# The Colour Out of Space (B1 edition)

*H. P. Lovecraft*

## The Colour Out of Space

West of Arkham the hills rise wild. There are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut. There are dark, narrow glens where the trees slope in strange ways. Thin little streams run through them, and sunlight has never reached that water. On the gentler slopes there are old, rocky farms. Their low cottages are covered in moss. They sit beside great walls of rock and seem to think forever about old New England secrets. But all of them are empty now. The wide chimneys are falling down. The wooden sides of the houses bulge dangerously under their low gambrel roofs.

The old people have gone away, and foreigners do not like to live there. French-Canadians have tried it, and Italians have tried it. The Poles have come and gone again. It is not because of anything that you can see or hear or touch. It is because of something that you imagine. The place is not good for the imagination, and it does not bring restful dreams at night. This must be what keeps the foreigners away. After all, old Ammi Pierce has never told them anything that he remembers from the strange days. Ammi's head has been a little queer for years. He is the only one who still stays there, or who ever talks of the strange days. He dares to do this because his house is so near the open fields and the travelled roads around Arkham.

Once there was a road over the hills and through the valleys. It ran straight across the place where the blasted heath is now. But people stopped using it, and a new road was built. It curves far to the south. You can still find traces of the old road among the weeds, where the land is turning wild again. Some of these traces will surely stay even when half the valleys are flooded for the new reservoir. Then the dark woods will be cut down. The blasted heath will sleep far below blue water. The surface of that water will mirror the sky and ripple in the sun. And the secrets of the strange days will become part of the secrets of the deep. They will join the hidden stories of the old ocean and all the mystery of the earth's first times.

I went into the hills and valleys to survey for the new reservoir. People told me the place was evil. They told me this in Arkham. Arkham is a very old town, full of witch legends. So I thought the evil must be some story that grandmothers had whispered to children for centuries. The name "blasted heath" seemed very odd and theatrical to me. I wondered how it had come into the folk stories of a Puritan people. Then I saw that dark tangle of glens and slopes in the west for myself. After that I stopped wondering about anything except its own old mystery. It was morning when I saw it, but there were always shadows 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 paths between them. The ground was too soft with wet moss and with the decay of endless years.

In the open spaces, mostly along the line of the old road, there were little hillside farms. Sometimes all the buildings were still standing. Sometimes only one or two were left. And sometimes there was only a lone chimney or a cellar that was quickly filling with earth. Weeds and thorny bushes were everywhere. Shy wild animals moved secretly in the bushes. Over everything there was a feeling of restlessness and heavy weight. Something about the place seemed unreal and strangely ugly. It was as if something important about distance, or about light and shadow, were wrong. I was not surprised that the foreigners would not stay. This was no place to sleep in. It looked too much like a landscape by Salvator Rosa. It looked too much like a forbidden old picture in a horror story.

But even all this was not as bad as the blasted heath. I knew it the moment I came to it, at the bottom of a wide valley. No other name could fit such a thing, and no other thing could fit such a name. It was as if the poet had made up the phrase after seeing this one place. When I looked at it, I thought it must be the result of a fire. But why had nothing new ever grown on those five acres of grey, empty land? They lay open to the sky like a great spot eaten by acid in the woods and fields. Most of it lay north of the old road line, but a little reached the other side. I felt a strange unwillingness to go near it. In the end I did, but only because my work took me through it and past it. Nothing grew anywhere on that wide area. There was only a fine grey dust or ash, and no wind ever seemed to blow it about. The trees near it were sick and small. Many dead trunks stood or lay rotting at the edge. As I walked quickly past, I saw fallen bricks and stones on my right. They were from an old chimney and cellar. I also saw the black, open mouth of an abandoned well. The still, bad air above it played strange tricks with the colours of the sunlight. After that, even the long, dark climb through the woods beyond seemed welcome. I no longer wondered at the frightened whispers of the Arkham people. There had been no house or ruin near. Even in the old days the place must have been lonely and far from everything. At twilight I was afraid to pass that evil spot again. So I walked back to the town the long way, by the curving road in the south. I vaguely wished some clouds would gather. A strange fear of the deep, empty sky above had moved slowly into my soul.

In the evening I asked old people in Arkham about the blasted heath. I also asked what they meant by "the strange days". Many of them said this phrase quietly, without really answering. I could not get any good answers. I learned only that the whole mystery was much more recent than I had dreamed. It was not an old legend at all. It had happened in the lifetime of the people I was speaking to. It had happened in the 'eighties, and a family had disappeared or been killed. Nobody would be exact. They all told me not to listen to old Ammi Pierce's crazy tales. So the next morning I went to find him. I had heard that he lived alone in an ancient, falling-down cottage. It stood where the trees first begin to get very thick. It was a frighteningly old place. It had begun to give off the faint, unhealthy smell of houses that have stood too long. I had to knock again and again before the old man came. He shuffled shyly to the door, and I could tell he was not glad to see me. He was not as weak as I had expected. But his eyes drooped in a strange way. His untidy clothes and white beard made him look very tired and sad.

I did not know how best to get him started on his tales. So I pretended that I had come on business. I told him about my surveying and asked general questions about the area. He was much brighter and better educated than people had told me. Very soon he understood the subject as well as any man I had talked with in Arkham. He was not like the other country people I had met in places where reservoirs were planned. He did not protest about the miles of old woods and farmland that would disappear. Perhaps he would have protested if his home had been inside the area of the future lake. But he showed only relief. He was glad that the dark old valleys he had wandered through all his life would end. They were better under water now—better under water since the strange days. As he said this, his rough voice sank low. He leaned forward, and his right forefinger began to point, shaking, in an impressive way.

It was then that I heard the story. The wandering voice scraped and whispered on. I shivered again and again, although it was a summer day. Often I had to bring the old man back when his talk wandered. Sometimes I had to piece together scientific points. He knew these only like a parrot, from a fading memory of the professors' talk. And sometimes I had to fill gaps where his sense of order broke down. When he had finished, I was not surprised that his mind had snapped a little. I was not surprised either that the people of Arkham would not speak much of the blasted heath. I went quickly back to my hotel before sunset. I did not want the stars to come out above me in the open. The next day I returned to Boston and gave up my job. I could not go into that dark, wild old forest and those slopes again. I could not face that grey blasted heath another time. There the black well opened deep beside the fallen bricks and stones. The reservoir will soon be built now. Then all those old secrets will lie safe forever under deep water. But even then I do not think I would like to visit that country at night. At least I would not go when the evil 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 there had been no wild legends at all since the witch trials. Even then, people did not fear these western woods half as much as the small island in the Miskatonic. On that island the devil held court. He sat beside a strange stone altar that was older than the Indians. These were not haunted woods. Their strange dusk was never terrible until the strange days. Then came that white cloud at noon and that string of explosions in the air. Then came that column of smoke from the valley far in the wood. By night all Arkham had heard about the great rock. It had fallen out of the sky. It had buried itself in the ground beside the well at the Nahum Gardner place. That was the house which had stood where the blasted heath was later. It was the trim white Nahum Gardner house, among its rich gardens and orchards.

