object:1f.lovecraft - The Dunwich Horror
author class:H P Lovecraft
subject class:Fiction
genre class:Horror
class:chapter
“Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimaeras—dire stories of Celaeno and the
Harpies—may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition—but
they were there before. They are transcripts, types—the archetypes
are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that which we
know in a waking sense to be false come to affect us at all? Is it
that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in
their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? O,
least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond
body—or without the body, they would have been the same. . . . That
the kind of fear here treated is purely spiritual—that it is strong
in proportion as it is objectless on earth, that it predominates in
the period of our sinless infancy—are difficulties the solution of
which might afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane
condition, and a peep at least into the shadowland of
pre-existence.”
—Charles Lamb: “Witches and Other Night-Fears”
I.
When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at
the junction of the Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean’s Corners he comes
upon a lonely and curious country. The ground gets higher, and the
brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts of
the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent forest belts seem
too large, and the wild weeds, brambles, and grasses attain a
luxuriance not often found in settled regions. At the same time the
planted fields appear singularly few and barren; while the sparsely
scattered houses wear a surprisingly uniform aspect of age, squalor,
and dilapidation. Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions
from the gnarled, solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling
doorsteps or on the sloping, rock-strown meadows. Those figures are so
silent and furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden
things, with which it would be better to have nothing to do. When a
rise in the road brings the mountains in view above the deep woods, the
feeling of strange uneasiness is increased. The summits are too rounded
and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and
sometimes the sky silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circles
of tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned.
Gorges and ravines of problematical depth intersect the way, and the
crude wooden bridges always seem of dubious safety. When the road dips
again there are stretches of marshland that one instinctively dislikes,
and indeed almost fears at evening when unseen whippoorwills chatter
and the fireflies come out in abnormal profusion to dance to the
raucous, creepily insistent rhythms of stridently piping bull-frogs.
The thin, shining line of the Miskatonic’s upper reaches has an oddly
serpent-like suggestion as it winds close to the feet of the domed
hills among which it rises.
As the hills draw nearer, one heeds their wooded sides more than their
stone-crowned tops. Those sides loom up so darkly and precipitously
that one wishes they would keep their distance, but there is no road by
which to escape them. Across a covered bridge one sees a small village
huddled between the stream and the vertical slope of Round Mountain,
and wonders at the cluster of rotting gambrel roofs bespeaking an
earlier architectural period than that of the neighbouring region. It
is not reassuring to see, on a closer glance, that most of the houses
are deserted and falling to ruin, and that the broken-steepled church
now harbours the one slovenly mercantile establishment of the hamlet.
One dreads to trust the tenebrous tunnel of the bridge, yet there is no
way to avoid it. Once across, it is hard to prevent the impression of a
faint, malign odour about the village street, as of the massed mould
and decay of centuries. It is always a relief to get clear of the
place, and to follow the narrow road around the base of the hills and
across the level country beyond till it rejoins the Aylesbury pike.
Afterward one sometimes learns that one has been through Dunwich.
Outsiders visit Dunwich as seldom as possible, and since a certain
season of horror all the signboards pointing toward it have been taken
down. The scenery, judged by any ordinary aesthetic canon, is more than
commonly beautiful; yet there is no influx of artists or summer
tourists. Two centuries ago, when talk of witch-blood, Satan-worship,
and strange forest presences was not laughed at, it was the custom to
give reasons for avoiding the locality. In our sensible age—since the
Dunwich horror of 1928 was hushed up by those who had the town’s and
the world’s welfare at heart—people shun it without knowing exactly
why. Perhaps one reason—though it cannot apply to uninformed
strangers—is that the natives are now repellently decadent, having gone
far along that path of retrogression so common in many New England
backwaters. They have come to form a race by themselves, with the
well-defined mental and physical stigmata of degeneracy and inbreeding.
The average of their intelligence is woefully low, whilst their annals
reek of overt viciousness and of half-hidden murders, incests, and
deeds of almost unnamable violence and perversity. The old gentry,
representing the two or three armigerous families which came from Salem
in 1692, have kept somewhat above the general level of decay; though
many branches are sunk into the sordid populace so deeply that only
their names remain as a key to the origin they disgrace. Some of the
Whateleys and Bishops still send their eldest sons to Harvard and
Miskatonic, though those sons seldom return to the mouldering gambrel
roofs under which they and their ancestors were born.
No one, even those who have the facts concerning the recent horror, can
say just what is the matter with Dunwich; though old legends speak of
unhallowed rites and conclaves of the Indians, amidst which they called
forbidden shapes of shadow out of the great rounded hills, and made
wild orgiastic prayers that were answered by loud crackings and
rumblings from the ground below. In 1747 the Reverend Abijah Hoadley,
newly come to the Congregational Church at Dunwich Village, preached a
memorable sermon on the close presence of Satan and his imps; in which
he said:
“It must be allow’d, that these Blasphemies of an infernall Train of
Daemons are Matters of too common Knowledge to be deny’d; the cursed
Voices of Azazel and Buzrael, of Beelzebub and Belial, being heard
now from under Ground by above a Score of credible Witnesses now
living. I my self did not more than a Fortnight ago catch a very
plain Discourse of evill Powers in the Hill behind my House; wherein
there were a Rattling and Rolling, Groaning, Screeching, and
Hissing, such as no Things of this Earth cou’d raise up, and which
must needs have come from those Caves that only black Magick can
discover, and only the Divell unlock.”
Mr. Hoadley disappeared soon after delivering this sermon; but the
text, printed in Springfield, is still extant. Noises in the hills
continued to be reported from year to year, and still form a puzzle to
geologists and physiographers.
Other traditions tell of foul odours near the hill-crowning circles of
stone pillars, and of rushing airy presences to be heard faintly at
certain hours from stated points at the bottom of the great ravines;
while still others try to explain the Devil’s Hop Yard—a bleak, blasted
hillside where no tree, shrub, or grass-blade will grow. Then too, the
natives are mortally afraid of the numerous whippoorwills which grow
vocal on warm nights. It is vowed that the birds are psychopomps lying
in wait for the souls of the dying, and that they time their eerie
cries in unison with the sufferer’s struggling breath. If they can
catch the fleeing soul when it leaves the body, they instantly flutter
away chittering in daemoniac laughter; but if they fail, they subside
gradually into a disappointed silence.
These tales, of course, are obsolete and ridiculous; because they come
down from very old times. Dunwich is indeed ridiculously old—older by
far than any of the communities within thirty miles of it. South of the
village one may still spy the cellar walls and chimney of the ancient
Bishop house, which was built before 1700; whilst the ruins of the mill
at the falls, built in 1806, form the most modern piece of architecture
to be seen. Industry did not flourish here, and the nineteenth-century
factory movement proved short-lived. Oldest of all are the great rings
of rough-hewn stone columns on the hill-tops, but these are more
generally attributed to the Indians than to the settlers. Deposits of
skulls and bones, found within these circles and around the sizeable
table-like rock on Sentinel Hill, sustain the popular belief that such
spots were once the burial-places of the Pocumtucks; even though many
ethnologists, disregarding the absurd improbability of such a theory,
persist in believing the remains Caucasian.
II.
It was in the township of Dunwich, in a large and partly inhabited
farmhouse set against a hillside four miles from the village and a mile
and a half from any other dwelling, that Wilbur Whateley was born at 5
A.M. on Sunday, the second of February, 1913. This date was recalled
because it was Candlemas, which people in Dunwich curiously observe
under another name; and because the noises in the hills had sounded,
and all the dogs of the countryside had barked persistently, throughout
the night before. Less worthy of notice was the fact that the mother
was one of the decadent Whateleys, a somewhat deformed, unattractive
albino woman of thirty-five, living with an aged and half-insane father
about whom the most frightful tales of wizardry had been whispered in
his youth. Lavinia Whateley had no known husband, but according to the
custom of the region made no attempt to disavow the child; concerning
the other side of whose ancestry the country folk might—and
did—speculate as widely as they chose. On the contrary, she seemed
strangely proud of the dark, goatish-looking infant who formed such a
contrast to her own sickly and pink-eyed albinism, and was heard to
mutter many curious prophecies about its unusual powers and tremendous
future.
Lavinia was one who would be apt to mutter such things, for she was a
lone creature given to wandering amidst thunderstorms in the hills and
trying to read the great odorous books which her father had inherited
through two centuries of Whateleys, and which were fast falling to
pieces with age and worm-holes. She had never been to school, but was
filled with disjointed scraps of ancient lore that Old Whateley had
taught her. The remote farmhouse had always been feared because of Old
Whateley’s reputation for black magic, and the unexplained death by
violence of Mrs. Whateley when Lavinia was twelve years old had not
helped to make the place popular. Isolated among strange influences,
Lavinia was fond of wild and grandiose day-dreams and singular
occupations; nor was her leisure much taken up by household cares in a
home from which all standards of order and cleanliness had long since
disappeared.
There was a hideous screaming which echoed above even the hill noises
and the dogs’ barking on the night Wilbur was born, but no known doctor
or midwife presided at his coming. Neighbours knew nothing of him till
a week afterward, when Old Whateley drove his sleigh through the snow
into Dunwich Village and discoursed incoherently to the group of
loungers at Osborn’s general store. There seemed to be a change in the
old man—an added element of furtiveness in the clouded brain which
subtly transformed him from an object to a subject of fear—though he
was not one to be perturbed by any common family event. Amidst it all
he shewed some trace of the pride later noticed in his daughter, and
what he said of the child’s paternity was remembered by many of his
hearers years afterward.
“I dun’t keer what folks think—ef Lavinny’s boy looked like his pa, he
wouldn’t look like nothin’ ye expeck. Ye needn’t think the only folks
is the folks hereabaouts. Lavinny’s read some, an’ has seed some things
the most o’ ye only tell abaout. I calc’late her man is as good a
husban’ as ye kin find this side of Aylesbury; an’ ef ye knowed as much
abaout the hills as I dew, ye wouldn’t ast no better church weddin’ nor
her’n. Let me tell ye suthin’—some day yew folks’ll hear a child o’
Lavinny’s a-callin’ its father’s name on the top o’ Sentinel Hill!”
The only persons who saw Wilbur during the first month of his life were
old Zechariah Whateley, of the undecayed Whateleys, and Earl Sawyer’s
common-law wife, Mamie Bishop. Mamie’s visit was frankly one of
curiosity, and her subsequent tales did justice to her observations;
but Zechariah came to lead a pair of Alderney cows which Old Whateley
had bought of his son Curtis. This marked the beginning of a course of
cattle-buying on the part of small Wilbur’s family which ended only in
1928, when the Dunwich horror came and went; yet at no time did the
ramshackle Whateley barn seem overcrowded with livestock. There came a
period when people were curious enough to steal up and count the herd
that grazed precariously on the steep hillside above the old farmhouse,
and they could never find more than ten or twelve anaemic,
bloodless-looking specimens. Evidently some blight or distemper,
perhaps sprung from the unwholesome pasturage or the diseased fungi and
timbers of the filthy barn, caused a heavy mortality amongst the
Whateley animals. Odd wounds or sores, having something of the aspect
of incisions, seemed to afflict the visible cattle; and once or twice
during the earlier months certain callers fancied they could discern
similar sores about the throats of the grey, unshaven old man and his
slatternly, crinkly-haired albino daughter.
