The men sniffed in disgust at the fluid, and toward the last held their
noses against the foetor they were uncovering. It was not so long a
job as they had feared it would be, since the water was phenomenally
low. There is no need to speak too exactly of what they found. Merwin
and Zenas were both there, in part, though the vestiges were mainly
skeletal. There were also a small deer and a large dog in about the
same state, and a number of bones of smaller animals. The ooze and
slime at the bottom seemed inexplicably porous and bubbling, and a man
who descended on hand-holds with a long pole found that he could sink
the wooden shaft to any depth in the mud of the floor without meeting
any solid obstruction. Twilight had now fallen, and lanterns were brought from the house. Then, when it was seen that nothing further could be gained from the
well, everyone went indoors and conferred in the ancient sitting-room
while the intermittent light of a spectral half-moon played wanly on
the grey desolation outside. The men were frankly nonplussed by the
entire case, and could find no convincing common element to link the
strange vegetable conditions, the unknown disease of livestock and
humans, and the unaccountable deaths of Merwin and Zenas in the tainted
well. They had heard the common country talk, it is true; but could not
believe that anything contrary to natural law had occurred. No doubt
the meteor had poisoned the soil, but the illness of person and animals
who had eaten nothing grown in that soil was another matter. Was it the
well water? Very possibly. It might be a good idea to analyse it. But
what peculiar madness could have made both boys jump into the well? Their deeds were so similar--and the fragments showed that they had
both suffered from the grey brittle death. Why was everything so grey
and brittle? It was the coroner, seated near a window overlooking the yard, who
first noticed the glow about the well. Night had fully set in, and all
the abhorrent grounds seemed faintly luminous with more than the fitful
moonbeams; but this new glow was something definite and distinct, and
appeared to shoot up from the black pit like a softened ray from a
searchlight, giving dull reflections in the little ground pools where
the water had been emptied. It had a very queer colour, and as all the
men clustered round the window Ammi gave a violent start. For this
strange beam of ghastly miasma was to him of no unfamiliar hue. He had
seen that colour before, and feared to think what it might mean. He
had seen it in the nasty brittle globule in that aerolite two summers
ago, had seen it in the crazy vegetation of the springtime, and had
thought he had seen it for an instant that very morning against the
small barred window of that terrible attic room where nameless things
had happened. It had flashed there a second, and a clammy and hateful
current of vapour had brushed past him--and then poor Nahum had been
taken by something of that colour. He had said so at the last--said it
was like the globule and the plants. After that had come the runaway
in the yard and the splash in the well--and now that well was belching
forth to the night a pale insidious beam of the same demoniac tint. It does credit to the alertness of Ammi's mind that he puzzled even
at that tense moment over a point which was essentially scientific. He could not but wonder at his gleaning of the same impression from
a vapour glimpsed in the daytime, against a window opening in the
morning sky, and from a nocturnal exhalation seen as a phosphorescent
mist against the black and blasted landscape. It wasn't right--it was
against Nature--and he thought of those terrible last words of his
stricken friend, "It come from some place whar things ain't as they is
here ... one o' them professors said so...."

All three horses outside, tied to a pair of shrivelled saplings by
the road, were now neighing and pawing frantically. The wagon driver
started for the door to do something, but Ammi laid a shaky hand on his
shoulder. "Dun't go out thar," he whispered. "They's more to this nor
what we know. Nahum said somethin' lived in the well that sucks your
life out. He said it must be some'at growed from a round ball like one
we all seen in the meteor stone that fell a year ago June. Sucks an'
burns, he said, an' is jest a cloud of colour like that light out thar
now, that ye can hardly see an' can't tell what it is. Nahum thought it
feeds on everything livin' an' gits stronger all the time. He said he
seen it this last week. It must be somethin' from away off in the sky
like the men from the college last year says the meteor stone was. The
way it's made an' the way it works ain't like no way o' God's world. It's some'at from beyond." So the men paused indecisively as the light from the well grew stronger
and the hitched horses pawed and whinnied in increasing frenzy. It was
truly an awful moment; with terror in that ancient and accursed house
itself, four monstrous sets of fragments--two from the house and two
from the well--in the woodshed behind, and that shaft of unknown and
unholy iridescence from the slimy depths in front. Ammi had restrained
the driver on impulse, forgetting how uninjured he himself was after
the clammy brushing of that coloured vapour in the attic room, but
perhaps it is just as well that he acted as he did. No one will ever
know what was abroad that night; and though the blasphemy from beyond
had not so far hurt any human of unweakened mind, there is no telling
what it might not have done at that last moment, and with its seemingly
increased strength and the special signs of purpose it was soon to
display beneath the half-clouded moonlit sky. *       *       *       *       *

All at once one of the detectives at the window gave a short, sharp
gasp. The others looked at him, and then quickly followed his own
gaze upward to the point at which its idle straying had been suddenly
arrested. There was no need for words. What had been disputed in
country gossip was disputable no longer, and it is because of the
thing which every man of that party agreed in whispering later on,
that strange days are never talked about in Arkham. It is necessary to
premise that there was no wind at that hour of the evening. One did
arise not long afterward, but there was absolutely none then. Even
the dry tips of the lingering hedge-mustard, grey and blighted, and
the fringe on the roof of the standing democrat-wagon were unstirred. And yet amid that tense, godless calm the high bare boughs of all
the trees in the yard were moving. They were twitching morbidly and
spasmodically, clawing in convulsive and epileptic madness at the
moonlit clouds; scratching impotently in the noxious air as if jerked
by some allied and bodiless line of linkage with sub-terrene horrors
writhing and struggling below the black roots. Not a man breathed for several seconds.