The Last Watch House

  Harrington Karris, last of the male line, knew it only as a deserted and somewhat picturesque center of legend until I told him my experience. He had meant to tear it down and build an apartment house on the site, but after my account he decided to let it stand, install plumbing, and rent it. Nor has he yet had any difficulty in obtaining tenants. Prominent among the materials welded into it was the dance of obscure origin. The greys are lost and found among the browns, insinuating themselves into the recesses and tracery on the walls, and every where influencing the warm colours. Drainage is said to be the cause of their comparative scarcity.

His own view, postulating simply a building and location of markedly unsanitary qualities, had nothing to do with abnormality; but he realized that the very picturesqueness, which aroused his own interest, would in a boy's fanciful mind take on all manner of gruesome imaginative associations. But when I should first succeed in subduing him and should have assured myself against his sharp claws, and keen teeth, then they would conceal nothing from me. At my feet lay crouched a fierce lion of the tropics.

In great confidence I approached the lion in his den and began to caress him, but he looked at me so fiercely with his brightly shining eyes that I could hardly restrain my tears. Just then I remembered that I had learned from one of the elders, while we were going to the lion's den, that very many people had undertaken to overcome the lion and very few could accomplish it. I was unwilling to be disgraced, and I recalled several grips that I had learned with great diligence in athletics, besides which I was well versed in natural magic magia so I gave up the caresses and seized the lion so dextrously, artfully and subtlely, that before he was well aware of it I forced the blood out of his body, yea, even out of his heart. 

There was, however, another, and a much more dangerous creature, whose acquaintance he sought to make. In spite of his care, some of the caterpillars got out, and wandered about the floor, sometimes creeping up the men's legs. Their object seems to be to leap over each other, and to kick the back of their enemy's head as they fly over; each trying to jump the highest, and to kick the hardest. In this way they beggar themselves and pauperise their families. Every species of calamity and horror befell me. What to do next I could not tell. But the last term of the definition is still more cogent, as coupled with the first.

Mercy was a plain, raw-boned woman of great strength; but her health visibly declined from the time of her advent. She was greatly devoted to her unfortunate sister, and had an especial affection for her only surviving nephew William, who from a sturdy infant had become a sickly, spindling lad. This is true of giant minds; it is equally true of average intellects. I listened long and their discourse pleased me well, only some would break forth from restraint, not touching upon the matter or work, but what touched upon the parables, similitudes and other parerga, in which they followed the poetic fancies of Aristotle, Pliny and others which the one had copied from the other.

So I could contain myself no longer and mixed in my own mustard, put in my own word, refuted such trivial things from experience, and the majority sided with me, examined me in their faculty and made it quite hot for me. However the foundation of my knowledge was so good, that I passed with all honors, whereupon they all were amazed, unanimously included and admitted me in their collegium, of which I was heartily glad. Then the stirring of my uncle in his sleep attracted my notice. He had turned restlessly on the cot several times during the latter half of the first hour, but now he was breathing with unusual irregularity, occasionally heaving a sigh which held more than a few of the qualities of a choking moan. His protectors then left him, and, spite of his pain, he fell asleep. 

He must have slept some time, for he was awakened by the murmuring of the sea, which was fast approaching the cave. Where music study becomes compulsory the blunder of permitting the compulsion to be felt must be avoided. The theme is treated with reverence, delicacy and judgment, and the leading tone is that of a mighty hymn of rejoicing. He did not know the names of the birds and animals that he caught.

Still nothing occurred to reward my watching; and I yawned repeatedly, fatigue getting the better of apprehension. Throughout there is a warmth, a contrapuntal splendor, a breadth, an elasticity, a richness of orchestration, unknown in previous oratorio, unless in parts of some of the master's own works. Even in the duet and choruses remodeled from his chamber duets, there is that jubilant character that makes them blend perfectly with the great whole. Born and educated on German soil, steeped during his wanderer's years in the spirit of the Italian muse, and finally nourished on the cathedral music of England, which became thoroughly cosmopolitan, appropriating what we chose from the influences that surrounded the Watch House. We had locked the door from the cellar to the ground floor; and having a key to the outside cellar door, were prepared to leave our expensive and delicate apparatus which we had obtained secretly and at great cost as many days as our vigils might be protracted. 

