xious quality.

This much I knew before my insistent questioning led my uncle to show me
the notes which finally embarked us both on our hideous investigation.
In my childhood the shunned house was vacant, with barren, gnarled and
terrible old trees, long, queerly pale grass and nightmarishly misshapen
weeds in the high terraced yard where birds never lingered. We boys used
to overrun the place, and I can still recall my youthful terror not only
at the morbid strangeness of this sinister vegetation, but at the
eldritch atmosphere and odor of the dilapidated house, whose unlocked
front door was often entered in quest of shudders. The small-paned
windows were largely broken, and a nameless air of desolation hung round
the precarious panelling, shaky interior shutters, peeling wall-paper,
falling plaster, rickety staircases, and such fragments of battered
furniture as still remained. 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.

But after all, the attic was not the most terrible part of the house. It
was the dank, humid cellar which somehow exerted the strongest repulsion
on us, even though it was wholly above ground on the street side, with
only a thin door and window-pierced brick wall to separate it from the
busy sidewalk. We scarcely knew whether to haunt it in spectral
fascination, or to shun it for the sake of our souls and our sanity. For
one thing, the bad odor of the house was strongest there; and for
another thing, we did not like the white fungous growths which
occasionally sprang up in rainy summer weather from the hard earth
floor. Those fungi, grotesquely like the vegetation in the yard outside,
were truly horrible in their outlines; detestable parodies of toadstools
and Indian-pipes, whose like we had never seen in any other situation.
They rotted quickly, and at one stage became slightly phosphorescent; so
that nocturnal passers-by sometimes spoke of witch-fires glowing behind
the broken panes of the fetor-spreading windows.

We never--even in our wildest Halloween moods--visited this cellar
by night, but in some of our daytime visits could detect the
phosphorescence, es