In the spring after Wilbur’s birth Lavinia resumed her customary
rambles in the hills, bearing in her misproportioned arms the swarthy
child. Public interest in the Whateleys subsided after most of the
country folk had seen the baby, and no one bothered to comment on the
swift development which that newcomer seemed every day to exhibit.
Wilbur’s growth was indeed phenomenal, for within three months of his
birth he had attained a size and muscular power not usually found in
infants under a full year of age. His motions and even his vocal sounds
shewed a restraint and deliberateness highly peculiar in an infant, and
no one was really unprepared when, at seven months, he began to walk
unassisted, with falterings which another month was sufficient to
remove.
It was somewhat after this time—on Hallowe’en—that a great blaze was
seen at midnight on the top of Sentinel Hill where the old table-like
stone stands amidst its tumulus of ancient bones. Considerable talk was
started when Silas Bishop—of the undecayed Bishops—mentioned having
seen the boy running sturdily up that hill ahead of his mother about an
hour before the blaze was remarked. Silas was rounding up a stray
heifer, but he nearly forgot his mission when he fleetingly spied the
two figures in the dim light of his lantern. They darted almost
noiselessly through the underbrush, and the astonished watcher seemed
to think they were entirely unclothed. Afterward he could not be sure
about the boy, who may have had some kind of a fringed belt and a pair
of dark trunks or trousers on. Wilbur was never subsequently seen alive
and conscious without complete and tightly buttoned attire, the
disarrangement or threatened disarrangement of which always seemed to
fill him with anger and alarm. His contrast with his squalid mother and
grandfather in this respect was thought very notable until the horror
of 1928 suggested the most valid of reasons.
The next January gossips were mildly interested in the fact that
“Lavinny’s black brat” had commenced to talk, and at the age of only
eleven months. His speech was somewhat remarkable both because of its
difference from the ordinary accents of the region, and because it
displayed a freedom from infantile lisping of which many children of
three or four might well be proud. The boy was not talkative, yet when
he spoke he seemed to reflect some elusive element wholly unpossessed
by Dunwich and its denizens. The strangeness did not reside in what he
said, or even in the simple idioms he used; but seemed vaguely linked
with his intonation or with the internal organs that produced the
spoken sounds. His facial aspect, too, was remarkable for its maturity;
for though he shared his mother’s and grandfather’s chinlessness, his
firm and precociously shaped nose united with the expression of his
large, dark, almost Latin eyes to give him an air of quasi-adulthood
and well-nigh preternatural intelligence. He was, however, exceedingly
ugly despite his appearance of brilliancy; there being something almost
goatish or animalistic about his thick lips, large-pored, yellowish
skin, coarse crinkly hair, and oddly elongated ears. He was soon
disliked even more decidedly than his mother and grandsire, and all
conjectures about him were spiced with references to the bygone magic
of Old Whateley, and how the hills once shook when he shrieked the
dreadful name of Yog-Sothoth in the midst of a circle of stones with a
great book open in his arms before him. Dogs abhorred the boy, and he
was always obliged to take various defensive measures against their
barking menace.
III.
Meanwhile Old Whateley continued to buy cattle without measurably
increasing the size of his herd. He also cut timber and began to repair
the unused parts of his house—a spacious, peaked-roofed affair whose
rear end was buried entirely in the rocky hillside, and whose three
least-ruined ground-floor rooms had always been sufficient for himself
and his daughter. There must have been prodigious reserves of strength
in the old man to enable him to accomplish so much hard labour; and
though he still babbled dementedly at times, his carpentry seemed to
shew the effects of sound calculation. It had already begun as soon as
Wilbur was born, when one of the many tool-sheds had been put suddenly
in order, clapboarded, and fitted with a stout fresh lock. Now, in
restoring the abandoned upper story of the house, he was a no less
thorough craftsman. His mania shewed itself only in his tight
boarding-up of all the windows in the reclaimed section—though many
declared that it was a crazy thing to bother with the reclamation at
all. Less inexplicable was his fitting up of another downstairs room
for his new grandson—a room which several callers saw, though no one
was ever admitted to the closely boarded upper story. This chamber he
lined with tall, firm shelving; along which he began gradually to
arrange, in apparently careful order, all the rotting ancient books and
parts of books which during his own day had been heaped promiscuously
in odd corners of the various rooms.
“I made some use of ’em,” he would say as he tried to mend a torn
black-letter page with paste prepared on the rusty kitchen stove, “but
the boy’s fitten to make better use of ’em. He’d orter hev ’em as well
sot as he kin, for they’re goin’ to be all of his larnin’.”
When Wilbur was a year and seven months old—in September of 1914—his
size and accomplishments were almost alarming. He had grown as large as
a child of four, and was a fluent and incredibly intelligent talker. He
ran freely about the fields and hills, and accompanied his mother on
all her wanderings. At home he would pore diligently over the queer
pictures and charts in his grandfather’s books, while Old Whateley
would instruct and catechise him through long, hushed afternoons. By
this time the restoration of the house was finished, and those who
watched it wondered why one of the upper windows had been made into a
solid plank door. It was a window in the rear of the east gable end,
close against the hill; and no one could imagine why a cleated wooden
runway was built up to it from the ground. About the period of this
work’s completion people noticed that the old tool-house, tightly
locked and windowlessly clapboarded since Wilbur’s birth, had been
abandoned again. The door swung listlessly open, and when Earl Sawyer
once stepped within after a cattle-selling call on Old Whateley he was
quite discomposed by the singular odour he encountered—such a stench,
he averred, as he had never before smelt in all his life except near
the Indian circles on the hills, and which could not come from anything
sane or of this earth. But then, the homes and sheds of Dunwich folk
have never been remarkable for olfactory immaculateness.
The following months were void of visible events, save that everyone
swore to a slow but steady increase in the mysterious hill noises. On
May-Eve of 1915 there were tremors which even the Aylesbury people
felt, whilst the following Hallowe’en produced an underground rumbling
queerly synchronised with bursts of flame—“them witch Whateleys’
doin’s”—from the summit of Sentinel Hill. Wilbur was growing up
uncannily, so that he looked like a boy of ten as he entered his fourth
year. He read avidly by himself now; but talked much less than
formerly. A settled taciturnity was absorbing him, and for the first
time people began to speak specifically of the dawning look of evil in
his goatish face. He would sometimes mutter an unfamiliar jargon, and
chant in bizarre rhythms which chilled the listener with a sense of
unexplainable terror. The aversion displayed toward him by dogs had now
become a matter of wide remark, and he was obliged to carry a pistol in
order to traverse the countryside in safety. His occasional use of the
weapon did not enhance his popularity amongst the owners of canine
guardians.
The few callers at the house would often find Lavinia alone on the
ground floor, while odd cries and footsteps resounded in the boarded-up
second story. She would never tell what her father and the boy were
doing up there, though once she turned pale and displayed an abnormal
degree of fear when a jocose fish-peddler tried the locked door leading
to the stairway. That peddler told the store loungers at Dunwich
Village that he thought he heard a horse stamping on that floor above.
The loungers reflected, thinking of the door and runway, and of the
cattle that so swiftly disappeared. Then they shuddered as they
recalled tales of Old Whateley’s youth, and of the strange things that
are called out of the earth when a bullock is sacrificed at the proper
time to certain heathen gods. It had for some time been noticed that
dogs had begun to hate and fear the whole Whateley place as violently
as they hated and feared young Wilbur personally.
In 1917 the war came, and Squire Sawyer Whateley, as chairman of the
local draft board, had hard work finding a quota of young Dunwich men
fit even to be sent to a development camp. The government, alarmed at
such signs of wholesale regional decadence, sent several officers and
medical experts to investigate; conducting a survey which New England
newspaper readers may still recall. It was the publicity attending this
investigation which set reporters on the track of the Whateleys, and
caused the Boston Globe and Arkham Advertiser to print flamboyant
Sunday stories of young Wilbur’s precociousness, Old Whateley’s black
magic, the shelves of strange books, the sealed second story of the
ancient farmhouse, and the weirdness of the whole region and its hill
noises. Wilbur was four and a half then, and looked like a lad of
fifteen. His lips and cheeks were fuzzy with a coarse dark down, and
his voice had begun to break.
Earl Sawyer went out to the Whateley place with both sets of reporters
and camera men, and called their attention to the queer stench which
now seemed to trickle down from the sealed upper spaces. It was, he
said, exactly like a smell he had found in the tool-shed abandoned when
the house was finally repaired; and like the faint odours which he
sometimes thought he caught near the stone circles on the mountains.
Dunwich folk read the stories when they appeared, and grinned over the
obvious mistakes. They wondered, too, why the writers made so much of
the fact that Old Whateley always paid for his cattle in gold pieces of
extremely ancient date. The Whateleys had received their visitors with
ill-concealed distaste, though they did not dare court further
publicity by a violent resistance or refusal to talk.
IV.
For a decade the annals of the Whateleys sink indistinguishably into
the general life of a morbid community used to their queer ways and
hardened to their May-Eve and All-Hallows orgies. Twice a year they
would light fires on the top of Sentinel Hill, at which times the
mountain rumblings would recur with greater and greater violence; while
at all seasons there were strange and portentous doings at the lonely
farmhouse. In the course of time callers professed to hear sounds in
the sealed upper story even when all the family were downstairs, and
they wondered how swiftly or how lingeringly a cow or bullock was
usually sacrificed. There was talk of a complaint to the Society for
the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; but nothing ever came of it,
since Dunwich folk are never anxious to call the outside world’s
attention to themselves.
About 1923, when Wilbur was a boy of ten whose mind, voice, stature,
and bearded face gave all the impressions of maturity, a second great
siege of carpentry went on at the old house. It was all inside the
sealed upper part, and from bits of discarded lumber people concluded
that the youth and his grandfather had knocked out all the partitions
and even removed the attic floor, leaving only one vast open void
between the ground story and the peaked roof. They had torn down the
great central chimney, too, and fitted the rusty range with a flimsy
outside tin stovepipe.
In the spring after this event Old Whateley noticed the growing number
of whippoorwills that would come out of Cold Spring Glen to chirp under
his window at night. He seemed to regard the circumstance as one of
great significance, and told the loungers at Osborn’s that he thought
his time had almost come.
