Shunned House | Page 9

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-favoured French settlers of two
centuries before, and still operative through rare and un known 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 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 even 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 mould on the floor,

the form of the yellowish vapour, 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 pro vided 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 care fully arranged with reference to the
cot and chairs, and to the spot before the fireplace where the mould 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 10 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 drip
ping stone of the walls, from which all traces of whitewash had
vanished; the dank,