Nabby Gardner

Nabby Gardner is a member of the Gardner family whose progressive mental and physical collapse makes the farm’s spreading corruption intimate and domestic. Her illness turns her from a wife moving through the household into a terrified, confined figure, and her fate becomes one of the losses that expose the cost of the alien presence at the heart of the family’s destruction.

Deterioration and Speech

In June, near the anniversary of the meteor’s fall, Nabby began screaming about presences in the air that she could not describe. Her ravings offered no specific nouns: only verbs and pronouns conveyed that things moved and changed, that the walls and windows seemed to shift, and that something was taking or fastening itself upon her. The failure of language is part of the horror. She registers an assault with force and urgency but cannot identify what is happening to her.

Her decline continued over the following weeks. By July she had stopped speaking and crawled on all fours. Nahum Gardner then believed that she gave off a faint light in the dark, like the nearby vegetation already turning grey. The resemblance places Nabby’s illness within the farm’s wider transformation: what is happening to her is not presented as an isolated domestic crisis, but as another manifestation of the influence spreading through living things.

Confinement in the Attic

Nahum did not send Nabby to the county asylum. At first he allowed her to wander around the house while she remained harmless to herself and others. He changed course when the boys became afraid of her and Thaddeus Gardner nearly fainted at the faces she made at him. Nahum locked her in the attic, turning the house’s upper room into the place where her worsening condition would be hidden from the family’s daily life.

By the time Ammi Pierce visited the farm after more than two weeks without seeing Nahum, the family’s account of Nabby had broken down. When Ammi asked about her, Nahum appeared not to recognize that she was missing and said she was there. Ammi took the keys from beside the door and searched upstairs. Of the four attic doors, only one was locked; after trying the keys, he opened it and found a dark, foul-smelling room. In its corner lay a slowly crumbling monstrosity, which the narrative identifies with the same nameless fate that had overtaken Thaddeus and the livestock. The search and discovery establish Nabby’s fate without giving her a final scene of her own.

Nahum’s Warning and Nabby’s Fate

Before he died, Nahum described the colour as something that burned while seeming cold and wet, and said that it drained life from living things. He connected its growth to the well, to the strange colour seen in the plants, and to the loss of Zenas Gardner. In this failing account, Nabby remained in immediate danger: Nahum said her face sometimes took on the colour toward night and feared that it would reach her too. He also could not remember how long it had been since he fed her, a small but stark sign of how thoroughly the family’s capacity to care for one another had collapsed.

Ammi later reported Nabby’s death to the authorities alongside Nahum’s, while Thaddeus’s death was already known. Her fate thus emerges through others’ observations and through the physical horror discovered behind a locked door. The contrast between her earlier inability to name the threat and Nahum’s late, fragmented explanation underscores the family’s helplessness: they can recognize the pattern only as it consumes them, and even then they cannot stop it.