“You mustn’t try anything more with that — thing. Nothing can be put back now. It would only make matters worse to do — or summon — anything. You are not as badly off as you might be — but you must get out of here at once and stay away. You’d better thank heaven it didn’t go further. . . .
“I’m going to prepare you as bluntly as I can. There’s been a certain change — in your personal appearance. He always causes that. But in a new country you can get used to it. There’s a mirror up at the other end of the room, and I’m going to take you to it. You’ll get a shock — though you will see nothing repulsive.”
I was now shaking with a deadly fear, and the bearded man almost had to hold me up as he walked me across the room to the mirror, the faint lamp (i.e., that formerly on the table, not the still fainter lantern he had brought) in his free hand. This is what I saw in the glass:
A thin, dark man of medium stature attired in the clerical garb of the Anglican church, apparently about thirty, and with rimless, steel-bowed glasses glistening beneath a sallow, olive forehead of abnormal height.
It was the silent first-comer who had burned his books.
For all the rest of my life, in outward form, I was to be that man!
The Horror in the Burying-Ground
By H. P Lovecraft and Hazel Heald
When the state highway to Rutland is closed, travellers are forced to take the Stillwater road past Swamp Hollow. The scenery is superb in places, yet somehow the route has been unpopular for years. There is something depressing about it, especially near Stillwater itself. Motorists feel subtly uncomfortable about the tightly shuttered farmhouse on the knoll just north of the village, and about the white-bearded half-wit who haunts the old burying-ground on the south, apparently talking to the occupants of some of the graves.
Not much is left of Stillwater, now. The soil is played out, and most of the people have drifted to the towns across the distant river or to the city beyond the distant hills. The steeple of the old white church has fallen down, and half of the twenty-odd straggling houses are empty and in various stages of decay. Normal life is found only around Peck’s general store and filling-station, and it is here that the curious stop now and then to ask about the shuttered house and the idiot who mutters to the dead.
Most of the questioners come away with a touch of distaste and disquiet. They find the shabby loungers oddly unpleasant and full of unnamed hints in speaking of the long-past events brought up. There is a menacing, portentous quality in the tones which they use to describe very ordinary events — a seemingly unjustified tendency to assume a furtive, suggestive, confidential air, and to fall into awesome whispers at certain points — which insidiously disturbs the listener. Old Yankees often talk like that; but in this case the melancholy aspect of the half-mouldering village, and the dismal nature of the story unfolded, give these gloomy, secretive mannerisms an added significance. One feels profoundly the quintessential horror that lurks behind the isolated Puritan and his strange repressions — feels it, and longs to escape precipitately into clearer air.
The loungers whisper impressively that the shuttered house is that of old Miss Sprague — Sophie Sprague, whose brother Tom was buried on the seventeenth of June, back in ‘86. Sophie was never the same after that funeral — that and the other thing which happened the same day — and in the end she took to staying in all the time. Won’t even be seen now, but leaves notes under the back-door mat and has her things brought from the store by Ned Peck’s boy. Afraid of something — the old Swamp Hollow burying-ground most of all. Never could be dragged near there since her brother — and the other one — were laid away. Not much wonder, though, seeing the way crazy Johnny Dow rants. He hangs around the burying-ground all day and sometimes at night, and claims he talks with Tom — and the other. Then he marches by Sophie’s house and shouts things at her — that’s why she began to keep the shutters closed. He says things are coming from somewhere to get her sometime. Ought to be stopped, but one can’t be too hard on poor Johnny. Besides, Steve Barbour always had his opinions.
Johnny does his talking to two of the graves. One of them is Tom Sprague’s. The other, at the opposite end of the graveyard, is that of Henry Thorndike, who was buried on the same day. Henry was the village undertaker — the only one in miles — and never liked around Stillwater. A city fellow from Rutland — been to college and full of book learning. Read queer things nobody else ever heard of, and mixed chemicals for no good purpose. Always trying to invent something new — some new-fangled embalming-fluid or some foolish kind of medicine. Some folks said he had tried to be a doctor but failed in his studies and took to the next best profession. Of course, there wasn’t much undertaking to do in a place like Stillwater, but Henry farmed on the side.