We were sitting on a dilapidated
seventeenth-century tomb in the late afternoon of an autumn day at the old
burying ground in Arkham, and speculating about the unnamable. Looking toward
the giant willow in the cemetery, whose trunk had nearly engulfed an ancient,
illegible slab, I had made a fantastic remark about the spectral and
unmentionable nourishment which the colossal roots must be sucking from that
hoary, charnel earth; when my friend chided me for such nonsense and told me
that since no interments had occurred there for over a century, nothing could
possibly exist to nourish the tree in other than an ordinary manner. Besides,
he added, my constant talk about "unnamable" and
"unmentionable" things was a very puerile device, quite in keeping
with my lowly standing as an author. I was too fond of ending my stories with
sights or sounds which paralyzed my heroes' faculties and left them without
courage, words, or associations to tell what they had experienced. We know
things, he said, only through our five senses or our intuitions; wherefore it
is quite impossible to refer to any object or spectacle which cannot be clearly
depicted by the solid definitions of fact or the correct doctrines of theology
- preferably those of the Congregationalist, with whatever modifications
tradition and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle may supply.
With this friend,
Joel Manton, I had often languidly disputed. He was principal of the East High
School, born and bred in Boston and sharing New England's self-satisfied
deafness to the delicate overtones of life. It was his view that only our
normal, objective experiences possess any esthetic significance, and that it is
the province of the artist not so much to rouse strong emotion by action,
ecstasy, and astonishment, as to maintain a placid interest and appreciation by
accurate, detailed transcripts of everyday affairs. Especially did he object to
my preoccupation with the mystical and the unexplained; for although believing
in the supernatural much more fully than I, he would not admit that it is
sufficiently commonplace for literary treatment. That a mind can find its
greatest pleasure in escapes from the daily treadmill, and in original and
dramatic recombinations of images usually thrown by habit and fatigue into the
hackneyed patterns of actual existence, was something virtually incredible to
his clear, practical, and logical intellect. With him all things and feelings
had fixed dimensions, properties, causes, and effects; and although he vaguely
knew that the mind sometimes holds visions and sensations of far less
geometrical, classifiable, and workable nature, he believed himself justified
in drawing an arbitrary line and ruling out of court all that cannot be
experienced and understood by the average citizen. Besides, he was almost sure
that nothing can be really "unnamable." It didn't sound sensible to
him.
Though I well
realized the futility of imaginative and metaphysical arguments against the
complacency of an orthodox sun-dweller, something in the scene of this
afternoon colloquy moved me to more than usual contentiousness. The crumbling
slate slabs, the patriarchal trees, and the centuried gambrel roofs of the
witch-haunted old town that stretched around, all combined to rouse my spirit
in defense of my work; and I was soon carrying my thrusts into the enemy's own
country. It was not, indeed, difficult to begin a counter-attack, for I knew
that Joel Manton actually half clung to many old-wives' superstitions which
sophisticated people had long outgrown; beliefs in the appearance of dying
persons at distant places, and in the impressions left by old faces on the
windows through which they had gazed all their lives. To credit these
whisperings of rural grandmothers, I now insisted, argued a faith in the
existence of spectral substances on the earth apart from and subsequent to
their material counterparts. It argued a capability of believing in phenomena
beyond all normal notions; for if a dead man can transmit his visible or
tangible image half across the world, or down the stretch of the centuries, how
can it be absurd to suppose that deserted houses are full of queer sentient
things, or that old graveyards teem with the terrible, unbodied intelligence of
generations? And since spirit, in order to cause all the manifestations
attributed to it, cannot be limited by any of the laws of matter, why is it
extravagant to imagine psychically living dead things in shapes - or absences
of shapes - which must for human spectators be utterly and appallingly
"unnamable"? "Common sense" in reflecting on these
subjects, I assured my friend with some warmth, is merely a stupid absence of
imagination and mental flexibility.
Twilight had now
approached, but neither of us felt any wish to cease speaking. Manton seemed
unimpressed by my arguments, and eager to refute them, having that confidence
in his own opinions which had doubtless caused his success as a teacher; whilst
I was too sure of my ground to fear defeat. The dusk fell, and lights faintly
gleamed in some of the distant windows, but we did not move. Our seat on the
tomb was very comfortable, and I knew that my prosaic friend would not mind the
cavernous rift in the ancient, root-disturbed brickwork close behind us, or the
utter blackness of the spot brought by the intervention of a tottering,
deserted seventeenth-century house between us and the nearest lighted road.
There in the dark, upon that riven tomb by the deserted house, we talked on
about the "unnamable" and after my friend had finished his scoffing I
told him of the awful evidence behind the story at which he had scoffed the
most.
