An intense fireball, a burst of light, a smoking crater, and Nahum Gardner had a meteorite buried in his backyard. Fortunately, it didn't hit the well, but landed a few feet away. At first, the meteorite drew much attention -- neighbors, sightseers, the professors from Miskatonic University -- and Gardner was proud of his fame.

But there was the matter of the strange color given off by the meteorite; a color never before seen on earth. Later there were changes in the flora and fauna around the farm. Animal footprints that looked eerily off-kilter in some barely definable way, trees swaying in the absence of wind, and the odd quality of the well-water soon after. Something definitely was not right...

Reprinted in:

• Amazing Stories, Vol. 2, No. 6 (September 1927), 557-67.
• The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre, New York: Ballantine Books, 1982, 185-206.
• The Dunwich Horror and Others, Ed. S.T. Joshi. Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1984, 53-82.
• The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft, Ed. S.T. Joshi. New York, NJ: Dell Publishing, 1997, 58-100.
• Tales of H.P. Lovecraft, Ed. Joyce Carol Oates. Hopewell, NJ: The Ecco Press, 1997, 77-100.
• The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, New York: Penguin Books, 1999, 170-99.
• H.P. Lovecraft: Tales. New York, NY: The Library of America, 2005, 340-69.