Shunned House | Page 8

unhurt. Surely a pretty hearthside tale, with
a queer significance as to name and place; but I decided that the
Providence gossips could not have generally known of it. Had they
known, the coincidence of names would have brought some drastic and
frightened action-indeed, might not its limited whispering have
precipitated the final riot which erased the Roulets from the town?
I now visited the accursed place with increased frequency; studying the
unwholesome vegetation of the garden, examining all the walls of the
building, and poring over every inch of the earthen cellar floor. Finally,
with Carrington Harris's permission, I fitted a key to the disused door
opening from the cellar directly upon Benefit Street, preferring to have
a more immediate access to the outside world than the dark stairs,
ground floor hall, and front door could give. There, where morbidity
lurked most thickly, I searched and poked during long afternoons when
the sunlight filtered in through the cobwebbed above-ground 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 odours 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 mouldy 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 clear ness 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 mould by the fireplace it rose; a
subtle, sickish, almost luminous vapour 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 foetor 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 fungous-cursed cellar.
IV
On Wednesday, June 25, 1919, after a proper notification of Carring
ton 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, we were
prepared to leave our expensive and delicate apparatus--which we had
obtained secretly and at great cost--as many days as our vigil might
need to 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
marvellous 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 vigour today. Only two persons suspect 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