The Shunned House
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.
Transcriber's Note:
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.