Holmes, Lowell, and Longfellow Lie Buried in Mount
Auburn_.

As I gradually steadied myself and got readjusted to this second room
of deviltry and morbidity, I began to analyze some of the points in my
sickening loathing. In the first place, I said to myself, these things
repelled because of the utter inhumanity and callous cruelty they
showed in Pickman. The fellow must be a relentless enemy of all mankind
to take such glee in the torture of brain and flesh and the degradation
of the mortal tenement. In the second place, they terrified because of
their very greatness. Their art was the art that convinced--when we
saw the pictures we saw the demons themselves and were afraid of them.
And the queer part was, that Pickman got none of his power from the
use of selectiveness or bizarreric. Nothing was blurred, distorted, or
conventionalized; outlines were sharp and lifelike, and details were
almost painfully defined. And the faces!

It was not any mere artist's interpretation that we saw; it was
pandemonium itself, crystal-clear in stark objectivity. That was it,
by heaven! The man was not a fantaisiste or romanticist at all--he did
not even try to give us the churning, prismatic ephemera of dreams,
but coldly and sardonically reflected some stable, mechanistic,
and well-established horror-world which he saw fully, brilliantly,
squarely, and unfalteringly. God knows what that world can have been,
or where he ever glimpsed the blasphemous shapes that loped and trotted
and crawled through it; but whatever the baffling source of his images,
one thing was plain. Pickman was in every sense--in conception and in
execution--a thorough, painstaking, and almost scientific _realist_.

       *       *       *       *       *

My host was now leading the way down cellar to his actual studio, and I
braced myself for some hellish effects among the unfinished canvases.
As we reached the bottom of the damp stairs he turned his flashlight
to a corner of the large open space at hand, revealing the circular
brick curb of what was evidently a great well in the earthen floor. We
walked nearer, and I saw that it must be five feet across, with walls
a good foot thick and some six inches above the ground level--solid
work of the Seventeenth Century, or I was much mistaken. That, Pickman
said, was the kind of thing he had been talking about--an aperture of
the network of tunnels that used to undermine the hill. I noticed idly
that it did not seem to be bricked up, and that a heavy disk of wood
formed the apparent cover. Thinking of the things this well must have
been connected with if Pickman's wild hints had not been mere rhetoric,
I shivered slightly; then turned to follow him up a step and through a
narrow door into a room of fair size, provided with a wooden floor and
furnished as a studio. An acetylene gas outfit gave the light necessary
for work.

The unfinished pictures on easels or propped against the walls were
as ghastly as the finished ones upstairs, and showed the painstaking
methods of the artist. Scenes were blocked out with extreme care, and
penciled guide lines told of the minute exactitude which Pickman used
in getting the right perspective and proportions. The man was great--I
say it even now, knowing as much as I do. A large camera on a table
excited my notice, and Pickman told me that he used it in taking scenes
for backgrounds, so that he might paint them from photographs in the
studio instead of carting his outfit around the town for this or that
view. He thought a photograph quite as good as an actual scene or model
for sustained work, and declared he employed them regularly.

There was something very disturbing about the nauseous sketches and
half-finished monstrosities that leered around from every side of the
room, and when Pickman suddenly unveiled a huge canvas on the side away
from the light I could not for my life keep back a loud scream--the
second I had emitted that night. It echoed and echoed through the dim
vaultings of that ancient and nitrous cellar, and I had to choke back a
flood of reaction that threatened to burst out as hysterical laughter.
Merciful Creator! Eliot, but I don't know how much was real and how
much was feverish fancy. It doesn't seem to me that earth can hold a
dream like that!

It was a colossal and nameless blasphemy with glaring red eyes, and it
held in bony claws a thing that had been a man, gnawing at the head as
a child nibbles at a stick of candy. Its position was a kind of crouch,
and as one looked one felt that at any moment it might drop its present
prey and seek a juicier morsel. But, damn it all, it wasn't even the
fiendish subject that made it such an immortal fountain-head of all
panic--not that, nor the dog face with its pointed ears, bloodshot
eyes, flat nose, and drooling lips. It wasn't the scaly claws nor the
mold-caked body nor the half-hooved feet--none of these, though any one
of them might well have driven an excitable man to madness.

It was the technique, Eliot--the cursed, the impious, the unnatural
technique! As I am a living being, I never elsewhere saw the actual
breath of life so fused into a canvas. The monster was there--it glared
and gnawed and gnawed and glared--and I knew that only a suspension of
nature's laws could ever let a man paint a thing like that without a
model--without some glimpse of the nether world which no mortal unsold
to the Fiend has ever had.

Pinned with a thumb-tack to a vacant part of the canvas was a piece of
paper now badly curled up--probably, I thought, a photograph from which
Pickman meant to paint a background as hideous as the nightmare it was
to enhance. I reached out to uncurl and look at it, when suddenly
I saw Pickman start as if shot. He had been listening with peculiar
intensity ever since my shocked scream had waked unaccustomed echoes in
the dark cellar, and now he seemed struck with a fright which, though
not comparable to my own, had in it more of the physical than of the
spiritual. He drew a revolver and motioned me to silence, then stepped
out into the main cellar and closed the door behind him.

I think I was paralyzed for an instant. Imitating Pickman's listening,
I fancied I heard a faint scurrying sound somewhere, and a series of
squeals or bleats in a direction I couldn't determine. I thought of
huge rats and shuddered. Then there came a subdued sort of clatter
which somehow set me all in gooseflesh--a furtive, groping kind of
clatter, though I can't attempt to convey what I mean in words. It was
like heavy wood falling on stone or brick--wood on brick--what did that
make me think of?

It came again, and louder. There was a vibration as if the wood had
fallen farther than it had fallen before. After that followed a sharp
grating noise, a shouted gibberish from Pickman, and the deafening
discharge of all six chambers of a revolver, fired spectacularly as
a lion-tamer might fire in the air for effect. A muffled squeal or
squawk, and a thud. Then more wood and brick grating, a pause, and the
opening of the door--at which I'll confess I started violently. Pickman
reappeared with his smoking weapon, cursing the bloated rats that
infested the ancient well.

"The deuce knows what they eat, Thurber," he grinned, "for those
archaic tunnels touched graveyard and witch-den and seacoast. But
whatever it is, they must have run short, for they were devilish
anxious to get out. Your yelling stirred them up, I fancy. Better be
cautious in these old places--our rodent friends are the one drawback,
though I sometimes think they're a positive asset by way of atmosphere
and color."

       *       *       *       *       *

Well, Eliot, that was the end of the night's adventure. Pickman had
promised to show me the place, and heaven knows he had done it. He led
me out of that tangle of alleys in another direction, it seems, for
when we sighted a lamp-post we were in a half-familiar street with
monotonous rows of mingled tenement blocks and old houses. Charter
Street, it turned out to be, but I was too flustered to notice just
where we hit it. We were too late for the elevated, and walked back
downtown through Hanover Street. I remember that walk. We switched from
Tremont up Beacon, and Pickman left me at the corner of Joy, where I
turned off. I never spoke to him again.

Why did I drop him? Don't be impatient. Wait till I ring for coffee.
We've had enough of the other stuff, but I for one need something.
No--it wasn't the paintings I saw in that place; though I'll swear they
were enough to get him ostracized in nine-tenths of the homes and clubs
of Boston, and I guess you won't wonder now why I have to steer clear
of subways and cellars. It was--something I found in my coat the next
morning. You know, the curled-up paper tacked to that frightful canvas
in the cellar; the thing I thought was a photograph of some scene he
meant to use as a background for that monster. That last scare had come
while I was reaching to uncurl it, and it seems I had vacantly crumpled
it into my pocket. But here's the coffee--take it black, Eliot, if
you're wise.

Yes, that paper was the reason I dropped Pickman; Richard Upton
Pickman, the greatest artist I have ever known--and the foulest being
that ever leaped the bounds of life into the pits of myth and madness.
Eliot--old Reid was right. He wasn't strictly human. Either he was born
in strange shadow, or he'd found a way to unlock the forbidden gate.
It's all the same now, for he's gone--back into the fabulous darkness
he loved to haunt. Here, let's have the chandelier going.

Don't ask me to explain or even conjecture about what I burned. Don't
ask me, either, what lay behind that mole-like scrambling Pickman
was so keen to pass off as rats. There are secrets, you know, which
might have come down from old Salem times, and Cotton Mather tells
even stranger things. You know how damned lifelike Pickman's paintings
were--how we all wondered where he got those faces.

[Illustration: "He had painted a monstrous being on that awful canvas."]

Well--that paper wasn't a photograph of any background, after all. What
it showed was simply the monstrous being he was painting on that awful
canvas. It was the model he was using--and its background was merely
the wall of the cellar studio in minute detail. But by God, Eliot, _it
was a photograph from life_.



# Project Gutenberg #79405

The Picture in the House

                          By H. P. LOVECRAFT

                      _A Chilling Tale of Horror
                    By a Master of Weird Fiction._

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                      Weird Tales, January 1924.]


Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the
catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare
countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles,
and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of
forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain
are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths
on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure in the terrible, to
whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and
justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely
farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of
strength, solitude, grotesqueness and ignorance combine to form the
perfection of the hideous.

Most horrible of all sights are the little unpainted wooden houses
remote from traveled ways, usually squatted upon some damp, grassy
slope or leaning against some gigantic outcropping rock. Two hundred
years and more they have leaned or squatted there, while the vines have
crawled and the trees have swelled and spread. They are almost hidden
now in lawless luxuriances of green and guardian shrouds of shadow;
but the small-paned windows still stare shockingly, as if blinking
through a lethal stupor which wards off madness by dulling the memory
of unutterable things.

In such houses have dwelt generations of strange people, whose like the
world has never seen. Seized with a gloomy and fanatical belief which
exiled them from their kind, their ancestors sought the wilderness for
freedom. There the scions of a conquering race indeed flourished, free
from the restrictions of their fellows, but cowered in an appalling
slavery to the dismal phantasms of their own minds.

Divorced from the enlightenment of civilization, the strength of these
Puritans turned into singular channels; and in their isolation, morbid
self-repression, and struggle for life with relentless Nature, there
came to them dark furtive traits from the prehistoric depths of their
cold Northern heritage. By necessity practical and by philosophy stern,
these folk were not beautiful in their sins. Erring as all mortals
must, they were forced by their rigid code to seek concealment above
all else; so that they came to use less and less taste in what they
concealed. Only the silent, sleepy, staring houses in the backwoods
can tell all that has lain hidden since the early days; and they are
not communicative, being loath to shake off the drowsiness which helps
them forget. Sometimes one feels that it would be merciful to tear down
these houses, for they must often dream.

It was to a time-battered edifice of this description that I was
driven one afternoon in November, 1896, by a rain of such chilling
copiousness that any shelter was preferable to exposure. I had been
traveling for some time amongst the people of the Miskatonic Valley
in quest of certain genealogical data; and from the remote, devious,
and problematical nature of my course, had deemed it convenient to
employ a bicycle despite the lateness of the season. Now I found myself
upon an apparently abandoned road which I had chosen as the shortest
cut to Arkham; overtaken by the storm at a point far from any town,
and confronted with no refuge save the antique and repellent wooden
building which blinked with bleared windows from between two huge
leafless oaks near the foot of a rocky hill.

Distant though it was from the remnant of a road, this house none the
less impressed me unfavorably the very moment I espied it. Honest,
wholesome structures do not stare at travelers so slyly and hauntingly,
and in my genealogical researches I had encountered legends of a
century before which biased me against places of this kind. Yet the
force of the elements was such as to overcome my scruples, and I did
not hesitate to wheel my machine up the weedy rise to the closed door
which seemed at once so suggestive and secretive.

       *       *       *       *       *

I had somehow taken it for granted that the house was abandoned, yet
as I approached it I was not so sure; for though the walks were indeed
overgrown with weeds, they seemed to retain their nature a little too
well to argue complete desertion. Therefore, instead of trying the door
I knocked, feeling as I did so a trepidation I could scarcely explain.

As I waited on the rough, mossy rock which served as a doorstep, I
glanced at the neighboring windows and the panes of the fanlight
above me, and noticed that although old, rattling, and almost opaque
with dirt, they were not broken. The building, then, must still be
inhabited, despite its isolation and general neglect.

However, my rapping evoked no response, so after repeating the summons
I tried the rusty latch and found the door unfastened. Inside was
a little vestibule with walls from which the plaster was falling,
and through the doorway came a faint but peculiarly hateful odor. I
entered, carrying my bicycle, and closed the door behind me. Ahead rose
a narrow staircase, flanked by a small door probably leading to the
cellar, while to the left and right were closed doors leadings to rooms
on the ground floor.

Leaning my cycle against the wall I opened the door at the left, and
crossed into a small low-ceiled chamber but dimly lighted by its two
dusty windows and furnished in the barest and most primitive possible
way. It appeared to be a kind of sitting-room, for it had a table
and several chairs, and an immense fireplace above which ticked an
antique clock on a mantel. Books and papers were very few, and in
the prevailing gloom I could not readily discern the titles. What
interested me was the uniform air of archaism as displayed in every
visible detail. Most of the houses in this region I had found rich in
relics of the past, but here the antiquity was curiously complete; for
in all the room I could not discover a single article of definitely
post-Revolutionary date. Had the furnishings been less humble, the
place would have been a collector's paradise.

As I surveyed this quaint apartment, I felt an increase in that
aversion first excited by the bleak exterior of the house. Just what
it was that I feared or loathed, I could by no means define; but
something in the whole atmosphere seemed redolent of unhallowed age, of
unpleasant crudeness, and of secrets which should be forgotten.

I felt disinclined to sit down, and wandered about, examining the
various articles which I had noticed. The first object of my curiosity
was a book of medium size lying upon the table and presenting such an
antediluvian aspect that I marveled at beholding it outside a museum
or library. It was bound in leather with metal fittings, and was in an
excellent state of preservation; being altogether an unusual sort of
volume to encounter in an abode so lowly. When I opened it to the title
page my wonder grew even greater, for it proved to be nothing less rare
than Pigafetta's account of the Congo region, written in Latin from the
notes of the sailor Lopez and printed at Frankfort in 1598. I had often
heard of this work, with its curious illustrations by the brothers
DeBry, hence for a moment forgot my uneasiness in my desire to turn the
pages before me. The engravings were indeed interesting, drawn wholly
from imagination and careless descriptions, and represented negroes
with white skins and Caucasian features; nor would I soon have closed
the book had not an exceedingly trivial circumstance upset my tired
nerves and revived my sensation of disquiet.

What annoyed me was merely the persistent way in which the volume
tended to fall open to itself at Plate XII, which represented
in gruesome detail a butcher's shop of the cannibal Anziques. I
experienced some shame at my susceptibility to so slight a thing, but
the drawing nevertheless disturbed me, especially in connection with
some adjacent passages descriptive of Anzique gastronomy.

I had turned to a neighboring shelf and was examining its meagre
literary contents--an eighteenth century Bible, a "Pilgrim's Progress"
of like period, illustrated with grotesque woodcuts and printed by
the almanack-maker Isaiah Thomas, the rotting bulk of Cotton Mather's
"Magnalia Christi Americana," and a few other books of evidently equal
age--when my attention was aroused by the unmistakable sound of walking
in the room overhead.

At first astonished and startled, considering the lack of response to
my recent knocking at the door, I immediately afterward concluded that
the walker had just awaked from a sound sleep; and listened with less
surprise as the footsteps sounded on the creaking stairs. The tread
was heavy, yet seemed to contain a curious quality of cautiousness; a
quality which I disliked the more because the tread was heavy.

When I had entered the room I had shut the door behind me. Now, after
a moment of silence during which the walker may have been inspecting
my bicycle in the hall, I heard a fumbling at the latch and saw the
paneled portal swing open again.

       *       *       *       *       *


In the doorway stood a person of such singular appearance that I should
have exclaimed aloud but for the restraints of good breeding. Old,
white-bearded, and ragged, my host possessed a countenance and physique
which inspired equal wonder and respect. His height could not have been
less than six feet, and despite a general air of age and poverty he was
stout and powerful in proportion.

His face, almost hidden by a long beard which grew high on the cheeks,
seemed abnormally ruddy and less wrinkled than one might expect; while
over a high forehead fell a shock of white hair little thinned by the
years. His blue eyes, though a trifle bloodshot, seemed inexplicably
keen and burning. But for his horrible unkemptness, the man would have
been as distinguished-looking as he was impressive. This unkemptness,
however, made him offensive despite his face and figure. Of what his
clothing consisted I could hardly tell, for it seemed to me no more
than a mass of tatters surmounting a pair of high, heavy boots; and his
lack of cleanliness surpassed description.

The appearance of this man, and the instinctive fear he inspired,
prepared me for something like enmity; so that I almost shuddered
through surprise and a sense of uncanny incongruity when he motioned
me to a chair and addressed me in a thin, weak voice full of fawning
respect and ingratiating hospitality. His speech was very curious,
an extreme form of Yankee dialect I had thought long extinct; and I
studied it closely as he sat down opposite me for conversation.

"'Ketched in the rain, be ye?" he greeted, "glad ye was nigh the haouse
en' hed the sense ta come right in. I calc'late I was asleep, else I'd
a heerd ye--I ain't as young as I uster be, an' I need a paowerful
sight o' naps naowadays. Trav'lin' fur? I hain't seed many folks 'long
this rud sence they tuk off the Arkham stage."

I replied that I was going to Arkham, and apologized for my rude entry
into his domicile, whereupon he continued:

"Glad ta see ye, young Sir--new faces is scurce arount here, an' I
hain't got much ta cheer me up these days. Guess yew hail from Bosting,
don't ye? I never ben thar, but I kin tell a taown man when I see
'im--we hed one fer deestrick schoolmaster in eighty-four, but he quit
suddent an' no one never heerd on 'im sence--"

Here the old man lapsed into a kind of chuckle, and made no explanation
when I questioned him. He seemed to be in an aboundingly good humor,
yet to possess those eccentricities which one might guess from
his grooming. For some time he rambled on with an almost feverish
geniality, when it struck me to ask him how he came by so rare a book
as Pigafetta's "Regnum Congo." The effect of this volume had not left
me, and I felt a certain hesitancy in speaking of it; but curiosity
overmastered all the vague fears which had steadily accumulated since
my first glimpse of the house. To my relief, the question did not seem
an awkward one; for the old man answered freely and volubly.

"Oh, thet Afriky book? Cap'n Ebenezer Holt traded me thet in
'sixty-eight--him as was kilt in the war.".

Something about the name of Ebenezer Holt caused me to look up sharply.
I had encountered it in my genealogical work, but not in any record
since the Revolution. I wondered if my host could help me in the task
at which I was laboring, and resolved to ask him about it later on. He
continued:

"Ebenezer was on a Salem merchantman fer years, an' picked up a sight
o' queer stuff in every port. He got this in London, I guess--he uster
like ter buy things at the shops. I was up ta his haouse onct on the
hill, tradin' hosses, when I see this book. I relished the picters, so
he give it in on a swap. 'Tis a queer book--here, leave me git on my
spectacles--"

The old man fumbled among his rags, producing a pair of dirty and
amazingly antique glasses with small octagonal lenses and steel bows.
Donning these, he reached for the volume on the table and turned the
pages lovingly.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Ebenezer cud read a leetle o' this--'tis Latin--but I can't. I hed two
er three schoolmasters read me a bit, an' Passon Clark, him they say
got draownded in the pond--kin yew make anything outen it?"

I told him that I could, and translated for his benefit a paragraph
near the beginning. If I erred, he was not scholar enough to correct
me; for he seemed childishly pleased at my English version. His
proximity was becoming rather obnoxious, yet I saw no way to escape
without offending him. I was amused at the childish fondness of this
ignorant old man for the pictures in a book he could not read, and
wondered how much better he could read the few books in English which
adorned the room. This revelation of simplicity removed much of the
ill-defined apprehension I had felt, and I smiled as my host rambled on:

"Queer haow picters kin set a body thinkin'. Take this un here near the
front. Hev yew ever seed trees like thet, with big leaves a-floppin'
over an' daown? And them men--them can't be niggers--they dew beat all!
Kinder like Injuns, I guess, even ef they be in Afriky. Some o' these
here critters looks like monkeys, or half monkeys an' half men, but I
never heerd o' nothin' like this un." Here he pointed to a fabulous
creature of the artist, which one might describe as a sort of dragon
with the head of an Alligator.

"But naow I'll show ye the best un--over here nigh the middle--" The
old man's speech grew a trifle thicker and his eyes assumed a brighter
glow; but his fumbling hands, though seemingly clumsier than before
were entirely adequate to their mission. The book fell open, almost
of its own accord and as if from frequent consultation at this place,
to the repellent twelfth plate showing a butcher's shop amongst the
Anzique cannibals. My sense of restlessness returned, though I did not
exhibit it. The especially bizarre thing was that the artist had made
his Africans look like white men--the limbs and quarters hanging about
the walls of the shop were ghastly, while the butcher with his axe was
hideously incongruous. But my host seemed to relish the view as much as
I disliked it.

"What d'ye think o' this--ain't never see the like hereabouts, eh? When
I see this I telled Eb Holt, 'Thar's suthin' ta stir ye up an' make
yer blood tickle!' When I read in Scripter about slayin'--like them
Midianites was slew--I kinder think things, but I ain't got a picter
of it. Here a body kin see all they is to it--I s'pose 'tis sinful,
but ain't we all born an' livin' in sin?--Thet feller bein' chopped up
gives me a tickle every time I look at 'im--I hev ta keep lookin' at
'im--see whar the butcher cut off his feet? Thar's his head on thet
bench, with one arm side of it, an' t'oter arm's on the graound side o'
the meat block."

As the man mumbled on in his shocking ecstasy the expression on his
hairy, spectacled face became indescribable, but his voice sank rather
than mounted. My own sensations can scarcely be recorded. All the
terror I had dimly felt before rushed upon me actively and vividly,
and I knew that I loathed the ancient and abhorrent creature so near
me with an infinite intensity. His madness, or at least his partial
perversion, seemed beyond dispute. He was almost whispering now, with a
huskiness more terrible than a scream, and I trembled as I listened.

"As I says, 'tis queer haow picters sets ye thinkin'. D'ye know, young
Sir, I'm right sot on this un here. Arter I got the book off Eb I uster
look at it a lot, especial when I'd heerd Passon Clark rant o' Sundays
in his big wig. Onct I tried suthin' funny--here, young Sir, don't git
skeert--all I done was ter look at the picter afore I kilt the sheep
for market--killin' sheep was kinder more fun arter lookin' at it--"

The tone of the old man now sank very low, sometimes becoming so faint
that his words were hardly audible. I listened to the rain, and to the
rattling of the bleared, small-paned windows, and marked a rumbling of
approaching thunder quite unusual for the season. Once a terrific flash
and peal shook the frail house to its foundations, but the whisperer
seemed not to notice it.

"Killin' sheep was kinder more fun--but d'ye know, 'twan't quite
_satisfyin'_. Queer haow a _cravin'_ gits a holt on ye---As ye love the
Almighty, young man don't tell nobody, but I swar ter Gawd thet picter
begun ta make me _hungry fer victuals I couldn't raise nor buy_--here
set still, what's ailin' ye?--I didn't do nothin', only I wondered haow
'twud be ef I _did_--They say meat makes blood an' flesh, an' gives ye
new life, so I wondered ef 'twudn't make a man live longer an' longer
ef 'twas _more the same_--"

But the whisperer never continued. The interruption was not due to my
fright, nor to the rapidly increasing storm amidst whose fury I was
presently to open my eyes on a smoky solitude of blackened ruins. It
was due to a very simple though somewhat unusual happening.

The open book lay flat between us with the picture staring repulsively
upward. As the old man whispered the words "_more the same_" a tiny
spattering impact was heard, and something showed on the yellowed
paper of the upturned volume. I thought of the ruin and of a leaky
roof, but rain is not red. On the butcher's shop of the Anzique
cannibals a small red spattering glistened picturesquely, lending
vividness to the horror of the engraving. The old man saw it, and
stopped whispering even before my expression of horror made it
necessary; saw it and glanced quickly toward the floor of the room he
had left an hour before. I followed his glance, and beheld just above
us on the loose plaster of the ancient ceiling a large irregular spot
of wet crimson which seemed to spread even as I viewed it. I did not
shriek or move, but merely shut my eyes.

A moment later came the titanic thunderbolt of thunderbolts, striking
the accursed house of unutterable secrets and bringing the oblivion
which alone saved my mind.



# Project Gutenberg #73177

Cool Air

                          By H. P. LOVECRAFT

               _A tale of dark science, and the ghastly
              mystery that enveloped the Spanish doctor's
                attempts at artificial refrigeration._

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                      Weird Tales September 1939.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


You ask me to explain why I am afraid of a draft of cool air; why I
shiver more than others upon entering a cold room, and seem nauseated
and repelled when the chill of evening creeps through the heat of a
mild autumn day. There are those who say I respond to cold as others do
to a bad odor, and I am the last to deny the impression. What I will
do is to relate the most horrible circumstance I ever encountered,
and leave it to you to judge whether or not this forms a suitable
explanation of my peculiarity.

It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably
with darkness, silence, and solitude. I found it in the glare of
midafternoon, in the clangor of a metropolis, and in the teeming midst
of a shabby and commonplace rooming-house with a prosaic landlady
and two stalwart men by my side. In the spring of 1923 I had secured
some dreary and unprofitable magazine work in the city of New York;
and being unable to pay any substantial rent, began drifting from one
cheap boarding establishment to another in search of a room which might
combine the qualities of decent cleanliness, endurable furnishings,
and very reasonable price. It soon developed that I had only a choice
between different evils, but after a time I came upon a house in West
Fourteenth Street which disgusted me much less than the others I had
sampled.

The place was a four-story mansion of brownstone, dating apparently
from the late forties, and fitted with woodwork and marble whose
stained and sullied splendor argued a descent from high levels of
tasteful opulence. In the rooms, large and lofty, and decorated with
impossible paper and ridiculously ornate stucco cornices, there
lingered a depressing mustiness and hint of obscure cookery; but the
floors were clean, the linen tolerably regular, and the hot water not
too often cold or turned off; so that I came to regard it as at least
a bearable place to hibernate until one might really live again. The
landlady, a slatternly, almost bearded Spanish woman named Herrero,
did not annoy me with gossip or with criticisms of the late-burning
electric light in my third floor front hall room; and my fellow-lodgers
were as quiet and uncommunicative as one might desire, being mostly
Spaniards a little above the coarsest and crudest grade. Only the din
of street-cars in the thoroughfare below proved a serious annoyance.

I had been there about three weeks when the first odd incident
occurred. One evening at about eight I heard a spattering on the floor
and became suddenly aware that I had been smelling the pungent odor of
ammonia for some time. Looking about, I saw that the ceiling was wet
and dripping; the soaking apparently proceeding from a corner on the
side toward the street. Anxious to stop the matter at its source, I
hastened to the basement to tell the landlady, and was assured by her
that the trouble would quickly be set right.

"Doctair Muñoz," she cried as she rushed upstairs ahead of me, "he have
speel hees chemicals. He ees too seeck for doctair heemself--seecker
and seecker all the time--but he weel not have no othair for help. He
ees vairy queer in hees seeckness--all day he take funnee-smelling
baths, and he cannot get excite or warm. All hees own housework he
do--hees leetle room are full of bottles and machines and he do not
work as doctair. But he was great once--my fathair in Barcelona have
hear of heem--and only joost now he feex a arm of the plumber that get
hurt of sudden. He nevair go out, only on roof, and my boy Esteban he
breeng heem hees food and laundry and mediceens and chemicals. My God,
the sal-ammoniac that man use for to keep heem cool!"

Mrs. Herrero disappeared up the staircase to the fourth floor, and I
returned to my room. The ammonia ceased to drip, and as I cleaned up
what had spilled and opened the window for air, I heard the landlady's
heavy footsteps above me. Doctor Muñoz I had never heard, save for
certain sounds as of some gasoline-driven mechanism; since his step was
soft and gentle. I wondered for a moment what the strange affliction
of this man might be, and whether his obstinate refusal of outside
aid were not the result of a rather baseless eccentricity. There is,
I reflected tritely, an infinite deal of pathos in the state of an
eminent person who has come down in the world.

       *       *       *       *       *

I might never have known Doctor Muñoz had it not been for the heart
attack that suddenly seized me one forenoon as I sat writing in my
room. Physicians had told me of the danger of those spells, and I knew
there was no time to be lost; so, remembering what the landlady had
said about the invalid's help of the injured workman, I dragged myself
upstairs and knocked feebly at the door above mine.

My knock was answered in good English by a curious voice some distance
to the right, asking my name and business; and these things being
stated, there came an opening of the door next to the one I had sought.

A rush of cool air greeted me; and though the day was one of the
hottest of late June, I shivered as I crossed the threshold into a
large apartment whose rich and tasteful decoration surprized me in
this nest of squalor and seediness. A folding couch now filled its
diurnal rôle of sofa, and the mahogany furniture, sumptuous hangings,
old paintings, and mellow bookshelves all bespoke a gentleman's study
rather than a boarding-house bedroom. I now saw that the hall room
above mine--the "leetle room" of bottles and machines which Mrs.
Herrero had mentioned--was merely the laboratory of the doctor; and
that his main living-quarters lay in the spacious adjoining room whose
convenient alcoves and large contiguous bathroom permitted him to hide
all dressers and obtrusively utilitarian devices. Doctor Muñoz, most
certainly, was a man of birth, cultivation, and discrimination.

