The narrator, an unnamed surveyor from Boston, describes his attempts to uncover the secrets behind a shunned place referred to by the locals of the hills west of Arkham as the "blasted heath". Unable to garner any information from the townspeople, the protagonist seeks out an old and allegedly crazy man by the name of Ammi Pierce, who relates his experiences with a farmer named Nahum Gardner and his family who used to live on the property.
A meteorite crashed into Nahum's land over fifty years prior, in June 1882. At the time, local scientists take a sample from the meteorite, and are perplexed by several strange behaviors that it exhibits. The sample disappears overnight after being stored in a glass beaker. When attempting to take a second sample from the meteorite, the scientists reveal a globule encased in the meteorite emitting a strange color. It was "only by analogy that they called it a color at all", as it fell outside of the range of anything known in the visible spectrum. One of the scientists hits the globule with a hammer, and it disintegrates. Overnight, the meteorite disappears after being struck by bolts of lightning.