 Pichon and Sons of the Croix-Russe. Anonymous. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Anne Erickson. Pichon and Sons of the Croix-Russe. Giraudier, Pharmacia, première classe, is a legend recorded in huge ill-proportioned letters, which directs the attention of the stranger to the most prosperous-looking shop in the grand plus of La Croix-Russe, a well-known suburb of the beautiful city of Lyon, which has its share of the shabby gentility and poor pretense common to the suburban commerce of great towns. Giraudier is not only pharmacien, but propriétaire, though not by inheritance, his possession of one of the prettiest and most prolific of the small vineyards in the beautiful suburb, and its charming and convenient house with low ceilings, liliputian bedrooms, and a perfusion of persienne, gelusie, and contrevent comes by purchase. This enviable little taire was sold by the nation when that terrible abstraction transacted the public business of France. And it was bought very cheaply by the strong-minded father of the Giraudier of the present. It was not disturbed by the evil reputation which the place had gained at a time when the peasants of France, having been bullied into a renunciation of religion, eagerly cherished superstition. The Giraudier of the present cherishes the particular superstition in question affectionately. It reminds him of an uncommonly good bargain made in his favor, which is always a pleasant association of ideas, especially to a Frenchman, still more especially to a Lyonnais, and it attracts strangers to his pharmacy and leads to transactions in Grand Chartres and Crème de Rose, ensuing naturally on the narration of the history of Pichon and Sons. Giraudier is not of aristocratic principles and sympathies. On the contrary, he has decided Republican leanings and considers Le Progrès a masterpiece of journalistic literature. But as he says simply and strongly, it is not because a man is a marquee that one is not to keep faith with him. A bad action is not good because it harms a good for nothing of a noble. The more when that good for nothing is no longer a noble, but pour rire. At the easy price of acquiescence in these sentiments, the stranger here is one of the most authentic, best remembered, most popular of the many traditions of the bad old times before general Bonaparte as Giraudier who has no sympathy with any later designation of Le Grandum calls the emperor, whose statue one can perceive a speck in the distance from the threshold of the pharmacy. The Marquis de Saint-Ange in the days of the triumph of the great revolution was fortunate enough to be out of France and wise enough to remain away from that country, though he persisted long after the old regime was as dead as the Ptolemies and believing it merely suspended and the revolution a lamentable accident of vulgar complexion, but happily temporary duration. The Marquis de Saint-Ange who affected the Stille-Garigeons and was the palatest of infidels and the most refined of the luxuaries got on indifferently in in appreciative foreign parts but the members of his family, his brothers and sisters, two of whom were guillotined while the third escaped to Savoy and found refuge there in a convent of her order, got on exceedingly ill in France. If the Cedema Marquis had had plenty of money to expend in such feeble imitations of his accustomed pleasures as were to be had out of Paris, he would not have been much effective by the fate of his relatives, but money became exceedingly scarce. The Marquis had actually beheld many of his peers reduced to the necessity of earning the despicable but indispensable article after many ludicrous fashions. And the duration of this absurd upsetting of law, order, privilege and property began to assume unexpected and very unpleasant proportions. The Château de Saint-Ange with its surrounding lands was confiscated to the nation during the third year of the emigration of the Marquis de Saint-Ange and the greater part of the estate was purchased by a thrifty, industrious and rich avocat named Prosper Alix, a widower with an only daughter. Prosper Alix enjoyed the esteem of the entire neighborhood. First, he was rich. Secondly, he was of a taciturn disposition and of a neutral tint in politics. He had done well under the old regime and he was doing well under the new. Thank God or the supreme being or the first cause or the goddess reason herself for all. He would have invoked Dagon, Mola or Kali quite as readily as the saints in the Madonna who had gone so utterly out of fashion of late. Nobody was afraid to speak out before Prosper Alix. He was not a spy and though a cold-hearted man except in the instance of his only daughter he never harmed anybody. Very likely it was because he was the last person in the vicinity whom anybody would have suspected of being applied to by the dispossessed family that the son of the Marquis's brother, a young man of promise, of courage, of intellect and of morals of decidedly a higher caliber than those actually and traditionally imputed to the family sought the aid of the new possessor of the Chateau de Sénage which had changed its old title for that of the Maison Alix. The father of Monsieur Paul de Sénage had perished in the September massacres. His mother had been guillotined at Lyon and he who had been saved by the interposition of a young comrade whose father had in the wonderful rotations of the Wheel of Fate acquired authority in the place where he had once esteemed the notice of the nephew of the Marquis, a crowning honor for his son had passed through the common vicissitudes of that dreadful time which would take a volume for their recital in each individual instance. Paul de Sénage was a handsome young fellow, rank, high spirited and of a brisk and happy temperament which however modified by the many misfortunes he had undergone was not permanently changed. He had plenty of capacity for enjoyment in him still and as his position was very isolated and his mind had become enlightened on social and political matters to an extent in which the men of his family would have discovered utter degradation and the women diabolical possession he would not have been very unhappy if under the new condition of things he could have lived in his native country and gained an honest livelihood but he could not do that. He was too thoroughly suspect. The antecedents of his family were too powerful against him. His only chance would have been to have gone into the popular camp as an extreme violent partisan to have outherited the revolutionary herds and that Paul de Sénage was too honest to do. So he was reduced to being thankful that he had escaped with his life and to watching for an opportunity of leaving France and gaining some country with a reign of liberty, fraternity and equality was not quite so oppressive. The long looked for opportunity at length offered itself and Paul de Sénage was instructed by his uncle the Marquis that he must contrive to reach Marseille once he should be transported to Spain in which country the illustrious immigrant was then residing by a certain named date. His uncle's communication arrived safely and the plan proposed seemed secure and eligible one. Only in two respects was it calculated to make Paul de Sénage thoughtful. The first was that his uncle should take any interest in the matter of his safety. The second what could be the nature of a certain deposit which the Marquis's letter directed him to procure, if possible, from the Chateau de Sénage. The fact of this injunction explained in some measure the first of the two difficulties. It was plain that whatever were the contents of this packet which he was to seek for according to the indications marked on a ground plan drawn by his uncle and enclosed in the letter the Marquis wanted them and could not procure them except by the agency of his nephew. That the Marquis should venture to direct Paul de Sénage to put himself in communication with Prospera leaks would have been surprising to anyone acquainted only with the external and generally understood features of the character of the new proprietor of the Chateau de Sénage. But a few people knew Prospera leaks thoroughly and the Marquis was one of the number. He was keen enough to know in theory that in the case of a man with only one weakness that is likely to be a very weak weakness indeed and to apply the theory to the avocat. The beautiful pious and aristocratic mother of Paul de Sénage a lady to whose superiority the Marquis had rendered the distinguished testimony of his dislike not hesitating to avow that she was much too good for his taste had been very fond of and very kind to the motherless daughter of Prospera leaks. And he held her memory in reverence which he accorded to nothing beside human or divine and taught his daughter the matchless worth of the friend she had lost. The Marquis knew this and though he had little sympathy with the sentiment he believed he might use it in the present instance to his own profit with safety. The event proved that he was right private negotiations with the manner of whose transaction we are not concerned passed between the avocat and the Cideban Marquis and the young man then leading a life in which Skulking had a large share in the vicinity of Dijon was instructed to present himself at the Maison a leaks under the designation of Henri Glère and in the character of an artist in house decoration. The circumstances of his life in childhood and boyhood had led to his being almost safe from recognition as a man at Lyon and indeed all the people on the Cideban visiting list of the Chateau have been pretty nearly killed off in the noble and patriotic ardor of the revolutionary times. The ancient Chateau de Saint-Ange was proudly placed near the summit of the Holy Hill and had suffered terrible depredations when the church at Fourvière was sacked and the shrine desecrated with that ingenious impiety which is characteristic of the French but it still retained somewhat of its former heavy grandeur. The Chateau was much too large for the needs, tastes or ambition of its present owner who was too wise if even he had been of an ostentatious disposition not to have sedulously resisted its promptings. The jealousy of the nation of brothers was easily excited and departure from simplicity and frugality was apt to be commented upon by domiciliary visits and the eager imposition of fanciful finds. That portion of the vast building occupied by Prosper Alix and the Citoyenne Bert, his daughter, presented an appearance of well-to-do comfort and modest ease which contrasted with the grandiose proportions and the elaborate decorations of the Y corridors, huge flat staircases and lofty panel departments. The avocat and his daughter lived quietly in the old place hoping after a general fashion for better times but not finding the present very bad. The father becoming day by day more pleased with his bargain, the daughter growing fonder of the great house and the noble bocage of the scrappy little vineyards struggling for existence on the sunny