The Shunned House

From even the greatest of horrors
irony is seldom absent. Sometimes
it enters directly into the composition
of the events, while sometimes it
relates only to their fortuitous position
among persons and places. The latter
sort is splendidly exemplified by a case
in the ancient city of Providence, where
in the late forties Edgar Allan Poe used
to sojourn often during his unsuccessful
wooing of the gifted poetess, Mrs. Whitman.
Poe generally stopped at the Mansion
House in Benefit Street—the renamed
Golden Ball Inn whose roof has
sheltered Washington, Jefferson, and
Lafayette—and his favorite walk led
northward along the same street to Mrs.
Whitman’s home and the neighboring
hillside churchyard of St. John’s, whose
hidden expanse of Eighteenth Century
gravestones had for him a peculiar fascination.

Now the irony is this. In this walk, so
many times repeated, the world’s greatest
master of the terrible and the bizarre
was obliged to pass a particular house
on the eastern side of the street; a dingy,
antiquated structure perched on the
abruptly rising side hill, with a great
unkempt yard dating from a time when
the region was partly open country. It
does not appear that he ever wrote or
spoke of it, nor is there any evidence
that he even noticed it. And yet that
house, to the two persons in possession
of certain information, equals or outranks
in horror the wildest fantasy of the
genius who so often passed it unknowingly,
and stands starkly leering as a
symbol of all that is unutterably hideous.

The house was—and for that matter
still is—of a kind to attract the attention
of the curious. Originally a farm or semi-farm
building, it followed the average
New England colonial lines of the middle
Eighteenth Century—the prosperous
peaked-roof sort, with two stories and
dormerless attic, and with the Georgian
doorway and interior panelling dictated
by the progress of taste at that time. It
faced south, with one gable end buried
to the lower windows in the eastward
rising hill, and the other exposed to the
foundations toward the street. Its construction,
over a century and a half ago,
had followed the grading and straightening
of the road in that especial vicinity;
for Benefit Street—at first called Back
Street—was laid out as a lane winding
amongst the graveyards of the first settlers,
and straightened only when the
removal of the bodies to the North Burial
Ground made it decently possible to cut
through the old family plots.

At the start, the western wall had lain
some twenty feet up a precipitous lawn
from the roadway; but a widening of the
street at about the time of the Revolution
sheared off most of the intervening space,
exposing the foundations so that a brick
basement wall had to be made, giving
the deep cellar a street frontage with door
and one window above ground, close to
the new line of public travel. When
the sidewalk was laid out a century ago
the last of the intervening space was
removed; and Poe in his walks must
have seen only a sheer ascent of dull gray
brick flush with the sidewalk and surmounted
at a height of ten feet by the
antique shingled bulk of the house
proper.

“That awful door in Benefit Street which I had left ajar.”

The farm-like ground extended back
very deeply up the hill, almost to
Wheaton Street. The space south of the
house, abutting on Benefit Street, was of
course greatly above the existing sidewalk
level, forming a terrace bounded by
a high bank wall of damp, mossy stone
pierced by a steep flight of narrow steps
which led inward between canyon-like
surfaces to the upper region of mangy
lawn, rheumy brick walks, and neglected
gardens whose dismantled cement urns,
rusted kettles fallen from tripods of
knotty sticks, and similar paraphernalia
set off the weather-beaten front door with
its broken fanlight, rotting Ionic pilasters,
and wormy triangular pediment.

What I heard in my youth about
the shunned house was merely that
people died there in alarmingly great
numbers. That, I was told, was why the
original owners had moved out some
twenty years after building the place. It
was plainly unhealthy, perhaps because
of the dampness and fungous growths in
the cellar, the general sickish smell, the
drafts of the hallways, or the quality of
the well and pump water. These things
were bad enough, and these were all that
gained belief among the persons whom
I knew. Only the notebooks of my antiquarian
uncle, Doctor Elihu Whipple, revealed
to me at length the darker, vaguer
surmises which formed an undercurrent
of folklore among old-time servants and
humble folk; surmises which never travelled
far, and which were largely forgotten
when Providence grew to be a
metropolis with a shifting modern population.

The general fact is, that the house was
never regarded by the solid part of the
community as in any real sense “haunted.”
There were no widespread tales of rattling
chains, cold currents of air, extinguished
lights, or faces at the window. Extremists
sometimes said the house was “unlucky,”
but that is as far as even they
went. What was really beyond dispute
is that a frightful proportion of persons
died there; or more accurately, had died
there, since after some peculiar happenings
over sixty years ago the building
had become deserted through the sheer
impossibility of renting it. These persons
were not all cut off suddenly by any one
cause; rather did it seem that their vitality
was insidiously sapped, so that each one
died the sooner from whatever tendency
to weakness he may have naturally had.
And those who did not die displayed in
varying degree a type of anemia or consumption,
and sometimes a decline of the
mental faculties, which spoke ill for the
salubriousness of the building. Neighboring
houses, it must be added, seemed
entirely free from the noxious quality.

This much I knew before my insistent
questioning led my uncle to show me the
notes which finally embarked us both on
our hideous investigation. In my childhood
the shunned house was vacant, with
barren, gnarled and terrible old trees,
long, queerly pale grass and nightmarishly
misshapen weeds in the high terraced
yard where birds never lingered. We
boys used to overrun the place, and I can
still recall my youthful terror not only at
the morbid strangeness of this sinister
vegetation, but at the eldritch atmosphere
and odor of the dilapidated house, whose
unlocked front door was often entered in
quest of shudders. The small-paned windows
were largely broken, and a nameless
air of desolation hung round the
precarious panelling, shaky interior shutters,
peeling wall-paper, falling plaster,
rickety staircases, and such fragments of
battered furniture as still remained. The
dust and cobwebs added their touch of
the fearful; and brave indeed was the
boy who would voluntarily ascend the
ladder to the attic, a vast raftered length
lighted only by small blinking windows
in the gable ends, and filled with a
massed wreckage of chests, chairs, and
spinning-wheels which infinite years of
deposit had shrouded and festooned into
monstrous and hellish shapes.

But after all, the attic was not the
most terrible part of the house. It was
the dank, humid cellar which somehow
exerted the strongest repulsion on us,
even though it was wholly above ground
on the street side, with only a thin door
and window-pierced brick wall to separate
it from the busy sidewalk. We
scarcely knew whether to haunt it in
spectral fascination, or to shun it for
the sake of our souls and our sanity. For
one thing, the bad odor of the house
was strongest there; and for another
thing, we did not like the white fungous
growths which occasionally sprang up in
rainy summer weather from the hard
earth floor. Those fungi, grotesquely like
the vegetation in the yard outside, were
truly horrible in their outlines; detestable
parodies of toadstools and Indian-pipes,
whose like we had never seen in any other
situation. They rotted quickly, and at one
stage became slightly phosphorescent; so
that nocturnal passers-by sometimes spoke
of witch-fires glowing behind the broken
panes of the fetor-spreading windows.

