The Shunned House

Howard PhillipsLovecraft

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From even the greatest of horrors irony is sel-dom absent. Sometimes it enters directly intothe composition of the events, while sometimesit relates only to their fortuitous positionamong persons and places. The latter sort issplendidly exemplified by a case in the ancientcity of Providence, where in the late forties Ed-gar Allan Poe used to sojourn often during hisunsuccessful wooing of the gifted poetess, Mrs.Whitman. Poe generally stopped at the Man-sion House in Benefit Street—the renamedGolden Ball Inn whose roof has shelteredWashington, Jefferson, and Lafayette—and hisfavorite walk led northward along the samestreet to Mrs. Whitman's home and theneighboring hillside churchyard of St. John's,whose hidden expanse of Eighteenth Centurygravestones had for him a peculiar fascination.

Now the irony is this. In this walk, so manytimes repeated, the world's greatest master ofthe terrible and the bizarre was obliged to pass

a particular house on the eastern side of thestreet; a dingy, antiquated structure perched onthe abruptly rising side hill, with a great un-kempt yard dating from a time when the regionwas partly open country. It does not appearthat he ever wrote or spoke of it, nor is thereany evidence that he even noticed it. And yetthat house, to the two persons in possession ofcertain information, equals or outranks in hor-ror the wildest fantasy of the genius who sooften passed it unknowingly, and standsstarkly leering as a symbol of all that is unut-terably hideous.

The house was—and for that matter still is—ofa kind to attract the attention of the curious.Originally a farm or semi-farm building, it fol-lowed the average New England colonial linesof the middle Eighteenth Century—the pros-perous peaked-roof sort, with two stories anddormerless attic, and with the Georgian door-way and interior panelling dictated by the pro-

gress of taste at that time. It faced south, withone gable end buried to the lower windows inthe eastward rising hill, and the other exposedto the foundations toward the street. Its con-struction, over a century and a half ago, hadfollowed the grading and straightening of theroad in that especial vicinity; for BenefitStreet—at first called Back Street—was laid outas a lane winding amongst the graveyards ofthe first settlers, and straightened only whenthe removal of the bodies to the North BurialGround made it decently possible to cutthrough the old family plots.

At the start, the western wall had lain sometwenty feet up a precipitous lawn from theroadway; but a widening of the street at aboutthe time of the Revolution sheared off most ofthe intervening space, exposing the founda-tions so that a brick basement wall had to bemade, giving the deep cellar a street frontagewith door and one window above ground,

close to the new line of public travel. When thesidewalk was laid out a century ago the last ofthe intervening space was removed; and Poe inhis walks must have seen only a sheer ascent ofdull gray brick flush with the sidewalk andsurmounted at a height of ten feet by the an-tique shingled bulk of the house proper.

The farm-like ground extended back very dee-ply up the hill, almost to Wheaton Street. Thespace south of the house, abutting on BenefitStreet, was of course greatly above the existingsidewalk level, forming a terrace bounded by ahigh bank wall of damp, mossy stone piercedby a steep flight of narrow steps which led in-ward between canyon-like surfaces to the up-per region of mangy lawn, rheumy brick walks,and neglected gardens whose dismantled ce-ment urns, rusted kettles fallen from tripods ofknotty sticks, and similar paraphernalia set offthe weather-beaten front door with its broken

fanlight, rotting Ionic pilasters, and wormytriangular pediment.

What I heard in my youth about the shunnedhouse was merely that people died there inalarmingly great numbers. That, I was told, waswhy the original owners had moved out sometwenty years after building the place. It wasplainly unhealthy, perhaps because of thedampness and fungous growths in the cellar,the general sickish smell, the drafts of the hall-ways, or the quality of the well and pump wa-ter. These things were bad enough, and thesewere all that gained belief among the personswhom I knew. Only the notebooks of my anti-quarian uncle, Doctor Elihu Whipple, revealedto me at length the darker, vaguer surmiseswhich formed an undercurrent of folkloreamong old-time servants and humble folk;surmises which never travelled far, and whichwere largely forgotten when Providence grew

to be a metropolis with a shifting modernpopulation.

The general fact is, that the house was neverregarded by the solid part of the community asin any real sense "haunted." There were no wi-despread tales of rattling chains, cold currentsof air, extinguished lights, or faces at the win-dow. Extremists sometimes said the house was"unlucky," but that is as far as even they went.What was really beyond dispute is that a fright-ful proportion of persons died there; or moreaccurately, had died there, since after some pe-culiar happenings over sixty years ago the buil-ding had become deserted through the sheerimpossibility of renting it. These persons werenot all cut off suddenly by any one cause;rather did it seem that their vitality was insidi-ously sapped, so that each one died the soonerfrom whatever tendency to weakness he mayhave naturally had. And those who did not diedisplayed in varying degree a type of anemia

or consumption, and sometimes a decline of themental faculties, which spoke ill for the salu-briousness of the building. Neighboringhouses, it must be added, seemed entirely freefrom the noxious quality.

This much I knew before my insistent question-ing led my uncle to show me the notes whichfinally embarked us both on our hideous inves-tigation. In my childhood the shunned housewas vacant, with barren, gnarled and terribleold trees, long, queerly pale grass and night-marishly misshapen weeds in the high terracedyard where birds never lingered. We boys usedto overrun the place, and I can still recall myyouthful terror not only at the morbid strange-ness of this sinister vegetation, but at the el-dritch atmosphere and odor of the dilapidatedhouse, whose unlocked front door was oftenentered in quest of shudders. The small-panedwindows were largely broken, and a namelessair of desolation hung round the precarious

panelling, shaky interior shutters, peeling wall-paper, falling plaster, rickety staircases, andsuch fragments of battered furniture as stillremained. The dust and cobwebs added theirtouch of the fearful; and brave indeed was theboy who would voluntarily ascend the ladderto the attic, a vast raftered length lighted onlyby small blinking windows in the gable ends,and filled with a massed wreckage of chests,chairs, and spinning-wheels which infiniteyears of deposit had shrouded and festoonedinto monstrous and hellish shapes.

But after all, the attic was not the most terriblepart of the house. It was the dank, humid cellarwhich somehow exerted the strongest repul-sion on us, even though it was wholly aboveground on the street side, with only a thin doorand window-pierced brick wall to separate itfrom the busy sidewalk. We scarcely knewwhether to haunt it in spectral fascination, or toshun it for the sake of our souls and our sanity.