hillside and the place where the famous shrine had been. They had done it much damage. They had parted its riches among them, the ones ever open doors were shut and the worn flags were untrodden but nothing could degrade it. Nothing could destroy what had been in the mind of Bert Alix, who was as devout as her father was unconcernedly unbelieving. Bert was wonderfully well-educated for a French woman of that period and surprisingly handsome for a French woman of any. Not too tall to offend the taste of her compatriots and not too short to be dignified and graceful. She had a symmetrical figure and a small well-poised head whose profuse, shining, silken dark brown hair she wore as nature intended and a shower of curls never touched by the hand of the coiffure curls which clustered over her brow and fell far down on her shapely neck. Her features were fine. The eyes very dark and the mouth very red. The complexion clear and rather pale and the style of the face and expression lofty. When Bert Alix was a child, people were accustomed to say she was pretty and refined enough to belong to the aristocracy. Nobody would have dared to say so now. Prettiness and refinement together with all the other virtues admitted to a place on the patriotic role having become national property. Bert loved her father dearly. She was deeply impressed with the sense of her supreme importance to him and fully comprehended that he would be influenced by and through her when all other persuasion or argument would be unavailing. When Prosper Alix wished and intended to do anything rather mean or selfish, he did it without letting Bert know. And when he wished to leave undone something which he knew his daughter would decide ought to be done, he carefully concealed from her the existence of the dilemma. Nevertheless, the system did not prevent the father and daughter being very good and even confidential friends. Prosper Alix loved his daughter immeasurably and respected her more than he respected anyone in the world. With regard to her persevering religiousness, when such things were not only out of fashion and date but illegal as well, he was very tolerant. Of course it was weak and an absurdity but every woman, even his beautiful and comparable Bert was weak and absurd on some point or other. And after all, he had come to the conclusion that safest weakness with which a woman can be afflicted is that romantic and ridiculous feblesse called piety. So these two lived a happy life together. Bert's share of it being very secluded and were wonderfully little troubled by the turbulence with which society was making its tumultuous way to the virtuous serenity of republican perfection. The communication announcing the project of the Siddhavan Marquis for the secure exportation of his nephew and containing the skillful appeal before mentioned, grievously disturbed the tranquility of Prosper and was precisely one of those incidents which he would especially have liked to conceal from his daughter. But he could not do so. The appeal was too cleverly made and utter indifference to it, utter neglect of the letter which naturally suggested itself as the easiest means of getting rid of a difficulty would have involved an act of direct and uncompromising dishonesty to which Prosper though of sufficiently elastic conscience within the limit of professional gains could not contemplate. The Chateau de Sénage was indeed his own lawful property is without prejudice to the former owners dispossessed by no act of his. But the Siddhavan Marquis confiding in him to an extent which was quite astonishing except on the PLA theory which is so unflattering as to be seldom accepted announced to him the existence of a certain packet hidden in the Chateau acknowledging its value and urging the need of its safe transmission. This was not his property. He hardly wished he had never learned its existence but wishing that was clearly of no use. Then he wished the nephew of the Siddhavan might come soon and take himself and the hidden wealth away with all possible speed. This latter was a more realizable desire and Prosper settled his mind with it, communicated the interesting but decidedly dangerous secret to Barrett, received her worm sanction and transmitted to the Marquis by the appointed means an assurance that his wishes should be punctually carried out. The absence of an interdiction of his visit before a certain date was to be the signal to Monsieur Paul de Sénage that he was to proceed to act upon his uncle's instructions. He waited the proper time, the reassuring silence was maintained unbroken and he ultimately set forth on his journey and accomplished it in safety. Preparations had been made at the Maison-à-Leagues for the reception of Monsieur Glère and his supposed occupation had been announced. The apartments were decorated in a heavy gloomy style and those of the Citoyenne in particular, they had been occupied by a lady who had once been designated as Feux Madame la Marquis but who is referred to now as La Mer du Siddhavan were much in need of renovation. The alcove, for instance, was all that was least gay and most far from simple. The Citoyenne would have all that changed. On the morning of the day of the expected arrival, Bert said to her father, it would seem as if the Marquis did not know the exact spot in which the packet is deposited. Monsieur Paul's assumed character implies the necessity for a search. Monsieur Henri Glère arrived at the Maison-à-Leagues was fraternally received and made acquainted with the sphere of his operations. The young man had a good deal of both ability and taste in the line he had assumed and the part was not difficult to play. Some days were judiciously allowed to pass before the real object of the masquerade was pursued and during that time, cordial relations established themselves between the avocat and his guest. The young man was handsome, elegant, engaging with all the external advantages and devoid of the vices, errors and hopelessly infatuated unscrupulousness of his class. He had naturally quick intelligence and some real knowledge and comprehension of life had been knocked into him by the hard-hitting blows of fate. His face was like his mother's, Prosper Alix thought, and his mind and taste were of the very pattern which, in theory, Bert approved. Bert, a very unconventional French girl who, though the new era of purity, love, virtue and disinterestedness ought to do away with marriage by Barter as one of its most notable reforms and had been disenchanted by discovering that the abolition of marriage altogether suited the taste of the incorruptible republic better, might like, might even love this young man. She saw so few men and had no fancy for patriots. She would certainly be obstinate about it if she did chance to love him. This would be a nice state of affairs. This would be a pleasant consequence of the confiding request of the Sedeval. Prosper wished with all his heart for the arrival of the concerted signal which should tell Henri Claire that he might fulfill the purpose of his sojourn at the Maison-en-Lix and set forth for Marseille. But the signal did not come and the days, long, beautiful, sunny, soothing summer days went on. The painting of the panels of the Citoyenne's apartment, which she vacated for that purpose, progressed slowly and Monsieur Paul de Saint-Ange, guided by the ground plan and aided by Bert, had discovered the spot in which the jewels of price, almost the last remnants of the princely wealth of Saint-Ange had been hidden by the fam de Chambre who had perished with her mistress, having confided a general statement of the fact to a priest or transmission to the marquee. This spot had been ingeniously chosen. The sleeping apartment of the late marquee was extensive, lofty and provided with an alcove of sufficiently large dimensions to a formed in itself a handsome room. This space containing a splendid but gloomy bed on an estrade and hung with rich faded brocade was divided from the general extent of the apartment by a low railing of black oak, elaborately carved, opening in the center and with a flat wide bar along the top, covered with crimson velvet. The curtains were contrived to hang from the ceiling and when let down inside the screen of railing, they matched the draperies which close before the great stone balcony at the opposite end of the room. Since the avocados daughter had occupied this palatial chamber, the curtains of the alcove had never been drawn and she had substituted for them a high folding screen of black and gold Japanese pattern, also a relic of the grand old times which stood about six feet on the outside of the rails that shut in her bed. The floor was of shining oak, testifying to the conscientious and successful labors of successive generations of frottere and on the spot where the railing of the alcove opened by a pretty quaint device, sundering the entwined arms of a pair of very chubby cherubs. A square space in the floor was also richly carved. The seekers soon reached the end of their search. A little effort removed the square of carved oak and underneath they found a casket. Evidently of old workmanship, richly wrought in silver, much tarnished but quite intact. It was agreed that this precious deposit should be replaced and the carved square laid down over it until the signal for his departure should reach Paul. The little baggage which under any circumstances he could have ventured to allow himself in the dangerous journey he was to undertake must be reduced so as to admit of his carrying the casket without exciting suspicion. The finding of the hidden treasure was not the first joint discovery made by the daughter of the avocat and the son of the Cedavon. The cogitations of Prospera leaks were very wise, very reasonable, but they were a little tardy. Before he admitted the possibility of mischief, the mischief was done. Each had found out that the love of the other was indispensable to the happiness of life and they had exchanged confidences, assurances, protestations and promises as freely as fervently and as hopefully as if no such thing as a republic one and indivisible. With a keen scent and an unappeasable thirst for the blood of aristocrats existed. They forgot all about liberty, fraternity and equality. These egotistical narrow-minded young people, they also forgot the characteristic alternative to those unparalleled blessings, death. But Prospera leaks did not forget any of these things and his consternation, his prevision of suffering for his beloved daughter were terrible when she told him with a simple noble frankness which the grand dame of the dead and gone time of great ladies had rarely had a chance of exhibiting that she loved Monsieur Paul de Saint-Ange and intended to marry him when the better time should come. Perhaps she meant when that alternative of death should be struck off the sacred formula. Of course, she meant to marry him with the sanction of her father which she made no doubt she should receive. Prospera leaks was impitiable perplexity. He could not bear to terrify his