The Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft Read Free Book Online

brittleness, and dry fragments were scaling off. Ammi could not touch it, but looked horrifiedly into the distorted parody that had been a face. "What was it, Nahum--what was it?" He whispered, and the cleft, bulging lips were just able to crackle out a final answer.
    "Nothin'...nothin'...the colour...it burns...cold an' wet, but it burns...it lived in the well...I seen it...a kind of smoke... jest like the flowers last spring...the well shone at night...Thad an' Merwin an' Zenas...everything alive...suckin' the life out of everything...in that stone...it must a' come in that stone pizened the whole place...dun't know what it wants...that round thing them men from the college dug outen the stone...they smashed it...it was the same colour...jest the same, like the flowers an' plants...must a' ben more of 'em...seeds...seeds...they growed...I seen it the fust time this week...must a' got strong on Zenas...he was a big boy, full o' life...it beats down your mind an' then gets ye...burns ye up...in the well water...you was right about that...evil water... Zenas never come back from the well...can't git away...draws ye...ye know summ'at's comin' but tain't no use...I seen it time an' agin senct Zenas was took...whar's Nabby, Ammi?...my head's no good... dun't know how long sense I fed her...it'll git her ef we ain't keerful...jest a colour...her face is gittin' to hev that colour sometimes towards night...an' it burns an' sucks...it come from some place whar things ain't as they is here...one o' them professors said so...he was right...look out, Ammi, it'll do suthin' more...sucks the life out..."
    But that was all. That which spoke could speak no more because it had completely caved in. Ammi laid a red checked tablecloth over what was left and reeled out the back door into the fields. He climbed the slope to the ten-acre pasture and stumbled home by the north road and the woods. He could not pass that well from which his horses had run away. He had looked at it through the window, and had seen that no stone was missing from the rim. Then the lurching buggy had not dislodged anything after all--the splash had been something else-- something which went into the well after it had done with poor Nahum.
    When Ammi reached his house the horses and buggy had arrived before him and thrown his wife into fits of anxiety. Reassuring her without explanations, he set out at once for Arkham and notified the authorities that the Gardner family was no more. He indulged in no details, but merely told of the deaths of Nahum and Nabby, that of Thaddeus being already known, and mentioned that the cause seemed to be the same strange ailment which had killed the live-stock. He also stated that Merwin and Zenas had disappeared. There was considerable questioning at the police station, and in the end Ammi was compelled to take three officers to the Gardner farm, together with the coroner, the medical examiner, and the veterinary who had treated the diseased animals. He went much against his will, for the afternoon was advancing and he feared the fall of night over that accursed place, but it was some comfort to have so many people with him.
    The six men drove out in a democrat-wagon, following Ammi's buggy, and arrived at the pest-ridden farmhouse about four o'clock. Used as the officers were to gruesome experiences, not one remained unmoved at what was found in the attic and under the red checked tablecloth on the floor below. The whole aspect of the farm with its grey desolation was terrible enough, but those two crumbling objects were beyond all bounds. No one could look long at them, and even the medical examiner admitted that there was very little to examine. Specimens could be analysed, of course, so he busied himself in obtaining them--and here it develops that a very puzzling aftermath occurred at the college laboratory where the two phials of dust were finally taken. Under the spectroscope both samples gave off an unknown spectrum, in which many