For one thing, the bad odor of the house wasstrongest there; and for another thing, we didnot like the white fungous growths which occa-sionally sprang up in rainy summer weatherfrom the hard earth floor. Those fungi, gro-tesquely like the vegetation in the yard outside,were truly horrible in their outlines; detestableparodies of toadstools and Indian-pipes, whoselike we had never seen in any other situation.They rotted quickly, and at one stage becameslightly phosphorescent; so that nocturnalpassers-by sometimes spoke of witch-firesglowing behind the broken panes of the fetor-spreading windows.

We never—even in our wildest Halloweenmoods—visited this cellar by night, but in someof our daytime visits could detect the phospho-rescence, especially when the day was dark andwet. There was also a subtler thing we oftenthought we detected—a very strange thingwhich was, however, merely suggestive at

most. I refer to a sort of cloudy whitish patternon the dirt floor—a vague, shifting deposit ofmold or niter which we sometimes thought wecould trace amidst the sparse fungous growthsnear the huge fireplace of the basement kitchen.Once in a while it struck us that this patch borean uncanny resemblance to a doubled-up hu-man figure, though generally no such kinshipexisted, and often there was no whitish depositwhatever.

On a certain rainy afternoon when this illusionseemed phenomenally strong, and when, inaddition, I had fancied I glimpsed a kind ofthin, yellowish, shimmering exhalation risingfrom the nitrous pattern toward the yawningfireplace, I spoke to my uncle about the matter.He smiled at this odd conceit, but it seemedthat his smile was tinged with reminiscence.Later I heard that a similar notion entered intosome of the wild ancient tales of the commonfolk—a notion likewise alluding to ghoulish,

wolfish shapes taken by smoke from the greatchimney, and queer contours assumed by cer-tain of the sinuous tree-roots that thrust theirway into the cellar through the loose founda-tion-stones.

2

Not till my adult years did my uncle set beforeme the notes and data which he had collectedconcerning the shunned house. Doctor Whipplewas a sane, conservative physician of the oldschool, and for all his interest in the place wasnot eager to encourage young thoughts towardthe abnormal. His own view, postulating sim-ply a building and location of markedly unsani-tary qualities, had nothing to do with abnor-mality; but he realized that the very pictur-esqueness which aroused his own interestwould in a boy's fanciful mind take on all man-ner of gruesome imaginative associations.

The doctor was a bachelor; a white-haired,clean-shaven, old-fashioned gentleman, and alocal historian of note, who had often broken alance with such controversial guardians of tra-dition as Sidney S. Rider and Thomas W. Bick-nell. He lived with one man-servant in a Geor-gian homestead with knocker and iron-railedsteps, balanced eerily on the steep ascent ofNorth Court Street beside the ancient brickcourt and colony house where his grandfa-ther—a cousin of that celebrated privateers-man, Captain Whipple, who burnt His Maj-esty's armed schooner Gaspee in 1772—hadvoted in the legislature on May 4, 1776, for theindependence of the Rhode Island Colony.Around him in the damp, low-ceiled librarywith the musty white panelling, heavy carvedovermantel and small-paned, vine-shadedwindows, were the relics and records of hisancient family, among which were many dubi-ous allusions to the shunned house in BenefitStreet. That pest spot lies not far distant—for

Benefit runs ledgewise just above the courthouse along the precipitous hill up which thefirst settlement climbed.

When, in the end, my insistent pestering andmaturing years evoked from my uncle thehoarded lore I sought, there lay before me astrange enough chronicle. Long-winded, statis-tical, and drearily genealogical as some of thematter was, there ran through it a continuousthread of brooding, tenacious horror and pre-ternatural malevolence which impressed meeven more than it had impressed the good doc-tor. Separate events fitted together uncannily,and seemingly irrelevant details held mines ofhideous possibilities. A new and burning curi-osity grew in me, compared to which my boy-ish curiosity was feeble and inchoate.

The first revelation led to an exhaustive re-search, and finally to that shuddering questwhich proved so disastrous to myself andmine. For at the last my uncle insisted on join-

ing the search I had commenced, and after acertain night in that house he did not comeaway with me. I am lonely without that gentlesoul whose long years were filled only withhonor, virtue, good taste, benevolence, andlearning. I have reared a marble urn to hismemory in St. John's churchyard—the placethat Poe loved—the hidden grove of giant wil-lows on the hill, where tombs and headstoneshuddle quietly between the hoary bulk of thechurch and the houses and bank walls of Bene-fit Street.

The history of the house, opening amidst amaze of dates, revealed no trace of the sinistereither about its construction or about the pros-perous and honorable family who built it. Yetfrom the first a taint of calamity, soon increasedto boding significance, was apparent. My un-cle's carefully compiled record began with thebuilding of the structure in 1763, and followedthe theme with an unusual amount of detail.

The shunned house, it seems, was first inhab-ited by William Harris and his wife Rhoby Dex-ter, with their children, Elkanah, born in 1755,Abigail, born in 1757, William, Jr., born in 1759,and Ruth, born in 1761. Harris was a substan-tial merchant and seaman in the West Indiatrade, connected with the firm of ObadiahBrown and his nephews. After Brown's deathin 1761, the new firm of Nicholas Brown &Company made him master of the brig Pru-dence, Providence-built, of 120 tons, thus ena-bling him to erect the new homestead he haddesired ever since his marriage.

The site he had chosen—a recently straightenedpart of the new and fashionable Back Street,which ran along the side of the hill above crow-ded Cheapside—was all that could be wished,and the building did justice to the location. Itwas the best that moderate means could afford,and Harris hastened to move in before the birthof 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 thathouse for a century and a half.

The next April, sickness occurred among thechildren, and Abigail and Ruth died before themonth was over. Doctor Job Ives diagnosed thetrouble as some infantile fever, though othersdeclared it was more of a mere wasting-awayor decline. It seemed, in any event, to be conta-gious; for Hannah Bowen, one of the two ser-vants, died of it in the following June. Eli Li-deason, the other servant, constantly com-plained of weakness; and would have returnedto his father's farm in Rehoboth but for a sud-den attachment for Mehitabel Pierce, who washired to succeed Hannah. He died the nextyear—a sad year indeed, since it marked thedeath of William Harris himself, enfeebled ashe was by the climate of Martinique, where hisoccupation had kept him for considerable peri-ods during the preceding decade.