daughter by a full explanation of the danger she was incurring. He could not bear to dilute her with false hope. If this young man could be got away at once safely there was not much likelihood that he would ever be able to return to France. Would bear to find for him or would she forget him and make a rational, sensible, rich Republican marriage which would not imperil either her reputation for pure patriotism or her father's. The latter would be the very best thing that could possibly happen and therefore it was decidedly unwise to calculate upon it. But after all it was possible and Prospera had not the courage in such a straight to resist the hopeful promptings of a possibility. How ardently he regretted that he had complied with the prayer of the Si Devon. When would the signal from Mr. Paul's departure come? Prospera leaks had made many sacrifices had exercised much self-control for his daughter's sake but he had never sustained a more severe trial than this. Never suffered more than he did now under the strong necessity for hiding from her his absolute conviction of the impossibility of a happy result for this attachment in that future to which the lovers looked so fearlessly. He could not even make his anxiety and apprehension known to Paul the Sainage for he did not believe the young man had sufficient strength of will to conceal anything so important from the keen and determined observation of Baird. The expected signal was not given and the lovers were in cautious. The seclusion of the Maison-Aliques had all the danger as well as all the delay of solitude and Paul dropped his disguise too much and too often. The servants, few in number, were of the truest patriotic principles and to some of them the denunciation of the Citoyen whom they condescended to serve because the sacred revolution had not yet made them as rich as he would have been a delightful duty, a sweet-smelling sacrifice to be laid on the altar of the country. They heard certain names and places mentioned. They perceived many things which led them to believe that Henri Glère was not an industrial artist and pure patriot worthy of respect but a wretched c-devant resorting to the dignity of labor to make up for the righteous destruction of every other kind of dignity. One day a gardener of less stoical virtue than his fellows gave Prospero-Aliques a warning that the presence of a c-devant upon his premises was suspected and that he might be certain a domiciliary visit attended with dangerous results to himself would soon take place. Of course, the avocad did not come in himself by any avowal to this lukewarm patriot but he casually mentioned that Henri Glère was about to take his leave. What was to be done? He must not leave the neighborhood without receiving the instructions he was awaiting but he must leave the house and be supposed to have gone quite away without any delay or hesitation Prospero explained the facts to Bert and her lover and insisted on the necessity for an instant parting. Then the courage and the readiness of the girl told there was no crime and very little trembling. She was strong and helpful. He must go to Pichon's father, she said and remained there until the signal was given. Pichon was a master mason Paul she continued turning to her lover and his wife was my nurse. They are avaricious people but they are fond of me in their way and they will shelter you faithfully enough when they know that my father will pay them handsomely. You must go at once unseen by the servants. They are at supper. Fetch your release and bring it to my room. We will put the casket in it and such of your things as you must take out to make room for it, we can hide under the plank. My father will go with you to Pichon's and we will communicate with you there as soon as it is safe. Paul followed her to the large gloomy room where the treasure lay and they took the casket from its hiding place. It was heavy though not large and an awkward thing to pack away among linen in a small valise. They managed it however and the brief preparation completed the moment of parting arrived. Firmly and eloquently though in haste they are to shirk Paul over a changeless love and faith and promised him to wait for him for any length of time in France if better days should be slow of coming or to join him in some foreign land if they were never to come. Her father was present full of compassion and misgiving. At length he said, come Paul you must leave her. Every moment is of importance. The young man and his betrothed were standing on the spot once they had taken the casket. The carved rail with the heavy curtains might have been the outer sanctuary of an altar and they bride and bridegroom before it with earnest loving faces and clasped hands. Farewell Paul, said Berth. Promise me once more in this the moment of our parting that you will come to me again if you are alive when the danger has passed. Whether I am living or dead Berth, said Paul to Sainage, strongly moved by some sudden inexplicable instant, I will come to you again. In a few more minutes, Prosper Alix and his guest who carried not without difficulty, the small but heavy leather valise had disappeared in the distance and Berth was on her knees before the pre-dieu of the Sudevant Marquis. Her face turned towards the holy hill of Fourvière. Pichon, Metra and his sons, Garçon, Messon were well-to-do people, rather morose, succeedingly avaricious and of taciturn dispositions but they were not ill-spoken of by their neighbours. They had amassed a good deal of money in their time and were just then engaged on a very lucrative job. This was the construction of several of the steep descents by means of stairs, straight and winding cut in the face of the coteau by which pedestrians were enabled to descend into the town. Pichon Perre was approprié terre as well. His property was that which is now in the possession of Giraudier, pharmacien, premier class and which was destined to attain a sinister celebrity during his proprietorship. One of the straightest and steepest of the stairways had been cut close to the terre which the Messon owned and a massive wall destined to bound the high road at the foot of the declivity was in course of construction. When Prosper League, St. Paul de Saint-Ange reached the abode of Pichon, the master messon with his sons and workmen, had just completed their day's work and were preparing to eat the supper served by the wife and mother. A tall, gaunt woman who looked as if a more liberal scale of housekeeping would have done her good. But on whose features the stamp of that devouring and degrading avarice which is the commonest vice of the French peasantry was set as plainly as on the hard faces of her husband and her sons. The avocat explained his business and introduced his companion briefly and awaited the reply of Pichon pair without any appearance of inquietude. You don't run any risk, he said. At least you don't run any risk which I cannot make it worth your while to incur. It is not the first time you have received a temporary guest on my recommendation. You know nothing about the citizen glare except that he is recommended to you by me. I am responsible. You can on occasion make me so. The citizen may remain with you a short time and hardly remain long. Say, citizen, is it agreed? I have no time to spare. It was agreed and prosperous leaks departed leaving Monsieur Paul de Saint-Age convinced that the right, indeed the only thing had been done and yet much troubled and depressed. Pichon pair was a short squat powerfully built man verging on 60 whose thick dark grizzled hair sturdy limbs and hard hands on which the muscles showed light cords spoke of endurance and strength. He was indeed noted in the neighborhood for those qualities. His sons resembled him slightly and each other closely as was natural for they were twins. They were heavy lumpish fellows and they made but an ungracious return to the attempted civilities of the stranger to whom the offer of their mother to show him his room was a decided relief. As he rose to follow the woman Paul de Saint-Age lifted his small valise with difficulty from the floor on what she had placed it on entering the house and carried it out of the room in both his arms. The brothers followed these movements with curiosity and when the door closed behind their mother and the stranger their eyes met. 24 hours had passed away and nothing new had occurred at the Maison Allig's. The servants had not expressed any curiosity respecting the departure of the citizen glare. No domiciliary visit had taken place and Bearton her father were discussing the propriety of Prosper's venturing on the pretext of an excursion in another direction, a visit to the isolated and quiet dwelling of the master Maison. No signal had yet arrived. It was agreed that after the lapse of another day if their tranquility remained undisturbed Prosper's leak should visit Paul de Saint-Age. Bearton was silent and preoccupied, retired to her own room early and her father who was uneasy and apprehensive, desperately anxious for the promised communication from the Marquis was relieved by her absence. The moon was high in the dark sky and her beams were flung across the polished oak floor of Bearton's bedroom through the great window with a stone balcony when the girl who had gone to sleep with her lover's name upon her lips in prayer awoke with a sudden start and set up in her bed an unbearable dread was upon her and yet she was unable to utter a cry. She was unable to make another movement. Has she heard a voice? No, no one had spoken nor did she fancy that she heard any sound but within her somewhere inside her heaving bosom something said, Bearton. And she listened and knew what it was and it spoke and said, I promised you that, living or dead, I will come to you again and I have come to you but not living. She was quite awake even in the agony of her fear she looked around and tried to move her hands to feel her dress and the bedclothes and to fix her eyes on some familiar object that she might satisfy herself before this racing and beating this whirling and yet icy chilliness of her blood should kill her outright that she was really awake. I have come to you but not living. What an awful thing that voice speaking within her was. She tried to raise her head and to look towards the place where the moonbeams marked bright lines upon the polish floor which lost themselves at the foot of the Japanese screen. She forced herself to this effort and lifted her eyes wild and haggard with fear and there the moonbeams at his feet the tall black screen behind him she saw Paul de Saint-Age she saw him she looked at him quite steadily she rose slowly with a mechanical movement and stood upright beside her bed clasping her forehead with her hands and gazing at him he stood motionless in the dress he had worn when he took leave of her the light-colored riding coat of the period with a short cape and a large white cravat tucked into the double breast the white muslin was flecked and the front of the riding coat was deeply stained