Edit Two

1. (OUTDOOR ACOUSTIC, WINDY NIGHT, OLD TREES RUSTLE, UNSETTLING SOUNDS, WIND THROUGH A VALLEY)

2. Narrator: West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut. There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glint of sunlight. On the gentle slopes there are farms, ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over old New England secrets in the lee of great ledges; but these are all vacant now, the wide chimneys crumbling and the shingled sides bulging perilously beneath low gambrel roofs.

The old folk have gone away, and foreigners do not like to live there. French-Canadians have tried it, Italians have tried it, and the Poles have come and departed. It is not because of anything that can be seen or heard or handled, but because of something that is imagined. The place is not good for imagination, and does not bring restful dreams at night. It must be this, which keeps the foreigners away, for old Ammi Pierce has never told them of anything he recalls from the strange days. Ammi, whose head has been a little queer for years, is the only one who still remains, or who ever talks of the strange days; and he dares to do this because his house is so near the open fields and the travelled roads around Arkham.

There was once a road over the hills and through the valleys, that ran straight where the blasted heath is now; but people ceased to use it and a new road was laid curving far toward the south. Traces of the old one can still be found amidst the weeds of a returning wilderness, and some of them will doubtless linger even when half the hollows are flooded for the new reservoir. Then the dark woods will be cut down and the blasted heath will slumber far below blue waters whose surface will mirror the sky and ripple in the sun. And the secrets of the strange days will be one with the deep's secrets, one with the hidden lore of Old Ocean, and all the mystery of primal earth.

When I went into the hills and vales to survey for the new reservoir they told me the place was evil. They told me this in Arkham, and because that is a very old town full of witch legends I thought the evil must he something, which grandmas had whispered to children through centuries. The name "blasted heath" seemed to me very odd and theatrical, and I wondered how it had come into the folklore of a Puritan people. Then I saw that dark westward tangle of glens and slopes for myself, end ceased to wonder at anything beside its own elder mystery. It was morning when I saw it, but shadow lurked always there. The trees grew too thickly, and their trunks were too big for any healthy New England wood. There was too much silence in the dim alleys between them, and the floor was too soft with the dank moss and matting of infinite years of decay.

In the open spaces, mostly along the line of the old road, there were little hillside farms; sometimes with all the buildings standing, sometimes with only one or two, and sometimes with only a lone chimney or fast-filling cellar. Weeds and briers reigned, and furtive wild things rustled in the undergrowth. Upon everything was a haze of restlessness and oppression, a touch of the unreal and the grotesque, as if some vital element of perspective or chiaroscuro were awry. I did not wonder that the foreigners would not stay, for this was no region to sleep in. It was too much like a landscape of Salvator Rosa; too much like some forbidden woodcut in a tale of terror.

But even all this was not so bad as the blasted heath. I knew it the moment I came upon it at the bottom of a spacious valley; for no other name could fit such a thing, or any other thing fit such a name. It was as if the poet had coined the phrase from having seen this one particular region. It must, I thought as I viewed it, be the outcome of a fire; but why had nothing new ever grown over these five acres of grey desolation that sprawled open to the sky like a great spot eaten by acid in the woods and fields? It lay largely to the north of the ancient road line, but encroached a little on the other side. I felt an odd reluctance about approaching, and did so at last only because my business took me through and past it. There was no vegetation of any kind on that broad expanse, but only a fine grey dust or ash, which no wind seemed ever to blow about. The trees near it were sickly and stunted, and many dead trunks stood or lay rotting at the rim. As I walked hurriedly by I saw the tumbled bricks and stones of an old chimney and cellar on my right, and the yawning black maw of an abandoned well whose stagnant vapours played strange tricks with the hues of the sunlight. Even the long, dark woodland climb beyond seemed welcome in contrast, and I marvelled no more at the frightened whispers of Arkham people. There had been no house or ruin near; even in the old days the place must have been lonely and remote. And at twilight, dreading to pass that ominous spot, I walked circuitously back to the town by the curious road on the south. I vaguely wished some clouds would gather, for an odd timidity about the deep-skied voids above had crept into my soul.

