Page:Weird Tales volume 32 number 05.djvu/44

554 distantly, the truth. Who knows? And who can say that Lovecraft might not—and with good reason—have half-believed those tales he wrote?"

that over for what seemed a long time. Then, in a curiously small, troubled voice, he said,

"Listen, McClusky; if I had any assurance that you wouldn't laugh at me I'd tell you something that'd knock you right off that bench."

"I won't laugh at you," I promised.

He shifted uneasily in his canvas chair. "But I'm telling this as truth," he insisted. "This isn't conjecture; it's real. The little bit that I tell you I saw, I did see. It's had me half mad for years, trying to find the explanation. Fothergill, like Lovecraft, had a theory. But I warn you that it's beyond our present-day, mundane science."

"Shoot," I said. "If you tell me your story as truth I have the privilege of believing you or not, as I please. Anyhow, I won't laugh."

He exhaled a tremendous sigh of relief. "All right," he said. "It'll take a load off my mind—just the telling; and so long as you won't laugh"

"I wasn't always as gregarious as I am now. In fact, I was, for years, quite the reverse of gregarious. Not that I was anti-social; I did have a few tried and true friends, and these I have retained through the years. But I had no instinct for fraternalism, for striking up superficial and meaningless acquaintanceships, for the 'Hail fellow, well-met' sort of existence.

"My about-face came in the late summer of 1928

"I acquired the New Hartford farm in 1925, and my reasons for purchasing it were two. First, although the land itself was poor, the house was one of the most exquisite—and I do not use that adjective lightly—examples of early Colonial design I have ever seen anywhere—and in a perfect state of preservation; practically all it needed was a coat of paint. Second, the place promised the seclusion I felt that I occasionally needed. The nearest house was more than a hundred yards away—and I carefully ascertained its ownership before I purchased my property. It was owned by a queer duck named Fothergill, an archeologist—the sort of fellow who would be away for months on end and who wouldn't be likely to bother me even when he was in residence."

"Fothergill?" Fred Winn asked now. "Fothergill? I place the name now. Wasn't he killed in an explosion—eight, nine years back? Didn't his house blow up, or something? There was quite a lot of talk about that."

"He was killed," Doctor Bowen said quietly, "at about two-thirty in the morning of August eleventh, 1928. But it wasn't an explosion that killed him."

Still speaking in that quiet monotone that carried more conviction than any amount of rhetoric, he went on:

"The New Hartford place suited me ideally. It was not so far from New York that I couldn't drive the distance in a couple of hours, and stepping into that farmhouse was like going back three hundred years. I furnished only three or four of the downstairs rooms, but I furnished them well—with authentic Colonial pieces; when I'd finished I felt as pleased as though I'd built a castle

"Well, in the summer of 1926 I met Fothergill. His first name was Robert—Robert Fothergill. I met him by accident; after all, our properties adjoined and fronted on the same road, so I suppose our meeting was