“They whistle jest in tune with my breathin’ naow,” he said, “an’ I
guess they’re gittin’ ready to ketch my soul. They know it’s a-goin’
aout, an’ dun’t calc’late to miss it. Yew’ll know, boys, arter I’m
gone, whether they git me er not. Ef they dew, they’ll keep up
a-singin’ an’ laffin’ till break o’ day. Ef they dun’t they’ll kinder
quiet daown like. I expeck them an’ the souls they hunts fer hev some
pretty tough tussles sometimes.”
On Lammas Night, 1924, Dr. Houghton of Aylesbury was hastily summoned
by Wilbur Whateley, who had lashed his one remaining horse through the
darkness and telephoned from Osborn’s in the village. He found Old
Whateley in a very grave state, with a cardiac action and stertorous
breathing that told of an end not far off. The shapeless albino
daughter and oddly bearded grandson stood by the bedside, whilst from
the vacant abyss overhead there came a disquieting suggestion of
rhythmical surging or lapping, as of the waves on some level beach. The
doctor, though, was chiefly disturbed by the chattering night birds
outside; a seemingly limitless legion of whippoorwills that cried their
endless message in repetitions timed diabolically to the wheezing gasps
of the dying man. It was uncanny and unnatural—too much, thought Dr.
Houghton, like the whole of the region he had entered so reluctantly in
response to the urgent call.
Toward one o’clock Old Whateley gained consciousness, and interrupted
his wheezing to choke out a few words to his grandson.
“More space, Willy, more space soon. Yew grows—an’ that grows faster.
It’ll be ready to sarve ye soon, boy. Open up the gates to Yog-Sothoth
with the long chant that ye’ll find on page 751 of the complete
edition, an’ then put a match to the prison. Fire from airth can’t burn
it nohaow.”
He was obviously quite mad. After a pause, during which the flock of
whippoorwills outside adjusted their cries to the altered tempo while
some indications of the strange hill noises came from afar off, he
added another sentence or two.
“Feed it reg’lar, Willy, an’ mind the quantity; but dun’t let it grow
too fast fer the place, fer ef it busts quarters or gits aout afore ye
opens to Yog-Sothoth, it’s all over an’ no use. Only them from beyont
kin make it multiply an’ work. . . . Only them, the old uns as wants to
come back. . . .”
But speech gave place to gasps again, and Lavinia screamed at the way
the whippoorwills followed the change. It was the same for more than an
hour, when the final throaty rattle came. Dr. Houghton drew shrunken
lids over the glazing grey eyes as the tumult of birds faded
imperceptibly to silence. Lavinia sobbed, but Wilbur only chuckled
whilst the hill noises rumbled faintly.
“They didn’t git him,” he muttered in his heavy bass voice.
Wilbur was by this time a scholar of really tremendous erudition in his
one-sided way, and was quietly known by correspondence to many
librarians in distant places where rare and forbidden books of old days
are kept. He was more and more hated and dreaded around Dunwich because
of certain youthful disappearances which suspicion laid vaguely at his
door; but was always able to silence inquiry through fear or through
use of that fund of old-time gold which still, as in his grandfather’s
time, went forth regularly and increasingly for cattle-buying. He was
now tremendously mature of aspect, and his height, having reached the
normal adult limit, seemed inclined to wax beyond that figure. In 1925,
when a scholarly correspondent from Miskatonic University called upon
him one day and departed pale and puzzled, he was fully six and
three-quarters feet tall.
Through all the years Wilbur had treated his half-deformed albino
mother with a growing contempt, finally forbidding her to go to the
hills with him on May-Eve and Hallowmass; and in 1926 the poor creature
complained to Mamie Bishop of being afraid of him.
“They’s more abaout him as I knows than I kin tell ye, Mamie,” she
said, “an’ naowadays they’s more nor what I know myself. I vaow afur
Gawd, I dun’t know what he wants nor what he’s a-tryin’ to dew.”
That Hallowe’en the hill noises sounded louder than ever, and fire
burned on Sentinel Hill as usual; but people paid more attention to the
rhythmical screaming of vast flocks of unnaturally belated
whippoorwills which seemed to be assembled near the unlighted Whateley
farmhouse. After midnight their shrill notes burst into a kind of
pandaemoniac cachinnation which filled all the countryside, and not
until dawn did they finally quiet down. Then they vanished, hurrying
southward where they were fully a month overdue. What this meant, no
one could quite be certain till later. None of the country folk seemed
to have died—but poor Lavinia Whateley, the twisted albino, was never
seen again.
In the summer of 1927 Wilbur repaired two sheds in the farmyard and
began moving his books and effects out to them. Soon afterward Earl
Sawyer told the loungers at Osborn’s that more carpentry was going on
in the Whateley farmhouse. Wilbur was closing all the doors and windows
on the ground floor, and seemed to be taking out partitions as he and
his grandfather had done upstairs four years before. He was living in
one of the sheds, and Sawyer thought he seemed unusually worried and
tremulous. People generally suspected him of knowing something about
his mother’s disappearance, and very few ever approached his
neighbourhood now. His height had increased to more than seven feet,
and shewed no signs of ceasing its development.
V.
The following winter brought an event no less strange than Wilbur’s
first trip outside the Dunwich region. Correspondence with the Widener
Library at Harvard, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the British
Museum, the University of Buenos Ayres, and the Library of Miskatonic
University of Arkham had failed to get him the loan of a book he
desperately wanted; so at length he set out in person, shabby, dirty,
bearded, and uncouth of dialect, to consult the copy at Miskatonic,
which was the nearest to him geographically. Almost eight feet tall,
and carrying a cheap new valise from Osborn’s general store, this dark
and goatish gargoyle appeared one day in Arkham in quest of the dreaded
volume kept under lock and key at the college library—the hideous
Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred in Olaus Wormius’ Latin
version, as printed in Spain in the seventeenth century. He had never
seen a city before, but had no thought save to find his way to the
university grounds; where, indeed, he passed heedlessly by the great
white-fanged watchdog that barked with unnatural fury and enmity, and
tugged frantically at its stout chain.
Wilbur had with him the priceless but imperfect copy of Dr. Dee’s
English version which his grandfather had bequeathed him, and upon
receiving access to the Latin copy he at once began to collate the two
texts with the aim of discovering a certain passage which would have
come on the 751st page of his own defective volume. This much he could
not civilly refrain from telling the librarian—the same erudite Henry
Armitage (A.M. Miskatonic, Ph. D. Princeton, Litt. D. Johns Hopkins)
who had once called at the farm, and who now politely plied him with
questions. He was looking, he had to admit, for a kind of formula or
incantation containing the frightful name Yog-Sothoth, and it puzzled
him to find discrepancies, duplications, and ambiguities which made the
matter of determination far from easy. As he copied the formula he
finally chose, Dr. Armitage looked involuntarily over his shoulder at
the open pages; the left-hand one of which, in the Latin version,
contained such monstrous threats to the peace and sanity of the world.
“Nor is it to be thought,” ran the text as Armitage mentally
translated it, “that man is either the oldest or the last of earth’s
masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone.
The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not
in the spaces we know, but between them, They walk serene and
primal, undimensioned and to us unseen. Yog-Sothoth knows the gate.
Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the
gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows
where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break
through again. He knows where They have trod earth’s fields, and
where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They
tread. By Their smell can men sometimes know Them near, but of Their
semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those They
have begotten on mankind; and of those are there many sorts,
differing in likeness from man’s truest eidolon to that shape
without sight or substance which is Them. They walk unseen and foul
in lonely places where the Words have been spoken and the Rites
howled through at their Seasons. The wind gibbers with Their voices,
and the earth mutters with Their consciousness. They bend the forest
and crush the city, yet may not forest or city behold the hand that
smites. Kadath in the cold waste hath known Them, and what man knows
Kadath? The ice desert of the South and the sunken isles of Ocean
hold stones whereon Their seal is engraven, but who hath seen the
deep frozen city or the sealed tower long garlanded with seaweed and
barnacles? Great Cthulhu is Their cousin, yet can he spy Them only
dimly. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their
hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation
is even one with your guarded threshold. Yog-Sothoth is the key to
the gate, whereby the spheres meet. Man rules now where They ruled
once; They shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is
winter, and after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for
here shall They reign again.”
Dr. Armitage, associating what he was reading with what he had heard of
Dunwich and its brooding presences, and of Wilbur Whateley and his dim,
hideous aura that stretched from a dubious birth to a cloud of probable
matricide, felt a wave of fright as tangible as a draught of the tomb’s
cold clamminess. The bent, goatish giant before him seemed like the
spawn of another planet or dimension; like something only partly of
mankind, and linked to black gulfs of essence and entity that stretch
like titan phantasms beyond all spheres of force and matter, space and
time. Presently Wilbur raised his head and began speaking in that
strange, resonant fashion which hinted at sound-producing organs unlike
the run of mankind’s.
“Mr. Armitage,” he said, “I calc’late I’ve got to take that book home.
They’s things in it I’ve got to try under sarten conditions that I
can’t git here, an’ it ’ud be a mortal sin to let a red-tape rule hold
me up. Let me take it along, Sir, an’ I’ll swar they wun’t nobody know
the difference. I dun’t need to tell ye I’ll take good keer of it. It
wa’n’t me that put this Dee copy in the shape it is. . . .”
He stopped as he saw firm denial on the librarian’s face, and his own
goatish features grew crafty. Armitage, half-ready to tell him he might
make a copy of what parts he needed, thought suddenly of the possible
consequences and checked himself. There was too much responsiblity in
giving such a being the key to such blasphemous outer spheres. Whateley
saw how things stood, and tried to answer lightly.
“Wal, all right, ef ye feel that way abaout it. Maybe Harvard wun’t be
so fussy as yew be.” And without saying more he rose and strode out of
the building, stooping at each doorway.
Armitage heard the savage yelping of the great watchdog, and studied
Whateley’s gorilla-like lope as he crossed the bit of campus visible
from the window. He thought of the wild tales he had heard, and
recalled the old Sunday stories in the Advertiser; these things, and
the lore he had picked up from Dunwich rustics and villagers during his
one visit there. Unseen things not of earth—or at least not of
tri-dimensional earth—rushed foetid and horrible through New England’s
glens, and brooded obscenely on the mountain-tops. Of this he had long
felt certain. Now he seemed to sense the close presence of some
terrible part of the intruding horror, and to glimpse a hellish advance
in the black dominion of the ancient and once passive nightmare. He
locked away the Necronomicon with a shudder of disgust, but the room
still reeked with an unholy and unidentifiable stench. “As a foulness
shall ye know them,” he quoted. Yes—the odour was the same as that
which had sickened him at the Whateley farmhouse less than three years
before. He thought of Wilbur, goatish and ominous, once again, and
laughed mockingly at the village rumours of his parentage.
“Inbreeding?” Armitage muttered half-aloud to himself. “Great God, what
simpletons! Shew them Arthur Machen’s Great God Pan and they’ll think
it a common Dunwich scandal! But what thing—what cursed shapeless
influence on or off this three-dimensioned earth—was Wilbur Whateley’s
father? Born on Candlemas—nine months after May-Eve of 1912, when the
talk about the queer earth noises reached clear to Arkham— What walked
on the mountains that May-Night? What Roodmas horror fastened itself on
the world in half-human flesh and blood?”
