The Shunned House
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.