The “blasted heath,” drawn by Lovecraft (from a letter to F. Lee Baldwin, dated March 27, 1934).
The rural tales are queer. They might be even queerer if city men and college chemists could be interested enough to analyse 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 neighbouring 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 stores 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 traveller 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 spirit 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 an 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 aërolite 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 the 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 townfolk 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? How clearly he recalled those dying words of Nahum’s—“can’t git away . . . draws ye . . . ye know summ’at’s comin’, but ’tain’t no use . . .” Ammi is such a good old man—when the reservoir gang gets to work I must write the chief engineer to keep a sharp watch on him. I would hate to think of him as the grey, twisted, brittle monstrosity which persists more and more in troubling my sleep.
1. Written in March 1927, the tale first appeared in Amazing Stories 2, no. 6 (September 1927), 557–67.
From The Night Side: Masterpieces of the Strange and Terrible. New York: Rinehart & Co., 1947 (artist: Lee Brown Coye)
2. It is likely that the narrator speaks of the intended Quabbin Reservoir, for which surveys began in 1922 (although construction was delayed until 1939). Lovecraft denied that the Quabbin Reservoir was the subject of the tale; rather, he said in a letter, it was the Scituate Reservoir in Rhode Island, built in 1926 (Lovecraft to Richard Ely Morse, October 13, 1935, described in I Am Providence). However, Joshi does not trust Lovecraft’s judgment on the source of the narrator’s tale and believes that he was “also” thinking of the Quabbin Reservoir.
3. This characteristic—the alteration of the environment where darker powers rule—can be seen in “The Dunwich Horror”: “The trees of the frequent forest belt seem too large. . . .” The quality was first noted by Bill Wallace in “The Untravelled Roads ’Round Arkham.”
4. An Italian Baroque painter of fantastic landscapes, he was born in 1615 and died in 1673.
5. The “blasted heath” is a phrase from Milton’s Paradise Lost as well as Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Which writer the narrator is indebted to is a matter of debate. Robert H. Waugh, in his essay “The Blasted Heath in ‘The Colour Out of Space,’” argues that both poets were in the narrator’s mind, and elements from both works appear throughout the tale.
6. The Salem Witch Trials, that is. See “The Festival,” note 11, above.
7. A device for raising and lowering buckets into a well.
A well-sweep.
8. Gases embedded in minerals, released in the process of heating metal or dissolving crystals or occasionally simply by cracking the structure. Such gases are a problem to be dealt with in mining, where they can be poisonous or explosive.
9. A test developed by the Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius in 1812 to check for the presence of certain metals in substances.
10. A device invented in 1813 by American chemist Robert Hare and British mineralogist Edward Daniel Clarke to produce a high-temperature flame, used for chemical analysis—now superseded by the oxyacetylene blowpipe.
11. A scientific instrument permitting the analysis of the components of metals by study of the spectrum of colors displayed upon heating the metal to incandescence. German oculist Joseph von Fraunhofer (1787–1826) first understood that the lines of the spectrum displayed by materials revealed their composition, but his work depended on a simple prism to diffract the light source to a separate viewing scope, and detailed measurements were difficult to perform. It was not until 1859 that two scientists, Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchoff, working on an older experiment of passing sunlight through a strong sodium flame, developed the first spectroscope. The spectroscope that Bunsen and Kirchoff developed had an integrated slit, prism, and collimator.
12. A new element, protactinium, had been discovered in 1913; the next element to be discovered, technetium, was not found until 1937.
13. A mixture of nitric acid and hydrochloric acid, so-called because it dissolves the “royal” metals of gold and platinum.
