# The Shunned House (B1 edition)

*H. P. Lovecraft*

## I.

Even in the greatest horrors, there is nearly always some irony. Sometimes the irony is part of the events themselves. Sometimes it lies only in where the events happen, and to which people. A case in the old city of Providence is a perfect example of the second kind.

In the late 1840s, Edgar Allan Poe often stayed in Providence. He was trying to win the love of the gifted poet Mrs. Whitman, but he did not succeed. Poe usually stayed at the Mansion House in Benefit Street. This was the old Golden Ball Inn with a new name. Washington, Jefferson and Lafayette had all stayed under its roof. Poe's favorite walk went north along the same street. It took him to Mrs. Whitman's home and to the churchyard of St. John's on the hillside nearby. That churchyard was full of hidden gravestones from the eighteenth century, and they fascinated him strangely.

Now, this is the irony. On this walk, which he made so many times, the world's greatest master of terror and strangeness had to pass a certain house. It stood on the eastern side of the street. It was a dirty, old-fashioned building on the steep side of the hill. It had a big, untidy yard from a time when the area was partly open country. Poe never seems to have written or spoken about it. There is no sign that he even noticed it. And yet two people know certain things about that house. To them, it is as horrible as the wildest story of the genius who walked past it without knowing. It may be even more horrible. It stands there like a cold, grinning symbol of everything too hideous to put into words.

The house was, and still is, the kind of place that curious people notice. At first it was a farm, or half a farm. It was built in the usual New England colonial style of the middle eighteenth century. It was the wealthy kind, with a pointed roof, two floors and an attic without dormer windows. It had a Georgian doorway and wooden panelling inside, as the fashion of that time demanded. The house faced south. One gable end was buried up to the lower windows in the hill, which rose to the east. The other end was open down to its foundations, on the side toward the street.

The house was built more than a century and a half ago. Before that, the road in that area had been levelled and straightened. Benefit Street was first called Back Street. It began as a lane that wound between the graveyards of the first settlers. It was straightened only when the bodies were moved to the North Burial Ground. After that, it was decent to cut the road through the old family graves.

At first, the western wall stood about twenty feet up a steep lawn from the road. But around the time of the Revolution, the street was made wider. This cut away most of the space between the house and the road. The foundations were left open, so a brick wall had to be built for the basement. Now the deep cellar faced the street. It had a door and one window above the ground, close to the new road. A century ago a sidewalk was made, and the last of that space disappeared. So on his walks, Poe must have seen only a tall wall of dull gray brick. It rose straight up from the edge of the sidewalk. Ten feet above it sat the old house itself, covered with wooden shingles.

The farm-like land went far back up the hill, almost to Wheaton Street. The ground south of the house, beside Benefit Street, was much higher than the sidewalk. It formed a terrace with a high wall of damp, mossy stone. A steep flight of narrow steps was cut into this wall. The steps went in between walls like the sides of a canyon. At the top was a poor, patchy lawn with wet brick paths and neglected gardens. There were broken cement urns there. There were rusty kettles that had fallen from tripods of knotty sticks, and other old things like that. Among them stood the weather-beaten front door. Above it was a broken fanlight. Beside it were rotting Ionic pilasters, and on top was a triangular pediment full of worm holes.

When I was young, I heard only one thing about the shunned house. People died there in frighteningly large numbers. I was told that this was why the first owners moved out, about twenty years after they built it. The place was clearly unhealthy. Perhaps it was the damp and the fungi in the cellar, or the sickly smell everywhere. Perhaps it was the cold drafts in the halls, or the water from the well and the pump. These things were bad enough. The people I knew believed in nothing more than these. Much later I read the notebooks of my uncle, Doctor Elihu Whipple, who loved and studied old things. Only they showed me darker, vaguer ideas. Old servants and poor, simple people had passed these ideas on quietly among themselves. The ideas never travelled far. Most were forgotten when Providence grew into a big city, full of people who came and went.

The general truth is that the serious, solid people of the town never thought the house was really "haunted." There were no well-known stories of rattling chains, cold winds, lights going out, or faces at the window. The most extreme people sometimes said the house was "unlucky." But even they went no further than that. What nobody could deny was that a terrible number of people died there. Or, to be more exact, they *had* died there. Over sixty years ago some strange things happened. After that, nobody would rent the building, so it stood empty. The people who died there were not all killed suddenly by one single cause. It seemed, rather, that their strength was slowly and secretly drained away. So each one died sooner from whatever weakness he naturally had. Those who did not die showed, more or less, a kind of anemia or consumption. Sometimes their minds became weaker too. All this said nothing good about the health of the building. I must add that the houses near it seemed completely free from this harmful quality.

I knew all this before I asked my uncle again and again about the house. In the end he showed me his notes, and these led us both into our hideous investigation. In my childhood the shunned house was empty. In the high terraced yard there were bare, twisted, terrible old trees. There was long grass of a strange, pale color, and weeds with shapes like a nightmare. Birds never stayed there. We boys used to run all over the place. I still remember how frightened I was. I feared the sick strangeness of those evil plants. I also feared the unearthly feeling and the smell of the falling-down house. Its front door was not locked, and we often went inside to frighten ourselves.

Most of the small-paned windows were broken. A feeling of loneliness and ruin hung over everything. The panelling was loose, and the shutters inside were shaky. The wallpaper was peeling and the plaster was falling. The stairs were unsafe, and a few pieces of broken furniture still remained. The dust and cobwebs made it all more frightening. Only a very brave boy would choose to climb the ladder to the attic. It was a huge, long space under the roof beams. Only small, blinking windows in the gable ends gave it light. It was full of old chests, chairs and spinning-wheels, all piled together. Endless years of dust and cobwebs had covered them. They had turned them into monstrous shapes, like things from hell.

But the attic was not the most terrible part of the house. The damp, wet cellar pushed us away more strongly than anything else. This was strange, because on the street side it was fully above the ground. Only a thin door and a brick wall with a window stood between it and the busy sidewalk. We hardly knew what to do about it. Should we visit it, because it drew us with a ghostly power? Or should we avoid it, to save our souls and our minds? For one thing, the bad smell of the house was strongest there. For another, we did not like the white fungi that sometimes grew from the hard earth floor in rainy summers. These fungi were strangely like the plants in the yard outside. Their shapes were truly horrible. They were ugly copies of toadstools and Indian-pipes. We had never seen anything like them anywhere else. They rotted quickly, and at one stage they glowed a little in the dark. So people passing at night sometimes talked of "witch-fires." They said these fires glowed behind the broken glass of the stinking windows.