My tale had been
called The Attic Window, and appeared in the January, 1922, issue of Whispers.
In a good many places, especially the South and the Pacific coast, they took
the magazines off the stands at the complaints of silly milk-sops; but New
England didn't get the thrill and merely shrugged its shoulders at my
extravagance. The thing, it was averred, was biologically impossible to start
with; merely another of those crazy country mutterings which Cotton Mather had
been gullible enough to dump into his chaotic Magnalia Christi Americana, and
so poorly authenticated that even he had not ventured to name the locality
where the horror occurred. And as to the way I amplified the bare jotting of
the old mystic - that was quite impossible, and characteristic of a flighty and
notional scribbler! Mather had indeed told of the thing as being born, but
nobody but a cheap sensationalist would think of having it grow up, look into
people's windows at night, and be hidden in the attic of a house, in flesh and
in spirit, till someone saw it at the window centuries later and couldn't
describe what it was that turned his hair gray. All this was flagrant
trashiness, and my friend Manton was not slow to insist on that fact. Then I
told him what I had found in an old diary kept between 1706 and 1723, unearthed
among family papers not a mile from where we were sitting; that, and the
certain reality of the scars on my ancestor's chest and back which the diary
described. I told him, too, of the fears of others in that region, and how they
were whispered down for generations; and how no mythical madness came to the
boy who in 1793 entered an abandoned house to examine certain traces suspected
to be there.
It had been an
eldritch thing - no wonder sensitive students shudder at the Puritan age in
Massachusetts. So little is known of what went on beneath the surface - so
little, yet such a ghastly festering as it bubbles up putrescently in
occasional ghoulish glimpses. The witchcraft terror is a horrible ray of light
on what was stewing in men's crushed brains, but even that is a trifle. There
was no beauty; no freedom - we can see that from the architectural and
household remains, and the poisonous sermons of the cramped divines. And inside
that rusted iron straitjacket lurked gibbering hideousness, perversion, and
diabolism. Here, truly, was the apotheosis of The Unnamable.
Cotton Mather, in
that demoniac sixth book which no one should read after dark, minced no words
as he flung forth his anathema. Stern as a Jewish prophet, and laconically
un-amazed as none since his day could be, he told of the beast that had brought
forth what was more than beast but less than man - the thing with the blemished
eye - and of the screaming drunken wretch that hanged for having such an eye.
This much he baldly told, yet without a hint of what came after. Perhaps he did
not know, or perhaps he knew and did not dare to tell. Others knew, but did not
dare to tell - there is no public hint of why they whispered about the lock on
the door to the attic stairs in the house of a childless, broken, embittered
old man who had put up a blank slate slab by an avoided grave, although one may
trace enough evasive legends to curdle the thinnest blood.
It is all in that
ancestral diary I found; all the hushed innuendoes and furtive tales of things
with a blemished eye seen at windows in the night or in deserted meadows near
the woods. Something had caught my ancestor on a dark valley road, leaving him with
marks of horns on his chest and of apelike claws on his back; and when they
looked for prints in the trampled dust they found the mixed marks of split
hooves and vaguely anthropoid paws. Once a post-rider said he saw an old man
chasing and calling to a frightful loping, nameless thing on Meadow Hill in the
thinly moonlit hours before dawn, and many believed him. Certainly, there was
strange talk one night in 1710 when the childless, broken old man was buried in
the crypt behind his own house in sight of the blank slate slab. They never
unlocked that attic door, but left the whole house as it was, dreaded and
deserted. When noises came from it, they whispered and shivered; and hoped that
the lock on that attic door was strong. Then they stopped hoping when the
horror occurred at the parsonage, leaving not a soul alive or in one piece.
With the years the legends take on a spectral character - I suppose the thing,
if it was a living thing, must have died. The memory had lingered hideously - all
the more hideous because it was so secret.
During this
narration my friend Manton had become very silent, and I saw that my words had
impressed him. He did not laugh as I paused, but asked quite seriously about
the boy who went mad in 1793, and who had presumably been the hero of my
fiction. I told him why the boy had gone to that shunned, deserted house, and
remarked that he ought to be interested, since he believed that windows latent
images of those who had sat at them. The boy had gone to look at the windows of
that horrible attic, because of tales of things seen behind them, and had come
back screaming maniacally.
Manton remained
thoughtful as I said this, but gradually reverted to his analytical mood. He
granted for the sake of argument that some unnatural monster had really
existed, but reminded me that even the most morbid perversion of nature need
not be unnamable or scientifically indescribable. I admired his clearness and
persistence, and added some further revelations I had collected among the old
people. Those later spectral legends, I made plain, related to monstrous
apparitions more frightful than anything organic could be; apparitions of
gigantic bestial forms sometimes visible and sometimes only tangible, which
floated about on moonless nights and haunted the old house, the crypt behind
it, and the grave where a sapling had sprouted beside an illegible slab.
