H.P. Lovecraft. The Colour Out of Space
The Colour Out of Space
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written March 1927
Published September 1927 in Amazing Stories, Vol. 2, No. 6, p. 557-67
West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods
that no axe has ever cut. There are dark narrow glens where the trees
slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having
caught the glint of sunlight. On the gentle slopes there are farms,
ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally
over old New England secrets in the lee of great ledges; but these are all
vacant now, the wide chimneys crumbling and the shingled sides bulging
perilously beneath low gambrel roofs.
The old folk have gone away, and foreigners do not like to live there.
French-Canadians have tried it, Italians have tried it, and the Poles have
come and departed. It is not because of anything that can be seen or heard
or handled, but because of something that is imagined. The place is not
good for imagination, and does not bring restful dreams at night. It must
be this which keeps the foreigners away, for old Ammi Pierce has never
told them of anything he recalls from the strange days. Ammi, whose head
has been a little queer for years, is the only one who still remains, or
who ever talks of the strange days; and he dares to do this because his
house is so near the open fields and the travelled roads around Arkham.
There was once a road over the hills and through the valleys, that ran
straight where the blasted heath is now; but people ceased to use it and a
new road was laid curving far toward the south. Traces of the old one can
still be found amidst the weeds of a returning wilderness, and some of
them will doubtless linger even when half the hollows are flooded for the
new reservoir. Then the dark woods will be cut down and the blasted heath
will slumber far below blue waters whose surface will mirror the sky and
ripple in the sun. And the secrets of the strange days will be one with
the deep's secrets; one with the hidden lore of old ocean, and all the
mystery of primal earth.
When I went into the hills and vales to survey for the new reservoir they
told me the place was evil. They told me this in Arkham, and because that
is a very old town full of witch legends I thought the evil must he
something which grandams had whispered to children through centuries. The
name "blasted heath" seemed to me very odd and theatrical, and I wondered
how it had come into the folklore of a Puritan people. Then I saw that
dark westward tangle of glens and slopes for myself, and ceased to wonder
at anything beside its own elder mystery. It was morning when I saw it,
but shadow lurked always there. The trees grew too thickly, and their
trunks were too big for any healthy New England wood. There was too much
silence in the dim alleys between them, and the floor was too soft with
the dank moss and mattings of infinite years of decay.
In the open spaces, mostly along the line of the old road, there were
little hillside farms; sometimes with all the buildings standing,
sometimes with only one or two, and sometimes with only a lone chimney or
fast-filling cellar. Weeds and briers reigned, and furtive wild things
rustled in the undergrowth. Upon everything was a haze of restlessness and
oppression; a touch of the unreal and the grotesque, as if some vital
element of perspective or chiaroscuro were awry. I did not wonder that the
foreigners would not stay, for this was no region to sleep in. It was too
much like a landscape of Salvator Rosa; too much like some forbidden
woodcut in a tale of terror.
But even all this was not so bad as the blasted heath. I knew it the
moment I came upon it at the bottom of a spacious valley; for no other
name could fit such a thing, or any other thing fit such a name. It was as
if the poet had coined the phrase from having seen this one particular
region. It must, I thought as I viewed it, be the outcome of a fire; but
why had nothing new ever grown over these five acres of grey desolation
that sprawled open to the sky like a great spot eaten by acid in the woods
and fields? It lay largely to the north of the ancient road line, but
encroached a little on the other side. I felt an odd reluctance about
approaching, and did so at last only because my business took me through
and past it. There was no vegetation of any kind on that broad expanse,
but only a fine grey dust or ash which no wind seemed ever to blow about.
The trees near it were sickly and stunted, and many dead trunks stood or
lay rotting at the rim. As I walked hurriedly by I saw the tumbled bricks
and stones of an old chimney and cellar on my right, and the yawning black
maw of an abandoned well whose stagnant vapours played strange tricks with
the hues of the sunlight. Even the long, dark woodland climb beyond seemed
welcome in contrast, and I marvelled no more at the frightened whispers of
Arkham people. There had been no house or ruin near; even in the old days
the place must have been lonely and remote. And at twilight, dreading to
repass that ominous spot, I walked circuitously back to the town by the
curious road on the south. I vaguely wished some clouds would gather, for
an odd timidity about the deep skyey voids above had crept into my soul.
In the evening I asked old people in Arkham about the blasted heath, and
what was meant by that phrase "strange days" which so many evasively
muttered. I could not, however, get any good answers except that all the
mystery was much more recent than I had dreamed. It was not a matter of
old legendry at all, but something within the lifetime of those who spoke.