We never went into this cellar at night, not even on our wildest Halloween evenings. But on some of our daytime visits we could see the glow, especially when the day was dark and wet. We also often thought we saw something else, something less clear. It was a very strange thing, but at most it only suggested something. I mean a sort of cloudy, whitish pattern on the dirt floor. It was a vague, changing layer of mold or niter. We sometimes thought we could see it among the few fungi near the huge fireplace of the old basement kitchen. Now and then we felt that this patch looked uncannily like a human figure, doubled up. But usually there was no such likeness. And often there was no white layer at all.

One rainy afternoon this strange picture seemed unusually strong. I also thought I saw a thin, yellowish, shimmering vapor. It seemed to rise from the white pattern toward the wide, open fireplace. Afterwards I told my uncle about it. He smiled at my odd idea. But his smile seemed to hold some memory. Later I heard that some of the wild old tales of the common people had a similar idea. These tales also spoke of ghoulish, wolfish shapes made by the smoke from the great chimney. And they spoke of strange shapes made by certain twisting tree-roots. These roots pushed their way into the cellar between the loose stones of the foundations.

### Glossary

- **irony**: a strange, unexpected situation, often the opposite of what you would expect
- **shunned**: avoided by people; nobody wants to go there
- **gable**: the triangular top part of a wall under a pointed roof
- **terrace**: a flat, raised area of ground
- **fanlight**: a half-round window above a door
- **pilasters**: flat columns built into a wall, used as decoration
- **pediment**: a triangular piece of stone or wood above a door
- **fungi**: plant-like living things such as mushrooms or mold; one is a "fungus"
- **anemia**: a sickness where the blood is weak, so a person is pale and tired
- **consumption**: an old name for tuberculosis, a lung disease that makes people weak and thin
- **niter**: a white salty powder that forms on damp walls and floors
- **vapor**: a thin cloud of gas or mist
- **ghoulish**: like an evil spirit that eats dead bodies; horrible

## II.

My uncle had collected notes and facts about the shunned house. He did not show them to me until I was an adult. Doctor Whipple was a sane, careful doctor of the old school. He was interested in the place, but he did not want to lead young minds toward abnormal things. His own view was simple. He thought the building and its location were very unhealthy, and that was all. In his opinion it had nothing to do with anything abnormal. But he understood one thing well. The strange, picturesque side of the house interested him. In a boy's imagination, that same strangeness would turn into all kinds of horrible fantasies.

The doctor never married. He was a white-haired, clean-shaven, old-fashioned gentleman. He was also a well-known local historian. He had often argued in public with people who defended old traditions. Among them were Sidney S. Rider and Thomas W. Bicknell. He lived with one man-servant in an old Georgian house. It had a door-knocker and steps with iron railings. It seemed to balance strangely on the steep slope of North Court Street. Beside it stood the old brick court house and colony house. In that building his grandfather had voted on May 4, 1776, for the independence of the Rhode Island Colony. This grandfather was a cousin of the famous privateersman Captain Whipple. In 1772 Captain Whipple had burnt His Majesty's armed schooner, the *Gaspee*.

My uncle's library was damp and had a low ceiling. It had musty white panelling and a heavy carved shelf above the fireplace. Its small-paned windows were shaded by vines. Around him in that room were the old objects and records of his family. Among them were many uncertain mentions of the shunned house in Benefit Street. That unhealthy place is not far away. Benefit Street runs like a ledge just above the court house. It follows the steep hill that the first settlement climbed.

In the end I kept asking him, and I was growing older. So at last my uncle gave me the knowledge he had kept for so long. What I saw was a strange record. Some of it was long and full of numbers. Some of it was dull lists of family members and their children. But through all of it ran a dark, stubborn thread of horror. There was an evil in it that seemed more than natural. It impressed me even more than it had impressed the good doctor. Separate events fitted together in an uncanny way. Small details that seemed unimportant were full of hideous possibilities. A new and burning curiosity grew in me. Next to it, my curiosity as a boy had been weak and unformed.

This first discovery led to long, careful research. In the end it led to that terrible search which was a disaster for me and my family. In the last stage my uncle insisted on joining the search I had begun. And after a certain night in that house, he did not come away with me. I am lonely without that gentle soul. His long life was filled only with honor, virtue, good taste, kindness and learning. I have put up a marble urn in his memory in St. John's churchyard. This is the place that Poe loved. It is a hidden grove of giant willows on the hill. There, tombs and gravestones crowd quietly together. They lie between the old gray church and the houses and walls of Benefit Street.

The history of the house began among a great many dates. At first it showed nothing evil about the building. It showed nothing evil about the rich and honorable family who built it, either. Yet from the very start there was a sign of disaster. Soon this sign grew in meaning and seemed to warn of worse things. My uncle had put his record together carefully. It began with the building of the house in 1763. From there it followed the story in unusual detail.

It seems that the first people to live in the shunned house were William Harris and his wife, Rhoby Dexter. They had four children. Elkanah was born in 1755, Abigail in 1757, William, Jr., in 1759, and Ruth in 1761. Harris was a rich merchant and seaman in the West India trade. He worked with the firm of Obadiah Brown and his nephews. Brown died in 1761, and a new firm took over, called Nicholas Brown & Company. This firm made Harris master of the brig *Prudence*. It was a ship of 120 tons, built in Providence. Because of this, he could at last build the new home he had wanted since his marriage.

He chose a part of the new and fashionable Back Street that had just been straightened. It ran along the side of the hill, above the crowded street of Cheapside. The place was everything he could wish for, and the house was worthy of it. It was the best house that a man of moderate money could build. Harris hurried to move in before the birth of a fifth child, which the family was expecting. That child, a boy, came in December. But he was still-born. And for a century and a half, no child was born alive in that house.

The next April, the children became sick. Abigail and Ruth died before the end of the month. Doctor Job Ives said the illness was some kind of childhood fever. Others said it was more like a simple wasting-away. In any case, it seemed to pass from person to person. In June, Hannah Bowen, one of the two servants, died of it. The other servant, Eli Lideason, always complained that he felt weak. He would have gone back to his father's farm in Rehoboth. But he suddenly fell in love with Mehitabel Pierce, who was hired to replace Hannah. So he stayed. He died the next year. It was a very sad year, because William Harris himself died too. He was already weak from the climate of Martinique. His work had kept him there for long periods during the ten years before.

Rhoby Harris, now a widow, never recovered from the shock of her husband's death. Two years later her first-born son, Elkanah, died. This was the last blow, and her mind broke. In 1768 she fell into a mild form of madness. From then on she was kept in the upper part of the house. Her older, unmarried sister, Mercy Dexter, moved in to run the family. Mercy was a plain, big-boned woman of great strength. But from the time she arrived, her health clearly became worse. She was very loyal to her unhappy sister. She especially loved her only living nephew, William. He had been a strong baby, but now he was a sickly, thin boy.

