Elwood wrote his part of the colloquy on paper, so that a fairly easy communication was maintained. Neither knew what to make of the whole chaotic business, and decided it would be better if they thought as little as possible about it. Both, though, agreed that they must leave this ancient and accursed house as soon as it could be arranged. Evening papers spoke of a police raid on some curious revellers in a ravine beyond Meadow Hill just before dawn, and mentioned that the white stone there was an object of age-long superstitious regard. Nobody had been caught, but among the scattering fugitives had been glimpsed a huge negro. In another column it was stated that no trace of the missing Ladislas Wolejko had been found.
The crowning horror came that very night. Elwood will never forget it, and was forced to stay out of college the rest of the term because of the resulting nervous breakdown. He had thought he heard rats in the partitions 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 red 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-floor lodger were all crowding into the doorway, and the landlord had sent his wife back to telephone for Dr. Malkowski. Everybody shrieked when a large rat-like form suddenly jumped out from beneath the ensanguined bedclothes and scuttled across the floor 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 constant 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 loomfixer would never stay sober, and was constantly whining and muttering about spectral and terrible things.
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 nearby hole. On the carpet they were very indistinct, but a piece of open flooring intervened between the carpet’s edge and the base-board. 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 flooring 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.30
The house was never rented again. As soon as Dombrowski left it the pall of its final desolation began to descend, for people shunned it both on account of its old reputation and because of the new fœtid 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 officials 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 fœtor 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 grumblingly acquiesced in the inertia—but the fœtor none the less formed an additional count against the place. Toward the last the house was condemned as an habitation by the building inspector.
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 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 edifice 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 floor beneath. The whole attic story 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 the coroner and several professors from the university. There were bones—badly crushed and splintered, but clearly recognisable as human—whose manifestly modern date conflicted puzzlingly with the remote period at which their only possible lurking-place, the low, slant-floored 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 reflection.
Other objects found included the mingled 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 150 to 200 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 baffle 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 monstrosity plainly resembling the strange image which Gilman gave to the college museum, save that it is larger, wrought of some peculiar bluish stone instead of metal, and possessed of a singularly angled pedestal with undecipherable hieroglyphics.
Archæologists 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 crucifix with broken chain mixed in the rubbish and shiveringly identified by Joe Mazurewicz as that which he had given poor Gilman many years before. Some believe this crucifix was dragged up to the sealed loft by rats, while others think it must have been on the floor in some corner of Gilman’s old room all 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 whic
h paralysed the wreckers with horror. In brief, the floor was a veritable ossuary of the bones of small children—some fairly modern, but others extending back in infinite 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 an object destined to cause more bafflement, 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.
1. The story was written in 1932 and first appeared in Weird Tales 22, no. 1 (July 1933), 86–111, where it was described by the editors as follows: “A story of mathematics, witchcraft and Walpurgis Night, in which the horror creeps and grows—a new tale by the author of ‘The Rats in the Walls.’”
2. This is a fictitious name; no “Keziah” or “Mason” is to be found in the transcripts of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692–93.
3. A nonsensical term, as Robert Weinberg demonstrates in “H. P. Lovecraft and Pseudomathematics,” because there is no real connection between geometry and calculus. Gilman speculates on four-dimensional objects, but necessarily, such an object cannot be constructed in a three-dimensional system. Donald R. Burleson disagrees, in “A Note on Lovecraft, Mathematics, and the Outer Spheres,” arguing that Lovecraft merely imagined realms in which such common geometric notions as distances have no ready meaning. “For example,” he argues, “a mathematician may work with the abstract structure called a ‘locally compact topological group,’ and in that context define an abstract ‘measure’ and what is called the Haar integral—so that even in this wholly abstract setting one may do a kind of ‘calculus.’” These are deep waters indeed!
4. A notion that was gaining traction at the time, as architects tried to blend the mysticism of Theosophy with science and the Society for Psychical Research attracted many prominent members. Later, physicists would note the resemblances between the descriptions of the Zen Buddhist universe and the chaotic world of the atom (see, for example, The Tao of Physics, by Fritjof Capra).
5. A town in Essex County, Massachusetts, on the Merrimack River, about ten miles west of Newburyport.
6. The book is first mentioned in Clark Ashton Smith’s 1932 story “Ubbo-Sathla”: “The Book of Eibon, that strangest and rarest of occult forgotten volumes . . . is said to have come down through a series of manifold translations from a prehistoric original written in the lost language of Hyperborea.”
7. The book is first mentioned in Robert E. Howard’s 1931 story “The Children of the Night,” where it is titled Nameless Cults. Nothing is known of von Junzt.
8. See, in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, notes 126 et seq., the discussion of the Salem witch trials and explanations of some of the words and phrases used here (such as “Oyer and Terminer”).
9. That is, April 30 and October 31, prominent dates when spirits are abroad.
10. Willem de Sitter (1872–1934), a Dutch mathematician, physicist, and astronomer, cowrote a paper with Einstein on dark matter but is no longer as renowned as Planck, Heisenberg, or Einstein. Nonetheless, his contributions were considerable, including, as José Natário writes, in General Relativity Without Calculus: A Concise Introduction to the Geometry of Relativity (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2011), a cosmological model “representing a hyperspherical Universe without matter but with a positive cosmological constant” (97).
