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% meta
\author{H. P. Lovecraft}
\title{The Colour Out of Space}
\date{March 1927}
\maketitle

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\pdfinfo{
   /Title        (H.P. Lovecraft)
   /Author       (The Colour Out of Space)
    /Keywords    (Science fiction, horror short story)
}


West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that 
no axe has ever cut. There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope 
fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the 
glint of sunlight. On the gentle slopes there are farms, ancient and rocky, 
with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over old New England 
secrets in the lee of great ledges; but these are all vacant now, the wide 
chimneys crumbling and the shingled sides bulging perilously beneath low 
gambrel roofs.

The old folk have gone away, and foreigners do not like to live there. 
French-Canadians have tried it, Italians have tried it, and the Poles have come 
and departed. It is not because of anything that can be seen or heard or 
handled, but because of something that is imagined. The place is not good for 
imagination, and does not bring restful dreams at night. It must be this which 
keeps the foreigners away, for old Ammi Pierce has never told them of anything 
he recalls from the strange days. Ammi, whose head has been a little queer for 
years, is the only one who still remains, or who ever talks of the strange 
days; and he dares to do this because his house is so near the open fields and 
the travelled roads around Arkham.

There was once a road over the hills and through the valleys, that ran straight 
where the blasted heath is now; but people ceased to use it and a new road was 
laid curving far toward the south. Traces of the old one can still be found 
amidst the weeds of a returning wilderness, and some of them will doubtless 
linger even when half the hollows are flooded for the new reservoir. Then the 
dark woods will be cut down and the blasted heath will slumber far below blue 
waters whose surface will mirror the sky and ripple in the sun. And the secrets 
of the strange days will be one with the deep's secrets; one with the hidden 
lore of old ocean, and all the mystery of primal earth.

When I went into the hills and vales to survey for the new reservoir they told 
me the place was evil. They told me this in Arkham, and because that is a very 
old town full of witch legends I thought the evil must be something which 
grandams had whispered to children through centuries. The name ``blasted heath'' 
seemed to me very odd and theatrical, and I wondered how it had come into the 
folklore of a Puritan people. Then I saw that dark westward tangle of glens and 
slopes for myself, and ceased to wonder at anything beside its own elder 
mystery. It was morning when I saw it, but shadow lurked always there. The 
trees grew too thickly, and their trunks were too big for any healthy New 
England wood. There was too much silence in the dim alleys between them, and 
the floor was too soft with the dank moss and mattings of infinite years of 
decay.

In the open spaces, mostly along the line of the old road, there were little 
hillside farms; sometimes with all the buildings standing, sometimes with only 
one or two, and sometimes with only a lone chimney or fast-filling cellar. 
Weeds and briers reigned, and furtive wild things rustled in the undergrowth. 
Upon everything was a haze of restlessness and oppression; a touch of the 
unreal and the grotesque, as if some vital element of perspective or 
chiaroscuro were awry. I did not wonder that the foreigners would not stay, for 
this was no region to sleep in. It was too much like a landscape of Salvator 
Rosa; too much like some forbidden woodcut in a tale of terror.

But even all this was not so bad as the blasted heath. I knew it the moment I 
came upon it at the bottom of a spacious valley; for no other name could fit 
such a thing, or any other thing fit such a name. It was as if the poet had 
coined the phrase from having seen this one particular region. It must, I 
thought as I viewed it, be the outcome of a fire; but why had nothing new ever 
grown over these five acres of grey desolation that sprawled open to the sky 
like a great spot eaten by acid in the woods and fields? It lay largely to the 
north of the ancient road line, but encroached a little on the other side. I 
felt an odd reluctance about approaching, and did so at last only because my 
business took me through and past it. There was no vegetation of any kind on 
that broad expanse, but only a fine grey dust or ash which no wind seemed ever 
to blow about. The trees near it were sickly and stunted, and many dead trunks 
stood or lay rotting at the rim. As I walked hurriedly by I saw the tumbled 
bricks and stones of an old chimney and cellar on my right, and the yawning 
black maw of an abandoned well whose stagnant vapours played strange tricks 
with the hues of the sunlight. Even the long, dark woodland climb beyond seemed 
welcome in contrast, and I marvelled no more at the frightened whispers of 
Arkham people. There had been no house or ruin near; even in the old days the 
place must have been lonely and remote. And at twilight, dreading to repass 
that ominous spot, I walked circuitously back to the town by the curious road 
on the south. I vaguely wished some clouds would gather, for an odd timidity 
about the deep skyey voids above had crept into my soul.

In the evening I asked old people in Arkham about the blasted heath, and what 
was meant by that phrase ``strange days'' which so many evasively muttered. I 
could not, however, get any good answers except that all the mystery was much 
more recent than I had dreamed. It was not a matter of old legendry at all, but 
something within the lifetime of those who spoke. It had happened in the 
'eighties, and a family had disappeared or was killed. Speakers would not be 
exact; and because they all told me to pay no attention to old Ammi Pierce's 
crazy tales, I sought him out the next morning, having heard that he lived 
alone in the ancient tottering cottage where the trees first begin to get very 
thick. It was a fearsomely ancient place, and had begun to exude the faint 
miasmal odour which clings about houses that have stood too long. Only with 
persistent knocking could I rouse the aged man, and when he shuffled timidly to 
the door could tell he was not glad to see me. He was not so feeble as I had 
expected; but his eyes drooped in a curious way, and his unkempt clothing and 
white beard made him seem very worn and dismal.

Not knowing just how he could best be launched on his tales, I feigned a matter 
of business; told him of my surveying, and asked vague questions about the 
district. He was far brighter and more educated than I had been led to think, 
and before I knew it had grasped quite as much of the subject as any man I had 
talked with in Arkham. He was not like other rustics I had known in the 
sections where reservoirs were to be. From him there were no protests at the 
miles of old wood and farmland to be blotted out, though perhaps there would 
have been had not his home lain outside the bounds of the future lake. Relief 
was all that he showed; relief at the doom of the dark ancient valleys through 
which he had roamed all his life. They were better under water now---better 
under water since the strange days. And with this opening his husky voice sank 
low, while his body leaned forward and his right forefinger began to point 
shakily and impressively.

It was then that I heard the story, and as the rambling voice scraped and 
whispered on I shivered again and again spite the summer day. Often I had to 
recall the speaker from ramblings, piece out scientific points which he knew 
only by a fading parrot memory of professors' talk, or bridge over gaps, where 
his sense of logic and continuity broke down. When he was done I did not wonder 
that his mind had snapped a trifle, or that the folk of Arkham would not speak 
much of the blasted heath. I hurried back before sunset to my hotel, unwilling 
to have the stars come out above me in the open; and the next day returned to 
Boston to give up my position. I could not go into that dim chaos of old forest 
and slope again, or face another time that grey blasted heath where the black 
well yawned deep beside the tumbled bricks and stones. The reservoir will soon 
be built now, and all those elder secrets will be safe forever under watery 
fathoms. But even then I do not believe I would like to visit that country by 
night---at least not when the sinister stars are out; and nothing could bribe 
me to drink the new city water of Arkham.