In the evening I asked old people in Arkham about the blasted heath, and what was meant by that phrase "strange days" which so many evasively muttered. I could not, however, get any good answers except that all the mystery was much more recent than I had dreamed. It was not a matter of old legendry at all, but something within the lifetime of those who spoke. It had happened in the 'eighties, and a family had disappeared or was killed. Speakers would not be exact; and because they all told me to pay no attention to old Ammi Pierce's crazy tales, I sought him out the next morning, having heard that he lived alone in the ancient tottering cottage where the trees first begin to get very thick. It was a fearsomely ancient place, and had begun to exude the faint miasmal odour, which clings about houses that have stood too long. Only with persistent knocking could I rouse the aged man, and when he shuffled timidly to the door could tell he was not glad to see me. He was not so feeble as I had expected; but his eyes drooped in a curious way, and his unkempt clothing and white beard made him seem very worn and dismal.

3. (PERSISTANT KNOCKING, SHUFFLING BEHIND
DOOR, DOOR CREAKS OPEN)

4. Old Ammi Pierce: (Timidly) What is it?

5. Narrator: Err, sorry to bother you sir, but I’m doing a survey concerning reservoir and lake developments here. I was wondering if you could tell me what you know about the area?

6. Old Ammi Pierce: I say good riddance; those miles of old wood and farmland ought to be blotted out by a lake - and good riddance to those valleys. They are better under water now - (lowers his voice and takes a deep breath) better under water since the strange days.

7. Narrator: It was then that I heard the story, and as the
rambling voice scraped and whispered on I shivered again and again spite the summer day. Often I had to recall the speaker from ramblings, piece out scientific points which he knew only by a fading parrot memory of professors' talk, or bridge over gaps, where his sense of logic and continuity broke down. When he was done I did not wonder that his mind had snapped a trifle, or that the folk of Arkham would not speak much of the blasted heath. I hurried back before sunset to my hotel, unwilling to have the stars come out above me in the open; and the next day returned to - Boston to give up my position. I could not go into that dim chaos of old forest and slope again, or face another time that grey blasted heath where the black well yawned deep beside the tumbled bricks and stones. The reservoir will soon be built now, and all those elder secrets will be safe forever under watery fathoms. But even then I do not believe I would like to visit that country by night - at least not when the sinister stars are out; and nothing could bribe me to drink the new city water of Arkham.

8. Old Ammi Pierce: It all began with the meteorite. Before that time there had been no wild legends at all since the witch trials, and even then these western woods were not feared half so much as the small island in the Miskatonic where the devil held court beside a curious, 'lone altar older than the Indians. These were not haunted woods, and their fantastic dusk was never terrible till the strange days. Then there had come that white noontide cloud, that string of explosions in the air, and that pillar of smoke from the valley far in the wood. And by night all Arkham had heard of the great rock that fell out of the sky and bedded itself in the ground beside the well at the Nahum Gardner place. That was the house, which had stood where the blasted heath was to come - the trim white Nahum Gardner house amidst its fertile gardens and orchards.

Nahum had come to town to tell people about the stone, and dropped in at mine on the way. I was forty then, and me and my wife had gone with the three professors from Miskatonic University who hastened out the next morning to see the weird visitor from unknown stellar space, and had wondered why Nahum had called it so large the day before.

9. (OUTDOOR ACOUSTICS, SUMMER WEATHER, BIRDS SINGING, GROUP WALK THROUGH ORCHARD TO THE COMET CRATER)

10. Nahum Gardner: The meteors down by the well (Stops the group) here it is.

11. Professor: Well it certainly doesn’t look as big as you implied on the telephone.

12. Nahum Gardner: (Surprised)It’s shrunk! It shrank overnigh-

13. Professor: (Interrupting) Preposterous! Stones do not
shrink.

14. Nahum Gardner: I saw it glowing overnight too.

15. Professor: Well that’s probably just the lingering heat from entering the atmosphere. May I take a sample?

16. Nahum Gardner: By all means.

17. Professor: (Moving in the dirt to the comet and chisels, then gouges at the strange, soft plastic-like rock. Muttering:) How strange, this rock is remarkably soft. I only have to gouge at the surface. Nahum, have you something I can take this back to the college in, it’s still rather hot?