We never—even in our wildest Halloween
moods—visited this cellar by
night, but in some of our daytime visits
could detect the phosphorescence, especially
when the day was dark and wet.
There was also a subtler thing we often
thought we detected—a very strange
thing which was, however, merely suggestive
at most. I refer to a sort of
cloudy whitish pattern on the dirt floor—a
vague, shifting deposit of mold or niter
which we sometimes thought we could
trace amidst the sparse fungous growths
near the huge fireplace of the basement
kitchen. Once in a while it struck us
that this patch bore an uncanny resemblance
to a doubled-up human figure,
though generally no such kinship existed,
and often there was no whitish deposit
whatever.

On a certain rainy afternoon when this
illusion seemed phenomenally strong, and
when, in addition, I had fancied I
glimpsed a kind of thin, yellowish, shimmering
exhalation rising from the nitrous
pattern toward the yawning fireplace,
I spoke to my uncle about the
matter. He smiled at this odd conceit,
but it seemed that his smile was tinged
with reminiscence. Later I heard that a
similar notion entered into some of the
wild ancient tales of the common folk—a
notion likewise alluding to ghoulish,
wolfish shapes taken by smoke from the
great chimney, and queer contours assumed
by certain of the sinuous tree-roots
that thrust their way into the cellar
through the loose foundation-stones.

2

Not till my adult years did my uncle
set before me the notes and data
which he had collected concerning the
shunned house. Doctor Whipple was a
sane, conservative physician of the old
school, and for all his interest in the
place was not eager to encourage young
thoughts toward the abnormal. His own
view, postulating simply a building and
location of markedly unsanitary qualities,
had nothing to do with abnormality;
but he realized that the very picturesqueness
which aroused his own interest would
in a boy’s fanciful mind take on all manner
of gruesome imaginative associations.

The doctor was a bachelor; a white-haired,
clean-shaven, old-fashioned gentleman,
and a local historian of note, who
had often broken a lance with such controversial
guardians of tradition as Sidney
S. Rider and Thomas W. Bicknell. He
lived with one man-servant in a Georgian
homestead with knocker and iron-railed
steps, balanced eerily on the steep ascent
of North Court Street beside the ancient
brick court and colony house where his
grandfather—a cousin of that celebrated
privateersman, Captain Whipple, who
burnt His Majesty’s armed schooner
Gaspee in 1772—had voted in the legislature
on May 4, 1776, for the independence
of the Rhode Island Colony.
Around him in the damp, low-ceiled library
with the musty white panelling,
heavy carved overmantel and small-paned,
vine-shaded windows, were the relics and
records of his ancient family, among
which were many dubious allusions to the
shunned house in Benefit Street. That
pest spot lies not far distant—for Benefit
runs ledgewise just above the court
house along the precipitous hill up which
the first settlement climbed.

When, in the end, my insistent pestering
and maturing years evoked from my
uncle the hoarded lore I sought, there lay
before me a strange enough chronicle.
Long-winded, statistical, and drearily
genealogical as some of the matter was,
there ran through it a continuous thread
of brooding, tenacious horror and preternatural
malevolence which impressed
me even more than it had impressed the
good doctor. Separate events fitted together
uncannily, and seemingly irrelevant
details held mines of hideous possibilities.
A new and burning curiosity
grew in me, compared to which my boyish
curiosity was feeble and inchoate.

The first revelation led to an exhaustive
research, and finally to that shuddering
quest which proved so disastrous to myself
and mine. For at the last my uncle
insisted on joining the search I had
commenced, and after a certain night in
that house he did not come away with
me. I am lonely without that gentle soul
whose long years were filled only with
honor, virtue, good taste, benevolence,
and learning. I have reared a marble urn
to his memory in St. John’s churchyard—the
place that Poe loved—the hidden
grove of giant willows on the hill, where
tombs and headstones huddle quietly between
the hoary bulk of the church and
the houses and bank walls of Benefit
Street.

The history of the house, opening
amidst a maze of dates, revealed no trace
of the sinister either about its construction
or about the prosperous and honorable
family who built it. Yet from the first
a taint of calamity, soon increased to
boding significance, was apparent. My
uncle’s carefully compiled record began
with the building of the structure in
1763, and followed the theme with an
unusual amount of detail. The shunned
house, it seems, was first inhabited by
William Harris and his wife Rhoby Dexter,
with their children, Elkanah, born
in 1755, Abigail, born in 1757, William,
Jr., born in 1759, and Ruth, born in
1761. Harris was a substantial merchant
and seaman in the West India trade, connected
with the firm of Obadiah Brown
and his nephews. After Brown’s death
in 1761, the new firm of Nicholas Brown
& Company made him master of the brig
Prudence, Providence-built, of 120 tons,
thus enabling him to erect the new homestead
he had desired ever since his marriage.

The site he had chosen—a recently
straightened part of the new and fashionable
Back Street, which ran along the
side of the hill above crowded Cheapside—was
all that could be wished, and
the building did justice to the location.
It was the best that moderate means
could afford, and Harris hastened to
move in before the birth of a fifth child
which the family expected. That child,
a boy, came in December; but was still-born.
Nor was any child to be born alive
in that house for a century and a half.

The next April, sickness occurred
among the children, and Abigail and
Ruth died before the month was over.
Doctor Job Ives diagnosed the trouble as
some infantile fever, though others declared
it was more of a mere wasting-away
or decline. It seemed, in any event,
to be contagious; for Hannah Bowen, one
of the two servants, died of it in the following
June. Eli Lideason, the other servant,
constantly complained of weakness;
and would have returned to his father’s
farm in Rehoboth but for a sudden attachment
for Mehitabel Pierce, who was
hired to succeed Hannah. He died the
next year—a sad year indeed, since it
marked the death of William Harris himself,
enfeebled as he was by the climate
of Martinique, where his occupation had
kept him for considerable periods during
the preceding decade.

The widowed Rhoby Harris never recovered
from the shock of her husband’s
death, and the passing of her first-born
Elkanah two years later was the final
blow to her reason. In 1768 she fell victim
to a mild form of insanity, and was
thereafter confined to the upper part of
the house; her elder maiden sister, Mercy
Dexter, having moved in to take charge
of the family. Mercy was a plain, raw-boned
woman of great strength; but her
health visibly declined from the time of
her advent. She was greatly devoted to
her unfortunate sister, and had an especial
affection for her only surviving nephew
William, who from a sturdy infant had
become a sickly, spindling lad. In this
year the servant Mehitabel died, and the
other servant, Preserved Smith, left without
coherent explanation—or at least,
with only some wild tales and a complaint
that he disliked the smell of the
place. For a time Mercy could secure no
more help, since the seven deaths and
case of madness, all occurring within five
years’ space, had begun to set in motion
the body of fireside rumor which later became
so bizarre. Ultimately, however, she
obtained new servants from out of town;
Ann White, a morose woman from that
part of North Kingstown now set off as
the township of Exeter, and a capable
Boston man named Zenas Low.