It all began, old Ammi said, with the meteorite. Before that time there had 
been no wild legends at all since the witch trials, and even then these western 
woods were not feared half so much as the small island in the Miskatonic where 
the devil held court beside a curious 'lone altar older than the Indians. These 
were not haunted woods, and their fantastic dusk was never terrible till the 
strange days. Then there had come that white noontide cloud, that string of 
explosions in the air, and that pillar of smoke from the valley far in the 
wood. And by night all Arkham had heard of the great rock that fell out of the 
sky and bedded itself in the ground beside the well at the Nahum Gardner place. 
That was the house which had stood where the blasted heath was to come---the 
trim white Nahum Gardner house amidst its fertile gardens and orchards.

Nahum had come to town to tell people about the stone, and dropped in at Ammi 
Pierce's on the way. Ammi was forty then, and all the queer things were fixed 
very strongly in his mind. He and his wife had gone with the three professors 
from Miskatonic University who hastened out the next morning to see the weird 
visitor from unknown stellar space, and had wondered why Nahum had called it so 
large the day before. It had shrunk, Nahum said as he pointed out the big 
brownish mound above the ripped earth and charred grass near the archaic 
well-sweep in his front yard; but the wise men answered that stones do not 
shrink. Its heat lingered persistently, and Nahum declared it had glowed 
faintly in the night. The professors tried it with a geologist's hammer and 
found it was oddly soft. It was, in truth, so soft as to be almost plastic; and 
they gouged rather than chipped a specimen to take back to the college for 
testing. They took it in an old pail borrowed from Nahum's kitchen, for even 
the small piece refused to grow cool. On the trip back they stopped at Ammi's 
to rest, and seemed thoughtful when Mrs. Pierce remarked that the fragment was 
growing smaller and burning the bottom of the pail. Truly, it was not large, 
but perhaps they had taken less than they thought.

The day after that---all this was in June of '82---the professors had trooped out 
again in a great excitement. As they passed Ammi's they told him what queer 
things the specimen had done, and how it had faded wholly away when they put it 
in a glass beaker. The beaker had gone, too, and the wise men talked of the 
strange stone's affinity for silicon. It had acted quite unbelievably in that 
well-ordered laboratory; doing nothing at all and showing no occluded gases 
when heated on charcoal, being wholly negative in the borax bead, and soon 
proving itself absolutely non-volatile at any producible temperature, including 
that of the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe. On an anvil it appeared highly malleable, 
and in the dark its luminosity was very marked. Stubbornly refusing to grow 
cool, it soon had the college in a state of real excitement; and when upon 
heating before the spectroscope it displayed shining bands unlike any known 
colours of the normal spectrum there was much breathless talk of new elements, 
bizarre optical properties, and other things which puzzled men of science are 
wont to say when faced by the unknown.

Hot as it was, they tested it in a crucible with all the proper reagents. Water 
did nothing. Hydrochloric acid was the same. Nitric acid and even aqua regia 
merely hissed and spattered against its torrid invulnerability. Ammi had 
difficulty in recalling all these things, but recognized some solvents as I 
mentioned them in the usual order of use. There were ammonia and caustic soda, 
alcohol and ether, nauseous carbon disulphide and a dozen others; but although 
the weight grew steadily less as time passed, and the fragment seemed to be 
slightly cooling, there was no change in the solvents to show that they had 
attacked the substance at all. It was a metal, though, beyond a doubt. It was 
magnetic, for one thing; and after its immersion in the acid solvents there 
seemed to be faint traces of the Widmanstatten figures found on meteoric iron. 
When the cooling had grown very considerable, the testing was carried on in 
glass; and it was in a glass beaker that they left all the chips made of the 
original fragment during the work. The next morning both chips and beaker were 
gone without trace, and only a charred spot marked the place on the wooden 
shelf where they had been.

All this the professors told Ammi as they paused at his door, and once more he 
went with them to see the stony messenger from the stars, though this time his 
wife did not accompany him. It had now most certainly shrunk, and even the 
sober professors could not doubt the truth of what they saw. All around the 
dwindling brown lump near the well was a vacant space, except where the earth 
had caved in; and whereas it had been a good seven feet across the day before, 
it was now scarcely five. It was still hot, and the sages studied its surface 
curiously as they detached another and larger piece with hammer and chisel. 
They gouged deeply this time, and as they pried away the smaller mass they saw 
that the core of the thing was not quite homogeneous.

They had uncovered what seemed to be the side of a large coloured globule 
embedded in the substance. The colour, which resembled some of the bands in the 
meteor's strange spectrum, was almost impossible to describe; and it was only 
by analogy that they called it colour at all. Its texture was glossy, and upon 
tapping it appeared to promise both brittleness and hollowness. One of the 
professors gave it a smart blow with a hammer, and it burst with a nervous 
little pop. Nothing was emitted, and all trace of the thing vanished with the 
puncturing. It left behind a hollow spherical space about three inches across, 
and all thought it probable that others would be discovered as the enclosing 
substance wasted away.

Conjecture was vain; so after a futile attempt to find additional globules by 
drilling, the seekers left again with their new specimen which proved, however, 
as baffling in the laboratory as its predecessor. Aside from being almost 
plastic, having heat, magnetism, and slight luminosity, cooling slightly in 
powerful acids, possessing an unknown spectrum, wasting away in air, and 
attacking silicon compounds with mutual destruction as a result, it presented 
no identifying features whatsoever; and at the end of the tests the college 
scientists were forced to own that they could not place it. It was nothing of 
this earth, but a piece of the great outside; and as such dowered with outside 
properties and obedient to outside laws.

That night there was a thunderstorm, and when the professors went out to 
Nahum's the next day they met with a bitter disappointment. The stone, magnetic 
as it had been, must have had some peculiar electrical property; for it had 
``drawn the lightning,'' as Nahum said, with a singular persistence. Six times 
within an hour the farmer saw the lightning strike the furrow in the front 
yard, and when the storm was over nothing remained but a ragged pit by the 
ancient well-sweep, half-choked with a caved-in earth. Digging had borne no 
fruit, and the scientists verified the fact of the utter vanishment. The 
failure was total; so that nothing was left to do but go back to the laboratory 
and test again the disappearing fragment left carefully cased in lead. That 
fragment lasted a week, at the end of which nothing of value had been learned 
of it. When it had gone, no residue was left behind, and in time the professors 
felt scarcely sure they had indeed seen with waking eyes that cryptic vestige 
of the fathomless gulfs outside; that lone, weird message from other universes 
and other realms of matter, force, and entity.

As was natural, the Arkham papers made much of the incident with its collegiate 
sponsoring, and sent reporters to talk with Nahum Gardner and his family. At 
least one Boston daily also sent a scribe, and Nahum quickly became a kind of 
local celebrity. He was a lean, genial person of about fifty, living with his 
wife and three sons on the pleasant farmstead in the valley. He and Ammi 
exchanged visits frequently, as did their wives; and Ammi had nothing but 
praise for him after all these years. He seemed slightly proud of the notice 
his place had attracted, and talked often of the meteorite in the succeeding 
weeks. That July and August were hot; and Nahum worked hard at his haying in 
the ten-acre pasture across Chapman's Brook; his rattling wain wearing deep 
ruts in the shadowy lanes between. The labour tired him more than it had in 
other years, and he felt that age was beginning to tell on him.