with blood he looked at her and she took a step forward another then with a desperate effort she dashed open the railing and flung herself on her knees before him with her arms outstretched as if to clasp him but he was no longer there the moonbeams fell clear and cold upon the polished floor and lost themselves where barely lay at the foot of the screen her head upon the ground and every sign of life gone from her where's the citizen glare as prosperer leaks of the c-toyenne Pichon entering the house of the master Mason abruptly with a stern and threatening countenance I have a message for him I must see him I know nothing about him replied the c-toyenne without turning in his direction or relaxing her culinary labours he went away from here the next morning and I did not trouble myself to ask where that is his affair he went away without letting me know be careful c-toyenne this is a serious matter so they tell me said the woman with a grin which was not altogether free from pain and fear for you a serious thing to have a suspect in your house and palm him off on honest people however he went away peacefully enough when he knew we had found him out and that we had no desire to go to prison nor worse on his account or yours she was strangely insolent this woman and the listener felt his helplessness he had brought the young man there with such secrecy he had so carefully provided for the success of concealment who carried his valise prosperer leaks asked her suddenly how should I know she replied but her hands lost their steadiness and she upset a stupend he carried it here didn't he and I suppose he carried it away again prosperer leaks looked at her steadily she shunned his gaze but she showed no other sign of confusion then horror and disgust of the woman came over him I must see pichon he said where is he where should he be but at the wall he and the boys are working there as always the citizen can see them but he will remember not to detain them and a little quarter of an hour the soup will be ready the citizen did see the master mason and his sons and after an interview of some duration he left the place in a state of violent agitation and complete disconfiture the master mason had addressed to him these words at parting I assert that the man went away of his own free will but if you do not keep very quiet I shall deny that he came here at all you cannot prove he did and I will denounce you for harboring a suspect and c davon under a false name I know a disainage when I see him as well as you citizen a leaks and wishing monsieur paul a good journey I hope you will consider about this matter for truly my friend I think you will sneeze in the sack before I shall we must bear it bear to my child said prosper leaks to his daughter many weeks later when the fever had left her and she was able to talk with her father of the mysterious and frightful events which had occurred we are utterly helpless there is no proof only the word of these wretches against mine and certain destruction to me if I speak we will go to spain and tell them our key all the truth and never return if you would rather not but for the rest we must bear it yes my father said bear it summissively I know we must but God need not and I don't believe he will the father and daughter left france unmolested and bear to bore it as well as she could when better times came they returned prosper leaks an old man and bear to stern silent handsome woman with whom no one associated any notions of love or marriage but long before their return the traditions of the croix rousse were enriched by circumstances which led to that before mentioned capital bargain made by the father of the giroge of the present these circumstances were the violent death of pichon and his two sons who were killed by the fall of a portion of the great boundary wall on the very day of its completion and the discovery close to its foundation at the extremity of pichon's tear of the corpse of a young man attired in a light colored writing coat who had been stabbed through the heart bear to leaks lived alone in the chateau de sanage under its restored name until she was a very old woman she lived long enough to see the golden figure on the summit of the holy hill long enough to forget the bad old times but not long enough to forget or cease to mourn the lover who had kept his promise and come back to her the lover who rested in the earth which once covered the bones of the martyrs and who kept a place for her by his side she has filled that place for many years you may see it when you look down from the second gallery of the bell tower at four vierre following the bend of the outstretched golden arm of Notre Dame the chateaus pulled down some years ago and there is no trace of its former existence among the vines good times and bad times and again good times have come for the croix-roux for leon and for france since then but the remembrance of the treachery of pichon and sons and of the retribution which at once exposed and punished their crime outlives all changes and once every year on a certain summer night three ghostly figures are seen by any who have courage and patience to watch for them gliding along by the foot of the boundary wall two of them carrying a dangling corpse and the other implements for mason's work and a small leather valise Giraudier for messian has never seen these ghostly figures but he describes them with much minuteness and only the esprit fort of the croix-roux deny that the ghosts of pichon and sons are not yet laid pichon and sons of the croix-roux recording by Anne Erickson Toronto the shunned house by hp lovecraft this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Helen Taylor the shunned house by hp lovecraft from even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent sometimes it enters directly into the composition of the events well sometimes it relates only to their fortuitous position among persons and places the latter sword is splendidly exemplified by a case in the ancient city of Providence where in the late 40s Edgar Allan Poe used to sojourn often during his unsuccessful wooing of the gifted poetess Mrs Whitman Poe generally stopped at the mansion house in benefit street the renamed golden ball in whose roof has sheltered Washington, Jefferson and Lafayette and his favourite walk led northward along the same street to Mrs Whitman's home and the neighbouring hillside churchyard of St John's whose hidden expanse of 18th century gravestones had for him a peculiar fascination now the irony is this in this walk so many times repeated the world's greatest master of the terrible and the bizarre was obliged to pass a particular house on the eastern side of the street a dingy, antiquated structure perched on the abruptly rising side hill with a great unkempt yard dating from a time when the region was partly open country it does not appear that he ever wrote or spoke of it nor is there any evidence that he even noticed it and yet that house to the two persons in possession of certain information equals or outranks in horror the wildest fantasy of the genius who so often passed it unknowingly and stands starkly leering as a symbol of all that is unutterably hideous the house was and for that matter still is of a kind to attract the attention of the curious originally a farm or semi-farm building it followed the average New England colonial lines of the middle 18th century the prosperous peaked roof sort with two stories and a dormal aesthetic and with a Georgian doorway and interior paneling dictated by the progress of tastes at the time it faced south with one gable and buried to the lower windows in the eastward rising hill and the other exposed to the foundations towards the street its construction over a century and a half ago had followed the grading and straightening of the road in that special vicinity for benefit street at first called back street was laid out as a lane winding amongst the graveyards of the first settlers and straightened only when the removal of bodies to the north burial ground made it decently possible to cut through the old family plots at the start the western wall had lain some 20 feet up a precipitous lawn from the roadway but a widening of the street at about the time of the revolution sheared off most of the intervening space exposing the foundations so that a brick basement war had to be made giving the deep cellar a street frontage with a door and one window above ground close to the new line of public travel when the sidewalk was laid out a century ago the last of the intervening space was removed and Poe in his walks must have seen only a sheer ascent of dull gray brick flush with the sidewalk and surmounted at a height of 10 feet by the antique shingle bulk of the house proper the farm-like ground extended back very deeply up the hill almost a wheatened street the space south of the house abutting on benefit street was of course greatly above the existing sidewalk level forming a terrace bounded by a high bank wall of damp mossy stone pierced by a steep flight of narrow steps which led inward between canyon-like surfaces to the upper region of a mangy lawn roomy brick walks and neglected gardens whose dismantled cement urns rusted kettles fallen from tripods of knotty sticks and similar paraphernalia set off the weather-beaten front door with its broken fan light rotting ionic pilasters and wormy triangular pediment what i heard in my youth about the shunt house was merely that people had died there in alarmingly great numbers that i was told was why the original owners had moved out some 20 years after building the place it was plainly unhealthy perhaps because of the dampness and fungus growths in the cellar the general sickish smell the drafts of the hallways or the quality of the well and pump water these things were bad enough and these were all the gained belief among the persons whom i knew only the notebooks of my antiquarian uncle Dr. Eliah Whipple revealed to me at length the darker vagus surmises which formed an undercurrent of folklore among old-time servants and humble folk surmises which never travelled far and which were largely forgotten when providence grew to be a metropolis with a shifting modern population the general 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 in the air extinguished lights or faces at the window extremists sometimes said the house was unlucky but that is as far as they ever 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 60 years ago the building had to become deserted through the sheer impossibility of renting it these persons were not all cut off suddenly by any one cause rather it did 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 anemia 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 of 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 shunt house was vacant with barren, gnarled and terrible old trees long, queery 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 and the small pained windows were largely broken and a nameless air of desolation hung round the precarious