The Horror in the Museum

by H. P. Lovecraft

  But no one save Barbour was paying any attention to poor Johnny. Indeed, what Steve himself had said had evidently fallen on deaf ears. Uncertainty was everywhere. Old Doc Pratt was applying final tests and mumbling about death certificate blanks, and unctuous Elder Atwood was suggesting that something be done about a double interment. With Thorndike dead there was no undertaker this side of Rutland, and it would mean a terrible expense if one were to be brought from there, and if Thorndike were not embalmed in this hot June weather—well, one couldn’t tell. And there were no relatives or friends to be critical unless Sophie chose to be—but Sophie was on the other side of the room, staring silently, fixedly, and almost morbidly into her brother’s coffin.

  Deacon Leavitt tried to restore a semblance of decorum, and had poor Thorndike carried across the hall to the sitting-room, meanwhile sending Zenas Wells and Walter Perkins over to the undertaker’s house for a coffin of the right size. The key was in Henry’s trousers pocket. Johnny continued to whine and paw at the body, and Elder Atwood busied himself with inquiring about Thorndike’s denomination—for Henry had not attended local services. When it was decided that his folks in Rutland—all dead now—had been Baptists, the Reverend Silas decided that Deacon Leavitt had better offer the brief prayer.

  It was a gala day for the funeral-fanciers of Stillwater and vicinity. Even Luella had recovered enough to stay. Gossip, murmured and whispered, buzzed busily while a few composing touches were given to Thorndike’s cooling, stiffening form. Johnny had been cuffed out of the house, as most agreed he should have been in the first place, but his distant howls were now and then wafted gruesomely in.

  When the body was encoffined and laid out beside that of Thomas Sprague, the silent, almost frightening-looking Sophie gazed intently at it as she had gazed at her brother’s. She had not uttered a word for a dangerously long time, and the mixed expression on her face was past all describing or interpreting. As the others withdrew to leave her alone with the dead she managed to find a sort of mechanical speech, but no one could make out the words, and she seemed to be talking first to one body and then the other.

  And now, with what would seem to an outsider the acme of gruesome unconscious comedy, the whole funeral mummery of the afternoon was listlessly repeated. Again the organ wheezed, again the choir screeched and scraped, again a droning incantation arose, and again the morbidly curious spectators filed past a macabre object—this time a dual array of mortuary repose. Some of the more sensitive people shivered at the whole proceeding, and again Stephen Barbour felt an underlying note of eldritch horror and daemoniac abnormality. God, how life-like both of those corpses were … and how in earnest poor Thorndike had been about not wanting to be judged dead … and how he hated Tom Sprague … but what could one do in the face of common sense—a dead man was a dead man, and there was old Doc Pratt with his years of experience … if nobody else bothered, why should one bother oneself? … Whatever Tom had got he had probably deserved … and if Henry had done anything to him, the score was even now … well, Sophie was free at last….

  As the peering procession moved at last toward the hall and the outer door, Sophie was alone with the dead once more. Elder At-wood was out in the road talking to the hearse-driver from Lee’s livery stable, and Deacon Leavitt was arranging for a double quota of pall-bearers. Luckily the hearse would hold two coffins. No hurry—Ed Plummer and Ethan Stone were going ahead with shovels to dig the second grave. There would be three livery hacks and any number of private rigs in the cavalcade—no use trying to keep the crowd away from the graves.

  Then came that frantic scream from the parlour where Sophie and the bodies were. Its suddenness almost paralysed the crowd and brought back the same sensation which had surged up when Luella had screamed and fainted. Steve Barbour and Deacon Leavitt started to go in, but before they could enter the house Sophie was bursting forth, sobbing and gasping about “That face at the window! … that face at the window! …”

  At the same time a wild-eyed figure rounded the corner of the house, removing all mystery from Sophie’s dramatic cry. It was, very obviously, the face’s owner—poor crazy Johnny, who began to leap up and down, pointing at Sophie and shrieking, “She knows! She knows! I seen it in her face when she looked at ‘em and talked to ‘em! She knows, and she’s a-lettin’ ‘em go down in the earth to scratch an’ claw for air…. But they’ll talk to her so’s she kin hear ‘em … they’ll talk to her, an’ appear to her … and some day they’ll come back an’ git her!”