Then fell the time of fruit and harvest. The pears and apples slowly ripened, 
and Nahum vowed that his orchards were prospering as never before. The fruit 
was growing to phenomenal size and unwonted gloss, and in such abundance that 
extra barrels were ordered to handle the future crop. But with the ripening 
came sore disappointment, for of all that gorgeous array of specious 
lusciousness not one single jot was fit to eat. Into the fine flavour of the 
pears and apples had crept a stealthy bitterness and sickishness, so that even 
the smallest bites induced a lasting disgust. It was the same with the melons 
and tomatoes, and Nahum sadly saw that his entire crop was lost. Quick to 
connect events, he declared that the meteorite had poisoned the soil, and 
thanked Heaven that most of the other crops were in the upland lot along the 
road.

Winter came early, and was very cold. Ammi saw Nahum less often than usual, and 
observed that he had begun to look worried. The rest of his family too, seemed 
to have grown taciturn; and were far from steady in their church-going or their 
attendance at the various social events of the countryside. For this reserve or 
melancholy no cause could be found, though all the household confessed now and 
then to poorer health and a feeling of vague disquiet. Nahum himself gave the 
most definite statement of anyone when he said he was disturbed about certain 
footprints in the snow. They were the usual winter prints of red squirrels, 
white rabbits, and foxes, but the brooding farmer professed to see something 
not quite right about their nature and arrangement. He was never specific, but 
appeared to think that they were not as characteristic of the anatomy and 
habits of squirrels and rabbits and foxes as they ought to be. Ammi listened 
without interest to this talk until one night when he drove past Nahum's house 
in his sleigh on the way back from Clark's Corner. There had been a moon, and a 
rabbit had run across the road, and the leaps of that rabbit were longer than 
either Ammi or his horse liked. The latter, indeed, had almost run away when 
brought up by a firm rein. Thereafter Ammi gave Nahum's tales more respect, and 
wondered why the Gardner dogs seemed so cowed and quivering every morning. They 
had, it developed, nearly lost the spirit to bark.

In February the McGregor boys from Meadow Hill were out shooting woodchucks, 
and not far from the Gardner place bagged a very peculiar specimen. The 
proportions of its body seemed slightly altered in a queer way impossible to 
describe, while its face had taken on an expression which no one ever saw in a 
woodchuck before. The boys were genuinely frightened, and threw the thing away 
at once, so that only their grotesque tales of it ever reached the people of 
the countryside. But the shying of horses near Nahum's house had now become an 
acknowledged thing, and all the basis for a cycle of whispered legend was fast 
taking form.

People vowed that the snow melted faster around Nahum's than it did anywhere 
else, and early in March there was an awed discussion in Potter's general store 
at Clark's Corners. Stephen Rice had driven past Gardner's in the morning, and 
had noticed the skunk-cabbages coming up through the mud by the woods across 
the road. Never were things of such size seen before, and they held strange 
colours that could not be put into any words. Their shapes were monstrous, and 
the horse had snorted at an odour which struck Stephen as wholly unprecedented. 
That afternoon several persons drove past to see the abnormal growth, and all 
agreed that plants of that kind ought never to sprout in a healthy world. The 
bad fruit of the fall before was freely mentioned, and it went from mouth to 
mouth that there was poison in Nahum's ground. Of course it was the meteorite; 
and remembering how strange the men from the college had found that stone to 


One day they paid Nahum a visit; but having no love of wild tales and folklore 
were very conservative in what they inferred. The plants were certainly odd, 
but all skunk-cabbages are more or less odd in shape and hue. Perhaps some 
mineral element from the stone had entered the soil, but it would soon be 
washed away. And as for the footprints and frightened horses---of course this 
was mere country talk which such a phenomenon as the aerolite would be certain 
to start. There was really nothing for serious men to do in cases of wild 
gossip, for superstitious rustics will say and believe anything. And so all 
through the strange days the professors stayed away in contempt. Only one of 
them, when given two phials of dust for analysis in a police job over a year 
and half later, recalled that the queer colour of that skunk-cabbage had been 
very like one of the anomalous bands of light shown by the meteor fragment in 
the college spectroscope, and like the brittle globule found imbedded in the 
stone from the abyss. The samples in this analysis case gave the same odd bands 
at first, though later they lost the property.

The trees budded prematurely around Nahum's, and at night they swayed ominously 
in the wind. Nahum's second son Thaddeus, a lad of fifteen, swore that they 
swayed also when there was no wind; but even the gossips would not credit this. 
Certainly, however, restlessness was in the air. The entire Gardner family 
developed the habit of stealthy listening, though not for any sound which they 
could consciously name. The listening was, indeed, rather a product of moments 
when consciousness seemed half to slip away. Unfortunately such moments 
increased week by week, till it became common speech that ``something was wrong 
with all Nahum's folks.'' When the early saxifrage came out it had another 
strange colour; not quite like that of the skunk-cabbage, but plainly related 
and equally unknown to anyone who saw it. Nahum took some blossoms to Arkham 
and showed them to the editor of the Gazette, but that dignitary did no more 
than write a humorous article about them, in which the dark fears of rustics 
were held up to polite ridicule. It was a mistake of Nahum's to tell a stolid 
city man about the way the great, overgrown mourning-cloak butterflies behaved 
in connection with these saxifrages.

April brought a kind of madness to the country folk, and began that disuse of 
the road past Nahum's which led to its ultimate abandonment. It was the 
vegetation. All the orchard trees blossomed forth in strange colours, and 
through the stony soil of the yard and adjacent pasturage there sprang up a 
bizarre growth which only a botanist could connect with the proper flora of the 
region. No sane wholesome colours were anywhere to be seen except in the green 
grass and leafage; but everywhere were those hectic and prismatic variants of 
some diseased, underlying primary tone without a place among the' known tints 
of earth. The ``Dutchman's breeches'' became a thing of sinister menace, and the 
bloodroots grew insolent in their chromatic perversion. Ammi and the Gardners 
thought that most of the colours had a sort of haunting familiarity, and 
decided that they reminded one of the brittle globule in the meteor. Nahum 
ploughed and sowed the ten-acre pasture and the upland lot, but did nothing 
with the land around the house. He knew it would be of no use, and hoped that 
the summer's strange growths would draw all the poison from the soil. He was 
prepared for almost anything now, and had grown used to the sense of something 
near him waiting to be heard. The shunning of his house by neighbors told on 
him, of course; but it told on his wife more. The boys were better off, being 
at school each day; but they could not help being frightened by the gossip. 
Thaddeus, an especially sensitive youth, suffered the most.

In May the insects came, and Nahum's place became a nightmare of buzzing and 
crawling. Most of the creatures seemed not quite usual in their aspects and 
motions, and their nocturnal habits contradicted all former experience. The 
Gardners took to watching at night---watching in all directions at random for 
something---they could not tell what. It was then that they owned that 
Thaddeus had been right about the trees. Mrs. Gardner was the next to see it 
from the window as she watched the swollen boughs of a maple against a moonlit 
sky. The boughs surely moved, and there was no wind. It must be the sap. 
Strangeness had come into everything growing now. Yet it was none of Nahum's 
family at all who made the next discovery. Familiarity had dulled them, and 
what they could not see was glimpsed by a timid windmill salesman from Bolton 
who drove by one night in ignorance of the country legends. What he told in 
Arkham was given a short paragraph in the Gazette; and it was there that all 
the farmers, Nahum included, saw it first. The night had been dark and the 
buggy-lamps faint, but around a farm in the valley which everyone knew from the 
account must be Nahum's, the darkness had been less thick. A dim though 
distinct luminosity seemed to inhere in all the vegetation, grass, leaves, and 
blossoms alike, while at one moment a detached piece of the phosphorescence 
appeared to stir furtively in the yard near the barn.