Nahum had come to town to tell people about the stone. On the way he had stopped at Ammi Pierce's house. Ammi was forty then, and all the strange things stayed very strongly in his mind. The next morning three professors from Miskatonic University went quickly out to the farm. They wanted to see the weird visitor from unknown space among the stars. Ammi and his wife went with them. They wondered why Nahum had said the day before that it was so large. It had shrunk, Nahum said. He pointed to the big brownish mound above the torn earth and burnt grass. It lay near the old well-sweep in his front yard. But the wise men answered that stones do not shrink. The stone stayed hot, and Nahum said it had glowed faintly in the night. The professors tried it with a geologist's hammer. They found that it was strangely soft. In fact, it was so soft that it was almost like clay. So they dug out a piece instead of breaking one off. They wanted to take this specimen back to the college for testing. They carried it in an old pail that they borrowed from Nahum's kitchen. Even the small piece would not cool down. On the way back they stopped at Ammi's to rest. They became thoughtful when Mrs. Pierce said that the piece was getting smaller and burning the bottom of the pail. It was true that it was not large. But perhaps they had taken less than they thought.

The day after that, the professors came out again in great excitement. All this was in June of '82. As they passed Ammi's, they told him about the strange things the specimen had done. It had disappeared completely when they put it in a glass beaker. The beaker had gone too. The wise men talked about the strange stone's attraction to silicon. In the well-ordered laboratory it had acted in unbelievable ways. When they heated it on charcoal, it did nothing at all and gave off no hidden gases. The borax bead test showed nothing. It would not turn into gas at any heat they could make. Not even the very hot flame of the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe could do it. On an anvil it could easily be hammered into new shapes. In the dark it glowed very clearly. It stubbornly refused to cool, and soon the whole college was really excited. Then they heated it in front of the spectroscope. It showed shining bands unlike any known colours of the normal spectrum. There was much breathless talk of new elements and strange properties of light. The scientists said all the other things that puzzled men of science usually say when they face the unknown.

Even though it was hot, they tested it in a crucible with all the right chemicals. Water did nothing. Hydrochloric acid did nothing either. Nitric acid and even aqua regia only hissed and spattered against it. The hot thing could not be hurt. Ammi found it hard to remember all these things. But he recognised some of the liquids when I named them in the usual order of use. There were ammonia and caustic soda, alcohol and ether, sickening carbon disulphide and a dozen others. As time passed, the piece weighed less and less, and it seemed to cool a little. But the liquids did not change at all. Nothing showed that they had attacked the stone. Still, it was a metal, without any doubt. For one thing, it was magnetic. And after it had been in the acids, there seemed to be faint traces of the Widmänstätten figures. These patterns are found on iron from meteorites. When it had cooled a lot, they did the testing in glass. They put all the chips from the first piece into a glass beaker and left them there. The next morning both the chips and the beaker were gone without a trace. Only a burnt spot marked the place on the wooden shelf where they had been.

The professors told Ammi all this as they stopped at his door. Once more he went with them to see the stony messenger from the stars. This time his wife did not go with him. Now the stone had certainly shrunk. Even the serious professors could not doubt what they saw. All around the shrinking brown lump near the well there was an empty space. Only in some places had the earth fallen in. The day before, it had been a good seven feet across. Now it was hardly five. It was still hot. The wise men studied its surface with interest. Then they took off another, larger piece with a hammer and chisel. This time they dug deeply. As they pulled the smaller piece away, they saw that the inside of the thing was not all the same.

They had uncovered what seemed to be the side of a large coloured globule inside the substance. The colour was like some of the bands in the meteor's strange spectrum. It was almost impossible to describe. Only by comparing it with other things could they call it a colour at all. Its surface was shiny. When they tapped it, it seemed both brittle and hollow. One of the professors hit it hard with a hammer, and it burst with a nervous little pop. Nothing came out of it, and every trace of the thing vanished when it broke. It left behind a round, hollow space about three inches across. Everyone thought that more globules would probably be found as the stone around them wasted away.

Guessing was useless. So they tried to find more globules by drilling, but they found none. Then they left again with their new specimen. In the laboratory it was as hard to understand as the first piece. It was almost as soft as clay. It was hot and magnetic, and it glowed slightly. It cooled a little in strong acids. It had an unknown spectrum. It wasted away in air. It attacked silicon compounds, and both were destroyed. Apart from these things, it had no features that could identify it. At the end of the tests, the college scientists had to admit that they could not place it. It was nothing of this earth. It was a piece of the great outside. So it had outside properties and obeyed outside laws.

That night there was a thunderstorm. When the professors went out to Nahum's the next day, they had a bitter disappointment. The stone had been magnetic, and it must have had some strange electrical property too. It had "drawn the lightning," as Nahum said, again and again. Six times within an hour the farmer saw the lightning strike the furrow in the front yard. When the storm was over, only a ragged pit by the old well-sweep was left. It was half full of fallen earth. They dug, but they found nothing. The scientists made sure that the stone had completely vanished. The failure was total. Nothing was left to do but go back to the laboratory. There they tested again the disappearing piece, which they had kept carefully in a lead case. That piece lasted a week, and at the end of it they had learned nothing of value. When it was gone, nothing at all was left behind. In time the professors were hardly sure that they had really seen it with waking eyes. It had been a mysterious trace from the endless deep spaces outside. It was a lone, weird message from other universes and other realms of matter, force and being.

Naturally, the Arkham papers made a lot of the event, because the college was involved. They sent reporters to talk with Nahum Gardner and his family. At least one Boston daily paper also sent a reporter. Nahum quickly became a kind of local celebrity. He was a lean, friendly man of about fifty. He lived with his wife and three sons on the pleasant farm in the valley. He and Ammi visited each other often, and so did their wives. Even after all these years, Ammi had nothing but praise for him. Nahum seemed a little proud of the attention his farm had got. In the weeks that followed he often talked about the meteorite. That July and August were hot. Nahum worked hard at his haying in the ten-acre pasture across Chapman's Brook. His rattling farm wagon wore deep tracks into the shady lanes on the way there. The work tired him more than in other years. He felt that age was beginning to show in him.

