The Shunned House Read online

confusion in which could be seen elements of familiar thingsin most unfamiliar and perturbing combinations. There was a suggestionof queerly disordered pictures superimposed one upon another; anarrangement in which the essentials of time as well as of space seemeddissolved and mixed in the most illogical fashion. In this kaleidoscopicvortex of phantasmal images were occasional snap-shots, if one might usethe term, of singular clearness but unaccountable heterogeneity.

  Once my uncle thought he lay in a carelessly dug open pit, with a crowdof angry faces framed by straggling locks and three-cornered hatsfrowning down on him. Again he seemed to be in the interior of ahouse--an old house, apparently--but the details and inhabitants wereconstantly changing, and he could never be certain of the faces or thefurniture, or even of the room itself, since doors and windows seemed injust as great a state of flux as the presumably more mobile objects. Itwas queer--damnably queer--and my uncle spoke almost sheepishly, as ifhalf expecting not to be believed, when he declared that of the strangefaces many had unmistakably borne the features of the Harris family. Andall the while there was a personal sensation of choking, as if somepervasive presence had spread itself through his body and sought topossess itself of his vital processes.

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

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

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

  5

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

  Yet after all, the sight was worse than I had dreaded. There are horrorsbeyond horrors, and this was one of those nuclei of all dreamablehideousness 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 invague outlines half human and half monstrous, through which I could seethe chimney and fireplace beyond. It was all eyes--wolfish andmocking--and the rugose insect-like head dissolved at the top to a thinstream of mist which curled putridly about and finally vanished up thechimney. I say that I saw this thing, but it is only in consciousretrospection that I ever definitely traced its damnable approach toform. At the time, it was to me only a seething, dimly phosphorescentcloud of fungous loathsomeness, enveloping and dissolving to anabhorrent plasticity the one object on which all my attention wasfocussed. That object was my uncle--the venerable Elihu Whipple--whowith blackening and decaying features leered and gibbered at me, andreached out dripping claws to rend me in the fury which this horror hadbrought.

  It was a sense of routine which kept me from going mad. I had drilledmyself in preparation for the crucial moment, and blind training savedme. Recognizing the bubbling evil as no substance reachable by matter ormaterial chemistry, and therefore ignoring the flame-thrower whichloomed on my left, I threw on the current of the Crookes tube apparatus,and focussed toward that scene of immortal blasphemousness the strongestether radiations which man's art can arouse from the spaces and fluidsof nature. There was a bluish haze and a frenzied sputtering, and theyellowish phosphorescence grew dimmer to my eyes. But I saw the dimnesswas only that of contrast, and that the waves from the machine had noeffect whatever.

  Then, in the midst of that demoniac spectacle, I saw a fresh horrorwhich brought cries to my lips and sent me fumbling and staggeringtoward that unlocked door to the quiet street, careless of what abnormalterrors I loosed upon the world, or what thoughts or judgments of men Ibrought down upon my head. In that dim blend of blue and yellow the formof my uncle had commenced a nauseous liquefaction whose essence eludesall description, and in which there played across his vanishing facesuch changes of identity as only madness can conceive. He was at once adevil and a multitude, a charnel-house and a pageant. Lit by the mixedand uncertain beams, that gelatinous face assumed a dozen--a score--ahundred--aspects; grinning, as it sank to the ground on a body thatmelted like tallow, in the caricatured likeness of legions strange andyet not strange.

  I saw the features of the Harris line, masculine and feminine, adult andinfantile, and other features old and young, coarse and refined,familiar and unfamiliar. For a second there flashed a degradedcounterfeit of a miniature of poor mad Rhoby Harris that I had seen inthe School of Design museum, and another time I thought I caught theraw-boned image of Mercy Dexter as I recalled her from a painting inCarrington Harris's house. It was frightful beyond conception; towardthe last, when a curious blend of servant and baby visages flickeredclose to the fungous floor where a pool of greenish grease wasspreading, it seemed as though the shifting features fought againstthemselves and strove to form contours like those of my uncle's kindlyface. I like to think that he existed at that moment, and that he triedto bid me farewell. It seems to me I hiccupped a farewell from my ownparched throat as I lurched out into the street; a thin stream of greasefollowing me through the door to the rain-drenched sidewalk.

  * * * * *

  The rest is shadowy and monstrous. There was no one in the soakingstreet, and in all the world there was no one I dared tell. I walkedaimlessly south past College Hill and the Athenaeum, down Hopkins Street,and over the bridge to the business section where tall buildings seemedto guard me as modern material things guard the world from ancient andunwholesome wonder. Then gray dawn unfolded wetly from the east,silhouetting the archaic hill and its venerable steeples, and beckoningme to the place where my terrible work was still unfinished. And in theend I went, wet, hatless, and dazed in the morning light, and enteredthat awful door in Benefit Street which I had left ajar, and which stillswung cryptically in full sight of the early householders to whom Idared not speak.

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

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

  In ten minutes my mind was made up, and taking my hat I set out forhome, 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 tobe delivered the next morning at the