The grass had so far seemed untouched, and the cows were freely pastured in the 
lot near the house, but toward the end of May the milk began to be bad. Then 
Nahum had the cows driven to the uplands, after which this trouble ceased. Not 
long after this the change in grass and leaves became apparent to the eye. All 
the verdure was going grey, and was developing a highly singular quality of 
brittleness. Ammi was now the only person who ever visited the place, and his 
visits were becoming fewer and fewer. When school closed the Gardners were 
virtually cut off from the world, and sometimes let Ammi do their errands in 
town. They were failing curiously both physically and mentally, and no one was 
surprised when the news of Mrs. Gardner's madness stole around.

It happened in June, about the anniversary of the meteor's fall, and the poor 
woman screamed about things in the air which she could not describe. In her 
raving there was not a single specific noun, but only verbs and pronouns. 
Things moved and changed and fluttered, and ears tingled to impulses which were 
not wholly sounds. Something was taken away---she was being drained of 
something---something was fastening itself on her that ought not to 
be---someone must make it keep off---nothing was ever still in the 
night---the walls and windows shifted. Nahum did not send her to the county 
asylum, but let her wander about the house as long as she was harmless to 
herself and others. Even when her expression changed he did nothing. But when 
the boys grew afraid of her, and Thaddeus nearly fainted at the way she made 
faces at him, he decided to keep her locked in the attic. By July she had 
ceased to speak and crawled on all fours, and before that month was over Nahum 
got the mad notion that she was slightly luminous in the dark, as he now 
clearly saw was the case with the nearby vegetation.

It was a little before this that the horses had stampeded. Something had 
aroused them in the night, and their neighing and kicking in their stalls had 
been terrible. There seemed virtually nothing to do to calm them, and when 
Nahum opened the stable door they all bolted out like frightened woodland deer. 
It took a week to track all four, and when found they were seen to be quite 
useless and unmanageable. Something had snapped in their brains, and each one 
had to be shot for its own good. Nahum borrowed a horse from Ammi for his 
haying, but found it would not approach the barn. It shied, balked, and 
whinnied, and in the end he could do nothing but drive it into the yard while 
the men used their own strength to get the heavy wagon near enough the hayloft 
for convenient pitching. And all the while the vegetation was turning grey and 
brittle. Even the flowers whose hues had been so strange were greying now, and 
the fruit was coming out grey and dwarfed and tasteless. The asters and 
golden-rod bloomed grey and distorted, and the roses and zinneas and hollyhocks 
in the front yard were such blasphemous-looking things that Nahum's oldest boy 
Zenas cut them down. The strangely puffed insects died about that time, even 
the bees that had left their hives and taken to the woods.

By September all the vegetation was fast crumbling to a greyish powder, and 
Nahum feared that the trees would die before the poison was out of the soil. 
His wife now had spells of terrific screaming, and he and the boys were in a 
constant state of nervous tension. They shunned people now, and when school 
opened the boys did not go. But it was Ammi, on one of his rare visits, who 
first realised that the well water was no longer good. It had an evil taste 
that was not exactly fetid nor exactly salty, and Ammi advised his friend to 
dig another well on higher ground to use till the soil was good again. Nahum, 
however, ignored the warning, for he had by that time become calloused to 
strange and unpleasant things. He and the boys continued to use the tainted 
supply, drinking it as listlessly and mechanically as they ate their meagre and 
ill-cooked meals and did their thankless and monotonous chores through the 
aimless days. There was something of stolid resignation about them all, as if 
they walked half in another world between lines of nameless guards to a certain 
and familiar doom.

Thaddeus went mad in September after a visit to the well. He had gone with a 
pail and had come back empty-handed, shrieking and waving his arms, and 
sometimes lapsing into an inane titter or a whisper about ``the moving colours 
down there.'' Two in one family was pretty bad, but Nahum was very brave about 
it. He let the boy run about for a week until he began stumbling and hurting 
himself, and then he shut him in an attic room across the hall from his 
mother's. The way they screamed at each other from behind their locked doors 
was very terrible, especially to little Merwin, who fancied they talked in some 
terrible language that was not of earth. Merwin was getting frightfully 
imaginative, and his restlessness was worse after the shutting away of the 
brother who had been his greatest playmate.

Almost at the same time the mortality among the livestock commenced. Poultry 
turned greyish and died very quickly, their meat being found dry and noisome 
upon cutting. Hogs grew inordinately fat, then suddenly began to undergo 
loathsome changes which no one could explain. Their meat was of course useless, 
and Nahum was at his wit's end. No rural veterinary would approach his place, 
and the city veterinary from Arkham was openly baffled. The swine began growing 
grey and brittle and falling to pieces before they died, and their eyes and 
muzzles developed singular alterations. It was very inexplicable, for they had 
never been fed from the tainted vegetation. Then something struck the cows. 
Certain areas or sometimes the whole body would be uncannily shrivelled or 
compressed, and atrocious collapses or disintegrations were common. In the last 
stages---and death was always the result---there would be a greying and 
turning brittle like that which beset the hogs. There could be no question of 
poison, for all the cases occurred in a locked and undisturbed barn. No bites 
of prowling things could have brought the virus, for what live beast of earth 
can pass through solid obstacles? It must be only natural disease---yet what 
disease could wreak such results was beyond any mind's guessing. When the 
harvest came there was not an animal surviving on the place, for the stock and 
poultry were dead and the dogs had run away. These dogs, three in number, had 
all vanished one night and were never heard of again. The five cats had left 
some time before, but their going was scarcely noticed since there now seemed 
to be no mice, and only Mrs. Gardner had made pets of the graceful felines.

On the nineteenth of October Nahum staggered into Ammi's house with hideous 
news. The death had come to poor Thaddeus in his attic room, and it had come in 
a way which could not be told. Nahum had dug a grave in the railed family plot 
behind the farm, and had put therein what he found. There could have been 
nothing from outside, for the small barred window and locked door were intact; 
but it was much as it had been in the barn. Ammi and his wife consoled the 
stricken man as best they could, but shuddered as they did so. Stark terror 
seemed to cling round the Gardners and all they touched, and the very presence 
of one in the house was a breath from regions unnamed and unnamable. Ammi 
accompanied Nahum home with the greatest reluctance, and did what he might to 
calm the hysterical sobbing of little Merwin. Zenas needed no calming. He had 
come of late to do nothing but stare into space and obey what his father told 
him; and Ammi thought that his fate was very merciful. Now and then Merwin's 
screams were answered faintly from the attic, and in response to an inquiring 
look Nahum said that his wife was getting very feeble. When night approached, 
Ammi managed to get away; for not even friendship could make him stay in that 
spot when the faint glow of the vegetation began and the trees may or may not 
have swayed without wind. It was really lucky for Ammi that he was not more 
imaginative. Even as things were, his mind was bent ever so slightly; but had 
he been able to connect and reflect upon all the portents around him he must 
inevitably have turned a total maniac. In the twilight he hastened home, the 
screams of the mad woman and the nervous child ringing horribly in his ears.