In that same year the servant Mehitabel died. The other servant, Preserved Smith, left without giving any clear reason. At least, he only told some wild stories and complained that he did not like the smell of the place. For a time Mercy could find no more servants. The seven deaths and the case of madness, all within five years, had started rumors at people's firesides. Later these rumors became very strange indeed. In the end, however, Mercy found new servants from outside the town. One was Ann White, a gloomy woman from part of North Kingstown. That part is now the separate township of Exeter. The other was a capable man from Boston named Zenas Low.

It was Ann White who first gave a clear shape to the dark gossip. Mercy should have known better than to hire anyone from the Nooseneck Hill country. That lonely backwoods area was then, as it is now, a home of the most disturbing superstitions. As recently as 1892, people in an Exeter community dug up a dead body. In a ceremony, they burnt its heart. They wanted to stop certain visits from the dead which, they said, harmed public health and peace. So you can imagine how people in that area thought in 1768. Ann talked far too much, and her talk did harm. Within a few months Mercy dismissed her. In her place Mercy hired Maria Robbins from Newport. Maria was a big, strong woman, an Amazon, faithful and friendly.

Meanwhile poor Rhoby Harris, in her madness, spoke out the most hideous dreams and fantasies. At times her screams became too terrible to bear. For long periods she shrieked out horrors. Because of this, her son had to live for a while with his cousin, Peleg Harris. Peleg lived in Presbyterian Lane, near the new college building. The boy always seemed to get better after these visits. If Mercy had been as wise as she was kind, she would have let him live with Peleg for good.

Tradition does not like to say exactly what Mrs. Harris cried out when she was violent. Or rather, it tells such wild stories that nobody can believe them. They are simply too absurd. It certainly sounds absurd that she shouted for hours in French. She had learned only the basics of that language. Yet she shouted in a rough, everyday kind of French. It sounds just as absurd that she complained wildly about a staring thing. She was alone and guarded, but she said this thing bit and chewed at her. In 1772 the servant Zenas died. When Mrs. Harris heard about it, she laughed with a shocking delight. This was completely unlike her. The next year she died herself. She was buried in the North Burial Ground, beside her husband.

In 1775 trouble began with Great Britain. William Harris was only sixteen and not strong. Still, he managed to join the Army of Observation under General Greene. From that time on, his health and his reputation grew steadily. In 1780 he was a captain in the Rhode Island forces in New Jersey, under Colonel Angell. There he met and married Phebe Hetfield of Elizabethtown. The next year he left the army with honor and brought her to Providence.

The young soldier's return was not completely happy. It is true that the house was still in good condition. The street had been widened, and its name had changed from Back Street to Benefit Street. But Mercy Dexter's body, once so strong, had decayed in a sad and strange way. Now she was a bent, pitiful figure, with a hollow voice and a disturbing paleness. The one servant who was left, Maria, shared these qualities to a strange degree. In the autumn of 1782 Phebe Harris gave birth to a still-born daughter. And on May 15 of the next year, Mercy Dexter died. Her life had been useful, strict and good.

William Harris was now fully sure that the house was deeply unhealthy. So he made plans to leave it and close it for ever. He found rooms for himself and his wife for a while at the newly opened Golden Ball Inn. He also arranged for a new and finer house to be built in Westminster Street. This was in the growing part of the town across the Great Bridge. There, in 1785, his son Dutee was born. The family lived there until business grew and pushed them out. Then they moved back across the river and over the hill to Angell Street. This was in the newer part of the East Side, where people had their homes. There, in 1876, the late Archer Harris built his mansion with its French-style roof. It was rich but ugly. William and Phebe both died in the yellow fever epidemic of 1797. Their son Dutee was brought up by his cousin Rathbone Harris, Peleg's son.

Rathbone was a practical man. William had wanted the Benefit Street house to stay empty, but Rathbone rented it out. He thought it was his duty to the boy in his care to make the most of all his property. He did not worry about the deaths and illnesses there. They made the tenants change very often. He did not worry about the growing dislike that people felt for the house, either. In 1804 the town council ordered him to fumigate the place with sulfur, tar and gum camphor. This was because of the much-discussed deaths of four people. They were probably caused by the fever epidemic, which was then growing weaker. The council said the place had a febrile smell. Rathbone probably felt only annoyed about it.

Dutee himself did not think much about the house. He grew up and became a privateersman. In the War of 1812 he served with honor on the *Vigilant* under Captain Cahoone. He came back unhurt and married in 1814. He became a father on a night that people still remember, September 23, 1815. That night a great storm drove the water of the bay over half the town. It carried a tall sloop far up Westminster Street. Its masts almost touched the windows of the Harris house. It was like a sign that the new boy, Welcome, was a seaman's son.

Welcome did not live longer than his father. He died a hero's death at Fredericksburg in 1862. Neither he nor his son Archer saw the shunned house as anything more than a nuisance. It was almost impossible to rent. They thought this was perhaps because of the musty, sickly smell of an old, neglected building. In fact, it was never rented again after a series of deaths that ended in 1861. The excitement of the war made people forget those deaths.

Carrington Harris is the last man of the Harris family line. He knew the house only as an empty, rather picturesque place with legends around it. Then I told him about my experience. He had planned to pull it down and build an apartment house there. But after he heard my story, he decided to keep it. He put in plumbing and rented it out. And so far he has had no trouble finding tenants. The horror has gone.

### Glossary

- **privateersman**: a sailor on a private armed ship that may attack enemy ships in war
- **schooner**: a kind of sailing ship
- **brig**: a kind of sailing ship with two masts
- **sloop**: a small sailing ship with one mast
- **still-born**: born dead
- **Amazon**: here, a tall, strong woman (a word of praise)
- **fumigate**: to fill a place with smoke or gas to kill disease
- **febrile**: like a fever; smelling or seeming like sickness with fever
- **urn**: a tall stone or metal vase, often a memorial for a dead person
- **tenants**: people who pay to live in a house that someone else owns

## III.

You can easily imagine how strongly the history of the Harrises affected me. In this long record I felt a lasting evil. It was beyond anything in nature that I had ever known. And it was clearly connected with the house, not with the family. My uncle had other material too, less well ordered. There were legends he had written down from the gossip of servants. There were cuttings from newspapers. There were copies of death certificates written by other doctors, and similar things. All this confirmed my feeling.

I cannot hope to give all of this material here. My uncle was a tireless antiquarian, and he was very deeply interested in the shunned house. But I can mention several main points. They deserve attention because they appear again and again, in many reports from many different sources. For example, almost all the servants agreed about one thing. They said that the fungous, bad-smelling *cellar* had by far the strongest evil influence in the house. Some servants, especially Ann White, would not use the cellar kitchen. And at least three clear legends told of strange shapes in that part of the house. Tree-roots and patches of mold there took shapes that were almost human, or like devils. These stories interested me deeply, because of what I had seen as a boy. But I felt that in each case their real meaning was hidden. People had added too many details from the usual local ghost stories.