It was Ann White who first gave definite
shape to the sinister idle talk.
Mercy should have known better than to
hire anyone from the Nooseneck Hill
country, for that remote bit of backwoods
was then, as now, a seat of the most uncomfortable
superstitions. As lately as
1892 an Exeter community exhumed a
dead body and ceremoniously burnt its
heart in order to prevent certain alleged
visitations injurious to the public health
and peace, and one may imagine the
point of view of the same section in
1768. Ann’s tongue was perniciously active,
and within a few months Mercy
discharged her, filling her place with a
faithful and amiable Amazon from Newport,
Maria Robbins.

Meanwhile poor Rhoby Harris, in her
madness, gave voice to dreams and
imaginings of the most hideous sort. At
times her screams became insupportable,
and for long periods she would utter
shrieking horrors which necessitated her
son’s temporary residence with his cousin,
Peleg Harris, in Presbyterian Lane near
the new college building. The boy would
seem to improve after these visits, and had
Mercy been as wise as she was well-meaning,
she would have let him live permanently
with Peleg. Just what Mrs. Harris
cried out in her fits of violence, tradition
hesitates to say; or rather, presents such
extravagant accounts that they nullify
themselves through sheer absurdity. Certainly
it sounds absurd to hear that a
woman educated only in the rudiments
of French often shouted for hours in a
coarse and idiomatic form of that language,
or that the same person, alone and
guarded, complained wildly of a staring
thing which bit and chewed at her. In
1772 the servant Zenas died, and when
Mrs. Harris heard of it she laughed with
a shocking delight utterly foreign to her.
The next year she herself died, and was
laid to rest in the North Burial Ground
beside her husband.

Upon the outbreak of trouble with
Great Britain in 1775, William Harris,
despite his scant sixteen years and feeble
constitution, managed to enlist in the
Army of Observation under General
Greene; and from that time on enjoyed a
steady rise in health and prestige. In
1780, as a captain in the Rhode Island
forces in New Jersey under Colonel
Angell, he met and married Phebe Hetfield
of Elizabethtown, whom he brought
to Providence upon his honorable discharge
in the following year.

The young soldier’s return was not a
thing of unmitigated happiness. The
house, it is true, was still in good condition;
and the street had been widened
and changed in name from Back Street
to Benefit Street. But Mercy Dexter’s
once robust frame had undergone a sad
and curious decay, so that she was now a
stooped and pathetic figure with hollow
voice and disconcerting pallor—qualities
shared to a singular degree by the one
remaining servant Maria. In the autumn
of 1782 Phebe Harris gave birth to a
still-born daughter, and on the fifteenth
of the next May Mercy Dexter took leave
of a useful, austere, and virtuous life.

William Harris, at last thoroughly convinced
of the radically unhealthful nature
of his abode, now took steps toward
quitting it and closing it for ever. Securing
temporary quarters for himself and
his wife at the newly opened Golden Ball
Inn, he arranged for the building of a
new and finer house in Westminster
Street, in the growing part of the town
across the Great Bridge. There, in 1785,
his son Dutee was born; and there the
family dwelt till the encroachments of
commerce drove them back across the
river and over the hill to Angell Street,
in the newer East Side residence district,
where the late Archer Harris built his
sumptuous but hideous French-roofed
mansion in 1876. William and Phebe
both succumbed to the yellow fever epidemic
of 1797, but Dutee was brought up
by his cousin Rathbone Harris, Peleg’s
son.

Rathbone was a practical man, and
rented the Benefit Street house despite
William’s wish to keep it vacant. He
considered it an obligation to his ward to
make the most of all the boy’s property,
nor did he concern himself with the
deaths and illnesses which caused so
many changes of tenants, or the steadily
growing aversion with which the house
was generally regarded. It is likely that he
felt only vexation when, in 1804, the
town council ordered him to fumigate the
place with sulfur, tar, and gum camphor
on account of the much-discussed deaths
of four persons, presumably caused by
the then diminishing fever epidemic.
They said the place had a febrile smell.

Dutee himself thought little of the
house, for he grew up to be a privateersman,
and served with distinction on the
Vigilant under Captain Cahoone in the
War of 1812. He returned unharmed,
married in 1814, and became a father on
that memorable night of September 23,
1815, when a great gale drove the waters
of the bay over half the town, and floated
a tall sloop well up Westminster Street
so that its masts almost tapped the Harris
windows in symbolic affirmation that the
new boy, Welcome, was a seaman’s son.

Welcome did not survive his father,
but lived to perish gloriously at Fredericksburg
in 1862. Neither he nor his
son Archer knew of the shunned house
as other than a nuisance almost impossible
to rent—perhaps on account of the
mustiness and sickly odor of unkempt
old age. Indeed, it never was rented after
a series of deaths culminating in 1861,
which the excitement of the war tended
to throw into obscurity. Carrington Harris,
last of the male line, knew it only as
a deserted and somewhat picturesque
center of legend until I told him my experience.
He had meant to tear it down
and build an apartment house on the site,
but after my account decided to let it
stand, install plumbing, and rent it. Nor
has he yet had any difficulty in obtaining
tenants. The horror has gone.

3

It may well be imagined how powerfully
I was affected by the annals of
the Harrises. In this continuous record
there seemed to me to brood a persistent
evil beyond anything in nature as I had
known it; an evil clearly connected with
the house and not with the family. This
impression was confirmed by my uncle’s
less systematic array of miscellaneous data—legends
transcribed from servant gossip,
cuttings from the papers, copies of
death certificates by fellow-physicians,
and the like. All of this material I cannot
hope to give, for my uncle was a tireless
antiquarian and very deeply interested in
the shunned house; but I may refer to
several dominant points which earn notice
by their recurrence through many reports
from diverse sources. For example, the
servant gossip was practically unanimous
in attributing to the fungous and malodorous
cellar of the house a vast supremacy
in evil influence. There had been
servants—Ann White especially—who
would not use the cellar kitchen, and at
least three well-defined legends bore
upon the queer quasi-human or diabolic
outlines assumed by tree-roots and
patches of mold in that region. These
latter narratives interested me profoundly,
on account of what I had seen in my boyhood,
but I felt that most of the significance
had in each case been largely obscured
by additions from the common
stock of local ghost lore.