Three days later Nahum burst into Ammi's kitchen in the early morning, and in 
the absence of his host stammered out a desperate tale once more, while Mrs. 
Pierce listened in a clutching fright. It was little Merwin this time. He was 
gone. He had gone out late at night with a lantern and pail for water, and had 
never come back. He'd been going to pieces for days, and hardly knew what he 
was about. Screamed at everything. There had been a frantic shriek from the 
yard then, but before the father could get to the door the boy was gone. There 
was no glow from the lantern he had taken, and of the child himself no trace. 
At the time Nahum thought the lantern and pail were gone too; but when dawn 
came, and the man had plodded back from his all-night search of the woods and 
fields, he had found some very curious things near the well. There was a 
crushed and apparently somewhat melted mass of iron which had certainly been 
the lantern; while a bent handle and twisted iron hoops beside it, both 
half-fused, seemed to hint at the remnants of the pail. That was all. Nahum was 
past imagining, Mrs. Pierce was blank, and Ammi, when he had reached home and 
heard the tale, could give no guess. Merwin was gone, and there would be no use 
in telling the people around, who shunned all Gardners now. No use, either, in 
telling the city people at Arkham who laughed at everything. Thad was gone, and 
now Merwin was gone. Something was creeping and creeping and waiting to be seen 
and heard. Nahum would go soon, and he wanted Ammi to look after his wife and 
Zenas if they survived him. It must all be a judgment of some sort; though he 
could not fancy what for, since he had always walked uprightly in the Lord's 
ways so far as he knew.

For over two weeks Ammi saw nothing of Nahum; and then, worried about what 
might have happened, he overcame his fears and paid the Gardner place a visit. 
There was no smoke from the great chimney, and for a moment the visitor was 
apprehensive of the worst. The aspect of the whole farm was 
shocking---greyish withered grass and leaves on the ground, vines falling in 
brittle wreckage from archaic walls and gables, and great bare trees clawing up 
at the grey November sky with a studied malevolence which Ammi could not but 
feel had come from some subtle change in the tilt of the branches. But Nahum 
was alive, after all. He was weak, and lying on a couch in the low-ceiled 
kitchen, but perfectly conscious and able to give simple orders to Zenas. The 
room was deadly cold; and as Ammi visibly shivered, the host shouted huskily to 
Zenas for more wood. Wood, indeed, was sorely needed; since the cavernous 
fireplace was unlit and empty, with a cloud of soot blowing about in the chill 
wind that came down the chimney. Presently Nahum asked him if the extra wood 
had made him any more comfortable, and then Ammi saw what had happened. The 
stoutest cord had broken at last, and the hapless farmer's mind was proof 
against more sorrow.

Questioning tactfully, Ammi could get no clear data at all about the missing 
Zenas. ``In the well---he lives in the well---'' was all that the clouded 
father would say. Then there flashed across the visitor's mind a sudden thought 
of the mad wife, and he changed his line of inquiry. ``Nabby? Why, here she is!'' 
was the surprised response of poor Nahum, and Ammi soon saw that he must search 
for himself. Leaving the harmless babbler on the couch, he took the keys from 
their nail beside the door and climbed the creaking stairs to the attic. It was 
very close and noisome up there, and no sound could be heard from any 
direction. Of the four doors in sight, only one was locked, and on this he 
tried various keys of the ring he had taken. The third key proved the right 
one, and after some fumbling Ammi threw open the low white door.

It was quite dark inside, for the window was small and half-obscured by the 
crude wooden bars; and Ammi could see nothing at all on the wide-planked floor. 
The stench was beyond enduring, and before proceeding further he had to retreat 
to another room and return with his lungs filled with breathable air. When he 
did enter he saw something dark in the corner, and upon seeing it more clearly 
he screamed outright. While he screamed he thought a momentary cloud eclipsed 
the window, and a second later he felt himself brushed as if by some hateful 
current of vapour. Strange colours danced before his eyes; and had not a 
present horror numbed him he would have thought of the globule in the meteor 
that the geologist's hammer had shattered, and of the morbid vegetation that 
had sprouted in the spring. As it was he thought only of the blasphemous 
monstrosity which confronted him, and which all too clearly had shared the 
nameless fate of young Thaddeus and the livestock. But the terrible thing about 
the horror was that it very slowly and perceptibly moved as it continued to 
crumble.

Ammi would give me no added particulars of this scene, but the shape in the 
corner does not reappear in his tale as a moving object. There are things which 
cannot be mentioned, and what is done in common humanity is sometimes cruelly 
judged by the law. I gathered that no moving thing was left in that attic room, 
and that to leave anything capable of motion there would have been a deed so 
monstrous as to damn any accountable being to eternal torment. Anyone but a 
stolid farmer would have fainted or gone mad, but Ammi walked conscious through 
that low doorway and locked the accursed secret behind him. There would be 
Nahum to deal with now; he must be fed and tended, and removed to some place 
where he could be cared for.

Commencing his descent of the dark stairs. Ammi heard a thud below him. He even 
thought a scream had been suddenly choked off, and recalled nervously the 
clammy vapour which had brushed by him in that frightful room above. What 
presence had his cry and entry started up? Halted by some vague fear, he heard 
still further sounds below. Indubitably there was a sort of heavy dragging, and 
a most detestably sticky noise as of some fiendish and unclean species of 
suction. With an associative sense goaded to feverish heights, he thought 
unaccountably of what he had seen upstairs. Good God! What eldritch dream-world 
was this into which he had blundered? He dared move neither backward nor 
forward, but stood there trembling at the black curve of the boxed-in 
staircase. Every trifle of the scene burned itself into his brain. The sounds, 
the sense of dread expectancy, the darkness, the steepness of the narrow 
step---and merciful Heaven!---the faint but unmistakable luminosity of all 
the woodwork in sight; steps, sides, exposed laths, and beams alike.

Then there burst forth a frantic whinny from Ammi's horse outside, followed at 
once by a clatter which told of a frenzied runaway. In another moment horse and 
buggy had gone beyond earshot, leaving the frightened man on the dark stairs to 
guess what had sent them. But that was not all. There had been another sound 
out there. A sort of liquid splash---water---it must have been the well. He 
had left Hero untied near it, and a buggy wheel must have brushed the coping 
and knocked in a stone. And still the pale phosphorescence glowed in that 
detestably ancient woodwork. God! how old the house was! Most of it built 
before 1670, and the gambrel roof no later than 1730.

A feeble scratching on the floor downstairs now sounded distinctly, and Ammi's 
grip tightened on a heavy stick he had picked up in the attic for some purpose. 
Slowly nerving himself, he finished his descent and walked boldly toward the 
kitchen. But he did not complete the walk, because what he sought was no longer 
there. It had come to meet him, and it was still alive after a fashion. Whether 
it had crawled or whether it had been dragged by any external forces, Ammi 
could not say; but the death had been at it. Everything had happened in the 
last half-hour, but collapse, greying, and disintegration were already far 
advanced. There was a horrible brittleness, and dry fragments were scaling off. 
Ammi could not touch it, but looked horrifiedly into the distorted parody that 
had been a face. ``What was it, Nahum---what was it?'' He whispered, and the 
cleft, bulging lips were just able to crackle out a final answer.

