My name is Jervas Dudley, and from earliest childhood I have
been a dreamer and a visionary. Wealthy beyond the necessity of a commercial
life, and temperamentally unfitted for the formal studies and social recreation
of my acquaintances, I have dwelt ever in realms apart from the visible world;
spending my youth and adolescence in ancient and little known books, and in
roaming the fields and groves of the region near my ancestral home. I do not
think that what I read in these books or saw in these fields and groves was
exactly what other boys read and saw there; but of this I must say little,
since detailed speech would but confirm those cruel slanders upon my intellect
which I sometimes overhear from the whispers of the stealthy attendants around
me. It is sufficient for me to relate events without analyzing causes.
I have said that I dwelt apart from the visible world, but I
have not said that I dwelt alone. This no human creature may do; for lacking
the fellowship of the living, he inevitably draws upon the companionship of
things that are not, or are no longer, living. Close by my home there lies a
singular wooded hollow, in whose twilight deeps I spent most of my time;
reading, thinking, and dreaming. Down its moss-covered slopes my first steps of
infancy were taken, and around its grotesquely gnarled oak trees my first
fancies of boyhood were woven. Well did I come to know the presiding dryads of
those trees, and often have I watched their wild dances in the struggling beams
of a waning moon but of these things I must not now speak. I will tell only of
the lone tomb in the darkest of the hillside thickets; the deserted tomb of the
Hydes, an old and exalted family whose last direct descendant had been laid
within its black recesses many decades before my birth.
The vault to which I refer is of ancient granite, weathered
and discolored by the mists and dampness of generations. Excavated back into
the hillside, the structure is visible only at the entrance. The door, a
ponderous and forbidding slab of stone, hangs upon rusted iron hinges, and is
fastened ajar in a queerly sinister way by means of heavy iron chains and
padlocks, according to a gruesome fashion of half a century ago. The abode of
the race whose scions are here inurned had once crowned the declivity which
holds the tomb, but had long since fallen victim to the flames which sprang up
from a stroke of lightning. Of the midnight storm which destroyed this gloomy
mansion, the older inhabitants of the region sometimes speak in hushed and
uneasy voices; alluding to what they call 'divine wrath' in a manner that in
later years vaguely increased the always strong fascination which I had felt
for the forest-darkened sepulcher. One man only had perished in the fire. When
the last of the Hydes was buried in this place of shade and stillness, the sad
urnful of ashes had come from a distant land, to which the family had repaired
when the mansion burned down. No one remains to lay flowers before the granite
portal, and few care to brave the depressing shadows which seem to linger
strangely about the water-worn stones.
I shall never forget the afternoon when first I stumbled upon
the half-hidden house of death. It was in midsummer, when the alchemy of nature
transmutes the sylvan landscape to one vivid and almost homogeneous mass of
green; when the senses are well-nigh intoxicated with the surging seas of moist
verdure and the subtly indefinable odors of the soil and the vegetation. In
such surroundings the mind loses its perspective; time and space become trivial
and unreal, and echoes of a forgotten prehistoric past beat insistently upon
the enthralled consciousness.
All day I had been wandering through the mystic groves of the
hollow; thinking thoughts I need not discuss, and conversing with things I need
not name. In years a child of ten, I had seen and heard many wonders unknown to
the throng; and was oddly aged in certain respects. When, upon forcing my way
between two savage clumps of briars, I suddenly encountered the entrance of the
vault, I had no knowledge of what I had discovered. The dark blocks of granite,
the door so curiously ajar, and the funeral carvings above the arch, aroused in
me no associations of mournful or terrible character. Of graves and tombs I
knew and imagined much, but had on account of my peculiar temperament been kept
from all personal contact with churchyards and cemeteries. The strange stone
house on the woodland slope was to me only a source of interest and
speculation; and its cold, damp interior, into which I vainly peered through the
aperture so tantalizingly left, contained for me no hint of death or decay. But
in that instant of curiosity was born the madly unreasoning desire which has
brought me to this hell of confinement. Spurred on by a voice which must have
come from the hideous soul of the forest, I resolved to enter the beckoning
gloom in spite of the ponderous chains which barred my passage. In the waning
light of day I alternately rattled the rusty impediments with a view to
throwing wide the stone door, and essayed to squeeze my slight form through the
space already provided; but neither plan met with success. At first curious, I
was now frantic; and when in the thickening twilight I returned to my home, I
had sworn to the hundred gods of the grove that at any cost I would some day
force an entrance to the black, chilly depths that seemed calling out to me.
The physician with the iron-grey beard who comes each day to my room, once told
a visitor that this decision marked the beginning of a pitiful monomania; but I
will leave final judgment to my readers when they shall have learnt all.