The widowed Rhoby Harris never recoveredfrom the shock of her husband's death, and thepassing of her first-born Elkanah two yearslater was the final blow to her reason. In 1768she fell victim to a mild form of insanity, andwas thereafter confined to the upper part of thehouse; her elder maiden sister, Mercy Dexter,having moved in to take charge of the family.Mercy was a plain, raw-boned woman of greatstrength; but her health visibly declined fromthe time of her advent. She was greatly devotedto her unfortunate sister, and had an especialaffection for her only surviving nephew Wil-liam, who from a sturdy infant had become asickly, spindling lad. In this year the servantMehitabel died, and the other servant, Pre-served Smith, left without coherent explana-tion—or at least, with only some wild tales anda complaint that he disliked the smell of theplace. For a time Mercy could secure no morehelp, since the seven deaths and case of mad-ness, all occurring within five years' space, had

begun to set in motion the body of fireside ru-mor which later became so bizarre. Ultimately,however, she obtained new servants from outof town; Ann White, a morose woman fromthat part of North Kingstown now set off as thetownship of Exeter, and a capable Boston mannamed Zenas Low.

It was Ann White who first gave definite shapeto the sinister idle talk. Mercy should haveknown better than to hire anyone from theNooseneck Hill country, for that remote bit ofbackwoods was then, as now, a seat of the mostuncomfortable superstitions. As lately as 1892an Exeter community exhumed a dead bodyand ceremoniously burnt its heart in order toprevent certain alleged visitations injurious tothe public health and peace, and one may imag-ine the point of view of the same section in1768. Ann's tongue was perniciously active,and within a few months Mercy discharged

her, filling her place with a faithful and amiableAmazon from Newport, Maria Robbins.

Meanwhile poor Rhoby Harris, in her madness,gave voice to dreams and imaginings of themost hideous sort. At times her screams be-came insupportable, and for long periods shewould utter shrieking horrors which necessi-tated her son's temporary residence with hiscousin, Peleg Harris, in Presbyterian Lane nearthe new college building. The boy would seemto improve after these visits, and had Mercybeen as wise as she was well-meaning, shewould have let him live permanently with Pe-leg. Just what Mrs. Harris cried out in her fits ofviolence, tradition hesitates to say; or rather,presents such extravagant accounts that theynullify themselves through sheer absurdity.Certainly it sounds absurd to hear that awoman educated only in the rudiments ofFrench often shouted for hours in a coarse andidiomatic form of that language, or that the

same person, alone and guarded, complainedwildly of a staring thing which bit and chewedat her. In 1772 the servant Zenas died, andwhen Mrs. Harris heard of it she laughed witha shocking delight utterly foreign to her. Thenext year she herself died, and was laid to restin the North Burial Ground beside her hus-band.

Upon the outbreak of trouble with Great Britainin 1775, William Harris, despite his scant six-teen years and feeble constitution, managed toenlist in the Army of Observation under Gen-eral Greene; and from that time on enjoyed asteady rise in health and prestige. In 1780, as acaptain in the Rhode Island forces in New Jer-sey under Colonel Angell, he met and marriedPhebe Hetfield of Elizabethtown, whom hebrought to Providence upon his honorable dis-charge in the following year.

The young soldier's return was not a thing ofunmitigated happiness. The house, it is true,

was still in good condition; and the street hadbeen widened and changed in name from BackStreet to Benefit Street. But Mercy Dexter's oncerobust frame had undergone a sad and curiousdecay, so that she was now a stooped and pa-thetic figure with hollow voice and disconcert-ing pallor—qualities shared to a singular de-gree by the one remaining servant Maria. In theautumn of 1782 Phebe Harris gave birth to astill-born daughter, and on the fifteenth of thenext May Mercy Dexter took leave of a useful,austere, and virtuous life.

William Harris, at last thoroughly convinced ofthe radically unhealthful nature of his abode,now took steps toward quitting it and closing itfor ever. Securing temporary quarters for him-self and his wife at the newly opened GoldenBall Inn, he arranged for the building of a newand finer house in Westminster Street, in thegrowing part of the town across the Great Brid-ge. There, in 1785, his son Dutee was born; and

there the family dwelt till the encroachments ofcommerce drove them back across the river andover the hill to Angell Street, in the newer EastSide residence district, where the late ArcherHarris built his sumptuous but hideous French-roofed mansion in 1876. William and Phebeboth succumbed to the yellow fever epidemicof 1797, but Dutee was brought up by hiscousin Rathbone Harris, Peleg's son.

Rathbone was a practical man, and rented theBenefit Street house despite William's wish tokeep it vacant. He considered it an obligation tohis ward to make the most of all the boy's pro-perty, nor did he concern himself with thedeaths and illnesses which caused so manychanges of tenants, or the steadily growingaversion with which the house was generallyregarded. It is likely that he felt only vexationwhen, in 1804, the town council ordered him tofumigate the place with sulfur, tar, and gumcamphor on account of the much-discussed

deaths of four persons, presumably caused bythe then diminishing fever epidemic. They saidthe place had a febrile smell.

Dutee himself thought little of the house, for hegrew up to be a privateersman, and servedwith distinction on the Vigilant under CaptainCahoone in the War of 1812. He returned un-harmed, married in 1814, and became a fatheron that memorable night of September 23, 1815,when a great gale drove the waters of the bayover half the town, and floated a tall sloop wellup Westminster Street so that its masts almosttapped the Harris windows in symbolic affir-mation that the new boy, Welcome, was a sea-man's son.

Welcome did not survive his father, but lived toperish gloriously at Fredericksburg in 1862.Neither he nor his son Archer knew of theshunned house as other than a nuisance almostimpossible to rent—perhaps on account of themustiness and sickly odor of unkempt old age.

Indeed, it never was rented after a series ofdeaths culminating in 1861, which the excite-ment of the war tended to throw into obscurity.Carrington Harris, last of the male line, knew itonly as a deserted and somewhat picturesquecenter of legend until I told him my experience.He had meant to tear it down and build anapartment house on the site, but after my ac-count decided to let it stand, install plumbing,and rent it. Nor has he yet had any difficulty inobtaining tenants. The horror has gone.

3

It may well be imagined how powerfully I wasaffected by the annals of the Harrises. In thiscontinuous record there seemed to me to brooda persistent evil beyond anything in nature as Ihad known it; an evil clearly connected withthe house and not with the family. This impres-sion was confirmed by my uncle's less system-atic array of miscellaneous data—legends tran-scribed from servant gossip, cuttings from the

papers, copies of death certificates by fellow-physicians, and the like. All of this material Icannot hope to give, for my uncle was a tirelessantiquarian and very deeply interested in theshunned house; but I may refer to severaldominant points which earn notice by theirrecurrence through many reports from diversesources. For example, the servant gossip waspractically unanimous in attributing to the fun-gous and malodorous cellar of the house a vastsupremacy in evil influence. There had beenservants—Ann White especially—who wouldnot use the cellar kitchen, and at least threewell-defined legends bore upon the queerquasi-human or diabolic outlines assumed bytree-roots and patches of mold in that region.These latter narratives interested me pro-foundly, on account of what I had seen in myboyhood, but I felt that most of the significancehad in each case been largely obscured by addi-tions from the common stock of local ghostlore.