Ann White came from Exeter and believed its superstitions. She spread the wildest story of all, but also the most consistent one. She said that one of those vampires must lie buried under the house. Vampires are the dead who keep the form of their bodies. They live on the blood or the breath of living people. Their hideous armies send out their hunting shapes or spirits at night. The grandmothers say there is only one way to destroy a vampire. You must dig it up and burn its heart. Or at least you must drive a stake through the heart. Ann kept stubbornly asking for a search under the cellar. This was one of the main reasons why she lost her job.

Her stories, however, had a wide audience. People believed them easily, because the house really did stand on land once used for graves. But for me, that fact was not the most interesting thing. What interested me was how well her stories fitted together with certain other things. First, there was the servant Preserved Smith. He had left the house before Ann came, and he had never heard of her. When he left, he complained that something "sucked his breath" at night. Second, there were the death certificates of the fever victims of 1804. Doctor Chad Hopkins had written them. They showed that all four dead people were strangely lacking in blood. Nobody could explain this. Third, there were the unclear parts of poor Rhoby Harris's ravings. In them she complained of the sharp teeth of a glassy-eyed presence. It was only half visible.

I am free from foolish superstition. Still, these things gave me a strange feeling. Two newspaper cuttings made this feeling even stronger. Both were about deaths in the shunned house, but they were written many years apart. One was from the *Providence Gazette and Country-Journal* of April 12, 1815. The other was from the *Daily Transcript and Chronicle* of October 27, 1845. Each one described a terribly gruesome detail, and it was remarkable that this detail was the same. In 1815 a gentle old lady named Stafford was dying. In 1845 a middle-aged schoolteacher named Eleazar Durfee was dying. In both cases, the dying person changed in a horrible way. Each one stared with glassy eyes and tried to bite the throat of the doctor.

But the last case was even more puzzling. It ended the renting of the house for good. There was a series of deaths from anemia. Before each death, the patient slowly went mad. In this madness, the patient would cunningly try to kill his relatives. He did this by cutting into their neck or wrist.

This was in 1860 and 1861. At that time my uncle had just started to work as a doctor. Before he left for the front, he heard a lot about these deaths from older doctors. The really unexplainable thing was the language of the victims. They were ignorant people, because by then nobody else would rent the smelly, shunned house. Yet they babbled curses in French. They could not possibly have studied that language in any serious way. It made people think of poor Rhoby Harris, almost a century before. It moved my uncle deeply. Some time after he came back from the war, he heard a first-hand account from Doctors Chase and Whitmarsh. After that, he began to collect historical facts about the house.

I could see that my uncle had thought deeply about the subject. He was glad of my own interest in it. I had an open mind and I understood him. So he could discuss things with me that other people would simply have laughed at. His imagination had not gone as far as mine. But he felt that the place was rare in what it could suggest to the imagination. He thought it was worth noting as an inspiration for stories of the grotesque and the macabre.

As for me, I wanted to treat the whole subject very seriously. At once I began to go over the evidence again. I also collected as much new evidence as I could. I talked many times with the old Archer Harris, who owned the house then. This was before his death in 1916. His unmarried sister Alice is still alive. From the two of them I got true confirmation of all the family facts my uncle had collected. But then I asked them what connection the house could have with France or its language. They told me honestly that they were as puzzled and ignorant as I was.

Archer knew nothing. Miss Harris could say only one thing. Her grandfather, Dutee Harris, had once heard of an old remark. It might have explained a little. The old seaman lived two years longer than his son Welcome, who died in battle. Dutee had not known the legend himself. But he remembered that his first nurse, the very old Maria Robbins, seemed to know something dark. It was something that might give a strange meaning to Rhoby Harris's French ravings. Maria had heard these ravings very often during the last days of that unlucky woman.

Maria had been at the shunned house from 1769 until the family left in 1783. She had seen Mercy Dexter die. Once she hinted to the child Dutee about something rather strange in Mercy's last moments. But he soon forgot all about it. He remembered only that it was something strange. And the granddaughter remembered even this much only with difficulty. She and her brother were not as interested in the house as Archer's son Carrington. He is the present owner, and I talked with him after my experience.

The Harris family had now told me everything they could. So I turned to the old town records and deeds. I worked harder at this than my uncle had when he sometimes did the same work. I wanted a full history of the land, from the first settlement in 1636. I even wanted to go back further, if I could find any Narragansett Indian legend about it.

At the start I found that the land had been part of a long strip called a home lot. It was first given to John Throckmorton. There were many similar strips. Each began at Town Street beside the river. Each ran up over the hill to a line close to modern Hope Street. Later, of course, the Throckmorton lot was divided into many smaller pieces. I worked very carefully to trace the part where Back Street, or Benefit Street, was later made. As people had said, it had been the Throckmorton graveyard. But I studied the records more carefully. Then I found that all the graves had been moved at an early date. They went to the North Burial Ground on the Pawtucket West Road.

Then, suddenly, I found something by a rare piece of luck. It was not in the main records, and I could easily have missed it. It made me very eager, because it fitted some of the strangest parts of the whole story. It was the record of a lease from 1697. A small piece of land was leased to an Etienne Roulet and his wife. At last the French element had appeared!

But that was not all. The name also brought up another, deeper horror from the darkest corners of my strange reading. I had read many strange and different books. I studied the old maps of the area with great excitement. They showed it as it had been before Back Street was cut through and partly straightened, between 1747 and 1758. I found what I had half expected. The shunned house now stood exactly where the Roulets had made their graveyard. It lay behind their cottage, which had one floor and an attic. And there was no record that any of those graves had ever been moved.

In fact, the document ended in great confusion. I had to search through both the Rhode Island Historical Society and Shepley Library. Then at last I found a local record that the name of Etienne Roulet would "unlock." In the end I did find something. It was vague, but its meaning was monstrous. At once I began to examine the cellar of the shunned house again. I studied it now with new, excited care.

It seemed that the Roulets had come in 1696 from East Greenwich, down the west shore of Narragansett Bay. They were Huguenots from Caude. Many people were against them before the Providence selectmen finally let them settle in the town. They had been unpopular in East Greenwich too. They had come there in 1686, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. People said the dislike was more than prejudice against their race and nation. It was also more than the quarrels about land between French and English settlers. Not even Governor Andros could stop those quarrels.

But the Roulets were very strong Protestants. Some people whispered that they were too strong. And they had clearly suffered when they were almost driven out of the village down the bay. The town fathers felt sorry for them. So the strangers were given a safe home here. Etienne Roulet was a dark-skinned man. He was not good at farming. He was better at reading strange books and drawing strange diagrams. He was given a job as a clerk in the warehouse at Pardon Tillinghast's wharf. It was far to the south, in Town Street. Later, however, there was some kind of riot. It was perhaps forty years later, after old Roulet had died. After that, nobody seemed to hear of the family again.