Whilst turning over the pages by chance, he saw a picture of old bones which had much puzzled his brains some thirty years before. And now he remembered that it was the picture of the bones here drawn, that had first given him the idea that this bone in the museum was the remnant of some extinct animal. They seem to me, when they do shut, to go together in the fashion of a rat-trap when closed. 

It would never have been here but for that old fool (naming a previous curator), whose only aim seems to have been to get the place filled up with useless trash. In the meantime the previous history of the bone may be given. Some sixty years before, when a mill-dam was being enlarged at Verichny, in the parish of Alvah, near Banff, one of the workmen came upon a dark-looking object embedded in the bank amongst clay and shingle, about six feet from the surface. Poetical ornaments destroy that air of truth and plainness which ought to characterize history; but the very being of poetry consists in departing from this plain narration, and adopting every ornament that will warm the imagination. 

Refusing to flee, I watched him fade and as I watched I felt that it was in turn watching me greedily with eyes more imaginable than visible. The most powerful impressions are produced by the simplest construction. Before me was the sea, behind and above me was an insurmountable barrier of feet of cliff. Numerous obstacles stand in the way of defining this story. I took hold of the big stone with both hands, and succeeded in drawing myself about half-way up when it suddenly gave way. On recovering, I found myself lying at the foot of the cliff, sick and very sore. I found that I had bled profusely from the nose and one of my ears. The reds and blues are combined of colours possessing the properties of each. The lightness or darkness of shadows are entirely regulated by the colour of the objects on which they fall. It was no ocean any man had ever dreamed of, the most powerful impressions are produced by the simplest construction. 

After abandoning photography as a means of subsistence, he returned to his old trade. If it were a bone, as you say, surely some of the gentlemen composing the scientific society would know. Give it time, replied edward, and some one will yet be able to tell us all about it. Time indeed! His own view, postulating simply a building and location of markedly unsanitary qualities, had nothing to do with abnormality; but he realized that the very picturesqueness which aroused his own interest would in a boy's fanciful mind take on all manner of gruesome imaginative associations. 

He turned very pale, but agreed to help me, and decided that it would now be safe to rent the house. To declare that we were not nervous on that rainy night of watching would be an exaggeration both gross and ridiculous. The rest is shadowy and monstrous. William was a practical man, and rented the benefit street house despite Harrington's wish to keep it vacant. He considered it an obligation to his ward to make the most of all the boy's property, nor did he concern himself with the deaths and illnesses which caused so many changes of tenants, or the steadily growing aversion with which the house was generally regarded. 

Whether modern efforts can ever surpass, or even equal, the sublime productions in this field, or whether creative genius will be turned into wholly new channels, the future alone may determine. The patient spider. True music has its privileged class. Time, morality, pleasure, and other solo characters bore in their hands musical instruments and seemed to play as they acted and declaimed their parts, while the playing actually came from the concealed instruments. I saw the difference in a moment, and smiled at my own stupidity. The world, the body and human life illustrated the transitoriness of earthly affairs by flinging away the gorgeous decorations they had worn when they appeared on the stage, and displaying their utter poverty and wretchedness in the face of death and dissolution. 

We had devised two weapons to fight it; a large and specially fitted crookes tube operated by powerful storage batteries and provided with peculiar screens and reflectors, in case it proved intangible and opposable only by vigorously destructive ether radiations, and a pair of military flame-throwers of the sort used in the world wars, 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 a heart existed to burn. All this aggressive mechanism we set in the cellar in positions carefully arranged with reference to the cot and chairs, and to the spot before the fireplace where the mold had taken strange shapes. 

After I had arrived at the gate of the garden, some on one side looked sourly at me, so that I was afraid they might hinder me in my project; but others said, "see, he will venture into the garden, and we have done garden service here so long, and have never gotten in; we will laugh him down if he fails." But I did not regard all that, as I knew the conditions of this garden better than they, even if I had never been in it, but went right to a gate that was tight shut so that one could neither see nor find a keyhole. The dust and cobwebs added their touch of the fearful; and brave indeed was the boy who would voluntarily ascend the ladder to the attic, a vast raftered length lighted only by small blinking windows in the gable ends, and filled with a massed wreckage of chests, chairs, and spinning-wheels which infinite years of deposit had shrouded and festooned into monstrous and hellish shapes.