Ann White, with her Exeter superstition,
had promulgated the most extravagant
and at the same time most consistent
tale; alleging that there must lie buried
beneath the house one of those vampires—the
dead who retain their bodily form
and live on the blood or breath of the
living—whose hideous legions send their
preying shapes or spirits abroad by night.
To destroy a vampire one must, the
grandmothers say, exhume it and burn its
heart, or at least drive a stake through
that organ; and Ann’s dogged insistence
on a search under the cellar had been
prominent in bringing about her discharge.

Her tales, however, commanded a wide
audience, and were the more readily accepted
because the house indeed stood on
land once used for burial purposes. To
me their interest depended less on this
circumstance than on the peculiarly appropriate
way in which they dovetailed
with certain other things—the complaint
of the departing servant Preserved Smith,
who had preceded Ann and never heard
of her, that something “sucked his
breath” at night; the death-certificates of
the fever victims of 1804, issued by
Doctor Chad Hopkins, and showing the
four deceased persons all unaccountably
lacking in blood; and the obscure passages
of poor Rhoby Harris’s ravings,
where she complained of the sharp teeth
of a glassy-eyed, half-visible presence.

Free from unwarranted superstition
though I am, these things produced in
me an odd sensation, which was intensified
by a pair of widely separated newspaper
cuttings relating to deaths in the
shunned house—one from the Providence
Gazette and Country-Journal of April
12, 1815, and the other from the Daily
Transcript and Chronicle of October 27,
1845—each of which detailed an appallingly
grisly circumstance whose duplication
was remarkable. It seems that in
both instances the dying person, in 1815
a gentle old lady named Stafford and in
1845 a schoolteacher of middle age
named Eleazar Durfee, became transfigured
in a horrible way, glaring glassily
and attempting to bite the throat of the
attending physician. Even more puzzling,
though, was the final case which put an
end to the renting of the house—a series
of anemia deaths preceded by progressive
madnesses wherein the patient would
craftily attempt the lives of his relatives
by incisions in the neck or wrist.

This was in 1860 and 1861, when my
uncle had just begun his medical practise;
and before leaving for the front he
heard much of it from his elder professional
colleagues. The really inexplicable
thing was the way in which the victims—ignorant
people, for the ill-smelling and
widely shunned house could now be
rented to no others—would babble
maledictions in French, a language they
could not possibly have studied to any
extent. It made one think of poor Rhoby
Harris nearly a century before, and so
moved my uncle that he commenced collecting
historical data on the house after
listening, some time subsequent to his
return from the war, to the first-hand account
of Doctors Chase and Whitmarsh.
Indeed, I could see that my uncle had
thought deeply on the subject, and that
he was glad of my own interest—an
open-minded and sympathetic interest
which enabled him to discuss with me
matters at which others would merely
have laughed. His fancy had not gone so
far as mine, but he felt that the place was
rare in its imaginative potentialities, and
worthy of note as an inspiration in the
field of the grotesque and macabre.

For my part, I was disposed to take the
whole subject with profound seriousness,
and began at once not only to review the
evidence, but to accumulate as much
more as I could. I talked with the elderly
Archer Harris, then owner of the house,
many times before his death in 1916; and
obtained from him and his still surviving
maiden sister Alice an authentic corroboration
of all the family data my uncle
had collected. When, however, I asked
them what connection with France or its
language the house could have, they confessed
themselves as frankly baffled and
ignorant as I. Archer knew nothing, and
all that Miss Harris could say was that
an old allusion her grandfather, Dutee
Harris, had heard of might have shed a
little light. The old seaman, who had
survived his son Welcome’s death in battle
by two years, had not himself known
the legend, but recalled that his earliest
nurse, the ancient Maria Robbins, seemed
darkly aware of something that might
have lent a weird significance to the
French raving of Rhoby Harris, which
she had so often heard during the last
days of that hapless woman. Maria had
been at the shunned house from 1769 till
the removal of the family in 1783, and
had seen Mercy Dexter die. Once she
hinted to the child Dutee of a somewhat
peculiar circumstance in Mercy’s last
moments, but he had soon forgotten all
about it save that it was something peculiar.
The granddaughter, moreover, recalled
even this much with difficulty. She
and her brother were not so much interested
in the house as was Archer’s
son Carrington, the present owner, with
whom I talked after my experience.

Having exhausted the Harris family
of all the information it could furnish,
I turned my attention to early town
records and deeds with a zeal more penetrating
than that which my uncle had occasionally
shown in the same work. What
I wished was a comprehensive history of
the site from its very settlement in 1636—or
even before, if any Narragansett
Indian legend could be unearthed to supply
the data. I found, at the start, that
the land had been part of the long strip
of home lot granted originally to John
Throckmorton; one of many similar strips
beginning at the Town Street beside the
river and extending up over the hill to a
line roughly corresponding with the
modern Hope Street. The Throckmorton
lot had later, of course, been much subdivided;
and I became very assiduous in
tracing that section through which Back
or Benefit Street was later run. It had, as
rumor indeed said, been the Throckmorton
graveyard; but as I examined the
records more carefully, I found that the
graves had all been transferred at an
early date to the North Burial Ground on
the Pawtucket West Road.

Then suddenly I came—by a rare piece
of chance, since it was not in the main
body of records and might easily have
been missed—upon something which
aroused my keenest eagerness, fitting in
as it did with several of the queerest
phases of the affair. It was the record of
a lease, in 1697, of a small tract of
ground to an Etienne Roulet and wife.
At last the French element had appeared—that,
and another deeper element of
horror which the name conjured up from
the darkest recesses of my weird and
heterogeneous reading—and I feverishly
studied the platting of the locality as it
had been before the cutting through and
partial straightening of Back Street between
1747 and 1758. I found what I
had half expected, that where the
shunned house now stood the Roulets had
laid out their graveyard behind a one-story
and attic cottage, and that no record
of any transfer of graves existed. The
document, indeed, ended in much confusion;
and I was forced to ransack both
the Rhode Island Historical Society and
Shepley Library before I could find a
local door which the name of Etienne
Roulet would unlock. In the end I did
find something; something of such vague
but monstrous import that I set about at
once to examine the cellar of the shunned
house itself with a new and excited
minuteness.

