Ann White, with her Exeter superstition11, had promulgated12 the most extravagant13 and at the same time most consistent tale; alleging14 that there must lie buried beneath the house one of those vampires—the dead who retain their bodily form and live on the blood or breath of the living—whose hideous16 legions send their preying17 shapes or spirits abroad by night. To destroy a vampire15 one must, the grandmothers say, exhume18 it and burn its heart, or at least drive a stake through that organ; and Ann's dogged insistence19 on a search under the cellar had been prominent in bringing about her discharge.
Her tales, however, commanded a wide audience, and were the more readily accepted because the house indeed stood on land once used for burial purposes. To me their interest depended less on this circumstance than on the peculiarly appropriate way in which they dovetailed with certain other things—the complaint of the departing servant Preserved Smith, who had preceded Ann and never heard of her, that something "sucked his breath" at night; the death-certificates of the fever victims of 1804, issued by Doctor Chad Hopkins, and showing the four deceased persons all unaccountably lacking in blood; and the obscure passages of poor Rhoby Harris's ravings, where she complained of the sharp teeth of a glassy-eyed, half-visible presence.
Free from unwarranted superstition though I am, these things produced in me an odd sensation, which was intensified22 by a pair of widely separated newspaper cuttings relating to deaths in the shunned house—one from the Providence23 Gazette and Country-Journal of April 12, 1815, and the other from the Daily Transcript24 and Chronicle of October 27, 1845—each of which detailed25 an appallingly26 grisly circumstance whose duplication was remarkable27. It seems that in both instances the dying person, in 1815 a gentle old lady named Stafford and in 1845 a schoolteacher of middle age named Eleazar Durfee, became transfigured in a horrible way, glaring glassily and attempting to bite the throat of the attending physician. Even more puzzling, though, was the final case which put an end to the renting of the house—a series of anemia28 deaths preceded by progressive madnesses wherein the patient would craftily29 attempt the lives of his relatives by incisions30 in the neck or wrist.
This was in 1860 and 1861, when my uncle had just begun his medical practise; and before leaving for the front he heard much of it from his elder professional colleagues. The really inexplicable31 thing was the way in which the victims—ignorant people, for the ill-smelling and widely shunned house could now be rented to no others—would babble32 maledictions in French, a language they could not possibly have studied to any extent. It made one think of poor Rhoby Harris nearly a century before, and so moved my uncle that he commenced collecting historical data on the house after listening, some time subsequent to his return from the war, to the first-hand account of Doctors Chase and Whitmarsh. Indeed, I could see that my uncle had thought deeply on the subject, and that he was glad of my own interest—an open-minded and sympathetic interest which enabled him to discuss with me matters at which others would merely have laughed. His fancy had not gone so far as mine, but he felt that the place was rare in its imaginative potentialities, and worthy34 of note as an inspiration in the field of the grotesque35 and macabre36.
For my part, I was disposed to take the whole subject with profound seriousness, and began at once not only to review the evidence, but to accumulate as much more as I could. I talked with the elderly Archer37 Harris, then owner of the house, many times before his death in 1916; and obtained from him and his still surviving maiden38 sister Alice an authentic39 corroboration40 of all the family data my uncle had collected. When, however, I asked them what connection with France or its language the house could have, they confessed themselves as frankly41 baffled and ignorant as I. Archer knew nothing, and all that Miss Harris could say was that an old allusion42 her grandfather, Dutee Harris, had heard of might have shed a little light. The old seaman43, who had survived his son Welcome's death in battle by two years, had not himself known the legend, but recalled that his earliest nurse, the ancient Maria Robbins, seemed darkly aware of something that might have lent a weird44 significance to the French raving21 of Rhoby Harris, which she had so often heard during the last days of that hapless woman. Maria had been at the shunned house from 1769 till the removal of the family in 1783, and had seen Mercy Dexter die. Once she hinted to the child Dutee of a somewhat peculiar20 circumstance in Mercy's last moments, but he had soon forgotten all about it save that it was something peculiar. The granddaughter, moreover, recalled even this much with difficulty. She and her brother were not so much interested in the house as was Archer's son Carrington, the present owner, with whom I talked after my experience.
Having exhausted45 the Harris family of all the information it could furnish, I turned my attention to early town records and deeds with a zeal46 more penetrating47 than that which my uncle had occasionally shown in the same work. What I wished was a comprehensive history of the site from its very settlement in 1636—or even before, if any Narragansett Indian legend could be unearthed48 to supply the data. I found, at the start, that the land had been part of the long strip of home lot granted originally to John Throckmorton; one of many similar strips beginning at the Town Street beside the river and extending up over the hill to a line roughly corresponding with the modern Hope Street. The Throckmorton lot had later, of course, been much subdivided49; and I became very assiduous in tracing that section through which Back or Benefit Street was later run. It had, as rumor50 indeed said, been the Throckmorton graveyard51; but as I examined the records more carefully, I found that the graves had all been transferred at an early date to the North Burial Ground on the Pawtucket West Road.
