H.P. Lovecraft. The Dunwich Horror
The Dunwich Horror
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written Summer 1928
Published April 1929 in Weird Tales, Vol. 13, No. 4, 481-508.
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 archtypes 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 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 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-strewn 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. Afterwards 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 towards it have been taken down. The
scenery, judged by an 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 unnameable 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
myself 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 could 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 hilltops, 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
wormholes. 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 Wateley drove his sleigh through the snow into Dunwich
Village and discoursed incoherently to the group of loungers at Osborne'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 showed 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 hereabouts. 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 person 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 Wateley 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 farm-house, 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
slattemly, 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 showed 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. Afterwards 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, peak-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 show 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
storey of the house, he was a no less thorough craftsman. His mania showed
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 storey. 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 so 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 dilligently over the queer pictures and
charts in his grandfather's books, while Old Whateley would instruct and
catechize 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 synchronized
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 towards 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
storey. 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-pedlar tried the locked door leading to the
stairway. That pedlar 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 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, and the shelves of strange
books, the sealed second storey 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 toolshed abandoned when the house
was finally repaired; and like the faint odours which he sometimes thought
he caught near the stone circle 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 farm-house. In the course
of time callers professed to hear sounds in the sealed upper storey 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 storey
and the peaked roof. They had torn down the great central chimney, too,
and fitted the rusty range with a flimsy outside tin stove-pipe.
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.
Towards 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 serve 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 pandemoniac 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 countryfolk 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 afterwards 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
disappearance, and very few ever approached his neighbourhood now. His
height had increased to more than seven feet, and showed 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 Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, the British Museum, the
University of Buenos Ayres, and the Library of Miskatonic University at
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 Osborne'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 chaim.
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 had
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 engraver, but who bath 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. Ia:!
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, after winter summer. They
wait patient and potent, for here shall They reign again.
Dr. Annitage, 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, en' 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 wan'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 responsibility 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 won'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 tridimensional 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! Show 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-dimensional 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 third 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 afterwards - 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