The figure before me was short but exquisitely proportioned, and clad
in somewhat formal dress of perfect fit and cut. A high-bred face
of masterful though not arrogant expression was adorned by a short
iron-gray full beard, and an old-fashioned pince-nez shielded the full,
dark eyes and surmounted an aquiline nose which gave a Moorish touch to
a physiognomy otherwise dominantly Celt-Iberian. Thick, well-trimmed
hair that argued the punctual calls of a barber was parted gracefully
above a high forehead; and the whole picture was one of striking
intelligence and superior blood and breeding.

Nevertheless, as I saw Doctor Muñoz in that blast of cool air, I felt
a repugnance which nothing in his aspect could justify. Only his
lividly inclined complexion and coldness of touch could have afforded
a physical basis for this feeling, and even these things should have
been excusable considering the man's known invalidism. It might, too,
have been the singular cold that alienated me; for such chilliness was
abnormal on so hot a day, and the abnormal always excites aversion,
distrust, and fear.

But repugnance was soon forgotten in admiration, for the strange
physician's extreme skill at once became manifest despite the
ice-coldness and shakiness of his bloodless-looking hands. He clearly
understood my needs at a glance, and ministered to them with a master's
deftness; the while reassuring me in a finely modulated though oddly
hollow and timbreless voice that he was the bitterest of sworn
enemies to death, and had sunk his fortune and lost all his friends
in a lifetime of bizarre experiment devoted to its bafflement and
extirpation. Something of the benevolent fanatic seemed to reside in
him, and he rambled on almost garrulously as he sounded my chest and
mixed a suitable draft of drugs fetched from the smaller laboratory
room. Evidently he found the society of a well-born man a rare novelty
in this dingy environment, and was moved to unaccustomed speech as
memories of better days surged over him.

His voice, if queer, was at least soothing; and I could not even
perceive that he breathed as the fluent sentences rolled urbanely
out. He sought to distract my mind from my own seizure by speaking of
his theories and experiments; and I remember his tactfully consoling
me about my weak heart by insisting that will and consciousness are
stronger than organic life itself, so that if a bodily frame be
but originally healthy and carefully preserved, it may through a
scientific enhancement of these qualities retain a kind of nervous
animation despite the most serious impairments, defects, or even
absences in the battery of specific organs. He might, he half-jestingly
said, some day teach me to live--or at least to possess some kind
of conscious existence--without any heart at all! For his part, he
was afflicted with a complication of maladies requiring a very exact
regimen which included constant cold. Any marked rise in temperature
might, if prolonged, affect him fatally; and the frigidity of his
habitation--some fifty-five or fifty-six degrees Fahrenheit--was
maintained by an absorption system of ammonia cooling, the gasoline
engine whose pumps I had often heard in my room below.

Relieved of my seizure in a marvelously short while, I left the shivery
place a disciple and devotee of the gifted recluse. After that I paid
him frequent overcoated calls, listening while he told of secret
researches and almost ghastly results, and trembling a bit when I
examined the unconventional and astonishingly ancient volumes on his
shelves. I was eventually, I may add, almost cured of my disease for
all time by his skilful ministrations. It seems that he did not scorn
the incantations of the mediævalists, since he believed these cryptic
formulæ to contain rare psychological stimuli which might conceivably
have singular effects on the substance of a nervous system from which
organic pulsations had fled. I was touched by his account of the aged
Doctor Torres of Valencia, who had shared his earlier experiments
and nursed him through the great illness of eighteen years before,
whence his present disorders proceeded. No sooner had the venerable
practitioner saved his colleague than he himself succumbed to the
grim enemy he had fought. Perhaps the strain had been too great; for
Doctor Muñoz made it whisperingly clear--though not in detail--that the
methods of healing had been most extraordinary, involving scenes and
processes not welcomed by elderly and conservative Galens.

       *       *       *       *       *

As the weeks passed, I observed with regret that my new friend
was indeed slowly but unmistakably losing ground physically, as
Mrs. Herrero had suggested. The livid aspect of his countenance
was intensified, his voice became more hollow and indistinct, his
muscular motions were less perfectly coördinated, and his mind and
will displayed less resilience and initiative. Of this sad change
he seemed by no means unaware, and little by little his expression
and conversation both took on a gruesome irony which restored in me
something of the subtle repulsion I had originally felt.

He developed strange caprices, acquiring a fondness for exotic
spices and Egyptian incense until his room smelled like the vault
of a sepulchered Pharaoh in the Valley of Kings. At the same time,
his demands for cold air increased, and with my aid he amplified the
ammonia piping of his room and modified the pumps and feed of his
refrigerating machine until he could keep the temperature as low as
thirty-four or forty degrees, and finally even twenty-eight degrees;
the bathroom and laboratory, of course, being less chilled, in order
that water might not freeze, and that chemical processes might not
be impeded. The tenant adjoining him complained of the icy air from
around the connecting door; so I helped him fit heavy hangings to
obviate the difficulty. A kind of growing horror, of outré and morbid
cast, seemed to possess him. He talked of death incessantly, but
laughed hollowly when such things as burial or funeral arrangements
were gently suggested.

All in all, he became a disconcerting and even gruesome companion; yet
in my gratitude for his healing, I could not well abandon him to the
strangers around him, and was careful to dust his room and attend to
his needs each day, muffled in a heavy ulster which I bought especially
for the purpose. I likewise did much of his shopping, and gasped in
bafflement at some of the chemicals he ordered from druggists and
laboratory supply houses.

An increasing and unexplained atmosphere of panic seemed to rise around
his apartment. The whole house, as I have said, had a musty odor;
but the smell in his room was worse, in spite of all the spices and
incense, and the pungent chemicals of the now incessant baths which he
insisted on taking unaided. I perceived that it must be connected with
his ailment, and shuddered when I reflected on what that ailment might
be. Mrs. Herrero crossed herself when she looked at him, and gave him
up unreservedly to me; not even letting her son Esteban continue to
run errands for him. When I suggested other physicians, the sufferer
would fly into as much of a rage as he seemed to dare to entertain.
He evidently feared the physical effect of violent emotion, yet his
will and driving force waxed rather than waned, and he refused to be
confined to his bed. The lassitude of his earlier ill days gave place
to a return of his fiery purpose, so that he seemed about to hurl
defiance at the death-demon even as that ancient enemy seized him. The
pretense of eating, always curiously like a formality with him, he
virtually abandoned; and mental power alone appeared to keep him from
total collapse.

He acquired a habit of writing long documents of some sort, which he
carefully sealed and filed with injunctions that I transmit them after
his death to certain persons whom he named--for the most part lettered
East Indians, but including also a once celebrated French physician
now generally thought dead, and about whom the most inconceivable
things had been whispered. As it happened, I burned all these papers
undelivered and unopened. His aspect and voice became utterly
frightful, and his presence almost unbearable. One September day an
unexpected glimpse of him induced an epileptic fit in a man who had
come to repair his electric desk lamp; a fit for which he prescribed
effectively while keeping himself well out of sight. That man, oddly
enough, had been through the terrors of the great war without having
incurred any fright so thorough.

       *       *       *       *       *

Then, in the middle of October, the horror of horrors came with
stupefying suddenness. One night about eleven the pump of the
refrigerating machine broke down, so that within three hours the
process of ammonia cooling became impossible. Doctor Muñoz summoned me
by thumping on the floor, and I worked desperately to repair the injury
while my host cursed in a tone whose lifeless, rattling hollowness
surpassed description. My amateur efforts, however, proved of no use;
and when I had brought in a mechanic from a neighboring all-night
garage we learned that nothing could be done until morning, when a
new piston would have to be obtained. The moribund hermit's rage and
fear, swelling to grotesque proportions, seemed likely to shatter what
remained of his failing physique; and once a spasm caused him to clap
his hands to his eyes and rush into the bathroom. He groped his way
out with face tightly bandaged, and I never saw his eyes again.

[Illustration: "He groped his way out with face tightly bandaged, and I
never saw his eyes again."]

The frigidity of the apartment was now sensibly diminishing, and
at about five in the morning, the doctor retired to the bathroom,
commanding me to keep him supplied with all the ice I could obtain
at all-night drugstores and cafeterias. As I would return from my
sometimes discouraging trips and lay my spoils before the closed
bathroom door, I could hear a restless splashing within, and a thick
voice croaking out the order for "More--more!" At length a warm day
broke, and the shops opened one by one. I asked Esteban either to help
with the ice-fetching while I obtained the pump piston, or to order the
piston while I continued with the ice; but, instructed by his mother,
he absolutely refused.

Finally I hired a seedy-looking loafer whom I encountered on the corner
of Eighth Avenue to keep the patient supplied with ice from a little
shop where I introduced him, and applied myself diligently to the task
of finding a pump piston and engaging workmen competent to install it.
The task seemed interminable, and I raged almost as violently as the
hermit when I saw the hours slipping by in a breathless, foodless round
of vain telephoning, and a hectic quest from place to place, hither and
thither by subway and surface car.

About noon I encountered a suitable supply house far downtown, and at
approximately one-thirty that afternoon arrived at my boarding-place
with the necessary paraphernalia and two sturdy and intelligent
mechanics. I had done all I could, and hoped I was in time.

Black terror, however, had preceded me. The house was in utter turmoil,
and above the chatter of awed voices I heard a man praying in a deep
basso. Fiendish things were in the air, and lodgers told over the
beads of their rosaries as they caught the odor from beneath the
doctor's closed door. The lounger I had hired, it seems, had fled
screaming and mad-eyed not long after his second delivery of ice:
perhaps as a result of excessive curiosity. He could not, of course,
have locked the door behind him; yet it was now fastened, presumably
from the inside. There was no sound within save a nameless sort of
slow, thick dripping.

Briefly consulting with Mrs. Herrero and the workmen despite a fear
that gnawed my inmost soul, I advised the breaking down of the door;
but the landlady found a way to turn the key from the outside with some
wire device. We had previously opened the doors of all the other rooms
on that hall, and flung all the windows to the very top. Now, noses
protected by handkerchiefs, we tremblingly invaded the accursed south
room, which blazed with the warm sun of early afternoon.

A kind of dark, slimy trail led from the open bathroom door to the
hall door, and thence to the desk, where a terrible little pool had
accumulated. Something was scrawled there in a pencil in an awful,
blind hand on a piece of paper hideously smeared as though by the very
claws that traced the hurried last words. Then the trail led to the
couch and ended unutterably.

What was, or had been, on the couch I cannot and dare not say here. But
this is what I shiveringly puzzled out on the stickily smeared paper
before I drew a match and burned it to a crisp; what I puzzled out
in terror as the landlady and two mechanics rushed frantically from
that hellish place to babble their incoherent stories at the nearest
police station. The nauseous words seemed well-nigh incredible in that
yellow sunlight, with the clatter of cars and motor trucks ascending
clamorously from crowded Fourteenth Street, yet I confess that I
believed them then. Whether I believe them now I honestly do not know.
There are things about which it is better not to speculate, and all
that I can say is that I hate the smell of ammonia, and grow faint at a
draft of unusually cool air.

"The end," ran that noisome scrawl, "is here. No more ice--the man
looked and ran away. Warmer every minute, and the tissues can't last.
I fancy you know--what I said about the will and the nerves and the
preserved body after the organs ceased to work. It was good theory, but
couldn't keep up indefinitely. There was a gradual deterioration I had
not foreseen. Doctor Torres knew, but the shock killed him. He couldn't
stand what he had to do; he had to get me in a strange, dark place,
when he minded my letter and nursed me back. And the organs never would
work again. It had to be done my way--artificial preservation--_for you
see I died that time eighteen years ago_."



# Project Gutenberg #68553

The Festival

By H. P. Lovecraft

Author of “Dagon,” “The Rats in the Walls,” etc.


    “Efficiunt daemones, ut quae non sunt, sic tamen quasi
    sint, conspicienda hominibus exhibeant.”--Lactantius.


I was far from home, and the spell of the eastern sea was upon me. In
the twilight I heard it pounding on the rocks, and I knew it lay just
over the hill where the twisting willows writhed against the clearing
sky and the first stars of evening. And because my fathers had called
me to the old town beyond, I pushed on through the shallow, new-fallen
snow along the road that soared lonely up to where Aldebaran twinkled
among the trees; on toward the very ancient town I had never seen but
often dreamed of.

It was the Yuletide, which men call Christmas, though they know in
their hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than
Memphis and mankind. It was the Yuletide, and I had come at last to
the ancient sea town where my people had dwelt and kept festival in
the elder time when festival was forbidden; where also they had
commanded their sons to keep festival once every century, that the
memory of primal secrets might not be forgotten. Mine were an old
people, old even when this land was settled three hundred years
before. And they were strange, because they had come as dark, furtive
folk from opiate southern gardens of orchids, and spoken another
tongue before they learnt the tongue of the blue-eyed fishers. And now
they were scattered, and shared only the rituals of mysteries that
none living could understand. I was the only one who came back that
night to the old fishing town as legend bade, for only the poor and
the lonely remember.

Then beyond the hill’s crest I saw Kingsport outspread frostily in the
gloaming; snowy Kingsport with its ancient vanes and steeples,
ridgepoles and chimneypots, wharves and small bridges, willow trees
and graveyards; endless labyrinths of steep, narrow, crooked streets,
and dizzy church-crowned central peak that time durst not touch;
ceaseless mazes of colonial houses piled and scattered at all angles
and levels like a child’s disordered blocks; antiquity hovering on
gray wings over winter-whitened gables and gambrel roofs. And against
the rotting wharves the sea pounded; the secretive, immemorial sea out
of which the people had come in the elder time.

Beside the road at its crest a still higher summit rose, bleak and
windswept, and I saw that it was a burying-ground where black
gravestones stuck ghoulishly through the snow like the decayed
fingernails of a gigantic corpse. The printless road was very lonely,
and sometimes I thought I heard a distant horrible creaking as of a
gibbet in the wind. They had hanged four kinsmen of mine for
witchcraft in 1692, but I did not know just where.

As the road wound down the seaward slope I listened for the merry
sounds of a village at evening, but did not hear them. Then I thought
of the season, and felt that these old Puritan folk might well have
Christmas customs strange to me, and full of silent hearthside prayer.
So after that I did not listen for merriment or look for wayfarers,
but kept on down past the hushed, lighted farmhouses and shadowy stone
walls to where the signs of ancient shops and sea taverns creaked in
the salt breeze, and the grotesque knockers of pillared doorways
glistened along deserted, unpaved lanes in the light of little,
curtained windows.

I had seen maps of the town, and knew where to find the home of my
people. It was told that I should be known and welcomed, for village
legend lives long; so I hastened through Back Street to Circle Court,
and across the fresh snow on the one full flagstone pavement in the
town, to where Green Lane leads off behind the Market House. I was
glad I had chosen to walk. The white village had seemed very beautiful
from the hill; and now I was eager to knock at the door of my people,
the seventh house on the left in Green Lane, with an ancient peaked
roof and jutting second story, all built before 1650.

There were lights inside the house when I came upon it, and I saw from
the diamond window-panes that it must have been kept very close to its
antique state. The upper part overhung the narrow, grass-grown street
and nearly met the overhanging part of the house opposite, so that I
was almost in a tunnel, with the low stone doorstep wholly free from
snow. There was no sidewalk, but many houses had high doors reached by
double flights of steps with iron railings. It was an odd scene, and
because I was strange to New England I had never known its like
before. Though it pleased me, I would have relished it better if there
had been footprints in the snow, and people in the streets, and a few
windows without drawn curtains.

                *       *       *       *       *

When I sounded the archaic iron knocker I was half afraid. Some fear
had been gathering in me, perhaps because of the strangeness of my
heritage, and the bleakness of the evening, and the queerness of the
silence in that aged town of curious customs. And when my knock was
answered I was fully afraid, because I had not heard any footsteps
before the door creaked open. But I was not afraid long, for the
gowned, slippered old man in the doorway had a bland face that
reassured me; and though he made signs that he was dumb, he wrote a
quaint and ancient welcome with the stylus and wax tablet he carried.

He beckoned me into a low, candlelit room with massive exposed rafters
and dark, stiff, sparse furniture of the seventeenth century. The past
was vivid there, for not an attribute was missing. There was a
cavernous fireplace and a spinning-wheel at which a bent old woman in
loose wrapper and deep poke-bonnet sat back toward me, silently
spinning despite the festive season. An infinite dampness seemed upon
the place, and I marveled that no fire should be blazing. The
high-backed settle faced the row of curtained windows at the left, and
seemed to be occupied, though I was not sure. I did not like
everything about what I saw, and felt again the fear I had had. This
fear grew stronger from what had before lessened it, for the more I
looked at the old man’s bland face, the more its very blandness
terrified me. The eyes never moved, and the skin was too like wax.
Finally I was sure it was not a face at all, but a fiendishly cunning
mask. But the flabby hands, curiously gloved, wrote genially on the
tablet and told me I must wait a while before I could be led to the
place of festival.

Pointing to a chair, table, and pile of books, the old man now left,
the room; and when I sat down to read I saw that the books were hoary
and moldy, and that they included old Morryster’s wild “Marvels of
Science,” the terrible “Saducismus Triumphatus” of Joseph Glanvil,
published in 1681, the shocking “Daemonolatreia” of Remigius, printed
in 1595 at Lyons, and worst of all, the unmentionable “Necronomicon”
of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, in Olaus Wormius’ forbidden Latin
translation: a book which I had never seen, but of which I had heard
monstrous things whispered. No one spoke to me, but I could hear the
creaking of signs in the wind outside, and the whir of the wheel as
the bonneted old woman continued her silent spinning, spinning.

I thought the room and the books and the people very morbid and
disquieting, but because an old tradition of my father’s had summoned
me to strange feastings, I resolved to expect queer things. So I tried
to read, and soon became tremblingly absorbed by something I found in
that accursed “Necronomicon”; a thought and a legend too hideous for
sanity or consciousness. But I disliked it when I fancied I heard the
closing of one of the windows that the settle faced, as if it had been
stealthily opened. It had seemed to follow a whirring that was not of
the old woman’s spinning-wheel. This was not much, though, for the old
woman was spinning very hard, and the aged clock had been striking.
After that I lost the feeling that there were persons on the settle,
and was reading intently and shudderingly when the old man came back
booted and dressed in a loose antique costume, and sat down on that
very bench, so that I could not see him. It was certainly nervous
waiting, and the blasphemous book in my hands made it doubly so. When
11 o’clock struck, however, the old man stood up, glided to a massive
carved chest in a corner, and got two hooded cloaks, one of which he
donned, and the other of which he draped round the old woman, who was
ceasing her monotonous spinning. Then they both started for the outer
door; the woman lamely creeping, and the old man, after picking up the
very book I had been reading, beckoning me as he drew his hood over
that unmoving face or mask.

We went out into the moonless and tortuous network of that incredibly
ancient town; went out as the lights in the curtained windows
disappeared one by one, and the Dog Star leered at the throng of
cowled, cloaked figures that poured silently from every doorway and
formed monstrous processions up this street and that, past the
creaking signs and antediluvian gables, the thatched roofs and the
diamond-paned windows; threading precipitous lanes where decaying
houses overlapped and crumbled together, gliding across open courts
and churchyards where the bobbing lanterns made eldritch drunken
constellations.

Amid these hushed throngs I followed my voiceless guides; jostled by
elbows that seemed preternaturally soft, and pressed by chests and
stomachs that seemed abnormally pulpy; but seeing never a face and
hearing never a word. Up, up, up, the eery columns slithered, and I
saw that all the travelers were converging as they flowed near a sort
of focus of crazy alleys at the top of a high hill in the center of
the town, where perched a great white church. I had seen it from the
road’s crest when I looked at Kingsport in the new dusk, and it had
made me shiver because Aldebaran had seemed to balance itself a moment
on the ghostly spire.

There was an open space around the church; partly a churchyard with
spectral shafts, and partly a half-paved square swept nearly bare of
snow by the wind, and lined with unwholesomely archaic houses having
peaked roofs and overhanging gables. Death-fires danced over the
tombs, revealing gruesome vistas, though queerly failing to cast any
shadows. Past the churchyard, where there were no houses, I could see
over the hill’s summit and watch the glimmer of stars on the harbor,
though the town was invisible in the dark. Only once in a while a
lantern bobbed horribly through serpentine alleys on its way to
overtake the throng that was now slipping speechlessly into the
church.

I waited till the crowd had oozed into the black doorway, and till all
the stragglers had followed. The old man was pulling at my sleeve, but
I was determined to be the last. Then finally I went, the sinister man
and the old spinning woman before me. Crossing the threshold into that
swarming temple of unknown darkness, I turned once to look at the
outside world as the churchyard phosphorescence cast a sickly glow on
the hilltop pavement. And as I did so I shuddered. For though the wind
had not left much snow, a few patches did remain on the path near the
door; and in that fleeting backward look it seemed to my troubled eye
that they bore no mark of passing feet, not even mine.

The church was scarce lighted by all the lanterns that had entered it,
for most of the throng had already vanished. They had streamed up the
aisle between the high white pews to the trapdoor of the vaults which
yawned loathsomely open just before the pulpit, and were now squirming
noiselessly in. I followed dumbly down the footworn steps and into the
dank, suffocating crypt. The tail of that sinuous line of
night-marchers seemed very horrible, and as I saw them wriggling into
a venerable tomb, they seemed more horrible still. Then I noticed that
the tomb’s floor had an aperture down which the throng was sliding,
and in a moment we were all descending an ominous staircase of
rough-hewn stone; a narrow spiral staircase damp and peculiarly
odorous, that wound endlessly down into the bowels of the hill, past
monotonous walls of dripping stone blocks and crumbling mortar. It was
a silent, shocking descent, and I observed after a horrible interval
that the walls and steps were changing in nature, as if chiseled out
of the solid rock. What mainly troubled me was that the myriad
footfalls made no sound and set up no echoes. After more eons of
descent I saw some side passages or burrows leading from unknown
recesses of blackness to this shaft of nighted mystery. Soon they
became excessively numerous, like impious catacombs of nameless
menace; and their pungent odor of decay grew quite unbearable. I knew
we must have passed down through the mountain and beneath the earth of
Kingsport itself, and I shivered that a town should be so aged and
maggoty with subterraneous evil.

Then I saw the lurid shimmering of pale light, and heard the insidious
lapping of sunless waters. Again I shivered, for I did not like the
things that the night had brought, and wished bitterly that no
forefather had summoned me to this primal rite. As the steps and the
passage grew broader, I heard another sound, the thin, whining mockery
of a feeble flute; and suddenly there spread out before me the
boundless vista of an inner world--a vast fungous shore litten by a
belching column of sick greenish flame and washed by a wide oily river
that flowed from abysses frightful and unsuspected to join the
blackest gulfs of immemorial ocean.

                *       *       *       *       *

Fainting and gasping, I looked at that unhallowed Erebus of titan
toadstools, leprous fire and slimy water, and saw the cloaked throngs
forming a semicircle around the blazing pillar. It was the Yule-rite,
older than man and fated to survive him; the primal rite of the
solstice and of spring’s promise beyond the snows; the rite of fire
and evergreen, light and music. And in that Stygian grotto I saw them
do the rite, and adore the sick pillar of flame, and throw into the
water handfuls gouged out of the viscous vegetation which glittered
green in the chlorotic glare. I saw this, and I saw something
amorphously squatted far away from the light, piping noisomely on a
flute; and as the thing piped I thought I heard noxious muffled
flutterings in the fetid darkness where I could not see. But what
frightened me most was that flaming column; spouting volcanically from
depths profound and inconceivable, casting no shadows as healthy flame
should, and coating the nitrous stone above with a nasty, venomous
verdigris. For in all that seething combustion no warmth lay, but only
the clamminess of death and corruption.

The man who had brought me now squirmed to a point directly beside the
hideous flame, and made stiff ceremonial motions to the semicircle he
faced. At certain stages of the ritual they did groveling obeisance,
especially when he held above his head that abhorrent “Necronomicon”
he had taken with him; and I shared all the obeisances because I had
been summoned to this festival by the writings of my forefathers. Then
the old man made a signal to the half-seen flute-player in the
darkness, which player thereupon changed its feeble drone to a scarce
louder drone in another key; precipitating as it did so a horror
unthinkable and unexpected. At this horror I sank nearly to the
lichened earth, transfixed with a dread not of this nor any world, but
only of the mad spaces between the stars.

Out of the unimaginable blackness beyond the gangrenous glare of that
cold flame, out of the tartarean leagues through which that oily river
rolled uncanny, unheard, and unsuspected, there flopped rhythmically a
horde of tame, trained, hybrid winged things that no sound eye could
ever wholly grasp, or sound brain ever wholly remember. They were not
altogether crows, nor moles, nor buzzards, nor ants, nor vampire bats,
nor decomposed human beings, but something I cannot and must not
recall. They flopped limply along, half with their webbed feet and
half with their membranous wings; and as they reached the throng of
celebrants the cowled figures seized and mounted them, and rode off
one by one along the reaches of that unlighted river, into pits and
galleries of panic where poison springs feed frightful and
undiscoverable cataracts.

The old spinning woman had gone with the throng, and the old man
remained only because I had refused when he motioned me to seize an
animal and ride like the rest. I saw when I staggered to my feet that
the amorphous flute-player had rolled out of sight, but that two of
the beasts were patiently standing by. As I hung back, the old man
produced his stylus and tablet and wrote that he was the true deputy
of my fathers who had founded the Yule worship in this ancient place;
that it had been decreed I should come back; and that the most secret
mysteries were yet to be performed. He wrote this in a very ancient
hand, and when I still hesitated he pulled from his loose robe a seal
ring and a watch, both with my family arms, to prove that he was what
he said. But it was a hideous proof, because I knew from old papers that
that watch had been buried with my great-great-great-great-grandfather
in 1698.

Presently the old man drew back his hood and pointed to the family
resemblance in his face, but I only shuddered, because I was sure that
the face was merely a devilish waxen mask. The flopping animals were
now scratching restlessly at the lichens, and I saw that the old man
was nearly as restless himself. When one of the things began to waddle
and edge away, he turned quickly to stop it; so that the suddenness of
his motion dislodged the waxen mask from what should have been his
head. And then, because that nightmare’s position barred me from the
stone staircase down which we had come, I flung myself into the oily
underground river that bubbled somewhere to the caves of the sea;
flung myself into that putrescent juice of earth’s inner horrors
before the madness of my screams could bring down upon me all the
charnel legions these pest-gulfs might conceal.

                *       *       *       *       *

At the hospital they told me I had been found half-frozen in Kingsport
Harbor at dawn, clinging to the drifting spar that accident sent to
save me. They told me I had taken the wrong fork of the hill road the
night before, and fallen over the cliffs at Orange Point--a thing they
deducted from prints found in the snow. There was nothing I could say,
because everything was wrong. Everything was wrong, with the broad
window showing a sea of roofs in which only about one in five was
ancient, and the sound of trolleys and motors in the streets below.
They insisted that this was Kingsport, and I could not deny it.

When I went delirious at hearing that the hospital stood near the old
churchyard on Central Hill, they sent me to St. Mary’s Hospital in
Arkham, where I could have better care. I liked it there, for the
doctors were broadminded, and even lent me their influence in
obtaining the carefully sheltered copy of Alhazred’s objectionable
“Necronomicon” from the library of Miskatonic University. They said
something about a “psychosis,” and agreed that I had better get my
harassing obsessions off my mind.

So I read again that hideous chapter, and shuddered doubly because it
was indeed not new to me. I had seen it before, let footprints tell
what they might; and where it was I had seen it were best forgotten.
There was no one--in waking hours--who could remind me of it; but my
dreams are filled with terror, because of phrases I dare not quote. I
dare quote only one paragraph, put into such English as I can make
from the awkward Low Latin.

“The nethermost caverns,” wrote the mad Arab, “are not for the
fathoming of eyes that see; for their marvels are strange and
terrific. Cursed the ground where dead thoughts live new and oddly
bodied, and evil the mind that is held by no head. Wisely did Ibn
Schacabac say that happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and
happy the town at night whose wizards are all in ashes. For it is of
old rumor that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his
charnel clay, but fats and instructs _the very worm that gnaws_; till
out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of
earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great
holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and
things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.”

[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the January 1925 issue of
Weird Tales Magazine.]



# Project Gutenberg #70486

The LURKING FEAR

                          By H. P. LOVECRAFT

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                        Weird Tales June 1928.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


                    _1. The Shadow on the Chimney_


There was thunder in the air on the night I went to the deserted
mansion atop Tempest Mountain to find the lurking fear. I was not
alone, for foolhardiness was not then mixed with that love of the
grotesque and the terrible which has made my career a series of quests
for strange horrors in literature and in life. With me were two
faithful and muscular men for whom I had sent when the time came; men
long associated with me in my ghastly explorations because of their
peculiar fitness.

We had started quietly from the village because of the reporters who
still lingered about after the eldritch panic of a month before--the
nightmare creeping death. Later, I thought, they might aid me; but I
did not want them then. Would to God I had let them share the search,
that I might not have had to bear the secret alone so long; to bear
it alone for fear the world would call me mad or go mad itself at the
demon implications of the thing. Now that I am telling it anyway, lest
the brooding make me a maniac, I wish I had never concealed it. For
I, and I only, know what manner of fear lurked on that spectral and
desolate mountain.

In a small motor-car we covered the miles of primeval forest and
hill until the wooded ascent checked it. The country bore an aspect
more than usually sinister as we viewed it by night and without the
accustomed crowds of investigators, so that we were often tempted to
use the acetylene headlights despite the attention it might attract.
It was not a wholesome landscape after dark, and I believe I would
have noticed its morbidity even had I been ignorant of the terror
that stalked there. Of wild creatures there were none--they are wise
when death leers close. The ancient lightning-scarred trees seemed
unnaturally large and twisted, and the other vegetation unnaturally
thick and feverish, while curious mounds and hummocks in the weedy,
fulgurite-pitted earth reminded me of snakes and dead men's skulls
swelled to gigantic proportions.