18. Nahum Gardner: Sure, there’s a pail in the kitchen, I’ll just go fetch you it. (Leaves for the kitchen)

19. (BACK TO AMMI’S HOME IN THE PRESENT)

20. Old Ami Pierce: (Narrating) On the trip back we stopped at mine to rest, and thought it odd when Mrs. Pierce remarked that the fragment was growing smaller and burning the bottom of the pail. Truly, it was not large, but I suggested perhaps they had taken less than they thought.

The day after that - all this was in June of '82 - the professors had trooped out again in a great excitement.

21. (AMMI’S DOORWAY IN THE PAST,
PROFESSORS PRESENT)

22. Professor: Such queer things the specimen has done!

23. Ammi Pierce: Really, what exactly is so queer that you should come knocking at this hour?

24. Professor: Yes of course, my apologies - it had faded wholly away when we put it in a glass beaker.

25. Ammi Pierce: Oh my, now that is very queer.

26. Professor: The beaker had gone, too, and such an affinity for silicon. It had acted quite unbelievably in the laboratory; doing nothing at all and showing no occluded gases when heated on charcoal, being wholly negative in the borax bead, and soon proving itself absolutely non-volatile at any producible temperature, including that of the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe. On an anvil it appeared highly malleable, and in the dark its luminosity was very marked. Stubbornly refusing to grow cool, it soon had the college in a state of real excitement; and when upon heating before the spectroscope it displayed shining bands unlike any known colours of the normal spectrum there was much breathless talk of new elements, bizarre optical properties, and other things which puzzled men of science are wont to say when faced by the unknown.

27. (DRIVING BACK TO ORCHARD TO REVISIT THE COMET)

28. Old Ammi Pierce: (Narrating) Hot as it was, they tested it in a crucible with all the proper reagents. Water did nothing. Hydrochloric acid was the same. Nitric acid and even aqua regia merely hissed and spattered against its torrid invulnerability. I had difficulty in recalling all these things, but recognized some solvents as the professor mentioned them in the usual order of use as we returned to the Orchard to visit the stony messenger from the stars.

29. Professor: There were ammonia and caustic soda, alcohol and ether, nauseous carbon disulphide and a dozen others; but although the weight grew steadily less as time passed, and the fragment seemed to be slightly cooling, there was no change in the solvents to show that they had attacked the substance at all.

30. Ammi Pierce: (Driving) But it was definitely a metal?

31. Professor: Beyond a doubt. It was magnetic, for one thing; and after its immersion in the acid solvents there seemed to be faint traces of the Widmanstatten figures found on meteoric iron. When the cooling had grown very considerable, the testing was carried on in glass; and it was in a glass beaker that they left all the chips made of the original fragment during the work. The next morning both chips and beaker were gone without trace, and only a charred spot marked the place on the wooden shelf where they had been.

32. Professor: (Agape). My god, it most certainly has shrunk, there’s no doubt there I think we can agree.

33. Nahum Gardner: Just as I said it had. All around the comet is a vacant space, except where the earth had caved in; and whereas it had been a good seven feet across like you saw the day before its now scarcely five. It’s still hot as well. See for yourself.

34. Professor: Indeed, we need another sample, the other one just seemed to, well, to disappear - the beaker too.

35. Nahum Gardner: Remarkable.

36. Professor: (Chiselling) Quite. Now… if I can just get a bigger sample than before…

37. Ammi Pierce: Hang on… What’s that coloured globule, embedded in the rock?

38. Nahum Gardner: Yes, what is that Professor? It’s not the same as the rest of the rock now, is it?

39. Professor: Indeed. Quite unusual; the colour, yes this is the same colour we saw the bands of the rock emit under the microscope. You see… it’s… almost alien.

40. Nahum Gardner: And so glossy.

41. Professor: (Tapping the rock). It seems to be quite brittle, hollow in fact. Stand back, I’m going to try the hammer on it.

(HEAVY BLOW OF THE HAMMER BURSTS THE GLOBULE WITH A SMALL POP AND THE GLOBULE DISAPPEARS)

No…. that’s impossible.

42. Ammi Pierce: What’s wrong professor?

43. Professor: Nothing was emitted, and all trace of the thing vanished with the puncturing. It’s left behind a hollow spherical space, which is roughly three inches across.