Then suddenly I came—by a rare piece of chance, since it was not in the main body of records and might easily have been missed—upon something which aroused my keenest eagerness, fitting in as it did with several of the queerest phases of the affair. It was the record of a lease, in 1697, of a small tract52 of ground to an Etienne Roulet and wife. At last the French element had appeared—that, and another deeper element of horror which the name conjured53 up from the darkest recesses54 of my weird and heterogeneous55 reading—and I feverishly56 studied the platting of the locality as it had been before the cutting through and partial straightening of Back Street between 1747 and 1758. I found what I had half expected, that where the shunned house now stood the Roulets had laid out their graveyard behind a one-story and attic57 cottage, and that no record of any transfer of graves existed. The document, indeed, ended in much confusion; and I was forced to ransack58 both the Rhode Island Historical Society and Shepley Library before I could find a local door which the name of Etienne Roulet would unlock. In the end I did find something; something of such vague but monstrous59 import that I set about at once to examine the cellar of the shunned house itself with a new and excited minuteness.
The Roulets, it seemed, had come in 1696 from East Greenwich, down the west shore of Narragansett Bay. They were Huguenots from Caude, and had encountered much opposition60 before the Providence selectmen allowed them to settle in the town. Unpopularity had dogged them in East Greenwich, whither they had come in 1686, after the revocation61 of the Edict of Nantes, and rumor said that the cause of dislike extended beyond mere33 racial and national prejudice, or the land disputes which involved other French settlers with the English in rivalries62 which not even Governor Andros could quell63. But their ardent64 Protestantism—too ardent, some whispered—and their evident distress65 when virtually driven from the village down the bay, had moved the sympathy of the town fathers. Here the strangers had been granted a haven66; and the swarthy Etienne Roulet, less apt at agriculture than at reading queer books and drawing queer diagrams, was given a clerical post in the warehouse67 at Pardon Tillinghast's wharf68, far south in Town Street. There had, however, been a riot of some sort later on—perhaps forty years later, after old Roulet's death—and no one seemed to hear of the family after that.
For a century and more, it appeared, the Roulets had been well remembered and frequently discussed as vivid incidents in the quiet life of a New England seaport69. Etienne's son Paul, a surly fellow whose erratic70 conduct had probably provoked the riot which wiped out the family, was particularly a source of speculation71; and though Providence never shared the witchcraft72 panics of her Puritan neighbors, it was freely intimated by old wives that his prayers were neither uttered at the proper time nor directed toward the proper object. All this had undoubtedly73 formed the basis of the legend known by old Maria Robbins. What relation it had to the French ravings of Rhoby Harris and other inhabitants of the shunned house, imagination or future discovery alone could determine. I wondered how many of those who had known the legends realized that additional link with the terrible which my wider reading had given me; that ominous74 item in the annals of morbid75 horror which tells of the creature Jacques Roulet, of Caude, who in 1598 was condemned76 to death as a demoniac but afterward77 saved from the stake by the Paris parliament and shut in a madhouse. He had been found covered with blood and shreds78 of flesh in a wood, shortly after the killing79 and rending80 of a boy by a pair of wolves. One wolf was seen to lope away unhurt. Surely a pretty hearthside tale, with a queer significance as to name and place; but I decided81 that the Providence gossips could not have generally known of it. Had they known, the coincidence of names would have brought some drastic and frightened action—indeed, might not its limited whispering have precipitated82 the final riot which erased83 the Roulets from the town?
I now visited the accursed place with increased frequency; studying the unwholesome vegetation of the garden, examining all the walls of the building, and poring over every inch of the earthen cellar floor. Finally, with Carrington Harris's permission, I fitted a key to the disused door opening from the cellar directly upon Benefit Street, preferring to have a more immediate84 access to the outside world than the dark stairs, ground-floor hall, and front door could give. There, where morbidity85 lurked86 most thickly, I searched and poked87 during long afternoons when the sunlight filtered in through the cobwebbed above-ground windows, and a sense of security glowed from the unlocked door which placed me only a few feet from the placid88 sidewalk outside. Nothing new rewarded my efforts—only the same depressing mustiness and faint suggestions of noxious89 odors and nitrous outlines on the floor—and I fancy that many pedestrians90 must have watched me curiously91 through the broken panes92.