Whether or not such apparitions had ever gored or smothered people to death, as
told in uncorroborated traditions, they had produced a strong and consistent
impression; and were yet darkly feared by very aged natives, though largely
forgotten by the last two generations - perhaps dying for lack of being thought
about. Moreover, so far as esthetic theory was involved, if the psychic
emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent
representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulosity as
the specter of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against
nature? Molded by the dead brain of a hybrid nightmare, would not such a
vaporous terror constitute in all loathsome truth the exquisitely, the
shriekingly unnamable?
The hour must now
have grown very late. A singularly noiseless bat brushed by me, and I believe
it touched Manton also, for although I could not see him I felt him raise his
arm. Presently he spoke.
"But is that
house with the attic window still standing and deserted?"
"Yes,"
I answered, "I have seen it."
"And
did you find anything there - in the attic or anywhere else?"
"There were
some bones up under the eaves. They may have been what that boy saw - if he was
sensitive he wouldn't have needed anything in the window-glass to unhinge him.
If they all came from the same object it must have been an hysterical,
delirious monstrosity. It would have been blasphemous to leave such bones in
the world, so I went back with a sack and took them to the tomb behind the
house. There was an opening where I could dump them in. Don't think I was a
fool - you ought to have seen that skull. It had four-inch horns, but a face
and jaw something like yours and mine."
At last I could
feel a real shiver run through Manton, who had moved very near. But his
curiosity was undeterred.
"And what
about the window-panes?"
"They were
all gone. One window had lost its entire frame, and in all the others there was
not a trace of glass in the little diamond apertures. They were that kind - the
old lattice windows that went out of use before 1700. I don't believe they've
had any glass for a hundred years or more - maybe the boy broke 'em if he got
that far; the legend doesn't say."
Manton was
reflecting again.
"I'd like to
see that house, Carter. Where is it? Glass or no glass, I must explore it a
little. And the tomb where you put those bones, and the other grave without an
inscription - the whole thing must be a bit terrible."
"You did see
it - until it got dark"
My friend was
more wrought upon than I had suspected, for at this touch of harmless
theatricalism he started neurotically away from me and actually cried out with
a sort of gulping gasp which released a strain of previous repression. It was
an odd cry, and all the more terrible because it was answered. For as it was
still echoing, I heard a creaking sound through the pitchy blackness, and knew
that a lattice window was opening in that accursed old house beside us. And
because all the other frames were long since fallen, I knew that it was the
grisly glassless frame of that demoniac attic window.
Then came a
noxious rush of noisome, frigid air from that same dreaded direction, followed
by a piercing shriek just beside me on that shocking rifted tomb of man and
monster. In another instant I was knocked from my gruesome bench by the
devilish threshing of some unseen entity of titanic size but undetermined
nature; knocked sprawling on the root-clutched mold of that abhorrent
graveyard, while from the tomb came such a stifled uproar of gasping and
whirring that my fancy peopled the rayless gloom with Miltonic legions of the
misshapen damned. There was a vortex of withering, ice-cold wind, and then the
rattle of loose bricks and plaster; but I had mercifully fainted before I could
learn what it meant.
Manton, though
smaller than I, is more resilient; for we opened our eyes at almost the same
instant, despite his greater injuries. Our couches were side by side, and we
knew in a few seconds that we were in St. Mary's Hospital. Attendants were
grouped about in tense curiosity, eager to aid our memory by telling us how we
came there, and we soon heard of the farmer who had found us at noon in a
lonely field beyond Meadow Hill, a mile from the old burying ground, on a spot
where an ancient slaughterhouse is reputed to have stood. Manton had two
malignant wounds in the chest, and some less severe cuts or gougings in the
back. I was not so seriously hurt, but was covered with welts and contusions of
the most bewildering character, including the print of a split hoof. It was
plain that Manton knew more than I, but he told nothing to the puzzled and
interested physicians till he had learned what our injuries were. Then he said
we were the victims of a vicious bull - though the animal was a difficult thing
to place and account for.
After the doctors
and nurses had left, I whispered an awe struck question:
"Good God,
Manton, but what was it? Those scars - was it like that?"
And I was too
dazed to exult when he whispered back a thing I had half expected -
"No - it
wasn't that way at all. It was everywhere - a gelatin - a slime yet it had
shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory. There were eyes - and a
blemish. It was the pit - the maelstrom - the ultimate abomination. Carter, it
was the unnamable!
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