44. Nahum Gardner: Would it be likely there might be more globules in the comet, sir?

45. Ammi Pierce: Makes sense.

46. Professor: Very well, would you pass me the hand drill from my satchel?

47. (DRILLING FADES TO OLD AMMI PIERCE’S HOUSE)

48. Old Ammi Pierce: Conjecture was vain; so after a futile attempt to find additional globules by drilling, we left again with the new specimen, which proved, however, as baffling in the laboratory as its predecessor. Aside from being almost plastic, having heat, magnetism, and slight luminosity, cooling slightly in powerful acids, possessing an unknown spectrum, wasting away in air, and attacking silicon compounds with mutual destruction as a result, it presented no identifying features whatsoever; and at the end of the tests the college scientists were forced to own that they could not place it. It was nothing of this earth, but a piece of the great outside; and as such dowered with outside properties and obedient to outside laws.

49. (THUNDERSTORM, RAIN, WIND, BOLT HITTING THE GROUND)

50. Old Ammi Pierce: That night there was a thunderstorm, and when the professors went out to Nahum's the next day they met with a bitter disappointment.

51. (FADE TO NEXT MORNING, WEATHER CALM, SOUND OF DIGGING)

52. Nahum Gardner: I’m sorry to disappoint you gentlemen, but the stone - it’s definitely gone. No matter how much you dig its just gone, simple as that.

53. Ammi Pierce: It can’t just be gone, surely.

54. Professor: The immediate evidence would certainly point to that conclusion. But it just can’t be possible. Tell me again, Nahum, what you saw.

55. Nahum Gardner: Well like I keep saying, it seemed to draw the lightning, from the storm, to it, like a lightning rod perhaps.

56. Ammi Pierce: But… surely a lightning rod has to be the highest point, the quickest direct route to the earth?

57. Nahum Gardner: Six times within an hour I saw the lightning strike the furrow in the front yard, and when the storm was over nothing remained but a ragged pit by the well-sweep, half-choked with a caved-in earth. I swear I saw the whole thing unfold before my very eyes.

58. Professor: I don’t doubt you Nahum. But that leaves one possibly explanation. It must have been the magnetic properties we discovered in the rock samples back at the lab. It must have had some effect on the lightning’s path to the earth.

59. Ammi Pierce: So, what else can we do professor?

60. Professor: There is nothing left to do but go back to the laboratory and test again the fragment left cased in lead.

61. (RETURN TO OLD AMMI PIERCE’S HOME)

62. Old Ammi Pierce: That fragment lasted a week, at the end of which nothing of value had been learned of it. When it had gone, no residue was left behind, and in time the professors felt scarcely sure they had indeed seen with waking eyes that cryptic vestige of the fathomless gulfs outside; that lone, weird message from other universes and other realms of matter, force, and entity.
As was natural, the Arkham papers made much of the incident with its collegiate sponsoring, and sent reporters to talk with Nahum Gardner and his family. At least one Boston daily also sent a scribe, and Nahum quickly became a kind of local celebrity. He was a lean, genial person of about fifty, living with his wife and three sons on the pleasant farmstead in the valley. He and myself exchanged visits frequently, as did our wives; and I have nothing but praise for him after all these years. He seemed slightly proud of the notice his place had attracted, and talked often of the meteorite in the succeeding weeks. That July and August were hot; and Nahum worked hard at his haying in the ten-acre pasture across Chapman's Brook; his rattling wane wearing deep ruts in the shadowy lanes between. The labour tired him more than it had in other years, and he felt that age was beginning to tell on him.

Then fell the time of fruit and harvest. The pears and apples slowly ripened, and Nahum vowed that his orchards were prospering as never before. The fruit was growing to phenomenal size and unwonted gloss, and in such abundance that extra barrels were ordered to handle the future crop. But with the ripening came sore disappointment, for of all that gorgeous array of specious lusciousness not one single jot was fit to eat. Into the fine flavour of the pears and apples had crept a stealthy bitterness and sickish-ness, so that even the smallest bites induced a lasting disgust. It was the same with the melons and tomatoes, and Nahum sadly saw that his entire crop was lost. Quick to connect events, he declared that the meteorite had poisoned the soil, and thanked Heaven that most of the other crops were in the upland lot along the road.