``Nothin'... nothin'... the colour... it burns... cold an' wet, but it burns... 
it lived in the well... I seen it... a kind of smoke... jest like the flowers 
last spring... the well shone at night... Thad an' Merwin an' Zenas... 
everything alive... suckin' the life out of everything... in that stone... it 
must a' come in that stone pizened the whole place... dun't know what it 
wants... that round thing them men from the college dug outen the stone... they 
smashed it... it was the same colour... jest the same, like the flowers an' 
plants... must a' ben more of 'em... seeds... seeds... they growed... I seen it 
the fust time this week... must a' got strong on Zenas... he was a big boy, 
full o' life... it beats down your mind an' then gets ye... burns ye up... in 
the well water... you was right about that... evil water... Zenas never come 
back from the well... can't git away... draws ye... ye know summ'at's comin' 
but tain't no use... I seen it time an' agin senct Zenas was took... whar's 
Nabby, Ammi?... my head's no good... dun't know how long sense I fed her... 
it'll git her ef we ain't keerful... jest a colour... her face is gittin' to 
hev that colour sometimes towards night... an' it burns an' sucks... it come 
from some place whar things ain't as they is here... one o' them professors 
said so... he was right... look out, Ammi, it'll do suthin' more... sucks the 
life out...''

But that was all. That which spoke could speak no more because it had 
completely caved in. Ammi laid a red checked tablecloth over what was left and 
reeled out the back door into the fields. He climbed the slope to the ten-acre 
pasture and stumbled home by the north road and the woods. He could not pass 
that well from which his horses had run away. He had looked at it through the 
window, and had seen that no stone was missing from the rim. Then the lurching 
buggy had not dislodged anything after all---the splash had been something 
else---something which went into the well after it had done with poor Nahum.

When Ammi reached his house the horses and buggy had arrived before him and 
thrown his wife into fits of anxiety. Reassuring her without explanations, he 
set out at once for Arkham and notified the authorities that the Gardner family 
was no more. He indulged in no details, but merely told of the deaths of Nahum 
and Nabby, that of Thaddeus being already known, and mentioned that the cause 
seemed to be the same strange ailment which had killed the live-stock. He also 
stated that Merwin and Zenas had disappeared. There was considerable 
questioning at the police station, and in the end Ammi was compelled to take 
three officers to the Gardner farm, together with the coroner, the medical 
examiner, and the veterinary who had treated the diseased animals. He went much 
against his will, for the afternoon was advancing and he feared the fall of 
night over that accursed place, but it was some comfort to have so many people 
with him.

The six men drove out in a democrat-wagon, following Ammi's buggy, and arrived 
at the pest-ridden farmhouse about four o'clock. Used as the officers were to 
gruesome experiences, not one remained unmoved at what was found in the attic 
and under the red checked tablecloth on the floor below. The whole aspect of 
the farm with its grey desolation was terrible enough, but those two crumbling 
objects were beyond all bounds. No one could look long at them, and even the 
medical examiner admitted that there was very little to examine. Specimens 
could be analysed, of course, so he busied himself in obtaining them---and 
here it develops that a very puzzling aftermath occurred at the college 
laboratory where the two phials of dust were finally taken. Under the 
spectroscope both samples gave off an unknown spectrum, in which many of the 
baffling bands were precisely like those which the strange meteor had yielded 
in the previous year. The property of emitting this spectrum vanished in a 
month, the dust thereafter consisting mainly of alkaline phosphates and 
carbonates.

Ammi would not have told the men about the well if he had thought they meant to 
do anything then and there. It was getting toward sunset, and he was anxious to 
be away. But he could not help glancing nervously at the stony curb by the 
great sweep, and when a detective questioned him he admitted that Nahum had 
feared something down there so much so that he had never even thought of 
searching it for Merwin or Zenas. After that nothing would do but that they 
empty and explore the well immediately, so Ammi had to wait trembling while 
pail after pail of rank water was hauled up and splashed on the soaking ground 
outside. The men sniffed in disgust at the fluid, and toward the last held 
their noses against the foetor they were uncovering. It was not so long a job 
as they had feared it would be, since the water was phenomenally low. There is 
no need to speak too exactly of what they found. Merwin and Zenas were both 
there, in part, though the vestiges were mainly skeletal. There were also a 
small deer and a large dog in about the same state, and a number of bones of 
small animals. The ooze and slime at the bottom seemed inexplicably porous and 
bubbling, and a man who descended on hand-holds with a long pole found that he 
could sink the wooden shaft to any depth in the mud of the floor without 
meeting any solid obstruction.

Twilight had now fallen, and lanterns were brought from the house. Then, when 
it was seen that nothing further could be gained from the well, everyone went 
indoors and conferred in the ancient sitting-room while the intermittent light 
of a spectral half-moon played wanly on the grey desolation outside. The men 
were frankly nonplussed by the entire case, and could find no convincing common 
element to link the strange vegetable conditions, the unknown disease of 
live-stock and humans, and the unaccountable deaths of Merwin and Zenas in the 
tainted well. They had heard the common country talk, it is true; but could not 
believe that anything contrary to natural law had occurred. No doubt the meteor 
had poisoned the soil, but the illness of persons and animals who had eaten 
nothing grown in that soil was another matter. Was it the well water? Very 
possibly. It might be a good idea to analyze it. But what peculiar madness 
could have made both boys jump into the well? Their deeds were so similar-and 
the fragments showed that they had both suffered from the grey brittle death. 
Why was everything so grey and brittle?

It was the coroner, seated near a window overlooking the yard, who first 
noticed the glow about the well. Night had fully set in, and all the abhorrent 
grounds seemed faintly luminous with more than the fitful moonbeams; but this 
new glow was something definite and distinct, and appeared to shoot up from the 
black pit like a softened ray from a searchlight, giving dull reflections in 
the little ground pools where the water had been emptied. It had a very queer 
colour, and as all the men clustered round the window Ammi gave a violent 
start. For this strange beam of ghastly miasma was to him of no unfamiliar hue. 
He had seen that colour before, and feared to think what it might mean. He had 
seen it in the nasty brittle globule in that aerolite two summers ago, had seen 
it in the crazy vegetation of the springtime, and had thought he had seen it 
for an instant that very morning against the small barred window of that 
terrible attic room where nameless things had happened. It had flashed there a 
second, and a clammy and hateful current of vapour had brushed past him---and 
then poor Nahum had been taken by something of that colour. He had said so at 
the last---said it was like the globule and the plants. After that had come 
the runaway in the yard and the splash in the well-and now that well was 
belching forth to the night a pale insidious beam of the same demoniac tint.

It does credit to the alertness of Ammi's mind that he puzzled even at that 
tense moment over a point which was essentially scientific. He could not but 
wonder at his gleaning of the same impression from a vapour glimpsed in the 
daytime, against a window opening on the morning sky, and from a nocturnal 
exhalation seen as a phosphorescent mist against the black and blasted 
landscape. It wasn't right---it was against Nature---and he thought of 
those terrible last words of his stricken friend, ``It come from some place whar 
things ain't as they is here... one o' them professors said so...''

