Miss Rhodes stood by her door hesitantly. She had read somewhere that to awaken a somnambulist in the midst of his meandering might induce shock. Nevertheless, she couldn’t let her friend move about in this condition at random. She hurried down the stairs.
The library was in total darkness, but when she switched on the light, the sight she saw held her rigid for an instant. Edith had drawn up a chair in the middle of the room and sat there stiffly erect staring at the aquarium. Her hands hung at her sides; her head was slightly tilted downward like a bird watching.
There was something quietly horrible about the taut posture, her sightless concentration. Miss Rhodes touched her on the shoulder. She said gently, “You must have dozed off. I told you not to read so much. Come to bed.”
It was a curious fact that the sleep-walking incident marked the end of that chain of events which had so disturbed Miss Rhodes. As if by magic, Edith roused herself from the mood which had gripped her since coming to this house. And, as if by magic, too, the murmuring sound dwindled and finally passed away. The very weather underwent a change, overcast days giving way to those of brightest sunshine.
Yet deep within Miss Rhodes was the conviction that it was the pause before the storm.
On the night of the nineteenth of May, she was working in the conservatory-studio, doing a new painting. For an hour Edith had silently watched her friend wield her brushes. Then she rose to her feet.
“I have some letters to write,” she said.
Miss Rhodes nodded, absorbed in her work. Across on the far wall, the pendulum clock pushed its ticks through the quiet. The air was sultry. Outside a light rain was beginning to fall, and the smell of wet earth drifted through the open window.
The painting, a still life, was going well, far better than the portrait of Edith, and Miss Rhodes worked with enthusiasm. Perhaps a half hour passed before she became conscious of the silence of the house. Silence pervaded the conservatory like a living entity through which the faint hushing of her brush strokes sounded unnaturally loud. Frowning a little, she went to the connecting door and stood there, listening. There was no sound in the house — no creaking of a chair, no rustling of a paper, nothing. A little chill of unease began to move up her spine.
“Edith!” she called hesitantly. “Are you all right?”
Her voice went bounding down the corridor to stir up a fusillade of echoes, but brought no reply.
Miss Rhodes put down her brush and palette and headed for the library. She reached the entrance and halted uncertainly. The door was locked. She knocked on the panel.
“Edith!” she called. “Let me in.”
That same ringing silence answered her. Again she pounded on the door.
“Edith! Why don’t you answer?”
Her unease gave way to alarm. She turned and ran down the corridor to the kitchen where a master key hung from a hook on the wall. A moment later, she had unlocked the library door and entered the room.
At first glance, she thought the room was empty. Her eyes lowered to the floor and she advanced several steps. For a long moment she stood there, looking down. A dribble of saliva ran from a corner of her mouth. Then she turned very quietly and left the room.
The rain, coming down harder, wrapped itself about her as she went out the door and down the outside steps to the street. She walked down Haney Lane to Brompton Road, heading south east toward Embankment. She moved into Basil Street and followed Basil into Walton, threading her way blindly through the night traffic, unaware of her surroundings, not knowing where she was or where she was going. She entered Pont Street and as she went on, she saw again in her mind’s eye what she had seen in the library — the sight which would live forever in her memory — the body of Edith Halbin lying limp on the floor… a body that was all but unrecognizable because the head and face had been partially devoured! And the aquarium that no longer showed a milky grey solution, was now a sickening pink. And most hideous of all — the marks on the floor, the still wet red convolutions extending from the aquarium to the body of Edith Halbin and from there back to the tank again — marks that might have been made by some crawling thing, satiated and slobbered with blood.
Miss Rhodes came into Cadogan Square. Here she suddenly stopped, threw back her head and screamed….
The Horror out of Lovecraft
DONALD A. WOLLHEIM
“Oh my Gawd, my Gawd,” the voice choked out. “It’s ago’n agin, an this time by day! It’s aout an’ a-movin this very minute, an’ only the Lord knows when it’ll be on us all!”
I do not know what strange thing came over me when I determined on my investigation of the mysterious doings of Eliphas Snodgrass that winter in ’39. There are things that it is better no man know, and there are mysteries that should remain forever hidden from mortal knowledge. The whereabouts of Eliphas Snodgrass during the autumn of ’39, and the ensuing winter, are among these things. Would that I had had the stamina to restrain my curiosity.
I first heard of Eliphas Snodgrass when I was visiting my aunt Eulalia Barker, at her home in East Arkham, in the back districts of Massachusetts. A forgotten terrain, dark and somber, it was a region amongst the oldest in America, not only in the origin of its white settlers (it was settled by several boatloads of surly bondsmen brought over on the packet Nancy B. in 1647, commanded by the time-befogged Captain Hugh Quinge, about whom little is known save that it is believed that he was part Hindoo and that he married an Irish girl from Cork under mysterious circumstances), but in other elder traditions. My maiden-aunt Eulalia was a pleasant enough spinster — she was related to me on my mother’s side, mother being a Barker from Bowser, a little, scarce-known fishing town.
Eulalia (she had moved from Bowser suddenly, many years ago, under circumstances which were never made clear) had struck up a passing acquaintance with the Snodgrass family, who occupied the sedate old Crombleigh mansion on the other side of West Arkham.
How she happened to meet Mrs. Snodgrass, she was seemingly reticent to discuss.
Nonetheless, I had been staying at her house while pursuing my studies in the famous library at Miskatonic University, located in Arkham, but a scant three weeks before she mentioned Eliphas Snodgrass. She spoke of him to me in a troubled tone; she seemed reluctant to do so, but confessed that Eliphas’ mother (who must have had Asiatic blood several generations back) had asked her to communicate to me her worries. As I was known to them for my scholarly research in the realm of the ancient mythologies, she knew me as a scholar. It seemed that Eliphas Snodgrass had been acting oddly. This was not new, as I learned later; it was only that his oddness had taken a curiously disturbing turn.
Eliphas Snodgrass, as I learned from my aunt and from other subsequent investigations, was a young man of about 27 — tall, thin, gaunt, rather stark of countenance, vaguely swarthy (probably an inheritance from his father, Hezekiah Snodgrass, who was reputed to have African blood on his mother’s side, six generations removed) and was given to long spells of brooding. At other times, he would be normal and almost cheerful (as much so as any other Arkham youth) but there were periods when, for weeks at a stretch, he would lock himself away in his chambers and remain grimly quiet. Occasionally strange noises could be heard issuing from his rooms — weird singing and odd conversations. Once in a while, the house would be thrown into a paroxysm of terror by unearthly screeches and a howling that would usually be cut off short in a manner dreadful to contemplate. When queried as to the nature of these noises, Eliphas would turn coldly, and, fixing the inquirer with a chilly stare, mumble something about trouble with his radio.