Fear had lurked on Tempest Mountain for more than a century. This I
learned at once from newspaper accounts of the catastrophe which first
brought the region to the world's notice. The place is a remote, lonely
elevation in that part of the Catskills where Dutch civilization once
feebly and transiently penetrated, leaving behind as it receded only
a few ruined mansions and a degenerate squatter population inhabiting
pitiful hamlets on isolated slopes. Normal beings seldom visited
the locality till the state police were formed, and even now only
infrequent troopers patrol it. The fear, however, is an old tradition
throughout the neighboring villages; since it is a prime topic in the
simple discourse of the poor mongrels who sometimes leave their valleys
to trade hand-woven baskets for such primitive necessities as they can
not shoot, raise, or make.

The lurking fear dwelt in the shunned and deserted Martense mansion,
which crowned the high but gradual eminence whose liability to frequent
thunderstorms gave it the name of Tempest Mountain. For over a hundred
years the antique, grove-circled stone house had been the subject
of stories incredibly wild and monstrously hideous; stories of a
silent colossal creeping death which stalked abroad in summer. With
whimpering insistence the squatters told tales of a demon which seized
lone wayfarers after dark, either carrying them off or leaving them
in a frightful state of gnawed dismemberment; while sometimes they
whispered of blood-trails toward the distant mansion. Some said the
thunder called the lurking fear out of its habitation, while others
said the thunder was its voice.

No one outside the backwoods had believed these varying and conflicting
stories, with their incoherent, extravagant descriptions of the
half-glimpsed fiend; yet not a farmer or villager doubted that the
Martense mansion was ghoulishly haunted. Local history forbade
such a doubt, although no ghostly evidence was ever found by such
investigators as had visited the building after some especially vivid
tales of the squatters. Grandmothers told strange myths of the Martense
specter; myths concerning the Martense family itself, its queer
hereditary dissimilarity of eyes, its long, unnatural annals, and the
murder which had cursed it.

The terror which brought me to the scene was a sudden and portentous
confirmation of the mountaineers' wildest legends. One summer night,
after a thunderstorm of unprecedented violence, the countryside was
aroused by a squatter stampede which no mere delusion could create. The
pitiful throngs of natives shrieked and whined of the unnamable horror
which had descended upon them, and they were not doubted. They had not
seen it, but had heard such cries from one of their hamlets that they
knew a creeping death had come.

In the morning citizens and state troopers followed the shuddering
mountaineers to the place where they said the death had come. Death
was indeed there. The ground under one of the squatters' villages
had caved in after a lightning strike, destroying several of the
malodorous shanties; but upon this property damage was superimposed an
organic devastation which paled it to insignificance. Of a possible
seventy-five natives who had inhabited this spot, not one living
specimen was visible. The disordered earth was covered with blood and
human debris bespeaking too vividly the ravages of demon teeth and
talons; yet no visible trail led away from the carnage. That some
hideous animal must be the cause, everyone quickly agreed; nor did any
tongue now revive the charge that such cryptic deaths formed merely the
sordid murders common in decadent communities. That charge was revived
only when about twenty-five of the estimated population were found
missing from the dead; and even then it was hard to explain the murder
of fifty by half that number. But the fact remained that on a summer
night a bolt had come out of the heavens and left a dead village whose
corpses were horribly mangled, chewed, and clawed.

The excited countryside immediately connected the horror with the
haunted Martense mansion, though the localities were over three miles
apart. The troopers were more skeptical, including the mansion only
casually in their investigations, and dropping it altogether when they
found it thoroughly deserted. Country and village people, however,
canvassed the place with infinite care; overturning everything in the
house, sounding ponds and brooks, beating down bushes, and ransacking
the near-by forests. All was in vain; the death that had come had left
no trace save destruction itself.

By the second day of the search the affair was fully treated by the
newspapers, whose reporters overran Tempest Mountain. They described
it in much detail, and with many interviews to elucidate the horror's
history as told by local grandams. I followed the accounts languidly
at first, for I am a connoisseur in horrors; but after a week I
detected an atmosphere which stirred me oddly, so that on August
5th, 1921, I registered among the reporters who crowded the hotel at
Lefferts Corners, nearest village to Tempest Mountain and acknowledged
headquarters of the searchers. Three weeks more, and the dispersal of
the reporters left me free to begin a terrible exploration based on the
minute inquiries and surveying with which I had meanwhile busied myself.

So on this summer night, while distant thunder rumbled, I left a silent
motor-car and tramped with two armed companions up the mound-covered
reaches of Tempest Mountain, casting the beams of an electric torch on
the spectral gray walls that began to appear through the giant oaks
ahead. In this morbid night solitude and feeble shifting illumination,
the vast boxlike pile displayed obscure hints of terror which day could
not uncover; yet I did not hesitate, since I had come with fierce
resolution to test an idea. I believed that the thunder called the
death-demon out of some fearsome secret place; and be that demon solid
entity or vaporous pestilence, I meant to see it.

       *       *       *       *       *

I had thoroughly searched the ruin before, hence knew my plan well;
choosing as the seat of my vigil the old room of Jan Martense, whose
murder looms so great in the rural legends. I felt subtly that the
apartment of this ancient victim was best for my purposes. The chamber,
measuring about twenty feet square, contained like the other rooms some
rubbish which had once been furniture. It lay on the second story, on
the southeast corner of the house, and had an immense east window and
narrow south window, both devoid of panes or shutters. Opposite the
large window was an enormous Dutch fireplace with scriptural tiles
representing the prodigal son, and opposite the narrow window was a
spacious bed built into the wall.

As the tree-muffled thunder grew louder, I arranged my plan's details.
First I fastened side by side on the ledge of the large window three
rope ladders which I had brought with me. I knew they reached a
suitable spot on the grass outside, for I had tested them. Then the
three of us dragged from another room a wide four-poster bedstead,
crowding it laterally against the window. Having strewn it with fir
boughs, all now rested on it with drawn automatics, two relaxing while
the third watched. From whatever direction the demon might come, our
potential escape was provided. If it came from within the house, we had
the window ladders; if from outside, the door and the stairs. We did
not think, judging from precedent, that it would pursue us far even at
worst.

I watched from midnight to 1 o'clock, when in spite of the sinister
house, the unprotected window, and the approaching thunder and
lightning, I felt singularly drowsy. I was between my two companions.
George Bennett being toward the window and William Tobey toward
the fireplace. Bennett was asleep, having apparently felt the same
anomalous drowsiness which affected me, so I designated Tobey for the
next watch although even he was nodding. It is curious how intently I
had been watching that fireplace.

The increasing thunder must have affected my dreams, for in the brief
time I slept there came to me apocalyptic visions. Once I partly
awaked, probably because the sleeper toward the window had restlessly
flung an arm across my chest. I was not sufficiently awake to see
whether Tobey was attending to his duties as sentinel, but felt a
distinct anxiety on that score. Never before had the presence of evil
so poignantly oppressed me. Later I must have dropped asleep again, for
it was out of a phantasmal chaos that my mind leaped when the night
grew hideous with shrieks beyond anything in my former experience or
imagination.

In that shrieking the inmost soul of human fear and agony clawed
hopelessly and insanely at the ebony gates of oblivion. I awoke to
red madness and the mockery of diabolism, as farther and farther down
inconceivable vistas that phobic and crystalline anguish retreated and
reverberated. There was no light, but I knew from the empty space at
my right that Tobey was gone, God alone knew whither. Across my chest
still lay the heavy arm of the sleeper at my left.

Then came the devastating stroke of lightning which shook the whole
mountain, lit the darkest crypts of the hoary grove, and splintered
the patriarch of the twisted trees. In the demon flash of a monstrous
fireball the sleeper started up suddenly while the glare from beyond
the window threw his shadow vividly upon the chimney above the
fireplace from which my eyes had never strayed. That I am still alive
and sane, is a marvel I can not fathom. I can not fathom it, for the
shadow on that chimney was not that of George Bennett or of any other
human creature; but a blasphemous abnormality from hell's nethermost
craters; a nameless, shapeless abomination which no mind could fully
grasp and no pen even partly describe. In another second I was alone
in the accursed mansion, shivering and gibbering. George Bennett and
William Tobey had left no trace, not even of a struggle. They were
never heard of again.


                      _2. A Passer in the Storm_


For days after that hideous experience in the forest-swathed mansion
I lay nervously exhausted in my hotel room at Lefferts Corners. I do
not remember exactly how I managed to reach the motor-car, start it,
and slip unobserved back to the village; for I retain no distinct
impression save of wild-armed titan trees, demoniac mutterings of
thunder, and Charonian shadows athwart the low mounds that dotted and
streaked the region.

As I shivered and brooded on the casting of that brain-blasting shadow,
I knew that I had at last pried out one of earth's supreme horrors--one
of those nameless blights of outer voids whose faint demon scratchings
we sometimes hear on the farthest rim of space, yet from which our own
finite vision has given us a merciful immunity. The shadow I had seen,
I hardly dared to analyze or identify. Something had lain between me
and the window that night, but I shuddered whenever I could not cast
off the instinct to classify it. If it had only snarled, or bayed,
or laughed titteringly--even that would have relieved the abysmal
hideousness. But it was so silent. It had rested a heavy arm or foreleg
on my chest.... Obviously it was organic, or had once been organic....
Jan Martense, whose room I had invaded, was buried in the graveyard
near the mansion.... I must find Bennett and Tobey, if they lived ...
why had it picked them, and left me for the last?... Drowsiness is so
stifling, and dreams are so horrible....

In a short time I realized that I must tell my story to someone or
break down completely. I had already decided not to abandon the quest
for the lurking fear, for in my rash ignorance it seemed to me that
uncertainty was worse than enlightenment, however terrible the latter
might prove to be. Accordingly I revolved in my mind the best course
to pursue; whom to select for my confidences, and how to track down the
thing which had obliterated two men and cast a nightmare shadow.

My chief acquaintances at Lefferts Corners had been the affable
reporters, of whom several still remained to collect final echoes of
the tragedy. It was from these that I determined to choose a colleague,
and the more I reflected the more my preference inclined toward one
Arthur Munroe, a dark, lean man of about thirty-five, whose education,
taste, intelligence, and temperament all seemed to mark him as one not
bound to conventional ideas and experiences.

On an afternoon in early September Arthur Munroe listened to my story.
I saw from the beginning that he was both interested and sympathetic,
and when I had finished he analyzed and discussed the thing with the
greatest shrewdness and judgment. His advice, moreover, was eminently
practical; for he recommended a postponement of operations at the
Martense mansion until we might become fortified with more detailed
historical and geographical data. On his initiative we combed the
countryside for information regarding the terrible Martense family, and
discovered a man who possessed a marvelously illuminating ancestral
diary. We also talked at length with such of the mountain mongrels
as had not fled from the terror and confusion to remoter slopes, and
arranged to precede our culminating task--the exhaustive and definitive
examination of the mansion in the light of its detailed history--with
an equally exhaustive and definitive examination of spots associated
with the various tragedies of squatter legend.

The results of this examination were not at first very enlightening,
though our tabulation of them seemed to reveal a fairly significant
trend; namely, that the number of reported horrors was by far the
greatest in areas either comparatively near the avoided house or
connected with it by stretches of the morbidly overnourished forest.
There were, it is true, exceptions; indeed, the horror which had caught
the world's ear had happened in a treeless space remote alike from the
mansion and from any connecting woods.

As to the nature and appearance of the lurking fear, nothing could
be gained from the scared and witless shanty-dwellers. In the same
breath they called it a snake and a giant, a thunder-devil and a bat, a
vulture and a walking tree. We did, however, deem ourselves justified
in assuming that it was a living organism highly susceptible to
electrical storms; and although certain of the stories suggested wings,
we believed that its aversion for open spaces made land locomotion
a more probable theory. The only thing really incompatible with the
latter view was the rapidity with which the creature must have traveled
in order to perform all the deeds attributed to it.

When we came to know the squatters better, we found them curiously
likable in many ways. Simple animals they were, gently descending
the evolutionary scale because of their unfortunate ancestry and
stultifying isolation. They feared outsiders, but slowly grew
accustomed to us; finally helping vastly when we beat down all the
thickets and tore out all the partitions of the mansion in our search
for the lurking fear. When we asked them to help us find Bennett and
Tobey they were truly distressed; for they wanted to help us, yet knew
that these victims had gone as wholly out of the world as their own
missing people. That great numbers of them had actually been killed
and removed, just as the wild animals had long been exterminated, we
were of course thoroughly convinced; and we waited apprehensively for
further tragedies to occur.

By the middle of October we were puzzled by our lack of progress. Owing
to the clear nights no demoniac aggressions had taken place, and the
completeness of our vain searches of house and country almost drove us
to regard the lurking fear as a non-material agency. We feared that
the cold weather would come on and halt our explorations, for all
agreed that the demon was generally quiet in winter. Thus there was
a kind of haste and desperation in our last daylight canvass of the
horror-visited hamlet; a hamlet now deserted because of the squatters'
fears.

The ill-fated squatter hamlet had borne no name, but had long stood
in a sheltered though treeless cleft between two elevations called
respectively Cone Mountain and Maple Hill. It was closer to Maple Hill
than to Cone Mountain, some of the crude abodes indeed being dugouts on
the side of the former eminence. Geographically it lay about two miles
northwest of the base of Tempest Mountain, and three miles from the
oak-girt mansion. Of the distance between the hamlet and the mansion,
fully two miles and a quarter on the hamlet's side was entirely open
country; the plain being of fairly level character save for some of the
low snakelike mounds, and having as vegetation only grass and scattered
weeds. Considering this topography, we had finally concluded that
the demon must have come by way of Cone Mountain, a wooded southern
prolongation of which ran to within a short distance of the westernmost
spur of Tempest Mountain. The upheaval of ground we traced conclusively
to a landslide from Maple Hill, a tall lone splintered tree on whose
side had been the striking point of the thunderbolt which summoned the
fiend.

       *       *       *       *       *

As for the twentieth time or more Arthur Munroe and I went minutely
over every inch of the violated village, we were filled with a
certain discouragement coupled with vague and novel fears. It was
acutely uncanny, even when frightful and uncanny things were common,
to encounter so blankly clueless a scene after such overwhelming
occurrences; and we moved about beneath the leaden, darkening sky with
that tragic directionless zeal which results from a combined sense of
futility and necessity of action. Our care was gravely minute; every
cottage was again entered, every hillside dugout again searched for
bodies, every thorny foot of adjacent slope again scanned for dens and
caves, but all without result. And yet, as I have said, vague new fears
hovered menacingly over us; as if giant bat-winged gryphons squatted
invisibly on the mountain-tops and leered with Abaddon-eyes that had
looked on transcosmic gulfs.

As the afternoon advanced, it became increasingly difficult to see; and
we heard the rumble of a thunderstorm gathering over Tempest Mountain.
This sound in such a locality naturally stirred us, though less than
it would have done at night. As it was, we hoped desperately that the
storm would last until well after dark; and with that hope turned from
our aimless hillside searching toward the nearest inhabited hamlet to
gather a body of squatters as helpers in the investigation. Timid as
they were, a few of the younger men were sufficiently inspired by our
protective leadership to promise such help.

We had hardly more than turned, however, when there descended such a
blinding sheet of torrential rain that shelter became imperative. The
extreme, almost nocturnal darkness of the sky caused us to stumble
sadly, but guided by the frequent flashes of lightning and by our
minute knowledge of the hamlet we soon reached the least porous cabin
of the lot; an heterogeneous combination of logs and boards whose still
existing door and single tiny window both faced Maple Hill. Barring
the door after us against the fury of the wind and rain, we put in
place the crude window shutter which our frequent searches had taught
us where to find. It was dismal sitting there on rickety boxes in the
pitchy darkness, but we smoked pipes and occasionally flashed our
pocket lamps about. Now and then we could see the lightning through
cracks in the wall; the afternoon was so incredibly dark that each
flash was extremely vivid.

The stormy vigil reminded me shudderingly of my ghastly night on
Tempest Mountain. My mind turned to that odd question which had kept
recurring ever since the nightmare thing had happened; and again I
wondered why the demon, approaching the three watchers either from the
window or the interior, had begun with the men on each side and left
the middle man till the last, when the titan fireball had scared it
away. Why had it not taken its victims in natural order, with myself
second, from whichever direction it had approached? With what manner
of far-reaching tentacles did it prey? Or did it know that I was the
leader, and save me for a fate worse than that of my companions?

In the midst of these reflections, as if dramatically arranged to
intensify them, there fell near by a terrific bolt of lightning
followed by the sound of sliding earth. At the same time the wolfish
wind rose to demoniac crescendos of ululation. We were sure that the
lone tree on Maple Hill had been struck again, and Munroe rose from
his box and went to the tiny window to ascertain the damage. When he
took down the shutter the wind and rain howled deafeningly in, so that
I could not hear what he said; but I waited while he leaned out and
tried to fathom nature's pandemonium.

Gradually a calming of the wind and dispersal of the unusual darkness
told of the storm's passing. I had hoped it would last into the night
to help our quest, but a furtive sunbeam from a knothole behind me
removed the likelihood of such a thing. Suggesting to Munroe that we
had better get some light even if more showers came, I unbarred and
opened the crude door. The ground outside was a singular mass of mud
and pools, with fresh heaps of earth from the slight landslide; but I
saw nothing to justify the interest which kept my companion silently
leaning out the window. Crossing to where he leaned, I touched his
shoulder; but he did not move. Then, as I playfully shook him and
turned him around, I felt the strangling tendrils of a cancerous horror
whose roots reached into illimitable pasts and fathomless abysms of the
night that broods beyond time.

For Arthur Munroe was dead. And on what remained of his chewed and
gouged head there was no longer a face.


                     _3. What the Red Glare Meant_


On the tempest-racked night of November 8th, 1921, with a lantern which
cast charnel shadows, I stood digging alone and idiotically in the
grave of Jan Martense. I had begun to dig in the afternoon, because a
thunderstorm was brewing, and now that it was dark and the storm had
burst above the maniacally thick foliage I was glad.

I believe that my mind was partly unhinged by events since August 5th;
the demon shadow in the mansion, the general strain and disappointment,
and the thing that occurred at the hamlet in an October storm.
After that thing I had dug a grave for one whose death I could not
understand. I knew that others could not understand either, so let
them think Arthur Munroe had wandered away. They searched, but found
nothing. The squatters might have understood, but I dared not frighten
them more. I myself seemed strangely callous. That shock at the mansion
had done something to my brain, and I could think only of the quest for
a horror now grown to cataclysmic stature in my imagination; a quest
which the fate of Arthur Munroe made me vow to keep silent and solitary.

The scene of my excavations would alone have been enough to unnerve
any ordinary man. Baleful primal trees of unholy size, age, and
grotesqueness leered above me like the pillars of some hellish Druidic
temple; muffling the thunder, hushing the clawing wind, and admitting
but little rain. Beyond the scarred trunks in the background, illumined
by faint flashes of filtered lightning, rose the damp ivied stones of
the deserted mansion, while somewhat nearer was the abandoned Dutch
garden whose walks and beds were polluted by a white, fungous, fetid,
overnourished vegetation that never saw full daylight. And nearest of
all was the graveyard, where deformed trees tossed insane branches
as their roots displaced unhallowed slabs and sucked venom from what
lay below. Now and then, beneath the brown pall of leaves that rotted
and festered in the antediluvian forest darkness, I could trace the
sinister outlines of some of these low mounds which characterized the
lightning-pierced region.

History had led me to this archaic grave. History, indeed, was all I
had after everything else ended in mocking Satanism. I now believed
that the lurking fear was no material thing, but a wolf-fanged ghost
that rode the midnight lightning. And I believed, because of the masses
of local tradition I had unearthed in my search with Arthur Munroe,
that the ghost was that of Jan Martense, who died in 1762. That is why
I was digging idiotically in his grave.

The Martense mansion was built in 1670 by Gerrit Martense, a wealthy
New Amsterdam merchant who disliked the changing order under British
rule, and had constructed this magnificent domicile on a remote
woodland summit whose untrodden solitude and unusual scenery pleased
him. The only substantial disappointment encountered in this site was
that which concerned the prevalence of violent thunderstorms in summer.
When selecting the hill and building his mansion, Mynheer Martense
had laid these frequent natural outbursts to some peculiarity of the
year; but in time he perceived that the locality was especially liable
to such phenomena. At length, having found these storms injurious to
his head, he fitted up a cellar into which he could retreat from their
wildest pandemonium.

Of Gerrit Martense's descendants less is known than of himself; since
they were all reared in hatred of the English civilization, and
trained to shun such of the colonists as accepted it. Their life was
exceedingly secluded, and people declared that their isolation had made
them heavy of speech and comprehension. In appearance all were marked
by a peculiar inherited dissimilarity of eyes; one generally being
blue and the other brown. Their social contacts grew fewer and fewer,
till at last they took to intermarrying with the numerous menial class
about the estate. Many of the crowded family degenerated, moved across
the valley, and merged with the mongrel population which was later to
produce the pitiful squatters. The rest had stuck sullenly to their
ancestral mansion, becoming more and more clannish and taciturn, yet
developing a nervous responsiveness to the frequent thunderstorms.

Most of this information reached the outside world through young Jan
Martense, who from some kind of restlessness joined the colonial army
when news of the Albany Convention reached Tempest Mountain. He was
the first of Gerrit's descendants to see much of the world; and when
he returned in 1760, after six years of campaigning, he was hated
as an outsider by his father, uncles, and brothers, in spite of his
dissimilar Martense eyes. No longer could he share the peculiarities
and prejudices of the Martenses, while the very mountain thunderstorms
failed to intoxicate him as they had before. Instead, his surroundings
depressed him; and he frequently wrote to a friend in Albany of plans
to leave the paternal roof.

In the spring of 1763 Jonathan Gifford, the Albany friend of Jan
Martense, became worried by his correspondent's silence; especially in
view of the conditions and quarrels at the Martense mansion. Determined
to visit Jan in person, he went into the mountains on horseback. His
diary states that he reached Tempest Mountain on September 20th,
finding the mansion in great decrepitude. The sullen, odd-eyed
Martenses, whose unclean animal aspect shocked him, told him in broken
gutturals than Jan was dead. He had, they insisted, been struck by
lightning the autumn before, and now lay buried behind the neglected
sunken gardens. They showed the visitor the grave, barren and devoid of
markers. Something in the Martenses' manner gave Gifford a feeling of
repulsion and suspicion, and a week later he returned with spade and
mattock to explore the sepulchral spot. He found what he expected--a
skull crushed cruelly as if by savage blows--so returning to Albany he
openly charged the Martenses with the murder of their kinsman.

Legal evidence was lacking, but the story spread rapidly around the
countryside; and from that time the Martenses were ostracized by the
world. No one would deal with them, and their distant manor was shunned
as an accursed place. Somehow they managed to live on independently
by the products of their estate, for occasional lights glimpsed from
far-away hills attested their continued presence. These lights were
seen as late as 1810, but toward the last they became very infrequent.

Meanwhile there grew up about the mansion and the mountain a body of
diabolic legendry. The place was avoided with doubled assiduousness,
and invested with every whispered myth tradition could supply. It
remained unvisited till 1816, when the continued absence of lights was
noticed by the squatters. At that time a party made investigations,
finding the house deserted and partly in ruins.

There were no skeletons about, so that departure rather than death
was inferred. The clan seemed to have left several years before,
and improvised penthouses showed how numerous it had grown prior to
its migration. Its cultural level had fallen very low, as proved by
decaying furniture and scattered silverware which must have been long
abandoned when its owners left. But though the dreaded Martenses were
gone, the fear of the haunted house continued; and grew very acute
when new and strange stories arose among the mountain decadents. There
it stood; deserted, feared, and linked with the vengeful ghost of Jan
Martense. There it still stood on the night I dug in Jan Martense's
grave.

       *       *       *       *       *

I have described my protracted digging as idiotic, and such it indeed
was in object and method. The coffin of Jan Martense had been soon
unearthed--it now held only dust and niter--but in my fury to exhume
his ghost I delved irrationally and clumsily down beneath where he had
lain. God knows what I expected to find--I only felt that I was digging
in the grave of a man whose ghost stalked by night.

It is impossible to say what monstrous depth I had attained when my
spade, and soon my feet, broke through the ground beneath. The event,
under the circumstances, was tremendous; for in the existence of a
subterranean space here, my mad theories had terrible confirmation. My
slight fall had extinguished the lantern, but I produced an electric
pocket-lamp and viewed the small horizontal tunnel which led away
indefinitely in both directions. It was amply large for a man to
wriggle through; and though no sane person would have tried it at that
time, I forgot danger, reason, and cleanliness in my single-minded
fever to unearth the lurking fear. Choosing the direction toward the
house, I scrambled recklessly into the narrow burrow; squirming ahead
blindly and rapidly, and flashing but seldom the lamp I kept before me.

What language can describe the spectacle of a man lost in infinitely
abysmal earth; pawing, twisting, wheezing; scrambling madly through
sunken convolutions of immemorial blackness without an idea of time,
safety, direction, or definite object? There is something hideous in
it, but that is what I did. I did it for so long that life faded to
a far memory, and I became one with the moles and grubs of nighted
depths. Indeed, it was only by accident that after interminable
writhings I jarred my forgotten electric lamp alight, so that it shone
eerily along the burrow of caked loam that stretched and curved ahead.

I had been scrambling in this way for some time, so that my battery
had burned very low, when the passage suddenly inclined sharply
upward, altering my mode of progress. And as I raised my glance it
was without preparation that I saw glistening in the distance two
demoniac reflections of my expiring lamp; two reflections glowing
with a baneful and unmistakable effulgence, and provoking maddeningly
nebulous memories. I stopped automatically, though lacking the brain to
retreat. The eyes approached, yet of the thing that bore them I could
distinguish only a claw. But what a claw! Then far overhead I heard
a faint crashing which I recognized. It was the wild thunder of the
mountain, raised to hysteric fury. I must have been crawling upward for
some time, so that the surface was now quite near. And as the muffled
thunder clattered, those eyes still stared with vacuous viciousness.

Thank God I did not then know what it was, else I should have died.
But I was saved by the very thunder that had summoned it, for after
a hideous wait there burst from the unseen outside sky one of those
frequent mountainward bolts whose aftermath I had noticed here and
there as gashes of disturbed earth and fulgurites of various sizes.
With Cyclopean rage it tore through the soil above that damnable pit,
blinding and deafening me, yet not wholly reducing me to a coma.

In the chaos of sliding, shifting earth I clawed and floundered
helplessly till the rain on my head steadied me and I saw that I had
come to the surface in a familiar spot; a steep unforested place on the
southwest slope of the mountain. Recurrent sheet lightnings illumed the
tumbled ground and the remains of the curious low hummock which had
stretched down from the wooded higher slope, but there was nothing in
the chaos to show my place of egress from the lethal catacomb. My brain
was as great a chaos as the earth, and as a distant red glare burst on
the landscape from the south I hardly realized the horror I had been
through.

But when two days later the squatters told me what the red glare
meant, I felt more horror than that which the mold-burrow and the
claw and eyes had given; more horror because of the overwhelming
implications. In a hamlet twenty miles away an orgy of fear had
followed the bolt which brought me above ground, and a nameless thing
had dropped from an overhanging tree into a weak-roofed cabin. It had
done a deed, but the squatters had fired the cabin in frenzy before it
could escape. It had been doing that deed at the very moment the earth
caved in on the thing with the claw and eyes.


                      _4. The Horror in the Eyes_


There can be nothing normal in the mind of one who, knowing what I
knew of the horrors of Tempest Mountain, would seek alone for the fear
that lurked there. That at least two of the fear's embodiments were
destroyed, formed but a slight guarantee of mental and physical safety
in this Acheron of multiform diabolism; yet I continued my quest with
even greater zeal as events and revelations became more monstrous.

When, two days after my frightful crawl through that crypt of the eyes
and claw, I learned that a thing had malignly hovered twenty miles
away at the same instant the eyes were glaring at me, I experienced
virtual convulsions of fright. But that fright was so mixed with wonder
and alluring grotesqueness that it was almost a pleasant sensation.
Sometimes, in the throes of a nightmare when unseen powers whirl one
over the roofs of strange dead cities toward the grinning chasm of
Nis, it is a relief and even a delight to shriek wildly and throw
oneself voluntarily along with the hideous vortex of dream-doom down
into whatever bottomless gulf may yawn. And so it was with the waking
nightmare of Tempest Mountain; the discovery that two monsters had
haunted the spot gave me ultimately a mad craving to plunge into the
very earth of the accursed region, and with bare hands dig out the
death that leered from every inch of the poisonous soil.

As soon as possible I visited the grave of Jan Martense and dug vainly
where I had dug before. Some extensive cave-in had obliterated all
trace of the underground passage, while the rain had washed so much
earth back into the excavation that I could not tell how deeply I had
dug that other day. I likewise made a difficult trip to the distant
hamlet where the death-creature had been burnt, and was little repaid
for my trouble. In the ashes of the fateful cabin I found several
bones, but apparently none of the monster's. The squatters said the
thing had had only one victim; but in this I judged them inaccurate,
since besides the complete skull of a human being, there was another
bony fragment which seemed certainly to have belonged to a human skull
at some time. Though the rapid drop of the monster had been seen, no
one could say just what the creature was like; those who had glimpsed
it called it simply a devil. Examining the great tree where it had
lurked, I could discern no distinctive marks. I tried to find some
trail into the black forest, but on this occasion could not stand the
sight of those morbidly large boles, or of those vast serpentlike roots
that twisted so malevolently before they sank into the earth.