During the ensuing weeks Dr. Armitage set about to collect all possible
data on Wilbur Whateley and the formless presences around Dunwich. He
got in communication with Dr. Houghton of Aylesbury, who had attended
Old Whateley in his last illness, and found much to ponder over in the
grandfather’s last words as quoted by the physician. A visit to Dunwich
Village failed to bring out much that was new; but a close survey of
the Necronomicon, in those parts which Wilbur had sought so avidly,
seemed to supply new and terrible clues to the nature, methods, and
desires of the strange evil so vaguely threatening this planet. Talks
with several students of archaic lore in Boston, and letters to many
others elsewhere, gave him a growing amazement which passed slowly
through varied degrees of alarm to a state of really acute spiritual
fear. As the summer drew on he felt dimly that something ought to be
done about the lurking terrors of the upper Miskatonic valley, and
about the monstrous being known to the human world as Wilbur Whateley.
VI.
The Dunwich horror itself came between Lammas and the equinox in 1928,
and Dr. Armitage was among those who witnessed its monstrous prologue.
He had heard, meanwhile, of Whateley’s grotesque trip to Cambridge, and
of his frantic efforts to borrow or copy from the Necronomicon at the
Widener Library. Those efforts had been in vain, since Armitage had
issued warnings of the keenest intensity to all librarians having
charge of the dreaded volume. Wilbur had been shockingly nervous at
Cambridge; anxious for the book, yet almost equally anxious to get home
again, as if he feared the results of being away long.
Early in August the half-expected outcome developed, and in the small
hours of the 3d Dr. Armitage was awakened suddenly by the wild, fierce
cries of the savage watchdog on the college campus. Deep and terrible,
the snarling, half-mad growls and barks continued; always in mounting
volume, but with hideously significant pauses. Then there rang out a
scream from a wholly different throat—such a scream as roused half the
sleepers of Arkham and haunted their dreams ever afterward—such a
scream as could come from no being born of earth, or wholly of earth.
Armitage, hastening into some clothing and rushing across the street
and lawn to the college buildings, saw that others were ahead of him;
and heard the echoes of a burglar-alarm still shrilling from the
library. An open window shewed black and gaping in the moonlight. What
had come had indeed completed its entrance; for the barking and the
screaming, now fast fading into a mixed low growling and moaning,
proceeded unmistakably from within. Some instinct warned Armitage that
what was taking place was not a thing for unfortified eyes to see, so
he brushed back the crowd with authority as he unlocked the vestibule
door. Among the others he saw Professor Warren Rice and Dr. Francis
Morgan, men to whom he had told some of his conjectures and misgivings;
and these two he motioned to accompany him inside. The inward sounds,
except for a watchful, droning whine from the dog, had by this time
quite subsided; but Armitage now perceived with a sudden start that a
loud chorus of whippoorwills among the shrubbery had commenced a
damnably rhythmical piping, as if in unison with the last breaths of a
dying man.
The building was full of a frightful stench which Dr. Armitage knew too
well, and the three men rushed across the hall to the small
genealogical reading-room whence the low whining came. For a second
nobody dared to turn on the light, then Armitage summoned up his
courage and snapped the switch. One of the three—it is not certain
which—shrieked aloud at what sprawled before them among disordered
tables and overturned chairs. Professor Rice declares that he wholly
lost consciousness for an instant, though he did not stumble or fall.
The thing that lay half-bent on its side in a foetid pool of
greenish-yellow ichor and tarry stickiness was almost nine feet tall,
and the dog had torn off all the clothing and some of the skin. It was
not quite dead, but twitched silently and spasmodically while its chest
heaved in monstrous unison with the mad piping of the expectant
whippoorwills outside. Bits of shoe-leather and fragments of apparel
were scattered about the room, and just inside the window an empty
canvas sack lay where it had evidently been thrown. Near the central
desk a revolver had fallen, a dented but undischarged cartridge later
explaining why it had not been fired. The thing itself, however,
crowded out all other images at the time. It would be trite and not
wholly accurate to say that no human pen could describe it, but one may
properly say that it could not be vividly visualised by anyone whose
ideas of aspect and contour are too closely bound up with the common
life-forms of this planet and of the three known dimensions. It was
partly human, beyond a doubt, with very man-like hands and head, and
the goatish, chinless face had the stamp of the Whateleys upon it. But
the torso and lower parts of the body were teratologically fabulous, so
that only generous clothing could ever have enabled it to walk on earth
unchallenged or uneradicated.
Above the waist it was semi-anthropomorphic; though its chest, where
the dog’s rending paws still rested watchfully, had the leathery,
reticulated hide of a crocodile or alligator. The back was piebald with
yellow and black, and dimly suggested the squamous covering of certain
snakes. Below the waist, though, it was the worst; for here all human
resemblance left off and sheer phantasy began. The skin was thickly
covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdomen a score of long
greenish-grey tentacles with red sucking mouths protruded limply. Their
arrangement was odd, and seemed to follow the symmetries of some cosmic
geometry unknown to earth or the solar system. On each of the hips,
deep set in a kind of pinkish, ciliated orbit, was what seemed to be a
rudimentary eye; whilst in lieu of a tail there depended a kind of
trunk or feeler with purple annular markings, and with many evidences
of being an undeveloped mouth or throat. The limbs, save for their
black fur, roughly resembled the hind legs of prehistoric earth’s giant
saurians; and terminated in ridgy-veined pads that were neither hooves
nor claws. When the thing breathed, its tail and tentacles rhythmically
changed colour, as if from some circulatory cause normal to the
non-human side of its ancestry. In the tentacles this was observable as
a deepening of the greenish tinge, whilst in the tail it was manifest
as a yellowish appearance which alternated with a sickly greyish-white
in the spaces between the purple rings. Of genuine blood there was
none; only the foetid greenish-yellow ichor which trickled along the
painted floor beyond the radius of the stickiness, and left a curious
discolouration behind it.
As the presence of the three men seemed to rouse the dying thing, it
began to mumble without turning or raising its head. Dr. Armitage made
no written record of its mouthings, but asserts confidently that
nothing in English was uttered. At first the syllables defied all
correlation with any speech of earth, but toward the last there came
some disjointed fragments evidently taken from the Necronomicon, that
monstrous blasphemy in quest of which the thing had perished. These
fragments, as Armitage recalls them, ran something like “N’gai,
n’gha’ghaa, bugg-shoggog, y’hah; Yog-Sothoth, Yog-Sothoth. . . .” They
trailed off into nothingness as the whippoorwills shrieked in
rhythmical crescendoes of unholy anticipation.
Then came a halt in the gasping, and the dog raised its head in a long,
lugubrious howl. A change came over the yellow, goatish face of the
prostrate thing, and the great black eyes fell in appallingly. Outside
the window the shrilling of the whippoorwills had suddenly ceased, and
above the murmurs of the gathering crowd there came the sound of a
panic-struck whirring and fluttering. Against the moon vast clouds of
feathery watchers rose and raced from sight, frantic at that which they
had sought for prey.
All at once the dog started up abruptly, gave a frightened bark, and
leaped nervously out of the window by which it had entered. A cry rose
from the crowd, and Dr. Armitage shouted to the men outside that no one
must be admitted till the police or medical examiner came. He was
thankful that the windows were just too high to permit of peering in,
and drew the dark curtains carefully down over each one. By this time
two policemen had arrived; and Dr. Morgan, meeting them in the
vestibule, was urging them for their own sakes to postpone entrance to
the stench-filled reading-room till the examiner came and the prostrate
thing could be covered up.
Meanwhile frightful changes were taking place on the floor. One need
not describe the kind and rate of shrinkage and disintegration that
occurred before the eyes of Dr. Armitage and Professor Rice; but it is
permissible to say that, aside from the external appearance of face and
hands, the really human element in Wilbur Whateley must have been very
small. When the medical examiner came, there was only a sticky whitish
mass on the painted boards, and the monstrous odour had nearly
disappeared. Apparently Whateley had had no skull or bony skeleton; at
least, in any true or stable sense. He had taken somewhat after his
unknown father.
VII.
Yet all this was only the prologue of the actual Dunwich horror.
Formalities were gone through by bewildered officials, abnormal details
were duly kept from press and public, and men were sent to Dunwich and
Aylesbury to look up property and notify any who might be heirs of the
late Wilbur Whateley. They found the countryside in great agitation,
both because of the growing rumblings beneath the domed hills, and
because of the unwonted stench and the surging, lapping sounds which
came increasingly from the great empty shell formed by Whateley’s
boarded-up farmhouse. Earl Sawyer, who tended the horse and cattle
during Wilbur’s absence, had developed a woefully acute case of nerves.
The officials devised excuses not to enter the noisome boarded place;
and were glad to confine their survey of the deceased’s living
quarters, the newly mended sheds, to a single visit. They filed a
ponderous report at the court-house in Aylesbury, and litigations
concerning heirship are said to be still in progress amongst the
innumerable Whateleys, decayed and undecayed, of the upper Miskatonic
valley.
An almost interminable manuscript in strange characters, written in a
huge ledger and adjudged a sort of diary because of the spacing and the
variations in ink and penmanship, presented a baffling puzzle to those
who found it on the old bureau which served as its owner’s desk. After
a week of debate it was sent to Miskatonic University, together with
the deceased’s collection of strange books, for study and possible
translation; but even the best linguists soon saw that it was not
likely to be unriddled with ease. No trace of the ancient gold with
which Wilbur and Old Whateley always paid their debts has yet been
discovered.
It was in the dark of September 9th that the horror broke loose. The
hill noises had been very pronounced during the evening, and dogs
barked frantically all night. Early risers on the 10th noticed a
peculiar stench in the air. About seven o’clock Luther Brown, the hired
boy at George Corey’s, between Cold Spring Glen and the village, rushed
frenziedly back from his morning trip to Ten-Acre Meadow with the cows.
He was almost convulsed with fright as he stumbled into the kitchen;
and in the yard outside the no less frightened herd were pawing and
lowing pitifully, having followed the boy back in the panic they shared
with him. Between gasps Luther tried to stammer out his tale to Mrs.
Corey.
“Up thar in the rud beyont the glen, Mis’ Corey—they’s suthin’ ben
thar! It smells like thunder, an’ all the bushes an’ little trees is
pushed back from the rud like they’d a haouse ben moved along of it.
An’ that ain’t the wust, nuther. They’s prints in the rud, Mis’
Corey—great raound prints as big as barrel-heads, all sunk daown deep
like a elephant had ben along, only they’s a sight more nor four feet
could make! I looked at one or two afore I run, an’ I see every one was
covered with lines spreadin’ aout from one place, like as if big
palm-leaf fans—twict or three times as big as any they is—hed of ben
paounded daown into the rud. An’ the smell was awful, like what it is
araound Wizard Whateley’s ol’ haouse. . . .”
