Yet the outcome
was the same, for in one feverish kaleidoscopic instant there burst up
from that doomed and accursed farm a gleamingly eruptive cataclysm of
unnatural sparks and substance; blurring the glance of the few who saw
it, and sending forth to the zenith a bombarding cloudburst of such
coloured and fantastic fragments as our universe must needs disown. Through quickly re-closing vapours they followed the great morbidity
that had vanished, and in another second they had vanished too. Behind
and below was only a darkness to which the men dared not return, and
all about was a mounting wind which seemed to sweep down in black,
frore gusts from interstellar space. It shrieked and howled, and lashed
the fields and distorted woods in a mad cosmic frenzy, till soon the
trembling party realized it would be no use waiting for the moon to
show what was left down there at Nahum's. Too awed even to hint theories, the seven shaking men trudged back
toward Arkham by the north road. Ammi was worse than his fellows,
and begged them to see him inside his own kitchen, instead of
keeping straight on to town. He did not wish to cross the blighted,
wind-whipped woods alone to his home on the main road. For he had had
an added shock that the others were spared, and was crushed for ever
with a brooding fear he dared not even mention for many years to come. As the rest of the watchers on that tempestuous hill had stolidly set
their faces toward the road, Ammi had looked back an instant at the
shadowed valley of desolation so lately sheltering his ill-starred
friend. And from that stricken, far-away spot he had seen something
feebly rise, only to sink down again upon the place from which the
great shapeless horror had shot into the sky. It was just a colour--but
not any colour of our earth or heavens. And because Ammi recognized
that colour, and knew that this last faint remnant must still lurk down
there in the well, he has never been quite right since. Ammi would never go near the place again. It is forty-four years now
since the horror happened, but he has never been there, and will be
glad when the new reservoir blots it out. I shall be glad, too, for I
do not like the way the sunlight changed colour around the mouth of
that abandoned well I passed. I hope the water will always be very
deep--but even so, I shall never drink it. I do not think I shall visit
the Arkham country hereafter. Three of the men who had been with Ammi
returned the next morning to see the ruins by daylight, but there were
not any real ruins. Only the bricks of the chimney, the stones of the
cellar, some mineral and metallic litter here and there, and the rim
of that nefandous well. Save for Ammi's dead horse, which they towed
away and buried, and the buggy which they shortly returned to him,
everything that had ever been living had gone. Five eldritch acres of
dusty grey desert remained, nor has anything ever grown there since. To this day it sprawls open to the sky like a great spot eaten by acid
in the woods and fields, and the few who have ever dared glimpse it in
spite of the rural tales have named it "the blasted heath." *       *       *       *       *

The rural tales are queer. They might be even queerer if city men
and college chemists could be interested enough to analyze the water
from that disused well, or the grey dust that no wind seems ever to
disperse. Botanists, too, ought to study the stunted flora on the
borders of that spot, for they might shed light on the country notion
that the blight is spreading--little by little, perhaps an inch a year. People say the colour of the neighboring herbage is not quite right
in the spring, and that wild things leave queer prints in the light
winter snow. Snow never seems quite so heavy on the blasted heath as
it is elsewhere. Horses--the few that are left in this motor age--grow
skittish in the silent valley; and hunters cannot depend on their dogs
too near the splotch of greyish dust. They say the mental influences are very bad, too; numbers went queer in
the years after Nahum's taking, and always they lacked the power to get
away. Then the stronger-minded folk all left the region, and only the
foreigners tried to live in the crumbling old homesteads. They could
not stay, though; and one sometimes wonders what insight beyond ours
their wild, weird stories of whispered magic have given them. Their
dreams at night, they protest, are very horrible in that grotesque
country; and surely the very look of the dark realm is enough to stir
a morbid fancy. No traveler has ever escaped a sense of strangeness in
those deep ravines, and artists shiver as they paint thick woods whose
mystery is as much of the spirits as of the eye. I myself am curious
about the sensation I derived from my one lone walk before Ammi told
me his tale. When twilight came I had vaguely wished some clouds would
gather, for odd timidity about the deep skyey voids above had crept
into my soul. Do not ask me for my opinion. I do not know--that is all. There was no
one but Ammi to question; for Arkham people will not talk about the
strange days, and all three professors who saw the aerolite and its
coloured globule are dead. There were other globules--depend upon that. One must have fed itself and escaped, and probably there was another
which was too late. No doubt it is still down the well--I know there
was something wrong with the sunlight I saw above that miasmal brink. The rustics say the blight creeps an inch a year, so perhaps there is
a kind of growth or nourishment even now. But whatever demon hatchling
is there, it must be tethered to something or else it would quickly
spread. Is it fastened to the roots of those trees that claw the air? One of the current Arkham tales is about fat oaks that shine and move
as they ought not to do at night. What it is, only God knows. In terms of matter I suppose the thing
Ammi described would be called a gas, but this gas obeyed laws that
are not of our cosmos. This was no fruit of such worlds and suns as
shine on the telescopes and photographic plates of our observatories. This was no breath from the skies whose motions and dimensions our
astronomers measure or deem too vast to measure. It was just a colour
out of space--a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity
beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns
the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open
before our frenzied eyes. I doubt very much if Ammi consciously lied to me, and I do not think
his tale was all a freak of madness as the townsfolk had forewarned. Something terrible came to the hills and valleys on that meteor,
and something terrible--though I know not in what proportion--still
remains. I shall be glad to see the water come. Meanwhile I hope
nothing will happen to Ammi. He saw so much of the thing--and its
influence was so insidious. Why has he never been able to move away?