My next step was to re-examine with microscopic care the deserted
hamlet where death had come most abundantly, and where Arthur Munroe
had seen something he never lived to describe. Though my vain previous
searches had been exceedingly minute, I now had new data to test; for
my horrible grave-crawl convinced me that at least one of the phases
of the monstrosity had been an underground creature. This time, on the
14th of November, my quest concerned itself mostly with the slopes
of Cone Mountain and Maple Hill where they overlook the unfortunate
hamlet, and I gave particular attention to the loose earth of the
landslide region on the latter eminence.

The afternoon of my search brought nothing to light, and dusk came
as I stood on Maple Hill looking down at the hamlet and across the
valley to Tempest Mountain. There had been a gorgeous sunset, and now
the moon came up, nearly full and shedding a silver flood over the
plain, the distant mountainside, and the curious low mounds that rose
here and there. It was a peaceful Arcadian scene, but knowing what it
hid I hated it. I hated the mocking moon, the hypocritical plain, the
festering mountain, and those sinister mounds. Everything seemed to me
tainted with a loathsome contagion, and inspired by a noxious alliance
with distorted hidden powers.

Presently, as I gazed abstractedly at the moonlit panorama, my eye
became attracted by something singular in the nature and arrangement
of a certain topographical element. Without having any exact knowledge
of geology, I had from the first been interested in the odd mounds
and hummocks of the region. I had noticed that they were pretty
widely distributed around Tempest Mountain, though less numerous on
the plain than near the hilltop itself, where prehistoric glaciation
had doubtless found feebler opposition to its striking and fantastic
caprices. Now, in the light of that low moon which cast long weird
shadows, it struck me forcibly that the various points and lines of the
mound system had a peculiar relation to the summit of Tempest Mountain.
That summit was undeniably a center from which the lines or rows of
points radiated indefinitely and irregularly, as if the unwholesome
Martense mansion had thrown out visible tentacles of terror. The idea
of such tentacles gave me an unexplained thrill, and I stopped to
analyze my reason for believing these mounds glacial phenomena.

The more I analyzed the less I believed, and against my newly opened
mind there began to beat grotesque and horrible analogies based on
superficial aspects and upon my experience beneath the earth. Before
I knew it I was uttering frenzied and disjointed words to myself: "My
God! ... Molehills ... the damned place must be honeycombed ... how
many ... that night at the mansion ... they took Bennett and Tobey
first ... on each side of us." ... Then I was digging frantically
into the mound which had stretched nearest me; digging desperately,
shiveringly, but almost jubilantly; digging and at last shrieking aloud
with some unplaced emotion as I came upon a tunnel or burrow just like
the one through which I had crawled on that other demoniac night.

After that I recall running, spade in hand; a hideous run across
moon-litten, mound-marked meadows and through diseased, precipitous
abysses of haunted hillside forest; leaping, screaming, panting,
bounding toward the terrible Martense mansion. I recall digging
unreasoningly in all parts of the brier-choked cellar; digging to find
the core and center of that malignant universe of mounds. And then I
recall how I laughed when I stumbled on the passageway; the hole at
the base of the old chimney, where the thick weeds grew and cast queer
shadows in the light of the lone candle I had happened to have with me.
What still remained down in that hell-hive, lurking and waiting for the
thunder to arouse it, I did not know. Two had been killed; perhaps that
had finished it. But still there remained that burning determination to
reach the innermost secret of the fear, which I had once more come to
deem definite, material, and organic.

My indecisive speculation whether to explore the passage alone and
immediately with my pocket-light or to try to assemble a band of
squatters for the quest was interrupted after a time by a sudden rush
of wind from the outside which blew out the candle and left me in stark
blackness. The moon no longer shone through the chinks and apertures
above me, and with a sense of fateful alarm I heard the sinister and
significant rumble of approaching thunder. A confusion of associated
ideas possessed my brain, leading me to grope back toward the farthest
corner of the cellar. My eyes, however, never turned away from the
horrible opening at the base of the chimney; and I began to get
glimpses of the crumbling bricks and unhealthy weeds as faint glows
of lightning penetrated the woods outside and illumined the chinks in
the upper wall. Every second I was consumed with a mixture of fear
and curiosity. What would the storm call forth--or was there anything
left for it to call? Guided by a lightning flash I settled myself down
behind a dense clump of vegetation, through which I could see the
opening without being seen.

       *       *       *       *       *

If heaven is merciful, it will some day efface from my consciousness
the sight that I saw, and let me live my last years in peace. I can
not sleep at night now, and have to take opiates when it thunders. The
thing came abruptly and unannounced; a demon, ratlike scurrying from
pits remote and unimaginable, a hellish panting and stifled grunting,
and then from that opening beneath the chimney a burst of multitudinous
and leprous life--a loathsome night-spawned flood of organic corruption
more devastatingly hideous than the blackest conjurations of mortal
madness and morbidity. Seething, stewing, surging, bubbling like
serpents' slime it rolled up and out of that yawning hole, spreading
like a septic contagion and streaming from the cellar at every point of
egress--streaming out to scatter through the accursed midnight forests
and strew fear, madness, and death.

God knows how many there were--there must have been thousands. To see
the stream of them in that faint, intermittent lightning was shocking.
When they had thinned out enough to be glimpsed as separate organisms,
I saw that they were dwarfed, deformed hairy devils or apes--monstrous
and diabolic caricatures of the monkey tribe. They were so hideously
silent; there was hardly a squeal when one of the last stragglers
turned with the skill of long practise to make a meal in accustomed
fashion on a weaker companion. Others snapped up what it left and ate
with slavering relish. Then, in spite of my daze of fright and disgust,
my morbid curiosity triumphed; and as the last of the monstrosities
oozed up alone from that nether world of unknown nightmare, I drew my
automatic pistol and shot it under cover of the thunder.

Shrieking, slithering, torrential shadows of red viscous madness
chasing one another through endless, ensanguined corridors of purple
fulgurous sky ... formless phantasms and kaleidoscopic mutations of a
ghoulish, remembered scene; forests of monstrous overnourished oaks
with serpent roots twisting and sucking unnamable juices from an
earth verminous with millions of cannibal devils; moundlike tentacles
groping from underground nuclei of polypous perversion ... insane
lightning over malignant ivied walls and demon arcades choked with
fungous vegetation.... Heaven be thanked for the instinct which led me
unconscious to places where men dwell; to the peaceful village that
slept under the calm stars of clearing skies.

[Illustration: "They were slithering shadows of red madness."]

I had recovered enough in a week to send to Albany for a gang of
men to blow up the Martense mansion and the entire top of Tempest
Mountain with dynamite, stop up all the discoverable mound-burrows,
and destroy certain overnourished trees whose very existence seemed an
insult to sanity. I could sleep a little after they had done this, but
true rest will never come as long as I remember that nameless secret
of the lurking fear. The thing will haunt me, for who can say the
extermination is complete, and that analogous phenomena do not exist
all over the world? Who can, with my knowledge, think of the earth's
unknown caverns without a nightmare dread of future possibilities? I
can not see a well or a subway entrance without shuddering ... why can
not the doctors give me something to make me sleep, or truly calm my
brain when it thunders?

What I saw in the glow of my flashlight after I shot the unspeakable
straggling object was so simple that almost a minute elapsed before
I understood and went delirious. The object was nauseous; a filthy
whitish gorilla thing with sharp yellow fangs and matted fur. It was
the ultimate product of mammalian degeneration; the frightful outcome
of isolated spawning, multiplication, and cannibal nutrition above and
below the ground; the embodiment of all the snarling chaos and grinning
fear that lurk behind life. It had looked at me as it died, and its
eyes had the same odd quality that marked those other eyes which had
stared at me underground and excited cloudy recollections. One eye
was blue, the other brown. They were the dissimilar Martense eyes of
the old legends, and I knew in one inundating cataclysm of voiceless
horror what had become of that vanished family; the terrible and
thunder-crazed house of Martense.



# Project Gutenberg #72966

[Source: Weird Tales, March 1952]


The Horror at Red Hook

By H. P. Lovecraft


_"The nightmare horde slithered away, led by the abominable naked
phosphorescent thing that now strode insolently, bearing in its arms
the glassy-eyed corpse of the corpulent old man._

_"There are sacraments of evil as well as of good about us, and we
live and move to my belief in an unknown world, a place where there
are caves and shadows and dwellers in twilight.  It is possible that
man may sometimes return on the track of evolution, and it is my
belief that an awful lore is not yet dead."_

_--Arthur Machen_


I

Not many weeks ago, on a street corner in the village of Pascoag,
Rhode Island, a tall heavily built, and wholesome looking pedestrian
furnished much speculation by a singular lapse of behavior.  He had,
it appears, been descending the hill by the road from Chepachet; and
encountering the compact section, had turned to his left into the
main thoroughfare where several modest business blocks convey a touch
of the urban.  At this point, without visible provocation, he
committed his astonishing lapse; staring queerly for a second at the
tallest of the buildings, before him, and then, with a series of
terrified, hysterical shrieks, breaking into a frantic run which
ended in a stumble and fall at the next crossing.  Picked up and
dusted off by ready hands, he was found to be conscious, organically
unhurt, and evidently cured of his sudden nervous attack.  He
muttered some shamefaced explanations involving a strain he had
undergone, and with downcast glance turned back, up the Chepachet
road, trudging out of sight, without once looking behind him.  It was
a strange incident to befall so large, robust, normal-featured, and
capable-looking a man, and the strangeness was not lessened by the
remarks of a bystander who had recognized him as the boarder of a
well-known dairyman on the outskirts of Chepachet.

He was, it developed, a New York police-detective named Thomas F.
Malone, now on a long leave of absence under medical treatment after
some disproportionately arduous work on a gruesome local case which
accident had made dramatic.  There had been a collapse of several old
brick buildings during a raid in which he had shared, and something
about the wholesale loss of life, both of prisoners and of his
companions, had peculiarly appalled him.  As a result, he had
acquired an acute and anomalous horror of any buildings even remotely
suggesting the ones which had fallen in, so that in the end mental
specialists forbade him the sight of such things for an indefinite
period.  A police surgeon with relatives in Chepachet had put forward
that quaint hamlet of wooden Colonial houses as an ideal spot for the
psychological convalescence; and thither the sufferer had gone,
promising never to venture among the brick-lined streets of larger
villages till duly advised by the Woonsocket specialist with whom he
was put in touch.  This walk to Pascoag for magazines had been a
mistake, and the patient had paid in fright, bruises, and humiliation
for his disobedience.

So much the gossips of Chepachet and Pascoag knew; and so much, also,
the most learned specialists believed.  But Malone had at first told
the specialists much more, ceasing only when he saw that utter
incredulity was his portion.  Thereafter he held his peace,
protesting not at all when it was generally agreed that the collapse
of certain squalid brick houses in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn,
and the consequent death of many brave officers, had unseated his
nervous equilibrium.  He had worked too hard, all said, in trying to
clean up those nests of disorder and violence; certain features were
shocking enough, in all conscience, and the unexpected tragedy was
the last straw.  This was a simple explanation which everyone could
understand, and because Malone was not a simple person he perceived
that he had better let it suffice.  To hint to unimaginative people
of a horror beyond all human conception--a horror of houses and
blocks and cities leprous and cancerous with evil dragged from elder
worlds--would be merely to invite a padded cell instead of a restful
rustication, and Malone was a man of sense despite his mysticism.  He
had the Celt's far vision of weird and hidden things, but the
logician's quick eye for the outwardly unconvincing; an amalgam which
had led him far afield in the forty-two years of his life, and set
him in strange places for a Dublin University man born in a Georgian
villa near Phoenix Park.

And now, as he reviewed the things he had seen and felt and
apprehended, Malone was content to keep unshared the secret of what
could reduce a dauntless fighter to a quivering neurotic; what could
make old brick slums and seas of dark, subtle faces a thing of
nightmare and eldritch portent.  It would not be the first time his
sensations had been forced to bide uninterpreted--for was not his
very act of plunging into the polyglot abyss of New York's underworld
a freak beyond sensible explanation?  What could he tell the prosaic
of the antique witcheries and grotesque marvels discernible to
sensitive eyes amidst the poison cauldron where all the varied dregs
of unwholesome ages mix their venom and perpetuate their obscene
terrors?  He had seen the hellish green flame of secret wonder in
this blatant, evasive welter of outward greed and inward blasphemy,
and had smiled gently when all the New Yorkers he knew scoffed at his
experiment in police work.  They had been very witty and cynical,
deriding his fantastic pursuit of unknowable mysteries and assuring
him that in these days New York held nothing but cheapness and
vulgarity.  One of them had wagered him a heavy sum that he could
not--despite many poignant things to his credit in the _Dublin
Review_--even write a truly interesting story of New York low life;
and now, looking back, he perceived that cosmic irony had justified
the prophet's words while secretly confuting their flippant meaning.
The horror, as glimpsed at last, could not make a story--for like the
book cited by Poe's German authority, "er lässt sich nicht lesen"--it
does not permit itself to be read.


II

To Malone the sense of latent mystery in existence was always
present.  In youth he had felt the hidden beauty and ecstasy of
things, and had been a poet; but poverty and sorrow and exile had
turned his gaze in darker directions, and he had thrilled at the
imputations of evil in the world around.  Daily life had for him come
to be a fantasmagoria of macabre shadow-studies; now glittering and
jeering with concealed rottenness as in Aubrey Beardsley's best
manner, now hinting terrors behind the commonest shapes and objects
as in the subtler and less obvious work of Gustave Doré.  He would
often regard it as merciful that most persons of high intelligence
jeer at the inmost mysteries; for, he argued, if superior minds were
ever placed in fullest contact with the secrets preserved by ancient
and lowly cults, the resultant abnormalities would soon not only
wreck the world, but threaten the very integrity of the universe.
All this reflection was no doubt morbid, but keen logic and a deep
sense of humor ably offset it.  Malone was satisfied to let his
notions remain as half-spied and forbidden visions to be lightly
played with; and hysteria came only when duty flung him into a hell
of revelation too sudden and insidious to escape.

He had for some time been detailed to the Butler Street station in
Brooklyn when the Red Hook matter came to his notice.  Red Hook is a
maze of hybrid squalor near the ancient waterfront opposite
Governor's Island, with dirty highways climbing the hill from the
wharves to that higher ground where the decayed lengths of Clinton
and Court Streets lead off toward the Borough Hall.  Its houses are
mostly of brick, dating from the first quarter of the middle of the
nineteenth century, and some of the obscurer alleys and byways have
that alluring antique flavor which conventional reading leads us to
call "Dickensian."  The population is a hopeless tangle and enigma;
Syrian, Spanish, Italian, and Negro elements impinging upon one
another, and fragments of Scandinavian and American belts lying not
far distant.  It is a babel of sound and filth, and sends out strange
cries to answer the lapping of oily waves at its grimy piers and the
monstrous organ litanies of the harbor whistles.  Here long ago a
brighter picture dwelt, with clear-eyed mariners on the lower streets
and homes of taste and substance where the larger houses line the
hill.  One can trace the relics of this former happiness in the trim
shapes of the buildings, the occasional graceful churches and the
evidences of original art and background in bits of detail here and
there--a worn flight of steps, a battered doorway, a wormy pair of
decorative columns or pilasters, or a fragment of once green space
with bent and rusted iron railing.  The houses are generally in solid
blocks, and now and then a many-windowed cupola arises to tell of
days when the households of captains and ship-owners watched the sea.

From this tangle of material and spiritual putrescence the
blasphemies of an hundred dialects assail the sky.  Hordes of
prowlers reel shouting and singing along the lanes and thoroughfares,
occasional furtive hands suddenly extinguish lights and pull down
curtains, and swarthy, sin-pitted faces disappear from windows when
visitors pick their way through.  Policemen despair of order or
reform, and seek rather to erect barriers protecting the outside
world from the contagion.

The clang of the patrol is answered by a kind of spectral silence,
and such prisoners as are taken are never communicative.  Visible
offenses are as varied as the local dialects, and run the gamut from
the smuggling of rum and prohibited aliens through diverse stages of
lawlessness and obscure vice to murder and mutilation in their most
abhorrent guises.  That these visible affairs are not more frequent
is not to the neighborhood's credit, unless the power of concealment
be an art demanding credit.  More people enter Red Hook than leave
it--or at least, than leave it by the landward side--and those who
are not loquacious are the likeliest to leave.


Malone found in this state of things a faint stench of secrets more
terrible than any of the sins denounced by citizens and bemoaned by
priest and philanthropists.  He was conscious, as one who united
imagination with scientific knowledge, that modern people under
lawless conditions tend uncannily to repeat the darkest instinctive
patterns of primitive half-ape savagery in their daily life and
ritual observances; and he had often viewed with an anthropologist's
shudder the chanting, cursing processions of blear-eyed and
pock-marked young men which wound their way along in the dark small
hours of morning.  One saw groups of these youths incessantly;
sometimes in leering vigils on street corners, sometimes in doorways
playing eerily on cheap instruments of music, sometimes in stupefied
dozes or indecent dialogues around cafeteria tables near Borough
Hall, and sometimes in whispering converse around dingy taxicabs
drawn up at the high stoops of crumbling and closely shuttered old
houses.  They chilled and fascinated him more than he dared confess
to his associates on the force, for he seemed to see in them some
monstrous thread of secret continuity; some fiendish, cryptical and
ancient pattern utterly beyond and below the sordid mass of facts and
habits and haunts listed with such conscientious technical care by
the police.  They must be, he felt inwardly, the heirs of some
shocking and primordial tradition; the sharers of debased and broken
scraps from cults and ceremonies older than mankind.  Their coherence
and definiteness suggested it, and it showed in the singular
suspicion of order which lurked beneath their squalid disorder.  He
had not read in vain such treatises as Miss Murray's Witch Cult in
Western Europe; and knew that up to recent years there had certainly
survived among peasants and furtive folk a frightful and clandestine
system of assemblies and orgies descended from dark religions
antedating the Aryan World, and appearing in popular legends as Black
Masses and Witches' Sabbaths.  That these hellish vestiges of old
Turanian-Asiatic magic and fertility-cults were even now wholly dead
he could not for a moment suppose, and he frequently wondered how
much older and how much blacker than the very worst of the muttered
tales some of them might really be.


III

It was the case of Robert Suydam which took Malone to the heart of
things in Red Hook.  Suydam was a lettered recluse of ancient Dutch
family, possessed originally of barely independent means, and
inhabiting the spacious but ill-preserved mansion which his
grandfather had built in Flatbush when that village was little more
then a pleasant group of Colonial cottages surrounding the steepled
and ivy-clad Reformed Church with its iron-railed yard of
Netherlandish gravestones.  In this lonely house, set back from
Martense Street amidst a yard of venerable trees, Suydam had read and
brooded for some six decades except for a period a generation before,
when he had sailed for the Old World and remained there out of sight
for eight years.  He could afford no servants, and would admit but
few visitors to his absolute solitude; eschewing close friendships
and receiving his rare acquaintances in one of the three ground-floor
rooms, which he kept in order--a vast, high-ceiled library whose
walls were solidly packed with tattered books of ponderous, archaic,
and vaguely repellent aspect.  The growth of the town and its final
absorption in the Brooklyn district had meant nothing to Suydam, and
he had come to mean less and less to the town.  Elderly people still
pointed him out on the streets, but to most of the recent population
he was merely a queer, corpulent old fellow whose unkempt white hair,
stubbly beard, shiny black clothes and gold-headed cane earned him an
amused glance and nothing more.  Malone did not know him by sight
till duty called him to the case, but had heard of him indirectly as
a really profound authority on medieval superstition, and had once
idly meant to look up an out-of-print pamphlet of his on the Kabbalah
and the Faustus legend, which a friend had quoted from memory.

Suydam became a "case" when his distant and only relatives sought
court pronouncements on his sanity.  Their action seemed sudden to
the outside world, but was really undertaken only after prolonged
observation and sorrowful debate.  It was based on certain odd
changes in his speech and habits; wild references to impending
wonders, and unaccountable hauntings of disreputable Brooklyn
neighborhoods.  He had been growing shabbier and shabbier with the
years, and now prowled about like a veritable mendicant; seen
occasionally by humiliated friends in subway stations, or loitering
on the benches around Borough Hall in conversation with groups of
swarthy, evil-looking strangers.  When he spoke it was to babble of
unlimited powers almost within his grasp, and to repeat with knowing
leers such mystical words of names as "Sephiroth," "Ashmodai" and
"Samael."  The court action revealed that he was using up his income
and wasting his principal in the purchase of curious tomes imported
from London and Paris, and in the maintenance of a squalid basement
flat in the Red Hook district where he spent nearly every night,
receiving odd delegations of mixed rowdies and foreigners, and
apparently conducting some kind of ceremonial service behind the
green blinds of secretive windows.  Detectives assigned to follow him
reported strange cries and chants and prancing of feet filtering out
from these nocturnal rites, and shuddered at their peculiar ecstasy
and abandon despite the commonness of weird orgies in that sodden
section.  When, however, the matter came to a hearing, Suydam managed
to preserve his liberty.  Before the judge his manner grew urbane and
reasonable, and he freely admitted the queerness of demeanor and
extravagant cast of language into which he had fallen through
excessive devotion to study and research.  He was, he said, engaged
in the investigation of certain details of European tradition which
required the closest contact with foreign groups and their songs and
folk dances.  The notion that any low secret society was preying upon
him, as hinted by his relatives, was obviously absurd; and showed how
sadly limited was their understanding of him and his work.
Triumphing with his calm explanations, he was suffered to depart
unhindered; and the paid detectives of the Suydams, Corlears and Van
Brunts were withdrawn in resigned disgust.

It was here that an alliance of Federal inspectors and police, Malone
with them, entered the case.  The law had watched the Suydam action
with interest, and had in many instances been called upon to aid the
private detectives.  In this work it developed that Suydam's new
associates were among the blackest and most vicious criminals of Red
Hook's devious lanes, and that at least a third of them were known
and repeated offenders in the matter of thievery, disorder, and the
importation of illegal immigrants.  Indeed, it would not have been
too much to say that the old scholar's particular circle coincided
almost perfectly with the worst of the organized cliques which
smuggled ashore certain nameless and unclassified Asian dregs wisely
turned back by Ellis Island.  In the teeming rookeries of Parker
Place--since renamed--where Suydam had his basement flat, there had
grown up a very unusual colony of unclassified slant-eyed folk who
used the Arabic alphabet but were eloquently repudiated by the great
mass of Syrians in and around Atlantic Avenue.  They could all have
been deported for lack of credentials, but legalism is slow-moving,
and one does not disturb Red Hook unless publicity forces one to.

These creatures attended a tumbledown stone church, used Wednesdays
as a dance hall, which reared its Gothic buttresses near the vilest
part of the waterfront.  Clergy throughout Brooklyn denied the place
all standing and authenticity, and policemen agreed with them when
they listened to the noises it emitted at night.  Malone used to
fancy he heard terrible cracked bass notes from a hidden organ far
underground when the church stood empty and unlighted, whilst all
observers dreaded the shrieking and drumming which accompanied the
visible services.  Suydam, when questioned, said he thought the
ritual was some remnant of Nestorian Christianity tinctured with the
Shamanism of Tibet.  Most of the people, he conjectured, were of
Mongoloid stock, originating somewhere in or near Kurdistan--and
Malone could not help recalling that Kurdistan is the land of the
Yezidees, last survivors of the Persian devil-worshippers.  However
this may have been, the stir of the Suydam investigation made it
certain that these unauthorized newcomers were flooding Red Hook in
increasing numbers; entering through some marine conspiracy unreached
by revenue officers and harbor police, overrunning Parker Place and
rapidly spreading up the hill, and welcomed with curious fraternalism
by the other assorted denizens of the region.  Their squat figures
and characteristic squinting physiognomies grotesquely combined with
flashy American clothing, appeared more and more numerously among the
loafers and nomad gangsters of the Borough Hall section; till at
length it was deemed necessary to compute their number, ascertain
their sources and occupations, and find if possible a way to round
them up and deliver them to the proper immigration authorities.  To
this task Malone was assigned by agreement of Federal and city
forces, and as he commenced his canvass of Red Hook he felt poised
upon the brink of nameless terrors, with the shabby, unkempt figure
of Robert Suydam as archfiend and adversary.


IV

Police methods are varied and ingenious.  Malone, through
unostentatious rambles, carefully casual conversations, well-timed
offers of hip-pocket liquor, and judicious dialogues with frightened
prisoners, learned many isolated facts about the movement whose
aspect had become so menacing.  The newcomers were indeed Kurds, but
of a dialect obscure and puzzling to exact philology.  Such of them
as worked lived mostly as dock-hands and unlicensed peddlers, though
frequently serving in Greek restaurants and tending corner
newsstands.  Most of them, however, had no visible means of support;
and were obviously connected with underworld pursuits, of which
smuggling and bootlegging were the least indescribable.  They had
come in steamships, apparently tramp freighters, and had been
unloaded by stealth on moonless nights in rowboats which stole under
a certain wharf and followed a hidden canal and house Malone could
not locate, for the memories of his informants were exceedingly
confused, while their speech was to a great extent beyond even the
ablest interpreters; nor could he gain any real data on the reasons
for their systematic importation.  They were reticent about the exact
spot from which they had come, and were never sufficiently off guard
to reveal the agencies which had sought them out and directed their
course.  Indeed, they developed something like acute fright when
asked the reason for their presence.  Gangsters of other breeds were
equally taciturn, and the most that could be gathered was that some
god or great priesthood had promised them unheard-of powers and
supernatural glories and rulerships in a strange land.

The attendance of both newcomers and old gangsters at Suydam's
closely guarded nocturnal meetings was very regular, and the police
soon learned that the erstwhile recluse had leased additional flats
to accommodate such guests as knew his password; at last occupying
three entire houses and permanently harboring many of his queer
companions.  He spent but little time now at his Flatbush home,
apparently going and coming only to obtain and return books; and his
face and manner had attained an appalling pitch of wildness.  Malone
twice interviewed him, but was each time bruskly repulsed.  He knew
nothing, he said, of any mysterious plots or movements; and had no
idea how the Kurds could have entered or what they wanted.  His
business was to study undisturbed the folk-lore of all the immigrants
of the district; a business with which policemen had no legitimate
concern.  Malone mentioned his admiration for Suydam's old brochure
on the Kabbalah and other myths, but the old man's softening was only
momentary.  He sensed an intrusion, and rebuffed his visitor in no
uncertain way; till Malone withdrew disgusted, and turned to other
channels of information.


What Malone would have unearthed could he have worked continuously on
the case, we shall never know.  As it was, a stupid conflict between
city and Federal authority suspended the investigation for several
months, during which the detective was busy with other assignments.
But at no time did he lose interest, or fail to stand amazed at what
began to happen to Robert Suydam.  Just at the time when a wave of
kidnappings and disappearances spread its excitement over New York,
the unkempt scholar embarked upon a metamorphosis as startling as it
was absurd.  One day he was seen near Borough Hall with clean-shaved
face, well-trimmed hair, and tastefully immaculate attire, and on
every day thereafter some obscure improvement was noticed in him.  He
maintained his new fastidiousness without interruption, added to it
an unwonted sparkle of eye and crispness of speech, and began little
by little to shed the corpulence which had so long deformed him.  Now
frequently taken for less than his age, he acquired an elasticity of
step and buoyancy of demeanor to match the new tradition, and showed
a curious darkening of the hair which somehow did not suggest dye.
As the months passed, he commenced to dress less and less
conservatively, and finally astonished his few friends by renovating
and redecorating his Flatbush mansion, which he threw open in a
series of receptions, summoning all the acquaintances he could
remember, and extending a special welcome to the fully forgiven
relatives who had lately sought his restraint.  Some attended through
curiosity, others through duty; but all were suddenly charmed by the
dawning grace and urbanity of the former hermit.  He had, he
asserted, accomplished most of his allotted work; and having just
inherited some property from a half-forgotten European friend, was
about to spend his remaining years in a brighter second youth which
ease, care and diet had made possible to him.  Less and less was he
seen at Red Hook, and more and more did he move in the society to
which he was born.  Policemen noted a tendency of the gangsters to
congregate at the old stone church and dancehall instead of at the
basement flat in Parker Place, though the latter and its recent
annexes still overflowed with noxious life.


Then two incidents occurred--wide enough apart, but both of intense
interest in the case as Malone envisaged it.  One was a quiet
announcement in the _Eagle_ of Robert Suydam's engagement to Miss
Cornelia Gerritsen of Bayside, a young woman of excellent position,
and distantly related to the elderly bridegroom-elect; whilst the
other was a raid on the dance-hall church by city police, after a
report that the face of a kidnapped child had been seen for a second
at one of the basement windows.  Malone had participated in this
raid, and studied the place with much care when inside.  Nothing was
found--in fact, the building was entirely deserted when visited--but
the sensitive Celt was vaguely disturbed by many things about the
interior.  There were crudely painted panels he did not like--panels
which depicted sacred faces with peculiarly worldly and sardonic
expressions, and which occasionally took liberties that even a
layman's sense of decorum could scarcely countenance.  Then, too, he
did not relish the Greek inscription on the wall above the pulpit; an
ancient incantation which he had once stumbled upon in Dublin college
days, and which read, literally translated: "O friend and companion
of night, thou who rejoicest in the baying of dogs and spilt blood,
who wanderest in the midst of shades among the tombs; who longest for
blood and bringest terror to mortals, Gorge, Mormo, thousand-faced
moon, look favorably on our sacrifices!"