It had happened in the 'eighties, and a family had disappeared or was
killed. Speakers would not be exact; and because they all told me to pay
no attention to old Ammi Pierce's crazy tales, I sought him out the next
morning, having heard that he lived alone in the ancient tottering cottage
where the trees first begin to get very thick. It was a fearsomely ancient
place, and had begun to exude the faint miasmal odour which clings about
houses that have stood too long. Only with persistent knocking could I
rouse the aged man, and when he shuffled timidly to the door could could
tell he was not glad to see me. He was not so feeble as I had expected;
but his eyes drooped in a curious way, and his unkempt clothing and white
beard made him seem very worn and dismal.
Not knowing just how he could best be launched on his tales, I feigned a
matter of business; told him of my surveying, and asked vague questions
about the district. He was far brighter and more educated than I had been
led to think, and before I knew it had grasped quite as much of the
subject as any man I had talked with in Arkham. He was not like other
rustics I had known in the sections where reservoirs were to be. From him
there were no protests at the miles of old wood and farmland to be blotted
out, though perhaps there would have been had not his home lain outside
the bounds of the future lake. Relief was all that he showed; relief at
the doom of the dark ancient valleys through which he had roamed all his
life. They were better under water now - better under water since the
strange days. And with this opening his husky voice sank low, while his
body leaned forward and his right forefinger began to point shakily and
impressively.
It was then that I heard the story, and as the rambling voice scraped and
whispered on I shivered again and again spite the summer day. Often I had
to recall the speaker from ramblings, piece out scientific points which he
knew only by a fading parrot memory of professors' talk, or bridge over
gaps, where his sense of logic and continuity broke down. When he was done
I did not wonder that his mind had snapped a trifle, or that the folk of
Arkham would not speak much of the blasted heath. I hurried back before
sunset to my hotel, unwilling to have the stars come out above me in the
open; and the next day returned to Boston to give up my position. I could
not go into that dim chaos of old forest and slope again, or face another
time that grey blasted heath where the black well yawned deep beside the
tumbled bricks and stones. The reservoir will soon be built now, and all
those elder secrets will be safe forever under watery fathoms. But even
then I do not believe I would like to visit that country by night - at
least not when the sinister stars are out; and nothing could bribe me to
drink the new city water of Arkham.
It all began, old Ammi said, with the meteorite. Before that time there
had been no wild legends at all since the witch trials, and even then
these western woods were not feared half so much as the small island in
the Miskatonic where the devil held court beside a curious 'lone altar
older than the Indians. These were not haunted woods, and their fantastic
dusk was never terrible till the strange days. Then there had come that
white noontide cloud, that string of explosions in the air, and that
pillar of smoke from the valley far in the wood. And by night all Arkham
had heard of the great rock that fell out of the sky and bedded itself in
the ground beside the well at the Nahum Gardner place. That was the house
which had stood where the blasted heath was to come - the trim white Nahum
Gardner house amidst its fertile gardens and orchards.
Nahum had come to town to tell people about the stone, and dropped in at
Ammi Pierce's on the way. Ammi was forty then, and all the queer things
were fixed very strongly in his mind. He and his wife had gone with the
three professors from Miskatonic University who hastened out the next
morning to see the weird visitor from unknown stellar space, and had
wondered why Nahum had called it so large the day before. It had shrunk,
Nahum said as he pointed out the big brownish mound above the ripped earth
and charred grass near the archaic well-sweep in his front yard; but the
wise men answered that stones do not shrink. Its heat lingered
persistently, and Nahum declared it had glowed faintly in the night. The
professors tried it with a geologist's hammer and found it was oddly soft.
It was, in truth, so soft as to be almost plastic; and they gouged rather
than chipped a specimen to take back to the college for testing. They took
it in an old pail borrowed from Nahum's kitchen, for even the small piece
refused to grow cool. On the trip back they stopped at Ammi's to rest, and
seemed thoughtful when Mrs. Pierce remarked that the fragment was growing
smaller and burning the bottom of the pail. Truly, it was not large, but
perhaps they had taken less than they thought.