Then came the time of fruit and harvest. The pears and apples ripened slowly, and Nahum said his orchards were doing better than ever. The fruit was growing to an amazing size and had an unusual shine. There was so much of it that extra barrels were ordered for the coming crop. But when the fruit was ripe, there was bitter disappointment. All that beautiful fruit looked delicious, but not one tiny bit of it was fit to eat. A secret bitterness and sickliness had come into the fine taste of the pears and apples. Even the smallest bite caused a disgust that lasted a long time. It was the same with the melons and tomatoes. Nahum sadly saw that his whole crop was lost. He was quick to connect events. He said that the meteorite had poisoned the soil. He thanked Heaven that most of his other crops were in the upland lot along the road.

Winter came early and was very cold. Ammi saw Nahum less often than usual. He noticed that Nahum had begun to look worried. The rest of the family also seemed to have grown quiet. They no longer went regularly to church or to the social events of the countryside. No one could find a cause for this quietness or sadness. But now and then everyone in the house admitted to poorer health and a vague, uneasy feeling. Nahum himself said the clearest thing of anyone. He said he was worried about certain footprints in the snow. They were the usual winter prints of red squirrels, white rabbits and foxes. But the troubled farmer felt that something was not quite right about their nature and arrangement. He never explained exactly. He seemed to think they did not fit the bodies and habits of squirrels, rabbits and foxes as they should. Ammi listened to this talk without interest. Then one night he drove past Nahum's house in his sleigh on the way back from Clark's Corners. There was a moon, and a rabbit ran across the road. The leaps of that rabbit were longer than Ammi or his horse liked. In fact, the horse almost ran away before Ammi held it back with a firm rein. After that Ammi gave Nahum's tales more respect. He wondered why the Gardner dogs seemed so frightened and shaking every morning. It turned out that they had almost lost the spirit to bark.

In February the McGregor boys from Meadow Hill were out shooting woodchucks. Not far from the Gardner place they shot a very strange one. The shape of its body seemed slightly changed in a queer way that was impossible to describe. Its face had an expression that no one had ever seen on a woodchuck before. The boys were really frightened and threw the thing away at once. So only their strange, ugly stories about it ever reached the country people. But by now everyone accepted that horses shied near Nahum's house. And a whole set of whispered legends was quickly starting to grow.

People swore that the snow melted faster around Nahum's than anywhere else. Early in March there was a frightened discussion in Potter's general store at Clark's Corners. Stephen Rice had driven past Gardner's that morning. He had noticed the skunk-cabbages coming up through the mud by the woods across the road. Nobody had ever seen plants of such a size. They had strange colours that no words could describe. Their shapes were monstrous. The horse had snorted at a smell, and Stephen had never smelled anything like it before. That afternoon several people drove past to see the unnatural plants. They all agreed that plants like that should never grow in a healthy world. People talked freely about the bad fruit of the autumn before. Word went from mouth to mouth that there was poison in Nahum's ground. Of course it was the meteorite. Several farmers remembered how strange the college men had found that stone. So they told the professors about the matter.

One day the professors visited Nahum. But they did not like wild tales and folklore, so they were very careful in what they concluded. The plants were certainly odd. But all skunk-cabbages are more or less odd in shape and colour. Perhaps some mineral from the stone had entered the soil, but it would soon be washed away. And the footprints and the frightened horses? That was only country talk, of course. A thing like the meteorite was sure to start such talk. Serious men could really do nothing about wild gossip. Superstitious country people will say and believe anything. And so, all through the strange days, the professors stayed away in contempt. Only one of them later remembered something. Over a year and a half later he was given two phials of dust to analyse for a police case. Then he remembered that the strange colour of that skunk-cabbage was very like one of the unusual bands of light. The meteor piece had shown those bands in the college spectroscope. The colour was also like the brittle globule found inside the stone from the deep spaces. At first the samples in that case showed the same odd bands. But later they lost this property.

The trees around Nahum's budded too early. At night they swayed threateningly in the wind. Nahum's second son Thaddeus was a boy of fifteen. He swore that the trees also swayed when there was no wind. But even the gossips would not believe this. Still, there was certainly restlessness in the air. The whole Gardner family began to listen secretly. They did not listen for any sound that they could name. The listening came in moments when their minds seemed half to slip away. Sadly, such moments increased week by week. In the end people commonly said that "something was wrong with all Nahum's folks." When the early saxifrage came out, it had another strange colour. It was not quite like the colour of the skunk-cabbage, but it was clearly related. And it was just as unknown to everyone who saw it. Nahum took some of the flowers to Arkham and showed them to the editor of the *Gazette*. But that important man only wrote a funny article about them. In it he politely laughed at the dark fears of the country people. It was a mistake of Nahum's to tell a calm, unimaginative city man about the mourning-cloak butterflies. He told him how these great, overgrown butterflies behaved around the saxifrages.

April brought a kind of madness to the country people. It also started the disuse of the road past Nahum's, and in the end that road was abandoned. Next it was the plants. All the orchard trees blossomed in strange colours. In the rocky soil of the yard and the pasture next to it, a bizarre growth sprang up. Only a botanist could connect it with the normal plants of the area. No healthy, natural colours could be seen anywhere, except in the green grass and leaves. Everywhere else there were wild, feverish, rainbow-like shades. They all seemed to come from one diseased, hidden basic colour. That colour had no place among the known colours of the earth. The "Dutchman's breeches" became something threatening and evil. The bloodroots grew rudely bold in their twisted colours. Ammi and the Gardners felt that most of the colours were strangely familiar. They decided that the colours reminded them of the brittle globule in the meteor.

Nahum ploughed and sowed the ten-acre pasture and the upland lot. But he did nothing with the land around the house. He knew it would be no use. He hoped that the summer's strange growths would draw all the poison out of the soil. He was ready for almost anything now. He had grown used to the feeling that something near him was waiting to be heard. Of course it hurt him that the neighbours avoided his house. But it hurt his wife more. The boys were better off, because they were at school every day. But they could not help being frightened by the gossip. Thaddeus was an especially sensitive boy, and he suffered the most.

In May the insects came, and Nahum's place became a nightmare of buzzing and crawling. Most of the creatures did not look or move quite normally. Their habits at night were unlike anything anyone had known before. The Gardners began to watch at night. They watched in all directions, without any plan, for something. They could not say what it was. It was then that they all admitted that Thaddeus had been right about the trees. Mrs. Gardner was the next to see it. She was at the window, watching the swollen branches of a maple against a moonlit sky. The branches surely moved, and there was no wind. It must be the sap. Strangeness had come into everything that grew now.

Yet the next discovery was not made by anyone in Nahum's family. They had grown too used to strange things to notice them. What they could not see was seen by a timid windmill salesman from Bolton. He drove by one night, and he knew nothing of the country legends. He told his story in Arkham, and the *Gazette* printed a short paragraph about it. That was where all the farmers, Nahum too, first read about it. The night had been dark, and the lamps on his buggy were weak. But around one farm in the valley, the darkness had been less thick. From his story, everyone knew it must be Nahum's farm. A faint but clear glow seemed to be inside all the plants. The grass, the leaves and the flowers were all glowing alike. At one moment a separate piece of the glowing light seemed to move secretly in the yard near the barn.