All three horses outside, tied to a pair of shrivelled saplings by the road, 
were now neighing and pawing frantically. The wagon driver started for the door 
to do something, but Ammi laid a shaky hand on his shoulder. ``Dun't go out 
thar,'' he whispered. ``They's more to this nor what we know. Nahum said 
somethin' lived in the well that sucks your life out. He said it must be 
some'at growed from a round ball like one we all seen in the meteor stone that 
fell a year ago June. Sucks an' burns, he said, an' is jest a cloud of colour 
like that light out thar now, that ye can hardly see an' can't tell what it is. 
Nahum thought it feeds on everything livin' an' gits stronger all the time. He 
said he seen it this last week. It must be somethin' from away off in the sky 
like the men from the college last year says the meteor stone was. The way it's 
made an' the way it works ain't like no way o' God's world. It's some'at from 
beyond.''

So the men paused indecisively as the light from the well grew stronger and the 
hitched horses pawed and whinnied in increasing frenzy. It was truly an awful 
moment; with terror in that ancient and accursed house itself, four monstrous 
sets of fragments-two from the house and two from the well-in the woodshed 
behind, and that shaft of unknown and unholy iridescence from the slimy depths 
in front. Ammi had restrained the driver on impulse, forgetting how uninjured 
he himself was after the clammy brushing of that coloured vapour in the attic 
room, but perhaps it is just as well that he acted as he did. No one will ever 
know what was abroad that night; and though the blasphemy from beyond had not 
so far hurt any human of unweakened mind, there is no telling what it might not 
have done at that last moment, and with its seemingly increased strength and 
the special signs of purpose it was soon to display beneath the half-clouded 
moonlit sky.

All at once one of the detectives at the window gave a short, sharp gasp. The 
others looked at him, and then quickly followed his own gaze upward to the 
point at which its idle straying had been suddenly arrested. There was no need 
for words. What had been disputed in country gossip was disputable no longer, 
and it is because of the thing which every man of that party agreed in 
whispering later on, that the strange days are never talked about in Arkham. It 
is necessary to premise that there was no wind at that hour of the evening. One 
did arise not long afterward, but there was absolutely none then. Even the dry 
tips of the lingering hedge-mustard, grey and blighted, and the fringe on the 
roof of the standing democrat-wagon were unstirred. And yet amid that tense 
godless calm the high bare boughs of all the trees in the yard were moving. 
They were twitching morbidly and spasmodically, clawing in convulsive and 
epileptic madness at the moonlit clouds; scratching impotently in the noxious 
air as if jerked by some allied and bodiless line of linkage with subterrene 
horrors writhing and struggling below the black roots.

Not a man breathed for several seconds. Then a cloud of darker depth passed 
over the moon, and the silhouette of clutching branches faded out momentarily. 
At this there was a general cry; muffled with awe, but husky and almost 
identical from every throat. For the terror had not faded with the silhouette, 
and in a fearsome instant of deeper darkness the watchers saw wriggling at that 
tree top height a thousand tiny points of faint and unhallowed radiance, 
tipping each bough like the fire of St. Elmo or the flames that come down on 
the apostles' heads at Pentecost. It was a monstrous constellation of unnatural 
light, like a glutted swarm of corpse-fed fireflies dancing hellish sarabands 
over an accursed marsh, and its colour was that same nameless intrusion which 
Ammi had come to recognize and dread. All the while the shaft of 
phosphorescence from the well was getting brighter and brighter, bringing to 
the minds of the huddled men, a sense of doom and abnormality which far 
outraced any image their conscious minds could form. It was no longer shining 
out; it was pouring out; and as the shapeless stream of unplaceable colour left 
the well it seemed to flow directly into the sky.

The veterinary shivered, and walked to the front door to drop the heavy extra 
bar across it. Ammi shook no less, and had to tug and point for lack of 
controllable voice when he wished to draw notice to the growing luminosity of 
the trees. The neighing and stamping of the horses had become utterly 
frightful, but not a soul of that group in the old house would have ventured 
forth for any earthly reward. With the moments the shining of the trees 
increased, while their restless branches seemed to strain more and more toward 
verticality. The wood of the well-sweep was shining now, and presently a 
policeman dumbly pointed to some wooden sheds and bee-hives near the stone wall 
on the west. They were commencing to shine, too, though the tethered vehicles 
of the visitors seemed so far unaffected. Then there was a wild commotion and 
clopping in the road, and as Ammi quenched the lamp for better seeing they 
realized that the span of frantic greys had broken their sapling and run off 
with the democrat-wagon.

The shock served to loosen several tongues, and embarrassed whispers were 
exchanged. ``It spreads on everything organic that's been around here,'' muttered 
the medical examiner. No one replied, but the man who had been in the well gave 
a hint that his long pole must have stirred up something intangible. ``It was 
awful,'' he added. ``There was no bottom at all. Just ooze and bubbles and the 
feeling of something lurking under there.'' Ammi's horse still pawed and 
screamed deafeningly in the road outside, and nearly drowned its owner's faint 
quaver as he mumbled his formless reflections. ``It come from that stone---it 
growed down thar---it got everything livin'---it fed itself on 'em, mind 
and body---Thad an' Merwin, Zenas an' Nabby---Nahum was the last---they 
all drunk the water---it got strong on 'em---it come from beyond, whar 
things ain't like they be here---now it's goin' home -''

At this point, as the column of unknown colour flared suddenly stronger and 
began to weave itself into fantastic suggestions of shape which each spectator 
described differently, there came from poor tethered Hero such a sound as no 
man before or since ever heard from a horse. Every person in that low-pitched 
sitting room stopped his ears, and Ammi turned away from the window in horror 
and nausea. Words could not convey it---when Ammi looked out again the 
hapless beast lay huddled inert on the moonlit ground between the splintered 
shafts of the buggy. That was the last of Hero till they buried him next day. 
But the present was no time to mourn, for almost at this instant a detective 
silently called attention to something terrible in the very room with them. In 
the absence of the lamplight it was clear that a faint phosphorescence had 
begun to pervade the entire apartment. It glowed on the broad-planked floor and 
the fragment of rag carpet, and shimmered over the sashes of the small-paned 
windows. It ran up and down the exposed corner-posts, coruscated about the 
shelf and mantel, and infected the very doors and furniture. Each minute saw it 
strengthen, and at last it was very plain that healthy living things must leave 
that house.

Ammi showed them the back door and the path up through the fields to the 
ten-acre pasture. They walked and stumbled as in a dream, and did not dare look 
back till they were far away on the high ground. They were glad of the path, 
for they could not have gone the front way, by that well. It was bad enough 
passing the glowing barn and sheds, and those shining orchard trees with their 
gnarled, fiendish contours; but thank Heaven the branches did their worst 
twisting high up. The moon went under some very black clouds as they crossed 
the rustic bridge over Chapman's Brook, and it was blind groping from there to 
the open meadows.

