The Shunned House
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