The day after that-all this was in June of '82-the professors had trooped
out again in a great excitement. As they passed Ammi's they told him what
queer things the specimen had done, and how it had faded wholly away when
they put it in a glass beaker. The beaker had gone, too, and the wise men
talked of the strange stone's affinity for silicon. It had acted quite
unbelievably in that well-ordered laboratory; doing nothing at all and
showing no occluded gases when heated on charcoal, being wholly negative
in the borax bead, and soon proving itself absolutely non-volatile at any
producible temperature, including that of the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe. On an
anvil it appeared highly malleable, and in the dark its luminosity was
very marked. Stubbornly refusing to grow cool, it soon had the college in
a state of real excitement; and when upon heating before the spectroscope
it displayed shining bands unlike any known colours of the normal spectrum
there was much breathless talk of new elements, bizarre optical
properties, and other things which puzzled men of science are wont to say
when faced by the unknown.
Hot as it was, they tested it in a crucible with all the proper reagents.
Water did nothing. Hydrochloric acid was the same. Nitric acid and even
aqua regia merely hissed and spattered against its torrid invulnerability.
Ammi had difficulty in recalling all these things, but recognized some
solvents as I mentioned them in the usual order of use. There were ammonia
and caustic soda, alcohol and ether, nauseous carbon disulphide and a
dozen others; but although the weight grew steadily less as time passed,
and the fragment seemed to be slightly cooling, there was no change in the
solvents to show that they had attacked the substance at all. It was a
metal, though, beyond a doubt. It was magnetic, for one thing; and after
its immersion in the acid solvents there seemed to be faint traces of the
Widmanstatten figures found on meteoric iron. When the cooling had grown
very considerable, the testing was carried on in glass; and it was in a
glass beaker that they left all the chips made of the original fragment
during the work. The next morning both chips and beaker were gone without
trace, and only a charred spot marked the place on the wooden shelf where
they had been.
All this the professors told Ammi as they paused at his door, and once
more he went with them to see the stony messenger from the stars, though
this time his wife did not accompany him. It had now most certainly
shrunk, and even the sober professors could not doubt the truth of what
they saw. All around the dwindling brown lump near the well was a vacant
space, except where the earth had caved in; and whereas it had been a good
seven feet across the day before, it was now scarcely five. It was still
hot, and the sages studied its surface curiously as they detached another
and larger piece with hammer and chisel. They gouged deeply this time, and
as they pried away the smaller mass they saw that the core of the thing
was not quite homogeneous.
They had uncovered what seemed to be the side of a large coloured globule
embedded in the substance. The colour, which resembled some of the bands
in the meteor's strange spectrum, was almost impossible to describe; and
it was only by analogy that they called it colour at all. Its texture was
glossy, and upon tapping it appeared to promise both brittleness and
hollowness. One of the professors gave it a smart blow with a hammer, and
it burst with a nervous little pop. Nothing was emitted, and all trace of
the thing vanished with the puncturing. It left behind a hollow spherical
space about three inches across, and all thought it probable that others
would be discovered as the enclosing substance wasted away.
Conjecture was vain; so after a futile attempt to find additional globules
by drilling, the seekers left again with their new specimen which proved,
however, as baffling in the laboratory as its predecessor. Aside from
being almost plastic, having heat, magnetism, and slight luminosity,
cooling slightly in powerful acids, possessing an unknown spectrum,
wasting away in air, and attacking silicon compounds with mutual
destruction as a result, it presented no identifying features whatsoever;
and at the end of the tests the college scientists were forced to own that
they could not place it. It was nothing of this earth, but a piece of the
great outside; and as such dowered with outside properties and obedient to
outside laws.
That night there was a thunderstorm, and when the professors went out to
Nahum's the next day they met with a bitter disappointment. The stone,
magnetic as it had been, must have had some peculiar electrical property;
for it had "drawn the lightning," as Nahum said, with a singular
persistence. Six times within an hour the farmer saw the lightning strike
the furrow in the front yard, and when the storm was over nothing remained
but a ragged pit by the ancient well-sweep, half-choked with a caved-in
earth. Digging had borne no fruit, and the scientists verified the fact of
the utter vanishment. The failure was total; so that nothing was left to
do but go back to the laboratory and test again the disappearing fragment
left carefully cased in lead. That fragment lasted a week, at the end of
which nothing of value had been learned of it. When it had gone, no
residue was left behind, and in time the professors felt scarcely sure
they had indeed seen with waking eyes that cryptic vestige of the
fathomless gulfs outside; that lone, weird message from other universes
and other realms of matter, force, and entity.