  Zenas Wells dragged the shrieking half-wit to a woodshed behind the house and bolted him in as best he could. His screams and poundings could be heard at a distance, but nobody paid him any further attention. The procession was made up, and with Sophie in the first hack it slowly covered the short distance past the village to the Swamp Hollow burying-ground.

  Elder Atwood made appropriate remarks as Thomas Sprague was laid to rest, and by the time he was through, Ed and Ethan had finished Thorndike’s grave on the other side of the cemetery—to which the crowd presently shifted. Deacon Leavitt then spoke ornamentally, and the lowering process was repeated. People had begun to drift off in knots, and the clatter of receding buggies and carryalls was quite universal, when the shovels began to fly again. As the earth thudded down on the coffin-lids, Thorndike’s first, Steve Barbour noticed the queer expressions flitting over Sophie Sprague’s face. He couldn’t keep track of them all, but behind the rest there seemed to lurk a sort of wry, perverse, half-suppressed look of vague triumph. He shook his head.

  Zenas had run back and let crazy Johnny out of the woodshed before Sophie got home, and the poor fellow at once made frantically for the graveyard. He arrived before the shovelmen were through, and while many of the curious mourners were still lingering about. What he shouted into Tom Sprague’s partly filled grave, and how he clawed at the loose earth of Thorndike’s freshly finished mound across the cemetery, surviving spectators still shudder to recall. Jotham Blake, the constable, had to take him back to the town farm by force, and his screams waked dreadful echoes.

  This is where Fred Peck usually leaves off the story. What more, he asks, is there to tell? It was a gloomy tragedy, and one can scarcely wonder that Sophie grew queer after that. That is all one hears if the hour is so late that old Calvin Wheeler has tottered home, but when he is still around he breaks in again with that damnably suggestive and insidious whisper. Sometimes those who hear him dread to pass either the shuttered house or the graveyard afterward, especially after dark.

  “Heh, heh … Fred was only a little shaver then, and don’t remember no more than half of what was goin’ on! You want to know why Sophie keeps her house shuttered, and why crazy Johnny still keeps a-talkin’ to the dead and a-shoutin’ at Sophie’s windows? Well, sir, I don’t know’s I know all there is to know, but I hear what I hear.”

  Here the old man ejects his cud of tobacco and leans forward to buttonhole the listener.

  “It was that same night, mind ye—toward mornin’, and just eight hours after them burials—when we heard the first scream from Sophie’s house. Woke us all up—Steve and Emily Barbour and me and Matildy goes over hot-footin’, all in night gear, and finds Sophie all dressed and dead fainted on the settin’-room floor. Lucky she hadn’t locked the door. When we got her to she was shakin’ like a leaf, and wouldn’t let on by so much as a word what was ailin’ her. Matildy and Emily done what they could to quiet her down, but Steve whispered things to me as didn’t make me none too easy. Come about an hour when we allowed we’d be goin’ home soon, that Sophie she begun to tip her head on one side like she was a-listenin’ to somethin’. Then on a sudden she screamed again, and keeled over in another faint.

  “Well, sir, I’m tellin’ what I’m tellin’, and won’t do no guessin’ like Steve Barbour would a done if he dared. He always was the greatest hand for hintin’ things … died ten years ago of pneumony.

  “What we heard so faint-like’ was just poor crazy Johnny, of
course. Taint more than a mile to the buryin’-ground, and he must a got out of the window where they’d locked him up at the town farm—even if Constable Blake says he didn’t get out that night. From that day to this he hangs around them graves a-talkin’ to the both of them—cussin’ and kickin’ at Tom’s mound, and puttin’ posies and things on Henry’s. And when he ain’t a-doin’ that he’s hangin’ around Sophie’s shuttered windows howlin’ about what’s a-comin’ soon to git her.