panelling 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 rafted length lighted only by small blinking windows in the gable ends and filled with a mass 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 sanity for one thing the bad odor of the house was strongest there and for another thing we did not like the white fungus growths which occasionally sprang up in summer weather from the hard earth floor those fungi grotesquely like the vegetation in the yard outside were truly horrible in their outlines detestable 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 passes by sometimes spoke of witch fires glowing behind the broken panes of the fetter spreading windows we never even in our wildest halloween moods visited the cellar by night but in some of our daytime visits we 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 nighter which we sometimes thought we could trace amidst the sparse fungus 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 whatsoever 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 towards 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 the smoke from the great chimney and queer contours assumed by certain of the sinuous tree roots that thrust their way into the cellar through those loose foundation stones Chapter 2 Not till my adult years did my uncle set before me the notes and data which he had collected concerning the shunned house Dr Whipple was a sane conservative physician of the old school and for all his interest in the place he was not eager to encourage young thoughts towards the abnormal his own view postulating simply a building and location of markedly unsanitary qualities had nothing to do with abnormality but he realised that the very picturesqueness which roused his own interest would in a boy's fanciful mind take on all manner of gruesome imaginative associations The doctor was a bachelor, a white haired clean shaven old-fashioned gentleman and a local historian of note who had often broken a lance with such controversial guardians of tradition as Sidney S. Ryder and Thomas W. Bicknell He lived with one manservant in a Georgian homestead with knocker and iron railed steps ballast eerily on the steeper centre of North Court Street beside the ancient brick court and colony house where his grandfather, a cousin of that celebrated privateeisman Captain Whipple who burnt his majesty's armed schooner Gaspie in 1772 had voted in the legislature of May the 4th 1776 for the independence of the Rhode Island colony Around him the damp, low-ceilinged library with a musty white panelling, heavy carved overmantle and small-pained vine-shaded windows with the relics and records of his ancient family among which were many dubious illusions to the shunned house in Benefit Street that pest spot lies not far distant for Benefit Street runs ledge-wise just above the courthouse along the precipitous hill at which the first settlement climbed When in the end my insistent pestering and maturing years evoked from my uncle the hoarded lore I sought there lay before me a strange enough chronicle long-winded, statistical and drearily genealogical as some of the matter was there ran through it a continuous thread of brooding tenacious horror and preternatural malevolence which impressed me even more than it had impressed the good doctor separate events fitted together uncannily and seemingly irrelevant details held minds of hideous possibilities a new and burning curiosity grew in me compared to which my boyish curiosity was feeble and inchoate The first revelation led to an exhaustive search and finally to that shuddering quest which proved so disastrous to myself and mine for at the last my uncle insisted on joining the search I had commenced and after a certain night in that house he did not come away with me I am lonely without that gentle soul whose long years were filled only with honour virtue, good taste, benevolence and learning I have reared a marble urn to his memory in St John's Churchyard the place that Poe loved the hidden grove of giant willows on the hill where tombs and headstones huddled quietly between the hoary bulk of the church and the houses and bank walls of benefit street The history of the house opening amidst a maze of dates revealed no trace of the sinister either about its construction or about the prosperous and honourable family who built it yet from the first a taint of calamity soon increased to boating significance was apparent my uncle's carefully compiled record began with the building of the structure in 1763 and followed the theme with an unusual amount of detail the shunned house it seems was first inhabited by William Harris and his wife Roby Dexter with their children Elkhana born 1755 Abigail born 1757 William Jr born 1759 and Ruth born 1761 Harris was a substantial merchant and seamen in the West India trade connected with the firm of Ogdaya Brown and his nephews after Brown's death in 1761 the new firm of Nicholas Brown and company made him master of the brig Prudence Providence built of 120 tons thus enabling him to erect the new homestead he had desired ever since his marriage the site he had chosen a recently straightened part of the new and fashionable backstreet which ran along the side of the hill above crowded Cheapside was all that could be wished and the building did justice to the location it was the best that moderate means could afford and Harris hastened to move in before the birth of a fifth child which the family expected that child a boy came in December but was still born nor was any child to be born alive in that house for a century and a half the next April sickness occurred among the children and Abigail and Ruth died before the month was over Dr Job Ives diagnosed the trouble of some infantile fever though others declared it was more of a mere wasting a whale decline it seemed in any event to be contagious for Hannah Bowen one of the two servants died of it in the following June Eli Leedison the other servant constantly complained of weakness and would have returned to his father's farm in Reoboth but for a sudden attachment for Metabel Pierce who was hired to succeed Hannah he died the next year the Sajir indeed since it marked the death of William Harris himself enfeebled as he was by the climate of Martinique where his occupation had kept him for considerable periods during the preceding decade the widowed Robie Harris never recovered from the shock of her husband's death and the passing of her firstborn Elkhana two years later was the final blow to her reason in 1768 she fell victim to a mild form of insanity and was thereafter confined to the upper part of the house her elder maiden sister Mercy Dexter having moved in to take charge of the family Mercy was a plain raw bone woman of great strength but her health visibly declined in the time of her advent she was greatly devoted to her unfortunate sister and had a special affection for her only surviving nephew William who from a sturdy infant had become a sickly spindling lad in this year the servant Metabel died and the other servant preserved Smith left without coherent explanation or at least with only some wild tales and a complaint that he disliked the smell of the place for a time Mercy could secure no more help since the seven deaths and case of madness all occurring within five years space had begun to set in motion the body of fireside rumour which later became so bizarre ultimately however she obtained new servants from out of town Anne White a morose woman from that part of North Kingstown now set off as the township of Exeter and a capable Boston man named Xenus Lowe it was Anne White who first gave definite shape to the sinister heidel talk Mercy should have known better than to hire anyone from the noosene hill country for that remote bit of backwards was then as now a seat of the most uncomfortable superstitions as lately as 1892 an Exeter community exhumed a dead body and ceremoniously burnt its heart in order to prevent certain alleged visitations injurious to public health and peace and one may imagine the point of view of this same section in 1768 Anne's tongue was perniciously active and within a few months Mercy discharged her filling her place with a faithful and amiable amazon from Newport Maria Robbins meanwhile poor Roby Harris in her madness gave voice to dreams and imaginings of the most hideous sort at times her screams became insupportable and for long periods she would utter shrieking horrors which necessitated her son's temporary residence with his cousin Pellegg Harris in Presbyterian Lane near the new college building the boy would seem to improve after these visits and had Mercy been as wise as she was well meaning she would have let him live permanently with Pellegg just what Mrs Harris cried out in her fits of violence tradition hesitates to say or rather presents such extravagant accounts that they nullify themselves through sheer absurdity certainly it sounds absurd to hear that a woman educated only in rudiments of French often shouted for hours in a course an idiomatic form of that language or that same person alone and guarded complained wildly of a staring thing which bit and chewed at her in 1772 the servant Xenus died and when Mrs Harris heard of it she laughed with a shocking delight utterly foreign to her the next year she herself died and was laid to rest in the north burial ground beside her husband upon the outbreak of trouble with Great Britain in 1775 William Harris despite his scant 16 years and feeble constitution managed to enlist in the army of observation under General Green and from that time on enjoyed a steady rise in health and prestige in 1780 as captain in the Rhode Island forces in New Jersey under Colonel Angle he met and married Phoebe Hetfield of Elizabeth Town whom he brought to Providence upon his honorable discharge in the following year the young soldier's return was not a thing of unmitigated happiness the house it is true was still in good condition and the street had been widened and changed in name from backstreet to benefit street but Mercy Dexter's once robust frame had undergone a sad and curious delay so that she was now a stooped and pathetic figure with a hollow voice and disconcerting power quality shared to a singular degree by the one remaining servant Maria in the autumn of 1782 Phoebe Harris gave birth to a stillborn daughter and on the 15th of the next May Mercy Dexter took leave of a useful austere and virtuous life William Harris at last thoroughly convinced of the radically unhealthful nature of his abode now took steps towards quitting it and closing it forever securing temporary quarters for himself and his wife at the newly opened Golden Ball Inn he arranged for the building of a new and finer house in Westminster Street in the growing part of the town across the Great Bridge there in 1785 his son duty was born and there the family dwelt till the encroachments of commerce drove them back across the river and over the hill to Angle Street in the newer east side residence district where the late Archer