Weeds and briers reigned, and furtive wild things rustled in the undergrowth
that alien and undimensioned rainbow of cryptic poison from the well – seething, feeling, lapping, reaching, scintillating, straining, and malignly bubbling in its cosmic and unrecognizable chromaticism.
It come from some place whar things ain't as they is here
Nothin'… nothin'… the colour… it burns… cold an' wet, but it burns… it lived in the well…
But he did not complete the walk, because what he sought was no longer there. It had come to meet him, and it was still alive after a fashion.
There are things which cannot be mentioned, and what is done in common humanity is sometimes cruelly judged by the law.
Something was creeping and creeping and waiting to be seen and heard.
He and the boys continued to use the tainted supply, drinking it as listlessly and mechanically as they ate their meagre and ill-cooked meals and did their thankless and monotonous chores through the aimless days. There was something of stolid resignation about them all, as if they walked half in another world between lines of nameless guards to a certain and familiar doom.
No sane wholesome colours were anywhere to be seen except in the green grass and leafage; but everywhere were those hectic and prismatic variants of some diseased, underlying primary tone without a place among the' known tints of earth.
It was nothing of this earth, but a piece of the great outside; and as such dowered with outside properties and obedient to outside laws.