When he read this he shuddered, and thought vaguely of the cracked
bass organ-notes he fancied he had heard beneath the church on
certain nights.  He shuddered again at the rust around the rim of a
metal basin which stood on the altar, and paused nervously when his
nostrils seemed to detect a curious and ghastly stench from somewhere
in the neighborhood.  That organ memory haunted him, and he explored
the basement with particular assiduity before he left.  The place was
very hateful to him; yet after all, were the blasphemous panels and
inscriptions more than mere crudities perpetrated by the ignorant?


By the time of Suydam's wedding the kidnapping epidemic had become a
popular newspaper scandal.  Most of the victims were young children
of the lowest classes, but the increasing number of disappearances
had worked up a sentiment of the strongest fury.  Journals clamored
for action from the police, and once more the Butler Street station
sent its men over Red Hook for clues, discoveries, and criminals.
Malone was glad to be on the trail again, and took pride in a raid on
one of Suydam's Parker Place houses.  There, indeed, no stolen child
was found, despite the tales of screams and the red sash picked up in
the areaway; but the paintings and rough inscriptions on the peeling
walls of most of the rooms, and the primitive chemical laboratory in
the attic, all helped to convince the detective that he was on the
track of something tremendous.  The paintings were appalling--hideous
monsters of every shape and size, and parodies on human outlines
which cannot be described.  The writing was in red, and varied from
Arabic to Greek, Roman, and Hebrew letters.  Malone could not read
much of it, but what he did decipher was portentous and cabalistic
enough.  One frequently repeated motto was in a sort of Hebraized
Hellenistic Greek, and suggested the most terrible demon-evocations
of the Alexandrian decadence:


HEL.  HELOYM.  SOTHER.  EMMANVEL.  SABOATH.  AGLA.  TETRAGRAMMATION.
AGYROS.  OTHEOS.  ISCHYROS.  ATHANATOS.  IEHOVA.  VA.  ADONAL.  SADY.
HOMOVSION.  MESSIAS.  ESCHEREHEYE.


Circles and pentagrams loomed on every hand, and told indubitably of
the strange beliefs and aspirations of those who dwelt so squalidly
here.  In the cellar, however, the strangest thing was found--a pile
of genuine gold ingots covered carelessly with a piece of burlap, and
bearing upon their shining surfaces the same weird hieroglyphics
which also adorned the walls.  During this raid the police
encountered only a passive resistance from the squinting Orientals
that swarmed from every door.  Finding nothing relevant, they had to
leave all as it was; but the precinct captain wrote Suydam a note,
advising him to look closely to the character of his tenants, and
protegés in view of the growing public clamor.


V

Then came the June wedding and the great sensation; Flatbush was gay
for the hour about high noon, and pennanted motors thronged the
street near the old Dutch church where an awning stretched from door
to highway.  No local event ever surpassed the Suydam-Gerritsen
nuptials in tone and scale, and the party which escorted the bride
and groom to the Cunard pier was, if not exactly the smartest, at
least a solid page from the Social Register!  At 5 o'clock adieux was
waved, and the ponderous liner edged away from the long pier, slowly
turned its nose seaward, discarded its tug, and headed for widening
water spaces that led to Old World wonders.  By night the outer
harbor was cleared, and late passengers watched the stars twinkling
above an unpolluted ocean.

Whether the tramp steamer or the scream was first to gain attention,
no one can say.  Probably they were simultaneous, but it is of no use
to calculate.  The scream came from the Suydam stateroom, and the
sailor who broke down the door could perhaps have told frightful
things if he had not forthwith gone completely mad--as it is, he
shrieked more loudly than the first victims, and thereafter ran
simpering about the vessel till caught and put in irons.  The ship's
doctor who entered the stateroom and turned on the lights a moment
later did not go mad, but told nobody what he saw till afterward,
when he corresponded with Malone in Chepachet.  It was
murder--strangulation--but one need not say that the claw-mark on
Mrs. Suydam's throat could not have come from her husband's or any
other human hand, or that upon the white wall there flickered for an
instant in hateful red a legend which, later copied from memory,
seems to have been nothing less than the fearsome Chaldee letters of
the word "LILITH."  One need not mention these things because they
vanished so quickly--as for Suydam, one could at least bar others
from the room until one knew what to think oneself.  The doctor has
distinctly assured Malone that he did not see IT.  The open porthole,
just before he turned on the lights, was clouded for a second with a
certain phosphorescence, and for a moment there seemed to echo in the
night outside the suggestion of a faint and hellish tittering; but no
real outline met the eye.  As proof, the doctor points to his
continued sanity.

Then the tramp steamer claimed all attention.  A boat put off, and a
horde of swart, insolent ruffians in officers' dress swarmed aboard
the temporarily halted Cunarder.  They wanted Suydam or his
body--they had known of his trip, and for certain reasons were sure
he would die.  The captain's deck was almost a pandemonium; for at
the instant, between the doctor's report from the stateroom and the
demands of the men from the tramp, not even the wisest and gravest
seaman could think what to do.  Suddenly the leader of the visiting
mariners, an Arab with a hatefully negroid mouth, pulled forth a
dirty, crumpled paper and handed it to the captain.  It was signed by
Robert Suydam, and bore the following odd message:


_In case of sudden or unexpected accident or death on my part, please
deliver me or my body unquestioningly into the hands of the bearer
and his associates.  Everything, for me, and perhaps for you, depends
on absolute compliance.  Explanations can come later--do not fail me
now._

_Robert Suydam._


Captain and doctor looked at each other, and the latter whispered
something to the former.  Finally they nodded rather helplessly and
led the way to the Suydam stateroom.  The doctor directed the
captain's glance away as he unlocked the door and admitted the
strange seamen, nor did he breathe easily, till they filed out with
their burden after an unaccountably long period of preparation.  It
was wrapped in bedding from the berths, and the doctor was glad that
the outlines were not very revealing.  Somehow the men got the thing
over the side and away to their tramp steamer without uncovering it.

The Cunarder started again, and the doctor and ship's undertaker
sought out the Suydam stateroom to perform what last services they
could.  Once more the physician was forced to reticence and even to
mendacity, for a hellish thing had happened.  When the undertaker
asked him why he had drained off all of Mrs. Suydam's blood, he
neglected to affirm that he had not done so; nor did he point to the
vacant bottle-spaces on the rack, or to the odor in the sink which
showed the hasty disposition of the bottles' original contents.  The
pockets of those men--if men they were--had bulged damnably when they
left the ship.  Two hours later, and the world knew by radio all that
it ought to know of the horrible affair.


VI

That same June evening, without having heard a word from the sea,
Malone was very busy among the alleys of Red Hook.  A sudden stir
seemed to permeate the place, and as if apprized by "grapevine
telegraph" of something singular, the denizens clustered expectantly
around the dance-hall church and the houses in Parker Place.  Three
children had just disappeared--blue-eyed Norwegians from the streets
toward Gowanus--and there were rumors of a mob forming among the
sturdy Viking of that section.  Malone had for weeks been urging his
colleagues to attempt a general clean-up; and at last, moved by
conditions more obvious to their common sense than the conjectures of
a Dublin dreamer, they had agreed upon a final stroke.  The unrest
and menace of this evening had been the deciding factor, and just
about midnight a raiding party recruited from three stations
descended upon Parker Place and its environs.  Doors were battered
in, stragglers arrested, and candle-lighted rooms forced to disgorge
unbelievable throngs of mixed foreigners in figured robes, miters and
other inexplicable devices.  Much was lost in the mêlée for objects
were thrown hastily down unexpected shafts, and betraying odors
deadened by the sudden kindling of pungent incense.  But spattered
blood was everywhere, and Malone shuddered whenever he saw a brazier
or altar from which the smoke was still rising.

He wanted to be in several places at once, and decided on Suydam's
basement flat only after a messenger had reported the complete
emptiness of the dilapidated dance-hall church.  The flat, he
thought, must hold some clue to a cult of which the occult scholar
had so obviously become the center and leader; and it was with real
expectancy that he ransacked the musty rooms, noted their vaguely
charnal odor, and examined the curious books, instruments, gold
ingots, and glass-stoppered bottles scattered carelessly here and
there.  Once a lean, black-and-white cat edged between his feet and
tripped him, overturning at the same time a beaker half full of red
liquid.  The shock was severe, and to this day Malone is not certain
of what he saw; but in dreams he still pictures that cat as it
scuttled away with certain monstrous alterations and peculiarities.


Then came the locked cellar door, and the search for something to
break it down.  A heavy stool stood near, and its tough seat was more
than enough for the antique panels.  A crack formed and enlarged, and
the whole door gave way--but from the other side; whence poured a
howling tumult of ice-cold wind with all the stenches of the
bottomless pit, and whence reached a sucking force not of earth or
heaven, which, coiling sentiently about the paralyzed detective,
dragged him through the aperture and down unmeasured spaces filled
with whispers and wails, and gusts of mocking laughter.

Of course it was a dream.  All the specialists have told him so, and
he has nothing tangible to prove the contrary.  Indeed, he would
rather have it thus; for then the sight of old brick slums and dark
foreign faces would not eat so deeply into his soul.  But at the time
it was all horribly real, and nothing can ever efface the memory of
those nighted crypts, those titan arcades, and those half-formed
shapes of hell that strode gigantically in silence holding half-eaten
things whose still surviving portions screamed for mercy or laughed
with madness.  Odors of incense and corruption joined in sickening
concert, and the black air was alive with the cloudy, semi-visible
bulk of shapeless elemental things with eyes.  Somewhere dark sticky
water was lapping at onyx piers, and once the shivery tinkle of
raucous little bells pealed out to greet the insane titter of a naked
phosphorescent thing which swam into sight, scrambled ashore, and
climbed up to squat leeringly on a carved golden pedestal in the
black ground.

Avenues of limitless night seemed to radiate in every direction, till
one might fancy that here lay the root of a contagion destined to
sicken and swallow cities, and engulf nations in the fetor of hybrid
pestilence.  Here cosmic sin had entered, and festered by unhallowed
rites had commenced the grinning march of death that was to rot us
all to fungus abnormalities too hideous for the grave's holding.
Satan here held his Babylonish court, and in the blood of stainless
childhood the leprous limbs of phosphorescent Lilith were laved.
Incubi and succubae howled praise to Hecate, and headless mooncalves
bleated to the Magna Mater.  Goats leaped to the sound of thin
accursed flutes, and AEgipans chased endlessly after misshapen fauns
over rocks twisted like swollen toads.  Moloch and Ashtaroth were not
absent; for in this quintessence of all damnation the bounds of
consciousness were let down, and man's fancy lay open to vistas of
every realm of horror and every forbidden dimension that evil had
power to mold.  The world and nature were helpless against such
assaults from unsealed wells of night, nor could any sign or prayer
check the Walpurgissage of horror which had come when a sage with the
hateful locked and brimming coffer of transmitted demon-lore.

Suddenly a ray of physical light shot through these fantasms, and
Malone heard the sound of oars amidst the blasphemies of things that
should be dead.  A boat with a lantern in its prow darted into sight,
made fast to an iron ring in the slimy stone pier, and vomited forth
several dark men bearing a long burden swathed in bedding.  They took
it to the naked phosphorescent thing on the carved gold pedestal, and
the thing tittered and pawed the bedding.  Then they unswathed it,
and propped upright before the pedestal the gangrenous corpse of a
corpulent old man with stubby beard and unkempt white hair.  The
phosphorescent thing tittered again, and the men produced bottles
from their pockets and anointed its feet with red, whilst they
afterward gave the bottles to the thing to drink from.

All at once, from an arcaded avenue leading endlessly away, there
came the demoniac rattle and wheeze of a blasphemous organ, choking
and rumbling out of the mockeries of hell in cracked, sardonic bass.
In an instant every moving entity was electrified; and forming at
once into a ceremonial procession, the nightmare horde slithered away
in quiet of the sound--goat, satyr, and AEgipan, incubus, succuba,
and lemur, twisted toad and shapeless elemental, dog-faced howler and
silent strutter in darkness--all led by the abominable naked
phosphorescent thing that had squatted on the carved golden throne;
and that now strode insolently bearing in its arms the glassy-eyed
corpse of the corpulent old man.  The strange dark man danced in the
rear, and the whole column skipped and leaped with Dionysiac fury.
Malone staggered after them a few steps, delirious and hazy, and
doubtful of his place in this or any world.  Then he turned,
faltered, and sank down on the cold damp stone, gasping and shivering
as the demon organ croaked on, and the howling and drumming and
tinkling of the mad procession grew fainter and fainter.

Vaguely he was conscious of chanted horrors, and shocking croakings
afar off.  Now and then a wail or whine of ceremonial devotion would
float to him through the black arcade, whilst eventually there rose
the dreadful Greek incantation whose text he had read above the
pulpit of that dance-hall church.

"O friend and companion of night thou who rejoicest in the baying of
dogs (here a hideous howl burst forth) and spilt blood (here nameless
sounds vied with morbid shriekings), who wanderest in the midst of
shades among the tombs (here a whistling sigh occurred), who longest
for blood and bringest terror to mortals (short, sharp cries from
myriad throats), Gorgo (repeated as response), Mormo (repeated with
ecstasy), thousand-faced moon (sighs and flute notes), look favorably
on our sacrifices!"

As the chant closed, a general shout went up, and hissing sounds
nearly drowned the croaking of the cracked bass organ.  Then a gasp
as from many throats, and a babel of barked and bleated
words--"Lilith, Great Lilith, behold the Bridegroom!"  More cries, a
clamor of rioting, and the sharp, clicking footfalls of a running
figure.  The footfalls approached, and Malone raised himself to his
elbow to look.


The luminosity of the crypt, lately diminished, had now slightly
increased; and in that devil-light there appeared the fleeing form of
that which should not flee or feel or breathe--the glassy-eyed,
gangrenous corpse of the corpulent old man, now needing no support,
but animated by some infernal sorcery of the rite just closed.  After
it raced the naked, tittering, phosphorescent thing that belonged on
the carven pedestal, and still farther behind panted the dark men,
and all the dread crew of sentient loathsomenesses.  The corpse was
gaining on its pursuers, and seemed bent on a definite object,
straining with every rotting muscle toward the carved golden
pedestal, whose necromantic importance was evidently so great.
Another moment and it had reached its goal, whilst the trailing
throng labored on with more frantic speed.  But they were too late,
for in one final spurt of strength which ripped tendon from tendon
and sent its noisome bulk floundering to the floor in a state of
jellyish dissolution, the staring corpse which had been Robert Suydam
achieved its object and its triumph.  The push had been tremendous,
but the force had held out; and as the pusher collapsed to a muddy
blotch of corruption the pedestal he had pushed tottered, tipped, and
finally careened from its onyx base into the thick waters below,
sending up a parting gleam of carven gold as it sank heavily to
undreamable gulfs of lower Tartarus.  In that instant, too, the whole
scene of horror faded to nothingness before Malone's eyes; and he
fainted amidst a thunderous crash which seemed to blot out all the
evil universe.


VII

Malone's dream, experienced in full before he knew of Suydam's death
and transfer at sea, was curiously supplemented by some oddities of
the case; though that is no reason why anyone should believe it.  The
three old houses in Parker Place, doubtless long rotten with decay in
its most insidious form, collapsed without visible cause while half
the raiders and most of the prisoners were inside; and both of the
greater number were instantly killed.  Only in the basements and
cellars was there much saving of life, and Malone was lucky to have
been deep below the house of Robert Suydam.  For he really was there,
as no one is disposed to deny.  They found him unconscious by the
edge of the night-black pool, with a grotesquely horrible jumble of
decay and bone, identifiable through dental work as the body of
Suydam, a few feet away.  The case was plain, for it was hither that
the smugglers' underground canal led; and the men who took Suydam
from the ship had brought him home.  They themselves were never
found, or identified; and the ship's doctor is not yet satisfied with
the certitudes of the police.

Suydam was evidently a leader in extensive man-smuggling operations,
for the canal to his house was but one of several subterranean
channels and tunnels in the neighborhood.  There was a tunnel from
this house to a crypt beneath the dance-hall church; a crypt
accessible from the church only through a narrow secret passage in
the north wall, and in whose chambers some singular and terrible
things were discovered.  The croaking organ was there, as well as a
vast arched chapel with wooden benches and a strangely figured altar.
The walls were lined with small cells, in seventeen of which--hideous
to relate--solitary prisoners in a state of complete idiocy were
found chained, including four mothers with infants of disturbingly
strange appearance.  These infants died soon after exposure to the
light; a circumstance which the doctors thought rather merciful.
Nobody but Malone, among those who inspected them, remembered the
somber question of old Delrio: "An sint unquan daemones incubi et
succubae, et an ex tali, congressu proles nasci queat?"

Before the canals were filled up they were thoroughly dredged, and
yielded forth a sensational array of sawed and split bones of all
sizes.  The kidnapping epidemic, very clearly, had been traced home;
though only two of the surviving prisoners could by any legal thread
be connected with it.  These men are now in prison, since they failed
of conviction as accessories in the actual murders.  The carved
golden pedestal or throne so often mentioned by Malone as of primary
occult importance was never brought to light, though at one place
under the Suydam house the canal, was observed to sink into a well
too deep for dredging.  It was choked up at the mouth and cemented
over when the cellars of the new houses were made, but Malone often
speculates on what lied beneath.  The police, satisfied that they had
shattered a dangerous gang of maniacs and alien smugglers, turned
over to the Federal authorities the unconvicted Kurds, who before
their deportation were conclusively found to belong to the Yezidee
clan of devils-worshippers.  The tramp ship and its crew remain an
elusive mystery, though cynical detectives are once more ready to
combat its smuggling and rum-running ventures.  Malone thinks these
detectives show a sadly limited perspective in their lack of wonder
at the myriad unexplainable details, and the suggestive obscurity of
the whole case; though he is just as critical of the newspapers,
which saw only a morbid sensation and gloated over a minor sadist
cult when they might have proclaimed a horror from the universe's
very heart.  But he is content to rest silent in Chepachet, calming
his nervous system and praying that time may gradually transfer his
terrible experience from the realm of present reality to that of
picturesque and semi-mythical remoteness.

Robert Suydam sleeps beside his bride in Greenwood Cemetery.  No
funeral was held over the strangely released bones, and relatives are
grateful for the swift oblivion which overtook the case as a whole.

The scholar's connection with the Red Hook horrors, indeed, was never
emblazoned by legal proof; since his death forestalled the inquiry he
would otherwise have faced.  His own end is not much mentioned, and
the Suydams hope that posterity may recall him only as a gentle
recluse who dabbled in harmless magic and folk-lore.

As for Red Hook--it is always the same.  Suydam came and went; a
terror gathered and faded; but the evil spirit of darkness and
squalor broods on amongst the mongrels in the old brick houses; and
prowling bands still parade on unknown errands past windows where
lights and twisted faces unaccountably appear and disappear.  Age-old
horror is a hydra with a thousand heads, and the cults of darkness
are rooted in blasphemies deeper than the well of Democritus.  The
soul of the beast is omnipresent and triumphant, and Red Hook's
legions of blear-eyed, pockmarked youths still chant and curse and
howl as they file from abyss to abyss, none knows whence or whither,
pushed on by blind laws of biology which they may never understand.
As of old more people enter Red Hook than leave it on the landward
side, and there are already rumors of new canals running underground
to certain centers of traffic in liquor and less mentionable things.

The dance-hall church is now mostly a dance-hall, and queer faces
have appeared at night at the windows.  Lately a policeman expressed
the belief that the filled-up crypt has been dug out again, and for
no simply explainable purpose.  Who are we to combat poisons older
than history and mankind?  Apes danced in Asia to those horrors, and
the cancer lurks secure and spreading where furtiveness hides in rows
of decaying brick.

Malone does not shudder without cause--for only the other day an
officer overheard a swarthy squinting hag teaching a small child some
whispering patois in the shadow of an areaway.  He listened, and
thought it very strange when he heard her repeat over and over again:

"O friend and companion of night thou who rejoicest in the baying of
dogs and spilt blood, who wanderest in the midst of shades among the
tombs, who longest for blood and bringest terror to mortals, Gorgo,
Mormo, thousand-faced moon, look favorably on our sacrifices!"



# Project Gutenberg #70478

The SILVER KEY

                          By H. P. LOVECRAFT

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                       Weird Tales January 1929.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key to the gate of dreams.
Prior to that time he had made up for the prosiness of life by nightly
excursions to strange and ancient cities beyond space, and lovely,
unbelievable garden lands across ethereal seas; but as middle age
hardened upon him he felt these liberties slipping away little by
little, until at last he was cut off altogether. No more could his
galleys sail up the river Oukranos past the gilded spires of Thran, or
his elephant caravans tramp through perfumed jungles in Kled, where
forgotten palaces with veined ivory columns sleep lovely and unbroken
under the moon.

He had read too much of things as they are, and talked with too many
people. Well-meaning philosophers had taught him to look into the
logical relations of things, and analyze the processes which shaped
his thoughts and fancies. Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten
that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which
there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those
born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the
other. Custom had dinned into his ears a superstitious reverence for
that which tangibly and physically exists, and had made him secretly
ashamed to dwell in visions. Wise men told him his simple fancies were
inane and childish, and he believed it because he could see that they
might easily be so. What he failed to recall was that the deeds of
reality are just as inane and childish, and even more absurd because
their actors persist in fancying them full of meaning and purpose as
the blind purpose grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something back to
nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of
the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness.

They had chained him down to things that are, and had then explained
the workings of those things till mystery had gone out of the world.
When he complained, and longed to escape into twilight realms where
magic molded all the little vivid fragments and prized associations of
his mind into vistas of breathless expectancy and unquenchable delight,
they turned him instead toward the new-found prodigies of science,
bidding him find wonder in the atom's vortex and mystery in the sky's
dimensions. And when he had failed to find these boons in things whose
laws are known and measurable, they told him he lacked imagination, and
was immature because he preferred dream-illusions to the illusions of
our physical creation.

So Carter had tried to do as others did, and pretended that the common
events and emotions of earthly minds were more important than the
fantasies of rare and delicate souls. He did not dissent when they told
him that the animal pain of a stuck pig or dyspeptic plowman in real
life is a greater thing than the peerless beauty of Narath with its
hundred carven gates and domes of chalcedony, which he dimly remembered
from his dreams; and under their guidance he cultivated a painstaking
sense of pity and tragedy.

Once in a while, though, he could not help seeing how shallow, fickle,
and meaningless all human aspirations are, and how emptily our real
impulses contrast with those pompous ideals we profess to hold. Then
he would have recourse to the polite laughter they had taught him to
use against the extravagance and artificiality of dreams; for he saw
that the daily life of our world is every inch as extravagant and
artificial, and far less worthy of respect because of its poverty in
beauty and its silly reluctance to admit its own lack of reason and
purpose. In this way he became a kind of humorist, for he did not see
that even humor is empty in a mindless universe devoid of any true
standard of consistency or inconsistency.

In the first days of his bondage he had turned to the gentle churchly
faith endeared to him by the naïve trust of his fathers, for thence
stretched mystic avenues which seemed to promise escape from life. Only
on closer view did he mark the starved fancy and beauty, the stale and
prosy triteness, and the owlish gravity and grotesque claims of solid
truth which reigned boresomely and overwhelmingly among most of its
professors; or feel to the full the awkwardness with which it sought to
keep alive as literal fact the outgrown fears and guesses of a primal
race confronting the unknown. It wearied Carter to see how solemnly
people tried to make earthly reality out of old myths which every step
of their boasted science confuted, and this misplaced seriousness
killed the attachment he might have kept for the ancient creeds had
they been content to offer the sonorous rites and emotional outlets in
their true guise of ethereal fantasy.

But when he came to study those who had thrown off the old myths,
he found them even more ugly than those who had not. They did not
know that beauty lies in harmony, and that loveliness of life has no
standard amidst an aimless cosmos save only its harmony with the
dreams and the feelings which have gone before and blindly molded our
little spheres out of the rest of chaos. They did not see that good and
evil and beauty and ugliness are only ornamental fruits of perspective,
whose sole value lies in their linkage to what chance made our fathers
think and feel, and whose fine details are different for every race
and culture. Instead, they either denied these things altogether or
transferred them to the crude, vague instincts which they shared with
the beasts and peasants; so that their lives were dragged malodorously
out in pain, ugliness, and disproportion, yet filled with a ludicrous
pride at having escaped from something no more unsound than that which
still held them. They had traded the false gods of fear and blind piety
for those of license and anarchy.

Carter did not taste deeply of these modern freedoms; for their
cheapness and squalor sickened a spirit loving beauty alone, while
his reason rebelled at the flimsy logic with which their champions
tried to gild brute impulse with a sacredness stripped from the idols
they had discarded. He saw that most of them, in common with their
cast-off priestcraft, could not escape from the delusion that life
has a meaning apart from that which men dream into it; and could not
lay aside the crude notion of ethics and obligations beyond those
of beauty, even when all Nature shrieked of its unconsciousness and
impersonal unmorality in the light of their scientific discoveries.
Warped and bigoted with preconceived illusions of justice, freedom,
and consistency, they cast off the old lore and the old ways with the
old beliefs; nor ever stopped to think that that lore and those ways
were the sole makers of their present thoughts and judgments, and the
sole guides and standards in a meaningless universe without fixed
aims or stable points of reference. Having lost these artificial
settings, their lives grew void of direction and dramatic interest;
till at length they strove to drown their ennui in bustle and pretended
usefulness, noise and excitement, barbaric display and animal
sensation. When these things palled, disappointed, or grew nauseous
through revulsion, they cultivated irony and bitterness, and found
fault with the social order. Never could they realize that their brute
foundations were as shifting and contradictory as the gods of their
elders, and that the satisfaction of one moment is the bane of the
next. Calm, lasting beauty comes only in dream, and this solace the
world had thrown away when in its worship of the real it threw away the
secrets of childhood and innocence.

Amidst this chaos of hollowness and unrest Carter tried to live as
befitted a man of keen thought and good heritage. With his dreams
fading under the ridicule of the age he could not believe in anything,
but the love of harmony kept him close to the ways of his race and
station. He walked impassive through the cities of men, and sighed
because no vista seemed fully real; because every flash of yellow
sunlight on tall roofs and every glimpse of balustraded plazas in the
first lamps of evening served only to remind him of dreams he had once
known, and to make him homesick for ethereal lands he no longer knew
how to find. Travel was only a mockery; and even the Great War stirred
him but little, though he served from the first in the Foreign Legion
of France. For a while he sought friends, but soon grew weary of the
crudeness of their emotions, and the sameness and earthiness of their
visions. He felt vaguely glad that all his relatives were distant and
out of touch with him, for they could not have understood his mental
life. That is, none but his grandfather and great-uncle Christopher
could, and they were long dead.

Then he began once more the writing of books, which he had left off
when dreams first failed him. But here, too, was there no satisfaction
or fulfilment; for the touch of earth was upon his mind, and he could
not think of lovely things as he had done of yore. Ironic humor
dragged down all the twilight minarets he reared, and the earthy fear
of improbability blasted all the delicate and amazing flowers in his
faery gardens. The convention of assumed piety spilt mawkishness on
his characters, while the myth of an important reality and significant
human events and emotions debased all his high fantasy into thin-veiled
allegory and cheap social satire. His new novels were successful as his
old ones had never been; and because he knew how empty they must be to
please an empty herd, he burned them and ceased his writing. They were
very graceful novels, in which he urbanely laughed at the dreams he
lightly sketched; but he saw that their sophistication had sapped all
their life away.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was after this that he cultivated deliberate illusion, and dabbled
in the notions of the bizarre and the eccentric as an antidote for the
commonplace. Most of these, however, soon showed their poverty and
barrenness; and he saw that the popular doctrines of occultism are as
dry and inflexible as those of science, yet without even the slender
palliative of truth to redeem them. Gross stupidity, falsehood, and
muddled thinking are not dream; and form no escape from life to a mind
trained above their level. So Carter bought stranger books and sought
out deeper and more terrible men of fantastic erudition; delving into
arcana of consciousness that few have trod, and learning things about
the secret pits of life, legend, and immemorial antiquity which
disturbed him ever afterward. He decided to live on a rarer plane, and
furnished his Boston home to suit his changing moods; one room for
each, hung in appropriate colors, furnished with befitting books and
objects, and provided with sources of the proper sensations of light,
heat, sound, taste, and odor.

Once he heard of a man in the South who was shunned and feared for
the blasphemous things he read in prehistoric books and clay tablets
smuggled from India and Arabia. Him he visited, living with him and
sharing his studies for seven years, till horror overtook them one
midnight in an unknown and archaic graveyard, and only one emerged
where two had entered. Then he went back to Arkham, the terrible
witch-haunted old town of his forefathers in New England, and had
experiences in the dark, amidst the hoary willows and tottering gambrel
roofs, which made him seal for ever certain pages in the diary of a
wild-minded ancestor. But these horrors took him only to the edge of
reality, and were not of the true dream country he had known in youth;
so that at fifty he despaired of any rest or contentment in a world
grown too busy for beauty and too shrewd for dream.

Having perceived at last the hollowness and futility of real things,
Carter spent his days in retirement, and in wistful disjointed memories
of his dream-filled youth. He thought it rather silly that he bother
to keep on living at all, and got from a South American acquaintance
a very curious liquid to take him to oblivion without suffering.
Inertia and force of habit, however, caused him to defer action; and
he lingered indecisively among thoughts of old times, taking down the
strange hangings from his walls and refitting the house as it was in
his early boyhood--purple panes, Victorian furniture, and all.