It seemed that people remembered the Roulets well for more than a century. They often talked about them. The Roulets had been an exciting event in the quiet life of a New England seaport. People talked most about Etienne's son Paul. He was a bad-tempered man. His strange behavior probably caused the riot that destroyed the family. Providence never shared the panics about witches that its Puritan neighbors had. But old women openly hinted things about Paul. They said he did not pray at the proper times. And they said he did not pray to the proper object.

There is no doubt that all this was the base of the legend that old Maria Robbins knew. How was it related to the French ravings of Rhoby Harris and other people in the shunned house? Only imagination or future discovery could say.

I wondered about the people who had known these legends. How many of them saw the extra link with horror that my wider reading had given me? It was a dark record from the history of horrible things. It tells of the creature *Jacques Roulet, of Caude*. In 1598 he was condemned to death as a demoniac. But afterwards the Paris parliament saved him from being burnt at the stake. Instead they shut him in a madhouse. He had been found in a wood, covered with blood and bits of flesh. This was soon after two wolves had killed a boy and torn him apart. One wolf was seen running away unhurt.

That is surely a pretty story to tell by the fire! And it had a strange meaning for the name and the place. But I decided that most of the gossips of Providence could not have known it. If they had known, the matching names would have caused some drastic and frightened action. Indeed, perhaps a few people did whisper about it. Perhaps that whispering caused the final riot that wiped the Roulets out of the town.

Now I visited the cursed place more and more often. I studied the unhealthy plants of the garden. I examined all the walls of the building. And I studied every inch of the earth floor of the cellar. In the end, with Carrington Harris's permission, I had a key made for an old door that nobody used. This door opened from the cellar straight onto Benefit Street. I wanted a quicker way out to the world outside. The dark stairs, the hall on the ground floor and the front door were too slow.

The cellar was where the unhealthy feeling was strongest. There I searched and poked during long afternoons. The sunlight came in weakly through the cobwebbed windows above the ground. The unlocked door gave me a warm feeling of safety. It put me only a few feet from the calm sidewalk outside. But my work brought me nothing new. There was only the same depressing mustiness, and faint hints of harmful smells. There were the same white shapes of niter on the floor. I imagine that many people walking past must have watched me curiously through the broken glass.

In the end my uncle suggested that I should try the place at night. So, one stormy midnight, I shone an electric torch over the moldy floor. I saw its uncanny shapes and its twisted, half-glowing fungi. The place had made me feel strangely low that evening. And I was almost ready for what I saw. Or thought I saw. Among the whitish deposits there was a very clear "huddled form." It was the shape I had suspected since I was a boy. It was astonishingly clear, clearer than ever before. And as I watched, I seemed to see something else again. It was the thin, yellowish, shimmering exhalation that had frightened me on that rainy afternoon so many years before.

It rose above the patch of mold by the fireplace, the patch shaped like a man. It was a faint, sickly vapor that almost glowed. It hung trembling in the damp air. As it did so, it seemed to form vague and shocking hints of a shape. Slowly it thinned into a misty decay. Then it went up into the blackness of the great chimney. It left a terrible smell behind it. It was truly horrible. To me it was even more horrible because of what I knew about the place. I refused to run away. I watched it fade. And as I watched it, I felt that it was watching me too. It watched me greedily, with eyes that I could imagine more than see.

I told my uncle about it, and he became very excited. He thought hard for a tense hour. Then he came to a firm and drastic decision. He weighed how important the matter was, and what our own connection to it meant. And he insisted that we should both test the horror of the house. If possible, we would destroy it. We would do this by keeping an aggressive vigil together, for one night or more. We would watch in that musty cellar, cursed by its fungi.

### Glossary

- **antiquarian**: a person who studies and collects old things and history
- **vampires**: in old stories, dead people who live on the blood or breath of living people
- **ravings**: wild, crazy talk
- **lease**: an agreement to rent land or a building
- **deeds**: legal papers that show who owns land
- **Huguenots**: French Protestants in the 1500s–1700s; many had to leave France
- **revocation of the Edict of Nantes**: the cancelling in 1685 of a French law that had protected the Huguenots
- **selectmen**: town leaders
- **demoniac**: a person believed to be controlled by a devil
- **riot**: violent fighting by an angry crowd
- **grotesque and the macabre**: strange, ugly and frightening things, often connected with death
- **vigil**: staying awake at night to watch

## IV.

On Wednesday, June 25, 1919, my uncle and I first told Carrington Harris properly about our plans. We did not tell him what we expected to find. Then we carried two camp chairs and a folding camp cot to the shunned house. We also took some scientific machines, which were heavier and more complicated. We placed all these things in the cellar during the day. We covered the windows with paper, and we planned to come back in the evening for our first vigil. We had locked the door from the cellar to the ground floor. We also had a key to the outside cellar door. So we could leave our expensive and delicate machines there for as many days as our vigils lasted. We had got them secretly and at great cost. Our plan was to sit up together until very late. Then we would watch one at a time until dawn, in turns of two hours. I would watch first, and then my uncle. The one who was not watching would rest on the cot.

My uncle got the instruments from the laboratories of Brown University and the Cranston Street Armory. He also took charge of our plan quite naturally, as a born leader. This showed wonderfully how much energy and strength a man of eighty-one could still have. Elihu Whipple had always lived by the rules of health that he had taught as a doctor. If it were not for what happened later, he would be here today, strong and healthy. Only two people suspected what really happened: Carrington Harris and I. I had to tell Harris because he owned the house. He deserved to know what had gone out of it. Also, we had told him about our plan before we began. After my uncle's going, I felt that Harris would understand. I hoped he would help me with some public explanations that were badly needed. He turned very pale, but he agreed to help me. He also decided that it would now be safe to rent the house.

It would be a huge and silly exaggeration to say that we were not nervous on that rainy night. As I have said, we were not superstitious like children. But science and careful thought had taught us something important. The universe we know has three dimensions. But it is only a tiny part of all the matter and energy that exists. In this case, a great amount of evidence from many true sources pointed one way. It showed that certain very powerful forces had lived on here for a long time. From a human point of view, these forces were extremely evil. It would be too simple to say that we really believed in vampires or werewolves. It is better to say that we could not deny one possibility. There might be strange, unknown changes of life-force and of very thin matter. Such things rarely exist in our three-dimensional space, because they are more closely connected with other spaces. But they are close enough to the edge of our own world to show themselves sometimes. We can never hope to understand these appearances, because we do not have the right point of view.