The grass had seemed untouched so far. The cows were freely grazing in the field near the house. But toward the end of May the milk began to be bad. So Nahum had the cows driven to the uplands, and after that the trouble stopped. Not long after this, the change in the grass and leaves could be seen. All the green was going grey. It was also becoming very strangely brittle. 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 almost cut off from the world. Sometimes they let Ammi do their shopping in town. They were failing strangely, in body and in mind. So no one was surprised when the news of Mrs. Gardner's madness quietly spread.

It happened in June, about a year after the meteor fell. The poor woman screamed about things in the air that she could not describe. In her mad talk there was not a single name for a real thing. There were only verbs and pronouns. Things moved and changed and fluttered. Ears tingled with feelings that were not quite 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 at night. The walls and windows shifted. Nahum did not send her to the county asylum. He let her wander about the house as long as she was no danger to herself or others. Even when her expression changed, he did nothing. But then the boys grew afraid of her. Thaddeus nearly fainted at the faces she made at him. So Nahum decided to keep her locked in the attic. By July she had stopped speaking and crawled on all fours. Before that month was over, Nahum got the mad idea that she glowed slightly in the dark. He now clearly saw that the plants nearby did the same.

A little before this, the horses had stampeded. Something had woken them in the night. Their neighing and kicking in their stalls had been terrible. There seemed to be nothing anyone could do to calm them. When Nahum opened the stable door, they all rushed out like frightened deer in the woods. It took a week to find all four. When they were found, they were quite useless and could not be controlled. Something had snapped in their brains. Each one had to be shot for its own good. Nahum borrowed a horse from Ammi for his haying. But he found it would not go near the barn. It shied, refused to move and whinnied. In the end he could only drive it into the yard. Then the men had to use their own strength to push the heavy wagon close to the hayloft. That way they could throw the hay up easily. And all the while the plants were turning grey and brittle. Even the flowers with such strange colours were greying now. The fruit was coming out grey, small and tasteless. The asters and goldenrod bloomed grey and twisted. The roses, zinnias and hollyhocks in the front yard looked so horrible and evil. So Nahum's oldest boy, Zenas, cut them down. The strangely swollen insects died at about that time. Even the bees died, though they had left their hives and gone to the woods.

By September all the plants were quickly falling to a greyish powder. Nahum feared that the trees would die before the poison was out of the soil. His wife now had spells of terrible screaming. He and the boys were nervous and tense all the time. They avoided people now. When school opened, the boys did not go. Ammi came to the farm only rarely now. But on one of these visits he was the first to realise that the well water was no longer good. It had an evil taste. It was not exactly rotten, and not exactly salty. Ammi advised his friend to dig another well on higher ground. Nahum could use it until the soil was good again. But Nahum ignored the warning. By that time he had grown hard to strange and unpleasant things. He and the boys went on using the bad water. They drank it as tiredly and mechanically as they did everything else. They ate their poor, badly cooked meals. They did their thankless, boring jobs through the empty days. They all had a kind of calm, hopeless acceptance. It was as if they walked half in another world. They seemed to walk between lines of nameless guards, toward a certain and familiar doom.

Thaddeus went mad in September after a visit to the well. He had gone there with a pail and had come back with nothing. He was shrieking and waving his arms. Sometimes he fell into a silly giggle, or whispered about "the moving colours down there." Two in one family was very bad, but Nahum was very brave about it. He let the boy run about for a week. Then Thaddeus began stumbling and hurting himself. So Nahum 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. It was worst for little Merwin. He imagined that they talked in some terrible language that was not of earth. Merwin's imagination was becoming frighteningly strong. His restlessness grew worse after his brother was shut away. Thaddeus had been his greatest playmate.

At almost the same time, the farm animals began to die. The poultry turned greyish and died very quickly. When their meat was cut, it was dry and smelled bad. The hogs grew enormously fat. Then suddenly they began to go through disgusting changes that no one could explain. Of course their meat was useless, and Nahum did not know what to do. No country vet would come near his place. The city veterinary from Arkham openly said that he did not understand it. The pigs began to grow grey and brittle. They fell to pieces before they died. Their eyes and noses changed in strange ways. It was impossible to explain, because they had never eaten the bad plants. Then something struck the cows. Parts of the body, or sometimes the whole body, would be strangely dried up or pressed together. Terrible collapses or breaking apart were common. In the last stages there was a greying and brittleness like that of the hogs. And death was always the end. It could not be poison, because all the cases happened in a locked and undisturbed barn. No bite from a wandering animal could have brought the disease. What living animal of earth can pass through solid walls? It must be just a natural disease. Yet no mind could guess what disease could cause such results. When the harvest came, not one animal was left alive on the place. The farm animals and the poultry were dead, and the dogs had run away. There had been three dogs. They had all vanished one night and were never heard of again. The five cats had left some time before. But hardly anyone noticed that they had gone, since there seemed to be no mice now. Only Mrs. Gardner had made pets of the graceful cats.

On the nineteenth of October Nahum stumbled into Ammi's house with horrible news. Death had come to poor Thaddeus in his attic room. It had come in a way that could not be told. Nahum had dug a grave in the railed family plot behind the farm. He had put in it what he found. Nothing could have come in from outside. The small barred window and the locked door were untouched. But it was much like what had happened in the barn. Ammi and his wife comforted the shocked man as well as they could. But they shook with fear as they did so. Pure terror seemed to cling to the Gardners and to everything they touched. Just having one of them in the house was like a breath from unknown places. Those places had no name and could never be named. Ammi went home with Nahum, very much against his will. He did what he could to calm the hysterical sobbing of little Merwin. Zenas needed no calming. Lately he had done nothing but stare into space and obey his father. Ammi thought that his fate was really a mercy. Now and then Merwin's screams were answered faintly from the attic. Ammi gave Nahum a questioning look, and Nahum said that his wife was getting very weak. When night came near, Ammi managed to get away. Not even friendship could make him stay there when the faint glow of the plants began. Then the trees might, or might not, sway without wind. It was really lucky for Ammi that he was not more imaginative. Even so, his mind was bent ever so slightly. If he had connected and thought about all the warning signs around him, he would surely have gone completely mad. He went quickly home in the twilight. The screams of the mad woman and the nervous child rang horribly in his ears.