The Roulets, it seemed, had come in
1696 from East Greenwich, down the
west shore of Narragansett Bay. They
were Huguenots from Caude, and had
encountered much opposition before the
Providence selectmen allowed them to
settle in the town. Unpopularity had
dogged them in East Greenwich, whither
they had come in 1686, after the revocation
of the Edict of Nantes, and rumor
said that the cause of dislike extended
beyond mere racial and national
prejudice, or the land disputes which involved
other French settlers with the
English in rivalries which not even Governor
Andros could quell. But their
ardent Protestantism—too ardent, some
whispered—and their evident distress
when virtually driven from the village
down the bay, had moved the sympathy
of the town fathers. Here the strangers
had been granted a haven; and the
swarthy Etienne Roulet, less apt at agriculture
than at reading queer books and
drawing queer diagrams, was given a
clerical post in the warehouse at Pardon
Tillinghast’s wharf, far south in Town
Street. There had, however, been a riot
of some sort later on—perhaps forty
years later, after old Roulet’s death—and
no one seemed to hear of the family
after that.

For a century and more, it appeared,
the Roulets had been well remembered
and frequently discussed as vivid incidents
in the quiet life of a New England
seaport. Etienne’s son Paul, a surly fellow
whose erratic conduct had probably
provoked the riot which wiped out the
family, was particularly a source of speculation;
and though Providence never
shared the witchcraft panics of her Puritan
neighbors, it was freely intimated by
old wives that his prayers were neither
uttered at the proper time nor directed
toward the proper object. All this had
undoubtedly formed the basis of the legend
known by old Maria Robbins. What
relation it had to the French ravings of
Rhoby Harris and other inhabitants of
the shunned house, imagination or future
discovery alone could determine. I
wondered how many of those who had
known the legends realized that additional
link with the terrible which my
wider reading had given me; that ominous
item in the annals of morbid horror
which tells of the creature Jacques
Roulet, of Caude, who in 1598 was condemned
to death as a demoniac but afterward
saved from the stake by the Paris
parliament and shut in a madhouse. He
had been found covered with blood and
shreds of flesh in a wood, shortly after
the killing and rending of a boy by a
pair of wolves. One wolf was seen to
lope away unhurt. Surely a pretty hearthside
tale, with a queer significance as to
name and place; but I decided that the
Providence gossips could not have generally
known of it. Had they known, the
coincidence of names would have brought
some drastic and frightened action—indeed,
might not its limited whispering
have precipitated the final riot which
erased the Roulets from the town?

I now visited the accursed place with
increased frequency; studying the unwholesome
vegetation of the garden, examining
all the walls of the building,
and poring over every inch of the
earthen cellar floor. Finally, with Carrington
Harris’s permission, I fitted a
key to the disused door opening from the
cellar directly upon Benefit Street, preferring
to have a more immediate access
to the outside world than the dark stairs,
ground-floor hall, and front door could
give. There, where morbidity lurked most
thickly, I searched and poked during
long afternoons when the sunlight filtered
in through the cobwebbed above-ground
windows, and a sense of security glowed
from the unlocked door which placed
me only a few feet from the placid sidewalk
outside. Nothing new rewarded my
efforts—only the same depressing mustiness
and faint suggestions of noxious
odors and nitrous outlines on the floor—and
I fancy that many pedestrians must
have watched me curiously through the
broken panes.

At length, upon a suggestion of my
uncle’s, I decided to try the spot nocturnally;
and one stormy midnight ran the
beams of an electric torch over the moldy
floor with its uncanny shapes and distorted,
half-phosphorescent fungi. The
place had dispirited me curiously that
evening, and I was almost prepared when
I saw—or thought I saw—amidst the
whitish deposits a particularly sharp definition
of the “huddled form” I had suspected
from boyhood. Its clearness was
astonishing and unprecedented—and as I
watched I seemed to see again the thin,
yellowish, shimmering exhalation which
had startled me on that rainy afternoon
so many years before.

Above the anthropomorphic patch of
mold by the fireplace it rose; a subtle,
sickish, almost luminous vapor which as
it hung trembling in the dampness
seemed to develop vague and shocking
suggestions of form, gradually trailing off
into nebulous decay and passing up into
the blackness of the great chimney with
a fetor in its wake. It was truly horrible,
and the more so to me because of what I
knew of the spot. Refusing to flee, I
watched it fade—and as I watched I felt
that it was in turn watching me greedily
with eyes more imaginable than visible.
When I told my uncle about it he was
greatly aroused; and after a tense hour
of reflection, arrived at a definite and
drastic decision. Weighing in his mind
the importance of the matter, and the
significance of our relation to it, he insisted
that we both test—and if possible
destroy—the horror of the house by a
joint night or nights of aggressive vigil
in that musty and fungus-cursed cellar.

4

On Wednesday, June 25, 1919,
after a proper notification of Carrington
Harris which did not include
surmises as to what we expected to find,
my uncle and I conveyed to the shunned
house two camp chairs and a folding
camp cot, together with some scientific
mechanism of greater weight and intricacy.
These we placed in the cellar during
the day, screening the windows with
paper and planning to return in the evening
for our first vigil. We had locked
the door from the cellar to the ground
floor; and having a key to the outside
cellar door, were prepared to leave our
expensive and delicate apparatus—which
we had obtained secretly and at great
cost—as many days as our vigils might
be protracted. It was our design to sit
up together till very late, and then watch
singly till dawn in two-hour stretches,
myself first and then my companion; the
inactive member resting on the cot.

The natural leadership with which my
uncle procured the instruments from the
laboratories of Brown University and the
Cranston Street Armory, and instinctively
assumed direction of our venture, was a
marvelous commentary on the potential
vitality and resilience of a man of eighty-one.
Elihu Whipple had lived according
to the hygienic laws he had preached as
a physician, and but for what happened
later would be here in full vigor today.
Only two persons suspected what did
happen—Carrington Harris and myself.
I had to tell Harris because he owned
the house and deserved to know what
had gone out of it. Then too, we had
spoken to him in advance of our quest;
and I felt after my uncle’s going that he
would understand and assist me in some
vitally necessary public explanations. He
turned very pale, but agreed to help me,
and decided that it would now be safe
to rent the house.

To declare that we were not nervous
on that rainy night of watching would be
an exaggeration both gross and ridiculous.
We were not, as I have said, in
any sense childishly superstitious, but scientific
study and reflection had taught us
that the known universe of three dimensions
embraces the merest fraction of the
whole cosmos of substance and energy. In
this case an overwhelming preponderance
of evidence from numerous authentic
sources pointed to the tenacious existence
of certain forces of great power and, so
far as the human point of view is concerned,
exceptional malignancy. To say
that we actually believed in vampires or
werewolves would be a carelessly inclusive
statement. Rather must it be said that
we were not prepared to deny the possibility
of certain unfamiliar and unclassified
modifications of vital force and attenuated
matter; existing very infrequently
in three-dimensional space because of
its more intimate connection with other
spatial units, yet close enough to the
boundary of our own to furnish us occasional
manifestations which we, for
lack of a proper vantage-point, may never
hope to understand.