In short, my uncle and I felt that many facts pointed to one thing, and nobody could argue against them. Some influence still remained in the shunned house. It came from one of those unpleasant French settlers of two hundred years before. And it still worked through rare and unknown laws of the movement of atoms and electrons. The history of the Roulet family seemed to prove one thing. They had had an abnormal closeness to "outer circles of entity". These are dark worlds beyond ours, which bring only disgust and terror to normal people. Was it not possible, then, that the riots of those far-off 1730s had set certain patterns of energy moving? Perhaps these patterns began in the sick brain of one or more of the Roulets, especially the evil Paul Roulet. Perhaps they somehow lived on after the mob had murdered and buried the bodies. Perhaps they went on working in some space of many dimensions. They followed the lines of force set by a wild hatred of the town that pressed in on them.

Such a thing was surely not impossible in physics or biochemistry. Newer science, with the theories of relativity and of what happens inside atoms, allowed it. One could easily imagine a strange, foreign core of matter or energy, with a shape or without one. It might be kept alive by taking small amounts of life-force from other living things. It might also take their body tissue and fluids, in ways nobody could see or feel. These living things would be more clearly alive than it was. It would enter into them, and sometimes it would mix completely with their bodies. It might be actively hostile. Or it might only be driven by a blind wish to stay alive. In either case, such a monster must be something wrong and foreign in our world, an intruder. Every man who is not an enemy of the world's life, health and sanity has a first duty. He must destroy it completely.

We were puzzled, because we had no idea what form the thing might take when we met it. No sane person had ever seen it, and few had ever clearly felt it. It might be pure energy, a form like air, outside the world of matter. Or it might be partly material. It might be some unknown, uncertain mass that could change its shape. It might change at will into rough copies of a solid, a liquid or a gas. Or it might become something even thinner, without any particles at all. There was the human-shaped patch of mold on the floor, and the shape of the yellowish vapor. There were also the curved tree-roots in some of the old tales. All these suggested at least a distant connection with the human shape, like an old memory of it. But nobody could say for certain how true or how lasting that likeness was.

We had prepared two weapons to fight it. The first was a large Crookes tube, specially fitted for our purpose. It was powered by strong storage batteries and had special screens and reflectors. We would use it if the thing could not be touched. Then only strong, destructive ether radiations could fight it. The second weapon was a pair of military flame-throwers, like those used in the World War. We would use them if the thing was partly material and could be destroyed physically. We were like the superstitious country people of Exeter. We were ready to burn out the thing's heart, if it had a heart to burn. We set up all these weapons in the cellar. We placed them carefully in relation to the cot and the chairs. We also placed them in relation to the spot before the fireplace, where the mold had taken strange shapes. That patch, by the way, was only faintly visible when we placed our furniture and instruments. It was also faint when we came back that evening for the real vigil. For a moment I half doubted that I had ever seen it more clearly. But then I thought of the legends.

Our vigil in the cellar began at ten p.m., daylight saving time. As it went on, we saw nothing that promised anything useful. A weak light came in from the street-lamps outside, where the rain beat against them. The hateful fungi inside also gave a faint, ghostly glow. In this light we could see the dripping stone of the walls. All traces of whitewash had gone from them. We saw the damp hard earth floor, which smelled bad and was spoiled by mildew, with its obscene fungi. We saw the rotting remains of old stools, chairs and tables, and other furniture that had no clear shape now. Above us were the heavy planks and big beams of the ground floor. There was the old, broken plank door that led to storage bins and rooms under other parts of the house. There was the crumbling stone staircase with its ruined wooden hand-rail. And there was the rough fireplace of blackened brick, deep like a cave. Rusty bits of iron in it showed that there had once been hooks, andirons, a spit and a crane there. There had also been a door to a Dutch oven. Besides these things, there were our plain cot and camp chairs. And there were the heavy, complicated machines of destruction that we had brought.

As in my earlier visits, we had left the door to the street unlocked. That way, we had a direct and practical way to escape. We might need it if things appeared that we could not deal with. Our idea was this. If we stayed there night after night, our presence would call out the evil thing that was hiding there. We would be ready for it. As soon as we had recognized and watched it enough, we could destroy it with one of our weapons. We had no idea how long it would take to call it out and destroy it. We also knew that our plan was far from safe. Nobody could tell how strong the thing might be when it appeared. But we thought the game was worth the risk. We started it alone and without hesitation. We knew that if we asked others for help, they would only laugh at us. That might even ruin our whole plan. These were our thoughts as we talked far into the night. Then my uncle grew more and more sleepy, and I reminded him to lie down for his two-hour sleep.

Something like fear made me cold as I sat there alone in the small hours. I say alone, because a person who sits by a sleeper is really alone. Perhaps he is more alone than he can understand. My uncle breathed heavily. I could hear his deep breaths in and out, and the rain outside. Another sound broke in from time to time and hurt my nerves. It was water dripping somewhere far off inside the house. The house was horribly damp even in dry weather, and in this storm it was like a swamp. I studied the loose, ancient stones of the walls in the light of the fungi. A few weak rays also came in from the street through the covered window. Once the bad air of the place seemed about to make me sick. So I opened the door and looked up and down the street. I enjoyed the familiar sights, and I breathed the clean, healthy air. Still nothing happened to reward my watching. I yawned again and again, and tiredness became stronger than fear.

Then my uncle began to move in his sleep, and I noticed it. He had turned restlessly on the cot several times during the second half of the first hour. But now his breathing was strangely irregular. Sometimes he gave a sigh that sounded very much like a choking moan.

I shone my electric flashlight on him, but his face was turned away. So I got up and went round to the other side of the cot. I shone the light again to see if he seemed to be in pain. What I saw upset me surprisingly, because it was quite a small thing. It must only have seemed bad because of the evil nature of our place and our mission. Surely the thing was not frightening or unnatural in itself. It was only my uncle's expression. Strange dreams were disturbing him, no doubt because of our situation. His face showed great agitation, and it did not look like him at all. His usual expression was kind, calm and gentlemanly. But now many different feelings seemed to be fighting inside him. I think it was mostly this *variety* that disturbed me. He gasped and tossed, more and more upset, and now his eyes had opened. He seemed to be not one man but many. He seemed strangely foreign to himself.

All at once he began to mutter, and I did not like the look of his mouth and teeth as he spoke. At first I could not understand the words. Then, with a great shock, I recognized something about them. It filled me with icy fear. But then I remembered how widely educated my uncle was. I remembered his endless translations of articles about people and history from the *Revue des Deux Mondes*. For the old and respected Elihu Whipple was muttering *in French*. I could understand only a few phrases. They seemed connected with the darkest myths he had ever adapted from that famous Paris magazine.

Suddenly sweat broke out on the sleeper's forehead, and he jumped up, half awake. The mixed-up French changed to a cry in English. His rough voice shouted excitedly, "My breath, my breath!" Then he woke up completely, and his face became calm and normal again. My uncle took my hand and began to tell me a dream. I could only guess at its central meaning, and I guessed with a kind of awe.