Ann White, with her Exeter superstition, hadpromulgated the most extravagant and at thesame time most consistent tale; alleging thatthere must lie buried beneath the house one ofthose vampires—the dead who retain theirbodily form and live on the blood or breath ofthe living—whose hideous legions send theirpreying shapes or spirits abroad by night. Todestroy a vampire one must, the grandmotherssay, exhume it and burn its heart, or at leastdrive a stake through that organ; and Ann'sdogged insistence on a search under the cellarhad been prominent in bringing about her dis-charge.

Her tales, however, commanded a wide audi-ence, and were the more readily accepted be-cause the house indeed stood on land onceused for burial purposes. To me their interestdepended less on this circumstance than on thepeculiarly appropriate way in which they dove-tailed with certain other things—the complaint

of the departing servant Preserved Smith, whohad preceded Ann and never heard of her, thatsomething "sucked his breath" at night; thedeath-certificates of the fever victims of 1804,issued by Doctor Chad Hopkins, and showingthe four deceased persons all unaccountablylacking in blood; and the obscure passages ofpoor Rhoby Harris's ravings, where she com-plained of the sharp teeth of a glassy-eyed,half-visible presence.

Free from unwarranted superstition though Iam, these things produced in me an odd sensa-tion, which was intensified by a pair of widelyseparated newspaper cuttings relating todeaths in the shunned house—one from theProvidence Gazette and Country-Journal of April12, 1815, and the other from the Daily Transcriptand Chronicle of October 27, 1845—each ofwhich detailed an appallingly grisly circum-stance whose duplication was remarkable. Itseems that in both instances the dying person,

in 1815 a gentle old lady named Stafford and in1845 a schoolteacher of middle age namedEleazar Durfee, became transfigured in a horri-ble way, glaring glassily and attempting to bitethe throat of the attending physician. Evenmore puzzling, though, was the final casewhich put an end to the renting of the house—aseries of anemia deaths preceded by progres-sive madnesses wherein the patient wouldcraftily attempt the lives of his relatives by inci-sions in the neck or wrist.

This was in 1860 and 1861, when my uncle hadjust begun his medical practise; and before lea-ving for the front he heard much of it from hiselder professional colleagues. The really inex-plicable thing was the way in which the vic-tims—ignorant people, for the ill-smelling andwidely shunned house could now be rented tono others—would babble maledictions inFrench, a language they could not possiblyhave studied to any extent. It made one think of

poor Rhoby Harris nearly a century before, andso moved my uncle that he commenced collect-ing historical data on the house after listening,some time subsequent to his return from thewar, to the first-hand account of Doctors Chaseand Whitmarsh. Indeed, I could see that myuncle had thought deeply on the subject, andthat he was glad of my own interest—an open-minded and sympathetic interest which en-abled him to discuss with me matters at whichothers would merely have laughed. His fancyhad not gone so far as mine, but he felt that theplace was rare in its imaginative potentialities,and worthy of note as an inspiration in the fieldof the grotesque and macabre.

For my part, I was disposed to take the wholesubject with profound seriousness, and beganat once not only to review the evidence, but toaccumulate as much more as I could. I talkedwith the elderly Archer Harris, then owner ofthe house, many times before his death in 1916;

and obtained from him and his still survivingmaiden sister Alice an authentic corroborationof all the family data my uncle had collected.When, however, I asked them what connectionwith France or its language the house couldhave, they confessed themselves as frankly baf-fled and ignorant as I. Archer knew nothing,and all that Miss Harris could say was that anold allusion her grandfather, Dutee Harris, hadheard of might have shed a little light. The oldseaman, who had survived his son Welcome'sdeath in battle by two years, had not himselfknown the legend, but recalled that his earliestnurse, the ancient Maria Robbins, seemed dar-kly aware of something that might have lent aweird significance to the French raving of Rho-by Harris, which she had so often heard duringthe last days of that hapless woman. Maria hadbeen at the shunned house from 1769 till theremoval of the family in 1783, and had seenMercy Dexter die. Once she hinted to the childDutee of a somewhat peculiar circumstance in

Mercy's last moments, but he had soon forgot-ten all about it save that it was something pecu-liar. The granddaughter, moreover, recalledeven this much with difficulty. She and herbrother were not so much interested in the hou-se as was Archer's son Carrington, the presentowner, with whom I talked after my experi-ence.

Having exhausted the Harris family of all theinformation it could furnish, I turned my atten-tion to early town records and deeds with azeal more penetrating than that which my un-cle had occasionally shown in the same work.What I wished was a comprehensive history ofthe site from its very settlement in 1636—oreven before, if any Narragansett Indian legendcould be unearthed to supply the data. I found,at the start, that the land had been part of thelong strip of home lot granted originally toJohn Throckmorton; one of many similar strips

beginning at the Town Street beside the riverand extending up over the hill to a line roughlycorresponding with the modern Hope Street.The Throckmorton lot had later, of course, beenmuch subdivided; and I became very assiduousin tracing that section through which Back orBenefit Street was later run. It had, as rumorindeed said, been the Throckmorton graveyard;but as I examined the records more carefully, Ifound that the graves had all been transferredat an early date to the North Burial Ground onthe Pawtucket West Road.

Then suddenly I came—by a rare piece of chan-ce, since it was not in the main body of recordsand might easily have been missed—upon so-mething which aroused my keenest eagerness,fitting in as it did with several of the queerestphases of the affair. It was the record of a lease,in 1697, of a small tract of ground to an EtienneRoulet and wife. At last the French element hadappeared—that, and another deeper element of

horror which the name conjured up from thedarkest recesses of my weird and heterogene-ous reading—and I feverishly studied the plat-ting of the locality as it had been before thecutting through and partial straightening ofBack Street between 1747 and 1758. I foundwhat I had half expected, that where theshunned house now stood the Roulets had laidout their graveyard behind a one-story andattic cottage, and that no record of any transferof graves existed. The document, indeed, endedin much confusion; and I was forced to ransackboth the Rhode Island Historical Society andShepley Library before I could find a local doorwhich the name of Etienne Roulet wouldunlock. In the end I did find something; some-thing of such vague but monstrous import thatI set about at once to examine the cellar of theshunned house itself with a new and excitedminuteness.

