So this, I thought on that fine September day less than one year ago, as I drove my car round a bend in the lane and drew up before a pair of wrought-iron gates, is where he lives. Despite the brilliance of the sunshine I could not help feeling somewhat disappointed. For the drab grey building visible beyond seemed to personify for me all that had struck me as wrong about the town I had left only two miles away, before passing through the tree-lined meadows and farms along the lane. The uncurtained windows of the house, however, the leaf-strewn pathway rank with mould and long, bare streaks of clay, all these gave off such an air of desolation that I felt instantly depressed. It was certainly not a place which I would have chosen to visit at any time of the day of my own free will, and certainly not at dusk, when the shadows lengthening all about the estate seemed to intensify its ugliness. Why Poole had decided to buy such a place I could not imagine, and I roundly cursed myself for having so readily agreed to come down here to visit him over the week-end. I only hoped, as I stepped out of my car, that the inside of the house would prove to be of a more hospitable appearance than its. facade.
Its blank, almost senile-looking windows stared down at me as I neared the door and rapped upon it. Soon, though, I found myself ushered deep inside the old house in Poole's redecorated study - a book lined room full of polished wood, paintings and leather armchairs, with a coal fire roaring in an elaborately carved hearth full of ebony cupids and flowers. Poole - tall, thin, with the concealed strength of a mountaineer - was in the best of spirits. My own, in contrast, though relieved to a degree by the signs of redecoration, were overcome by a newer and less easily explainable feeling of abhorrence. There was a certain, indefinable quality about the house which I strongly disliked, and I knew then, without a shadow of a doubt, that, however much Poole might enthuse about it, this initial feeling of mine would not be changed. The more I saw of the house, in fact, as Poole showed me around it, the stronger this abhorrence grew.
Upstairs it was almost derelict, with large, grey, vacuous rooms that echoed their emptiness through fibrous veils of cobwebs and dust. Looking at them I could well imagine this place as:
A house without a living room For dead it was, and called a tomb!
"I don't intend using them much," Poole explained, interrupting my thoughts, "except, perhaps, as store rooms, though I might have two or three done up for guests."
Presently we returned downstairs to the hallway where, at Poole's insistence, we turned off into an arched alcove, within which stood a sturdy wooden door that led to the cellar steps. Lighting a paraffin lamp from a shelf beside it, he unlocked the door and led me down the damp-slicked steps beyond into a tactile darkness that took us into its frigid depths like the waters of a Stygian well.