The months following my discovery were spent in futile
attempts to force the complicated padlock of the slightly open vault, and in
carefully guarded inquiries regarding the nature and history of the structure.
With the traditionally receptive ears of the small boy, I learned much; though
an habitual secretiveness caused me to tell no one of my information or my
resolve. It is perhaps worth mentioning that I was not at all surprised or
terrified on learning of the nature of the vault. My rather original ideas
regarding life and death had caused me to associate the cold clay with the
breathing body in a vague fashion; and I felt that the great and sinister
family of the burned-down mansion was in some way represented within the stone
space I sought to explore. Mumbled tales of the weird rites and godless revels
of bygone years in the ancient hall gave to me a new and potent interest in the
tomb, before whose door I would sit for hours at a time each day. Once I thrust
a candie within the nearly closed entrance, but could see nothing save a flight
of damp stone steps leading downward. The odor of the place repelled yet
bewitched me. I felt I had known it before, in a past remote beyond all
recollection; beyond even my tenancy of the body I now possess.
The year after I first beheld the tomb, I stumbled upon a
worm-eaten translation of Plutarch's Lives in the book-filled attic of my home.
Reading the life of Theseus, I was much impressed by that passage telling of
the great stone beneath which the boyish hero was to find his tokens of destiny
whenever he should become old enough to lift its enormous weight. The legend
had the effect of dispelling my keenest impatience to enter the vault, for it
made me feel that the time was not yet ripe. Later, I told myself, I should
grow to a strength and ingenuity which might enable me to unfasten the heavily
chained door with ease; but until then I would do better by conforming to what
seemed the will of Fate.
Accordingly my watches by the dank portal became less
persistent, and much of my time was spent in other though equally strange
pursuits. I would sometimes rise very quietly in the night, stealing out to
walk in those church-yards and places of burial from which I had been kept by
my parents. What I did there I may not say, for I am not now sure of the
reality of certain things; but I know that on the day after such a nocturnal
ramble I would often astonish those about me with my knowledge of topics almost
forgotten for many generations. It was after a night like this that I shocked
the community with a queer conceit about the burial of the rich and celebrated
Squire Brewster, a maker of local history who was interred in 1711, and whose
slate headstone, bearing a graven skull and crossbones, was slowly crumbling to
powder. In a moment of childish imagination I vowed not only that the
undertaker, Goodman Simpson, had stolen the silver-buckled shoes, silken hose,
and satin small-clothes of the deceased before burial; but that the Squire
himself, not fully inanimate, had turned twice in his mound-covered coffin on
the day after interment.
But the idea of entering the tomb never left my thoughts;
being indeed stimulated by the unexpected genealogical discovery that my own
maternal ancestry possessed at least a slight link with the supposediy extinct
family of the Hydes. Last of my paternal race, I was likewise the last of this
older and more mysterious line. I began to feel that the tomb was mine, and to
look forward with hot eagerness to the time when I might pass within that stone
door and down those slimy stone steps in the dark. I now formed the habit of
listening very intently at the slightly open portal, choosing my favorite hours
of midnight stillness for the odd vigil. By the time I came of age, I had made
a small clearing in the thicket before the mold-stained facade of the hillside,
allowing the surrounding vegetation to encircle and overhang the space like the
walls and roof of a sylvan bower. This bower was my temple, the fastened door
my shrine, and here I would lie outstretched on the mossy ground, thinking
strange thoughts and dreaming strange dreams.
The night of the first revelation was a sultry one. I must
have fallen asleep from fatigue, for it was with a distinct sense of awakening
that I heard the voices. Of these tones and accents I hesitate to speak; of
their quality I will not speak; but I may say that they presented certain
uncanny differences in vocabulary, pronunciation, and mode of utterance. Every
shade of New England dialect, from the uncouth syllables of the Puritan
colonists to the precise rhetoric of fifty years ago, seemed represented in
that shadowy colloquy, though it was only later that I noticed the fact. At the
time, indeed, my attention was distracted from this matter by another
phenomenon; a phenomenon so fleeting that I could not take oath upon its
reality. I barely fancied that as I awoke, a light had been hurriedly
extinguished within the sunken sepulcher. I do not think I was either astounded
or panic-stricken, but I know that I was greatly and permanently changed that
night. Upon returning home I went with much directness to a rotting chest in
the attic, wherein I found the key which next day unlocked with ease the
barrier I had so long stormed in vain.
