“But let me explain how the stone came into my possession. Five years ago we took a house situated about four or five miles from Montreal. It was a long, low, two storey house, standing a little back from the road, and connected with it by a semi-circular sweep of gravel road. Opposite the house was a large pit, where quarrying had recently been begun, but had been discontinued, owing to the calcinous nature of the rock, which rendered it of little use for building purposes. Incessant rains had formed a deep pool in the bottom of the pit, and the water possessed this idiosyncrasy—the weather made no difference to its temperature—it was icy cold in summer and winter alike.
“Viewed in the day-time, the quarry struck one as ordinary enough. It was at dusk, when the shadows from the trees and bushes swept across the road and dimmed the mouth of the great pit, that it impressed one as unsavoury. I remember marvelling at this metamorphosis the first day of our arrival. It was July, and the landscape was vividly aglow with brilliant, scintillating sunbeams. A more radiant scene you could not imagine. ‘One might make a capital swimming bath of this,’ I remarked to my wife, as we wandered to the edge of the pit and peered down into the silent, sparkling water.
“‘Yes,’ she laughed. ‘Supposing we start right away. I never appreciate a bath more than after a journey.’
“That was in the morning. In the evening the place produced a very different impression. We had dinner—the sort of scratch meal one must expect when one is ‘moving in,’ and I had strolled out alone. I first of all explored the premises. There was a big garden with an orchard alongside, and a small field beyond; and I pictured to myself how nice it would all look when the grass was properly cut and the flower-beds planted by my wife, who, by the way, thoroughly understands landscape gardening. You do, don’t you, Mabel?”
Mrs. Fanshawe nodded, and her husband resumed his story.
“I lit another cigar and walked out into the road to have a look at the quarry. I hardly recognised it. It seemed, since the morning, to have undergone a complete change. The banks appeared higher and more precipitous, the water blacker and infinitely deeper, and there was a cold dreariness about the place that made me shiver. I thought I had never viewed anything so utterly forlorn and murderous. On the opposite bank were a few rank sedges and several white trunks of decayed trees. I had not noticed them before, but now, as I gazed down at the pool, I saw their re-modelled and inverted images outlined with a clearness that more than rivalled that of their material counterparts.
“I was pondering over this phenomenon, when I suddenly felt I was being watched, and, raising my eyes, I perceived on the bank facing me, just out of reach of the water, a boulder of ebony-black and grotesquely-wrought rock. I could not see anything behind it, but I was convinced that something was there, something that was crouching on its haunches and glaring savagely at me. I also felt convinced that this thing, which I could not actually see—though I knew for certain it was there—was some strange hybrid of a man and animal; a thing with limbs like ours, but the face of some fantastic, mocking, malevolent beast.
“Filled with a great uneasiness and all manner of vague fears, I hurried back to the house, where all was bright and cheerful, but I could not rid my mind of the impression it had taken from the pool, and that night my dreams were troubled and alarming.
“I said nothing about it to my wife, but two days later, when I was mending my fishing-rod in the study, she came to me in a great state of agitation. ‘Why, what’s the matter, Mabel?’ I asked anxiously; ‘you look very white! Are you ill?’ ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ve only had a shock.’”