With the passage of time he became almost glad he had lingered, for
his relics of youth and his cleavage from the world made life and
sophistication seem very distant and unreal; so much so that a touch of
magic and expectancy stole back into his nightly slumbers. For years
those slumbers had known only such twisted reflections of every-day
things as the commonest slumbers know, but now there returned a
flicker of something stranger and wilder; something of vaguely awesome
immanence which took the form of tensely clear pictures from his
childhood days, and made him think of little inconsequential things he
had long forgotten. He would often awake calling for his mother and
grandfather, both in their graves a quarter of a century.

Then one night his grandfather reminded him of the key. The gray
old scholar, as vivid as in life, spoke long and earnestly of their
ancient line, and of the strange visions of the delicate and sensitive
men who composed it. He spoke of the flame-eyed Crusader who learnt
wild secrets of the Saracens that held him captive; and of the first
Sir Randolph Carter who studied magic when Elizabeth was queen. He
spoke, too, of that Edmund Carter who had just escaped hanging in the
Salem witchcraft, and who had placed in an antique box a great silver
key handed down from his ancestors. Before Carter awaked, the gentle
visitant had told him where to find that box; that carved oak-box of
archaic wonder whose grotesque lid no hand had raised for two centuries.

In the dust and shadows of the great attic he found it, remote and
forgotten at the back of a drawer in a tall chest. It was about a foot
square, and its Gothic carvings were so fearful that he did not marvel
no person since Edmund Carter had dared open it. It gave forth no noise
when shaken, but was mystic with the scent of unremembered spices. That
it held a key was indeed only a dim legend, and Randolph Carter's
father had never known such a box existed. It was bound in rusty iron,
and no means was provided for working the formidable lock. Carter
vaguely understood that he would find within it some key to the lost
gate of dreams, but of where and how to use it his grandfather had told
him nothing.

An old servant forced the carven lid, shaking as he did so at the
hideous faces leering from the blackened wood, and at some unplaced
familiarity. Inside, wrapped in a discolored parchment, was a huge
key of tarnished silver covered with cryptical arabesques; but of any
legible explanation there was none. The parchment was voluminous, and
held only the strange hieroglyphs of an unknown tongue written with an
antique reed. Carter recognized the characters as those he had seen
on a certain papyrus scroll belonging to that terrible scholar of the
South who had vanished one midnight in a nameless cemetery. The man had
always shivered when he read this scroll, and Carter shivered now.

But he cleaned the key, and kept it by him nightly in its aromatic box
of ancient oak. His dreams were meanwhile increasing in vividness, and
though showing him none of the strange cities and incredible gardens
of the old days, were assuming a definite cast whose purpose could not
be mistaken. They were calling him back along the years, and with the
mingled wills of all his fathers were pulling him toward some hidden
and ancestral source. Then he knew he must go into the past and merge
himself with old things, and day after day he thought of the hills
to the north where haunted Arkham and the rushing Miskatonic and the
lonely rustic homestead of his people lay.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the brooding fire of autumn Carter took the old remembered way past
graceful lines of rolling hill and stone-walled meadow, distant vale
and hanging woodland, curving road and nestling farmstead, and the
crystal windings of the Miskatonic, crossed here and there by rustic
bridges of wood or stone. At one bend he saw a group of giant elms
among which an ancestor had oddly vanished a century and a half before,
and shuddered as the wind blew meaningly through them. Then there was
the crumbling farmhouse of old Goody Fowler the witch, with its little
evil windows and great roof sloping nearly to the ground on the north
side. He speeded up his car as he passed it, and did not slacken till
he had mounted the hill where his mother and her fathers before her
were born, and where the old white house still looked proudly across
the road at the breathlessly lovely panorama of rocky slope and verdant
valley, with the distant spires of Kingsport on the horizon, and hints
of the archaic, dream-laden sea in the farthest background.

Then came the steeper slope that held the old Carter place he had not
seen in over forty years. Afternoon was far gone when he reached the
foot, and at the bend half-way up he paused to scan the outspread
countryside golden and glorified in the slanting floods of magic poured
out by a western sun. All the strangeness and expectancy of his recent
dreams seemed present in this hushed and unearthly landscape, and he
thought of the unknown solitudes of other planets as his eyes traced
out the velvet and deserted lawns shining undulant between their
tumbled walls, the clumps of faery forest setting off far lines of
purple hills beyond hills, and the spectral wooded valley dipping down
in shadow to dank hollows where trickling waters crooned and gurgled
among swollen and distorted roots.

Something made him feel that motors did not belong in the realm he was
seeking, so he left his car at the edge of the forest, and putting the
great key in his coat pocket walked on up the hill. Woods now engulfed
him utterly, though he knew the house was on a high knoll that cleared
the trees except to the north. He wondered how it would look, for it
had been left vacant and untended through his neglect since the death
of his strange great-uncle Christopher thirty years before. In his
boyhood he had reveled through long visits there, and had found weird
marvels in the woods beyond the orchard.

Shadows thickened around him, for the night was near. Once a gap in
the trees opened up to the right, so that he saw off across leagues of
twilight meadow and spied the old Congregational steeple on Central
Hill in Kingsport; pink with the last flush of day, the panes of the
little round windows blazing with reflected fire. Then, when he was in
deep shadow again, he recalled with a start that the glimpse must have
come from childish memory alone, since the old white church had long
been torn down to make room for the Congregational Hospital. He had
read of it with interest, for the paper had told about some strange
burrows or passages found in the rocky hill beneath.

Through his puzzlement a voice piped, and he started again at its
familiarity after long years. Old Benijah Corey had been his Uncle
Christopher's hired man, and was aged even in those far-off times of
his boyhood visits. Now he must be well over a hundred, but that piping
voice could come from no one else. He could distinguish no words, yet
the tone was haunting and unmistakable. To think that "Old Benijy"
should still be alive!

"Mister Randy! Mister Randy! Whar be ye? D'ye want to skeer yer Aunt
Marthy plumb to death? Hain't she tuld ye to keep nigh the place in
the arternoon an' git back afur dark? Randy! Ran--dee!... He's the
beatin'est boy fer runnin' off in the woods I ever see; haff the time
a-settin' moonin' raound that snake-den in the upper timber-lot!...
Hey, yew, Ran--dee!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Randolph Carter stopped in the pitch darkness and rubbed his hand
across his eyes. Something was queer. He had been somewhere he ought
not to be; had strayed very far away to places where he had not
belonged, and was now inexcusably late. He had not noticed the time on
the Kingsport steeple, though he could easily have made it out with
his pocket telescope; but he knew his lateness was something very
strange and unprecedented. He was not sure he had his little telescope
with him, and put his hand in his blouse pocket to see. No, it was
not there, but there was the big silver key he had found in a box
somewhere. Uncle Chris had told him something odd once about an old
unopened box with a key in it, but Aunt Martha had stopped the story
abruptly, saying it was no kind of thing to tell a child whose head was
already too full of queer fancies. He tried to recall just where he
had found the key, but something seemed very confused. He guessed it
was in the attic at home in Boston, and dimly remembered bribing Parks
with half his week's allowance to help him open the box and keep quiet
about it; but when he remembered this, the face of Parks came up very
strangely, as if the wrinkles of long years had fallen upon the brisk
little cockney.

"Ran--dee! Ran--dee! Hi! Hi! Randy!"

A swaying lantern came around the black bend, and old Benijah pounced
on the silent and bewildered form of the pilgrim.

"Durn ye, boy, so thar ye be! Ain't ye got a tongue in yer head, that
ye can't answer a body? I ben callin' this haff hour, an' ye must a
heerd me long ago! Don't ye know yer Aunt Marthy's all a-fidget over
yer bein' off arter dark? Wait till I tell yer Uncle Chris when he
gets hum! Ye'd orta know these here woods ain't no fitten place to be
traipsin' this hour! They's things abroad what dun't do nobody no good,
as my gran'sir' knowed afur me. Come, Mister Randy, or Hannah wun't
keep supper no longer!"

So Randolph Carter was marched up the road where wondering stars
glimmered through high autumn boughs. And dogs barked as the yellow
light of small-paned windows shone out at the farther turn, and the
Pleiades twinkled across the open knoll where a great gambrel roof
stood black against the dim west. Aunt Martha was in the doorway, and
did not scold too hard when Benijah shoved the truant in. She knew
Uncle Chris well enough to expect such things of the Carter blood.
Randolph did not show his key, but ate his supper in silence and
protested only when bedtime came. He sometimes dreamed better when
awake, and he wanted to use that key.

In the morning Randolph was up early, and would have run off to the
upper timber-lot if Uncle Chris had not caught him and forced him
into his chair by the breakfast table. He looked impatiently around
the low-pitched room with the rag carpet and exposed beams and
corner-posts, and smiled only when the orchard boughs scratched at the
little leaded panes of the rear window. The trees and the hills were
close to him, and formed the gates of that timeless realm which was his
true country.

Then, when he was free, he felt in his blouse pocket for the key; and
being reassured, skipped off across the orchard to the rise beyond,
where the wooded hill climbed again to heights above even the treeless
knoll. The floor of the forest was mossy and mysterious, and great
lichened rocks rose vaguely here and there in the dim light like druid
monoliths among the swollen and twisted trunks of a sacred grove. Once
in his ascent Randolph crossed a rushing stream whose falls a little
way off sang runic incantations to the lurking fauns and ægipans and
dryads.

Then he came to the strange cave in the forest slope, the dreaded
"snake-den" which country folk shunned, and away from which Benijah had
warned him again and again. It was deep; far deeper than anyone but
Randolph suspected, for the boy had found a fissure in the farthermost
black corner that led to a loftier grotto beyond--a haunting sepulchral
place whose granite walls held a curious illusion of conscious
artifice. On this occasion he crawled in as usual, lighting his way
with matches filched from the sitting-room match-safe, and edging
through the final crevice with an eagerness hard to explain even to
himself. He could not tell why he approached the farther wall so
confidently, or why he instinctively drew forth the great silver key as
he did so. But on he went, and when he danced back to the house that
night he offered no excuses for his lateness, nor heeded in the least
the reproofs he gained for ignoring the noontide dinner-horn altogether.

       *       *       *       *       *

Now it is agreed by all the distant relatives of Randolph Carter that
something occurred to heighten his imagination in his tenth year. His
cousin, Ernest B. Aspinwall, Esq., of Chicago, is fully ten years his
senior and distinctly recalls a change in the boy after the autumn of
1883. Randolph had looked on scenes of fantasy that few others can
ever have beheld, and stranger still were some of the qualities which
he showed in relation to very mundane things. He seemed, in fine, to
have picked up an odd gift of prophecy; and reacted unusually to things
which, though at the time without meaning, were later found to justify
the singular impressions. In subsequent decades as new inventions,
new names, and new events appeared one by one in the book of history,
people would now and then recall wonderingly how Carter had years
before let fall some careless word of undoubted connection with what
was then far in the future. He did not himself understand these words,
or know why certain things made him feel certain emotions; but fancied
that some unremembered dream must be responsible. It was as early as
1897 that he turned pale when some traveler mentioned the French town
of Belloy-en-Santerre, and friends remembered it when he was almost
mortally wounded there in 1916, while serving with the Foreign Legion
in the Great War.

Carter's relatives talk much of these things because he has lately
disappeared. His little old servant Parks, who for years bore patiently
with his vagaries, last saw him on the morning he drove off alone in
his car with a key he had recently found. Parks had helped him get the
key from the old box containing it, and had felt strangely affected by
the grotesque carvings on the box, and by some other odd quality he
could not name. When Carter left, he had said he was going to visit his
old ancestral country around Arkham.

Half-way up Elm Mountain, on the way to the ruins of the old Carter
place, they found his motor set carefully by the roadside; and in it
was a box of fragrant wood with carvings that frightened the countrymen
who stumbled on it. The box held only a queer parchment whose
characters no linguist or paleographer has been able to decipher or
identify. Rain had long effaced any possible footprints, though Boston
investigators had something to say about evidences of disturbances
among the fallen timbers of the Carter place. It was, they averred,
as though someone had groped about the ruins at no distant period. A
common white handkerchief found among the forest rocks on the hillside
beyond can not be identified as belonging to the missing man.

There is talk of apportioning Randolph Carter's estate among his heirs,
but I shall stand firmly against this course because I do not believe
he is dead. There are twists of time and space, of vision and reality,
which only a dreamer can divine; and from what I know of Carter I think
he has merely found a way to traverse these mazes. Whether or not he
will ever come back, I can not say. He wanted the lands of dreams he
had lost, and yearned for the days of his childhood. Then he found a
key, and I somehow believe he was able to use it to strange advantage.

[Illustration: "There the bearded and finny Gnorri
build their labyrinths."]

I shall ask him when I see him, for I expect to meet him shortly in
a certain dream-city we both used to haunt. It is rumored in Ulthar,
beyond the River Skai, that a new king reigns on the opal throne of
Ilek-Vad, that fabulous town of turrets atop the hollow cliffs of glass
overlooking the twilight sea wherein the bearded and finny Gnorri build
their singular labyrinths, and I believe I know how to interpret this
rumor. Certainly, I look forward impatiently to the sight of that great
silver key, for in its cryptical arabesques there may stand symbolized
all the aims and mysteries of a blindly impersonal cosmos.



# Project Gutenberg #68547

HE

By H. P. Lovecraft


[Illustration: “The old man clawed and spat at me through the moldy
air, and barked things in his throat as he swayed with the yellow
curtain he clutched.”]


I saw him on a sleepless night when I was walking desperately to save
my soul and my vision. My coming to New York had been a mistake; for
whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration in the
teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twist endlessly from
forgotten courts and squares and waterfronts to courts and squares and
waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean modern towers and
pinnacles that rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found
instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to
master, paralyze, and annihilate me.

The disillusion had been gradual. Coming for the first time upon the
town, I had seen it in the sunset from a bridge, majestic above its
waters, its incredible peaks and pyramids rising flowerlike and
delicate from pools of violet mist to play with the flaming golden
clouds and the first stars of evening. Then it had lighted up window
by window above the shimmering tides where lanterns nodded and glided
and deep horns bayed weird harmonies, and had itself become a starry
firmament of dream, redolent of faery music, and one with the marvels
of Carcassonne and Samarcand and El Dorado and all glorious and
half-fabulous cities. Shortly afterward I was taken through those
antique ways so dear to my fancy--narrow, curving alleys and passages
where rows of red Georgian brick blinked with small-paned dormers
above pillared doorways that had looked on gilded sedans and paneled
coaches--and in the first flush of realization of these long-wished
things I thought I had indeed achieved such treasures as would make me
in time a poet.

But success and happiness were not to be. Garish daylight showed only
squalor and alienage and the noxious elephantiasis of climbing,
spreading stone where the moon had hinted of loveliness and elder
magic; and the throngs of people that seethed through the flumelike
streets were squat, swarthy strangers with hardened faces and narrow
eyes, shrewd strangers without dreams and without kinship to the
scenes about them, who could never mean aught to a blue-eyed man of
the old folk, with the love of fair green lanes and white New England
village steeples in his heart.

So instead of the poems I had hoped for, there came only a shuddering
blankness and ineffable loneliness; and I saw at last a fearful truth
which no one had ever dared to breathe before--the unwhisperable
secret of secrets--the fact that this city of stone and stridor is not
a sentient perpetuation of Old New York as London is of Old London and
Paris of Old Paris, but that it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling
body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate things which
have nothing to do with it as it was in life. Upon making this
discovery I ceased to sleep comfortably; though something of resigned
tranquillity came back as I gradually formed the habit of keeping off
the streets by day and venturing abroad only at night, when darkness
calls forth what little of the past still hovers wraithlike about, and
old white doorways remember the stalwart forms that once passed
through them. With this mode of relief I even wrote a few poems, and
still refrained from going home to my people lest I seem to crawl back
ignobly in defeat.

Then, on a sleepless night’s walk, I met the man. It was in a
grotesque hidden courtyard of the Greenwich section, for there in my
ignorance I had settled, having heard of the place as the natural home
of poets and artists. The archaic lanes and houses and unexpected bits
of square and court had indeed delighted me, and when I found the
poets and artists to be loud-voiced pretenders whose quaintness is
tinsel and whose lives are a denial of all that pure beauty which is
poetry and art, I stayed on for love of these venerable things. I
fancied them as they were in their prime, when Greenwich was a placid
village not yet engulfed by the town; and in the hours before dawn,
when all the revellers had slunk away, I used to wander alone among
their cryptical windings and brood upon the curious arcana which
generations must have deposited there. This kept my soul alive, and
gave me a few of those dreams and visions for which the poet far
within me cried out.

The man came upon me at about 2 one cloudy August morning, as I was
threading a series of detached courtyards; now accessible only through
the unlighted hallways of intervening buildings, but once forming
parts of a continuous network of picturesque alleys. I had heard of
them by vague rumor, and realized that they could not be upon any map
of today; but the fact that they were forgotten only endeared them to
me, so that I had sought them with twice my usual eagerness. Now that
I had found them, my eagerness was again redoubled; for something in
their arrangement dimly hinted that they might be only a few of many
such, with dark, dumb counterparts wedged obscurely betwixt high blank
walls and deserted rear tenements, or lurking lamplessly behind
archways, unbetrayed by hordes of the foreign-speaking or guarded by
furtive and uncommunicative artists whose practises do not invite
publicity or the light of day.

He spoke to me without invitation, noting my mood and glances as I
studied certain knockered doorways above iron-railed steps, the pallid
glow of traceried transoms feebly lighting my face. His own face was
in shadow, and he wore a wide-brimmed hat which somehow blended
perfectly with the out-of-date cloak he affected; but I was subtly
disquieted even before he addressed me. His form was very slight, thin
almost to cadaverousness; and his voice proved phenomenally soft and
hollow, though not particularly deep. He had, he said, noticed me
several times at my wanderings; and inferred that I resembled him in
loving the vestiges of former years. Would I not like the guidance of
one long practised in these explorations, and possessed of local
information profoundly deeper than any which an obvious newcomer could
possibly have gained?

As he spoke, I caught a glimpse of his face in the yellow beam from a
solitary attic window. It was a noble, even a handsome, elderly
countenance; and bore the marks of a lineage and refinement unusual
for the age and place. Yet some quality about it disturbed me almost
as much as its features pleased me--perhaps it was too white, or too
expressionless, or too much out of keeping with the locality, to make
me feel easy or comfortable. Nevertheless I followed him; for in those
dreary days my quest for antique beauty and mystery was all that I had
to keep my soul alive, and I reckoned it a rare favor of Fate to fall
in with one whose kindred seekings seemed to have penetrated so much
farther than mine.

Something in the night constrained the cloaked man to silence, and for
a long hour he led me forward without needless words; making only the
briefest of comments concerning ancient names and dates and changes,
and directing my progress very largely by gestures as we squeezed
through interstices, tiptoed through corridors, clambered over brick
walls, and once crawled on hands and knees through a low, arched
passage of stone whose immense length and tortuous twistings effaced
at last every hint of geographical location I had managed to preserve.
The things we saw were very old and marvelous, or at least they seemed
so in the few straggling rays of light by which I viewed them, and I
shall never forget the tottering Ionic columns and fluted pilasters
and urn-headed iron fenceposts and flaring-linteled windows and
decorative fanlights that appeared to grow quainter and stranger the
deeper we advanced into this inexhaustible maze of unknown antiquity.

                *       *       *       *       *

We met no person, and as time passed the lighted windows became fewer
and fewer. The streetlights we first encountered had been of oil, and
of the ancient lozenge pattern. Later I noticed some with candles; and
at last, after traversing a horrible unlighted court where my guide
had to lead me with his gloved hand through total blackness to a
narrow wooden gate in a high wall, we came upon a fragment of alley
lit only by lanterns in front of every seventh house--unbelievably
Colonial tin lanterns with conical tops and holes punched in the
sides. This alley led steeply uphill--more steeply than I had thought
possible in this part of New York--and the upper end was blocked
squarely by the ivy-clad wall of a private estate, beyond which I
could see a pale cupola, and the tops of trees waving against a vague
lightness in the sky. In this wall was a small, low-arched gate of
nail-studded black oak, which the man proceeded to unlock with a
ponderous key. Leading me within, he steered a course in utter
blackness over what seemed to be a gravel path, and finally up a
flight of stone steps to the door of the house, which he unlocked and
opened for me.

We entered, and as we did so I grew faint from a reek of infinite
mustiness which welled out to meet us, and which must have been the
fruit of unwholesome centuries of decay. My host appeared not to
notice this, and in courtesy I kept silent as he piloted me up a
curving stairway, across a hall, and into a room whose door I heard
him lock behind us. Then I saw him pull the curtains of the three
small-paned windows that barely showed themselves against the
lightening sky; after which he crossed to the mantel, struck flint and
steel, lighted two candles of a candelabrum of twelve sconces, and
made a gesture enjoining soft-toned speech.

In this feeble radiance I saw that we were in a spacious,
well-furnished and paneled library dating from the first quarter of
the Eighteenth Century, with splendid doorway pediments, a delightful
Doric cornice, and a magnificently carved overmantel with
scroll-and-urn top. Above the crowded bookshelves at intervals along
the walls were well-wrought family portraits; all tarnished to an
enigmatical dimness, and bearing an unmistakable likeness to the man
who now motioned me to a chair beside the graceful Chippendale table.
Before seating himself across the table from me, my host paused for a
moment as if in embarrassment; then, tardily removing his gloves,
wide-brimmed hat, and cloak, stood theatrically revealed in full
mid-Georgian costume from queued hair and neck ruffles to
knee-breeches, silk hose, and the buckled shoes I had not previously
noticed. Now slowly sinking into a lyre-back chair, he commenced to
eye me intently.

Without his hat he took on an aspect of extreme age which was scarcely
visible before, and I wondered if this unperceived mark of singular
longevity were not one of the sources of my original disquiet. When he
spoke at length, his soft, hollow, and carefully muffled voice not
infrequently quavered; and now and then I had great difficulty in
following him as I listened with a thrill of amazement and
half-disavowed alarm which grew each instant.

“You behold, Sir,” my host began, “a man of very eccentrical habits,
for whose costume no apology need be offered to one with your wit and
inclinations. Reflecting upon better times, I have not scrupled to
ascertain their ways and adopt their dress and manners; an indulgence
which offends none if practised without ostentation. It hath been my
good fortune to retain the rural seat of my ancestors, swallowed
though it was by two towns, first Greenwich, which built up hither
after 1800, then New York, which joined on near 1830. There were many
reasons for the close keeping of this place in my family, and I have
not been remiss in discharging such obligations. The squire who
succeeded to it in 1768 studied sartain arts and made sartain
discoveries, all connected with influences residing in this particular
plot of ground, and eminently desarving of the strongest guarding.
Some curious effects of these arts and discoveries I now purpose to
show you, under the strictest secrecy; and I believe I may rely on my
judgment of men enough to have no distrust of either your interest or
your fidelity.”

He paused, but I could only nod my head. I have said that I was
alarmed, yet to my soul nothing was more deadly than the material
daylight world of New York, and whether this man were a harmless
eccentric or a wielder of dangerous arts I had no choice save to
follow him and slake my sense of wonder on whatever he might have to
offer. So I listened.

“To--my ancestor,” he softly continued, "there appeared to reside some
very remarkable qualities in the will of mankind; qualities having a
little-suspected dominance not only over the acts of one’s self and of
others, but over every variety of force and substance in Nature, and
over many elements and dimensions deemed more universal than Nature
herself. May I say that he flouted the sanctity of things as great as
space and time and that he put to strange uses the rites of sartain
half-breed red Indians once encamped upon this hill? These Indians
showed choler when the place was built, and were plaguey pestilent in
asking to visit the grounds at the full of the moon. For years they
stole over the wall each month when they could, and by stealth
performed sartain acts. Then, in ’68, the new squire catched them at
their doings, and stood still at what he saw. Thereafter he bargained
with them and exchanged the free access of his grounds for the exact
inwardness of what they did; larning that their grandfathers got part
of their custom from red ancestors and part from an old Dutchman in
the time of the States-General. And pox on him, I’m afeared the squire
must have sarved them monstrous bad rum--whether or not by intent--for
a week after he larnt the secret he was the only man living that knew
it. You, Sir, are the first outsider to be told there is a secret, and
split me if I’d have risked tampering that much with--the powers--had
ye not been so hot after bygone things.”

I shuddered as the man grew colloquial--and with the familiar speech
of another day. He went on.

“But you must know, Sir, that what--the squire--got from those mongrel
salvages was but a small part of the larning he came to have. He had
not been at Oxford for nothing, nor talked to no account with an
ancient chymist and astrologer in Paris. He was, in fine, made
sensible that all the world is but the smoke of our intellects; past
the bidding of the vulgar, but by the wise to be puffed out and drawn
in like any cloud of prime Virginia tobacco. What we want, we may make
about us; and what we don’t want, we may sweep away. I won’t say that
all this is wholly true in body, but ’tis sufficient true to furnish a
very pretty spectacle now and then. You, I conceive, would be tickled
by a better sight of sartain other years than your fancy affords you;
so be pleased to hold back any fright at what I design to show. Come
to the window and be quiet.”

                *       *       *       *       *

My host now took my hand to draw me to one of the two windows on the
long side of the malodorous room, and at the first touch of his
ungloved fingers I turned cold. His flesh, though dry and firm, was of
the quality of ice; and I almost shrank away from his pulling. But
again I thought of the emptiness and horror of reality, and boldly
prepared to follow whithersoever I might be led. Once at the window,
the man drew apart the yellow silk curtains and directed my stare into
the blackness outside. For a moment I saw nothing save a myriad of
tiny dancing lights, far, far before me. Then, as if in response to an
insidious motion of my host’s hand, a flash of heat-lightning played
over the scene, and I looked out upon a sea of luxuriant
foliage--foliage unpolluted, and not the sea of roofs to be expected
by any normal mind. On my right the Hudson glittered wickedly, and in
the distance ahead I saw the unhealthy shimmer of a vast salt marsh
constellated with nervous fireflies. The flash died, and an evil smile
illumined the waxy face of the aged necromancer.

“That was before my time--before the new squire’s time. Pray let us
try again.”

I was faint, even fainter than the hateful modernity of that accursed
city had made me.

“Good God!” I whispered; “can you do that for _any time_?” And as he
nodded, and bared the black stumps of what had once been yellow fangs,
I clutched at the curtains to prevent myself from falling. But he
steadied me with that terrible, ice-cold claw, and once more made his
insidious gesture.

Again the lightning flashed--but this time upon a scene not wholly
strange. It was Greenwich, the Greenwich that used to be, with here
and there a roof or row of houses as we see it now, yet with lovely
green lanes and fields and bits of grassy common. The marsh still
glittered beyond, but in the farther distance I saw the steeples of
what was then all of New York; Trinity and St. Paul’s and the Brick
Church dominating their sisters, and a faint haze of wood smoke
hovering over the whole. I breathed hard, but not so much from the
sight itself as from the possibilities my imagination terrifiedly
conjured up.

“Can you--dare you--go _far_?” I spoke with awe, and I think he shared
it for a second, but the evil grin returned.

“_Far?_ What I have seen would blast ye to a mad statue of stone!
Back, back--forward, _forward_--look, ye puling lack-wit!”

And as he snarled the phrase under his breath he gestured anew;
bringing to the sky a flash more blinding than either which had come
before. For full three seconds I could glimpse that pandemoniac sight,
and in those seconds I saw a vista which will ever afterward torment
me in dreams. I saw the heavens verminous with strange flying things,
and beneath them a hellish black city of giant stone terraces with
impious pyramids flung savagely to the moon, and devil-lights burning
from unnumbered windows. And swarming loathsomely on aerial galleries
I saw the yellow, squint-eyed people of that city, robed horribly in
orange and red, and dancing insanely to the pounding of fevered
kettle-drums, the clatter of obscene crotala, and the maniacal moaning
of muted horns whose ceaseless dirges rose and fell undulantly like
the waves of an unhallowed ocean of bitumen.

I saw this vista, I say, and heard as with the mind’s ear the
blasphemous domdaniel of cacophony which companioned it. It was the
shrieking fulfilment of all the horror which that corpse-city had ever
stirred in my soul, and forgetting every injunction to silence I
screamed and screamed and screamed as my nerves gave way and the walls
quivered about me.

Then, as the flash subsided, I saw that my host was trembling too; a
look of shocking fear half-blotting from his face the serpent
distortion of rage which my screams had excited. He tottered, clutched
at the curtains as I had done before, and wriggled his head wildly,
like a hunted animal. God knows he had cause, for as the echoes of my
screaming died away there came another sound so hellishly suggestive
that only numbed emotion kept me sane and conscious. It was the
steady, stealthy creaking of the stairs beyond the locked door, as
with the ascent of a barefoot or skin-shod horde; and at last the
cautious, purposeful rattling of the brass latch that glowed in the
feeble candlelight. The old man clawed and spat at me through the
moldy air, and barked things in his throat as he swayed with the
yellow curtain he clutched.