As was natural, the Arkham papers made much of the incident with its
collegiate sponsoring, and sent reporters to talk with Nahum Gardner and
his family. At least one Boston daily also sent a scribe, and Nahum
quickly became a kind of local celebrity. He was a lean, genial person of
about fifty, living with his wife and three sons on the pleasant farmstead
in the valley. He and Ammi exchanged visits frequently, as did their
wives; and Ammi had nothing but praise for him after all these years. He
seemed slightly proud of the notice his place had attracted, and talked
often of the meteorite in the succeeding weeks. That July and August were
hot; and Nahum worked hard at his haying in the ten-acre pasture across
Chapman's Brook; his rattling wain wearing deep ruts in the shadowy lanes
between. The labour tired him more than it had in other years, and he felt
that age was beginning to tell on him.
Then fell the time of fruit and harvest. The pears and apples slowly
ripened, and Nahum vowed that his orchards were prospering as never
before. The fruit was growing to phenomenal size and unwonted gloss, and
in such abundance that extra barrels were ordered to handle the future
crop. But with the ripening came sore disappointment, for of all that
gorgeous array of specious lusciousness not one single jot was fit to eat.
Into the fine flavour of the pears and apples had crept a stealthy
bitterness and sickishness, so that even the smallest bites induced a
lasting disgust. It was the same with the melons and tomatoes, and Nahum
sadly saw that his entire crop was lost. Quick to connect events, he
declared that the meteorite had poisoned the soil, and thanked Heaven that
most of the other crops were in the upland lot along the road.
Winter came early, and was very cold. Ammi saw Nahum less often than
usual, and observed that he had begun to look worried. The rest of his
family too, seemed to have grown taciturn; and were far from steady in
their church-going or their attendance at the various social events of the
countryside. For this reserve or melancholy no cause could be found,
though all the household confessed now and then to poorer health and a
feeling of vague disquiet. Nahum himself gave the most definite statement
of anyone when he said he was disturbed about certain footprints in the
snow. They were the usual winter prints of red squirrels, white rabbits,
and foxes, but the brooding farmer professed to see something not quite
right about their nature and arrangement. He was never specific, but
appeared to think that they were not as characteristic of the anatomy and
habits of squirrels and rabbits and foxes as they ought to be. Ammi
listened without interest to this talk until one night when he drove past
Nahum's house in his sleigh on the way back from Clark's Corner. There had
been a moon, and a rabbit had run across the road, and the leaps of that
rabbit were longer than either Ammi or his horse liked. The latter,
indeed, had almost run away when brought up by a firm rein. Thereafter
Ammi gave Nahum's tales more respect, and wondered why the Gardner dogs
seemed so cowed and quivering every morning. They had, it developed,
nearly lost the spirit to bark.
In February the McGregor boys from Meadow Hill were out shooting
woodchucks, and not far from the Gardner place bagged a very peculiar
specimen. The proportions of its body seemed slightly altered in a queer
way impossible to describe, while its face had taken on an expression
which no one ever saw in a woodchuck before. The boys were genuinely
frightened, and threw the thing away at once, so that only their grotesque
tales of it ever reached the people of the countryside. But the shying of
horses near Nahum's house had now become an acknowledged thing, and all
the basis for a cycle of whispered legend was fast taking form.
People vowed that the snow melted faster around Nahum's than it did
anywhere else, and early in March there was an awed discussion in Potter's
general store at Clark's Corners. Stephen Rice had driven past Gardner's
in the morning, and had noticed the skunk-cabbages coming up through the
mud by the woods across the road. Never were things of such size seen
before, and they held strange colours that could not be put into any
words. Their shapes were monstrous, and the horse had snorted at an odour
which struck Stephen as wholly unprecedented. That afternoon several
persons drove past to see the abnormal growth, and all agreed that plants
of that kind ought never to sprout in a healthy world. The bad fruit of
the fall before was freely mentioned, and it went from mouth to mouth that
there was poison in Nahum's ground. Of course it was the meteorite; and
remembering how strange the men from the college had found that stone to
be, several farmers spoke about the matter to them.
One day they paid Nahum a visit; but having no love of wild tales and
folklore were very conservative in what they inferred. The plants were
certainly odd, but all skunk-cabbages are more or less odd in shape and
hue. Perhaps some mineral element from the stone had entered the soil, but
it would soon be washed away. And as for the footprints and frightened
horses - of course this was mere country talk which such a phenomenon as
the aerolite would be certain to start. There was really nothing for
serious men to do in cases of wild gossip, for superstitious rustics will
say and believe anything. And so all through the strange days the
professors stayed away in contempt. Only one of them, when given two
phials of dust for analysis in a police job over a year and half later,
recalled that the queer colour of that skunk-cabbage had been very like
one of the anomalous bands of light shown by the meteor fragment in the
college spectroscope, and like the brittle globule found imbedded in the
stone from the abyss. The samples in this analysis case gave the same odd
bands at first, though later they lost the property.