It was not so very unreasonable after all. The hard bone turned up the edge of the spade. It was handed about, to ascertain if anybody could make anything of it. In the second place, besides the striking disparity in size, the mandibles in this species appear to me to differ considerably from the same organs in the anceus maxillaris. The sacred Vedas bear testimony to the high place it held in Hindu worship and life. Proud records of stone reveal its dignified role in the civilization of Egypt, where Plato stated there had existed ten thousand years before his day music that could only have emanated from gods or godlike men. 

Some seasons large flocks appear, then only a few; then, again, perhaps none; and this may be the case for many succeeding seasons. Many of them leave us towards winter. This is another species which endeavours to mislead you when searching for its eggs. They alighted on the water within a short distance of the bar, where he was sitting.

I shuddered at the thought of those vital processes, worn as they were by eighty-one years of continuous functioning, in conflict with unknown forces of which the youngest and strongest system might well be afraid; but in another moment reflected that dreams are only dreams, and that these uncomfortable visions could be, at most, no more than my uncle's reaction to the investigations and expectations which had lately filled our minds to the exclusion of all else. My uncle seemed now very wakeful, and welcomed his period of watching even though the nightmare had aroused him far ahead of his allotted two hours. Sleep seized me quickly, and I was at once haunted with dreams of the most disturbing kind. All distances should have their outlines confused and unfinished, while foreground objects should be bold and determined. Objects appear most remote that are divested of their outline, giving the idea of space and largeness.

He's your man. He's made up of bones. Consider a moment whether this would become you. The chorus had seats assigned on the stage, but rose to sing, employing suitable movements and gestures. Time, morality, pleasure, and other solo characters bore in their hands musical instruments and seemed to play as they acted and declaimed their parts, while the playing actually came from the concealed instruments. The world, the body and human life illustrated the transitoriness of earthly affairs by flinging away the gorgeous decorations they had worn when they appeared on the stage, and displaying their utter poverty and wretchedness in the face of death and dissolution. When, in the end, my insistent pestering and maturing years evoked from my uncle the hoarded lore I sought, there lay before me a strange enough chronicle. Long-Winded, statistical, and drearily genealogical as some of the matter was, there ran through it a continuous thread of brooding, tenacious horror and preternatural malevolence which impressed me even more than it had impressed the good doctor. 

Of solos in our modern sense nothing was known beyond the folk-songs, instinctive outpourings of the human heart, and these learned composers had merely used as pegs on which to hang their counterpoint. The study of the origin, function and evolution of music, according to modern scientific methods, is a matter of comparatively recent date. Beyond the confines of the church was another musical growth, springing up by the wayside and in remote places. Such a boat they had never seen before. 

Other music was required to depict the emotions than that of the contrapuntist, with its puzzling intricacies. So thought these ardent Hellenists, and a burning zeal possessed them to mate dramatic poetry with a music that would heighten and intensify its expression and effect. They who seek are sure to find, even if it be not always the object of their search. In the earnest quest of these reformers for dramatic truth an unexpected treasure was disclosed. "We know a true poem to the extent to which our spirits respond to the spiritual appeal it makes," as nature seldom looks the same two hours together. He had meant to tear it down and build an apartment house on the site, but after my account decided to let it stand, install plumbing, and rent it. Nor has he yet had any difficulty in obtaining tenants. 

That music was capable of conveying an impression in her own tone-language was apparent, and in due time the symphony rose majestic from the forge of genius. He was thought to produce a small but electric tone, and to play invariably in tune. William was now on the alert, and watched the spout closely. They do not go into the fields to drink in the sweets of nature, but rush unthinkingly into the portals of hell, and drown their sorrows in whisky. 

One of earth's nethermost terrors had perished for ever; and if there be a hell, it had received at last the demon soul of an unhallowed thing. And as I patted down the last spadeful of mold, I shed the first of the many tears with which I have paid unaffected tribute to my beloved uncle's memory. 

The next spring no more pale grass and strange weeds came up in the shunned Watch House's terraced garden, and shortly afterward Harrington Karris rented the place. It is still spectral, but its strangeness fascinates me, and I shall find mixed with my relief a queer regret when it is torn down to make way for a tawdry shop or vulgar apartment building. The barren old trees in the yard have begun to bear small, sweet apples, and last year the birds nested in their gnarled boughs.

SOURCES: Harry Wilson, Samuel Smiles, Aubertine Woodward Moore, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Dr. Herbert Silberer.