  “She wouldn’t never go near the buryin’-ground, and now she won’t come out of the house at all nor see nobody. Got to sayin’ there was a curse on Stillwater—and I’m dinged if she ain’t half right, the way things is a-goin’ to pieces these days. There certainly was somethin’ queer about Sophie right along. Once when Sally Hopkins was a-callin’ on her—in ‘97 or ‘98,1 think it was—there was an awful rattlin’ at her winders—and Johnny was safe locked up at the time—at least, so Constable Dodge swore up and down. But I ain’t takin’ no stock in their stories about noises every seventeenth of June, or about faint shinin’ figures a-tryin’ Sophie’s door and winders every black mornin’ about two o’clock.

  “You see, it was about two o’clock in the mornin’ that Sophie heard the sounds and keeled over twice that first night after the buryin’. Steve and me, and Matildy and Emily, heard the second lot, faint as it was, just like I told you. And I’m a-tellin’ you again as how it must a been crazy Johnny over to the buryin’-ground, let Jotham Blake claim what he will. There ain’t no tellin’ the sound of a man’s voice so far off, and with our heads full of nonsense it ain’t no wonder we thought there was two voices—and voices that hadn’t ought to be speakin’ at all.

  “Steve, he claimed to have heard more than I did. I verily believe he took some stock in ghosts. Matildy and Emily was so scared they didn’t remember what they heard. And curious enough, nobody else in town—if anybody was awake at the ungodly hour— never said nothin’ about hearin’ no sounds at all.

  “Whatever it was, was so faint it might have been the wind if there hadn’t been words. I made out a few, but don’t want to say as I’d back up all Steve claimed to have caught….

  “‘She-devil’… ‘all the time”… ‘Henry’… and ‘alive’ was plain … and so was ‘you know’… ‘said you’d stand by’… ‘get rid of him’ and ‘bury me’ … in a kind of changed voice…. Then there was that awful ‘comin’ again some day’—in a death-like squawk … but you can’t tell me Johnny couldn’t have made those sounds.

  “Hey, you! What’s takin’ you off in such a hurry? Mebbe there’s more I could tell you if I had a mind…. “

  William Lumley

  The Diary of Alonzo Typer

  EDITOR’S NOTE: Alonzo Hasbrouck Typer of Kingston, N.Y., was last seen and recognised on April 17, 1908, around noon, at the Hotel Richmond in Batavia. He was the only survivor of an ancient Ulster County family, and was fifty-three years old at the time of his disappearance.

  Mr. Typer was educated privately and at Columbia and Heidelberg Universities. All his life was spent as a student; the field of his researches including many obscure and generally feared borderlands of human knowledge. His papers on vampirism, ghouls, and poltergeist phenomena were privately printed after rejection by many publishers. He resigned from the Society for Psychical Research in 1902 after a series of peculiarly bitter controversies.

  At various times Mr. Typer travelled extensively, sometimes dropping out of sight for long periods. He is known to have visited obscure spots in Nepal, India, Thibet, and Indo-China, and passed most of the year 1899 on mysterious Easter Island. The extensive search for Mr. Typer after his disappearance yielded no results, and his estate was divided among distant cousins in New York City.

  The diary herewith presented was allegedly found in the ruins of a large country house near Attica, N.Y., which had borne a curiously sinister reputation for generations before its collapse. The edifice was very old, antedating the general white settlement of the region, and had formed the home of a strange and secretive family named van der Heyl, which had migrated from Albany in 1746 under a curious cloud of witchcraft suspicion. The structure probably dated from about 1760. -

  Of the history of the van der Heyls very little is known. They remained entirely aloof from their normal neighbours, employed negro servants brought directly from Africa and speaking little English, and educated their children privately and at European colleges. Those of them who went out into the world were soon lost to sight, though not before gaining evil repute for association with Black Mass groups and cults of even darker significance.

  Around the dreaded house a straggling village arose, populated by Indians and later by renegades from the surrounding country, which bore the dubious name of Chorazin. Of the singular hereditary strains which afterward appeared in the mixed Chorazin villagers, several monographs have been written by ethnologists. Just behind the village, and in sight of the van der Heyl house, is a steep hill crowned with a peculiar ring of ancient standing stones which the Iroquois always regarded with fear and loathing. The origin and nature of the stones, whose date, according to archaeological and climatological evidence, must be fabulously early, is a problem still unsolved.