Here he faltered, and seemed to shiver afresh with the fright that had
sent him flying home. Mrs. Corey, unable to extract more information,
began telephoning the neighbours; thus starting on its rounds the
overture of panic that heralded the major terrors. When she got Sally
Sawyer, housekeeper at Seth Bishop’s, the nearest place to Whateley’s,
it became her turn to listen instead of transmit; for Sally’s boy
Chauncey, who slept poorly, had been up on the hill toward Whateley’s,
and had dashed back in terror after one look at the place, and at the
pasturage where Mr. Bishop’s cows had been left out all night.
“Yes, Mis’ Corey,” came Sally’s tremulous voice over the party wire,
“Cha’ncey he just come back a-postin’, and couldn’t haff talk fer bein’
scairt! He says Ol’ Whateley’s haouse is all blowed up, with the
timbers scattered raound like they’d ben dynamite inside; only the
bottom floor ain’t through, but is all covered with a kind o’ tar-like
stuff that smells awful an’ drips daown offen the aidges onto the
graoun’ whar the side timbers is blown away. An’ they’s awful kinder
marks in the yard, tew—great raound marks bigger raound than a
hogshead, an’ all sticky with stuff like is on the blowed-up haouse.
Cha’ncey he says they leads off into the medders, whar a great swath
wider’n a barn is matted daown, an’ all the stun walls tumbled every
whichway wherever it goes.
“An’ he says, says he, Mis’ Corey, as haow he sot to look fer Seth’s
caows, frighted ez he was; an’ faound ’em in the upper pasture nigh the
Devil’s Hop Yard in an awful shape. Haff on ’em’s clean gone, an’ nigh
haff o’ them that’s left is sucked most dry o’ blood, with sores on ’em
like they’s ben on Whateley’s cattle ever senct Lavinny’s black brat
was born. Seth he’s gone aout naow to look at ’em, though I’ll vaow he
wun’t keer ter git very nigh Wizard Whateley’s! Cha’ncey didn’t look
keerful ter see whar the big matted-daown swath led arter it leff the
pasturage, but he says he thinks it p’inted towards the glen rud to the
village.
“I tell ye, Mis’ Corey, they’s suthin’ abroad as hadn’t orter be
abroad, an’ I for one think that black Wilbur Whateley, as come to the
bad eend he desarved, is at the bottom of the breedin’ of it. He wa’n’t
all human hisself, I allus says to everybody; an’ I think he an’ Ol’
Whateley must a raised suthin’ in that there nailed-up haouse as ain’t
even so human as he was. They’s allus ben unseen things araound
Dunwich—livin’ things—as ain’t human an’ ain’t good fer human folks.
“The graoun’ was a-talkin’ lass night, an’ towards mornin’ Cha’ncey he
heerd the whippoorwills so laoud in Col’ Spring Glen he couldn’t sleep
nun. Then he thought he heerd another faint-like saound over towards
Wizard Whateley’s—a kinder rippin’ or tearin’ o’ wood, like some big
box er crate was bein’ opened fur off. What with this an’ that, he
didn’t git to sleep at all till sunup, an’ no sooner was he up this
mornin’, but he’s got to go over to Whateley’s an’ see what’s the
matter. He see enough, I tell ye, Mis’ Corey! This dun’t mean no good,
an’ I think as all the men-folks ought to git up a party an’ do
suthin’. I know suthin’ awful’s abaout, an’ feel my time is nigh,
though only Gawd knows jest what it is.
“Did your Luther take accaount o’ whar them big tracks led tew? No?
Wal, Mis’ Corey, ef they was on the glen rud this side o’ the glen, an’
ain’t got to your haouse yet, I calc’late they must go into the glen
itself. They would do that. I allus says Col’ Spring Glen ain’t no
healthy nor decent place. The whippoorwills an’ fireflies there never
did act like they was creaters o’ Gawd, an’ they’s them as says ye kin
hear strange things a-rushin’ an’ a-talkin’ in the air daown thar ef ye
stand in the right place, atween the rock falls an’ Bear’s Den.”
By that noon fully three-quarters of the men and boys of Dunwich were
trooping over the roads and meadows between the new-made Whateley ruins
and Cold Spring Glen, examining in horror the vast, monstrous prints,
the maimed Bishop cattle, the strange, noisome wreck of the farmhouse,
and the bruised, matted vegetation of the fields and roadsides.
Whatever had burst loose upon the world had assuredly gone down into
the great sinister ravine; for all the trees on the banks were bent and
broken, and a great avenue had been gouged in the precipice-hanging
underbrush. It was as though a house, launched by an avalanche, had
slid down through the tangled growths of the almost vertical slope.
From below no sound came, but only a distant, undefinable foetor; and
it is not to be wondered at that the men preferred to stay on the edge
and argue, rather than descend and beard the unknown Cyclopean horror
in its lair. Three dogs that were with the party had barked furiously
at first, but seemed cowed and reluctant when near the glen. Someone
telephoned the news to the Aylesbury Transcript; but the editor,
accustomed to wild tales from Dunwich, did no more than concoct a
humorous paragraph about it; an item soon afterward reproduced by the
Associated Press.
That night everyone went home, and every house and barn was barricaded
as stoutly as possible. Needless to say, no cattle were allowed to
remain in open pasturage. About two in the morning a frightful stench
and the savage barking of the dogs awakened the household at Elmer
Frye’s, on the eastern edge of Cold Spring Glen, and all agreed that
they could hear a sort of muffled swishing or lapping sound from
somewhere outside. Mrs. Frye proposed telephoning the neighbours, and
Elmer was about to agree when the noise of splintering wood burst in
upon their deliberations. It came, apparently, from the barn; and was
quickly followed by a hideous screaming and stamping amongst the
cattle. The dogs slavered and crouched close to the feet of the
fear-numbed family. Frye lit a lantern through force of habit, but knew
it would be death to go out into that black farmyard. The children and
the womenfolk whimpered, kept from screaming by some obscure, vestigial
instinct of defence which told them their lives depended on silence. At
last the noise of the cattle subsided to a pitiful moaning, and a great
snapping, crashing, and crackling ensued. The Fryes, huddled together
in the sitting-room, did not dare to move until the last echoes died
away far down in Cold Spring Glen. Then, amidst the dismal moans from
the stable and the daemoniac piping of late whippoorwills in the glen,
Selina Frye tottered to the telephone and spread what news she could of
the second phase of the horror.
The next day all the countryside was in a panic; and cowed,
uncommunicative groups came and went where the fiendish thing had
occurred. Two titan swaths of destruction stretched from the glen to
the Frye farmyard, monstrous prints covered the bare patches of ground,
and one side of the old red barn had completely caved in. Of the
cattle, only a quarter could be found and identified. Some of these
were in curious fragments, and all that survived had to be shot. Earl
Sawyer suggested that help be asked from Aylesbury or Arkham, but
others maintained it would be of no use. Old Zebulon Whateley, of a
branch that hovered about half way between soundness and decadence,
made darkly wild suggestions about rites that ought to be practiced on
the hill-tops. He came of a line where tradition ran strong, and his
memories of chantings in the great stone circles were not altogether
connected with Wilbur and his grandfather.
Darkness fell upon a stricken countryside too passive to organise for
real defence. In a few cases closely related families would band
together and watch in the gloom under one roof; but in general there
was only a repetition of the barricading of the night before, and a
futile, ineffective gesture of loading muskets and setting pitchforks
handily about. Nothing, however, occurred except some hill noises; and
when the day came there were many who hoped that the new horror had
gone as swiftly as it had come. There were even bold souls who proposed
an offensive expedition down in the glen, though they did not venture
to set an actual example to the still reluctant majority.
When night came again the barricading was repeated, though there was
less huddling together of families. In the morning both the Frye and
the Seth Bishop households reported excitement among the dogs and vague
sounds and stenches from afar, while early explorers noted with horror
a fresh set of the monstrous tracks in the road skirting Sentinel Hill.
As before, the sides of the road shewed a bruising indicative of the
blasphemously stupendous bulk of the horror; whilst the conformation of
the tracks seemed to argue a passage in two directions, as if the
moving mountain had come from Cold Spring Glen and returned to it along
the same path. At the base of the hill a thirty-foot swath of crushed
shrubbery saplings led steeply upward, and the seekers gasped when they
saw that even the most perpendicular places did not deflect the
inexorable trail. Whatever the horror was, it could scale a sheer stony
cliff of almost complete verticality; and as the investigators climbed
around to the hill’s summit by safer routes they saw that the trail
ended—or rather, reversed—there.
It was here that the Whateleys used to build their hellish fires and
chant their hellish rituals by the table-like stone on May-Eve and
Hallowmass. Now that very stone formed the centre of a vast space
thrashed around by the mountainous horror, whilst upon its slightly
concave surface was a thick and foetid deposit of the same tarry
stickiness observed on the floor of the ruined Whateley farmhouse when
the horror escaped. Men looked at one another and muttered. Then they
looked down the hill. Apparently the horror had descended by a route
much the same as that of its ascent. To speculate was futile. Reason,
logic, and normal ideas of motivation stood confounded. Only old
Zebulon, who was not with the group, could have done justice to the
situation or suggested a plausible explanation.
Thursday night began much like the others, but it ended less happily.
The whippoorwills in the glen had screamed with such unusual
persistence that many could not sleep, and about 3 A.M. all the party
telephones rang tremulously. Those who took down their receivers heard
a fright-mad voice shriek out, “Help, oh, my Gawd! . . .” and some
thought a crashing sound followed the breaking off of the exclamation.
There was nothing more. No one dared do anything, and no one knew till
morning whence the call came. Then those who had heard it called
everyone on the line, and found that only the Fryes did not reply. The
truth appeared an hour later, when a hastily assembled group of armed
men trudged out to the Frye place at the head of the glen. It was
horrible, yet hardly a surprise. There were more swaths and monstrous
prints, but there was no longer any house. It had caved in like an
egg-shell, and amongst the ruins nothing living or dead could be
discovered. Only a stench and a tarry stickiness. The Elmer Fryes had
been erased from Dunwich.
VIII.
In the meantime a quieter yet even more spiritually poignant phase of
the horror had been blackly unwinding itself behind the closed door of
a shelf-lined room in Arkham. The curious manuscript record or diary of
Wilbur Whateley, delivered to Miskatonic University for translation,
had caused much worry and bafflement among the experts in languages
both ancient and modern; its very alphabet, notwithstanding a general
resemblance to the heavily shaded Arabic used in Mesopotamia, being
absolutely unknown to any available authority. The final conclusion of
the linguists was that the text represented an artificial alphabet,
giving the effect of a cipher; though none of the usual methods of
cryptographic solution seemed to furnish any clue, even when applied on
the basis of every tongue the writer might conceivably have used. The
ancient books taken from Whateley’s quarters, while absorbingly
interesting and in several cases promising to open up new and terrible
lines of research among philosophers and men of science, were of no
assistance whatever in this matter. One of them, a heavy tome with an
iron clasp, was in another unknown alphabet—this one of a very
different cast, and resembling Sanscrit more than anything else. The
old ledger was at length given wholly into the charge of Dr. Armitage,
both because of his peculiar interest in the Whateley matter, and
because of his wide linguistic learning and skill in the mystical
formulae of antiquity and the Middle Ages.