When they looked back toward the valley and the distant Gardner place at the 
bottom they saw a fearsome sight. At the farm was shining with the hideous 
unknown blend of colour; trees, buildings, and even such grass and herbage as 
had not been wholly changed to lethal grey brittleness. The boughs were all 
straining skyward, tipped with tongues of foul flame, and lambent tricklings of 
the same monstrous fire were creeping about the ridgepoles of the house, barn 
and sheds. It was a scene from a vision of Fuseli, and over all the rest 
reigned that riot of luminous amorphousness, that alien and undimensioned 
rainbow of cryptic poison from the well---seething, feeling, lapping, 
reaching, scintillating, straining, and malignly bubbling in its cosmic and 
unrecognizable chromaticism.

Then without warning the hideous thing shot vertically up toward the sky like a 
rocket or meteor, leaving behind no trail and disappearing through a round and 
curiously regular hole in the clouds before any man could gasp or cry out. No 
watcher can ever forget that sight, and Ammi stared blankly at the stars of 
Cygnus, Deneb twinkling above the others, where the unknown colour had melted 
into the Milky Way. But his gaze was the next moment called swiftly to earth by 
the crackling in the valley. It was just that. Only a wooden ripping and 
crackling, and not an explosion, as so many others of the party vowed. Yet the 
outcome was the same, for in one feverish kaleidoscopic instant there burst up 
from that doomed and accursed farm a gleamingly eruptive cataclysm of unnatural 
sparks and substance; blurring the glance of the few who saw it, and sending 
forth to the zenith a bombarding cloudburst of such coloured and fantastic 
fragments as our universe must needs disown. Through quickly reclosing vapours 
they followed the great morbidity that had vanished, and in another second they 
had vanished too. Behind and below was only a darkness to which the men dared 
not return, and all about was a mounting wind which seemed to sweep down in 
black, frore gusts from interstellar space. It shrieked and howled, and lashed 
the fields and distorted woods in a mad cosmic frenzy, till soon the trembling 
party realized it would be no use waiting for the moon to show what was left 
down there at Nahum's.

Too awed even to hint theories, the seven shaking men trudged back toward 
Arkham by the north road. Ammi was worse than his fellows, and begged them to 
see him inside his own kitchen, instead of keeping straight on to town. He did 
not wish to cross the blighted, wind-whipped woods alone to his home on the 
main road. For he had had an added shock that the others were spared, and was 
crushed forever with a brooding fear he dared not even mention for many years 
to come. As the rest of the watchers on that tempestuous hill had stolidly set 
their faces toward the road, Ammi had looked back an instant at the shadowed 
valley of desolation so lately sheltering his ill-starred friend. And from that 
stricken, far-away spot he had seen something feebly rise, only to sink down 
again upon the place from which the great shapeless horror had shot into the 
sky. It was just a colour---but not any colour of our earth or heavens. And 
because Ammi recognized that colour, and knew that this last faint remnant must 
still lurk down there in the well, he has never been quite right since.

Ammi would never go near the place again. It is forty-four years now since the 
horror happened, but he has never been there, and will be glad when the new 
reservoir blots it out. I shall be glad, too, for I do not like the way the 
sunlight changed colour around the mouth of that abandoned well I passed. I 
hope the water will always be very deep---but even so, I shall never drink 
it. I do not think I shall visit the Arkham country hereafter. Three of the men 
who had been with Ammi returned the next morning to see the ruins by daylight, 
but there were not any real ruins. Only the bricks of the chimney, the stones 
of the cellar, some mineral and metallic litter here and there, and the rim of 
that nefandous well. Save for Ammi's dead horse, which they towed away and 
buried, and the buggy which they shortly returned to him, everything that had 
ever been living had gone. Five eldritch acres of dusty grey desert remained, 
nor has anything ever grown there since. To this day it sprawls open to the sky 
like a great spot eaten by acid in the woods and fields, and the few who have 
ever dared glimpse it in spite of the rural tales have named it ``the blasted 
heath.''

The rural tales are queer. They might be even queerer if city men and college 
chemists could be interested enough to analyze the water from that disused 
well, or the grey dust that no wind seems to disperse. Botanists, too, ought to 
study the stunted flora on the borders of that spot, for they might shed light 
on the country notion that the blight is spreading---little by little, 
perhaps an inch a year. People say the colour of the neighboring herbage is not 
quite right in the spring, and that wild things leave queer prints in the light 
winter snow. Snow never seems quite so heavy on the blasted heath as it is 
elsewhere. Horses---the few that are left in this motor age---grow skittish 
in the silent valley; and hunters cannot depend on their dogs too near the 
splotch of greyish dust.

They say the mental influences are very bad, too; numbers went queer in the 
years after Nahum's taking, and always they lacked the power to get away. Then 
the stronger-minded folk all left the region, and only the foreigners tried to 
live in the crumbling old homesteads. They could not stay, though; and one 
sometimes wonders what insight beyond ours their wild, weird stories of 
whispered magic have given them. Their dreams at night, they protest, are very 
horrible in that grotesque country; and surely the very look of the dark realm 
is enough to stir a morbid fancy. No traveler has ever escaped a sense of 
strangeness in those deep ravines, and artists shiver as they paint thick woods 
whose mystery is as much of the spirits as of the eye. I myself am curious 
about the sensation I derived from my one lone walk before Ammi told me his 
tale. When twilight came I had vaguely wished some clouds would gather, for an 
odd timidity about the deep skyey voids above had crept into my soul.

Do not ask me for my opinion. I do not know---that is all. There was no one 
but Ammi to question; for Arkham people will not talk about the strange days, 
and all three professors who saw the aerolite and its coloured globule are 
dead. There were other globules---depend upon that. One must have fed itself 
and escaped, and probably there was another which was too late. No doubt it is 
still down the well---I know there was something wrong with the sunlight I 
saw above the miasmal brink. The rustics say the blight creeps an inch a year, 
so perhaps there is a kind of growth or nourishment even now. But whatever 
demon hatchling is there, it must be tethered to something or else it would 
quickly spread. Is it fastened to the roots of those trees that claw the air? 
One of the current Arkham tales is about fat oaks that shine and move as they 
ought not to do at night.

What it is, only God knows. In terms of matter I suppose the thing Ammi 
described would be called a gas, but this gas obeyed the laws that are not of 
our cosmos. This was no fruit of such worlds and suns as shine on the 
telescopes and photographic plates of our observatories. This was no breath 
from the skies whose motions and dimensions our astronomers measure or deem too 
vast to measure. It was just a colour out of space---a frightful messenger 
from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms 
whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic 
gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes.

I doubt very much if Ammi consciously lied to me, and I do not think his tale 
was all a freak of madness as the townsfolk had forewarned. Something terrible 
came to the hills and valleys on that meteor, and something terrible---though 
I know not in what proportion---still remains. I shall be glad to see the 
water come. Meanwhile I hope nothing will happen to Ammi. He saw so much of the 
thing---and its influence was so insidious. Why has he never been able to 
move away? How clearly he recalled those dying words of Nahum's---``Can't git 
away---draws ye---ye know summ'at's comin' but tain't no use---''. Ammi is 
such a good old man---when the reservoir gang gets to work I must write the 
chief engineer to keep a sharp watch on him. I would hate to think of him as 
the grey, twisted, brittle monstrosity which persists more and more in 
troubling my sleep.

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