Merwin Gardner

Merwin Gardner is one of the children of Nahum Gardner whose deterioration and disappearance turn the family’s decline into an immediate personal horror. Once described as imaginative and closely attached to his brother Thaddeus Gardner, he becomes increasingly distressed as the household is overtaken by illness and strange changes. His disappearance beside the well leaves a few damaged objects as clues; the later discovery of partial remains makes the well a grave as well as the focus of the family’s unanswered fears.

Family Life and Growing Distress

Merwin is presented as a boy whose imaginative disposition intensifies under the pressure of events at the farm. After Thaddeus Gardner is shut in an attic room, Merwin loses the brother who had been his greatest playmate. He becomes more restless, and the narrator describes his imagination as frighteningly active. The boys’ mother is also confined to a room, and her screams and Thaddeus’s cries answer one another through locked doors. Merwin imagines that they are speaking in a terrible language not of Earth, a perception that conveys how completely the family’s familiar home has become strange to him.

By the time Merwin disappears, his condition has worsened. Nahum Gardner later says that the boy had been going to pieces for days and scarcely knew what he was doing; he screamed at everything. This account links the disappearance to a sustained deterioration rather than to a sudden, unexplained departure, while leaving its precise cause unknown.

Disappearance at the Well

Late one night, Merwin takes a lantern and pail to fetch water and does not return. A shriek comes from the yard, but before Nahum Gardner can reach the door, the boy is gone. The lantern gives no further glow, and no trace of Merwin can be found. Nahum searches the woods and fields through the night, initially believing that the lantern and pail have vanished with his son.

At dawn, he discovers the objects near the well: the lantern has become a crushed, partly melted mass of iron, while the pail’s bent bail and twisted hoops are also half-fused. These remnants establish that something destructive occurred by the well, but do not explain what happened to Merwin. Nahum cannot make sense of the evidence, and the family’s isolation leaves him with little prospect of help or understanding. He asks Ammi Pierce to look after his wife and Zenas Gardner if they survive him, speaking as though his own death is near.

Discovery and Narrative Significance

During the later examination of the well, investigators find the remains of Merwin and Zenas Gardner, both present only in part and mainly skeletal. A small deer, a large dog, and bones of smaller animals are also found. The mud at the bottom is porous and bubbling; a pole can be pushed down through it without meeting solid ground. The discovery confirms that Merwin’s disappearance ended in the well, but it does not reveal how he entered it or account for the condition of his remains.

Merwin’s trajectory compresses the story’s movement from domestic unease to irrecoverable loss. His imagined language, his escalating distress, the brief shriek from the yard, and the fused remains of his water pail all point toward a danger associated with the well without making that danger fully knowable. His eventual identification among the remains gives the family’s private catastrophe material evidence, yet the investigators still cannot fit the deaths and transformations into a convincing explanation.