Three days later, early in the morning, Nahum burst into Ammi's kitchen. Ammi was not at home. So Nahum told Mrs. Pierce another desperate story in broken words, and she listened in great fear. This time it was little Merwin. He was gone. He had gone out late at night with a lantern and a pail for water. He had never come back. He had been going to pieces for days. He hardly knew what he was doing. He screamed at everything. Then there had been a wild shriek from the yard. But before his father could get to the door, the boy was gone. There was no light from the lantern he had taken. And there was no trace of the child himself. At the time Nahum thought the lantern and pail were gone too. He searched the woods and fields all night. At dawn he walked slowly back, and he found some very strange things near the well. There was a crushed mass of iron that seemed partly melted. It had certainly been the lantern. Beside it lay a bent pail and twisted iron hoops, both half-melted. They seemed to be what was left of the pail. That was all. Nahum could no longer imagine anything. Mrs. Pierce had no idea. And when Ammi came home and heard the story, he could not guess either. Merwin was gone. There was no use telling the neighbours, who avoided all Gardners now. There was no use telling the city people in Arkham either, because they 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. He wanted Ammi to look after his wife and Zenas if they lived longer than he did. It must all be some kind of judgment. But he could not think what it was for. As far as he knew, he had always walked uprightly in the Lord's ways.

For over two weeks Ammi saw nothing of Nahum. Then he grew worried about what might have happened. He overcame his fears and visited the Gardner place. There was no smoke from the great chimney. For a moment Ammi feared the worst. The whole farm looked shocking. Grey, dried-up grass and leaves lay on the ground. Vines were falling in brittle pieces from the old walls and gables. Great bare trees clawed up at the grey November sky with a planned kind of evil. Ammi could not help feeling that this came from some small change in the angle of the branches. But Nahum was alive after all. He was weak and lay on a couch in the low-ceilinged kitchen. But he was fully conscious and could give simple orders to Zenas. The room was deadly cold. Ammi was clearly shaking with cold, and Nahum shouted roughly to Zenas for more wood. Wood was badly needed indeed. The huge fireplace was unlit and empty. A cloud of soot blew about in the cold wind that came down the chimney. Soon Nahum asked him if the extra wood had made him more comfortable. Then Ammi saw what had happened. The strongest cord had broken at last. The poor farmer's mind could feel no more sorrow.

Ammi asked gentle questions, but he could get no clear facts at all about the missing Zenas.

"In the well—he lives in the well—" was all that the confused father would say.

Then Ammi suddenly thought of the mad wife, and he asked about her instead.

"Nabby? Why, here she is!" poor Nahum answered in surprise.

Ammi soon saw that he must search for himself. He left the harmless man on the couch, talking nonsense. He took the keys from their nail beside the door and climbed the creaking stairs to the attic. Up there the air was very heavy and smelled bad. No sound could be heard from anywhere. He could see four doors, and only one of them was locked. He tried different keys from the ring he had taken. The third key was the right one. After some trouble with the lock, Ammi threw open the low white door.

It was quite dark inside. The window was small and half covered by rough wooden bars. Ammi could see nothing at all on the wide-planked floor. The smell was unbearable. Before he went further, he had to go back to another room. He returned with his lungs full of air that he could breathe. When he did go in, he saw something dark in the corner. When he saw it more clearly, he screamed out loud. While he screamed, he thought a cloud darkened the window for a moment. A second later he felt something brush past him like a hateful current of vapour. Strange colours danced before his eyes. The horror in front of him numbed his mind. If it had not, he would have thought of the globule that the geologist's hammer had broken. He would have thought of the sick plants that had grown in the spring. As it was, he thought only of the horrible, evil thing in front of him. All too clearly, it had shared the nameless fate of young Thaddeus and the farm animals. But the terrible thing about this horror was that it moved. It moved very slowly, but he could see it moving as it went on crumbling.

Ammi would give me no more details about this scene. But the shape in the corner does not appear again in his story as a moving thing. There are things that cannot be spoken of. And what is done out of simple human kindness is sometimes cruelly judged by the law. I understood that nothing moving was left in that attic room. To leave anything there that could still move would have been a terrible deed. It would have damned any responsible person to eternal torment. Anyone but a calm, stolid farmer would have fainted or gone mad. But Ammi walked through that low doorway fully conscious. He locked the cursed secret behind him. Now there was Nahum to deal with. He must be fed and looked after. He must be taken to some place where he could be cared for.

Ammi began to go down the dark stairs. Then he heard a thud below him. He even thought that a scream had been suddenly cut off. Nervously he remembered the damp vapour that had brushed past him in that terrible room above. What had his cry and his entry woken up? Some vague fear stopped him, and he heard more sounds below. There was certainly a kind of heavy dragging. And there was a most hateful, sticky noise, like some evil and unclean kind of sucking. His mind was excited to a fever. For some reason it made him think of what he had seen upstairs. Good God! What strange dream-world, not of this earth, had he stumbled into? He dared not move backward or forward. He stood there shaking at the black curve of the boxed-in staircase. Every small detail of the scene burned itself into his brain. There were the sounds and the feeling of dreadful waiting. There was the darkness and the steepness of the narrow steps. And, merciful Heaven, there was the faint but clear glow of all the woodwork he could see. The steps, the sides, the bare laths and the beams were all glowing.

Then Ammi's horse outside gave a wild whinny. At once there followed a clatter that told of a wild runaway. In another moment the horse and buggy were out of hearing. The frightened man was left on the dark stairs to guess what had sent them away. But that was not all. There had been another sound out there. It was a kind of liquid splash. Water. It must have been the well. He had left Hero untied near it. A buggy wheel must have brushed the stone rim and knocked a stone in. And still the pale light glowed in that horribly ancient woodwork. God, how old the house was! Most of it was built before 1700.

Now a weak scratching on the floor downstairs sounded clearly. Ammi held tighter the heavy stick he had picked up in the attic for some reason. Slowly he found his courage. He finished going down the stairs and walked boldly toward the kitchen. But he did not get there, because what he was looking for was no longer there. It had come to meet him, and it was still alive in a way. Perhaps it had crawled, or perhaps some outside force had dragged it. Ammi could not say. But the death had been at it. Everything had happened in the last half-hour. Yet the collapse, the greying and the breaking apart were already far advanced. It was horribly brittle, and dry pieces were flaking off. Ammi could not touch it. He looked in horror at the twisted copy of what had been a face.

"What was it, Nahum—what was it?" he whispered.

The split, swollen lips were just able to crackle out a final answer.