Harris built his sumptuous but hideous French-roofed mansion in 1876 William and Phoebe both succumbed to the yellow fever epidemic in 1797 but duty was brought up by his cousin Rathbone Harris Peleg's son Rathbone was a practical man and rented the benefit street house despite William's wish to keep it vacant he considered it an obligation to his ward to make the most of all the boy's property nor did he concern himself with the deaths and illnesses which caused so many changes of tenants or the steadily growing aversion with which the house was generally regarded it is likely that he felt only vexation when in 1804 the town council ordered him to fumigate the place with sulfur tar and gum camphor on account of the much discussed deaths of four persons presumably caused by the then diminishing fever epidemic they said the place had a feebrile smell duty himself thought little of the house for he grew up to be a privateersman and served with distinction on the vigilant under Captain Cahoon in the war of 1812 he returned unharmed married in 1814 and became a father on that memorable night of September the 23rd 1815 when a great gale drove the waters of the bay over half the town and floated a small sloop well up Westminster Street so that its masts almost tapped the Harris windows in a symbolic affirmation that the new boy welcome was a seamen's son welcome did not survive his father but lived to perish gloriously at Fredericksburg in 1862 neither he nor his son archer knew of the shunt house as other than a nuisance almost impossible to rent perhaps on account of the mustiness and sickly odor of unkempt old age indeed it never was rented after a series of deaths culminating in 1861 which the excitement of war tended to throw into obscurity Carrington Harris last of the male line knew it only as a deserted and somewhat picturesque centre of legend until I told him my experience he had meant to tear it down and build an apartment house on the side but after my account decided to let it stand install plumbing and rented nor has he yet had any difficulty in obtaining tenants the horror has gone chapter three it may well be imagined how powerfully I was affected by the annals of the harrasses in this continuous record there seemed to me to brood a persistent evil beyond anything in nature as I had known it an evil clearly connected with the house and not with the family this impression was confirmed by my uncle's less systematic array of miscellaneous data legends transcribed from servant gossip cuttings from the papers copies of death certificates by fellow physicians and the like all of this material I cannot hope to give for my uncle was a tireless antiquarian and very deeply interested in the shunned house but I may refer to several dominant points which are noticed by their occurrence through many reports from diverse sources for example the servant gossip was practically unanimous in attributing the fungus a malodorous cellar of the house as a vast supremacy in evil influence there had been servants and white especially who would not use the cellar kitchen and at least three well-defined legends bore upon the queer, quasi-human or diabolic outlines assumed by tree roots and patches of mould in that region these latter narratives interested me profoundly on account of what I had seen in my boyhood but I felt that most of the significance had in each case been largely obscured by additions from the common stock of local ghost lore. Anne White with her Exeter superstition had promulgated the most extravagant and at the same time most consistent tale alleging that there must lie buried beneath the house one of those vampires the dead who retain their bodily form and live on the blood or breath of the living whose hideous legions send their praying shapes or spirits abroad by night to destroy a vampire one must the grandmother say exhumate and burn its heart or at least drive a stake through that organ and Anne's dogged insistence on a search under the cellar had been prominent in bringing about her discharge her tales however commanded a wide audience and were the more readily accepted because the house indeed stood on land once used for burial purposes to me their interest depended less on this circumstance than on the peculiarly appropriate way in which they dovetailed with certain other things the complaint of the departing servant preserved smith who had preceded Anne and never heard of her that something sucked his breath at night the death certificates of the fever victims of 1804 issued by Dr Chad Hopkins and showing the four deceased persons all unaccountably lacking in blood and the obscure passages of poor roby harris's ravings where she complained of the sharp teeth of a glassy eyed half visible presence free from unwarranted superstition though i am these things produced in me an odd sensation which was intensified by a pair of widely separated newspaper cuttings relating to the deaths in the shunned house one from the providence gazette and country journal of april 12 1815 and the other from the daily transcript and chronicle of october 27 1845 each of which detailed an appallingly grisly circumstance his duplication was remarkable it seems that in both instances the dying person in 1815 a gentle old lady named Stafford and in 1845 a schoolteacher of middle age named Eliza Durfey became transfigured in a horrible way staring glassily and attempting to bite the throat of the attending physician even more puzzling though was the final case which put an end to the renting of the house a series of anemia deaths preceded by progressive madness wherein the patient would craftily attempt the lives of his relatives by incisions in the neck or wrist this was in 1860 and 1861 when my uncle had just begun his medical practice and before leaving for the front he heard much of it from his elder professional colleagues the really inexplicable thing was the way in which the victims ignorant people for the ill smelling and widely shunned house could now be rented to no others would bubble maledictions in french a language they could not possibly have studied to any extent it made one think of poor robie harris nearly a century before and so moved my uncle that he commenced collecting historical data on the house after listening sometimes subsequent to his return from the war to the first-hand accounts of doctors chase and whitmarsh indeed i could see that my uncle had thought deeply on the subject and that he was glad of my own interest and open-minded and sympathetic interest which enabled him to discuss with me matters which others would merely have laughed his fancy had not gone so far as mine but he felt the place was rare in its imaginative potentialities and worthy of note as an inspiration in the field of the grotesque and the macabre for my part i was disposed to take the whole subject with profound seriousness and began at once not only to review the evidence but to accumulate as much as i could i talked with the elderly archer harris then owner of the house many times before his death in 1916 and obtained from him and is still surviving maiden sister alice an authentic corroboration of all the family data my uncle had collected when however i asked them what connection with France or its language the house could have they confessed themselves as frankly baffled and ignorant as i archer knew nothing and all that miss harris could say was that an old illusion a grandfather duty harris had heard might have shared a little light the old seaman who had survived his son welcomes death in battle by two years had not himself known the legend but recalled it is earliest nurse the ancient maria robbins seemed darkly aware of something that might have lent a weird significance to the french raving of roby harris which she had so often heard during the last days of that hapless woman maria had been at the shunt house from 1769 till the removal of the family in 1783 and had seen mercy dexter die once she hinted to the child duty of a somewhat peculiar circumstance in mercy's last moments but he had soon forgotten all about it save that it was something peculiar the granddaughter moreover recalled even this much with difficulty she and her brother were not so much interested in the house as was archer's son carrington the present owner with whom i talked after my experience having exhausted the harris family of all the information it could furnish i turned my attention to early town records and deeds with a zeal more penetrating than that which my uncle had occasionally shown in the same word what i wished was a comprehensive history of the site from its very settlement in 1636 or even before if any narrow gansett indian legend could be unearthed to supply the data i found at the start that the land had been part of the long strip of home lot granted originally to john throckmorton one of many similar strips beginning at the town street beside the river and extending up over the hill to a line roughly corresponding with the modern hope street the throckmorton lot had later of course been much subdivided and i became very assidious in tracing that section through which back or benefit street was later run it had as rumour indeed said been the throckmorton graveyard but as i examine the records more carefully i found that the graves had all been transferred at an early date to the north burial ground on the poor tuckett west road then suddenly i came by a rare piece of chance since it was not in the main body of records and might easily have been missed upon something which aroused my keenest eagerness fitting in as it did with several of the queerest phases of the affair it was the record of a lease in 1697 of a small tract of ground to an etienne roulette and wife at last the french element had appeared that and another deeper element of horror which the name conjured up from the darkest recesses of my weird and heterogeneous reading and i feverishly studied the plotting of the locality as it had been before the cutting through and partial straightening of backstreet between 1747 and 1758 i found what i had half expected that where the shunned house now stood the roulette had laid out their graveyard behind a one-story and attic cottage and that no record of any transfer of graves existed the document indeed ended in much confusion and i was forced to ransack both the rhodeland historical society and shepley library before i could find a local door which the name of etienne roulette would unlock in the end i did find something something of such vague but monstrous import that i set about at once to examine the seller of the shunned house itself with a new and excited minuteness the roulettes it seemed had come in 1696 from east Greenwich down the west shore of Narangasset bay they were Huguenots from Corde and had encountered much opposition before the provident selectmen allowed them to settle in the town unpopularity had dogged them in east Greenwich with that they had come in 1686 after the revocation of the edict of Nantes and rumors said that the cause of dislike