The Roulets, it seemed, had come in 1696 fromEast Greenwich, down the west shore of Nar-ragansett Bay. They were Huguenots fromCaude, and had encountered much oppositionbefore the Providence selectmen allowed themto settle in the town. Unpopularity had doggedthem in East Greenwich, whither they hadcome in 1686, after the revocation of the Edictof Nantes, and rumor said that the cause ofdislike extended beyond mere racial and na-tional prejudice, or the land disputes whichinvolved other French settlers with the Englishin rivalries which not even Governor Androscould quell. But their ardent Protestantism—too ardent, some whispered—and their evidentdistress when virtually driven from the villagedown the bay, had moved the sympathy of thetown fathers. Here the strangers had beengranted a haven; and the swarthy Etienne Rou-let, less apt at agriculture than at reading queerbooks and drawing queer diagrams, was givena clerical post in the warehouse at Pardon Till-

inghast's wharf, far south in Town Street. Therehad, however, been a riot of some sort lateron—perhaps forty years later, after old Roulet'sdeath—and no one seemed to hear of the fam-ily after that.

For a century and more, it appeared, the Rou-lets had been well remembered and frequentlydiscussed as vivid incidents in the quiet life of aNew England seaport. Etienne's son Paul, asurly fellow whose erratic conduct had proba-bly provoked the riot which wiped out the fam-ily, was particularly a source of speculation;and though Providence never shared the witch-craft panics of her Puritan neighbors, it wasfreely intimated by old wives that his prayerswere neither uttered at the proper time nordirected toward the proper object. All this hadundoubtedly formed the basis of the legendknown by old Maria Robbins. What relation ithad to the French ravings of Rhoby Harris andother inhabitants of the shunned house, imagi-

nation or future discovery alone could deter-mine. I wondered how many of those who hadknown the legends realized that additional linkwith the terrible which my wider reading hadgiven me; that ominous item in the annals ofmorbid horror which tells of the creatureJacques Roulet, of Caude, who in 1598 was con-demned to death as a demoniac but afterwardsaved from the stake by the Paris parliamentand shut in a madhouse. He had been foundcovered with blood and shreds of flesh in awood, shortly after the killing and rending of aboy by a pair of wolves. One wolf was seen tolope away unhurt. Surely a pretty hearthsidetale, with a queer significance as to name andplace; but I decided that the Providence gossipscould not have generally known of it. Had theyknown, the coincidence of names would havebrought some drastic and frightened action—indeed, might not its limited whispering haveprecipitated the final riot which erased theRoulets from the town?

I now visited the accursed place with increasedfrequency; studying the unwholesome vegeta-tion of the garden, examining all the walls ofthe building, and poring over every inch of theearthen cellar floor. Finally, with CarringtonHarris's permission, I fitted a key to the disuseddoor opening from the cellar directly upon Be-nefit Street, preferring to have a more immedi-ate access to the outside world than the darkstairs, ground-floor hall, and front door couldgive. There, where morbidity lurked most thic-kly, I searched and poked during long after-noons when the sunlight filtered in through thecobwebbed above-ground windows, and asense of security glowed from the unlockeddoor which placed me only a few feet from theplacid sidewalk outside. Nothing new re-warded my efforts—only the same depressingmustiness and faint suggestions of noxiousodors and nitrous outlines on the floor—and Ifancy that many pedestrians must have

watched me curiously through the brokenpanes.

At length, upon a suggestion of my uncle's, Idecided to try the spot nocturnally; and onestormy midnight ran the beams of an electrictorch over the moldy floor with its uncannyshapes and distorted, half-phosphorescentfungi. The place had dispirited me curiouslythat evening, and I was almost prepared when Isaw—or thought I saw—amidst the whitishdeposits a particularly sharp definition of the"huddled form" I had suspected from boyhood.Its clearness was astonishing and unprece-dented—and as I watched I seemed to seeagain the thin, yellowish, shimmering exhala-tion which had startled me on that rainy after-noon so many years before.

Above the anthropomorphic patch of mold bythe fireplace it rose; a subtle, sickish, almostluminous vapor which as it hung trembling inthe dampness seemed to develop vague and

shocking suggestions of form, gradually trail-ing off into nebulous decay and passing up intothe blackness of the great chimney with a fetorin its wake. It was truly horrible, and the moreso to me because of what I knew of the spot.Refusing to flee, I watched it fade—and as Iwatched I felt that it was in turn watching megreedily with eyes more imaginable than visi-ble. When I told my uncle about it he wasgreatly aroused; and after a tense hour of reflec-tion, arrived at a definite and drastic decision.Weighing in his mind the importance of thematter, and the significance of our relation to it,he insisted that we both test—and if possibledestroy—the horror of the house by a jointnight or nights of aggressive vigil in that mustyand fungus-cursed cellar.

4

On Wednesday, June 25, 1919, after a propernotification of Carrington Harris which did notinclude surmises as to what we expected to

find, my uncle and I conveyed to the shunnedhouse two camp chairs and a folding camp cot,together with some scientific mechanism ofgreater weight and intricacy. These we placedin the cellar during the day, screening the win-dows with paper and planning to return in theevening for our first vigil. We had locked thedoor from the cellar to the ground floor; andhaving a key to the outside cellar door, wereprepared to leave our expensive and delicateapparatus—which we had obtained secretlyand at great cost—as many days as our vigilsmight be protracted. It was our design to sit uptogether till very late, and then watch singly tilldawn in two-hour stretches, myself first andthen my companion; the inactive member rest-ing on the cot.

The natural leadership with which my uncleprocured the instruments from the laboratoriesof Brown University and the Cranston StreetArmory, and instinctively assumed direction of

our venture, was a marvelous commentary onthe potential vitality and resilience of a man ofeighty-one. Elihu Whipple had lived accordingto the hygienic laws he had preached as a phy-sician, and but for what happened later wouldbe here in full vigor today. Only two personssuspected what did happen—Carrington Har-ris and myself. I had to tell Harris because heowned the house and deserved to know whathad gone out of it. Then too, we had spoken tohim in advance of our quest; and I felt after myuncle's going that he would understand andassist me in some vitally necessary public ex-planations. He turned very pale, but agreed tohelp me, and decided that it would now be safeto rent the house.

To declare that we were not nervous on thatrainy night of watching would be an exaggera-tion both gross and ridiculous. We were not, asI have said, in any sense childishly supersti-tious, but scientific study and reflection had

taught us that the known universe of three di-mensions embraces the merest fraction of thewhole cosmos of substance and energy. In thiscase an overwhelming preponderance of evi-dence from numerous authentic sourcespointed to the tenacious existence of certainforces of great power and, so far as the humanpoint of view is concerned, exceptional malig-nancy. To say that we actually believed invampires or werewolves would be a carelesslyinclusive statement. Rather must it be said thatwe were not prepared to deny the possibility ofcertain unfamiliar and unclassified modifica-tions of vital force and attenuated matter; exist-ing very infrequently in three-dimensionalspace because of its more intimate connectionwith other spatial units, yet close enough to theboundary of our own to furnish us occasionalmanifestations which we, for lack of a propervantage-point, may never hope to understand.