The trees budded prematurely around Nahum's, and at night they swayed
ominously in the wind. Nahum's second son Thaddeus, a lad of fifteen,
swore that they swayed also when there was no wind; but even the gossips
would not credit this. Certainly, however, restlessness was in the air.
The entire Gardner family developed the habit of stealthy listening,
though not for any sound which they could consciously name. The listening
was, indeed, rather a product of moments when consciousness seemed half to
slip away. Unfortunately such moments increased week by week, till it
became common speech that "something was wrong with all Nahum's folks."
When the early saxifrage came out it had another strange colour; not quite
like that of the skunk-cabbage, but plainly related and equally unknown to
anyone who saw it. Nahum took some blossoms to Arkham and showed them to
the editor of the Gazette, but that dignitary did no more than write a
humorous article about them, in which the dark fears of rustics were held
up to polite ridicule. It was a mistake of Nahum's to tell a stolid city
man about the way the great, overgrown mourning-cloak butterflies behaved
in connection with these saxifrages.
April brought a kind of madness to the country folk, and began that disuse
of the road past Nahum's which led to its ultimate abandonment. It was the
vegetation. All the orchard trees blossomed forth in strange colours, and
through the stony soil of the yard and adjacent pasturage there sprang up
a bizarre growth which only a botanist could connect with the proper flora
of the region. No sane wholesome colours were anywhere to be seen except
in the green grass and leafage; but everywhere were those hectic and
prismatic variants of some diseased, underlying primary tone without a
place among the' known tints of earth. The "Dutchman's breeches" became a
thing of sinister menace, and the bloodroots grew insolent in their
chromatic perversion. Ammi and the Gardners thought that most of the
colours had a sort of haunting familiarity, and decided that they reminded
one of the brittle globule in the meteor. Nahum ploughed and sowed the
ten-acre pasture and the upland lot, but did nothing with the land around
the house. He knew it would be of no use, and hoped that the summer's
strange growths would draw all the poison from the soil. He was prepared
for almost anything now, and had grown used to the sense of something near
him waiting to be heard. The shunning of his house by neighbors told on
him, of course; but it told on his wife more. The boys were better off,
being at school each day; but they could not help being frightened by the
gossip. Thaddeus, an especially sensitive youth, suffered the most.
In May the insects came, and Nahum's place became a nightmare of buzzing
and crawling. Most of the creatures seemed not quite usual in their
aspects and motions, and their nocturnal habits contradicted all former
experience. The Gardners took to watching at night - watching in all
directions at random for something - they could not tell what. It was then
that they owned that Thaddeus had been right about the trees. Mrs. Gardner
was the next to see it from the window as she watched the swollen boughs
of a maple against a moonlit sky. The boughs surely moved, and there was
no 'wind. It must be the sap. Strangeness had come into everything growing
now. Yet it was none of Nahum's family at all who made the next discovery.
Familiarity had dulled them, and what they could not see was glimpsed by a
timid windmill salesman from Bolton who drove by one night in ignorance of
the country legends. What he told in Arkham was given a short paragraph in
the Gazette; and it was there that all the farmers, Nahum included, saw it
first. The night had been dark and the buggy-lamps faint, but around a
farm in the valley which everyone knew from the account must be Nahum's,
the darkness had been less thick. A dim though distinct luminosity seemed
to inhere in all the vegetation, grass, leaves, and blossoms alike, while
at one moment a detached piece of the phosphorescence appeared to stir
furtively in the yard near the barn.
The grass had so far seemed untouched, and the cows were freely pastured
in the lot near the house, but toward the end of May the milk began to be
bad. Then Nahum had the cows driven to the uplands, after which this
trouble ceased. Not long after this the change in grass and leaves became
apparent to the eye. All the verdure was going grey, and was developing a
highly singular quality of brittleness. Ammi was now the only person who
ever visited the place, and his visits were becoming fewer and fewer. When
school closed the Gardners were virtually cut off from the world, and
sometimes let Ammi do their errands in town. They were failing curiously
both physically and mentally, and no one was surprised when the news of
Mrs. Gardner's madness stole around.
It happened in June, about the anniversary of the meteor's fall, and the
poor woman screamed about things in the air which she could not describe.