In short, it seemed to my uncle and
me that an incontrovertible array of facts
pointed to some lingering influence in the
shunned house; traceable to one or another
of the ill-favored French settlers of
two centuries before, and still operative
through rare and unknown laws of
atomic and electronic motion. That the
family of Roulet had possessed an abnormal
affinity for outer circles of entity—dark
spheres which for normal folk
hold only repulsion and terror—their recorded
history seemed to prove. Had not,
then, the riots of those bygone seventeen-thirties
set moving certain kinetic patterns
in the morbid brain of one or more of
them—notably the sinister Paul Roulet—which
obscurely survived the bodies murdered
and buried by the mob, and continued
to function in some multiple-dimensioned
space along the original
lines of force determined by a frantic
hatred of the encroaching community?

Such a thing was surely not a physical
or biochemical impossibility in the light
of a newer science which includes the
theories of relativity and intra-atomic
action. One might easily imagine an alien
nucleus of substance or energy, formless
or otherwise, kept alive by imperceptible
or immaterial subtractions from the life-force
or bodily tissue and fluids of other
and more palpably living things into
which it penetrates and with whose fabric
it sometimes completely merges itself. It
might be actively hostile, or it might be
dictated merely by blind motives of self-preservation.
In any case such a monster
must of necessity be in our scheme of
things an anomaly and an intruder,
whose extirpation forms a primary duty
with every man not an enemy to the
world’s life, health, and sanity.

What baffled us was our utter ignorance
of the aspect in which we might encounter
the thing. No sane person had
ever seen it, and few had ever felt it
definitely. It might be pure energy—a
form ethereal and outside the realm of
substance—or it might be partly material;
some unknown and equivocal mass of
plasticity, capable of changing at will to
nebulous approximations of the solid,
liquid, gaseous, or tenuously unparticled
states. The anthropomorphic patch of
mold on the floor, the form of the yellowish
vapor, and the curvature of the
tree-roots in some of the old tales, all
argued at least a remote and reminiscent
connection with the human shape; but
how representative or permanent that
similarity might be, none could say with
any kind of certainty.

We had devised two weapons to
fight it; a large and specially fitted
Crookes tube operated by powerful storage
batteries and provided with peculiar
screens and reflectors, in case it proved
intangible and opposable only by vigorously
destructive ether radiations, and a
pair of military flame-throwers of the sort
used in the World War, in case it proved
partly material and susceptible of mechanical
destruction—for like the superstitious
Exeter rustics, we were prepared
to burn the thing’s heart out if heart
existed to burn. All this aggressive mechanism
we set in the cellar in positions
carefully arranged with reference to the
cot and chairs, and to the spot before the
fireplace where the mold had taken
strange shapes. That suggestive patch, by
the way, was only faintly visible when we
placed our furniture and instruments, and
when we returned that evening for the
actual vigil. For a moment I half doubted
that I had ever seen it in the more definitely
limned form—but then I thought
of the legends.

Our cellar vigil began at ten p. m.,
daylight saving time, and as it continued
we found no promise of pertinent developments.
A weak, filtered glow from the
rain-harassed street-lamps outside, and a
feeble phosphorescence from the detestable
fungi within, showed the dripping
stone of the walls, from which all traces
of whitewash had vanished; the dank,
fetid and mildew-tainted hard earth floor
with its obscene fungi; the rotting remains
of what had been stools, chairs, and
tables, and other more shapeless furniture;
the heavy planks and massive beams
of the ground floor overhead; the decrepit
plank door leading to bins and
chambers beneath other parts of the
house; the crumbling stone staircase with
ruined wooden hand-rail; and the crude
and cavernous fireplace of blackened
brick where rusted iron fragments revealed
the past presence of hooks, andirons,
spit, crane, and a door to the
Dutch oven—these things, and our austere
cot and camp chairs, and the heavy
and intricate destructive machinery we
had brought.

We had, as in my own former explorations,
left the door to the street unlocked;
so that a direct and practical path
of escape might lie open in case of
manifestations beyond our power to deal
with. It was our idea that our continued
nocturnal presence would call forth whatever
malign entity lurked there; and that
being prepared, we could dispose of the
thing with one or the other of our provided
means as soon as we had recognized
and observed it sufficiently. How long it
might require to evoke and extinguish
the thing, we had no notion. It occurred
to us, too, that our venture was
far from safe; for in what strength the
thing might appear no one could tell.
But we deemed the game worth the
hazard, and embarked on it alone and
unhesitatingly; conscious that the seeking
of outside aid would only expose us to
ridicule and perhaps defeat our entire
purpose. Such was our frame of mind as
we talked—far into the night, till my
uncle’s growing drowsiness made me remind
him to lie down for his two-hour
sleep.

Something like fear chilled me as I
sat there in the small hours alone—I say
alone, for one who sits by a sleeper is
indeed alone; perhaps more alone than
he can realize. My uncle breathed heavily,
his deep inhalations and exhalations
accompanied by the rain outside, and
punctuated by another nerve-racking
sound of distant dripping water within—for
the house was repulsively damp even
in dry weather, and in this storm positively
swamp-like. I studied the loose,
antique masonry of the walls in the
fungus-light and the feeble rays which
stole in from the street through the
screened window; and once, when the
noisome atmosphere of the place seemed
about to sicken me, I opened the door
and looked up and down the street,
feasting my eyes on familiar sights and
my nostrils on wholesome air. Still nothing
occurred to reward my watching; and
I yawned repeatedly, fatigue getting the
better of apprehension.

Then the stirring of my uncle in his
sleep attracted my notice. He had turned
restlessly on the cot several times during
the latter half of the first hour, but now
he was breathing with unusual irregularity,
occasionally heaving a sigh which
held more than a few of the qualities of
a choking moan.

I turned my electric flashlight on him
and found his face averted; so rising and
crossing to the other side of the cot, I
again flashed the light to see if he seemed
in any pain. What I saw unnerved me
most surprisingly, considering its relative
triviality. It must have been merely the
association of any odd circumstance with
the sinister nature of our location and
mission, for surely the circumstance was
not in itself frightful or unnatural. It
was merely that my uncle’s facial expression,
disturbed no doubt by the strange
dreams which our situation prompted,
betrayed considerable agitation, and
seemed not at all characteristic of him.
His habitual expression was one of kindly
and well-bred calm, whereas now a variety
of emotions seemed struggling within
him. I think, on the whole, that it was
this variety which chiefly disturbed me.
My uncle, as he gasped and tossed in
increasing perturbation and with eyes that
had now started open, seemed not one
but many men, and suggested a curious
quality of alienage from himself.

All at once he commenced to mutter,
and I did not like the look of his
mouth and teeth as he spoke. The words
were at first indistinguishable, and then—with
a tremendous start—I recognized
something about them which filled me
with icy fear till I recalled the breadth
of my uncle’s education and the interminable
translations he had made from
anthropological and antiquarian articles in
the Revue des Deux Mondes. For the
venerable Elihu Whipple was muttering
in French, and the few phrases I could
distinguish seemed connected with the
darkest myths he had ever adapted from
the famous Paris magazine.