He said he had floated away from a very ordinary series of dream-pictures. He came into a scene stranger than anything he had ever read about. It was of this world, and yet not of it. It was a shadowy confusion of geometric shapes. In it he could see parts of familiar things in very unfamiliar and disturbing combinations. Strange, disordered pictures seemed to lie one on top of another. In this arrangement, time and space seemed to dissolve and mix in a completely illogical way. It was like a whirling kaleidoscope of ghostly pictures. Now and then there were "snap-shots", if one can use the word. They were strangely clear, but they were mixtures of very different things that he could not explain.

Once my uncle thought he was lying in a carelessly dug open pit. A crowd of angry faces frowned down at him. They had untidy hair and three-cornered hats. Another time he seemed to be inside a house, an old house it seemed. But the details and the people kept changing. He could never be sure of the faces or the furniture, or even of the room itself. Even the doors and windows kept changing, just as much as the things that could move. It was strange, damnably strange. My uncle spoke almost shyly, as if he half expected me not to believe him. He said that many of the strange faces had clearly had the features of the Harris family. And all the time he had felt that he was choking. It was as if some presence had spread through his whole body. It seemed to be trying to take control of his life processes.

I shuddered when I thought of those life processes. They were worn by eighty-one years of work. Now they were fighting unknown forces that even the youngest and strongest body might fear. But a moment later I told myself that dreams are only dreams. These unpleasant visions were at most my uncle's reaction to our investigation. Our search and what we expected to find had filled our minds lately, and we had thought of nothing else.

Our talk soon helped to remove my feeling of strangeness. In time I gave in to my yawns and took my turn to sleep. My uncle now seemed very wide awake. He was glad to begin his time of watching. The nightmare had woken him long before his two hours were over.

Sleep took me quickly, and at once I had dreams of the most disturbing kind. In my dreams I felt a deep loneliness, as huge as the universe. Hostility seemed to rush from all sides onto a prison where I lay locked up. I seemed to be tied up and gagged. The echoing yells of distant crowds mocked me, and they wanted my blood. My uncle's face came to me, but in a less pleasant way than when I was awake. I remember many useless struggles and attempts to scream. It was not a pleasant sleep. So for a second I was not sorry to hear the echoing shriek. It broke through the walls of my dream and threw me awake, sharp and startled. Every real object in front of my eyes stood out more clearly and more real than was natural.

### Glossary

- **vigil**: staying awake at night to watch for something.
- **cot**: a narrow folding bed.
- **dimensions**: directions of space, like length, width and height.
- **intruder**: someone or something that comes in where it does not belong.
- **Crookes tube**: an early electric glass tube that gives off rays.
- **ether radiations**: rays that scientists then believed travelled through the "ether", an invisible substance filling space.
- **flame-throwers**: weapons that shoot out fire.
- **mildew**: a thin white or gray growth on damp things, like mold.
- **andirons**: metal stands that hold wood in a fireplace.
- **kaleidoscope**: a tube toy with colored glass that makes changing patterns.
- **gagged**: with something tied over the mouth so you cannot speak or shout.

## V.

I had been lying with my face turned away from my uncle's chair. So in this sudden moment of waking I saw only certain things. I saw the door to the street, the window, and the north wall, floor and ceiling of the room. All this was printed on my brain with sick, sharp clearness, as in a photograph. The light was brighter than the glow of the fungi or the rays from the street outside. It was not a strong light, not even a fairly strong one. It was certainly not strong enough to read an ordinary book by. But it threw a shadow of me and the cot onto the floor. It also had a yellowish, piercing force that suggested something more powerful than light. I noticed this with unhealthy sharpness, although two of my other senses were under violent attack. My ears were ringing with the echoes of that shocking scream. And my nose was sickened by the terrible smell that filled the place. My mind was as alert as my senses, and it knew that something seriously wrong was happening. Almost automatically I jumped up and turned around. I wanted to grab our weapons, which we had left aimed at the moldy spot before the fireplace. As I turned, I was afraid of what I would see. The scream had been in my uncle's voice. And I did not know what danger I would have to defend him and myself against.

Yet the sight was worse than I had feared. There are horrors beyond horrors. This was one of those centers of every hideous thing that a mind can dream. The universe keeps such things to destroy a cursed and unhappy few. A kind of corpse-light rose like steam out of the earth, where the fungi grew thickly. It was yellow and diseased, and it bubbled and rose to a gigantic height. It had vague outlines, half human and half like a monster. Through it I could see the chimney and the fireplace behind it. It was all eyes, wolfish and mocking. Its head was full of lines and folds, like an insect's head. At the top it dissolved into a thin stream of mist. The mist curled around in a rotten way and finally vanished up the chimney. I say that I saw this thing. But I clearly saw how it had almost taken a shape only later, when I remembered it. At that moment it was only a boiling, softly glowing cloud of disgusting fungus to me. It surrounded the one thing that held all my attention, and it was melting that thing into a horrible softness. That thing was my uncle, the old and respected Elihu Whipple. His face was turning black and decaying. He grinned at me and made wild, meaningless sounds. He reached out dripping claws to tear me, in the fury that this horror had brought.

It was habit and routine that kept me from going mad. I had trained myself for this important moment, and blind training saved me. I saw that the boiling evil was nothing that matter or ordinary chemistry could reach. So I ignored the flame-thrower that stood darkly on my left. Instead I switched on the current of the Crookes tube apparatus. I aimed it at that scene of endless evil. I sent the strongest ether radiations toward it. No human skill can draw stronger rays from the spaces and fluids of nature. There was a blue mist and a wild, spitting noise. The yellowish glow seemed to grow weaker to my eyes. But then I saw that it only looked weaker next to the blue light. The waves from the machine had no effect at all.

Then, in the middle of that devilish scene, I saw a new horror. It made me cry out. I stumbled and felt my way toward the unlocked door to the quiet street. I did not care what strange terrors I let loose on the world. Nor did I care what people would think or say about me. In that dim mix of blue and yellow, my uncle's body had begun a disgusting liquefaction. Its true nature is beyond all description. Across his fading face there passed changes of identity that only madness can imagine. He was a devil and a crowd at the same time, a charnel-house and a pageant. The mixed and uncertain light lit that jelly-like face. It took on a dozen, a score, a hundred different looks. It grinned as it sank to the ground on a body that melted like tallow. Its looks were mocking copies of crowds of people, strange and yet not strange.