"Nothing ... nothing ... the colour ... it burns ... cold and wet, but it burns ... it lived in the well ... I saw it ... a kind of smoke ... just like the flowers last spring ... the well shone at night ... Thad and Merwin and Zenas ... everything alive ... sucking the life out of everything ... in that stone ... it must have come in that stone ... poisoned the whole place ... don't know what it wants ... that round thing the college men dug out of the stone ... they smashed it ... it was that same colour ... just the same, like the flowers and plants ... must have been more of them ... seeds ... seeds ... they grew ... I saw it the first time this week ... it must have got strong on Zenas ... he was a big boy, full of life ... it beats down your mind and then gets you ... burns you up ... in the well water ... you were right about that ... evil water ... Zenas never came back from the well ... can't get away ... it draws you ... you know something's coming, but it's no use ... I saw it time and again after Zenas was taken ... where's Nabby, Ammi? ... my head's no good ... don't know how long since I fed her ... it'll get her if we aren't careful ... just a colour ... her face is getting that colour sometimes towards night ... and it burns and sucks ... it came from some place where things are not as they are here ... one of those professors said so ... he was right ... look out, Ammi, it'll do something more ... it sucks the life out ..."

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

When Ammi reached his house, the horses and buggy were already there. They had arrived before him and had made his wife terribly worried. He calmed her without explaining anything. Then he set out at once for Arkham. He told the authorities that the Gardner family was no more. He gave no details. He only told them about the deaths of Nahum and his wife Nabby. The death of Thaddeus was already known. He said that the cause seemed to be the same strange illness that had killed the farm animals. He also said that Merwin and Zenas had disappeared. There were a lot of questions at the police station. In the end Ammi was forced to take three officers to the Gardner farm. The coroner, the medical examiner and the veterinary who had treated the sick animals went too. Ammi went very much against his will. The afternoon was getting late, and he feared night falling over that cursed 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. They arrived at the diseased farmhouse at about four o'clock. The officers were used to terrible sights. But not one of them was unmoved by what they found in the attic. The same was true of what lay under the red checked tablecloth on the floor below. The whole farm, with its grey, empty land, looked terrible enough. But those two crumbling objects were beyond all limits. No one could look at them for long. Even the medical examiner admitted that there was very little to examine. Of course, samples could be analysed, so he got busy collecting them. Later the two phials of dust were taken to the college laboratory. There something very strange happened. Under the spectroscope both samples gave an unknown spectrum. Many of its strange bands were exactly like those of the strange meteor the year before. The samples lost this property within a month. After that the dust was made up mainly of alkaline phosphates and carbonates.

Ammi would not have told the men about the well if he had thought they would do something at once. It was getting toward sunset, and he wanted to get away. But he could not help looking nervously at the stone rim by the great well-sweep. Then a detective questioned him. Ammi admitted that Nahum had feared something down there. He had feared it so much that he had never even thought of searching it for Merwin or Zenas. After that, the men had to empty and explore the well immediately. So Ammi had to wait, shaking, while they pulled up pail after pail of stinking water. They threw it onto the soaking ground outside. The men sniffed the water in disgust. Toward the end they held their noses against the horrible smell they were uncovering. The job did not take as long as they had feared, because the water was extremely low. There is no need to say too exactly what they found. Merwin and Zenas were both there, in part, although what was left was mainly bones. There were also a small deer and a large dog in about the same state. And there were many bones of smaller animals. The ooze and slime at the bottom seemed strangely full of holes and bubbling. One man went down on hand-holds with a long pole. He found that he could push the wooden pole to any depth in the mud. It never hit anything solid.

Twilight had now fallen, and lanterns were brought from the house. It was clear that nothing more could be learned from the well. So everyone went inside and talked in the ancient sitting-room. Outside, the changing light of a ghostly half-moon fell weakly on the grey, empty land. The men were honestly puzzled by the whole case. They could find nothing that clearly linked all the facts. There were the strange plants and the unknown disease of the animals and the people. And there were the mysterious deaths of Merwin and Zenas in the bad well. It is true that they had heard the usual country talk. But they could not believe that anything against natural law had happened. No doubt the meteor had poisoned the soil. But the people and animals had eaten nothing grown in that soil, so their illness was another matter. Was it the well water? Very possibly. It might be a good idea to analyse it. But what strange madness could have made both boys jump into the well? Their deeds were so similar. And the remains showed that both had suffered from the grey, brittle death. Why was everything so grey and brittle?

The coroner was sitting near a window that looked over the yard. He was the first to notice the glow around the well. Night had fully come. All the horrible grounds seemed faintly bright, and the weak moonlight could not explain it. But this new glow was something clear and separate. It seemed to shoot up from the black hole like a softened beam from a searchlight. It gave dull reflections in the little pools on the ground, where the well water had been poured out. It had a very queer colour. All the men crowded round the window, and Ammi gave a violent start. To him, the colour of this strange, horrible beam was not unfamiliar. He had seen that colour before, and he was afraid to think what it might mean. He had seen it in the nasty brittle globule in that meteorite two summers ago. He had seen it in the crazy plants of the spring. And he thought he had seen it for an instant that very morning. It had been against the small barred window of that terrible attic room, where nameless things had happened. It had flashed there for a second. Then a damp, hateful current of vapour had brushed past him. And then poor Nahum had been taken by something of that colour. Nahum had said so at the end. He had 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 pouring out into the night a pale, evil beam of the same devilish colour.

It shows how alert Ammi's mind was. Even at that tense moment, he puzzled over a point that was really scientific. He could not help wondering about one thing. He had seen a vapour in the daytime, against a window that opened onto the morning sky. Now he saw a glowing mist at night, against the black and blasted land. How could both give him the same impression? It was not right. It was against Nature. He thought of those terrible last words of his dying friend. "It came from some place where things are not as they are here ... one of those professors said so ..."

All three horses outside were tied to a pair of dried-up saplings by the road. Now they were neighing and stamping wildly. The wagon driver started for the door to do something. But Ammi laid a shaking hand on his shoulder.

"Don't go out there," he whispered. "There's more to this than we know. Nahum said something lived in the well that sucks your life out. He said it must be something grown from a round ball. It was like the one we all saw in the meteor stone that fell in June of last year. It sucks and burns, he said. And it's just a cloud of colour, like that light out there now. You can hardly see it, and you can't tell what it is. Nahum thought it feeds on everything living and gets stronger all the time. He said he saw it this last week. It must be something from far away in the sky. That's what the college men said last year about the meteor stone. The way it's made and the way it works is not like anything in God's world. It's something from beyond."

So the men stopped, unsure what to do. The light from the well grew stronger. The tied horses stamped and whinnied more and more wildly. It was truly an awful moment. There was terror in that ancient, cursed house itself. Four horrible sets of remains lay in the woodshed behind. Two were from the house and two from the well. And in front, that beam of unknown and evil rainbow light rose from the slimy depths. Ammi had stopped the driver on impulse. He forgot that he himself had not been hurt when the coloured vapour brushed him in the attic room. But perhaps it was just as well that he acted as he did. No one will ever know what was out there that night. So far the evil thing from beyond had not hurt any human whose mind was strong and healthy. Still, no one can say what it might have done at that last moment. Its strength seemed greater now. And it would soon show special signs of purpose under the half-cloudy, moonlit sky.