In her raving there was not a single specific noun, but only verbs and
pronouns. Things moved and changed and fluttered, and ears tingled to
impulses which were not wholly sounds. Something was taken away - she was
being drained of something - something was fastening itself on her that
ought not to be - someone must make it keep off - nothing was ever still
in the night - the walls and windows shifted. Nahum did not send her to
the county asylum, but let her wander about the house as long as she was
harmless to herself and others. Even when her expression changed he did
nothing. But when the boys grew afraid of her, and Thaddeus nearly fainted
at the way she made faces at him, he decided to keep her locked in the
attic. By July she had ceased to speak and crawled on all fours, and
before that month was over Nahum got the mad notion that she was slightly
luminous in the dark, as he now clearly saw was the case with the nearby
vegetation.
It was a little before this that the horses had stampeded. Something had
aroused them in the night, and their neighing and kicking in their stalls
had been terrible. There seemed virtually nothing to do to calm them, and
when Nahum opened the stable door they all bolted out like frightened
woodland deer. It took a week to track all four, and when found they were
seen to be quite useless and unmanageable. Something had snapped in their
brains, and each one had to be shot for its own good. Nahum borrowed a
horse from Ammi for his haying, but found it would not approach the barn.
It shied, balked, and whinnied, and in the end he could do nothing but
drive it into the yard while the men used their own strength to get the
heavy wagon near enough the hayloft for convenient pitching. And all the
while the vegetation was turning grey and brittle. Even the flowers whose
hues had been so strange were greying now, and the fruit was coming out
grey and dwarfed and tasteless. The asters and golden-rod bloomed grey and
distorted, and the roses and zinneas and hollyhocks in the front yard were
such blasphemous-looking things that Nahum's oldest boy Zenas cut them
down. The strangely puffed insects died about that time, even the bees
that had left their hives and taken to the woods.
By September all the vegetation was fast crumbling to a greyish powder,
and Nahum feared that the trees would die before the poison was out of the
soil. His wife now had spells of terrific screaming, and he and the boys
were in a constant state of nervous tension. They shunned people now, and
when school opened the boys did not go. But it was Ammi, on one of his
rare visits, who first realised that the well water was no longer good. It
had an evil taste that was not exactly fetid nor exactly salty, and Ammi
advised his friend to dig another well on higher ground to use till the
soil was good again. Nahum, however, ignored the warning, for he had by
that time become calloused to strange and unpleasant things. He and the
boys continued to use the tainted supply, drinking it as listlessly and
mechanically as they ate their meagre and ill-cooked meals and did their
thankless and monotonous chores through the aimless days. There was
something of stolid resignation about them all, as if they walked half in
another world between lines of nameless guards to a certain and familiar
doom.
Thaddeus went mad in September after a visit to the well. He had gone with
a pail and had come back empty-handed, shrieking and waving his arms, and
sometimes lapsing into an inane titter or a whisper about "the moving
colours down there." Two in one family was pretty bad, but Nahum was very
brave about it. He let the boy run about for a week until he began
stumbling and hurting himself, and then he shut him in an attic room
across the hall from his mother's. The way they screamed at each other
from behind their locked doors was very terrible, especially to little
Merwin, who fancied they talked in some terrible language that was not of
earth. Merwin was getting frightfully imaginative, and his restlessness
was worse after the shutting away of the brother who had been his greatest
playmate.
Almost at the same time the mortality among the livestock commenced.
Poultry turned greyish and died very quickly, their meat being found dry
and noisome upon cutting. Hogs grew inordinately fat, then suddenly began
to undergo loathsome changes which no one could explain. Their meat was of
course useless, and Nahum was at his wit's end. No rural veterinary would
approach his place, and the city veterinary from Arkham was openly
baffled. The swine began growing grey and brittle and falling to pieces
before they died, and their eyes and muzzles developed singular
alterations. It was very inexplicable, for they had never been fed from
the tainted vegetation. Then something struck the cows. Certain areas or
sometimes the whole body would be uncannily shrivelled or compressed, and
atrocious collapses or disintegrations were common. In the last stages -
and death was always the result - there would be a greying and turning
brittle like that which beset the hogs. There could be no question of
poison, for all the cases occurred in a locked and undisturbed barn. No
bites of prowling things could have brought the virus, for what live beast
of earth can pass through solid obstacles? It must be only natural disease
- yet what disease could wreak such results was beyond any mind's
guessing. When the harvest came there was not an animal surviving on the
place, for the stock and poultry were dead and the dogs had run away.
These dogs, three in number, had all vanished one night and were never
heard of again. The five cats had left some time before, but their going
was scarcely noticed since there now seemed to be no mice, and only Mrs.
Gardner had made pets of the graceful felines.