I saw the features of the Harris family, men and women, adults and babies. I saw other features too, old and young, rough and fine, familiar and unfamiliar. For a second there flashed an ugly, false copy of a miniature of poor mad Rhoby Harris. I had seen that miniature in the School of Design museum. Another time I thought I saw the big-boned face of Mercy Dexter. I remembered her from a painting in Carrington Harris's house. It was terrible beyond imagining. Near the end, a strange mix of servants' and babies' faces flickered close to the floor with its fungi. A pool of greenish grease was spreading there. Then the changing features seemed to fight against themselves. They seemed to try to form the shape of my uncle's kind face. I like to think that he existed at that moment, and that he tried to say goodbye to me. I believe I choked out a goodbye from my own dry throat as I stumbled out into the street. A thin stream of grease followed me through the door onto the rain-soaked sidewalk.

The rest is shadowy and horrible. There was nobody in the soaking street. And in all the world there was nobody I dared to tell. I walked south without any aim, past College Hill and the Athenæum. I went down Hopkins Street and over the bridge to the business district. There the tall buildings seemed to protect me. In the same way, modern material things protect the world from ancient and unhealthy wonders. Then the gray dawn opened wetly in the east. It showed the dark outline of the old hill and its old church towers. It seemed to call me back to the place where my terrible work was still unfinished. In the end I went back, wet, without a hat, and confused in the morning light. I entered that awful door in Benefit Street, which I had left ajar. It was still swinging mysteriously in full view of the early residents, and I dared not speak to them.

The grease was gone, because the moldy floor was porous. And in front of the fireplace there was no trace of the giant doubled-up form drawn in niter. I looked at the cot, the chairs, the instruments, my forgotten hat, and my uncle's yellowed straw hat. I was still confused, and I could hardly remember what was dream and what was reality. Then my thoughts slowly came back. I knew that I had seen things more horrible than anything I had dreamed.

I sat down and tried to understand what had happened, as far as my sanity would let me. I also tried to think how I might end the horror, if it had really been real. It did not seem to be matter, or ether, or anything else a human mind could imagine. What else could it be, then, but some strange *emanation*? Perhaps it was a vampire-like vapor, like the ones that the Exeter country people describe. They say such vapors hide and hang over certain churchyards. I felt that this was the clue. Again I looked at the floor before the fireplace, where the mold and niter had taken strange forms.

In ten minutes I had made up my mind. I took my hat and set out for home. There I bathed and ate. Then I ordered by telephone a pickax, a spade, a military gas-mask and six carboys of sulfuric acid. Everything was to be delivered the next morning at the cellar door of the shunned house in Benefit Street. After that I tried to sleep. I could not, so I spent the hours reading and writing silly poems to fight my dark mood.

At eleven a.m. the next day I began digging. The weather was sunny, and I was glad of that. I was still alone. I was afraid of the unknown horror I was looking for. But I was even more afraid of telling anybody. Later I told Harris, but only because I really had to. Also, he had heard odd tales from old people, which made him just a little ready to believe. I turned up the stinking black earth in front of the fireplace. My spade cut through the white fungi, and a thick yellow ichor oozed out of them. I trembled at the thought of what I might find. Some secrets deep inside the earth are not good for people to know. This seemed to me to be one of them.

My hand was clearly shaking, but still I dug. After a while I was standing in the large hole I had made. The hole was about six feet square. As it grew deeper, the evil smell grew stronger. I no longer had any doubt that I would soon touch the hellish thing. Its emanations had cursed the house for over a century and a half. I wondered what it would look like. What would its form and substance be? How big might it have grown through long ages of sucking life? At last I climbed out of the hole and spread out the heaped-up dirt. Then I arranged the big carboys of acid around two sides of the hole and near them. That way I could empty them all into the opening quickly, one after another, when I needed to. After that I dumped earth only along the other two sides. I worked more slowly now, and I put on my gas-mask as the smell grew. I nearly lost my courage, being so close to a nameless thing at the bottom of a pit.

Suddenly my spade hit something softer than earth. I shuddered and started to climb out of the hole, which was now as deep as my neck. Then my courage came back. I scraped away more dirt by the light of the electric torch I had brought. The surface I uncovered was fishy and glassy. It was a kind of half-rotten, set jelly, and light seemed to pass through it a little. I scraped further, and I saw that it had a form. There was a split where part of the substance was folded over. The part I could see was huge and roughly cylindrical. It looked like a giant, soft, blue-white stovepipe bent in two. Its widest part was about two feet across. I scraped still more. Then suddenly I jumped out of the hole and away from the filthy thing. Wildly I pulled the stoppers out of the heavy carboys and tipped them over. I poured their burning acid down into that hole of death, one bottle after another. It poured onto the unthinkable, abnormal thing whose giant *elbow* I had seen.

I will never forget the blinding whirlpool of greenish-yellow vapor. It rushed up wildly from that hole as the floods of acid went down. All along the hill people tell of "the yellow day". On that day, they say, poisonous and horrible gases rose from factory waste dumped in the Providence River. But I know how wrong they are about where the gases came from. They also tell of the hideous roar that came at the same time. They say it came from some broken water-pipe or gas main under the ground. But again I could correct them, if I dared. It was shocking beyond words, and I do not know how I lived through it. I did faint after I poured out the fourth bottle. I had to handle it after the gases had begun to get through my mask. But when I woke up, I saw that no new vapors were coming from the hole.

I poured the acid from the last two carboys into it, without much result. After a while I felt it was safe to shovel the earth back into the pit. It was twilight before I finished, but fear had gone out of the place. The damp air smelled less bad. All the strange fungi had dried up into a kind of harmless grayish powder. It blew like ash along the floor. One of the deepest terrors of the earth had died for ever. And if there is a hell, it had at last received the demon soul of an evil thing. As I patted down the last spadeful of earth, I cried. These were the first of the many tears I have cried in honest memory of my beloved uncle.

The next spring, no more pale grass and strange weeds came up in the terraced garden of the shunned house. Soon afterward Carrington Harris rented the place. It is still ghostly, but its strangeness fascinates me. Some day it will be torn down to make way for a tawdry shop or a vulgar apartment building. Then I will feel relief, but mixed with it I will feel a strange regret. The bare old trees in the yard have begun to bear small, sweet apples. And last year the birds nested in their twisted branches.

### Glossary

- **corpse-light**: a strange, pale light that, in old stories, appears over dead bodies or graves.
- **Crookes tube apparatus**: a machine with an early electric glass tube that gives off rays.
- **liquefaction**: turning into liquid; melting.
- **charnel-house**: a building where dead bodies or bones are kept.
- **pageant**: a colorful parade of people in costume.
- **tallow**: animal fat used to make candles.
- **miniature**: a very small painted portrait of a person.
- **ajar**: a little open.
- **porous**: full of tiny holes, so liquid can soak into it.
- **emanation**: something that flows or comes out from a source, like a gas or a force.
- **carboys**: very large glass bottles for liquids such as acid.
- **ichor**: a thick liquid that comes out of something.
- **tawdry**: cheap and ugly.