Armitage had an idea that the alphabet might be something esoterically
used by certain forbidden cults which have come down from old times,
and which have inherited many forms and traditions from the wizards of
the Saracenic world. That question, however, he did not deem vital;
since it would be unnecessary to know the origin of the symbols if, as
he suspected, they were used as a cipher in a modern language. It was
his belief that, considering the great amount of text involved, the
writer would scarcely have wished the trouble of using another speech
than his own, save perhaps in certain special formulae and
incantations. Accordingly he attacked the manuscript with the
preliminary assumption that the bulk of it was in English.
Dr. Armitage knew, from the repeated failures of his colleagues, that
the riddle was a deep and complex one; and that no simple mode of
solution could merit even a trial. All through late August he fortified
himself with the massed lore of cryptography; drawing upon the fullest
resources of his own library, and wading night after night amidst the
arcana of Trithemius’ Poligraphia, Giambattista Porta’s De Furtivis
Literarum Notis, De Vigenère’s Traité des Chiffres, Falconer’s
Cryptomenysis Patefacta, Davys’ and Thicknesse’s eighteenth-century
treatises, and such fairly modern authorities as Blair, von Marten, and
Klüber’s Kryptographik. He interspersed his study of the books with
attacks on the manuscript itself, and in time became convinced that he
had to deal with one of those subtlest and most ingenious of
cryptograms, in which many separate lists of corresponding letters are
arranged like the multiplication table, and the message built up with
arbitrary key-words known only to the initiated. The older authorities
seemed rather more helpful than the newer ones, and Armitage concluded
that the code of the manuscript was one of great antiquity, no doubt
handed down through a long line of mystical experimenters. Several
times he seemed near daylight, only to be set back by some unforeseen
obstacle. Then, as September approached, the clouds began to clear.
Certain letters, as used in certain parts of the manuscript, emerged
definitely and unmistakably; and it became obvious that the text was
indeed in English.
On the evening of September 2nd the last major barrier gave way, and
Dr. Armitage read for the first time a continuous passage of Wilbur
Whateley’s annals. It was in truth a diary, as all had thought; and it
was couched in a style clearly shewing the mixed occult erudition and
general illiteracy of the strange being who wrote it. Almost the first
long passage that Armitage deciphered, an entry dated November 26,
1916, proved highly startling and disquieting. It was written, he
remembered, by a child of three and a half who looked like a lad of
twelve or thirteen.
“Today learned the Aklo for the Sabaoth,” it ran, “which did not
like, it being answerable from the hill and not from the air. That
upstairs more ahead of me than I had thought it would be, and is not
like to have much earth brain. Shot Elam Hutchins’ collie Jack when
he went to bite me, and Elam says he would kill me if he dast. I
guess he won’t. Grandfather kept me saying the Dho formula last
night, and I think I saw the inner city at the 2 magnetic poles. I
shall go to those poles when the earth is cleared off, if I can’t
break through with the Dho-Hna formula when I commit it. They from
the air told me at Sabbat that it will be years before I can clear
off the earth, and I guess grandfather will be dead then, so I shall
have to learn all the angles of the planes and all the formulas
between the Yr and the Nhhngr. They from outside will help, but they
cannot take body without human blood. That upstairs looks it will
have the right cast. I can see it a little when I make the Voorish
sign or blow the powder of Ibn Ghazi at it, and it is near like them
at May-Eve on the Hill. The other face may wear off some. I wonder
how I shall look when the earth is cleared and there are no earth
beings on it. He that came with the Aklo Sabaoth said I may be
transfigured, there being much of outside to work on.”
Morning found Dr. Armitage in a cold sweat of terror and a frenzy of
wakeful concentration. He had not left the manuscript all night, but
sat at his table under the electric light turning page after page with
shaking hands as fast as he could decipher the cryptic text. He had
nervously telephoned his wife he would not be home, and when she
brought him a breakfast from the house he could scarcely dispose of a
mouthful. All that day he read on, now and then halted maddeningly as a
reapplication of the complex key became necessary. Lunch and dinner
were brought him, but he ate only the smallest fraction of either.
Toward the middle of the next night he drowsed off in his chair, but
soon woke out of a tangle of nightmares almost as hideous as the truths
and menaces to man’s existence that he had uncovered.
On the morning of September 4th Professor Rice and Dr. Morgan insisted
on seeing him for a while, and departed trembling and ashen-grey. That
evening he went to bed, but slept only fitfully. Wednesday—the next
day—he was back at the manuscript, and began to take copious notes both
from the current sections and from those he had already deciphered. In
the small hours of that night he slept a little in an easy-chair in his
office, but was at the manuscript again before dawn. Some time before
noon his physician, Dr. Hartwell, called to see him and insisted that
he cease work. He refused; intimating that it was of the most vital
importance for him to complete the reading of the diary, and promising
an explanation in due course of time.
That evening, just as twilight fell, he finished his terrible perusal
and sank back exhausted. His wife, bringing his dinner, found him in a
half-comatose state; but he was conscious enough to warn her off with a
sharp cry when he saw her eyes wander toward the notes he had taken.
Weakly rising, he gathered up the scribbled papers and sealed them all
in a great envelope, which he immediately placed in his inside coat
pocket. He had sufficient strength to get home, but was so clearly in
need of medical aid that Dr. Hartwell was summoned at once. As the
doctor put him to bed he could only mutter over and over again, “But
what, in God’s name, can we do?”
Dr. Armitage slept, but was partly delirious the next day. He made no
explanations to Hartwell, but in his calmer moments spoke of the
imperative need of a long conference with Rice and Morgan. His wilder
wanderings were very startling indeed, including frantic appeals that
something in a boarded-up farmhouse be destroyed, and fantastic
references to some plan for the extirpation of the entire human race
and all animal and vegetable life from the earth by some terrible elder
race of beings from another dimension. He would shout that the world
was in danger, since the Elder Things wished to strip it and drag it
away from the solar system and cosmos of matter into some other plane
or phase of entity from which it had once fallen, vigintillions of
aeons ago. At other times he would call for the dreaded Necronomicon
and the Daemonolatreia of Remigius, in which he seemed hopeful of
finding some formula to check the peril he conjured up.
“Stop them, stop them!” he would shout. “Those Whateleys meant to let
them in, and the worst of all is left! Tell Rice and Morgan we must do
something—it’s a blind business, but I know how to make the
powder. . . . It hasn’t been fed since the second of August, when
Wilbur came here to his death, and at that rate. . . .”
But Armitage had a sound physique despite his seventy-three years, and
slept off his disorder that night without developing any real fever. He
woke late Friday, clear of head, though sober with a gnawing fear and
tremendous sense of responsibility. Saturday afternoon he felt able to
go over to the library and summon Rice and Morgan for a conference, and
the rest of that day and evening the three men tortured their brains in
the wildest speculation and the most desperate debate. Strange and
terrible books were drawn voluminously from the stack shelves and from
secure places of storage; and diagrams and formulae were copied with
feverish haste and in bewildering abundance. Of scepticism there was
none. All three had seen the body of Wilbur Whateley as it lay on the
floor in a room of that very building, and after that not one of them
could feel even slightly inclined to treat the diary as a madman’s
raving.
Opinions were divided as to notifying the Massachusetts State Police,
and the negative finally won. There were things involved which simply
could not be believed by those who had not seen a sample, as indeed was
made clear during certain subsequent investigations. Late at night the
conference disbanded without having developed a definite plan, but all
day Sunday Armitage was busy comparing formulae and mixing chemicals
obtained from the college laboratory. The more he reflected on the
hellish diary, the more he was inclined to doubt the efficacy of any
material agent in stamping out the entity which Wilbur Whateley had
left behind him—the earth-threatening entity which, unknown to him, was
to burst forth in a few hours and become the memorable Dunwich horror.
Monday was a repetition of Sunday with Dr. Armitage, for the task in
hand required an infinity of research and experiment. Further
consultations of the monstrous diary brought about various changes of
plan, and he knew that even in the end a large amount of uncertainty
must remain. By Tuesday he had a definite line of action mapped out,
and believed he would try a trip to Dunwich within a week. Then, on
Wednesday, the great shock came. Tucked obscurely away in a corner of
the Arkham Advertiser was a facetious little item from the Associated
Press, telling what a record-breaking monster the bootleg whiskey of
Dunwich had raised up. Armitage, half stunned, could only telephone for
Rice and Morgan. Far into the night they discussed, and the next day
was a whirlwind of preparation on the part of them all. Armitage knew
he would be meddling with terrible powers, yet saw that there was no
other way to annul the deeper and more malign meddling which others had
done before him.
IX.
Friday morning Armitage, Rice, and Morgan set out by motor for Dunwich,
arriving at the village about one in the afternoon. The day was
pleasant, but even in the brightest sunlight a kind of quiet dread and
portent seemed to hover about the strangely domed hills and the deep,
shadowy ravines of the stricken region. Now and then on some
mountain-top a gaunt circle of stones could be glimpsed against the
sky. From the air of hushed fright at Osborn’s store they knew
something hideous had happened, and soon learned of the annihilation of
the Elmer Frye house and family. Throughout that afternoon they rode
around Dunwich; questioning the natives concerning all that had
occurred, and seeing for themselves with rising pangs of horror the
drear Frye ruins with their lingering traces of the tarry stickiness,
the blasphemous tracks in the Frye yard, the wounded Seth Bishop
cattle, and the enormous swaths of disturbed vegetation in various
places. The trail up and down Sentinel Hill seemed to Armitage of
almost cataclysmic significance, and he looked long at the sinister
altar-like stone on the summit.
At length the visitors, apprised of a party of State Police which had
come from Aylesbury that morning in response to the first telephone
reports of the Frye tragedy, decided to seek out the officers and
compare notes as far as practicable. This, however, they found more
easily planned than performed; since no sign of the party could be
found in any direction. There had been five of them in a car, but now
the car stood empty near the ruins in the Frye yard. The natives, all
of whom had talked with the policemen, seemed at first as perplexed as
Armitage and his companions. Then old Sam Hutchins thought of something
and turned pale, nudging Fred Farr and pointing to the dank, deep
hollow that yawned close by.
“Gawd,” he gasped, “I telled ’em not ter go daown into the glen, an’ I
never thought nobody’d dew it with them tracks an’ that smell an’ the
whippoorwills a-screechin’ daown thar in the dark o’ noonday. . . .”