At length, upon a suggestion of my uncle's, I decided to try the spot nocturnally; and one stormy midnight ran the beams of an electric torch over the moldy93 floor with its uncanny shapes and distorted, half-phosphorescent fungi94. The place had dispirited me curiously that evening, and I was almost prepared when I saw—or thought I saw—amidst the whitish deposits a particularly sharp definition of the "huddled95 form" I had suspected from boyhood. Its clearness was astonishing and unprecedented—and as I watched I seemed to see again the thin, yellowish, shimmering96 exhalation which had startled me on that rainy afternoon so many years before.
Above the anthropomorphic patch of mold by the fireplace it rose; a subtle, sickish, almost luminous97 vapor98 which as it hung trembling in the dampness seemed to develop vague and shocking suggestions of form, gradually trailing off into nebulous decay and passing up into the blackness of the great chimney with a fetor in its wake. It was truly horrible, and the more so to me because of what I knew of the spot. Refusing to flee, I watched it fade—and as I watched I felt that it was in turn watching me greedily with eyes more imaginable than visible. When I told my uncle about it he was greatly aroused; and after a tense hour of reflection, arrived at a definite and drastic decision. Weighing in his mind the importance of the matter, and the significance of our relation to it, he insisted that we both test—and if possible destroy—the horror of the house by a joint99 night or nights of aggressive vigil in that musty and fungus-cursed cellar.
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1
affected
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| adj.不自然的，假装的 | |
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persistent
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| adj.坚持不懈的，执意的；持续的 | |
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systematic
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| adj.有系统的，有计划的，有方法的 | |
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transcribed
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| （用不同的录音手段）转录( transcribe的过去式和过去分词 )； 改编（乐曲）（以适应他种乐器或声部）； 抄写； 用音标标出（声音） | |
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5
shunned
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| v.避开，回避，避免( shun的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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dominant
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| adj.支配的，统治的；占优势的；显性的；n.主因，要素，主要的人(或物)；显性基因 | |
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recurrence
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| n.复发，反复，重现 | |
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supremacy
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| n.至上；至高权力 | |
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narratives
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| 记叙文( narrative的名词复数 )； 故事； 叙述； 叙述部分 | |
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lore
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| n.传说；学问，经验，知识 | |
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superstition
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| n.迷信，迷信行为 | |
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promulgated
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| v.宣扬（某事物）( promulgate的过去式和过去分词 )；传播；公布；颁布（法令、新法律等） | |
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13
extravagant
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| adj.奢侈的；过分的；(言行等)放肆的 | |
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alleging
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| 断言，宣称，辩解( allege的现在分词 ) | |
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vampire
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| n.吸血鬼 | |
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hideous
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| adj.丑陋的，可憎的，可怕的，恐怖的 | |
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preying
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| v.掠食( prey的现在分词 )；掠食；折磨；（人）靠欺诈为生 | |
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exhume
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| v.掘出，挖掘 | |
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insistence
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| n.坚持；强调；坚决主张 | |
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peculiar
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| adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的 | |
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raving
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| adj.说胡话的；疯狂的，怒吼的；非常漂亮的；令人醉心[痴心]的v.胡言乱语(rave的现在分词)n.胡话；疯话adv.胡言乱语地；疯狂地 | |
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22
intensified
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| v.（使）增强， （使）加剧( intensify的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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23
providence
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| n.深谋远虑，天道，天意；远见；节约；上帝 | |
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transcript
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| n.抄本，誊本，副本，肄业证书 | |
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detailed
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| adj.详细的，详尽的，极注意细节的，完全的 | |
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appallingly
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| 毛骨悚然地 | |
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remarkable
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| adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的 | |
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anemia
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| n.贫血，贫血症 | |
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craftily
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| 狡猾地，狡诈地 | |
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incisions
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| n.切开，切口( incision的名词复数 ) | |
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31
inexplicable
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| adj.无法解释的，难理解的 | |
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babble
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| v.含糊不清地说，胡言乱语地说，儿语 | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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worthy
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| adj.(of)值得的，配得上的；有价值的 | |
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35
grotesque
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| adj.怪诞的，丑陋的；n.怪诞的图案，怪人（物） | |
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macabre
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| adj.骇人的，可怖的 | |
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archer
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| n.射手，弓箭手 | |
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maiden
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| n.少女，处女；adj.未婚的，纯洁的，无经验的 | |
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authentic
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| a.真的，真正的；可靠的，可信的，有根据的 | |
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40
corroboration
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| n.进一步的证实，进一步的证据 | |
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41
frankly
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| adv.坦白地，直率地；坦率地说 | |
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42
allusion
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| n.暗示，间接提示 | |
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43
seaman
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| n.海员，水手，水兵 | |
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44
weird
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| adj.古怪的，离奇的；怪诞的，神秘而可怕的 | |
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45