14. Carbon disulphide inhalation does indeed cause nausea, but many other solvents do as well.
15. The scientist Count Alois von Beckh Widmanstätten (1753–1849), born in Styria, in southeast Austria, learned the printing trade from his father as a boy and subsequently held jobs ranging from Emperor Franz Joseph I’s technology officer to submanager of the Cotton Spinning and Weaving Mills of Pottendorf, a small market town situated twenty-one miles south of Vienna. The first such mill in Austria, established in 1801, it was, according to Joseph Arenstein’s Austria at the International Exhibition of 1862, already a substantial operation in 1804, the year of Widmanstätten’s employ there, with “18,000 mules and 430 throstle spindles a-going, furnishing about 12,000 knots of yarn (5 lb. Engl[ish] each) annually” (65). Widmanstätten is wrongly credited with discovering magnetic patterns in iron meteors in 1808. The discovery actually occ
urred sometime before 1804, when an English geologist, known only as G. Thomson, published a description of the patterns in the Bibliothèque Britannique. “Widmanstätten figures” are latticeworks of nickel-iron crystals, revealed by application of nitric acid.
16. Cf. Ambrose Bierce’s “The Damned Thing,” mentioned in “The Hound,” note 16, above:
At each end of the solar spectrum the chemist can detect the presence of what are known as “actinic” rays. They represent colors—integral colors in the composition of light—which we are unable to discern. The human eye is an imperfect instrument; its range is but a few octaves of the real “chromatic scale.” I am not mad; there are colors that we cannot see.
And, God help me! the Damned Thing is of such a color!
17. There is a long folkloric association of gelatinous masses associated with meteorites, stretching back to fourteenth-century Latin texts, according to David Haden (“Some Notes on the Origins of Lovecraft’s ‘The Colour Out of Space’” in his Lovecraft in Historical Context: Further Essays and Notes). See generally Hilary Belcher and Erica Swale’s “To Catch a Falling Star.” For example, in reporting on a meteorite landing near Lowville, New York, in 1846, Scientific American wrote, “It [the meteor] appeared larger than the sun, illumined the hemisphere nearly as light as day. A large company of the citizens immediately repaired to the spot [of the meteorite’s landing] and found a body of fetid jelly, four feet in diameter.”
18. The stone here appears to have the characteristics of the “thunderstones” described by Charles Fort, in The Book of the Damned (1919), supposed to have fallen “in or with lightning”—that is, fallen from the sky. Fort concluded that while the stones’ existence was irrefutable, the connection with lightning was a myth and the stones were already present before lightning struck the spot (103). See “The Whisperer in Darkness,” note 10, below, for more about Fort.
19. A common wildflower, Dicentra cucullaria.
Dutchman’s breeches.
20. Another pervasive wildflower, Sanguinaria canadensis.
Bloodroot.
21. We are led to believe that Ammi beat or smashed the disintegrating wife to death, but no murder weapon is mentioned. There is no firewood in the house; perhaps he found a walking stick or broom or used a bedpost.
22. A flatbed wagon with two or more seats.
23. Pliny the Elder recorded this phenomenon in his Naturalis Historia (published ca. 77–79 CE):
Over and besides, there be fires seene suddainely to arise, both in waters and also about the bodies of men. Valerius Antias reporteth, That the lake Thrasymenus once burned all over: also that Servius Tullius in his childhood, as hee lay asleepe, had a light fire shone out of his head: likewise, as L. Martius made an Oration in open audience to the armie, after the two Scipios were slaine in Spain, and exhorted his souldiors to revenge their death, his head was on a flaming fire in the same sort. More of this argument, and in better order, will we write soone hereafter. For now we exhibite and shew the mervailes of all things huddled and intermingled together. But in the meane while, my mind being passed beyond the interpretation of Nature, hasteneth to lead as it were by the hand the minds also of the readers, throughout the whole world.
It is explained by the fact that a coronal discharge of a grounded object in an electrical field, usually a thunderstorm, causes luminous plasma to appear. Observed (as a purplish glowing flame) by sailors on the masts of ships, it was attributed to St. Erasmus or St. Ermo (corrupted to St. Elmo), the patron saint of Mediterranean sailors.
24. In Christianity, Pentecost is observed fifty days after Easter:
And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place.
And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.
And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them.
And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance (Acts 2:1–4, King James Version).
25. A rapid, erotic Latin dance of the sixteenth century, often performed to the accompaniment of castanets and seen as risqué. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it had evolved, in France and Spain, into a slower dance form that the authorities of both countries found relatively unobjectionable.