A cold shudder ran through natives and visitors alike, and every ear
seemed strained in a kind of instinctive, unconscious listening.
Armitage, now that he had actually come upon the horror and its
monstrous work, trembled with the responsibility he felt to be his.
Night would soon fall, and it was then that the mountainous blasphemy
lumbered upon its eldritch course. Negotium perambulans in
tenebris. . . . The old librarian rehearsed the formulae he had
memorised, and clutched the paper containing the alternative one he had
not memorised. He saw that his electric flashlight was in working
order. Rice, beside him, took from a valise a metal sprayer of the sort
used in combating insects; whilst Morgan uncased the big-game rifle on
which he relied despite his colleague’s warnings that no material
weapon would be of help.
Armitage, having read the hideous diary, knew painfully well what kind
of a manifestation to expect; but he did not add to the fright of the
Dunwich people by giving any hints or clues. He hoped that it might be
conquered without any revelation to the world of the monstrous thing it
had escaped. As the shadows gathered, the natives commenced to disperse
homeward, anxious to bar themselves indoors despite the present
evidence that all human locks and bolts were useless before a force
that could bend trees and crush houses when it chose. They shook their
heads at the visitors’ plan to stand guard at the Frye ruins near the
glen; and as they left, had little expectancy of ever seeing the
watchers again.
There were rumblings under the hills that night, and the whippoorwills
piped threateningly. Once in a while a wind, sweeping up out of Cold
Spring Glen, would bring a touch of ineffable foetor to the heavy night
air; such a foetor as all three of the watchers had smelled once
before, when they stood above a dying thing that had passed for fifteen
years and a half as a human being. But the looked-for terror did not
appear. Whatever was down there in the glen was biding its time, and
Armitage told his colleagues it would be suicidal to try to attack it
in the dark.
Morning came wanly, and the night-sounds ceased. It was a grey, bleak
day, with now and then a drizzle of rain; and heavier and heavier
clouds seemed to be piling themselves up beyond the hills to the
northwest. The men from Arkham were undecided what to do. Seeking
shelter from the increasing rainfall beneath one of the few undestroyed
Frye outbuildings, they debated the wisdom of waiting, or of taking the
aggressive and going down into the glen in quest of their nameless,
monstrous quarry. The downpour waxed in heaviness, and distant peals of
thunder sounded from far horizons. Sheet lightning shimmered, and then
a forky bolt flashed near at hand, as if descending into the accursed
glen itself. The sky grew very dark, and the watchers hoped that the
storm would prove a short, sharp one followed by clear weather.
It was still gruesomely dark when, not much over an hour later, a
confused babel of voices sounded down the road. Another moment brought
to view a frightened group of more than a dozen men, running, shouting,
and even whimpering hysterically. Someone in the lead began sobbing out
words, and the Arkham men started violently when those words developed
a coherent form.
“Oh, my Gawd, my Gawd,” the voice choked out. “It’s a-goin’ agin, an’
this time by day! It’s aout—it’s aout an’ a-movin’ this very minute,
an’ only the Lord knows when it’ll be on us all!”
The speaker panted into silence, but another took up his message.
“Nigh on a haour ago Zeb Whateley here heerd the ’phone a-ringin’, an’
it was Mis’ Corey, George’s wife, that lives daown by the junction. She
says the hired boy Luther was aout drivin’ in the caows from the storm
arter the big bolt, when he see all the trees a-bendin’ at the maouth
o’ the glen—opposite side ter this—an’ smelt the same awful smell like
he smelt when he faound the big tracks las’ Monday mornin’. An’ she
says he says they was a swishin’, lappin’ saound, more nor what the
bendin’ trees an’ bushes could make, an’ all on a suddent the trees
along the rud begun ter git pushed one side, an’ they was a awful
stompin’ an’ splashin’ in the mud. But mind ye, Luther he didn’t see
nothin’ at all, only just the bendin’ trees an’ underbrush.
“Then fur ahead where Bishop’s Brook goes under the rud he heerd a
awful creakin’ an’ strainin’ on the bridge, an’ says he could tell the
saound o’ wood a-startin’ to crack an’ split. An’ all the whiles he
never see a thing, only them trees an’ bushes a-bendin’. An’ when the
swishin’ saound got very fur off—on the rud towards Wizard Whateley’s
an’ Sentinel Hill—Luther he had the guts ter step up whar he’d heerd it
furst an’ look at the graound. It was all mud an’ water, an’ the sky
was dark, an’ the rain was wipin’ aout all tracks abaout as fast as
could be; but beginnin’ at the glen maouth, whar the trees had moved,
they was still some o’ them awful prints big as bar’ls like he seen
Monday.”
At this point the first excited speaker interrupted.
“But that ain’t the trouble naow—that was only the start. Zeb here was
callin’ folks up an’ everybody was a-listenin’ in when a call from Seth
Bishop’s cut in. His haousekeeper Sally was carryin’ on fit ter
kill—she’d jest seed the trees a-bendin’ beside the rud, an’ says they
was a kind o’ mushy saound, like a elephant puffin’ an’ treadin’,
a-headin’ fer the haouse. Then she up an’ spoke suddent of a fearful
smell, an’ says her boy Cha’ncey was a-screamin’ as haow it was jest
like what he smelt up to the Whateley rewins Monday mornin’. An’ the
dogs was all barkin’ an’ whinin’ awful.
“An’ then she let aout a turrible yell, an’ says the shed daown the rud
had jest caved in like the storm hed blowed it over, only the wind
wa’n’t strong enough to dew that. Everybody was a-listenin’, an’ we
could hear lots o’ folks on the wire a-gaspin’. All to onct Sally she
yelled agin, an’ says the front yard picket fence hed just crumbled up,
though they wa’n’t no sign o’ what done it. Then everybody on the line
could hear Cha’ncey an’ ol’ Seth Bishop a-yellin’ tew, an’ Sally was
shriekin’ aout that suthin’ heavy hed struck the haouse—not lightnin’
nor nothin’, but suthin’ heavy agin the front, that kep’ a-launchin’
itself agin an’ agin, though ye couldn’t see nothin’ aout the front
winders. An’ then . . . an’ then . . .”
Lines of fright deepened on every face; and Armitage, shaken as he was,
had barely poise enough to prompt the speaker.
“An’ then . . . Sally she yelled aout, ’O help, the haouse is a-cavin’
in’ . . . an’ on the wire we could hear a turrible crashin’, an’ a hull
flock o’ screamin’ . . . jest like when Elmer Frye’s place was took,
only wuss. . . .”
The man paused, and another of the crowd spoke.
“That’s all—not a saound nor squeak over the ’phone arter that. Jest
still-like. We that heerd it got aout Fords an’ wagons an’ raounded up
as many able-bodied menfolks as we could git, at Corey’s place, an’
come up here ter see what yew thought best ter dew. Not but what I
think it’s the Lord’s jedgment fer our iniquities, that no mortal kin
ever set aside.”
Armitage saw that the time for positive action had come, and spoke
decisively to the faltering group of frightened rustics.
“We must follow it, boys.” He made his voice as reassuring as possible.
“I believe there’s a chance of putting it out of business. You men know
that those Whateleys were wizards—well, this thing is a thing of
wizardry, and must be put down by the same means. I’ve seen Wilbur
Whateley’s diary and read some of the strange old books he used to
read; and I think I know the right kind of spell to recite to make the
thing fade away. Of course, one can’t be sure, but we can always take a
chance. It’s invisible—I knew it would be—but there’s a powder in this
long-distance sprayer that might make it shew up for a second. Later on
we’ll try it. It’s a frightful thing to have alive, but it isn’t as bad
as what Wilbur would have let in if he’d lived longer. You’ll never
know what the world has escaped. Now we’ve only this one thing to
fight, and it can’t multiply. It can, though, do a lot of harm; so we
mustn’t hesitate to rid the community of it.
“We must follow it—and the way to begin is to go to the place that has
just been wrecked. Let somebody lead the way—I don’t know your roads
very well, but I’ve an idea there might be a shorter cut across lots.
How about it?”
The men shuffled about a moment, and then Earl Sawyer spoke softly,
pointing with a grimy finger through the steadily lessening rain.
“I guess ye kin git to Seth Bishop’s quickest by cuttin’ acrost the
lower medder here, wadin’ the brook at the low place, an’ climbin’
through Carrier’s mowin’ and the timber-lot beyont. That comes aout on
the upper rud mighty nigh Seth’s—a leetle t’other side.”
Armitage, with Rice and Morgan, started to walk in the direction
indicated; and most of the natives followed slowly. The sky was growing
lighter, and there were signs that the storm had worn itself away. When
Armitage inadvertently took a wrong direction, Joe Osborn warned him
and walked ahead to shew the right one. Courage and confidence were
mounting; though the twilight of the almost perpendicular wooded hill
which lay toward the end of their short cut, and among whose fantastic
ancient trees they had to scramble as if up a ladder, put these
qualities to a severe test.
At length they emerged on a muddy road to find the sun coming out. They
were a little beyond the Seth Bishop place, but bent trees and
hideously unmistakable tracks shewed what had passed by. Only a few
moments were consumed in surveying the ruins just around the bend. It
was the Frye incident all over again, and nothing dead or living was
found in either of the collapsed shells which had been the Bishop house
and barn. No one cared to remain there amidst the stench and tarry
stickiness, but all turned instinctively to the line of horrible prints
leading on toward the wrecked Whateley farmhouse and the altar-crowned
slopes of Sentinel Hill.
As the men passed the site of Wilbur Whateley’s abode they shuddered
visibly, and seemed again to mix hesitancy with their zeal. It was no
joke tracking down something as big as a house that one could not see,
but that had all the vicious malevolence of a daemon. Opposite the base
of Sentinel Hill the tracks left the road, and there was a fresh
bending and matting visible along the broad swath marking the monster’s
former route to and from the summit.
Armitage produced a pocket telescope of considerable power and scanned
the steep green side of the hill. Then he handed the instrument to
Morgan, whose sight was keener. After a moment of gazing Morgan cried
out sharply, passing the glass to Earl Sawyer and indicating a certain
spot on the slope with his finger. Sawyer, as clumsy as most non-users
of optical devices are, fumbled a while; but eventually focussed the
lenses with Armitage’s aid. When he did so his cry was less restrained
than Morgan’s had been.
“Gawd almighty, the grass an’ bushes is a-movin’! It’s a-goin’
up—slow-like—creepin’ up ter the top this minute, heaven only knows
what fur!”
Then the germ of panic seemed to spread among the seekers. It was one
thing to chase the nameless entity, but quite another to find it.
Spells might be all right—but suppose they weren’t? Voices began
questioning Armitage about what he knew of the thing, and no reply
seemed quite to satisfy. Everyone seemed to feel himself in close
proximity to phases of Nature and of being utterly forbidden, and
wholly outside the sane experience of mankind.
X.
