_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 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. |