exhausted
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| adj.极其疲惫的，精疲力尽的 | |
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46
zeal
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| n.热心，热情，热忱 | |
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47
penetrating
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| adj.（声音）响亮的，尖锐的adj.（气味）刺激的adj.（思想）敏锐的，有洞察力的 | |
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48
unearthed
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| 出土的（考古） | |
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49
subdivided
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| 再分，细分( subdivide的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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50
rumor
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| n.谣言，谣传，传说 | |
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51
graveyard
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| n.坟场 | |
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52
tract
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| n.传单，小册子，大片(土地或森林) | |
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53
conjured
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| 用魔术变出( conjure的过去式和过去分词 )； 祈求，恳求； 变戏法； （变魔术般地） 使…出现 | |
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54
recesses
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| n.壁凹( recess的名词复数 )；（工作或业务活动的）中止或暂停期间；学校的课间休息；某物内部的凹形空间v.把某物放在墙壁的凹处( recess的第三人称单数 )；将（墙）做成凹形，在（墙）上做壁龛；休息，休会，休庭 | |
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55
heterogeneous
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| adj.庞杂的；异类的 | |
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56
feverishly
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| adv. 兴奋地 | |
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attic
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| n.顶楼，屋顶室 | |
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58
ransack
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| v.彻底搜索，洗劫 | |
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monstrous
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| adj.巨大的；恐怖的；可耻的，丢脸的 | |
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60
opposition
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| n.反对，敌对 | |
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revocation
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| n.废止，撤回 | |
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rivalries
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| n.敌对，竞争，对抗( rivalry的名词复数 ) | |
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63
quell
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| v.压制，平息，减轻 | |
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64
ardent
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| adj.热情的，热烈的，强烈的，烈性的 | |
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65
distress
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| n.苦恼，痛苦，不舒适；不幸；vt.使悲痛 | |
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haven
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| n.安全的地方，避难所，庇护所 | |
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67
warehouse
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| n.仓库；vt.存入仓库 | |
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wharf
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| n.码头，停泊处 | |
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seaport
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| n.海港，港口，港市 | |
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70
erratic
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| adj.古怪的，反复无常的，不稳定的 | |
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71
speculation
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| n.思索，沉思；猜测；投机 | |
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72
witchcraft
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| n.魔法，巫术 | |
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undoubtedly
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| adv.确实地，无疑地 | |
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ominous
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| adj.不祥的，不吉的，预兆的，预示的 | |
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morbid
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| adj.病的；致病的；病态的；可怕的 | |
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76
condemned
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| adj. 被责难的, 被宣告有罪的 动词condemn的过去式和过去分词 | |
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77
afterward
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| adv.后来；以后 | |
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shreds
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| v.撕碎，切碎( shred的第三人称单数 )；用撕毁机撕毁（文件） | |
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79
killing
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| n.巨额利润；突然赚大钱，发大财 | |
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80
rending
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| v.撕碎( rend的现在分词 )；分裂；（因愤怒、痛苦等而）揪扯（衣服或头发等）；（声音等）刺破 | |
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81
decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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82
precipitated
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| v.（突如其来地）使发生( precipitate的过去式和过去分词 )；促成；猛然摔下；使沉淀 | |
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erased
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| v.擦掉( erase的过去式和过去分词 )；抹去；清除 | |
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84
immediate
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| adj.立即的；直接的，最接近的；紧靠的 | |
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85
morbidity
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| n.病态；不健全；发病；发病率 | |
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86
lurked
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| vi.潜伏，埋伏（lurk的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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87
poked
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| v.伸出( poke的过去式和过去分词 )；戳出；拨弄；与（某人）性交 | |
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88
placid
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| adj.安静的，平和的 | |
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89
noxious
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| adj.有害的，有毒的；使道德败坏的，讨厌的 | |
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90
pedestrians
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| n.步行者( pedestrian的名词复数 ) | |
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curiously
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| adv.有求知欲地；好问地；奇特地 | |
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panes
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| 窗玻璃( pane的名词复数 ) | |
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93
moldy
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| adj.发霉的 | |
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fungi
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| n.真菌，霉菌 | |
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95
huddled
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| 挤在一起（huddle的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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96
shimmering
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| v.闪闪发光，发微光( shimmer的现在分词 ) | |
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luminous
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| adj.发光的，发亮的；光明的；明白易懂的；有启发的 | |
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vapor
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| n.蒸汽，雾气 | |
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joint
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| adj.联合的，共同的；n.关节，接合处；v.连接，贴合 | |
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