In the end the three men from Arkham—old, white-bearded Dr. Armitage,
stocky, iron-grey Professor Rice, and lean, youngish Dr.
Morgan—ascended the mountain alone. After much patient instruction
regarding its focussing and use, they left the telescope with the
frightened group that remained in the road; and as they climbed they
were watched closely by those among whom the glass was passed around.
It was hard going, and Armitage had to be helped more than once. High
above the toiling group the great swath trembled as its hellish maker
re-passed with snail-like deliberateness. Then it was obvious that the
pursuers were gaining.
Curtis Whateley—of the undecayed branch—was holding the telescope when
the Arkham party detoured radically from the swath. He told the crowd
that the men were evidently trying to get to a subordinate peak which
overlooked the swath at a point considerably ahead of where the
shrubbery was now bending. This, indeed, proved to be true; and the
party were seen to gain the minor elevation only a short time after the
invisible blasphemy had passed it.
Then Wesley Corey, who had taken the glass, cried out that Armitage was
adjusting the sprayer which Rice held, and that something must be about
to happen. The crowd stirred uneasily, recalling that this sprayer was
expected to give the unseen horror a moment of visibility. Two or three
men shut their eyes, but Curtis Whateley snatched back the telescope
and strained his vision to the utmost. He saw that Rice, from the
party’s point of vantage above and behind the entity, had an excellent
chance of spreading the potent powder with marvellous effect.
Those without the telescope saw only an instant’s flash of grey cloud—a
cloud about the size of a moderately large building—near the top of the
mountain. Curtis, who had held the instrument, dropped it with a
piercing shriek into the ankle-deep mud of the road. He reeled, and
would have crumpled to the ground had not two or three others seized
and steadied him. All he could do was moan half-inaudibly,
“Oh, oh, great Gawd . . . that . . . that . . .”
There was a pandemonium of questioning, and only Henry Wheeler thought
to rescue the fallen telescope and wipe it clean of mud. Curtis was
past all coherence, and even isolated replies were almost too much for
him.
“Bigger’n a barn . . . all made o’ squirmin’ ropes . . . hull thing
sort o’ shaped like a hen’s egg bigger’n anything, with dozens o’ legs
like hogsheads that haff shut up when they step . . . nothin’ solid
abaout it—all like jelly, an’ made o’ sep’rit wrigglin’ ropes pushed
clost together . . . great bulgin’ eyes all over it . . . ten or twenty
maouths or trunks a-stickin’ aout all along the sides, big as
stovepipes, an’ all a-tossin’ an’ openin’ an’ shuttin’ . . . all grey,
with kinder blue or purple rings . . . an’ Gawd in heaven—that haff
face on top! . . .”
This final memory, whatever it was, proved too much for poor Curtis;
and he collapsed completely before he could say more. Fred Farr and
Will Hutchins carried him to the roadside and laid him on the damp
grass. Henry Wheeler, trembling, turned the rescued telescope on the
mountain to see what he might. Through the lenses were discernible
three tiny figures, apparently running toward the summit as fast as the
steep incline allowed. Only these—nothing more. Then everyone noticed a
strangely unseasonable noise in the deep valley behind, and even in the
underbrush of Sentinel Hill itself. It was the piping of unnumbered
whippoorwills, and in their shrill chorus there seemed to lurk a note
of tense and evil expectancy.
Earl Sawyer now took the telescope and reported the three figures as
standing on the topmost ridge, virtually level with the altar-stone but
at a considerable distance from it. One figure, he said, seemed to be
raising its hands above its head at rhythmic intervals; and as Sawyer
mentioned the circumstance the crowd seemed to hear a faint,
half-musical sound from the distance, as if a loud chant were
accompanying the gestures. The weird silhouette on that remote peak
must have been a spectacle of infinite grotesqueness and
impressiveness, but no observer was in a mood for aesthetic
appreciation. “I guess he’s sayin’ the spell,” whispered Wheeler as he
snatched back the telescope. The whippoorwills were piping wildly, and
in a singularly curious irregular rhythm quite unlike that of the
visible ritual.
Suddenly the sunshine seemed to lessen without the intervention of any
discernible cloud. It was a very peculiar phenomenon, and was plainly
marked by all. A rumbling sound seemed brewing beneath the hills, mixed
strangely with a concordant rumbling which clearly came from the sky.
Lightning flashed aloft, and the wondering crowd looked in vain for the
portents of storm. The chanting of the men from Arkham now became
unmistakable, and Wheeler saw through the glass that they were all
raising their arms in the rhythmic incantation. From some farmhouse far
away came the frantic barking of dogs.
The change in the quality of the daylight increased, and the crowd
gazed about the horizon in wonder. A purplish darkness, born of nothing
more than a spectral deepening of the sky’s blue, pressed down upon the
rumbling hills. Then the lightning flashed again, somewhat brighter
than before, and the crowd fancied that it had shewed a certain
mistiness around the altar-stone on the distant height. No one,
however, had been using the telescope at that instant. The
whippoorwills continued their irregular pulsation, and the men of
Dunwich braced themselves tensely against some imponderable menace with
which the atmosphere seemed surcharged.
Without warning came those deep, cracked, raucous vocal sounds which
will never leave the memory of the stricken group who heard them. Not
from any human throat were they born, for the organs of man can yield
no such acoustic perversions. Rather would one have said they came from
the pit itself, had not their source been so unmistakably the
altar-stone on the peak. It is almost erroneous to call them sounds at
all, since so much of their ghastly, infra-bass timbre spoke to dim
seats of consciousness and terror far subtler than the ear; yet one
must do so, since their form was indisputably though vaguely that of
half-articulate words. They were loud—loud as the rumblings and the
thunder above which they echoed—yet did they come from no visible
being. And because imagination might suggest a conjectural source in
the world of non-visible beings, the huddled crowd at the mountain’s
base huddled still closer, and winced as if in expectation of a blow.
“Ygnaiih . . . ygnaiih . . . thflthkh’ngha . . . Yog-Sothoth . . .”
rang the hideous croaking out of space. “Y’bthnk . . .
h’ehye—n’grkdl’lh. . . .”
The speaking impulse seemed to falter here, as if some frightful
psychic struggle were going on. Henry Wheeler strained his eye at the
telescope, but saw only the three grotesquely silhouetted human figures
on the peak, all moving their arms furiously in strange gestures as
their incantation drew near its culmination. From what black wells of
Acherontic fear or feeling, from what unplumbed gulfs of extra-cosmic
consciousness or obscure, long-latent heredity, were those
half-articulate thunder-croakings drawn? Presently they began to gather
renewed force and coherence as they grew in stark, utter, ultimate
frenzy.
“Eh-ya-ya-ya-yahaah—e’yayayayaaaa . . . ngh’aaaaa . . . ngh’aaaa . . .
h’yuh . . . h’yuh . . . HELP! HELP! . . . ff—ff—ff—FATHER! FATHER!
YOG-SOTHOTH! . . .”
But that was all. The pallid group in the road, still reeling at the
indisputably English syllables that had poured thickly and thunderously
down from the frantic vacancy beside that shocking altar-stone, were
never to hear such syllables again. Instead, they jumped violently at
the terrific report which seemed to rend the hills; the deafening,
cataclysmic peal whose source, be it inner earth or sky, no hearer was
ever able to place. A single lightning-bolt shot from the purple zenith
to the altar-stone, and a great tidal wave of viewless force and
indescribable stench swept down from the hill to all the countryside.
Trees, grass, and underbrush were whipped into a fury; and the
frightened crowd at the mountain’s base, weakened by the lethal foetor
that seemed about to asphyxiate them, were almost hurled off their
feet. Dogs howled from the distance, green grass and foliage wilted to
a curious, sickly yellow-grey, and over field and forest were scattered
the bodies of dead whippoorwills.
The stench left quickly, but the vegetation never came right again. To
this day there is something queer and unholy about the growths on and
around that fearsome hill. Curtis Whateley was only just regaining
consciousness when the Arkham men came slowly down the mountain in the
beams of a sunlight once more brilliant and untainted. They were grave
and quiet, and seemed shaken by memories and reflections even more
terrible than those which had reduced the group of natives to a state
of cowed quivering. In reply to a jumble of questions they only shook
their heads and reaffirmed one vital fact.
“The thing has gone forever,” Armitage said. “It has been split up into
what it was originally made of, and can never exist again. It was an
impossibility in a normal world. Only the least fraction was really
matter in any sense we know. It was like its father—and most of it has
gone back to him in some vague realm or dimension outside our material
universe; some vague abyss out of which only the most accursed rites of
human blasphemy could ever have called him for a moment on the hills.”
There was a brief silence, and in that pause the scattered senses of
poor Curtis Whateley began to knit back into a sort of continuity; so
that he put his hands to his head with a moan. Memory seemed to pick
itself up where it had left off, and the horror of the sight that had
prostrated him burst in upon him again.
“Oh, oh, my Gawd, that haff face—that haff face on top of it . . . that
face with the red eyes an’ crinkly albino hair, an’ no chin, like the
Whateleys . . . It was a octopus, centipede, spider kind o’ thing, but
they was a haff-shaped man’s face on top of it, an’ it looked like
Wizard Whateley’s, only it was yards an’ yards acrost. . . .”
He paused exhausted, as the whole group of natives stared in a
bewilderment not quite crystallised into fresh terror. Only old Zebulon
Whateley, who wanderingly remembered ancient things but who had been
silent heretofore, spoke aloud.
“Fifteen year’ gone,” he rambled, “I heerd Ol’ Whateley say as haow
some day we’d hear a child o’ Lavinny’s a-callin’ its father’s name on
the top o’ Sentinel Hill. . . .”
But Joe Osborn interrupted him to question the Arkham men anew.
“What was it anyhaow, an’ haowever did young Wizard Whateley call it
aout o’ the air it come from?”
Armitage chose his words very carefully.
“It was—well, it was mostly a kind of force that doesn’t belong in our
part of space; a kind of force that acts and grows and shapes itself by
other laws than those of our sort of Nature. We have no business
calling in such things from outside, and only very wicked people and
very wicked cults ever try to. There was some of it in Wilbur Whateley
himself—enough to make a devil and a precocious monster of him, and to
make his passing out a pretty terrible sight. I’m going to burn his
accursed diary, and if you men are wise you’ll dynamite that
altar-stone up there, and pull down all the rings of standing stones on
the other hills. Things like that brought down the beings those
Whateleys were so fond of—the beings they were going to let in tangibly
to wipe out the human race and drag the earth off to some nameless
place for some nameless purpose.
“But as to this thing we’ve just sent back—the Whateleys raised it for
a terrible part in the doings that were to come. It grew fast and big
from the same reason that Wilbur grew fast and big—but it beat him
because it had a greater share of the outsideness in it. You needn’t
ask how Wilbur called it out of the air. He didn’t call it out. It was
his twin brother, but it looked more like the father than he did.”
Return to “The Dunwich Horror”
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