When school closed the Gardners were
virtually cut off from the world, and sometimes let Ammi do their
errands in town. They were failing curiously both physically and
mentally, and no one was surprised when the news of Mrs. Gardner's
madness stole around. It happened in June, about the anniversary of the meteor's fall, and
the poor woman screamed about things in the air which she could not
describe. In her raving there was not a single specific noun, but
only verbs and pronouns. Things moved and changed and fluttered, and
ears tingled to impulses which were not wholly sounds. Something
was taken away--she was being drained of something--something was
fastening itself on her that ought not to be--someone must make it
keep off--nothing was ever still in the night--the walls and windows
shifted. Nahum did not send her to the county asylum, but let her
wander about the house as long as she was harmless to herself and
others. Even when her expression changed he did nothing. But when the
boys grew afraid of her, and Thaddeus nearly fainted at the way she
made faces at him, he decided to keep her locked in the attic. By July
she had ceased to speak and crawled on all fours, and before that month
was over Nahum got the mad notion that she was slightly luminous in the
dark, as he now clearly saw was the case with the nearby vegetation. It was a little before this that the horses had stampeded. Something
had aroused them in the night, and their neighing and kicking in their
stalls had been terrible. There seemed virtually nothing to do to calm
them, and when Nahum opened the stable door they all bolted out like
frightened woodland deer. It took a week to track all four, and when
found they were seen to be quite useless and unmanageable. Something
had snapped in their brains, and each one had to be shot for its own
good. Nahum borrowed a horse from Ammi for his haying, but found it
would not approach the barn. It shied, balked, and whinnied, and in
the end he could do nothing but drive it into the yard while the men
used their own strength to get the heavy wagon near enough the hayloft
for convenient pitching. And all the while the vegetation was turning
grey and brittle. Even the flowers whose hues had been so strange
were graying now, and the fruit was coming out grey and dwarfed and
tasteless. The asters and goldenrod bloomed grey and distorted, and
the roses and zinnias and hollyhocks in the front yard were such
blasphemous-looking things that Nahum's oldest boy Zenas cut them down. The strangely puffed insects died about that time, even the bees that
had left their hives and taken to the woods. By September all the vegetation was fast crumbling to a greyish
powder, and Nahum feared that the trees would die before the poison
was out of the soil. His wife now had spells of terrific screaming,
and he and the boys were in a constant state of nervous tension. They shunned people now, and when school opened the boys did not go. But it was Ammi, on one of his rare visits, who first realized that
the well water was no longer good. It had an evil taste that was not
exactly fetid nor exactly salty, and Ammi advised his friend to dig
another well on higher ground to use till the soil was good again. Nahum, however, ignored the warning, for he had by that time become
calloused to strange and unpleasant things. He and the boys continued
to use the tainted supply, drinking it as listlessly and mechanically
as they ate their meagre and ill-cooked meals and did their thankless
and monotonous chores through the aimless days. There was something of
stolid resignation about them all, as if they walked half in another
world between lines of nameless guards to a certain and familiar doom. Thaddeus went mad in September after a visit to the well. He had gone
with a pail and had come back empty-handed, shrieking and waving his
arms, and sometimes lapsing into an inane titter or a whisper about
"the moving colours down there." Two in one family was pretty bad,
but Nahum was very brave about it. He let the boy run about for a
week until he began stumbling and hurting himself, and then he shut
him in an attic room across the hall from his mother's. The way they
screamed at each other from behind their locked doors was very
terrible, especially to little Merwin, who fancied they talked in some
terrible language that was not of earth. Merwin was getting frightfully
imaginative, and his restlessness was worse after the shutting away of
the brother who had been his greatest playmate. Almost at the same time the mortality among the livestock commenced. Poultry turned greyish and died very quickly, their meat being found
dry and noisome upon cutting. Hogs grew inordinately fat, then suddenly
began to undergo loathsome changes which no one could explain. Their
meat was of course useless, and Nahum was at his wit's end. No rural
veterinary would approach his place, and the city veterinary from
Arkham was openly baffled. The swine began growing grey and brittle
and falling to pieces before they died, and their eyes and muzzles
developed singular alterations. It was very inexplicable, for they had
never been fed from the tainted vegetation. Then something struck the
cows. Certain areas or sometimes the whole body would be uncannily
shrivelled or compressed, and atrocious collapses or disintegrations
were common. In the last stages--and death was always the result--there
would be a greying and turning brittle like that which beset the hogs. There could be no question of poison, for all the cases occurred in a
locked and undisturbed barn. No bites of prowling things could have
brought the virus, for what live beast of earth can pass through solid
obstacles? It must be only natural disease--yet what disease could
wreak such results was beyond any mind's guessing. When the harvest
came there was not an animal surviving on the place, for the stock
and poultry were dead and the dogs had run away. These dogs, three
in number, had all vanished one night and were never heard of again. The five cats had left some time before, but their going was scarcely
noticed since there now seemed to be no mice, and only Mrs. Gardner had
made pets of the graceful felines. *       *       *       *       *

On the nineteenth of October Nahum staggered into Ammi's house with
hideous news. The death had come to poor Thaddeus in his attic room,
and it had come in a way which could not be told. Nahum had dug a grave
in the railed family plot behind the farm, and had put therein what
he found. There could have been nothing from outside, for the small
barred window and locked door were intact; but it was much as it had
been in the barn. Ammi and his wife consoled the stricken man as best
they could, but shuddered as they did so. Stark terror seemed to cling
round the Gardners and all they touched, and the very presence of one
in the house was a breath from regions unnamed and unnameable.