The Shunned House Read online

information it couldfurnish, I turned my attention to early town records and deeds with azeal more penetrating than that which my uncle had occasionally shown inthe same work. What I wished was a comprehensive history of the sitefrom its very settlement in 1636--or even before, if any NarragansettIndian legend could be unearthed to supply the data. I found, at thestart, that the land had been part of the long strip of home lot grantedoriginally to John Throckmorton; one of many similar strips beginning atthe Town Street beside the river and extending up over the hill to aline roughly corresponding with the modern Hope Street. The Throckmortonlot had later, of course, been much subdivided; and I became veryassiduous in tracing that section through which Back or Benefit Streetwas later run. It had, as rumor indeed said, been the Throckmortongraveyard; but as I examined the records more carefully, I found thatthe graves had all been transferred at an early date to the North BurialGround on the Pawtucket West Road.

  Then suddenly I came--by a rare piece of chance, since it was not in themain body of records and might easily have been missed--upon somethingwhich aroused my keenest eagerness, fitting in as it did with several ofthe queerest phases of the affair. It was the record of a lease, in1697, of a small tract of ground to an Etienne Roulet and wife. At lastthe French element had appeared--that, and another deeper element ofhorror which the name conjured up from the darkest recesses of my weirdand heterogeneous reading--and I feverishly studied the platting of thelocality as it had been before the cutting through and partialstraightening of Back Street between 1747 and 1758. I found what I hadhalf expected, that where the shunned house now stood the Roulets hadlaid out their graveyard behind a one-story and attic cottage, and thatno record of any transfer of graves existed. The document, indeed, endedin much confusion; and I was forced to ransack both the Rhode IslandHistorical Society and Shepley Library before I could find a local doorwhich the name of Etienne Roulet would unlock. In the end I did findsomething; something of such vague but monstrous import that I set aboutat once to examine the cellar of the shunned house itself with a new andexcited minuteness.

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

  For a century and more, it appeared, the Roulets had been wellremembered and frequently discussed as vivid incidents in the quietlife of a New England seaport. Etienne's son Paul, a surly fellow whoseerratic conduct had probably provoked the riot which wiped out thefamily, was particularly a source of speculation; and though Providencenever shared the witchcraft panics of her Puritan neighbors, it wasfreely intimated by old wives that his prayers were neither uttered atthe proper time nor directed toward the proper object. All this hadundoubtedly formed the basis of the legend known by old Maria Robbins.What relation it had to the French ravings of Rhoby Harris and otherinhabitants of the shunned house, imagination or future discovery alonecould determine. I wondered how many of those who had known the legendsrealized that additional link with the terrible which my wider readinghad given me; that ominous item in the annals of morbid horror whichtells of the creature _Jacques Roulet, of Caude_, who in 1598 wascondemned to death as a demoniac but afterward saved from the stake bythe Paris parliament and shut in a madhouse. He had been found coveredwith blood and shreds of flesh in a wood, shortly after the killing andrending of a boy by a pair of wolves. One wolf was seen to lope awayunhurt. Surely a pretty hearthside tale, with a queer significance as toname and place; but I decided that the Providence gossips could not havegenerally known of it. Had they known, the coincidence of names wouldhave brought some drastic and frightened action--indeed, might not itslimited whispering have precipitated the final riot which erased theRoulets from the town?

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

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

  Above the anthropomorphic patch of mold by the fireplace it rose; asubtle, sickish, almost luminous vapor which as it hung trembling in thedampness seemed to develop vague and shocking suggestions of form,gradually trailing off into nebulous decay and passing up into theblackness of the great chimney with a fetor in its wake. It was trulyhorrible, 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 wasin turn watching me greedily with eyes more imaginable than visible.When I told my uncle about it he was greatly aroused; and after a tensehour of reflection, arrived at a definite and drastic decision. Weighingin his mind the importance of the matter, and the significance of ourrelation to it, he insisted that we both test--and if possibledestroy--the horror of the house by a joint night or nights ofaggressive vigil in that musty and fungus-cursed cellar.

  4

  On Wednesday, June 25, 1919, after a proper notification of CarringtonHarris which did not include surmises as to what we expected to find, myuncle and I conveyed to the shunned house two camp chairs and a foldingcamp cot, together with some scientific mechanism of greater weight andintricacy. These we placed in the cellar during the day, screening thewindows with paper and planning to return in the evening for our firstvigil. We had locked the door from the cellar to the ground floor; andhaving a key to the outside cellar door, were prepared to leave ourexpensive and delicate apparatus--which we had obtained secretly and atgreat cost--as many days as our vigils might be protracted. It was ourdesign to sit up together till very late, and then watch singly tilldawn in two-hour stretches, myself first and then my companion; theinactive member resting on the cot.

  The natural leadership with which my uncle procured the instruments fromthe laboratories of Brown University and the Cranston Street Armory, andinstinctively assumed direction of our ven
ture, was a marvelouscommentary on the potential vitality and resilience of a man ofeighty-one. Elihu Whipple had lived according to the hygienic laws hehad preached as a physician, and but for what happened later would behere in full vigor today. Only two persons suspected what didhappen--Carrington Harris and myself. I had to tell Harris because heowned 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 myuncle's going that he would understand and assist me in some vitallynecessary public explanations. He turned very pale, but agreed to helpme, and decided that it would now be safe to rent the house.

  To declare that we were not nervous on that rainy night of watchingwould be an exaggeration both gross and ridiculous. We were not, as Ihave said, in any sense childishly superstitious, but scientific studyand reflection had taught us that the known universe of three dimensionsembraces the merest fraction of the whole