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