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Файл:The Dreams in the Witch-House and Other Stories
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THE DREAMS IN THE WITCH HOUSE
the term because of the resulting nervous breakdown. He had
thought he heard rats in the partition all the evening, but paid
little attention to them. Then, long after both he and Gilman
had retired, the atrocious shrieking began. Elwood jumped
up, turned on the lights and rushed over to his guest’s couch.
The occupant was emitting sounds of veritably inhuman nature, as if racked by some torment beyond description. He was
writhing under the bedclothes, and a great stain was beginning to appear on the blankets.
Elwood scarcely dared to touch him, but gradually
the screaming and writhing subsided. By this time Dombrowski, Choynski, Desrochers, Mazurewicz, and the top-fl oor lodger were all crowding into the doorway, and the landlord had
sent his wife back to telephone for Doctor Malkowaki. Everybody shrieked when a large rat-like form suddenly jumped out
from beneath the ensanguined bedclothes and scuttled across
the fl oor to a fresh, open hole close by. When the doctor arrived and began to pull down those frightful covers Walter
Gilman was dead.
It would be barbarous to do more than suggest what had
killed Gilman. There had been virtually a tunnel through
his body – something had eaten his heart out. Dombrowski,
frantic at the failure of his rat-poisoning efforts, cast aside all
thought of his lease and within a week had moved with all
his older lodgers to a dingy but less ancient house in Walnut
Street. The worst thing for a while was keeping Joe Mazurewicz quiet; for the brooding loom-fi xer would never stay sober,
and was constantly whining and muttering about spectral and
terrible things.
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HOWARD LOVECRAFT
It seems that on that last hideous night Joe had stooped to
look at the crimson rat-tracks which led from Gilman’s
couch to the near-by hole. On the carpet they were very indistinct, but a piece of open fl ooring intervened between
the carpet’s edge and the baseboard. There Mazurewicz had
found something monstrous – or thought he had, for no one
else could quite agree with him despite the undeniable queerness of the prints. The tracks on the fl ooring were certainly
vastly unlike the average prints of a rat but even Choynski and
Desrochers would not admit that they were like the prints of
four tiny human hands.
The house was never rented again. As soon as Dombrowski left it the pall of its fi nal desolation began to descend, for
people shunned it both on account of its old reputation and
because of the new foetid odour. Perhaps the ex-landlord’s
rat-poison had worked after all, for not long after his departure the place became a neighbourhood nuisance. Health offi cials traced the smell to the closed spaces above and beside
the eastern garret room, and agreed that the number of dead
rats must be enormous. They decided, however, that it was not
worth their while to hew open and disinfect the long-sealed
spaces; for the foetor would soon be over, and the locality
was not one which encouraged fastidious standards. Indeed,
there were always vague local tales of unexplained stenches
upstairs in the Witch–House just after May–Eve and Hallowmass. The neighbours acquiesced in the inertia – but the foetor none the less formed an additional count against the place.
Toward the last the house was condemned as a habitation by
the building inspector.
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THE DREAMS IN THE WITCH HOUSE
Gilman’s dreams and their attendant circumstances have
never been explained. Elwood, whose thoughts on the entire
episode are sometimes almost maddening, came back to college the next autumn and was graduated in the following
June. He found the spectral gossip of the town much diminished, and it is indeed a fact that – notwithstanding certain
reports of a ghostly tittering in the deserted house which
lasted almost as long as that edifi ce itself – no fresh appearances either of Old Keziah or of Brown Jenkin have been
muttered of since Gilman’s death. It is rather fortunate that
Elwood was not in Arkham in that later year when certain
events abruptly renewed the local whispers about elder horrors. Of course he heard about the matter afterward and suffered untold torments of black and bewildered speculation;
but even that was not as bad as actual nearness and several
possible sights would have been.
In March, 1931, a gale wrecked the roof and great chimney of the vacant Witch–House, so that a chaos of crumbling
bricks, blackened, moss-grown shingles, and rotting planks
and timbers crashed down into the loft and broke through
the fl oor beneath. The whole attic storey was choked with debris from above, but no one took the trouble to touch the mess
before the inevitable razing of the decrepit structure. That ultimate step came in the following December, and it was when
Gilman’s old room was cleared out by reluctant, apprehensive
workmen that the gossip began.