Suddenly one of the detectives at the window gave a short, sharp gasp. The others looked at him. Then they quickly followed his gaze upward. His eyes had been wandering without purpose, and now they had suddenly stopped at one point. There was no need for words. What country gossip had argued about could no longer be argued. Later every man in that group agreed on one thing, in whispers. And it is because of this that the strange days are never talked about in Arkham. I must first explain that there was no wind at that hour of the evening. A wind did come up not long afterwards, but there was none at all then. Even the dry tips of the remaining hedge-mustard, grey and diseased, did not move. The fringe on the roof of the democrat-wagon did not move either. And yet, in that tense, godless calm, the high bare branches of all the trees in the yard were moving. They were twitching sickly, in sudden jerks. They clawed madly at the moonlit clouds, as if they were having a fit. They scratched uselessly at the poisonous air. It was as if some bodiless line was jerking them. That line seemed to connect them with horrors below the black roots. Those horrors were twisting and struggling under the ground.

Not a man breathed for several seconds. Then a darker cloud passed over the moon. For a moment the outline of the grasping branches disappeared. At this there was a general cry. It was muffled with awe, but it was rough and almost the same from every throat. The terror had not gone away with the outline. In a fearful moment of deeper darkness, the watchers saw something at the height of the treetops. A thousand tiny points of faint, evil light were wriggling there. They sat on the tip of every branch, like St. Elmo's fire. They were like the flames that came down on the apostles' heads at Pentecost. It was a horrible group of unnatural lights. It was like a swarm of fireflies that had fed on dead bodies until they were full. They seemed to dance hellish dances over a cursed marsh. And their colour was that same nameless intruder that Ammi had learned to recognise and fear. All the while the beam from the well was getting brighter and brighter. The men stood close together. They felt a sense of doom and wrongness far greater than any picture their minds could form. It was no longer *shining* out; it was *pouring* out. As the shapeless stream of unplaceable colour left the well, it seemed to flow straight into the sky.

The veterinary was shaking. He walked to the front door and dropped the heavy extra bar across it. Ammi shook just as much. He wanted to show the others the growing light of the trees. But he could not control his voice, so he had to pull at them and point. The neighing and stamping of the horses had become truly terrible. But not one person in that old house would have gone out for any reward on earth. Minute by minute the shining of the trees grew stronger. Their restless branches seemed to stretch more and more straight upward. The wood of the well-sweep was shining now. Soon a policeman silently pointed to some wooden sheds and beehives near the stone wall on the west. They were starting to shine too. But so far the visitors' tied-up vehicles did not seem to be affected. Then there was a wild noise and a clopping of hooves in the road. Ammi put out the lamp so that they could see better. Then they realised what had happened. The pair of terrified grey horses had broken their sapling and run off with the democrat-wagon.

The shock loosened several tongues, and embarrassed whispers were exchanged.

"It spreads on everything organic that's been around here," the medical examiner said quietly.

No one answered. But the man who had been down in the well hinted at something. He thought his long pole must have stirred up something that could not be touched.

"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 was still stamping and screaming deafeningly in the road outside. It nearly drowned its owner's weak, shaking voice as he quietly spoke his formless thoughts.

"It came from that stone ... it grew down there ... it got everything living ... it fed itself on them, mind and body ... Thad and Merwin, Zenas and Nabby ... Nahum was the last ... they all drank the water ... it got strong on them ... it came from beyond, where things are not like they are here ... now it's going home ..."

At this point the column of unknown colour suddenly flared stronger. It began to weave itself into strange suggestions of shape. Later each man described those shapes differently. Then poor tied-up Hero made a sound. No man before or since has ever heard such a sound from a horse. Everyone in that low sitting-room covered his ears. Ammi turned away from the window, filled with horror and sickness. Words cannot describe it. When Ammi looked out again, the poor animal lay curled up and still on the moonlit ground. It lay between the broken shafts of the buggy. That was the last of Hero until they buried him the next day.

But this was no time to mourn. Almost at that moment a detective silently pointed to something terrible in the room with them. Now that the lamp was out, they could clearly see a faint glow. It had begun to fill the whole room. It glowed on the broad-planked floor where the rag carpet left it bare. It shimmered over the frames of the small-paned windows. It ran up and down the bare corner-posts. It sparkled around the shelf and mantel. It spread into the doors and the furniture themselves. Every minute it grew stronger. At last it was very clear 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 if in a dream. They did not dare to look back until they were far away on the high ground. They were glad of the path, because they could not have gone the front way, past that well. It was bad enough to pass the glowing barn and sheds. It was bad enough to pass those shining orchard trees, with their twisted, devilish shapes. 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. From there they had to feel their way blindly to the open meadows.

They looked back toward the valley and the distant Gardner place at the bottom. There they saw a fearful sight. The whole farm was shining with the horrible, unknown mix of colour. The trees and buildings were shining. Even the grass and plants that had not yet fully turned to deadly grey brittleness were shining. All the branches were stretching toward the sky. Their tips were burning with tongues of foul flame. Soft, flickering streams of the same horrible fire were creeping along the ridgepoles of the house, barn and sheds. It was a scene from a vision of Fuseli. Over everything else ruled that wild, shapeless light. It was a strange rainbow without size or shape, made of secret poison from the well. It was boiling, feeling, lapping, reaching, sparkling, straining and evilly bubbling. Its colour came from beyond the stars, and no one could recognise it.

Then, without warning, the horrible thing shot straight up toward the sky like a rocket or meteor. It left no trail behind it. It disappeared through a round and strangely regular hole in the clouds. No man had time to gasp or cry out. No one who watched can ever forget that sight. Ammi stared blankly at the stars of Cygnus, with Deneb shining above the others. There the unknown colour had melted into the Milky Way. But the next moment his eyes were called quickly back to earth by a crackling in the valley. It was just that. It was only a wooden ripping and crackling. It was not an explosion, as so many of the others swore. Yet the result was the same. In one feverish instant, full of changing colours, something burst up from that doomed and cursed farm. It was a shining, bursting disaster of unnatural sparks and matter. It blurred the eyes of the few who saw it. It sent up to the highest point of the sky a bombarding cloudburst of coloured, fantastic pieces. Our universe must refuse to own such things. The men watched the pieces through the clouds, which were quickly closing again. The pieces followed the great sick thing that had vanished. In another second they had vanished too. Behind and below there was only darkness, and the men did not dare to go back there. All around them a wind was rising. It seemed to sweep down in black, freezing gusts from the space between the stars. It shrieked and howled. It whipped the fields and the twisted woods in a mad fury from beyond the world. Soon the shaking men realised that it would be no use waiting for the moon. It would not show them what was left down there at Nahum's.