11. Their testimony has apparently been bodily removed from the transcripts of the trials. However, Rebecca Eames testified that the devil appeared to her in the form of a mouse or rat.
12. Fritz Leiber Jr., in “Through Hyperspace with Brown Jenkin,” points out that this and other aspects of Gilman’s experiences sound remarkably like modern suggestions of the effects of travel through hyperspace or wormholes. “Here,” Leiber notes, “(1) a rational foundation for such travel is set up; (2) hyperspace is visualised; and (3) a trigger for such travel is devised.”
13. Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866), a German mathematician who essentially singlehandedly created the field known as Riemannian geometry, the study of higher dimensions and the extension of differential geometry in n dimensions. Riemann’s work was vital to Einstein’s theory of relativity. Thomas Pynchon’s brilliant 2006 novel Against the Day explores in part the darkly co(s)mic aspects of the work of Riemann and his students.
14. A loomfixer is a worker who adjusts or repairs looms in the textile industry. “It is better to be a successful loomfixer than an unsuccessful overseer,” admonished Albert Ainley, in Woolen and Worsted Loomfixing: A Book for Loomfixers and All Who Are Interested in the Production of Plain and Fancy Worsteds and Woolens (Lawrence, MA: Privately printed, 1900). The profession continues today, although with unionization, the lot of the loomfixer has improved. A 1921 editorial in the Shoe Workers’ Journal on the need for trade unions quoted from a Manchester, New Hampshire, newspaper that pointed out that a loomfixer in Lawrence, Massachusetts, might work 48 hours per week for $32, while a loomfixer at the Amoskeag company of Manchester, minding 20 looms more than the Lawrence loomfixer, worked a 54-hour week for only $25.
Loomfixers in New Market, New Hampshire (probably 1903–7).
15. The name appears also in Lovecraft’s discarded draft of “The Shadow over Innsmouth.”
16. That is, say the rosary.
17. A prolate spheroid is one in which the polar axis is longer than the diameter; that is, it is a sphere that’s been “stretched” vertically to be more oval-shaped than round.
18. The water snake, also representing the dragon of Æëtes, slain by Jason and the Argonauts to capture the golden fleece. Hydra is the largest constellation in the sky.
19. Argo Navis, the ship Argo (Jason’s ship), is a constellation that lies entirely in the Southern Hemisphere, east of Canis Major, and covers a great portion of the sky. Only a few of its numerous stars are visible over the East Coast. It includes Canopus, an extremely bright white star.
20. T. R. Livesey points out, in “Dispatches from the Providence Observatory,” that this “is one of the emptiest regions in the sky; no star brighter than third magnitude is found anywhere near Hydra’s second magnitude Alphard” (40).
21. The third Monday in April, a holiday commemorating the beginning of the American War of Independence.
22. These creatures also appear in At the Mountains of Madness (here, above).
23. Evidently the sound of the Black Man’s cloven hooves.
24. Unfortunately for Gilman, no one at Miskatonic University had yet learned of the creature depicted. The story is set sometime between 1927 (235 years after the trial of Kizziah Brown) and 1931, when the building was demolished. Professor Dyer’s expedition to the Antarctic (reported in At the Mountains of Madness), on which he would see creatures fitting this description, did not take place until 1930, and he did not return to Arkham until at least early 1931.
25. Around 1868, two men, working independently, observed the periodicity—that is, patterns i
n the properties—of the sixty-three elements then known. Dimitri Mendeleev (1834–1907) published his work first and is generally credited with having devised the periodic table, an arrangement of the known elements in a recurring pattern of those properties. Lothar Meyer’s work, actually completed slightly earlier but unpublished, was soon forgotten. Mendeleev’s table also proved predictive—that is, gaps in the recurring patterns were thought to be descriptions of elements not yet discovered; and this thesis proved correct when the table accurately predicted the discoveries of gallium, scandium, and germanium. The first table was adjusted and refined (most importantly, with the addition of the noble gases by Sir William Ramsay about thirty years later), but the fundamental structure of Mendeleev’s periodic table is unchanged.
“The hideous crone seized Gilman by the shoulder, yanking him out of bed and into empty space.” Weird Tales 22, no. 1 (July 1933) (artist: Jayem Wilcox)
26. The name Orne has appeared in several other tales, notably “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” where the family dominates the town, and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, in which the diabolical connections of the Salem branch of the family are revealed. The site mentioned here ties in to the shipping business conducted by the Innsmouth branch.
27. This suggestive remark probably reflects Lovecraft’s low view of the morality of the foreign populations in New England.
28. Too horrible to be described.
29. This is the only suggestion in any of Lovecraft’s stories that religious symbols might have some effect on the beings confronted by the various narrators. Perhaps Lovecraft means to show that Keziah was not a supernatural being but rather merely a human, with seventeenth-century superstitions.
30. Evidently, it is Brown Jenkin that killed Gilman. How did the fanged, furry thing get out of the abyss?
The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft Page 99