On the nineteenth of October Nahum staggered into Ammi's house with
hideous news. The death had come to poor Thaddeus in his attic room, and
it had come in a way which could not be told. Nahum had dug a grave in the
railed family plot behind the farm, and had put therein what he found.
There could have been nothing from outside, for the small barred window
and locked door were intact; but it was much as it had been in the barn.
Ammi and his wife consoled the stricken man as best they could, but
shuddered as they did so. Stark terror seemed to cling round the Gardners
and all they touched, and the very presence of one in the house was a
breath from regions unnamed and unnamable. Ammi accompanied Nahum home
with the greatest reluctance, and did what he might to calm the hysterical
sobbing of little Merwin. Zenas needed no calming. He had come of late to
do nothing but stare into space and obey what his father told him; and
Ammi thought that his fate was very merciful. Now and then Merwin's
screams were answered faintly from the attic, and in response to an
inquiring look Nahum said that his wife was getting very feeble. When
night approached, Ammi managed to get away; for not even friendship could
make him stay in that spot when the faint glow of the vegetation began and
the trees may or may not have swayed without wind. It was really lucky for
Ammi that he was not more imaginative. Even as things were, his mind was
bent ever so slightly; but had he been able to connect and reflect upon
all the portents around him he must inevitably have turned a total maniac.
In the twilight he hastened home, the screams of the mad woman and the
nervous child ringing horribly in his ears.
Three days later Nahum burst into Ammi's kitchen in the early morning, and
in the absence of his host stammered out a desperate tale once more, while
Mrs. Pierce listened in a clutching fright. It was little Merwin this
time. He was gone. He had gone out late at night with a lantern and pail
for water, and had never come back. He'd been going to pieces for days,
and hardly knew what he was about. Screamed at everything. There had been
a frantic shriek from the yard then, but before the father could get to
the door the boy was gone. There was no glow from the lantern he had
taken, and of the child himself no trace. At the time Nahum thought the
lantern and pail were gone too; but when dawn came, and the man had
plodded back from his all-night search of the woods and fields, he had
found some very curious things near the well. There was a crushed and
apparently somewhat melted mass of iron which had certainly been the
lantern; while a bent handle and twisted iron hoops beside it, both
half-fused, seemed to hint at the remnants of the pail. That was all.
Nahum was past imagining, Mrs. Pierce was blank, and Ammi, when he had
reached home and heard the tale, could give no guess. Merwin was gone, and
there would be no use in telling the people around, who shunned all
Gardners now. No use, either, in telling the city people at Arkham who
laughed at everything. Thad was gone, and now Merwin was gone. Something
was creeping and creeping and waiting to be seen and heard. Nahum would go
soon, and he wanted Ammi to look after his wife and Zenas if they survived
him. It must all be a judgment of some sort; though he could not fancy
what for, since he had always walked uprightly in the Lord's ways so far
as he knew.
For over two weeks Ammi saw nothing of Nahum; and then, worried about what
might have happened, he overcame his fears and paid the Gardner place a
visit. There was no smoke from the great chimney, and for a moment the
visitor was apprehensive of the worst. The aspect of the whole farm was
shocking - greyish withered grass and leaves on the ground, vines falling
in brittle wreckage from archaic walls and gables, and great bare trees
clawing up at the grey November sky with a studied malevolence which Ammi
could not but feel had come from some subtle change in the tilt of the
branches. But Nahum was alive, after all. He was weak, and lying on a
couch in the low-ceiled kitchen, but perfectly conscious and able to give
simple orders to Zenas. The room was deadly cold; and as Ammi visibly
shivered, the host shouted huskily to Zenas for more wood. Wood, indeed,
was sorely needed; since the cavernous fireplace was unlit and empty, with
a cloud of soot blowing about in the chill wind that came down the
chimney. Presently Nahum asked him if the extra wood had made him any more
comfortable, and then Ammi saw what had happened. The stoutest cord had
broken at last, and the hapless farmer's mind was proof against more
sorrow.
Questioning tactfully, Ammi could get no clear data at all about the
missing Zenas. "In the well - he lives in the well - " was all that the
clouded father would say. Then there flashed across the visitor's mind a
sudden thought of the mad wife, and he changed his line of inquiry.
"Nabby? Why, here she is!" was the surprised response of poor Nahum, and
Ammi soon saw that he must search for himself. Leaving the harmless
babbler on the couch, he took the keys from their nail beside the door and
climbed the creaking stairs to the attic. It was very close and noisome up
there, and no sound could be heard from any direction. Of the four doors
in sight, only one was locked, and on this he tried various keys of the
ring he had taken. The third key proved the right one, and after some
fumbling Ammi threw open the low white door.