The seven shaking men were too full of awe even to suggest any theories. They walked heavily back toward Arkham by the north road. Ammi was worse than the others. He begged them to take him into his own kitchen instead of going straight on to town. He did not want to cross the dead, wind-whipped woods alone to his home on the main road. He had had an extra shock that the others were spared. It crushed him forever with a dark fear, and for many years he did not dare even to mention it. The other watchers on that stormy hill had calmly turned their faces toward the road. But Ammi had looked back for an instant at the dark valley. Until so recently it had sheltered his unlucky friend. And from that stricken, far-away spot he had seen something weakly rise. Then it sank down again onto 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 sky. Ammi recognised that colour. He knew that this last weak remnant must still be hiding down there in the well. And because of this, 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. He will be glad when the new reservoir covers it. I shall be glad too. 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 again.

Three of the men who had been with Ammi went back the next morning. They wanted to see the ruins by daylight, but there were no real ruins. There were only the bricks of the chimney and the stones of the cellar. There was some mineral and metal rubbish here and there. And there was the rim of that terribly evil well. Ammi's dead horse was still there, and they pulled it away and buried it. They soon returned the buggy to him. Apart from these, everything that had ever been alive had gone. Five strange, ghostly acres of dusty grey desert remained. Nothing has ever grown there since. It still lies open to the sky like a great spot eaten by acid in the woods and fields. A few people have dared to look at it, in spite of the country stories. They have named it "the blasted heath."

The country stories are queer. They might be even queerer if city men and college chemists became interested enough. They could analyse the water from that unused well. Or they could analyse the grey dust that no wind ever seems to blow away. Botanists ought to study the small, sick plants at the edges of that spot too. They might explain the country belief that the blight is spreading. People say it spreads little by little, perhaps an inch a year. They say the colour of the plants nearby is not quite right in the spring. They say wild animals leave queer prints in the light winter snow. Snow never seems quite as heavy on the blasted heath as it is elsewhere. Horses grow nervous in the silent valley—the few horses that are left in this motor age. And hunters cannot trust their dogs too near the patch of greyish dust.

They say the effects on the mind are very bad too. Many people went queer in the years after Nahum was taken. And they always lacked the power to get away. Then the stronger-minded people all left the area. Only the foreigners tried to live in the falling-down old farmhouses. But they could not stay. Sometimes one wonders what their wild, weird stories of whispered magic have taught them. Perhaps they understand something that we do not. They say their dreams at night are very horrible in that strange, ugly country. And surely the very look of that dark land is enough to stir a sick imagination. No traveller has ever escaped a feeling of strangeness in those deep valleys. Artists shiver as they paint the thick woods. Their mystery is as much for the spirit as for the eye. I myself wonder about the feeling I had on my one lone walk, before Ammi told me his tale. When twilight came I had vaguely wished some clouds would gather. A strange fear of the deep, empty sky above had moved slowly into my soul.

Do not ask me for my opinion. I do not know—that is all. There was no one but Ammi to ask. Arkham people will not talk about the strange days. And all three professors who saw the meteorite and its coloured globule are dead. There were other globules—you can be sure of that. One must have fed itself and escaped. And probably there was another one that was too late. No doubt it is still down the well. I know there was something wrong with the sunlight I saw above that unhealthy edge. The country people say the blight creeps an inch a year. So perhaps there is still some kind of growth or feeding, even now. But whatever young demon is there, it must be tied to something. Otherwise 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. People say they shine and move at night, as they should not.

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 universe. It did not come from the worlds and suns that shine in the telescopes of our observatories. It did not come from those that appear on their photographic plates. It was not a breath from the skies whose movements and sizes our astronomers measure. Nor was it from skies that they think too large to measure. It was just a colour out of space. It was a frightening messenger from shapeless regions of infinity, beyond all Nature as we know it. Those regions stun the brain just by existing. They open black gulfs outside the universe before our wild eyes, and they numb us.

I very much doubt that Ammi lied to me on purpose. And I do not think his tale was all madness, as the townspeople had warned me. Something terrible came to the hills and valleys on that meteor. And something terrible still remains, though I do not know how much. 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 secret and slow. Why has he never been able to move away? How clearly he remembered Nahum's dying words! "Can't get away—it draws you—you know something's coming, but it's no use—" Ammi is such a good old man. When the reservoir workers start their work, I must write to the chief engineer. I must ask him to keep a careful watch on Ammi. I would hate to think of him as the grey, twisted, brittle monster that troubles my sleep more and more.

### Glossary

- **glen**: a narrow, deep valley between hills
- **gambrel roof**: a roof with two slopes on each side, the lower slope steeper than the upper one
- **blasted heath**: open, empty land that has been destroyed, as if by lightning or a curse
- **survey**: to measure and map land
- **reservoir**: a large lake made by people to store water for a town
- **Salvator Rosa**: an Italian painter of wild, dark landscapes
- **well-sweep**: a long wooden pole over a well, used to lift the bucket
- **pail**: a bucket
- **silicon**: a natural material that glass and sand are made of
- **spectroscope**: an instrument that splits light into its colours
- **crucible**: a small pot that can be heated to very high temperatures
- **globule**: a small round ball
- **skunk-cabbage**: a wild plant with big leaves that grows in wet ground and smells bad
- **saxifrage**: a small wild flower that comes out early in spring
- **phial**: a small glass bottle
- **botanist**: a scientist who studies plants
- **sap**: the liquid inside a tree or plant
- **asylum**: (old word) a hospital for people with mental illness
- **attic**: the room or space under the roof of a house
- **stampede**: when animals suddenly run wildly in fear
- **hayloft**: the upper part of a barn where dry grass is kept
- **poultry**: chickens and other farm birds
- **veterinary**: a doctor for animals; a vet
- **judgment**: here, a punishment from God
- **gable**: the top part of a wall, shaped like a triangle, under the ends of a roof
- **vapour**: a thin cloud of gas or mist
- **laths**: thin strips of wood inside walls and ceilings
- **stolid**: calm and not easily excited; not very imaginative
- **democrat-wagon**: a light, open farm wagon with seats, pulled by horses
- **coroner**: an official who finds out why a person died
- **medical examiner**: a doctor who examines dead bodies for the police
- **ooze**: soft, wet mud
- **sapling**: a young tree
- **hedge-mustard**: a wild plant, a kind of weed, that grows by roads and walls
- **St. Elmo's fire**: a natural glow sometimes seen at the tops of ships' masts in storms
- **Pentecost**: a Christian holy day; in the Bible story, flames came down on the heads of the apostles
- **ridgepole**: the long wooden beam along the top of a roof
- **Fuseli**: a painter who was famous for pictures of nightmares
- **Cygnus**: a group of stars in the night sky; Deneb is its brightest star
- **blight**: a disease that makes plants die; something that spoils a place