Among the rubbish which had crashed through the ancient
slanting ceiling were several things which made the workmen
pause and call in the police. Later the police in turn called in
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HOWARD LOVECRAFT
the coroner and several professors from the university. There
were bones – badly crushed and splintered, but clearly recognizable as human – whose manifestly modern date confl icted
puzzlingly with the remote period at which their only possible lurking place, the low, slant-fl oored loft overhead, had
supposedly been sealed from all human access. The coroner’s
physician decided that some belonged to a small child, while
certain others – found mixed with shreds of rotten brownish
cloth – belonged to a rather undersized, bent female of advanced years. Careful sifting of debris also disclosed many tiny
bones of rats caught in the collapse, as well as older rat-bones
gnawed by small fangs in a fashion now and then highly productive of controversy and refl ection.
Other objects found included the mangled fragments of
many books and papers, together with a yellowish dust left
from the total disintegration of still older books and papers. All,
without exception, appeared to deal with black magic in its most
advanced and horrible forms; and the evidently recent date of
certain items is still a mystery as unsolved as that of the modern human bones. An even greater mystery is the absolute
homogeneity of the crabbed, archaic writing found on a wide
range of papers whose conditions and watermarks suggest age
differences of at least one hundred and fi fty to two hundred
years. To some, though, the greatest mystery of all is the variety of utterly inexplicable objects – objects whose shapes, materials, types of workmanship, and purposes baffl e all conjecture – found scattered amidst the wreckage in evidently diverse
states of injury. One of these things – which excited several
Miskatonic professors profoundly is a badly damaged monstros-
54
THE DREAMS IN THE WITCH HOUSE
ity plainly resembling the strange image which Gilman gave to
the college museum, save that it is large, wrought of some peculiar bluish stone instead of metal, and possessed of a singularly
angled pedestal with undecipherable hieroglyphics.
Archaeologists and anthropologists are still trying to explain the bizarre designs chased on a crushed bowl of light
metal whose inner side bore ominous brownish stains when
found. Foreigners and credulous grandmothers are equally garrulous about the modern nickel crucifi x with broken
chain mixed in the rubbish and shiveringly identifi ed by Joe
Maturewicz as that which he had given poor Gilman many
years before. Some believe this crucifi x was dragged up to
the sealed loft by rats, while others think it must have been on
the fl oor in some corner of Gilman’s old room at the time. Still
others, including Joe himself, have theories too wild and fantastic for sober credence.
When the slanting wall of Gilman’s room was torn out,
the once-sealed triangular space between that partition and
the house’s north wall was found to contain much less structural debris, even in proportion to its size, than the room itself,
though it had a ghastly layer of older materials which paralyzed
the wreckers with horror. In brief, the fl oor was a veritable ossuary of the bones of small children – some fairly modern, but others extending back in infi nite gradations to a period so remote
that crumbling was almost complete. On this deep bony layer
rested a knife of great size, obvious antiquity, and grotesque, ornate, and exotic design – above which the debris was piled.
In the midst of this debris, wedged between a fallen plank
and a cluster of cemented bricks from the ruined chimney, was
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HOWARD LOVECRAFT
an object destined to cause more baffl ement, veiled fright, and
openly superstitious talk in Arkham than anything else discovered in the haunted and accursed building.
This object was the partly crushed skeleton of a huge diseased rat, whose abnormalities of form are still a topic of debate and source of singular reticence among the members of
Miskatonic’s department of comparative anatomy. Very little
concerning this skeleton has leaked out, but the workmen
who found it whisper in shocked tones about the long, brownish hairs with which it was associated.
The bones of the tiny paws, it is rumoured, imply prehensile
characteristics more typical of a diminutive monkey than of
a rat, while the small skull with its savage yellow fangs is of
the utmost anomalousness, appearing from certain angles like
a miniature, monstrously degraded parody of a human skull.
The workmen crossed themselves in fright when they came
upon this blasphemy, but later burned candles of gratitude in
St. Stanislaus’ Church because of the shrill, ghostly tittering
they felt they would never hear again.
IN THE VAULT
There is nothing more absurd, as I view it, than that conventional association of the homely and the wholesome which
seems to pervade the psychology of the multitude. Mention
a bucolic Yankee setting, a bungling and thick-fi bred village
undertaker, and a careless mishap in a tomb, and no average
reader can be brought to expect more than a hearty albeit grotesque phase of comedy. God knows, though, that the prosy
tale which George Birch’s death permits me to tell has in it
aspects beside which some of our darkest tragedies are light.
Birch acquired a limitation and changed his business in
1881, yet never discussed the case when he could avoid it. Neither did his old physician Dr. Davis, who died years ago. It was
generally stated that the affl iction and shock were results of
an unlucky slip whereby Birch had locked himself for nine
hours in the receiving tomb of Peck Valley Cemetery, escaping only by crude and disastrous mechanical means; but while
this much was undoubtedly true, there were other and blacker
things which the man used to whisper to me in his drunken
delirium toward the last. He confi ded in me because I was his
doctor, and because he probably felt the need of confi ding in
someone else after Davis died. He was a bachelor, wholly without relatives.