In short, it seemed to my uncle and me that anincontrovertible array of facts pointed to somelingering influence in the shunned house; tra-ceable to one or another of the ill-favoredFrench settlers of two centuries before, and stilloperative through rare and unknown laws ofatomic and electronic motion. That the familyof Roulet had possessed an abnormal affinityfor outer circles of entity—dark spheres whichfor normal folk hold only repulsion and ter-ror—their recorded history seemed to prove.Had not, then, the riots of those bygone seven-teen-thirties set moving certain kinetic patternsin the morbid brain of one or more of them—notably the sinister Paul Roulet—which ob-scurely survived the bodies murdered and bur-ied by the mob, and continued to function insome multiple-dimensioned space along theoriginal lines of force determined by a frantichatred of the encroaching community?

Such a thing was surely not a physical or bio-chemical impossibility in the light of a newerscience which includes the theories of relativityand intra-atomic action. One might easily imag-ine an alien nucleus of substance or energy,formless or otherwise, kept alive by impercep-tible or immaterial subtractions from the life-force or bodily tissue and fluids of other andmore palpably living things into which it pene-trates and with whose fabric it sometimes com-pletely merges itself. It might be actively hos-tile, or it might be dictated merely by blind mo-tives of self-preservation. In any case such amonster must of necessity be in our scheme ofthings an anomaly and an intruder, whose ex-tirpation forms a primary duty with every mannot an enemy to the world's life, health, andsanity.

What baffled us was our utter ignorance of theaspect 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 sub-stance—or it might be partly material; someunknown and equivocal mass of plasticity, ca-pable of changing at will to nebulous approxi-mations of the solid, liquid, gaseous, or tenu-ously unparticled states. The anthropomorphicpatch of mold on the floor, the form of the yel-lowish vapor, and the curvature of the tree-roots in some of the old tales, all argued at leasta remote and reminiscent connection with thehuman shape; but how representative or per-manent that similarity might be, none could saywith any kind of certainty.

We had devised two weapons to fight it; a largeand specially fitted Crookes tube operated bypowerful storage batteries and provided withpeculiar screens and reflectors, in case it provedintangible and opposable only by vigorouslydestructive ether radiations, and a pair of mili-

tary flame-throwers of the sort used in theWorld War, in case it proved partly materialand susceptible of mechanical destruction—forlike the superstitious Exeter rustics, we wereprepared to burn the thing's heart out if heartexisted to burn. All this aggressive mechanismwe set in the cellar in positions carefully ar-ranged with reference to the cot and chairs, andto the spot before the fireplace where the moldhad taken strange shapes. That suggestivepatch, by the way, was only faintly visiblewhen we placed our furniture and instruments,and when we returned that evening for theactual vigil. For a moment I half doubted that Ihad ever seen it in the more definitely limnedform—but then I thought of the legends.

Our cellar vigil began at ten p. m., daylightsaving time, and as it continued we found nopromise of pertinent developments. A weak,filtered glow from the rain-harassed street-lamps outside, and a feeble phosphorescence

from the detestable fungi within, showed thedripping stone of the walls, from which all tra-ces of whitewash had vanished; the dank, fetidand mildew-tainted hard earth floor with itsobscene fungi; the rotting remains of what hadbeen stools, chairs, and tables, and other moreshapeless furniture; the heavy planks and mas-sive beams of the ground floor overhead; thedecrepit plank door leading to bins and cham-bers beneath other parts of the house; the crum-bling stone staircase with ruined wooden hand-rail; and the crude and cavernous fireplace ofblackened brick where rusted iron fragmentsrevealed the past presence of hooks, andirons,spit, crane, and a door to the Dutch oven—these things, and our austere cot and campchairs, and the heavy and intricate destructivemachinery we had brought.

We had, as in my own former explorations, leftthe door to the street unlocked; so that a directand practical path of escape might lie open in

case of manifestations beyond our power todeal with. It was our idea that our continuednocturnal presence would call forth whatevermalign entity lurked there; and that being pre-pared, we could dispose of the thing with oneor the other of our provided means as soon aswe had recognized and observed it sufficiently.How long it might require to evoke and extin-guish the thing, we had no notion. It occurredto us, too, that our venture was far from safe;for in what strength the thing might appear noone could tell. But we deemed the game worththe hazard, and embarked on it alone and un-hesitatingly; conscious that the seeking of out-side aid would only expose us to ridicule andperhaps defeat our entire purpose. Such wasour frame of mind as we talked—far into thenight, till my uncle's growing drowsiness mademe remind him to lie down for his two-hoursleep.

Something like fear chilled me as I sat there inthe small hours alone—I say alone, for one whosits by a sleeper is indeed alone; perhaps morealone than he can realize. My uncle breathedheavily, his deep inhalations and exhalationsaccompanied by the rain outside, and punctu-ated by another nerve-racking sound of distantdripping water within—for the house wasrepulsively damp even in dry weather, and inthis storm positively swamp-like. I studied theloose, antique masonry of the walls in the fun-gus-light and the feeble rays which stole infrom the street through the screened window;and once, when the noisome atmosphere of theplace seemed about to sicken me, I opened thedoor and looked up and down the street, feast-ing my eyes on familiar sights and my nostrilson wholesome air. Still nothing occurred toreward my watching; and I yawned repeatedly,fatigue getting the better of apprehension.

Then the stirring of my uncle in his sleep at-tracted my notice. He had turned restlessly onthe cot several times during the latter half ofthe first hour, but now he was breathing withunusual irregularity, occasionally heaving asigh which held more than a few of the quali-ties of a choking moan.

I turned my electric flashlight on him andfound his face averted; so rising and crossing tothe other side of the cot, I again flashed thelight to see if he seemed in any pain. What Isaw unnerved me most surprisingly, consider-ing its relative triviality. It must have beenmerely the association of any odd circumstancewith the sinister nature of our location and mis-sion, for surely the circumstance was not initself frightful or unnatural. It was merely thatmy uncle's facial expression, disturbed nodoubt by the strange dreams which our situa-tion 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 emotionsseemed struggling within him. I think, on thewhole, that it was this variety which chieflydisturbed me. My uncle, as he gasped andtossed in increasing perturbation and with eyesthat had now started open, seemed not one butmany men, and suggested a curious quality ofalienage from himself.

