Shunned House | Page 2

fact is, that the house was never regarded by the solid part
of the community as in any real sense "haunted." There were no
widespread tales of rattling chains, cold currents of air, extinguished
lights, or faces at the window. Extremists sometimes said the house
was "unlucky," but that is as far as even they went. What was really
beyond dispute is that a frightful proportion of persons died there; or
more accurately, had died there, since after some peculiar happenings
over sixty years ago the building had become deserted through the
sheer impossibility of renting it. These persons were not all cut off
suddenly by any one cause; rather did it seem that their vitality was
insidiously sapped, so that each one died the sooner from whatever
tendency to weakness he may have naturally had. And those who did
not die displayed in varying degree a type of anaemia or consumption,
and sometimes a decline of the mental faculties, which spoke ill for the
salubriousness of the building. Neighbouring houses, it must be added,
seemed entirely free from the noxious quality.
This much I knew before my insistent questioning led my uncle to
show me the notes which finally embarked us both on our hideous
investigation. In my childhood the shunned house was vacant, with
barren, gnarled and terrible old trees, long, queerly pale grass and
nightmarishly misshapen weeds in the high terraced yard where birds
never lingered. We boys used to overrun the place, and I can still recall
my youthful terror not only at the morbid strangeness of this sinister
vegetation, but at the eldritch atmosphere and odour of the dilapidated
house, whose unlocked front door was often entered in quest of

shudders. The small-paned windows were largely broken, and a
nameless air of desolation hung round the precarious panel ling, shaky
interior shutters, peeling wallpaper, falling plaster, rickety staircases,
and such fragments of battered furniture as still remained. The dust and
cobwebs added their touch of the fearful; and brave indeed was the boy
who would voluntarily ascend the ladder to the attic, a vast raftered
length lighted only by small blinking windows in the gable ends, and
filled with a massed wreckage of chests, chairs, and spinning-wheels
which infinite years of deposit had shrouded and festooned into
monstrous and hellish shapes.
But after all, the attic was not the most terrible part of the house. It was
the dank, humid cellar which somehow exerted the strongest repulsion
on us, even though it was wholly above ground on the street side, with
only a thin door and window-pierced brick wall to separate it from the
busy sidewalk. We scarcely knew whether to haunt it in spectral
fascination, or to shun it for the sake of our souls and our sanity. For
one thing, the bad odour of the house was strongest there; and for
another thing, we did not like the white fungous growths which
occasionally sprang up in rainy summer weather from the hard earth
floor. Those fungi, grotesquely like the vegetation in the yard outside,
were truly horrible in their outlines; detest able parodies of toadstools
and Indian pipes, whose like we had never seen in any other situation.
They rotted quickly, and at one stage became slightly phosphorescent;
so that nocturnal passers-by sometimes spoke of witch-fires glowing
behind the broken panes of the foetor-spreading windows.
We never--even in our wildest Hallowe'en moods--visited this cellar by
night, but in some of our daytime visits could detect the
phosphorescence, especially when the day was dark and wet. There was
also a subtler thing we often thought we detected--a very strange thing
which was, however, merely suggestive at most. I refer to a sort of
cloudy whitish pattern on the dirt floor--a vague, shifting deposit of
mould or nitre which we sometimes thought we could trace amidst the
sparse fungous growths near the huge fireplace of the basement kitchen.
Once in a while it struck us that this patch bore an uncanny
resemblance to a doubled-up human figure, though generally no such

kinship existed, and often there was no whitish deposit whatever. .On a
certain rainy afternoon when this illusion seemed phenomenally strong,
and when, in addition, I had fancied I glimpsed a kind of thin,
yellowish, shimmering exhalation rising from the nitrous pattern
toward the yawning fireplace, I spoke to my uncle about the matter. He
smiled at this odd conceit, but it seemed that his smile was tinged with
reminiscence. Later I heard that a similar notion entered into some of
the wild ancient tales of the common folk--a notion likewise alluding to
ghoulish, wolfish shapes taken by smoke from the great chimney, and
queer contours assumed by certain of the sinuous tree-roots that thrust
their way into the cellar through the loose foundation-stones.
II
Not