As Lovecraft spins his tale, we learn that the land that the house was built upon once was used as a cemetery. The French Huguenot descendants of Jacques Roulet, condemned to be burned at the stake in Caude, France, in 1598 after confessing that he was a werewolf, were buried in an unmarked cemetery beneath the shunned house. The "anthropomorphic patch of mould" in the cellar acquired an increased terror, and Lovecraft noticed that above it rose "a subtle, sickish, almost luminous vapour 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 foetor in its wake." Lovecraft and his uncle, Dr. Whipple (filling a role similar to that of Dr. Van Helsing in Dracula), decided to spend the night in the cellar, augmented with scientific apparatus to analyze and, if necessary, destroy the evil entity, which they surmised was "traceable to one or another of the ill-savoured French settlers of two centuries before, and still operative through rare and unknown laws of atomic and electronic motion." One of their weapons, a flamethrower, was to be used "in case it proved partly material and susceptible of mechanical destruction--for like the superstitious Exeter rustics, we were prepared to burn the thing's heart out if heart existed to burn." I won't ruin a good story by revealing its ending, so I suggest you read it yourself.

Text © Dr. Michael Bell