All at once he commenced to mutter, and I didnot like the look of his mouth and teeth as hespoke. The words were at first indistinguish-able, and then—with a tremendous start—Irecognized something about them which filledme with icy fear till I recalled the breadth of myuncle's education and the interminable transla-tions he had made from anthropological andantiquarian articles in the Revue des Deux Mon-des. For the venerable Elihu Whipple was mut-tering in French, and the few phrases I could

distinguish seemed connected with the darkestmyths he had ever adapted from the famousParis magazine.

Suddenly a perspiration broke out on the slee-per's forehead, and he leaped abruptly up, halfawake. The jumble of French changed to a cryin English, and the hoarse voice shouted excit-edly, "My breath, my breath!" Then the awak-ening became complete, and with a subsidenceof facial expression to the normal state my un-cle seized my hand and began to relate a dreamwhose nucleus of significance I could only sur-mise with a kind of awe.

He had, he said, floated off from a very ordi-nary series of dream-pictures into a scenewhose strangeness was related to nothing hehad ever read. It was of this world, and yet notof it—a shadowy geometrical confusion inwhich could be seen elements of familiar thingsin most unfamiliar and perturbing combina-tions. There was a suggestion of queerly disor-

dered pictures superimposed one upon an-other; an arrangement in which the essentials oftime as well as of space seemed dissolved andmixed in the most illogical fashion. In this ka-leidoscopic vortex of phantasmal images wereoccasional snap-shots, if one might use theterm, of singular clearness but unaccountableheterogeneity.

Once my uncle thought he lay in a carelesslydug open pit, with a crowd of angry faces fra-med by straggling locks and three-corneredhats frowning down on him. Again he seemedto be in the interior of a house—an old house,apparently—but the details and inhabitantswere constantly changing, and he could neverbe certain of the faces or the furniture, or evenof the room itself, since doors and windowsseemed in just as great a state of flux as the pre-sumably more mobile objects. It was queer—damnably queer—and my uncle spoke almostsheepishly, as if half expecting not to be be-

lieved, when he declared that of the strangefaces many had unmistakably borne the fea-tures of the Harris family. And all the whilethere was a personal sensation of choking, as ifsome pervasive presence had spread itselfthrough his body and sought to possess itself ofhis vital processes.

I shuddered at the thought of those vital proc-esses, worn as they were by eighty-one years ofcontinuous functioning, in conflict with un-known forces of which the youngest andstrongest system might well be afraid; but inanother moment reflected that dreams are onlydreams, and that these uncomfortable visionscould be, at most, no more than my uncle's re-action to the investigations and expectationswhich had lately filled our minds to the exclu-sion of all else.

Conversation, also, soon tended to dispel mysense of strangeness; and in time I yielded tomy yawns and took my turn at slumber. My

uncle seemed now very wakeful, and wel-comed his period of watching even though thenightmare had aroused him far ahead of hisallotted two hours.

Sleep seized me quickly, and I was at oncehaunted with dreams of the most disturbingkind. I felt, in my visions, a cosmic and abysmalloneness; with hostility surging from all sidesupon some prison where I lay confined. I see-med bound and gagged, and taunted by theechoing yells of distant multitudes whothirsted for my blood. My uncle's face came tome with less pleasant association than in wak-ing hours, and I recall many futile strugglesand attempts to scream. It was not a pleasantsleep, and for a second I was not sorry for theechoing shriek which clove through the barriersof dream and flung me to a sharp and startledawakeness in which every actual object beforemy eyes stood out with more than naturalclearness and reality.

5

I had been lying with my face away from myuncle's chair, so that in this sudden flash ofawakening I saw only the door to the street, thewindow, and the wall and floor and ceilingtoward the north of the room, all photographedwith morbid vividness on my brain in a lightbrighter than the glow of the fungi or the raysfrom the street outside. It was not a strong oreven a fairly strong light; certainly not nearlystrong enough to read an average book by. Butit cast a shadow of myself and the cot on thefloor, and had a yellowish, penetrating forcethat hinted at things more potent than luminos-ity. This I perceived with unhealthy sharpnessdespite the fact that two of my other senseswere violently assailed. For on my ears rang thereverberations of that shocking scream, whilemy nostrils revolted at the stench which filledthe place. My mind, as alert as my senses, rec-ognized the gravely unusual; and almost auto-

matically I leaped up and turned about to graspthe destructive instruments which we had lefttrained on the moldy spot before the fireplace.As I turned, I dreaded what I was to see; for thescream had been in my uncle's voice, and Iknew not against what menace I should have todefend him and myself.

Yet after all, the sight was worse than I haddreaded. There are horrors beyond horrors,and this was one of those nuclei of alldreamable hideousness which the cosmos savesto blast an accursed and unhappy few. Out ofthe fungus-ridden earth steamed up a vaporouscorpse-light, yellow and diseased, which bub-bled and lapped to a gigantic height in vagueoutlines half human and half monstrous,through which I could see the chimney andfireplace beyond. It was all eyes—wolfish andmocking—and the rugose insect-like head dis-solved at the top to a thin stream of mist whichcurled putridly about and finally vanished up

the chimney. I say that I saw this thing, but it isonly in conscious retrospection that I ever defi-nitely traced its damnable approach to form. Atthe time, it was to me only a seething, dimlyphosphorescent cloud of fungous loathsome-ness, enveloping and dissolving to an abhor-rent plasticity the one object on which all myattention was focussed. That object was myuncle—the venerable Elihu Whipple—whowith blackening and decaying features leeredand gibbered at me, and reached out drippingclaws to rend me in the fury which this horrorhad brought.

It was a sense of routine which kept me fromgoing mad. I had drilled myself in preparationfor the crucial moment, and blind trainingsaved me. Recognizing the bubbling evil as nosubstance reachable by matter or materialchemistry, and therefore ignoring the flame-thrower which loomed on my left, I threw onthe current of the Crookes tube apparatus, and

focussed toward that scene of immortal blas-phemousness the strongest ether radiationswhich man's art can arouse from the spaces andfluids of nature. There was a bluish haze and afrenzied sputtering, and the yellowish phos-phorescence grew dimmer to my eyes. But Isaw the dimness was only that of contrast, andthat the waves from the machine had no effectwhatever.

Then, in the midst of that demoniac spectacle, Isaw a fresh horror which brought cries to mylips and sent me fumbling and staggering to-ward that unlocked door to the quiet street,careless of what abnormal terrors I loosed uponthe world, or what thoughts or judgments ofmen I brought down upon my head. In thatdim blend of blue and yellow the form of myuncle had commenced a nauseous liquefactionwhose essence eludes all description, and inwhich there played across his vanishing facesuch changes of identity as only madness can

conceive. He was at once a devil and a multi-tude, a charnel-house and a pageant. Lit by themixed and uncertain beams, that gelatinousface assumed a dozen—a score—a hundred—aspects; grinning, as it sank to the ground on abody that melted like tallow, in the caricaturedlikeness of legions strange and yet not strange.