  From about 1795 onward, the legends of the incoming pioneers and later population have much to say about strange cries and chants proceeding at certain seasons from Chorazin and from the great house and hill of standing stones; though there is reason to suppose that the noises ceased about 1872, when the entire van der Heyl household—servants and all—suddenly and simultaneously disappeared.

  Thenceforward the house was deserted; for other disastrous events—including three unexplained deaths, five disappearances, and four cases of sudden insanity—occurred when later owners and interested visitors attempted to stay in it. The house, village, and extensive rural areas on all sides reverted to the state and were auctioned off in the absence of discoverable van der Heyl heirs. Since about 1890 the owners (successively the late Charles A. Shields and his son Oscar S. Shields, of Buffalo) have left the entire property in a state of absolute neglect, and have warned all inquirers not to visit the region.

  Of those known to have approached the house during the last forty years, most were occult students, police officers, newspaper men, and odd characters from abroad. Among the latter was a mysterious Eurasian, probably from Cochin-China, whose later appearance with blank mind and bizarre mutilations excited wide press notice in 1903.

  Mr. Typer’s diary—a book about 6х3½ inches in size, with tough paper and an oddly durable binding of thin sheet metal—was discovered in the possession of one of the decadent Chorazin villagers on Nov. 16, 1935, by a state policeman sent to investigate the rumoured collapse of the deserted van der Heyl mansion. The house had indeed fallen, obviously from sheer age and decrepitude, in the severe gale of Nov. 12. Disintegration was peculiarly complete, and no thorough search of the ruins could be made for several weeks. John Eagle, the swarthy, simian-faced, Indian-like villager who had the diary, said that he found the book quite near the surface of the debris, in what must have been an upper front room.

  Very little of the contents of the house could be identified, though an enormous and astonishingly solid brick vault in the cellar (whose ancient iron door had to be blasted open because of the strangely figured and perversely tenacious lock) remained intact and presented several puzzling features. For one thing, the walls were covered with still undeciphered hieroglyphs roughly incised in the brickwork. Another peculiarity was a huge circular aperture in the rear of the vault, blocked by a cave-in evidently caused by the collapse of the house.

  But strangest of all was the apparently recent deposit of some foetid, slimy, pitch-black substance on the flagstoned floor, extending in a yard-broad, irregular line with one end at the blocked circular aperture. Those who first opened the vault declared that the place smelled like the snake-house at a zoo.

  The diary, which was apparently designed solely to cove
r an investigation of the dreaded van der Heyl house by the vanished Mr. Typer, has been proved by handwriting experts to be genuine. The script shews signs of increasing nervous strain as it progresses toward the end, in places becoming almost illegible. Chorazin villagers—whose stupidity and taciturnity baffle all students of the region and its secrets—admit no recollection of Mr. Typer as distinguished from other rash visitors to the dreaded house.

  The text of the diary is here given verbatim and without comment. How to interpret it, and what, other than the writer’s madness, to infer from it, the reader must decide for himself. Only the future can tell what its value may be in solving a generation-old mystery. It may be remarked that genealogists confirm Mr. Typer’s belated memory in the matter of Adriaen Sleght.

  THE DIARY

  April 17, 1908

  Arrived here about 6 p.m. Had to walk all the way from Attica in the teeth of an oncoming storm, for no one would rent me a horse or rig, and I can’t run an automobile. This place is even worse than I had expected, and I dread what is coming, even though I long at the same time to learn the secret. All too soon will come the night— the old Walpurgis Sabbat horror—and after that time in Wales I know what to look for. Whatever comes, I shall not flinch. Prodded by some unfathomable urge, I have given my whole life to the quest of unholy mysteries. I came here for nothing else, and will not quarrel with fate.

  It was very dark when I got here, though the sun had by no means set. The storm-clouds were the densest I had ever seen, and I could not have found my way but for the lightning flashes. The village is a hateful little backwater, and its few inhabitants no better than idiots. One of them saluted me in a queer way, as if he knew me. I could see very little of the landscape—just a small, swampy valley of strange brown weed-stalks and dead fungi surrounded by scraggly, evilly twisted trees with bare boughs. But behind the village is a dismal-looking hill on whose summit is a circle of great stones with another stone at the centre. That, without question, is the vile primordial thing V——told me about at the N——estbat.