It was in the soft glow of late afternoon that I first entered
the vault on the abandoned slope. A spell was upon me, and my heart leaped with
an exultation I can but ill describe. As I closed the door behind me and
descended the dripping steps by the light of my lone candle, I seemed to know
the way; and though the candle sputtered with the stifling reek of the place, I
felt singularly at home in the musty, charnel-house air. Looking about me, I
beheld many marble slabs bearing coffins, or the remains of coffins. Some of
these were sealed and intact, but others had nearly vanished, leaving the
silver handles and plates isolated amidst certain curious heaps of whitish
dust. Upon one plate I read the name of Sir Geoffrey Hyde, who had come from
Sussex in 1640 and died here a few years later. In a conspicuous alcove was one
fairly well preserved and untenanted casket, adorned with a single name which
brought me both a smile and a shudder. An odd impulse caused me to climb upon
the broad slab, extinguish my candle, and lie down within the vacant box.
In the gray light of dawn I staggered from the vault and
locked the chain of the door behind me. I was no longer a young man, though but
twenty-one winters had chilled my bodily frame. Early-rising villagers who
observed my homeward progress looked at me strangely, and marveled at the signs
of ribald revelry which they saw in one whose life was known to be sober and
solitary. I did not appear before my parents till after a long and refreshing
sleep.
Henceforward I haunted the tomb each night; seeing, hearing,
and doing things I must never recall. My speech, always susceptible to
environmental influences, was the first thing to succumb to the change; and my
suddenly acquired archaism of diction was soon remarked upon. Later a queer
boldness and recklessness came into my demeanor, till I unconsciously grew to
possess the bearing of a man of the world despite my lifelong seclusion. My
formerly silent tongue waxed voluble with the easy grace of a Chesterfield or
the godless cynicism of a Rochester. I displayed a peculiar erudition utterly
unlike the fantastic, monkish lore over which I had pored in youth; and covered
the fly-leaves of my books with facile impromptu epigrams which brought up suggestions
of Gay, Prior, and the sprightliest of the Augustan wits and rimesters. One
morning at breakfast I came close to disaster by declaiming in palpably
liquorish accents an effusion of Eighteenth Century bacchanalian mirth, a bit
of Georgian playfulness never recorded in a book, which ran something like
this:
Come hither, my lads, with your tankards of ale,
And drink to the present before it shall fail;
Pile each on your platter a mountain of beef,
For 'tis eating and drinking that bring us relief:
So fill up your glass, For life will soon pass;
When you're dead ye'll ne'er drink to your king or your lass!
Anacreon had a red nose, so they say;
But what's a red nose if ye're happy and gay?
Gad split me! I'd rather be red whilst I'm here,
Than white as a lily and dead half a year!
So Betty, my miss,
Come give me kiss;
In hell there's no innkeeper's daughter like this!
Young Harry, propp'd up just as straight as he's able,
Will soon lose his wig and slip under the table,
But fill up your goblets and pass 'em around
Better under the table than under the ground!
So revel and chaff
As ye thirstily quaff:
Under six feet of dirt 'tis less easy to laugh!
The fiend strike me blue! l'm scarce able to walk,
And damn me if I can stand upright or talk!
Here, landlord, bid Betty to summon a chair;
l'll try home for a while, for my wife is not there!
So lend me a hand;
I'm not able to stand,
But I'm gay whilst I linger on top of the land!
About this time I conceived my present fear of fire and
thunderstorms. Previously indifferent to such things, I had now an unspeakable
horror of them; and would retire to the innermost recesses of the house
whenever the heavens threatened an electrical display. A favorite haunt of mine
during the day was the ruined cellar of the mansion that had burned down, and
in fancy I would picture the structure as it had been in its prime. On one
occasion I startled a villager by leading him confidently to a shallow
subcellar, of whose existence I seemed to know in spite of the fact that it had
been unseen and forgotten for many generations.
At last came that which I had long feared. My parents, alarmed
at the altered manner and appearance of their only son, commenced to exert over
my movements a kindly espionage which threatened to result in disaster. I had
told no one of my visits to the tomb, having guarded my secret purpose with
religious zeal since childhood; but now I was forced to exercise care in
threading the mazes of the wooded hollow, that I might throw off a possible
pursuer. My key to the vault I kept suspended from a cord about my neck, its
presence known only to me. I never carried out of the sepulcher any of the
things I came upon whilst within its walls.
One morning as I emerged from the damp tomb and fastened the
chain of the portal with none too steady hand, I beheld in an adjacent thicket
the dreaded face of a watcher. Surely the end was near; for my bower was
discovered, and the objective of my nocturnal journeys revealed. The man did
not accost me, so I hastened home in an effort to overhear what he might report
to my careworn father. Were my sojourns beyond the chained door about to be
proclaimed to the world? Imagine my delighted astonishment on hearing the spy inform
my parent in a cautious whisper that I had spent the night in the bower outside
the tomb; my sleep-filmed eyes fixed upon the crevice where the padlocked
portal stood ajar! By what miracle had the watcher been thus deluded? I was now
convinced that a supernatural agency protected me. Made bold by this
heaven-sent circumstance, I began to resume perfect openness in going to the
vault; confident that no one could witness my entrance. For a week I tasted to
the full joys of that charnel conviviality which I must not describe, when the
thing happened, and I was borne away to this accursed abode of sorrow and
monotony.