Winter came early, and was very cold. I saw Nahum less often than usual, and observed that he had begun to look worried. The rest of his family too, seemed to have grown taciturn; and were far from steady in their church going or their attendance at the various social events of the countryside. For this reserve or melancholy no cause could be found, though the entire household confessed now and then to poorer health and a feeling of vague disquiet. Nahum himself gave the most definite statement of anyone when he said he was disturbed about certain footprints in the snow. They were the usual winter prints of red squirrels, white rabbits, and foxes, but the brooding farmer professed to see something not quite right about their nature and arrangement. He was never specific, but appeared to think that they were not as characteristic of the anatomy and habits of squirrels and rabbits and foxes as they ought to be. I listened without interest to this talk until one night when I drove past Nahum's house in my sleigh on the way back from Clark's Comer. There had been a moon, and a rabbit had run across the road, and the leaps of that rabbit were longer than either my horse or myself liked. The latter, indeed, had almost run away when brought up by a firm rein. Thereafter I gave Nahum's tales more respect, and wondered why the Gardner dogs seemed so cowed and quivering every morning. They had, it developed, nearly lost the spirit to bark.

In February the McGregor boys from Meadow Hill were out shooting woodchucks, and not far from the Gardner place bagged a very peculiar specimen. The proportions of its body seemed slightly altered in a queer way impossible to describe, while its face had taken on an expression which no one ever saw in a woodchuck before. The boys were genuinely frightened, and threw the thing away at once, so that only their grotesque tales of it ever reached the people of the countryside. But the shying of horses near Nahum's house had now become an acknowledged thing, and the entire basis for a cycle of whispered legend was fast taking form.

People vowed that the snow melted faster around Nahum's than it did anywhere else, and early in March there was an awed discussion in Potter's general store at Clark's Corners. Stephen Rice had driven past Gardner's in the morning, and had noticed the skunk cabbages coming up through the mud by the woods across the road. Never were things of such size seen before, and they held strange colours that could not be put into any words. Their shapes were monstrous, and the horse had snorted at an odour, which struck Stephen as wholly unprecedented. That afternoon several persons drove past to see the abnormal growth, and all agreed that plants of that kind ought never to sprout in a healthy world. The bad fruit of the fall before was freely mentioned, and it went from mouth to mouth that there was poison in Nahum's ground. Of course it was the meteorite; and remembering how strange the men from the college had found that stone to be, several farmers spoke about the matter to them.

One day they paid Nahum a visit; but having no love of wild tales and folklore were very conservative in what they inferred. The plants were certainly odd, but all skunk cabbages are more or less odd in shape and hue. Perhaps some mineral element from the stone had entered the soil, but it would soon be washed away. And as for the footprints and frightened horses - of course this was mere country talk, which such a phenomenon as the comet would be certain to start. There was really nothing for serious men to do in cases of wild gossip, for superstitious rustics will say and believe anything. And so all through the strange days the professors stayed away in contempt. Only one of them, when given two phials of dust for analysis in a police job over a year and half later, recalled that the queer colour of that skunk-cabbage had been very like one of the anomalous bands of light shown by the meteor fragment in the college spectroscope, and like the brittle globule found imbedded in the stone from the abyss. The samples in this analysis case gave the same odd bands at first, though later they lost the property.

The trees budded prematurely around Nahum's, and at night they swayed ominously in the wind. Nahum's second son Thaddeus, a lad of fifteen, swore that they swayed also when there was no wind; but even the gossips would not credit this. Certainly, however, restlessness was in the air. The entire Gardner family developed the habit of stealthy listening, though not for any sound which they could consciously name. The listening was, indeed, rather a product of moments when consciousness seemed half to slip away. Unfortunately such moments increased week by week, till it became common speech that "something was wrong with all Nahum's folks." When the early saxifrage came out it had another strange colour; not quite like that of the skunk cabbage, but plainly related and equally unknown to anyone who saw it. Nahum took some blossoms to Arkham and showed them to the editor of the Gazette, but that dignitary did no more than write a humorous article about them, in which the dark fears of rustics were held up to polite ridicule. It was a mistake of Nahum's to tell a stolid city man about the way the great, overgrown mourning-cloak butterflies behaved in connection with these saxifrages.

