[Transcriber's note: This etext was produced from Weird Tales April
1929. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed.]
_The_ Dunwich Horror
by H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimeras--dire stories of Celæno 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? Oh, 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_.
1
When a traveler 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 surprizing 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 in 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 bullfrogs.
The thin, shining line of the Miskatonic's upper reaches has an oddly
serpentlike 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 neighboring 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 harbors 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 odor about the village street, as of the massed mold 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 esthetic 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 can not 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 wofully 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 moldering 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 Dæmons are Matters of too common Knowledge to be deny'd; the
cursed Voices of _Azazel_ and _Buzrael_, of _Beelzebub_ and
_Belial_, being heard 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
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 odors 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 eery 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 demoniac 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 sizable
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.
2
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 35, 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 daydreams 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. Neighbors 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 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 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 over-crowded 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 anemic,
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 gray, 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
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. Afterward he could not be sure
about the boy, who may have had some kind of a fringed belt and a pair
of dark blue 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 on 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.
3
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
labor; and though he still babbled dementedly at times, his carpentry
seemed to show the effects of sound calculation. It had really 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 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 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 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 odor 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 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 lip and cheek 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 odors 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.
4
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-Hallow 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 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.
Toward 1 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 gray 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 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
neighborhood now. His height had increased to more than seven feet, and
showed no signs of ceasing its development.
5
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 Aires, 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 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 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
_They_. 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 draft 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 fantasms 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 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 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 fetid 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 odor 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 rumors 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-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.
6
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
afterward--such a scream as could come from no being born of earth, or
wholly of earth.
Armitage hastened into some clothing and rushed 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 showed 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 breath 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 fetid 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 visualized 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 manlike 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 fantasy began. The skin was
thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdomen a score of
long greenish-gray 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 color, 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 grayish-white
in the spaces between the purple rings. Of genuine blood there was
none; only the fetid greenish-yellow ichor which trickled along the
painted floor beyond the radius of the stickiness, and left a curious
discoloration 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.
Those 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 his 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.