I should not have ventured out that night; for the taint of
thunder was in the clouds, and a hellish phosphoresence rose from the rank
swamp at the bottom of the hollow. The call of the dead, too, was different.
Instead of the hillside tomb, it was the charred cellar on the crest of the
slope whose presiding demon beckoned to me with unseen fingers. As I emerged
from an intervening grove upon the plain before the ruin. I beheld in the misty
moonlight a thing I had always vaguely expected. The mansion, gone for a
century, once more reared its stately height to the raptured vision; every
window ablaze with the splendor of many candles. Up the long drive rolled the
coaches of the Boston gentry, whilst on foot came a numerous assemblage of
powdered exquisites from the neighboring mansions. With this throng I mingled,
though I knew I belonged with the hosts rather than with the guests. Inside the
hall were music, laughter, and wine on every hand. Several faces I recognized;
though I should have known them better had they been shriveled or eaten away by
death and decomposition. Amidst a wild and reckless throng I was the wildest
and most abandoned. Gay blasphemy poured in torrents from my lips, and in
shocking sallies I heeded no law of God, or nature.
Suddenly a peal of thunder, resonant even above the din of the
swinish revelry, clave the very roof and laid a hush of fear upon the
boisterous company. Red tongues of flame and searing gusts of heat engulfed the
house; and the roysterers, struck with terror at the descent of a calamity
which seemed to transcend the bounds of unguided nature, fled shrieking into
the night. I alone remained, riveted to my seat by a groveling fear which I had
never felt before. And then a second horror took possession of my soul. Burnt
alive to ashes, my body dispersed by the four winds, I might never lie in the
tomb of the Hydesi Was not my coffin prepared for me? Had I not a right to rest
till eternity amongst the descendants of Sir Geoffrey Hyde? Aye! I would claim
my heritage of death, even though my soul go seeking through the ages for
another corporeal tenement to represent it on that vacant slab in the alcove of
the vault. Jervas Hyde should never share the sad fate of Palinurus!
As the phantom of the burning house faded, I found myself
screaming and struggling madly in the arms of two men, one of whom was the spy
who had followed me to the tomb. Rain was pouring down in torrents, and upon
the southern horizon were flashes of lightning that had so lately passed over
our heads. My father, his face lined with sorrow, stood by as I shouted my
demands to be laid within the tomb, frequently admonishing my captors to treat
me as gently as they could. A blackened circle on the floor of the ruined
cellar told of a violent stroke from the heavens; and from this spot a group of
curious villagers with lanterns were prying a small box of antique workmanship,
which the thunderbolt had brought to light.
Ceasing my futile and now objectless writhing, I watched the
spectators as they viewed the treasure-trove, and was permitted to share in
their discoveries. The box, whose fastenings were broken by the stroke which
had unearthed it, contained many papers and objects of value, but I had eyes
for one thing alone. It was the porcelain miniature of a young man in a smartly
curled bag-wig, and bore the initials 'J. H.' The face was such that as I
gazed, I might well have been studying my mirror.
On the following day I was brought to this room with the barred
windows, but I have been kept informed of certain things through an aged and
simple-minded servitor, for whom I bore a fondness in infancy, and who, like
me, loves the churchyard. What I have dared relate of my experiences within the
vault has brought me only pitying smiles. My father, who visits me frequently,
declares that at no time did I pass the chained portal, and swears that the
rusted padlock had not been touched for fifty years when he examined it. He
even says that all the village knew of my journeys to the tomb, and that I was
often watched as I slept in the bower outside the grim facade, my half-open
eyes fixed on the crevice that leads to the interior. Against these assertions
I have no tangible proof to offer, since my key to the padlock was lost in the
struggle on that night of horrors. The strange things of the past which I have
learned during those nocturnal meetings with the dead he dismisses as the
fruits of my lifelong and omnivorous browsing amongst the ancient volumes of
the family library. Had it not been for my old servant Hiram, I should have by
this time become quite convinced of my madness.
But Hiram, loyal to the last, has held faith in me, and has
done that which impels me to make public at least part of my story. A week ago he
burst open the lock which chains the door of the tomb perpetually ajar, and
descended with a lantern into the murky depths. On a slab in an alcove he found
an old but empty coffin whose tarnished plate bears the single word: Jervas. In
that coffin and in that vault they have promised me I shall be buried.
_____________
by H. P. Lovecraft
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