extended beyond mere racial and national prejudice or the land disputes which involved other french settlers with the english in rivalries which not even governor andros could quell but there aren't Protestantism too ardent some whispered and their evident distress when virtually driven from the village down the bay had moved to sympathy of the town fathers here the strangers had been granted a haven and the swarthy etienne roulette less apt to agriculture than at reading queer books and drawing queer diagrams was given a clerical post in the warehouse at pardon tilling haste's wharf far south in town street the had however been a riot of some sort later on perhaps 40 years later after old roulette's death and no one seemed to hear from the family after that for a century or more it appeared the roulettes had been well remembered and frequently discussed as vivid incidents in the quiet life of a new england seaport etienne's son paul a surly fellow whose erratic conduct had probably provoked the riot which wiped out the family was a particular source of speculation and though providence never shared the weak craft panics of her Puritan neighbors it was freely intimated by old wives that his prayers were neither uttered at the proper time nor directed towards the proper object all this had undoubtedly formed the basis of the legend known by old maria robbins what relation it had to the french ravings of robie harris and the other inhabitants of the shunt house imagination or future discovery alone could determine i wondered how many of those who had known the legends realized that additional link with the terrible which my wider reading had given me that ominous item in the annals of morbid horror which tells of the creature jack roulette of cord who in 1598 was condemned to death as demonic but afterwards saved from the state by the paris parliament and shut in a madhouse he had been found covered with blood and shreds of flesh in a wood shortly after the killing and rending of a boy by a pair of wolves one wolf was seen to lope away unheard surely a pretty half side 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 might have brought some drastic and frightened action indeed might not its limited whispering have precipitated the final riot which erased the roulette's from town i now visited the accursed place with increasing frequency studying the unwholesome vegetation of the garden examining the walls of the building and pouring over every inch of the earth and 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 or front door could give there where morbidity lurked most thickly i searched and poked during long afternoons when the sunlight filtered in through the cobweb above grand windows and a sense of security glowed from the unlocked 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 suggestion of my uncles i decided to try the spot nocturnally and one stormy midnight ran the beams of an electric torch over the moldy 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 clearness 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 mold 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 tailing off into nebulous decay and passing up into the blackness of the great chimney with a fetal 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 nice of aggressive visual in that musty and fungus cursed cellar chapter four on wednesday june 25th 1919 after a proper notification of carrington harris which did not include surmises as to what we expected to find my uncle and i conveyed to the shunt 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're prepared to leave our expensive and delicate apparatus which we had obtained secretly and at great cost as many days as our vigils might 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 cramston street armory and instinctively assumed direction of our venture was a marvellous commentary on the potential vitality and resilience of a man of 81. Eliah 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 vigor today only two persons suspected 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 he agreed to help me and decided that it would now be safe to rent the house to declare that we were 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 we actually believed in vampires awarewolves would have been a carelessly inclusive statement rather it must 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 house traceable to one or another of the ill-favoured french settlers of two centuries before and still operative through rare and unknown laws of atomic and electronic motion that the family of roulette had possessed an abnormal affinity for outer circles of entity dark spheres for which normal folk hold only repulsion and terror their recorded history seemed to prove had not then the riots of those bygone 1730s set moving certain kinetic patterns in the morbid brain of one or more of them notably the sinister Paul roulette which obscurely survived the bodies murdered and buried by the mob and continued to function in some multi-dimensional 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 light of newer science which includes 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 have 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 same person had ever 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 tenaciously unparticle states the anthropomorphic patch of mould on the floor the form of the yellowish vapor and the curvature of the tree roots in some of the old tales all argued at least a remote and reminiscent connection with a 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 crook's tube operated by powerful storage batteries and provided with peculiar screens and reflectors in case it proved intangible and opposable only by vigorously destructive aether radiations and a pair of military flamethrowers of the sort used in the world war in case it proved partly material and susceptible of mechanical destruction for like the superstitious exoterostics we were prepared to burn the thing's heart out if a heart existed to burn all this aggressive mechanism we set in the cellar in positions carefully arranged with reference to the cotton 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 limbed 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 streetlamps outside and a feeble phosphorescence from the detestable fungi within showed the dripping stone walls from which all traces of whitewash had vanished the dank fetid and mildew tainted hard earth floor with its obscene fungi the rotting remains of what had been stools chairs and tables and other more shapeless furniture the heavy planks and massive beams of the ground floor overhead the decrepit plank door leading to bins and chambers beneath other parts of the house the crumbling stone staircase with ruined wooden handrail and the crude and cavernous fireplace of blackened brick where rusted iron fragments revealed the past presence of hooks and irons spit crane and a door to the dutch oven these things and our austere cot and camp chairs and the heavy intricate destructive machinery we had brought we had as in my own former explorations left the door to the street unlocked so that a direct and practical path of escape might lie open in case of manifestations beyond our power to deal with it was our idea that our continued nocturnal presence would call forth whatever malign entity lurked there and the being prepared we could dispose of the thing with one or the other of our provided means as soon as we had recognised and observed it sufficiently how long it might require to evoke and extinguish the thing we had no notion it occurred to us too that our venture was far from safe for in what strength the thing might appear no one could tell but we deemed the game worth the hazard and embarked on it alone and unhesitatingly conscious that the seeking of outside aid would only expose us to ridicule and perhaps defeat our entire purpose such was our frame of mind as we talk far into the night till my uncle's growing drowsiness made me remind him to lie down for his two hour sleep something like fear chilled me as i sat there in the small hours alone i say alone for one who sits by a sleeper is indeed alone perhaps more alone than he can realise my uncle breathed heavily his deep inhalations and exhalations accompanied by the rain outside and punctuated by another nerve-wracking sound of distant dripping water within for the house was repulsively damp even in dry weather and in this storm positively swamp-like i studied the loose antique masonry of the walls in the fungus light and the feeble rays which stole in from the street through the screened window and once when the noisome atmosphere of the place seemed about to sicken me i opened the door and looked up and down the street feasting my eyes on familiar sights and my nostrils on wholesome air still nothing occurred to reward my watching and i yawned repeatedly fatigue getting the better of apprehension then the stirring of my uncle in his sleep attracted my notice he had turned restlessly on the cot several times during the latter half of the first hour but now he was breathing with unusual irregularity occasionally heaving a sigh which held more than a few of the qualities of a choking moan i turned my electric flashlight on him and found his face averted so rising and crossing to the other side of the cot i again flashed the light to see if he seemed in any pain what i saw and nerved me most surprisingly considering his relative triviality it must have been merely the association of any odd circumstance with the sinister nature of our location and mission for surely the circumstance was not in his self frightful or unnatural it was merely that my uncle's facial expression disturbed no doubt by the strange dreams which our situation prompted betrayed considerable agitation and seemed not a tall characteristic of him his habitual expression was one of kindly and well-bred calm whereas now a variety of emotions seemed struggling within him i think on the whole that it was this variety which chiefly disturbed me my uncle as he gassed and tossed an increasing perturbation and with eyes that had now started open seemed not one but many men and suggested a curious quality of alienage from himself all at once he commenced to mutter and i did not like the look of his mouth and teeth as he spoke the words were at first indistinguishable and then with a tremendous start i recognized something about them which filled me with icy fear till i recalled the breath of my uncle's education and the interminable translations he had made from the anthropological and antiquarian articles in the revue des demand for the venerable alaya wicker was muttering in french and the few phrases i could distinguish seem connected with the darkest myths he had ever adapted from the famous paris magazine suddenly a perspiration broke out on the sleeper's forehead and he leaped up abruptly half awake the jumble of french changed to a cry of english and the horse voice shouted excitedly my breath my breath