“The full moon--damn ye--ye . . . ye yelping dog--ye called ’em, and
they’ve come for me! Moccasined feet--dead men--Gad sink ye, ye red
devils, but I poisoned no rum o’ yours--han’t I kept your pox-rotted
magic safe?--ye swilled yourselves sick, curse ye, and ye must needs
blame the squire--let go, you! Unhand that latch--I’ve naught for ye
here----”

At this point three slow and very deliberate raps shook the panels of
the door, and a white foam gathered at the mouth of the frantic
magician. His fright, turning to steely despair, left room for a
resurgence of his rage against me; and he staggered a step toward the
table on whose edge I was steadying myself. The curtains, still
clutched in his right hand as his left clawed out at me, grew taut and
finally crashed down from their lofty fastenings; admitting to the
room a flood of that full moonlight which the brightening of the sky
had presaged. In those greenish beams the candles paled, and a new
semblance of decay spread over the musk-reeking room with its wormy
paneling, sagging floor, battered mantel, rickety furniture, and
ragged draperies. It spread over the old man, too, whether from the
same source or because of his fear and vehemence, and I saw him
shrivel and blacken as he lurched near and strove to rend me with
vulturine talons. Only his eyes stayed whole, and they glared with a
propulsive, dilated incandescence which grew as the face around them
charred and dwindled.

The rapping was now repeated with greater insistence, and this time
bore a hint of metal. The black thing facing me had become only a head
with eyes, impotently trying to wriggle across the sinking floor in my
direction, and occasionally emitting feeble little spits of immortal
malice. Now swift and splintering blows assailed the sickly panels,
and I saw the gleam of a tomahawk as it cleft the rending wood. I did
not move, for I could not; but watched dazedly as the door fell in
pieces to admit a colossal, shapeless influx of inky substance starred
with shining, malevolent eyes. It poured thickly, like a flood of oil
bursting a rotten bulkhead, overturned a chair as it spread, and
finally flowed under the table and across the room to where the
blackened head with the eyes still glared at me. Around that head it
closed, totally swallowing it up, and in another moment it had begun
to recede; bearing away its invisible burden without touching me, and
flowing again out of that black doorway and down the unseen stairs,
which creaked as before, though in reverse order.

Then the floor gave way at last, and I slid gaspingly down into the
nighted chamber below, choking with cobwebs and half-swooning with
terror. The green moon, shining through broken windows, showed me the
hall door half open; and as I rose from the plaster-strewn floor and
twisted myself free from the sagged ceiling, I saw sweep past it an
awful torrent of blackness, with scores of baleful eyes glowing in it.
It was seeking the door to the cellar, and when it found it, it
vanished therein. I now felt the floor of this lower room giving as
that of the upper chamber had done, and once a crashing above had been
followed by the fall past the west window of something which must have
been the cupola. Now liberated for the instant from the wreckage, I
rushed through the hall to the front door; and finding myself unable
to open it, seized a chair and broke a window, climbing frenziedly out
upon the unkempt lawn where moonlight danced over yard-high grass and
weeds. The wall was high, and all the gates were locked; but moving a
pile of boxes in a corner I managed to gain the top and cling to the
great stone urn set there.

About me in my exhaustion I could see only strange walls and windows
and old gambrel roofs. The steep street of my approach was nowhere
visible, and the little I did see succumbed rapidly to a mist that
rolled in from the river despite the glaring moonlight. Suddenly the
urn to which I clung began to tremble, as if sharing my own lethal
dizziness; and in another instant my body was plunging downward to I
knew not what fate.

The man who found me said that I must have crawled a long way despite
my broken bones, for a trail of blood stretched off as far as he dared
look. The gathering rain soon effaced this link with the scene of my
ordeal, and reports could state no more than that I had appeared from
a place unknown, at the entrance of a little black court off Perry
Street.

I never sought to return to those tenebrous labyrinths, nor would I
direct any sane man thither if I could. Of who or what that ancient
creature was, I have no idea; but I repeat that the city is dead and
full of unsuspected horrors. Whither _he_ has gone, I do not know; but
I have gone home to the pure New England lanes up which fragrant
sea-winds sweep at evening.

[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the September 1926 issue
of Weird Tales Magazine.]



# Project Gutenberg #68236

THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE

                          By H. P. Lovecraft

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                    Amazing Stories September 1927.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

            _Here is a totally different story that we can
           highly recommend to you. We could wax rhapsodical
           in our praise, as the story is one of the finest
         pieces of literature it has been our good fortune to
            read. The theme is original, and yet fantastic
            enough to make it rise head and shoulders above
          many contemporary scientifiction stories. You will
             not regret having read this marvellous tale._


West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep
woods that no axe has ever cut. There are dark narrow glens where the
trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without
ever having caught the glint of sunlight. On the gentler slopes there
are farms, ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding
eternally over old New England secrets in the lee of great ledges; but
these are all vacant now, the wide chimneys crumbling and the shingled
sides bulging perilously beneath low gambrel roofs.

The old folk have gone away, and foreigners do not like to live there.
French-Canadians have tried it, Italians have tried it, and the Poles
have come and departed. It is not because of anything that can be seen
or heard or handled, but because of something that is imagined. The
place is not good for imagination, and does not bring restful dreams at
night. It must be this which keeps the foreigners away, for old Ammi
Pierce has never told them of anything he recalls from the strange
days. Ammi, whose head has been a little queer for years, is the only
one who still remains, or who ever talks of the strange days; and he
dares to do this because his house is so near the open fields and the
travelled roads around Arkham.

There was once a road over the hills and through the valleys, that ran
straight where the blasted heath is now; but people ceased to use it
and a new road was laid curving far toward the south. Traces of the
old one can still be found amidst the weeds of a returning wilderness,
and some of them will doubtless linger even when half the hollows are
flooded for the new reservoir. Then the dark woods will be cut down and
the blasted heath will slumber far below blue waters whose surface will
mirror the sky and ripple in the sun. And the secrets of the strange
days will be one with the deep's secrets; one with the hidden lore of
old ocean, and all the mystery of primal earth.

When I went into the hills and vales to survey for the new reservoir
they told me the place was evil. They told me this in Arkham, and
because that is a very old town full of witch legends I thought the
evil must be something which grandmas had whispered to children
through centuries. The name "blasted heath" seemed to me very odd
and theatrical, and I wondered how it had come into the folklore of
a Puritan people. Then I saw that dark westward tangle of glens and
slopes for myself, and ceased to wonder at anything besides its own
elder mystery. It was morning when I saw it, but shadow lurked always
there. The trees grew too thickly, and their trunks were too big for
any healthy New England wood. There was too much silence in the dim
alleys between them, and the floor was too soft with the dank moss and
mattings of infinite years of decay.

In the open spaces, mostly along the line of the old road, there were
little hillside farms; sometimes with all the buildings standing,
sometimes with only one or two, and sometimes with only a lone chimney
or fast-filling cellar. Weeds and briers reigned, and furtive wild
things rustled in the undergrowth. Upon everything was a haze of
restlessness and oppression; a touch of the unreal and the grotesque,
as if some vital element of perspective or chiaroscuro were awry. I did
not wonder that the foreigners would not stay, for this was no region
to sleep in. It was too much like a landscape of Salvator Rosa; too
much like some forbidden woodcut in a tale of terror.

But even all this was not so bad as the blasted heath. I knew it the
moment I came upon it at the bottom of a spacious valley; for no other
name could fit such thing, or any other thing fit such a name. It
was as if the poet had coined the phrase from having seen this one
particular region. It must, I thought as I viewed it, be the outcome
of a fire; but why had nothing new ever grown over those five acres of
grey desolation that sprawled open to the sky like a great spot eaten
by acid in the woods and fields? It lay largely to the north of the
ancient road line, but encroached a little on the other side. I felt
an odd reluctance about approaching, and did so at last only because
my business took me through and past it. There was no vegetation of
any kind on that broad expanse, but only a fine grey dust or ash which
no wind seemed ever to blow about. The trees near it were sickly
and stunted, and many dead trunks stood or lay rotting at the rim.
As I walked hurriedly by I saw the tumbled bricks and stones of an
old chimney and cellar on my right, and the yawning black maw of an
abandoned well whose stagnant vapours played strange tricks with the
hues of the sunlight. Even the long, dark woodland climb beyond seemed
welcome in contrast, and I marvelled no more at the frightened whispers
of Arkham people. There had been no house or ruin near; even in the
old days the place must have been lonely and remote. And at twilight,
dreading to repass that ominous spot, I walked circuitously back to the
town by the curving road on the south. I vaguely wished some clouds
would gather, for an odd timidity about the deep skyey voids above had
crept into my soul.

In the evening I asked old people in Arkham about the blasted heath,
and what was meant by that phrase "strange days" which so many
evasively muttered. I could not, however, get any good answers, except
that all the mystery was much more recent than I had dreamed. It was
not a matter of old legendry at all, but something within the lifetime
of those who spoke. It had happened in the 'eighties, and a family had
disappeared or was killed. Speakers would not be exact; and because
they all told me to pay no attention to old Ammi Pierce's crazy tales,
I sought him out the next morning, having heard that he lived alone in
the ancient tottering cottage where the trees first begin to get very
thick. It was a fearsomely ancient place, and had begun to exude the
faint miasmal odour which clings about houses that have stood too long.
Only with persistent knocking could I rouse the aged man, and when he
shuffled timidly to the door I could tell he was not glad to see me. He
was not so feeble as I had expected; but his eyes drooped in a curious
way, and his unkempt clothing and white beard made him seem very worn
and dismal.

Not knowing just how he could best be launched on his tales, I feigned
a matter of business; told him of my surveying, and asked vague
questions about the district. He was far brighter and more educated
than I had been led to think, and before I knew it had grasped quite
as much of the subject as any man I had talked with in Arkham. He was
not like other rustics I had known in the sections where reservoirs
were to be. From him there were no protests at the miles of old wood
and farmland to be blotted out, though perhaps there would have been
had not his home lain outside the bounds of the future lake. Relief
was all that he showed; relief at the doom of the dark ancient valleys
through which he had roamed all his life. They were better under water
now--better under water since the strange days. And with this opening
his husky voice sank low, while his body leaned forward and his right
forefinger began to point shakily and impressively.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was then that I heard the story, and as the rambling voice scraped
and whispered on I shivered again and again despite the summer day.
Often I had to recall the speaker from ramblings, piece out scientific
points which he knew only by a fading parrot memory of professors'
talk, or bridge over gaps, where his sense of logic and continuity
broke down. When he was done I did not wonder that his mind had snapped
a trifle, or that the folk of Arkham would not speak much of the
blasted heath. I hurried back before sunset to my hotel, unwilling to
have the stars come out above me in the open; and the next day returned
to Boston to give up my position. I could not go into that dim chaos
of old forest and slope again, or face another time that grey blasted
heath where the black well yawned deep beside the tumbled bricks and
stones. The reservoir will soon be built now, and all those elder
secrets will lie safe forever under watery fathoms. But even then I do
not believe I would like to visit that country by night--at least not
when the sinister stars are out; and nothing could bribe me to drink
the new city water of Arkham.

It all began, old Ammi said, with the meteorite. Before that time there
had been no wild legends at all since the witch trials, and even then
these western woods were not feared half so much as the small island
in the Miskatonic where the devil held court beside a curious stone
altar older than the Indians. These were not haunted woods, and their
fantastic dusk was never terrible till the strange days. Then there
had come that white noontide cloud, that string of explosions in the
air, and that pillar of smoke from the valley far in the wood. And by
night all Arkham had heard of the great rock that fell out of the sky
and bedded itself in the ground beside the well at the Nahum Gardner
place. That was the house which had stood where the blasted heath was
to come--the trim white Nahum Gardner house amidst its fertile gardens
and orchards.

Nahum had come to town to tell people about the stone, and had dropped
in at Ammi Pierce's on the way. Ammi was forty then, and all the queer
things were fixed very strongly in his mind. He and his wife had gone
with the three professors from Miskatonic University who hastened out
the next morning to see the weird visitor from unknown stellar space,
and had wondered why Nahum had called it so large the day before. It
had shrunk, Nahum said as he pointed out the big brownish mound above
the ripped earth and charred grass near the archaic well-sweep in his
front yard; but the wise men answered that stones do not shrink. Its
heat lingered persistently, and Nahum declared it had glowed faintly in
the night. The professors tried it with a geologist's hammer and found
it was oddly soft. It was, in truth, so soft as to be almost plastic;
and they gouged rather than chipped a specimen to take back to the
college for testing. They took it in an old pail borrowed from Nahum's
kitchen, for even the small piece refused to grow cool. On the trip
back they stopped at Ammi's to rest, and seemed thoughtful when Mrs.
Pierce remarked that the fragment was growing smaller and burning the
bottom of the pail. Truly, it was not large, but perhaps they had taken
less than they thought.

The day after that--all this was in June of '82--the professors had
trooped out again in a great excitement. As they passed Ammi's they
told him what queer things the specimen had done, and how it had
faded wholly away when they put it in a glass beaker. The beaker had
gone, too, and the wise men talked of the strange stone's affinity
for silicon. It had acted quite unbelievably in that well-ordered
laboratory; doing nothing at all and showing no occluded gases when
heated on charcoal, being wholly negative in the borax bead, and soon
proving itself absolutely non-volatile at any producible temperature,
including that of the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe. On an anvil it appeared
highly malleable, and in the dark its luminosity was very marked.
Stubbornly refusing to grow cool, it soon had the college in a state
of real excitement; and when upon heating before the spectroscope it
displayed shining bands unlike any known colours of the normal spectrum
there was much breathless talk of new elements, bizarre optical
properties, and other things which puzzled men of science are wont to
say when faced by the unknown.

Hot as it was, they tested it in a crucible with all the proper
reagents. Water did nothing. Hydrochloric acid was the same. Nitric
acid and even aqua regia merely hissed and spattered against its torrid
invulnerability. Ammi had difficulty in recalling all these things, but
recognized some solvents as I mentioned them in the usual order of use.
There were ammonia and caustic soda, alcohol and ether, nauseous carbon
disulphide and a dozen others; but although the weight grew steadily
less as time passed, and the fragment seemed to be slightly cooling,
there was no change in the solvents to show that they had attacked
the substance at all. It was a metal, though, beyond a doubt. It was
magnetic, for one thing; and after its immersion in the acid solvents
there seemed to be faint traces of the Widmänstätten figures found
on meteoric iron. When the cooling had grown very considerable, the
testing was carried on in glass; and it was in a glass beaker that they
left all the chips made of the original fragment during the work. The
next morning both chips and beaker were gone without trace, and only a
charred spot marked the place on the wooden shelf where they had been.

All this the professors told Ammi as they paused at his door, and
once more he went with them to see the stony messenger from the
stars, though this time his wife did not accompany him. It had now
most certainly shrunk, and even the sober professors could not doubt
the truth of what they saw. All around the dwindling brown lump near
the well was a vacant space, except where the earth had caved in;
and whereas it had been a good seven feet across the day before, it
was now scarcely five. It was still hot, and the sages studied its
surface curiously as they detached another and larger piece with hammer
and chisel. They gouged deeply this time, and as they pried away
the smaller mass they saw that the core of the thing was not quite
homogeneous.

       *       *       *       *       *

They had uncovered what seemed to be the side of a large coloured
globule embedded in the substance. The colour, which resembled some
of the bands in the meteor's strange spectrum, was almost impossible
to describe; and it was only by analogy that they called it colour at
all. Its texture was glossy, and upon tapping it appeared to promise
both brittleness and hollowness. One of the professors gave it a smart
blow with a hammer, and it burst with a nervous little pop. Nothing was
emitted, and all trace of the thing vanished with the puncturing. It
left behind a hollow spherical space about three inches across, and all
thought it probable that others would be discovered as the enclosing
substance wasted away.

Conjecture was vain; so after a futile attempt to find additional
globules by drilling, the seekers left again with their new
specimen--which proved, however, as baffling in the laboratory as
its predecessor. Aside from being almost plastic, having heat,
magnetism, and slight luminosity, cooling slightly in powerful acids,
possessing an unknown spectrum, wasting away in air, and attacking
silicon compounds with mutual destruction as a result, it presented
no identifying features whatsoever; and at the end of the tests the
college scientists were forced to own that they could not place it. It
was nothing of this earth, but a piece of the great outside; and as
such dowered with outside properties and obedient to outside laws.

That night there was a thunderstorm, and when the professors went out
to Nahum's the next day they met with a bitter disappointment. The
stone, magnetic as it had been, must have had some peculiar electrical
property; for it had "drawn the lightning," as Nahum said, with a
singular persistence. Six times within an hour the farmer saw the
lightning strike the furrow in the front yard, and when the storm was
over nothing remained but a ragged pit by the ancient well-sweep,
half-chocked with caved-in earth. Digging had borne no fruit, and the
scientists verified the fact of the utter vanishment. The failure was
total; so that nothing was left to do but go back to the laboratory and
test again the disappearing fragment left carefully cased in lead. That
fragment lasted a week, at the end of which nothing of value had been
learned of it. When it had gone, no residue was left behind, and in
time the professors felt scarcely sure they had indeed seen with waking
eyes that cryptic vestige of the fathomless gulfs outside; that lone,
weird message from other universes and other realms of matter, force,
and entity.

As was natural, the Arkham papers made much of the incident with its
collegiate sponsoring, and sent reporters to talk with Nahum Gardner
and his family. At least one Boston daily also sent a scribe, and Nahum
quickly became a kind of local celebrity. He was a lean, genial person
of about fifty, living with his wife and three sons on the pleasant
farmstead in the valley. He and Ammi exchanged visits frequently, as
did their wives; and Ammi had nothing but praise for him after all
these years. He seemed slightly proud of the notice his place had
attracted, and talked often of the meteorite in the succeeding weeks.
That July and August were hot; and Nahum worked hard at his haying in
the ten-acre pasture across Chapman's Brook; his rattling wain wearing
deep ruts in the shadowy lanes between. The labour tired him more than
it had in other years, and he felt that age was beginning to tell on
him.

Then fell the time of fruit and harvest. The pears and apples slowly
ripened, and Nahum vowed that his orchards were prospering as never
before. The fruit was growing to phenomenal size and unwonted gloss,
and in such abundance that extra barrels were ordered to handle the
future crop. But with the ripening came sore disappointment, for of all
that gorgeous array of specious lusciousness not one single jot was
fit to eat. Into the fine flavour of the pears and apples had crept
a stealthy bitterness and sickishness, so that even the smallest of
bites induced a lasting disgust. It was the same with the melons and
tomatoes, and Nahum sadly saw that his entire crop was lost. Quick to
connect events, he declared that the meteorite had poisoned the soil,
and thanked Heaven that most of the other crops were in the upland lot
along the road.

       *       *       *       *       *

Winter came early, and was very cold. Ammi saw Nahum less often than
usual, and observed that he had begun to look worried. The rest of his
family too, seemed to have grown taciturn; and were far from steady
in their churchgoing or their attendance at the various social events
of the countryside. For this reserve or melancholy no cause could be
found, though all the household confessed now and then to poorer health
and a feeling of vague disquiet. Nahum himself gave the most definite
statement of anyone when he said he was disturbed about certain
footprints in the snow. They were the usual winter prints of red
squirrels, white rabbits, and foxes, but the brooding farmer professed
to see something not quite right about their nature and arrangement.
He was never specific, but appeared to think that they were not as
characteristic of the anatomy and habits of squirrels and rabbits and
foxes as they ought to be. Ammi listened without interest to this talk
until one night when he drove past Nahum's house in his sleigh on the
way back from Clark's Corners. There had been a moon, and a rabbit had
run across the road; and the leaps of that rabbit were longer than
either Ammi or his horse liked. The latter, indeed, had almost run away
when brought up by a firm rein. Thereafter Ammi gave Nahum's tales
more respect, and wondered why the Gardner dogs seemed so cowed and
quivering every morning. They had, it developed, nearly lost the spirit
to bark.

In February the McGregor boys from Meadow Hill were out shooting
woodchucks, and not far from the Gardner place bagged a very peculiar
specimen. The proportions of its body seemed slightly altered in a
queer way impossible to describe, while its face had taken on an
expression which no one ever saw in a woodchuck before. The boys were
genuinely frightened, and threw the thing away at once, so that only
their grotesque tales of it ever reached the people of the countryside.
But the shying of horses near Nahum's house had now become an
acknowledged thing, and all the basis for a cycle of whispered legend
was fast taking form.

People vowed that the snow melted faster around Nahum's than it did
anywhere else, and early in March there was an awed discussion in
Potter's general store at Clark's Corners. Stephen Rice had driven past
Gardner's in the morning, and had noticed the skunk-cabbages coming
up through the mud by the woods across the road. Never were things of
such size seen before, and they held strange colours that could not
be put into any words. Their shapes were monstrous, and the horse had
snorted at an odour which struck Stephen as wholly unprecedented. That
afternoon several persons drove past to see the abnormal growth, and
all agreed that plants of that kind ought never to sprout in a healthy
world. The bad fruit of the fall before was freely mentioned, and it
went from mouth to mouth that there was poison in Nahum's ground. Of
course it was the meteorite; and remembering how strange the men from
the college had found that stone to be, several farmers spoke about the
matter to them.

One day they paid Nahum a visit; but having no love of wild tales and
folklore were very conservative in what they inferred. The plants were
certainly odd, but all skunk-cabbages are more or less odd in shape
and hue. Perhaps some mineral element from the stone had entered the
soil, but it would soon be washed away. And as for the footprints and
frightened horses--of course this was mere country talk which such
a phenomenon as the aerolite would be certain to start. There was
really nothing for serious men to do in cases of wild gossip, for
superstitious rustics will say and believe anything. And so all through
the strange days the professors stayed away in contempt. Only one
of them, when given two phials of dust for analysis in a police job
over a year and a half later, recalled that the queer colour of that
skunk-cabbage had been very like one of the anomalous bands of light
shown by the meteor fragment in the college spectroscope, and like the
brittle globule found imbedded in the stone from the abyss. The samples
in this analysis case gave the same odd bands at first, though later
they lost the property.

The trees budded prematurely around Nahum's, and at night they swayed
ominously in the wind. Nahum's second son Thaddeus, a lad of fifteen,
swore that they swayed also when there was no wind; but even the
gossips would not credit this. Certainly, however, restlessness was
in the air. The entire Gardner family developed the habit of stealthy
listening, though not for any sound which they could consciously
name. The listening was, indeed, rather a product of moments when
consciousness seemed half to slip away. Unfortunately such moments
increased week by week, till it became common speech that "something
was wrong with all Nahum's folks." When the early saxifrage came out it
had another strange colour; not quite like that of the skunk-cabbage,
but plainly related and equally unknown to anyone who saw it. Nahum
took some blossoms to Arkham and showed them to the editor of the
_Gazette_, but that dignitary did no more than write a humorous article
about them, in which the dark fears of rustics were held up to polite
ridicule. It was a mistake of Nahum's to tell a stolid city man about
the way the great, overgrown mourning-cloak butterflies behaved in
connection with these saxifrages.

April brought a kind of madness to the country folk, and began that
disuse of the road past Nahum's which led to its ultimate abandonment.
It was next the vegetation. All the orchard trees blossomed forth in
strange colours, and through the stony soil of the yard and adjacent
pasturage there sprang up a bizarre growth which only a botanist could
connect with the proper flora of the region. No sane wholesome colours
were anywhere to be seen except in the green grass and leafage; but
everywhere were those hectic and prismatic variants of some diseased,
underlying primary tone without a place among the known tints of earth.
The "Dutchman's breeches" became a thing of sinister menace, and the
bloodroots grew insolent in their chromatic perversion. Ammi and the
Gardners thought that most of the colours had a sort of haunting
familiarity, and decided that they reminded one of the brittle globule
in the meteor. Nahum ploughed and sowed the ten-acre pasture and the
upland lot, but did nothing with the land around the house. He knew it
would be of no use, and hoped that the summer's strange growths would
draw all the poison from the soil. He was prepared for almost anything
now, and had grown used to the sense of something near him waiting
to be heard. The shunning of his house by neighbours told on him, of
course; but it told on his wife more. The boys were better off, being
at school each day; but they could not help being frightened by the
gossip. Thaddeus, an especially sensitive youth, suffered the most.

       *       *       *       *       *

In May the insects came, and Nahum's place became a nightmare of
buzzing and crawling. Most of the creatures seemed not quite usual in
their aspects and motions, and their nocturnal habits contradicted all
former experience. The Gardners took to watching at night--watching in
all directions at random for something they could not tell what. It was
then that they all owned that Thaddeus had been right about the trees.
Mrs. Gardner was the next to see it from the window as she watched the
swollen boughs of a maple against a moonlit sky. The boughs surely
moved, and there was no wind. It must be the sap. Strangeness had come
into everything growing now. Yet it was none of Nahum's family at all
who made the next discovery. Familiarity had dulled them, and what they
could not see was glimpsed by a timid windmill salesman from Bolton who
drove by one night in ignorance of the country legends. What he told in
Arkham was given a short paragraph in the _Gazette_; and it was there
that all the farmers, Nahum included, saw it first. The night had been
dark and the buggy-lamps faint, but around a farm in the valley which
everyone knew from the account must be Nahum's, the darkness had been
less thick. A dim though distinct luminosity seemed to inhere in all
the vegetation, grass, leaves, and blossoms alike, while at one moment
a detached piece of the phosphorescence appeared to stir furtively in
the yard near the barn.

The grass had so far seemed untouched, and the cows were freely
pastured in the lot near the house, but toward the end of May the milk
began to be bad. Then Nahum had the cows driven to the uplands, after
which this trouble ceased. Not long after this the change in grass and
leaves became apparent to the eye. All the verdure was going grey,
and was developing a highly singular quality of brittleness. Ammi
was now the only person who ever visited the place, and his visits
were becoming fewer and fewer. When school closed the Gardners were
virtually cut off from the world, and sometimes let Ammi do their
errands in town. They were failing curiously both physically and
mentally, and no one was surprised when the news of Mrs. Gardner's
madness stole around.

It happened in June, about the anniversary of the meteor's fall, and
the poor woman screamed about things in the air which she could not
describe. In her raving there was not a single specific noun, but
only verbs and pronouns. Things moved and changed and fluttered, and
ears tingled to impulses which were not wholly sounds. Something
was taken away--she was being drained of something--something was
fastening itself on her that ought not to be--someone must make it
keep off--nothing was ever still in the night--the walls and windows
shifted. Nahum did not send her to the county asylum, but let her
wander about the house as long as she was harmless to herself and
others. Even when her expression changed he did nothing. But when the
boys grew afraid of her, and Thaddeus nearly fainted at the way she
made faces at him, he decided to keep her locked in the attic. By July
she had ceased to speak and crawled on all fours, and before that month
was over Nahum got the mad notion that she was slightly luminous in the
dark, as he now clearly saw was the case with the nearby vegetation.

It was a little before this that the horses had stampeded. Something
had aroused them in the night, and their neighing and kicking in their
stalls had been terrible. There seemed virtually nothing to do to calm
them, and when Nahum opened the stable door they all bolted out like
frightened woodland deer. It took a week to track all four, and when
found they were seen to be quite useless and unmanageable. Something
had snapped in their brains, and each one had to be shot for its own
good. Nahum borrowed a horse from Ammi for his haying, but found it
would not approach the barn. It shied, balked, and whinnied, and in
the end he could do nothing but drive it into the yard while the men
used their own strength to get the heavy wagon near enough the hayloft
for convenient pitching. And all the while the vegetation was turning
grey and brittle. Even the flowers whose hues had been so strange
were graying now, and the fruit was coming out grey and dwarfed and
tasteless. The asters and goldenrod bloomed grey and distorted, and
the roses and zinnias and hollyhocks in the front yard were such
blasphemous-looking things that Nahum's oldest boy Zenas cut them down.
The strangely puffed insects died about that time, even the bees that
had left their hives and taken to the woods.

By September all the vegetation was fast crumbling to a greyish
powder, and Nahum feared that the trees would die before the poison
was out of the soil. His wife now had spells of terrific screaming,
and he and the boys were in a constant state of nervous tension.
They shunned people now, and when school opened the boys did not go.
But it was Ammi, on one of his rare visits, who first realized that
the well water was no longer good. It had an evil taste that was not
exactly fetid nor exactly salty, and Ammi advised his friend to dig
another well on higher ground to use till the soil was good again.
Nahum, however, ignored the warning, for he had by that time become
calloused to strange and unpleasant things. He and the boys continued
to use the tainted supply, drinking it as listlessly and mechanically
as they ate their meagre and ill-cooked meals and did their thankless
and monotonous chores through the aimless days. There was something of
stolid resignation about them all, as if they walked half in another
world between lines of nameless guards to a certain and familiar doom.

Thaddeus went mad in September after a visit to the well. He had gone
with a pail and had come back empty-handed, shrieking and waving his
arms, and sometimes lapsing into an inane titter or a whisper about
"the moving colours down there." Two in one family was pretty bad,
but Nahum was very brave about it. He let the boy run about for a
week until he began stumbling and hurting himself, and then he shut
him in an attic room across the hall from his mother's. The way they
screamed at each other from behind their locked doors was very
terrible, especially to little Merwin, who fancied they talked in some
terrible language that was not of earth. Merwin was getting frightfully
imaginative, and his restlessness was worse after the shutting away of
the brother who had been his greatest playmate.

Almost at the same time the mortality among the livestock commenced.
Poultry turned greyish and died very quickly, their meat being found
dry and noisome upon cutting. Hogs grew inordinately fat, then suddenly
began to undergo loathsome changes which no one could explain. Their
meat was of course useless, and Nahum was at his wit's end. No rural
veterinary would approach his place, and the city veterinary from
Arkham was openly baffled. The swine began growing grey and brittle
and falling to pieces before they died, and their eyes and muzzles
developed singular alterations. It was very inexplicable, for they had
never been fed from the tainted vegetation. Then something struck the
cows. Certain areas or sometimes the whole body would be uncannily
shrivelled or compressed, and atrocious collapses or disintegrations
were common. In the last stages--and death was always the result--there
would be a greying and turning brittle like that which beset the hogs.
There could be no question of poison, for all the cases occurred in a
locked and undisturbed barn. No bites of prowling things could have
brought the virus, for what live beast of earth can pass through solid
obstacles? It must be only natural disease--yet what disease could
wreak such results was beyond any mind's guessing. When the harvest
came there was not an animal surviving on the place, for the stock
and poultry were dead and the dogs had run away. These dogs, three
in number, had all vanished one night and were never heard of again.
The five cats had left some time before, but their going was scarcely
noticed since there now seemed to be no mice, and only Mrs. Gardner had
made pets of the graceful felines.