Suddenly a perspiration broke out on
the sleeper’s forehead, and he leaped
abruptly up, half awake. The jumble of
French changed to a cry in English, and
the hoarse voice shouted excitedly, “My
breath, my breath!” Then the awakening
became complete, and with a subsidence
of facial expression to the normal state
my uncle seized my hand and began to
relate a dream whose nucleus of significance
I could only surmise with a kind
of awe.

He had, he said, floated off from a very
ordinary series of dream-pictures into a
scene whose strangeness was related to
nothing he had ever read. It was of this
world, and yet not of it—a shadowy
geometrical confusion in which could be
seen elements of familiar things in most
unfamiliar and perturbing combinations.
There was a suggestion of queerly disordered
pictures superimposed one upon
another; an arrangement in which the
essentials of time as well as of space
seemed dissolved and mixed in the most
illogical fashion. In this kaleidoscopic
vortex of phantasmal images were occasional
snap-shots, if one might use the
term, of singular clearness but unaccountable
heterogeneity.

Once my uncle thought he lay in a
carelessly dug open pit, with a crowd of
angry faces framed by straggling locks
and three-cornered hats frowning down
on him. Again he seemed to be in the
interior of a house—an old house, apparently—but
the details and inhabitants
were constantly changing, and he could
never be certain of the faces or the furniture,
or even of the room itself, since
doors and windows seemed in just as
great a state of flux as the presumably
more mobile objects. It was queer—damnably
queer—and my uncle spoke
almost sheepishly, as if half expecting
not to be believed, when he declared
that of the strange faces many had unmistakably
borne the features of the
Harris family. And all the while there
was a personal sensation of choking, as
if some pervasive presence had spread
itself through his body and sought to
possess itself of his vital processes.

I shuddered at the thought of those
vital processes, worn as they were by
eighty-one years of continuous functioning,
in conflict with unknown forces of
which the youngest and strongest system
might well be afraid; but in another
moment reflected that dreams are only
dreams, and that these uncomfortable
visions could be, at most, no more than
my uncle’s reaction to the investigations
and expectations which had lately filled
our minds to the exclusion of all else.

Conversation, also, soon tended to dispel
my sense of strangeness; and in time
I yielded to my yawns and took my turn
at slumber. My uncle seemed now very
wakeful, and welcomed his period of
watching even though the nightmare had
aroused him far ahead of his allotted two
hours.

Sleep seized me quickly, and I was at
once haunted with dreams of the most
disturbing kind. I felt, in my visions, a
cosmic and abysmal loneness; with hostility
surging from all sides upon some
prison where I lay confined. I seemed
bound and gagged, and taunted by the
echoing yells of distant multitudes who
thirsted for my blood. My uncle’s face
came to me with less pleasant association
than in waking hours, and I recall many
futile struggles and attempts to scream.
It was not a pleasant sleep, and for a
second I was not sorry for the echoing
shriek which clove through the barriers
of dream and flung me to a sharp and
startled awakeness in which every actual
object before my eyes stood out with
more than natural clearness and reality.

5

I had been lying with my face away
from my uncle’s chair, so that in this
sudden flash of awakening I saw
only the door to the street, the window,
and the wall and floor and ceiling
toward the north of the room, all
photographed with morbid vividness on
my brain in a light brighter than the
glow of the fungi or the rays from the
street outside. It was not a strong or
even a fairly strong light; certainly not
nearly strong enough to read an average
book by. But it cast a shadow of myself
and the cot on the floor, and had a
yellowish, penetrating force that hinted
at things more potent than luminosity.
This I perceived with unhealthy sharpness
despite the fact that two of my other
senses were violently assailed. For on my
ears rang the reverberations of that
shocking scream, while my nostrils revolted
at the stench which filled the
place. My mind, as alert as my senses,
recognized the gravely unusual; and almost
automatically I leaped up and turned
about to grasp the destructive instruments
which we had left trained on the
moldy spot before the fireplace. As I
turned, I dreaded what I was to see; for
the scream had been in my uncle’s voice,
and I knew not against what menace I
should have to defend him and myself.

Yet after all, the sight was worse than
I had dreaded. There are horrors beyond
horrors, and this was one of those nuclei
of all dreamable hideousness which the
cosmos saves to blast an accursed and unhappy
few. Out of the fungus-ridden
earth steamed up a vaporous corpse-light,
yellow and diseased, which bubbled and
lapped to a gigantic height in vague outlines
half human and half monstrous,
through which I could see the chimney
and fireplace beyond. It was all eyes—wolfish
and mocking—and the rugose
insect-like head dissolved at the top to a
thin stream of mist which curled putridly
about and finally vanished up the chimney.
I say that I saw this thing, but it is
only in conscious retrospection that I ever
definitely traced its damnable approach to
form. At the time, it was to me only a
seething, dimly phosphorescent cloud of
fungous loathsomeness, enveloping and
dissolving to an abhorrent plasticity the
one object on which all my attention was
focussed. That object was my uncle—the
venerable Elihu Whipple—who with
blackening and decaying features leered
and gibbered at me, and reached out
dripping claws to rend me in the fury
which this horror had brought.

It was a sense of routine which kept
me from going mad. I had drilled myself
in preparation for the crucial moment,
and blind training saved me. Recognizing
the bubbling evil as no substance
reachable by matter or material
chemistry, and therefore ignoring the
flame-thrower which loomed on my left,
I threw on the current of the Crookes
tube apparatus, and focussed toward that
scene of immortal blasphemousness the
strongest ether radiations which man’s
art can arouse from the spaces and fluids
of nature. There was a bluish haze and
a frenzied sputtering, and the yellowish
phosphorescence grew dimmer to my eyes.
But I saw the dimness was only that of
contrast, and that the waves from the
machine had no effect whatever.

Then, in the midst of that demoniac
spectacle, I saw a fresh horror which
brought cries to my lips and sent me
fumbling and staggering toward that unlocked
door to the quiet street, careless
of what abnormal terrors I loosed upon
the world, or what thoughts or judgments
of men I brought down upon my
head. In that dim blend of blue and
yellow the form of my uncle had commenced
a nauseous liquefaction whose
essence eludes all description, and in
which there played across his vanishing
face such changes of identity as only
madness can conceive. He was at once
a devil and a multitude, a charnel-house
and a pageant. Lit by the mixed and uncertain
beams, that gelatinous face assumed
a dozen—a score—a hundred—aspects;
grinning, as it sank to the ground
on a body that melted like tallow, in the
caricatured likeness of legions strange
and yet not strange.