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HOWARD LOVECRAFT
Birch, before 1881, had been the village undertaker of
Peck Valley; and was a very calloused and primitive specimen
even as such specimens go. The practices I heard attributed to
him would be unbelievable today, at least in a city; and even
Peck Valley would have shuddered a bit had it known the easy
ethics of its mortuary artist in such debatable matters as
the ownership of costly “laying-out” apparel invisible beneath
the casket’s lid, and the degree of dignity to be maintained in
posing and adapting the unseen members of lifeless tenants to
containers not always calculated with sublimest accuracy.
Most distinctly Birch was lax, insensitive, and professionally
undesirable; yet I still think he was not an evil man. He was
merely crass of fi bre and function – thoughtless, careless, and
liquorish, as his easily avoidable accident proves, and without
that modicum of imagination which holds the average citizen
within certain limits fi xed by taste.
Just where to begin Birch’s story I can hardly decide,
since I am no practiced teller of tales. I suppose one should
start in the cold December of 1880, when the ground froze
and the cemetery delvers found they could dig no more graves
till spring. Fortunately the village was small and the death
rate low, so that it was possible to give all of Birch’s inanimate
charges a temporary haven in the single antiquated receiving tomb. The undertaker grew doubly lethargic in the bitter
weather, and seemed to outdo even himself in carelessness.
Never did he knock together fl imsier and ungainlier caskets,
or disregard more fl agrantly the needs of the rusty lock on
the tomb door which he slammed open and shut with such
nonchalant abandon.
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IN THE VAULT
At last the spring thaw came, and graves were laboriously prepared for the nine silent harvests of the grim reaper
which waited in the tomb. Birch, though dreading the bother of removal and interment, began his task of transference
one disagreeable April morning, but ceased before noon because of a heavy rain that seemed to irritate his horse, after
having laid but one mortal tenant to its permanent rest. That
was Darius Peck, the nonagenarian, whose grave was not far
from the tomb. Birch decided that he would begin the next
day with little old Matthew Fenner, whose grave was also near
by; but actually postponed the matter for three days, not getting to work till Good Friday, the 15th. Being without superstition, he did not heed the day at all; though ever afterward
he refused to do anything of importance on that fateful sixth
day of the week. Certainly, the events of that evening greatly
changed George Birch.
On the afternoon of Friday, April 15th, then, Birch set out
for the tomb with horse and wagon to transfer the body of
Matthew Fenner. That he was not perfectly sober, he subsequently admitted; though he had not then taken to the wholesale drinking by which he later tried to forget certain things.
He was just dizzy and careless enough to annoy his sensitive
horse, which as he drew it viciously up at the tomb neighed
and pawed and tossed its head, much as on that former occasion when the rain had vexed it. The day was clear, but a high
wind had sprung up; and Birch was glad to get to shelter as he
unlocked the iron door and entered the side-hill vault. Another might not have relished the damp, odorous chamber
with the eight carelessly placed coffi ns; but Birch in those days
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HOWARD LOVECRAFT
was insensitive, and was concerned only in getting the right
coffi n for the right grave. He had not forgotten the criticism
aroused when Hannah Bixby’s relatives, wishing to transport
her body to the cemetery in the city whither they had moved,
found the casket of Judge Capwell beneath her headstone.
The light was dim, but Birch’s sight was good, and he did
not get Asaph Sawyer’s coffi n by mistake, although it was very
similar. He had, indeed, made that coffi n for Matthew Fenner;
but had cast it aside at last as too awkward and fl imsy, in a fi t of
curious sentimentality aroused by recalling how kindly and
generous the little old man had been to him during his bankruptcy fi ve years before. He gave old Matt the very best his
skill could produce, but was thrifty enough to save the rejected
specimen, and to use it when Asaph Sawyer died of a malignant fever. Sawyer was not a lovable man, and many stories
were told of his almost inhuman vindictiveness and tenacious
memory for wrongs real or fancied. To him Birch had felt no
compunction in assigning the carelessly made coffi n which he
now pushed out of the way in his quest for the Fenner casket.
It was just as he had recognised old Matt’s coffi n that
the door slammed to in the wind, leaving him in a dusk
even deeper than before. The narrow transom admitted only
the feeblest of rays, and the overhead ventilation funnel virtually none at all; so that he was reduced to a profane fumbling as he made his halting way among the long boxes toward
the latch. In this funereal twilight he rattled the rusty handles,
pushed at the iron panels, and wondered why the massive portal had grown so suddenly recalcitrant. In this twilight too, he
began to realise the truth and to shout loudly as if his horse
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