       *       *       *       *       *

On the nineteenth of October Nahum staggered into Ammi's house with
hideous news. The death had come to poor Thaddeus in his attic room,
and it had come in a way which could not be told. Nahum had dug a grave
in the railed family plot behind the farm, and had put therein what
he found. There could have been nothing from outside, for the small
barred window and locked door were intact; but it was much as it had
been in the barn. Ammi and his wife consoled the stricken man as best
they could, but shuddered as they did so. Stark terror seemed to cling
round the Gardners and all they touched, and the very presence of one
in the house was a breath from regions unnamed and unnameable. Ammi
accompanied Nahum home with the greatest reluctance, and did what he
might to calm the hysterical sobbing of little Merwin. Zenas needed no
calming. He had come of late to do nothing but stare into space and
obey what his father told him; and Ammi thought that his fate was very
merciful. Now and then Merwin's screams were answered faintly from the
attic, and in response to an inquiring look Nahum said that his wife
was getting very feeble. When night approached, Ammi managed to get
away; for not even friendship could make him stay in that spot when the
faint glow of the vegetation began and the trees may or may not have
swayed without wind. It was really lucky for Ammi that he was not more
imaginative. Even as things were, his mind was bent ever so slightly;
but had he been able to connect and reflect upon all the portents
around him he must inevitably have turned a total maniac. In the
twilight he hastened home, the screams of the mad woman and the nervous
child ringing horrible in his ears.

Three days later Nahum burst into Ammi's kitchen in the early morning,
and in the absence of his host stammered out a desperate tale once
more, while Mrs. Pierce listened in a clutching fright. It was little
Merwin this time. He was gone. He had gone out late at night with a
lantern and pail for water, and had never come back. He'd been going
to pieces for days, and hardly knew what he was about. Screamed at
everything. There had been a frantic shriek from the yard then, but
before the father could get to the door the boy was gone. There was no
glow from the lantern he had taken, and of the child himself no trace.
At the time Nahum thought the lantern and pail were gone too; but when
dawn came, and the man had plodded back from his all-night search of
the woods and fields, he had found some very curious things near the
well. There was a crushed and apparently somewhat melted mass of iron
which had certainly been the lantern; while a bent pail and twisted
iron hoops beside it, both half-fused, seemed to hint at the remnants
of the pail. That was all. Nahum was past imagining, Mrs. Pierce was
blank, and Ammi, when he had reached home and heard the tale, could
give no guess. Merwin was gone, and there would be no use in telling
the people around, who shunned all Gardners now. No use, either, in
telling the city people at Arkham who laughed at everything. Thad was
gone, and now Merwin was gone. Something was creeping and creeping and
waiting to be seen and heard. Nahum would go soon, and he wanted Ammi
to look after his wife and Zenas if they survived him. It must all be a
judgment of some sort; though he could not fancy what for, since he had
always walked uprightly in the Lord's ways so far as he knew.

For over two weeks Ammi saw nothing of Nahum; and then, worried about
what might have happened, he overcame his fears and paid the Gardner
place a visit. There was no smoke from the great chimney, and for a
moment the visitor was apprehensive of the worst. The aspect of the
whole farm was shocking--greyish withered grass and leaves on the
ground, vines falling in brittle wreckage from archaic walls and
gables, and great bare trees clawing up at the grey November sky with
a studied malevolence which Ammi could not but feel had come from some
subtle change in the tilt of the branches. But Nahum was alive, after
all. He was weak, and lying in a couch in the low-ceiled kitchen,
but perfectly conscious and able to give simple orders to Zenas. The
room was deadly cold; and as Ammi visibly shivered, the host shouted
huskily to Zenas for more wood. Wood, indeed, was sorely needed; since
the cavernous fireplace was unlit and empty, with a cloud of soot
blowing about in the chill wind that came down the chimney. Presently
Nahum asked him if the extra wood had made him any more comfortable,
and then Ammi saw what had happened. The stoutest cord had broken at
last, and the hapless farmer's mind was proof against more sorrow.

Questioning tactfully, Ammi could get no clear data at all about the
missing Zenas. "In the well--he lives in the well--" was all that the
clouded father would say. Then there flashed across the visitor's mind
a sudden thought of the mad wife, and he changed his line of inquiry.
"Nabby? Why, here she is!" was the surprised response of poor Nahum,
and Ammi soon saw that he must search for himself. Leaving the harmless
babbler on the couch, he took the keys from their nail beside the door
and climbed the creaking stairs to the attic. It was very close and
noisome up there, and no sound could be heard from any direction. Of
the four doors in sight, only one was locked, and on this he tried
various keys on the ring he had taken. The third key proved the right
one, and after some fumbling Ammi threw open the low white door.

It was quite dark inside, for the window was small and half-obscured
by the crude wooden bars; and Ammi could see nothing at all on the
wide-planked floor. The stench was beyond enduring, and before
proceeding further he had to retreat to another room and return
with his lungs filled with breathable air. When he did enter he saw
something dark in the corner, and upon seeing it more clearly he
screamed outright. While he screamed he thought a momentary cloud
eclipsed the window, and a second later he felt himself brushed as if
by some hateful current of vapour. Strange colours danced before his
eyes; and had not a present horror numbed him he would have thought of
the globule in the meteor that the geologist's hammer had shattered,
and of the morbid vegetation that had sprouted in the spring. As it
was he thought only of the blasphemous monstrosity which confronted
him, and which all too clearly had shared the nameless fate of young
Thaddeus and the livestock. But the terrible thing about the horror was
that it very slowly and perceptibly moved as it continued to crumble.

       *       *       *       *       *

Ammi would give me no added particulars of this scene, but the shape
in the corners does not re-appear in his tale as a moving object.
There are things which cannot be mentioned, and what is done in common
humanity is sometimes cruelly judged by the law. I gathered that no
moving thing was left in that attic room, and that to leave anything
capable of motion there would have been a deed so monstrous as to damn
any accountable being to eternal torment. Anyone but a stolid farmer
would have fainted or gone mad, but Ammi walked conscious through that
low doorway and locked the accursed secret behind him. There would be
Nahum to deal with now; he must be fed and tended, and removed to some
place where he could be cared for.

Commencing his descent of the dark stairs, Ammi heard a thud below him.
He even thought a scream had been suddenly choked off, and recalled
nervously the clammy vapour which had brushed by him in that frightful
room above. What presence had his cry and entry started up? Halted by
some vague fear, he heard still further sounds below. Indubitably there
was a sort of heavy dragging, and a most detestably sticky noise as
of some fiendish and unclean species of suction. With an associative
sense goaded to feverish heights, he thought unaccountably of what he
had seen upstairs. Good God! What eldritch dream-world was this into
which he had blundered? He dared move neither backward nor forward, but
stood there trembling at the black curve of the boxed-in staircase.
Every trifle of the scene burned itself into his brain. The sounds, the
sense of dread expectancy, the darkness, the steepness of the narrow
steps--and merciful Heaven!--the faint but unmistakable luminosity of
all the woodwork in sight; steps, sides, exposed laths, and beams alike.

Then there burst forth a frantic whinny from Ammi's horse outside,
followed at once by a clatter which told of a frenzied runaway. In
another moment horse and buggy had gone beyond earshot, leaving the
frightened man on the dark stairs to guess what had sent them. But that
was not all. There had been another sound out there. A sort of liquid
splash--water--it must have been the well. He had left Hero untied
near it, and a buggy-wheel must have brushed the coping and knocked in
a stone. And still the pale phosphorescense glowed in that detestably
ancient woodwork. God! how old the house was! Most of it built before
1700.

A feeble scratching on the floor downstairs now sounded distinctly, and
Ammi's grip tightened on a heavy stick he had picked up in the attic
for some purpose. Slowly nerving himself, he finished his descent and
walked boldly toward the kitchen. But he did not complete the walk,
because what he sought was no longer there. It had come to meet him,
and it was still alive after a fashion. Whether it had crawled or
whether it had been dragged by any external forces, Ammi could not
say; but the death had been at it. Everything had happened in the last
half-hour, but collapse, greying, and disintegration were already far
advanced. There was a horrible brittleness, and dry fragments were
scaling off. Ammi could not touch it, but looked horrifiedly into the
distorted parody that had been a face. "What was it, Nahum--what
was it?" He whispered, and the cleft, bulging lips were just able to
crackle out a final answer.

"Nothin' ... nothin' ... the colour ... it burns ... cold an' wet, but
it burns ... it lived in the well.... I seen it ... a kind o' smoke ...
jest like the flowers last spring ... the well shone at night.... Thad
an' Merwin an' Zenas ... everything alive ... suckin' the life out of
everything ... in that stone ... it must o' come in that stone ...
pizened the whole place ... dun't know what it wants ... that round
thing them men from the college dug outen the stone ... they smashed
it ... it was that same colour ... jest the same, like the flowers an'
plants ... must a' ben more of 'em ... seeds ... seeds ... they
growed ... I seen it the fust time this week ... must a' got strong
on Zenas ... he was a big boy, full o' life ... it beats down your
mind an' then gits ye ... burns ye up ... in the well water ... you
was right about that ... evil water ... Zenas never come back from the
well ... can't git away ... draws ye ... ye know summ'at's comin', but
'tain't no use ... I seen it time an' agin Zenas was took ... whar's
Nabby, Ammi? ... my head's no good ... dun't know how long sence I fed
her ... it'll git her ef we ain't keerful ... jest a colour ... her
face is gittin' to hev that colour sometimes towards night ... an' it
burns an' sucks ... it come from some place whar things ain't as they
is here ... one o' them professors said so ... he was right ... look
out, Ammi, it'll do suthin' more ... sucks the life out...."

But that was all. That which spoke could speak no more because it had
completely caved in. Ammi laid a red checked tablecloth over what was
left and reeled out the back door into the fields. He climbed the slope
to the ten-acre pasture and stumbled home by the north road and the
woods. He could not pass that well from which his horses had run away.
He had looked at it through the window, and had seen that no stone
was missing from the rim. Then the lurching buggy had not dislodged
anything after all--the splash had been something else--something which
went into the well after it had done with poor Nahum....

When Ammi reached his house the horses and buggy had arrived before
him and thrown his wife into fits of anxiety. Reassuring her without
explanations, he set out at once for Arkham and notified the
authorities that the Gardner family was no more. He indulged in no
details, but merely told of the deaths of Nahum and Nabby, that of
Thaddeus being already known, and mentioned that the cause seemed to
be the same strange ailment which had killed the livestock. He also
stated that Merwin and Zenas had disappeared. There was considerable
questioning at the police station, and in the end Ammi was compelled
to take three officers to the Gardner farm, together with the coroner,
the medical examiner, and the veterinary who had treated the diseased
animals. He went much against his will, for the afternoon was advancing
and he feared the fall of night over that accursed place, but it was
some comfort to have so many people with him.

The six men drove out in a democrat-wagon, following Ammi's buggy, and
arrived at the pest-ridden farmhouse about four o'clock. Used as the
officers were to gruesome experiences, not one remained unmoved at
what was found in the attic and under the red checked tablecloth on
the floor below. The whole aspect of the farm with its grey desolation
was terrible enough, but those two crumbling objects were beyond all
bounds. No one could look long at them, and even the medical examiner
admitted that there was very little to examine. Specimens could be
analysed, of course, so he busied himself in obtaining them--and here
it develops that a very puzzling aftermath occurred at the college
laboratory where the two phials of dust were finally taken. Under the
spectroscope both samples gave off an unknown spectrum, in which many
of the baffling bands were precisely like those which the strange
meteor had yielded in the previous year. The property of emitting this
spectrum vanished in a month, the dust thereafter consisting mainly of
alkaline phosphates and carbonates.

       *       *       *       *       *

Ammi would not have told the men about the well if he had thought they
meant to do anything then and there. It was getting toward sunset, and
he was anxious to be away. But he could not help glancing nervously
at the stony curb by the great sweep, and when a detective questioned
him he admitted that Nahum had feared something down there--so much so
that he had never even thought of searching it for Merwin or Zenas.
After that nothing would do but that they empty and explore the well
immediately, so Ammi had to wait trembling while pail after pail of
rank water was hauled up and splashed on the soaking ground outside.
The men sniffed in disgust at the fluid, and toward the last held their
noses against the foetor they were uncovering. It was not so long a
job as they had feared it would be, since the water was phenomenally
low. There is no need to speak too exactly of what they found. Merwin
and Zenas were both there, in part, though the vestiges were mainly
skeletal. There were also a small deer and a large dog in about the
same state, and a number of bones of smaller animals. The ooze and
slime at the bottom seemed inexplicably porous and bubbling, and a man
who descended on hand-holds with a long pole found that he could sink
the wooden shaft to any depth in the mud of the floor without meeting
any solid obstruction.

Twilight had now fallen, and lanterns were brought from the house.
Then, when it was seen that nothing further could be gained from the
well, everyone went indoors and conferred in the ancient sitting-room
while the intermittent light of a spectral half-moon played wanly on
the grey desolation outside. The men were frankly nonplussed by the
entire case, and could find no convincing common element to link the
strange vegetable conditions, the unknown disease of livestock and
humans, and the unaccountable deaths of Merwin and Zenas in the tainted
well. They had heard the common country talk, it is true; but could not
believe that anything contrary to natural law had occurred. No doubt
the meteor had poisoned the soil, but the illness of person and animals
who had eaten nothing grown in that soil was another matter. Was it the
well water? Very possibly. It might be a good idea to analyse it. But
what peculiar madness could have made both boys jump into the well?
Their deeds were so similar--and the fragments showed that they had
both suffered from the grey brittle death. Why was everything so grey
and brittle?

It was the coroner, seated near a window overlooking the yard, who
first noticed the glow about the well. Night had fully set in, and all
the abhorrent grounds seemed faintly luminous with more than the fitful
moonbeams; but this new glow was something definite and distinct, and
appeared to shoot up from the black pit like a softened ray from a
searchlight, giving dull reflections in the little ground pools where
the water had been emptied. It had a very queer colour, and as all the
men clustered round the window Ammi gave a violent start. For this
strange beam of ghastly miasma was to him of no unfamiliar hue. He had
seen that colour before, and feared to think what it might mean. He
had seen it in the nasty brittle globule in that aerolite two summers
ago, had seen it in the crazy vegetation of the springtime, and had
thought he had seen it for an instant that very morning against the
small barred window of that terrible attic room where nameless things
had happened. It had flashed there a second, and a clammy and hateful
current of vapour had brushed past him--and then poor Nahum had been
taken by something of that colour. He had said so at the last--said it
was like the globule and the plants. After that had come the runaway
in the yard and the splash in the well--and now that well was belching
forth to the night a pale insidious beam of the same demoniac tint.

It does credit to the alertness of Ammi's mind that he puzzled even
at that tense moment over a point which was essentially scientific.
He could not but wonder at his gleaning of the same impression from
a vapour glimpsed in the daytime, against a window opening in the
morning sky, and from a nocturnal exhalation seen as a phosphorescent
mist against the black and blasted landscape. It wasn't right--it was
against Nature--and he thought of those terrible last words of his
stricken friend, "It come from some place whar things ain't as they is
here ... one o' them professors said so...."

All three horses outside, tied to a pair of shrivelled saplings by
the road, were now neighing and pawing frantically. The wagon driver
started for the door to do something, but Ammi laid a shaky hand on his
shoulder. "Dun't go out thar," he whispered. "They's more to this nor
what we know. Nahum said somethin' lived in the well that sucks your
life out. He said it must be some'at growed from a round ball like one
we all seen in the meteor stone that fell a year ago June. Sucks an'
burns, he said, an' is jest a cloud of colour like that light out thar
now, that ye can hardly see an' can't tell what it is. Nahum thought it
feeds on everything livin' an' gits stronger all the time. He said he
seen it this last week. It must be somethin' from away off in the sky
like the men from the college last year says the meteor stone was. The
way it's made an' the way it works ain't like no way o' God's world.
It's some'at from beyond."

So the men paused indecisively as the light from the well grew stronger
and the hitched horses pawed and whinnied in increasing frenzy. It was
truly an awful moment; with terror in that ancient and accursed house
itself, four monstrous sets of fragments--two from the house and two
from the well--in the woodshed behind, and that shaft of unknown and
unholy iridescence from the slimy depths in front. Ammi had restrained
the driver on impulse, forgetting how uninjured he himself was after
the clammy brushing of that coloured vapour in the attic room, but
perhaps it is just as well that he acted as he did. No one will ever
know what was abroad that night; and though the blasphemy from beyond
had not so far hurt any human of unweakened mind, there is no telling
what it might not have done at that last moment, and with its seemingly
increased strength and the special signs of purpose it was soon to
display beneath the half-clouded moonlit sky.

       *       *       *       *       *

All at once one of the detectives at the window gave a short, sharp
gasp. The others looked at him, and then quickly followed his own
gaze upward to the point at which its idle straying had been suddenly
arrested. There was no need for words. What had been disputed in
country gossip was disputable no longer, and it is because of the
thing which every man of that party agreed in whispering later on,
that strange days are never talked about in Arkham. It is necessary to
premise that there was no wind at that hour of the evening. One did
arise not long afterward, but there was absolutely none then. Even
the dry tips of the lingering hedge-mustard, grey and blighted, and
the fringe on the roof of the standing democrat-wagon were unstirred.
And yet amid that tense, godless calm the high bare boughs of all
the trees in the yard were moving. They were twitching morbidly and
spasmodically, clawing in convulsive and epileptic madness at the
moonlit clouds; scratching impotently in the noxious air as if jerked
by some allied and bodiless line of linkage with sub-terrene horrors
writhing and struggling below the black roots.

Not a man breathed for several seconds. Then a cloud of darker depth
passed over the moon, and the silhouette of clutching branches faded
out momentarily. At this there was a general cry; muffled with awe,
but husky and almost identical from every throat. For the terror had
not faded with the silhouette, and in a fearsome instant of deeper
darkness the watchers saw wriggling at the treetop height a thousand
tiny points of faint and unhallowed radiance, tipping each bough like
the fire of St. Elmo or the flames that come down on the apostles'
heads at Pentecost. It was a monstrous constellation of unnatural
light, like a glutted swarm of corpse-fed fireflies dancing hellish
sarabands over an accursed marsh; and its colour was that same nameless
intrusion which Ammi had come to recognise and dread. All the while
the shaft of phosphorescence from the well was getting brighter and
brighter, bringing to the minds of the huddled men, a sense of doom and
abnormality which far outraced any image their conscious minds could
form. It was no longer _shining_ out; it was _pouring_ out; and as the
shapeless stream of unplaceable colour left the well it seemed to flow
directly into the sky.

[Illustration: ... and in the fearsome instant of deeper darkness, the
watchers saw wriggling at that treetop height, a thousand tiny points
of faint and unhallowed radiance, tipping each bough like the fire
of St. Elmo ... and all the while the shaft of phosphorescence from
the well was getting brighter and brighter and bringing to the minds
of the huddled men, a sense of doom and abnormality.... It was no
longer shining out; it was pouring out; and as the shapeless stream of
unplaceable colour left the well, it seemed to flow directly into the
sky.]

The veterinary shivered, and walked to the front door to drop the heavy
extra bar across it. Ammi shook no less, and had to tug and point for
lack of a controllable voice when he wished to draw notice to the
growing luminosity of the trees. The neighing and stamping of the
horses had become utterly frightful, but not a soul of that group in
the old house would have ventured forth for any earthly reward. With
the moments the shining of the trees increased, while their restless
branches seemed to strain more and more toward verticality. The wood
of the well-sweep was shining now, and presently a policeman dumbly
pointed to some wooden sheds and beehives near the stone wall on the
west. They were commencing to shine, too, though the tethered vehicles
of the visitors seemed so far unaffected. Then there was a wild
commotion and clopping in the road, and as Ammi quenched the lamp for
better seeing they realized that the span of frantic grays had broken
their sapling and run off with the democrat-wagon.

The shock served to loosen several tongues, and embarrassed whispers
were exchanged. "It spreads on everything organic that's been around
here," muttered the medical examiner. No one replied, but the man who
had been in the well gave a hint that his long pole must have stirred
up something intangible. "It was awful," he added. "There was no bottom
at all. Just ooze and bubbles and the feeling of something lurking
under there." Ammi's horse still pawed and screamed deafeningly in
the road outside, and nearly drowned its owner's faint quaver as he
mumbled his formless reflections. "It come from that stone--it growed
down thar--it got everything livin'--it fed itself on 'em, mind and
body--Thad an' Merwin, Zenas an' Nabby--Nahum was the last--they all
drunk the water--it got strong on 'em--it come from beyond, whar things
ain't like they be here--now it's goin' home--"

At this point, as the column of unknown colour flared suddenly stronger
and began to weave itself into fantastic suggestions of shape which
each spectator later described differently, there came from poor
tethered Hero such a sound as no man before or since ever heard from
a horse. Every person in that low-pitched sitting-room stopped his
ears, and Ammi turned away from the window in horror and nausea. Words
could not convey it--when Ammi looked out again the hapless beast lay
huddled inert on the moonlit ground between the splintered shafts of
the buggy. That was the last of Hero till they buried him next day.
But the present was no time to mourn, for almost at this instant a
detective silently called attention to something terrible in the very
room with them. In the absence of the lamplight it was clear that a
faint phosphorescence had begun to pervade the entire apartment. It
glowed on the broad-planked floor where the rag carpet left it bare,
and shimmered over the sashes of the small-paned windows. It ran up
and down the exposed corner-posts, coruscated about the shelf and
mantel, and infected the very doors and furniture. Each minute saw it
strengthen, and at last it was very plain that healthy living things
must leave that house.

Ammi showed them the back door and the path up through the fields to
the ten-acre pasture. They walked and stumbled as in a dream, and did
not dare look back till they were far away on the high ground. They
were glad of the path, for they could not have gone the front way, by
that well. It was bad enough passing the glowing barn and sheds, and
those shining orchard trees with their gnarled, fiendish contours; but
thank Heaven the branches did their worst twisting high up. The moon
went under some very black clouds as they crossed the rustic bridge
over Chapman's Brook, and it was blind groping from there to the open
meadows.

       *       *       *       *       *

When they looked back toward the valley and the distant Gardner place
at the bottom they saw a fearsome sight. All the farm was shining
with the hideous unknown blend of colour; trees, buildings, and even
such grass and herbage as had not been wholly changed to lethal grey
brittleness. The boughs were all straining skyward, tipped with tongues
of foul flame, and lambent tricklings of the same monstrous fire were
creeping about the ridgepoles of the house, barn and sheds. It was a
scene from a vision of Fuseli, and over all the rest reigned that riot
of luminous amorphousness, that alien and undimensioned rainbow of
cryptic poison from the well--seething, feeling, lapping, reaching,
scintillating, straining, and malignly bubbling in its cosmic and
unrecognizable chromaticism.

Then without warning the hideous thing shot vertically up toward the
sky like a rocket or meteor, leaving behind no trail and disappearing
through a round and curiously regular hole in the clouds before any
man could gasp or cry out. No watcher can ever forget that sight, and
Ammi stared blankly at the stars of Cygnus, Deneb twinkling above the
others, where the unknown colour had melted into the Milky Way. But his
gaze was the next moment called swiftly to earth by the crackling in
the valley. It was just that. Only a wooden ripping and crackling, and
not an explosion, as so many others of the party vowed. Yet the outcome
was the same, for in one feverish kaleidoscopic instant there burst up
from that doomed and accursed farm a gleamingly eruptive cataclysm of
unnatural sparks and substance; blurring the glance of the few who saw
it, and sending forth to the zenith a bombarding cloudburst of such
coloured and fantastic fragments as our universe must needs disown.
Through quickly re-closing vapours they followed the great morbidity
that had vanished, and in another second they had vanished too. Behind
and below was only a darkness to which the men dared not return, and
all about was a mounting wind which seemed to sweep down in black,
frore gusts from interstellar space. It shrieked and howled, and lashed
the fields and distorted woods in a mad cosmic frenzy, till soon the
trembling party realized it would be no use waiting for the moon to
show what was left down there at Nahum's.

Too awed even to hint theories, the seven shaking men trudged back
toward Arkham by the north road. Ammi was worse than his fellows,
and begged them to see him inside his own kitchen, instead of
keeping straight on to town. He did not wish to cross the blighted,
wind-whipped woods alone to his home on the main road. For he had had
an added shock that the others were spared, and was crushed for ever
with a brooding fear he dared not even mention for many years to come.
As the rest of the watchers on that tempestuous hill had stolidly set
their faces toward the road, Ammi had looked back an instant at the
shadowed valley of desolation so lately sheltering his ill-starred
friend. And from that stricken, far-away spot he had seen something
feebly rise, only to sink down again upon the place from which the
great shapeless horror had shot into the sky. It was just a colour--but
not any colour of our earth or heavens. And because Ammi recognized
that colour, and knew that this last faint remnant must still lurk down
there in the well, he has never been quite right since.

Ammi would never go near the place again. It is forty-four years now
since the horror happened, but he has never been there, and will be
glad when the new reservoir blots it out. I shall be glad, too, for I
do not like the way the sunlight changed colour around the mouth of
that abandoned well I passed. I hope the water will always be very
deep--but even so, I shall never drink it. I do not think I shall visit
the Arkham country hereafter. Three of the men who had been with Ammi
returned the next morning to see the ruins by daylight, but there were
not any real ruins. Only the bricks of the chimney, the stones of the
cellar, some mineral and metallic litter here and there, and the rim
of that nefandous well. Save for Ammi's dead horse, which they towed
away and buried, and the buggy which they shortly returned to him,
everything that had ever been living had gone. Five eldritch acres of
dusty grey desert remained, nor has anything ever grown there since.
To this day it sprawls open to the sky like a great spot eaten by acid
in the woods and fields, and the few who have ever dared glimpse it in
spite of the rural tales have named it "the blasted heath."

       *       *       *       *       *

The rural tales are queer. They might be even queerer if city men
and college chemists could be interested enough to analyze the water
from that disused well, or the grey dust that no wind seems ever to
disperse. Botanists, too, ought to study the stunted flora on the
borders of that spot, for they might shed light on the country notion
that the blight is spreading--little by little, perhaps an inch a year.
People say the colour of the neighboring herbage is not quite right
in the spring, and that wild things leave queer prints in the light
winter snow. Snow never seems quite so heavy on the blasted heath as
it is elsewhere. Horses--the few that are left in this motor age--grow
skittish in the silent valley; and hunters cannot depend on their dogs
too near the splotch of greyish dust.

They say the mental influences are very bad, too; numbers went queer in
the years after Nahum's taking, and always they lacked the power to get
away. Then the stronger-minded folk all left the region, and only the
foreigners tried to live in the crumbling old homesteads. They could
not stay, though; and one sometimes wonders what insight beyond ours
their wild, weird stories of whispered magic have given them. Their
dreams at night, they protest, are very horrible in that grotesque
country; and surely the very look of the dark realm is enough to stir
a morbid fancy. No traveler has ever escaped a sense of strangeness in
those deep ravines, and artists shiver as they paint thick woods whose
mystery is as much of the spirits as of the eye. I myself am curious
about the sensation I derived from my one lone walk before Ammi told
me his tale. When twilight came I had vaguely wished some clouds would
gather, for odd timidity about the deep skyey voids above had crept
into my soul.

Do not ask me for my opinion. I do not know--that is all. There was no
one but Ammi to question; for Arkham people will not talk about the
strange days, and all three professors who saw the aerolite and its
coloured globule are dead. There were other globules--depend upon that.
One must have fed itself and escaped, and probably there was another
which was too late. No doubt it is still down the well--I know there
was something wrong with the sunlight I saw above that miasmal brink.
The rustics say the blight creeps an inch a year, so perhaps there is
a kind of growth or nourishment even now. But whatever demon hatchling
is there, it must be tethered to something or else it would quickly
spread. Is it fastened to the roots of those trees that claw the air?
One of the current Arkham tales is about fat oaks that shine and move
as they ought not to do at night.

What it is, only God knows. In terms of matter I suppose the thing
Ammi described would be called a gas, but this gas obeyed laws that
are not of our cosmos. This was no fruit of such worlds and suns as
shine on the telescopes and photographic plates of our observatories.
This was no breath from the skies whose motions and dimensions our
astronomers measure or deem too vast to measure. It was just a colour
out of space--a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity
beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns
the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open
before our frenzied eyes.

I doubt very much if Ammi consciously lied to me, and I do not think
his tale was all a freak of madness as the townsfolk had forewarned.
Something terrible came to the hills and valleys on that meteor,
and something terrible--though I know not in what proportion--still
remains. I shall be glad to see the water come. Meanwhile I hope
nothing will happen to Ammi. He saw so much of the thing--and its
influence was so insidious. Why has he never been able to move away?
How clearly he recalled those dying words of Nahum's--"can't git
away--draws ye--ye know summ'at's comin', but 'tain't no use--" Ammi is
such a good old man--when the reservoir gang gets to work I must write
the chief engineer to keep a sharp watch on him. I would hate to think
of him as the grey, twisted, brittle monstrosity which persists more
and more in troubling my sleep.


                                THE END