I saw the features of the Harris line, masculineand feminine, adult and infantile, and otherfeatures old and young, coarse and refined,familiar and unfamiliar. For a second thereflashed a degraded counterfeit of a miniature ofpoor mad Rhoby Harris that I had seen in theSchool of Design museum, and another time Ithought I caught the raw-boned image ofMercy Dexter as I recalled her from a paintingin Carrington Harris's house. It was frightfulbeyond conception; toward the last, when acurious blend of servant and baby visagesflickered close to the fungous floor where apool of greenish grease was spreading, it

seemed as though the shifting features foughtagainst themselves and strove to form contourslike those of my uncle's kindly face. I like tothink that he existed at that moment, and thathe tried to bid me farewell. It seems to me Ihiccupped a farewell from my own parchedthroat as I lurched out into the street; a thinstream of grease following me through the doorto the rain-drenched sidewalk.

The rest is shadowy and monstrous. There wasno one in the soaking street, and in all theworld there was no one I dared tell. I walkedaimlessly south past College Hill and theAthenæum, down Hopkins Street, and over thebridge to the business section where tall build-ings seemed to guard me as modern materialthings guard the world from ancient and un-wholesome wonder. Then gray dawn unfoldedwetly from the east, silhouetting the archaic hilland its venerable steeples, and beckoning me to

the place where my terrible work was still un-finished. And in the end I went, wet, hatless,and dazed in the morning light, and enteredthat awful door in Benefit Street which I hadleft ajar, and which still swung cryptically infull sight of the early householders to whom Idared not speak.

The grease was gone, for the moldy floor wasporous. And in front of the fireplace was novestige of the giant doubled-up form traced inniter. I looked at the cot, the chairs, the instru-ments, my neglected hat, and the yellowedstraw hat of my uncle. Dazedness was upper-most, and I could scarcely recall what wasdream and what was reality. Then thought tric-kled back, and I knew that I had witnessedthings more horrible than I had dreamed.

Sitting down, I tried to conjecture as nearly assanity would let me just what had happened,and how I might end the horror, if indeed ithad been real. Matter it seemed not to be, nor

ether, nor anything else conceivable by mortalmind. What, then, but some exotic emanation;some vampirish vapor such as Exeter rusticstell of as lurking over certain churchyards? ThisI felt was the clue, and again I looked at thefloor before the fireplace where the mold andniter had taken strange forms.

In ten minutes my mind was made up, andtaking my hat I set out for home, where Ibathed, ate, and gave by telephone an order fora pickax, a spade, a military gas-mask, and sixcarboys of sulfuric acid, all to be delivered thenext morning at the cellar door of the shunnedhouse in Benefit Street. After that I tried tosleep; and failing, passed the hours in readingand in the composition of inane verses to coun-teract my mood.

At eleven a. m. the next day I commenced dig-ging. It was sunny weather, and I was glad ofthat. I was still alone, for as much as I fearedthe unknown horror I sought, there was more

fear in the thought of telling anybody. Later Itold Harris only through sheer necessity, andbecause he had heard odd tales from old peo-ple which disposed him ever so little towardbelief. As I turned up the stinking black earth infront of the fireplace, my spade causing a vis-cous yellow ichor to ooze from the white fungiwhich it severed, I trembled at the dubiousthoughts of what I might uncover. Some secretsof inner earth are not good for mankind, andthis seemed to me one of them.

My hand shook perceptibly, but still I delved;after a while standing in the large hole I hadmade. With the deepening of the hole, whichwas about six feet square, the evil smell in-creased; and I lost all doubt of my imminentcontact with the hellish thing whose emana-tions had cursed the house for over a centuryand a half. I wondered what it would looklike—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 ofthe hole and dispersed the heaped-up dirt, thenarranging the great carboys of acid around andnear two sides, so that when necessary I mightempty them all down the aperture in quicksuccession. After that I dumped earth onlyalong the other two sides; working more slowlyand donning my gas-mask as the smell grew. Iwas nearly unnerved at my proximity to anameless thing at the bottom of a pit.

Suddenly my spade struck something softerthan earth. I shuddered, and made a motion asif to climb out of the hole, which was now asdeep as my neck. Then courage returned, and Iscraped away more dirt in the light of the elec-tric torch I had provided. The surface I uncov-ered was fishy and glassy—a kind of semi-putrid congealed jelly with suggestions oftranslucency. I scraped further, and saw that ithad form. There was a rift where a part of thesubstance was folded over. The exposed area

was huge and roughly cylindrical; like a mam-moth soft blue-white stovepipe doubled in two,its largest part some two feet in diameter. Stillmore I scraped, and then abruptly I leaped outof the hole and away from the filthy thing; fran-tically unstopping and tilting the heavy car-boys, and precipitating their corrosive contentsone after another down that charnel gulf andupon the unthinkable abnormality whose titanelbow I had seen.

The blinding maelstrom of greenish-yellowvapor which surged tempestuously up fromthat hole as the floods of acid descended, willnever leave my memory. All along the hill peo-ple tell of the yellow day, when virulent andhorrible fumes arose from the factory wastedumped in the Providence River, but I knowhow mistaken they are as to the source. Theytell, too, of the hideous roar which at the sametime came from some disordered water-pipe or

gas main underground—but again I could cor-rect them if I dared. It was unspeakably shock-ing, and I do not see how I lived through it. Idid faint after emptying the fourth carboy,which I had to handle after the fumes had be-gun to penetrate my mask; but when I recov-ered I saw that the hole was emitting no freshvapors.

The two remaining carboys I emptied downwithout particular result, and after a time I feltit safe to shovel the earth back into the pit. Itwas twilight before I was done, but fear hadgone out of the place. The dampness was lessfetid, and all the strange fungi had withered toa kind of harmless grayish powder which blewash-like along the floor. One of earth's nether-most terrors had perished for ever; and if therebe a hell, it had received at last the demon soulof an unhallowed thing. And as I patted downthe last spadeful of mold, I shed the first of the

many tears with which I have paid unaffectedtribute to my beloved uncle's memory.

The next spring no more pale grass and strangeweeds came up in the shunned house's terracedgarden, and shortly afterward Carrington Har-ris rented the place. It is still spectral, but itsstrangeness fascinates me, and I shall findmixed with my relief a queer regret when it istorn down to make way for a tawdry shop orvulgar apartment building. The barren old treesin the yard have begun to bear small, sweetapples, and last year the birds nested in theirgnarled boughs.