They found Gilman on the floor of his queerly-angled
old garret room long before dawn, for the terrible cry had brought Desrochers
and Choynski and Dombrowski and Mazurewicz at once, and had even wakened
the soundly sleeping Elwood in his chair. He was alive, and with open,
staring eyes, but seemed largely unconscious. On his throat were the marks
of murderous hands, and on his left ankle was a distressing rat-bite. His
clothing was badly rumpled and Joe's crucifix was missing, Elwood trembled,
afraid even to speculate what new form his friend's sleep-walking had taken.
Mazurewicz seemed half dazed because of a "sign" he said he had had in
response to his prayers, and he crossed himself frantically when the squealing
and whimpering of a rat sounded from beyond the slanting partition.
When the dreamer was settled on his couch in Elwood's
room they sent for Doctor Malkowski - a local practitioner who would repeat
no tales where they might prove embarrassing - and he gave Gilman two hypodermic
injections which caused him to relax in something like natural drowsiness.
During the day the patient regained consciousness at times and whispered
his newest dream disjointedly to Elwood. It was a painful process, and
at its very start brought out a fresh and disconcerting fact.
Gilman - whose ears had so lately possessed an abnormal
sensitiveness - was now stone-deaf. Doctor Malkowski, summoned again in
haste, told Elwood that both ear-drums were ruptured, as if by the impact
of some stupendous sound intense beyond all human conception or endurance.
How such a sound could have been heard in the last few hours without arousing
all the Miskatonic Valley was more than the honest physician could say.
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 child 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 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-floor 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 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 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-fixer 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
near-by hole. On the carpet they were very indistinct, but a piece of open
flooring 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 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.
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 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
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 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.
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 disminished, 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 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 the coroner and several
professors from the university. There were bones - badly crushed and splintered,
but clearly recognizable 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 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 fifty 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 baffle all conjecture - found
scattered amidst the wreckage in evidently diverse states of injury. One
of these things - which excited several Miskatonie professors profoundly
is a badly damaged monstrosity 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 crucifix with
broken chain mixed in the rubbish and shiveringly identified by Joe Maturewicz
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 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 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.
FINIS
