On Yuletide night a narrator answers an ancestral summons to Kingsport, where silent townsfolk lead him through ancient streets and deep underground. The rite conducted there belongs to no Christian tradition, and the things that fly the celebrants out of the pit are not birds.
Among Lovecraft's earliest Kingsport stories and one of the first to quote the "Necronomicon" by name, lending the Mythos a documentary authority. Its atmosphere of hereditary compulsion anticipates "The Rats in the Walls."