April brought a kind of madness to the country folk, and began that disuse of the road past Nahum's which led to its ultimate abandonment. It was the vegetation. All the orchard trees blossomed forth in strange colours, and through the stony soil of the yard and adjacent pasturage there sprang up a bizarre growth, which only a botanist could connect with the proper flora of the region. No sane wholesome colours were anywhere to be seen except in the green grass and leafage; but everywhere were those hectic and prismatic variants of some diseased, underlying primary tone without a place among the' known tints of earth. The "Dutchman's breeches" became a thing of sinister menace, and the bloodroots grew insolent in their chromatic perversion. Me and the Gardner’s thought that most of the colours had a sort of haunting familiarity, and decided that they reminded one of the brittle globule in the meteor. Nahum ploughed and sowed the ten-acre pasture and the upland lot, but did nothing with the land around the house. He knew it would be of no use, and hoped that the summer's strange growths would draw all the poison from the soil. He was prepared for almost anything now, and had grown used to the sense of something near him waiting to be heard. The shunning of his house by neighbours told on him, of course; but it told on his wife more. The boys were better off, being at school each day; but they could not help being frightened by the gossip. Thaddeus, an especially sensitive youth, suffered the most.

In May the insects came, and Nahum's place became a nightmare of buzzing and crawling. Most of the creatures seemed not quite usual in their aspects and motions, and their nocturnal habits contradicted all former experience. The Gardner’s took to watching at night - watching in all directions at random for something - they could not tell what. It was then that they owned that Thaddeus had been right about the trees.

63. (THE GARDNER KITCHEN, FOOD COOKING, GRAMMAPHONE PLAYING)

64. Mrs. Gardner: (Talking to herself) ooh, this pie smells delicious. The boys will eat well tonight. Hang on… what on earth?
(Gasps)
(Shouting) THADDEUS! THADDEUS!

65. Thaddeus Gardner: (Runs in) What is it mother?

66. Mrs. Gardner: (Shaken) you were right. The trees. They’re moving! Look, look out the window!

67. Thaddeus Gardner: I told you! The swollen boughs in the moonlight, just as I keep telling you!

68. Mrs. Gardner: But, there’s no wind. It must be the sap surely?

69. Thaddeus Gardner: Strangeness has come into everything growing now. Everything.

70. (OLD AMMI PIERCE’S HOME, EERIE NON-DIAGETIC SOUND)

71. Old Ammi Pierce: Yet it was none of Nahum's family at all who made the next discovery. Familiarity had dulled them, and a timid windmill salesman from Bolton who drove by one night in ignorance of the country legends glimpsed what they could not see. What he told in Arkham was given a short paragraph in the Gazette; and it was there that all the farmers, Nahum included, saw it first. The night had been dark and the buggy-lamps faint, but around a farm in the valley, which everyone knew from the account, must be Nahum's, the darkness had been less thick. A dim though distinct luminosity seemed to inhere in all the vegetation, grass, leaves, and blossoms alike, while at one moment a detached piece of the phosphorescence appeared to stir furtively in the yard near the barn.

The grass had so far seemed untouched, and the cows were freely pastured in the lot near the house, but toward the end of May the milk began to be bad. Then Nahum had the cows driven to the uplands, after which this trouble ceased. Not long after this the change in grass and leaves became apparent to the eye. All the verdure was going grey, and was developing a highly singular quality of brittleness. I was now the only person who ever visited the place, and my visits were becoming fewer and fewer. When school closed the Gardner’s were virtually cut off from the world, and sometimes let me 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. Something was taken away - she was being drained of something - something was fastening itself on her that ought not to be.

72. (MRS. GARDNER’S MADNESS)

73. Mrs Gardner: (Hysterical). They move! Change! Flutter! Urrrrrgh!. Someone must make it keep off – nothing is still in the night!
(Piercing scream). The walls and windows shift! The colours! THE COLOURS!

74. (OLD AMMI PIERCE’S HOME, NON DIAGETIC MUTTERINGS, GROANING, TENSION, SCUFFLING, EERIE SOUNDS)

75. Old Ammi Pierce: 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.

76. (SPOOKED/TETCHY HORSES)

77. Old Ammi Pierce: 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.
(Gun shot, horse dying)
Nahum borrowed my horse 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 greying now, and the fruit was coming out grey and dwarfed and tasteless. The asters and golden-rod 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.