then the awakening became complete and with the subsidence of facial expression to the normal state my uncle seized my hand and began to relate a dream whose nucleus of significance i could only surmise with a kind of awe he had he said floated off from a very ordinary series of dream pictures into a scene whose strangeness was related to nothing he had ever read it was of this world and yet not of it a shadowy geometrical confusion in which could be seen elements of familiar things in most unfamiliar and perturbing combinations there was a suggestion of clearly disordered pictures superimposed on one another an arrangement in which the essentials of time as well as of space seemed dissolved and mixed in the most illogical fashion in this kaleidoscope vortex of phantasmal images were occasional snapshots if one might use the term of singular clearness but unaccountable heterogeneity once my uncle thought he lay in a carelessly dug open pit with a crowd of angry faces framed by struggling locks and three cornered hats frowning down on him again he seemed to be in the interior of a house an old house apparently but the details and inhabitants were constantly changing and he could never be certain of the faces or the furniture or even the room itself since doors and windows seemed in just as great a state of flux as the presumably more mobile objects it was queer damn doubly queer and my uncle spoke almost sheepishly as if half expecting not to be believed when he declared that of the strange faces many had unmistakenly borne the features of the Harris family and all the while there was a personal sensation of choking as if some pervasive presence had spread itself through his body and sought to possess itself of his vital processes I shuddered at the thought of those vital processes worn as they were by 81 years of continuous functioning in conflict with unknown forces of which the youngest and strongest system might well be afraid but in another moment reflected that dreams are only dreams and that these uncomfortable visions could be at most no more than my uncle's reaction to the investigations and expectations which had lately filled our minds to the exclusion of all else conversation also soon tended to dispel my sense of strangeness and in time I yielded to my yawns and took my turn at slumber my uncle seemed now very wakeful and welcomed his period of watching even though the nightmare had aroused him far ahead of his allotted two hours sleep seized me quickly and I was once haunted with dreams of the most disturbing kind I felt in my visions a cosmic and abysmal loneliness with hostility surging from all sides upon some prison where I lay confined I seemed bound and gagged and taunted by the echoing yells of distant multitudes who thirsted for my blood my uncle's face came to me with less pleasant association than in waking hours and I recall many futile struggles and attempts to scream it was not a pleasant sleep and for a second I was not sorry for the echoing shriek which clove through the barriers of dream and flung me to a sharp and startled awakeness in which every actual object before my eyes stood out with more than natural clearness and reality chapter five I had been lying with my face away from my uncle's chair so that in this sudden flash of awakening I saw only the door to the street the window and the wall and floor and ceiling towards the north of the room all photographed with morbid vividness on my brain in a light brighter than the glow of the fungi or the rays from the street outside it was not a strong or even fairly strong light certainly not nearly strong enough to read an average book by but it cast a shadow of myself and the cot on the floor and had a yellowish penetrating force that hinted at things more potent than luminosity this I perceived with unhealthy sharpness despite the fact that two of my other senses were violently assailed for on my ears rang the reverberations of that shocking scream while my nostrils revolted at the stench which filled the place my mind as alert as my senses recognized the gravely unusual and almost automatically I leaped up and turned about to grasp the destructive instruments which we had left trained on the moldy spot before the fireplace as I turned I dreaded what I was to see for the scream had been in my uncle's voice and I knew not against what menace I should have to defend him and myself yet after all the sight was worse than I had dreaded there are horrors beyond horrors and this was one of those nuclei of all dreamable hideousness which the cosmos saves to blast and accursed and unhappy few out of the fungus-ridden earth steamed up a vaporous corpse light yellow and diseased which bubbled and lapped to a gigantic height in vague outlines half human and half monstrous through which I could see the chimney and fireplace beyond it was all eyes wolfish and mocking and the rugo's insect-like head dissolved at the top to a thin stream of mist which curled putridly about and finally vanished up the chimney I say I saw this thing but it is only conscious retrospection that I ever definitely traced its damnable approach to form at the time it was to me only a seething dimly phosphorescent cloud of fungus loathesomeness enveloping and dissolving to an abhorrent plasticity the one object on which all my attention was focused that object was my uncle the venerable Eliu Whipple who with blackening and decaying features leered and gibbered at me and reached out dripping claws to rend me in the fury which this horror had brought it was a sense of routine which kept me from going mad I had drilled myself in preparation for the crucial moment and blind training saved me recognizing the bubbling evil as no substance reachable by matter or material chemistry and therefore ignoring the flamethrower which loomed to my left I threw on the current of the crook's tube apparatus and focused towards that scene of immortal blasphemousness the strongest aether radiations which man's art can arouse from the spaces and fluids of nature there was a bluish haze and a frenzied sputtering and the yellowish phosphorescence grew dimmer to my eyes but I saw the dimness was only that of contrast and that the waves from the machine had no effect whatsoever then in the midst of that demonic spectacle I saw a fresh horror of which brought cries to my lips and sent me fumbling and staggering towards that unlocked door to the quiet street careless of what abnormal terrors I loosed up on the world or what thoughts or judgments of men I brought down on my head in that dim blend of blue and yellow the form of my uncle had commenced a nauseous liquefaction whose essence eludes all description and in which there played across his vanishing face such changes of identity as only madness can conceive he was at once a devil and a multitude a channel house and a pageant lit by the mixed and uncertain beams that gelatinous face assumed a dozen a score a hundred aspects grinning as it sank to the ground on a body that melted like tallow in caricatured likeness of legion strange and yet not strange I saw the features of the harris line masculine and feminine adult and infantile and other features old and young coarse and refined familiar and unfamiliar for a second there flashed a degraded counterfeit of a miniature of poor mad roby harris that I had seen in the school of design museum and another time I thought I'd caught the raw-boned image of mercy dexter as I recalled her from a painting in kerranton harris's house it was frightful beyond conception towards the last when a curious blend of serban and baby visages flickered close to the fungus floor where a pool of greenish grease was spreading it seemed as though the shifting features fought against themselves and strove to form contours like those of my uncle's kindly face I like to think that he existed at that moment and that he tried to bid me farewell it seems to me I hiccup to farewell from my own parched throat as I lurched out into the street a thin stream of grease following me through the door to the rain-drenched sidewalk the rest is shadowy and monstrous there was no one in the soaking street and in all the world there was no one I dared to tell I walked aimlessly south past College Hill and the Athenium down Hopkins Street and over a bridge to the business section where tall buildings seem to guard me as modern material things guard the world from ancient and unwholesome wonder then grey dawn unfolded wetly from the east silhouetting the archaic hill and its venerable steeples and beckoning me to the place where my terrible work was still unfinished and in the end I went wet, hapless and dazed in the morning light and entered that awful door in Benefit Street which I had left a jar and which still swung cryptically in full sight of the early householders to whom I dared not speak the grease was gone for the mouldy floor was porous and in front of the fireplace was no vestige of the giant doubled up form traced in nighter I looked at the cot the chairs the instruments my neglected hat and the yellow straw hat of my uncle dazedness was uppermost and I could scarcely recall what was dream and what was reality then thought trickled back and I knew that I had witnessed things more horrible than I had dreamed sitting down I tried to conjecture as nearly as sanity would let me just what had happened and how I might end the horror if indeed it had been real matter it seemed not to be nor ether nor anything else conceivable by mortal mind what then but some exotic emanation some vampirish vapor such as exoteristics tell of as lurking over certain church yards this I felt was the clue and again I looked at the floor before the fireplace where mould and night had taken strange forms in 10 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 pickaxe 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 past the hours in reading and in the composition of inane verses to counteract my mood at 11 am 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 people which disposed him ever so little towards belief as I turned up the stinking black earth in front of the fireplace my spade causing a viscous yellow icca 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 his 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 the pit suddenly my spade struck something softer than earth I shuddered and made emotion 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 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 channel gulf and upon the unthinkable abnormality who's tightened 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 two of the hideous raw 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 vapours 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 nevertheless terrors had perished forever 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 spade full of mould 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 terrace garden and shortly afterwards 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 end of the shunned house recording by Helen Taylor Lincolnshire