Nahum Gardner

Nahum owned the trim white farmhouse amid fertile orchards where the blasted heath later formed. A meteorite fell from the sky and bedded itself beside his well; he reported the stone to the town and to Ammi Pierce, noting that it had shrunk overnight and glowed faintly, though the professors insisted stones do not shrink. He was a lean, genial man of about fifty living with his wife and three sons, and lightning struck the strange, magnetic stone's furrow six times within an hour.

Over the following year his orchard fruit grew to abnormal size but proved bitter and inedible, and he came to believe the meteorite had poisoned his soil. Disturbed by strange footprints in the snow, he ploughed only his upland fields and drove his cows uplands after their milk turned bad. His wife went mad and was eventually locked in the attic, and he came to believe she glowed faintly in the dark like the surrounding vegetation; his horses went mad and had to be shot.

His son Zenas cut down blasphemous-looking flowers in the yard; his son Thaddeus went mad after visiting the well and died mysteriously in a locked attic room; his youngest son Merwin vanished one night fetching water, leaving only a crushed lantern behind. Found by Ammi weeks later, mentally broken, Nahum could only murmur "In the well—he lives in the well—" of Zenas. As his body collapsed, greyed, and disintegrated, he described a colour that lived in the well, had come from the meteorite, burned and sucked the life from everything, and had taken his wife and sons one by one before it would come for him too. He died completely caved in, his last words warning that whatever remained "can't git away."