I saw the features of the Harris line,
masculine and feminine, adult and infantile,
and other features old and young,
coarse and refined, familiar and unfamiliar.
For a second there flashed a
degraded counterfeit of a miniature of
poor mad Rhoby Harris that I had seen
in the School of Design museum, and
another time I thought I caught the raw-boned
image of Mercy Dexter as I recalled
her from a painting in Carrington
Harris’s house. It was frightful beyond
conception; toward the last, when
a curious blend of servant and baby
visages flickered close to the fungous floor
where a pool of greenish grease was
spreading, it seemed as though the shifting
features fought against themselves
and strove to form contours like those
of my uncle’s kindly face. I like to think
that he existed at that moment, and that
he tried to bid me farewell. It seems to
me I hiccupped a farewell from my own
parched throat as I lurched out into the
street; a thin stream of grease following
me through the door to the rain-drenched
sidewalk.

The rest is shadowy and monstrous.
There was no one in the soaking
street, and in all the world there was no
one I dared tell. I walked aimlessly south
past College Hill and the Athenæum,
down Hopkins Street, and over the bridge
to the business section where tall buildings
seemed to guard me as modern
material things guard the world from
ancient and unwholesome wonder. Then
gray dawn unfolded wetly from the east,
silhouetting the archaic hill and its venerable
steeples, and beckoning me to the
place where my terrible work was still
unfinished. And in the end I went, wet,
hatless, and dazed in the morning light,
and entered that awful door in Benefit
Street which I had left ajar, and which
still swung cryptically in full sight of the
early householders to whom I dared not
speak.

The grease was gone, for the moldy
floor was porous. And in front of the
fireplace was no vestige of the giant doubled-up
form traced in niter. I looked
at the cot, the chairs, the instruments, my
neglected hat, and the yellowed straw hat
of my uncle. Dazedness was uppermost,
and I could scarcely recall what was
dream and what was reality. Then
thought trickled back, and I knew that I
had witnessed things more horrible than
I had dreamed.

Sitting down, I tried to conjecture as
nearly as sanity would let me just what
had happened, and how I might end the
horror, if indeed it had been real. Matter
it seemed not to be, nor ether, nor anything
else conceivable by mortal mind.
What, then, but some exotic emanation;
some vampirish vapor such as Exeter
rustics tell of as lurking over certain
churchyards? This I felt was the clue,
and again I looked at the floor before
the fireplace where the mold and niter
had taken strange forms.

In ten minutes my mind was made up,
and taking my hat I set out for home,
where I bathed, ate, and gave by telephone
an order for a pickax, a spade, a
military gas-mask, and six carboys of
sulfuric acid, all to be delivered the next
morning at the cellar door of the shunned
house in Benefit Street. After that I tried
to sleep; and failing, passed the hours in
reading and in the composition of inane
verses to counteract my mood.

At eleven a. m. the next day I commenced
digging. It was sunny weather,
and I was glad of that. I was still alone,
for as much as I feared the unknown
horror I sought, there was more fear in
the thought of telling anybody. Later I
told Harris only through sheer necessity,
and because he had heard odd tales from
old people which disposed him ever so
little toward belief. As I turned up the
stinking black earth in front of the fireplace,
my spade causing a viscous yellow
ichor to ooze from the white fungi which
it severed, I trembled at the dubious
thoughts of what I might uncover. Some
secrets of inner earth are not good for
mankind, and this seemed to me one of
them.

My hand shook perceptibly, but still I
delved; after a while standing in the
large hole I had made. With the deepening
of the hole, which was about six
feet square, the evil smell increased; and
I lost all doubt of my imminent contact
with the hellish thing whose emanations
had cursed the house for over a century
and a half. I wondered what it would
look like—what its form and substance
would be, and how big it might have
waxed through long ages of life-sucking.
At length I climbed out of the hole and
dispersed the heaped-up dirt, then arranging
the great carboys of acid around and
near two sides, so that when necessary
I might empty them all down the aperture
in quick succession. After that I dumped
earth only along the other two sides;
working more slowly and donning my
gas-mask as the smell grew. I was nearly
unnerved at my proximity to a nameless
thing at the bottom of a pit.

Suddenly my spade struck something
softer than earth. I shuddered, and made
a motion as if to climb out of the hole,
which was now as deep as my neck. Then
courage returned, and I scraped away
more dirt in the light of the electric
torch I had provided. The surface I uncovered
was fishy and glassy—a kind of
semi-putrid congealed jelly with suggestions
of translucency. I scraped further,
and saw that it had form. There was a
rift where a part of the substance was
folded over. The exposed area was huge
and roughly cylindrical; like a mammoth
soft blue-white stovepipe doubled in two,
its largest part some two feet in diameter.
Still more I scraped, and then abruptly I
leaped out of the hole and away from the
filthy thing; frantically unstopping and
tilting the heavy carboys, and precipitating
their corrosive contents one after another
down that charnel gulf and upon
the unthinkable abnormality whose titan
elbow I had seen.

The blinding maelstrom of greenish-yellow
vapor which surged tempestuously
up from that hole as the floods of
acid descended, will never leave my
memory. All along the hill people tell of
the yellow day, when virulent and horrible
fumes arose from the factory waste
dumped in the Providence River, but I
know how mistaken they are as to the
source. They tell, too, of the hideous
roar which at the same time came from
some disordered water-pipe or gas main
underground—but again I could correct
them if I dared. It was unspeakably
shocking, and I do not see how I lived
through it. I did faint after emptying
the fourth carboy, which I had to handle
after the fumes had begun to penetrate
my mask; but when I recovered I saw
that the hole was emitting no fresh
vapors.

The two remaining carboys I emptied
down without particular result, and after
a time I felt it safe to shovel the earth
back into the pit. It was twilight before
I was done, but fear had gone out of the
place. The dampness was less fetid, and
all the strange fungi had withered to a
kind of harmless grayish powder which
blew ash-like along the floor. One of
earth’s nethermost terrors had perished
for ever; and if there be a hell, it had
received at last the demon soul of an
unhallowed thing. And as I patted down
the last spadeful of mold, I shed the
first of the many tears with which I have
paid unaffected tribute to my beloved
uncle’s memory.

The next spring no more pale grass
and strange weeds came up in the shunned
house’s terraced garden, and shortly afterward
Carrington Harris rented the place.
It is still spectral, but its strangeness
fascinates me, and I shall find mixed with
my relief a queer regret when it is torn
down to make way for a tawdry shop or
vulgar apartment building. The barren
old trees in the yard have begun to bear
small, sweet apples, and last year the
birds nested in their gnarled boughs.

Transcriber’s Note:

This etext was produced from Weird Tales October 1937.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note.