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

He mulled that over for what seemed a long time. Then, in a cu- riously small, troubled voice, he said, "Listen, McClusky; if I had any as- surance 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 the- ory. 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. Any- how, I won't laugh." He exhaled a tremendous sigh of re- lief. "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 re- tained through the years. But I had no instinct for fraternalism, for striking up superficial and meaningless acquaint- anceships, for the 'Hail fellow, well- met' sort of existence. "My about-face came in the late sum- mer of 1928. . . . "I acquired the New Hartford farm in 1925, and my reasons for purchas- ing 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 oc- casionally needed. The nearest house was more than a hundred yards away — and I carefully ascertained its own- ership 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 resi- dence." "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 au- thentic Colonial pieces; when I'd fin- ished 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 ac- cident; after all, our properties ad- joined and fronted on the same road, so I suppose our meeting was inevit-