It was quite dark inside, for the window was small and half-obscured by
the crude wooden bars; and Ammi could see nothing at all on the
wide-planked floor. The stench was beyond enduring, and before proceeding
further he had to retreat to another room and return with his lungs filled
with breathable air. When he did enter he saw something dark in the
corner, and upon seeing it more clearly he screamed outright. While he
screamed he thought a momentary cloud eclipsed the window, and a second
later he felt himself brushed as if by some hateful current of vapour.
Strange colours danced before his eyes; and had not a present horror
numbed him he would have thought of the globule in the meteor that the
geologist's hammer had shattered, and of the morbid vegetation that had
sprouted in the spring. As it was he thought only of the blasphemous
monstrosity which confronted him, and which all too clearly had shared the
nameless fate of young Thaddeus and the livestock. But the terrible thing
about the horror was that it very slowly and perceptibly moved as it
continued to crumble.
Ammi would give me no added particulars of this scene, but the shape in
the corner does not reappear in his tale as a moving object. There are
things which cannot be mentioned, and what is done in common humanity is
sometimes cruelly judged by the law. I gathered that no moving thing was
left in that attic room, and that to leave anything capable of motion
there would have been a deed so monstrous as to damn any accountable being
to eternal torment. Anyone but a stolid farmer would have fainted or gone
mad, but Ammi walked conscious through that low doorway and locked the
accursed secret behind him. There would be Nahum to deal with now; he must
be fed and tended, and removed to some place where he could be cared for.
Commencing his descent of the dark stairs. Ammi heard a thud below him. He
even thought a scream had been suddenly choked off, and recalled nervously
the clammy vapour which had brushed by him in that frightful room above.
What presence had his cry and entry started up? Halted by some vague fear,
he heard still further sounds below. Indubitably there was a sort of heavy
dragging, and a most detestably sticky noise as of some fiendish and
unclean species of suction. With an associative sense goaded to feverish
heights, he thought unaccountably of what he had seen upstairs. Good God!
What eldritch dream-world was this into which he had blundered? He dared
move neither backward nor forward, but stood there trembling at the black
curve of the boxed-in staircase. Every trifle of the scene burned itself
into his brain. The sounds, the sense of dread expectancy, the darkness,
the steepness of the narrow step - and merciful Heaven! - the faint but
unmistakable luminosity of all the woodwork in sight; steps, sides,
exposed laths, and beams alike.
Then there burst forth a frantic whinny from Ammi's horse outside,
followed at once by a clatter which told of a frenzied runaway. In another
moment horse and buggy had gone beyond earshot, leaving the frightened man
on the dark stairs to guess what had sent them. But that was not all.
There had been another sound out there. A sort of liquid splash - water -
it must have been the well. He had left Hero untied near it, and a buggy
wheel must have brushed the coping and knocked in a stone. And still the
pale phosphorescence glowed in that detestably ancient woodwork. God! how
old the house was! Most of it built before 1670, and the gambrel roof no
later than 1730.
A feeble scratching on the floor downstairs now sounded distinctly, and
Ammi's grip tightened on a heavy stick he had picked up in the attic for
some purpose. Slowly nerving himself, he finished his descent and walked
boldly toward the kitchen. But he did not complete the walk, because what
he sought was no longer there. It had come to meet him, and it was still
alive after a fashion. Whether it had crawled or whether it had been
dragged by any external forces, Ammi could not say; but the death had been
at it. Everything had happened in the last half-hour, but collapse,
greying, and disintegration were already far advanced. There was a
horrible brittleness, and dry fragments were scaling off. Ammi could not
touch it, but looked horrifiedly into the distorted parody that had been a
face. "What was it, Nahum - what was it?" He whispered, and the cleft,
bulging lips were just able to crackle out a final answer.
"Nothin'... nothin'... the colour... it burns... cold an' wet, but it
burns... it lived in the well... I seen it... a kind of smoke... jest like
the flowers last spring... the well shone at night... Thad an' Merwin an'
Zenas... everything alive... suckin' the life out of everything... in that
stone... it must a' come in that stone pizened the whole place... dun't
know what it wants... that round thing them men from the college dug outen
the stone... they smashed it... it was the same colour... jest the same,
like the flowers an' plants... must a' ben more of 'em... seeds...
seeds... they growed... I seen it the fust time this week... must a' got
strong on Zenas... he was a big boy, full o' life... it beats down your
mind an' then gets ye... burns ye up... in the well water... you was right