Chapter 2

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

4

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

At eleven a. m. the next day I commenced digging. It was sunny weather,
and I was glad of that. I was still alone, for as much as I feared the
unknown horror I sought, there was more fear in the thought of telling
anybody. Later I told Harris only through sheer necessity, and because
he had heard odd tales from old people which disposed him ever so little
toward belief. As I turned up the stinking black earth in front of the
fireplace, my spade causing a viscous yellow ichor to ooze from the
white fungi which it severed, I trembled at the dubious thoughts of what
I might uncover.

Some secrets of inner earth are not good for mankind,
and this seemed to me one of them.

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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