26. Henry Fuseli, born Füssli (1741–1825), Swiss painter of fantastic visions who spent his adult life in England. His most famous painting is The Nightmare (1781).
27. The Swan, also known by other bird names, a constellation lying in the plane of the Milky Way, of unusual density with over 145 visible stars. The most prominent, Alpha Cygni, or Deneb, a brilliant white star, the nineteenth-brightest in the sky. Its name is derived from the Arabic Al Dhanab al Daja¯jah, the hen’s tail.
28. An obsolete word meaning very cold, frozen.
29. “Over half a century now” in later publications.
30. Unmentionable, unspeakable.
Poster from Colour from the Dark (Studio Interzona, 2008).
Poster from Die, Monster, Die! (American International Pictures, 1965), loosely based on “The Colour Out of Space.”
The Dunwich Horror1
“The Dunwich Horror” has been viewed as biblical parody, and it clearly borrows elements from Arthur Machen’s “Great God Pan,” Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla,” Fitz-James O’Brien’s “What Was It?” and Ambrose Bierce’s “The Wendigo.” Despite the familiarity of the ideas, it was a great hit with the Weird Tales readership and remains one of Lovecraft’s most popular and frequently reprinted tales. Building on “The Call of Cthulhu,” it fits neatly into what Lovecraft called his Arkham cycle—stories set in his fictionalized backwoods of New England and the hallowed halls of Miskatonic University. This is also the only story with an extended excerpt from the Necronomicon.
Weird Tales 13, no. 4 (April 1929) (artist: Hugh Rankin)
Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimæras2—dire stories of Celæno3 and the Harpies—may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition—but they were there before. They are transcripts, types—the archetypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come to affect us at all? . . . Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? O, least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body—or without the body, they would have been the same . . . That the kind of fear here treated is purely spiritual—that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on earth, that it predominates in the period of our sinless infancy—are difficulties the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence.
—CHARLES LAMB, Witches, and Other Night-Fears4
I.
When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury pike5 just beyond Dean’s Corners6 he comes upon a lonely and curious country. The ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent forest belts seem too large, and the wild weeds, brambles and grasses attain a luxuriance not often found in settled regions. At the same time the planted fields appear singularly few and barren; while the sparsely scattered houses wear a surprisingly uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation. Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling doorsteps or on the sloping, rock-strown meadows. Those figures are so silent and furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden things, with which it would be better to have nothing to do. When a rise in the road brings the mountains in view above the deep woods, the feeling of strange uneasiness is increased. The summits are too rounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and sometime
s the sky silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circles of tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned.
Gorges and ravines of problematical depth intersect the way, and the crude wooden bridges always seem of dubious safety. When the road dips again there are stretches of marshland that one instinctively dislikes, and indeed almost fears at evening when unseen whippoorwills chatter and the fireflies come out in abnormal profusion to dance to the raucous, creepily insistent rhythms of stridently piping bull-frogs. The thin, shining line of the Miskatonic’s upper reaches has an oddly serpent-like suggestion as it winds close to the feet of the domed hills among which it rises.
As the hills draw nearer, one heeds their wooded sides more than their stone-crowned tops. Those sides loom up so darkly and precipitously that one wishes they would keep their distance, but there is no road by which to escape them. Across a covered bridge one sees a small village huddled between the stream and the vertical slope of Round Mountain,7 and wonders at the cluster of rotting gambrel roofs bespeaking an earlier architectural period than that of the neighbouring region. It is not reassuring to see, on a closer glance, that most of the houses are deserted and falling to ruin, and that the broken-steepled church now harbours the one slovenly mercantile establishment of the hamlet. One dreads to trust the tenebrous tunnel of the bridge, yet there is no way to avoid it. Once across, it is hard to prevent the impression of a faint, malign odour about the village street, as of the massed mould and decay of centuries. It is always a relief to get clear of the place, and to follow the narrow road around the base of the hills and across the level country beyond till it rejoins the Aylesbury pike. Afterward one sometimes learns that one has been through Dunwich.
The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft Page 55