the _indisputably English_ syllables that had poured thickly and
thunderously down from the frantic vacancy beside that shocking
altar-stone, were never to hear such syllables again. Instead, they
jumped violently at the terrific report which seemed to rend the hills;
the deafening, cataclysmic peal whose source, be it inner earth or
sky, no hearer was ever able to place. A single lightning bolt shot
from the purple zenith to the altar-stone, and a great tidal wave of
viewless force and indescribable stench swept down from the hill to
all the countryside. Trees, grass, and underbrush were whipped into a
fury; and the frightened crowd at the mountain's base, weakened by the
lethal fetor that seemed about to asphyxiate them, were almost hurled
off their feet. Dogs howled from the distance, green grass and foliage
wilted to a curious, sickly yellow-gray, and over field and forest were
scattered the bodies of dead whippoorwills.
The stench left quickly, but the vegetation never came right again.
To this day there is something queer and unholy about the growths on
and around that fearsome hill. Curtis Whateley was only just regaining
consciousness when the Arkham men came slowly down the mountain in the
beams of a sunlight once more brilliant and untainted. They were grave
and quiet, and seemed shaken by memories and reflections even more
terrible than those which had reduced the group of natives to a state
of cowed quivering. In reply to a jumble of questions they only shook
their heads and reaffirmed one vital fact.
"The thing has gone for ever," Armitage said. "It has been split up
into what it was originally made of, and can never exist again. It was
an impossibility in a normal world. Only the least fraction was really
matter in any sense we know. It was like its father--and most of it has
gone back to him in some vague realm or dimension outside our material
universe; some vague abyss out of which only the most accursed rites of
human blasphemy could ever have called him for a moment on the hills."
There was a brief silence, and in that pause the scattered senses of
poor Curtis Whateley began to knit back into a sort of continuity; so
that he put his hands to his head with a moan. Memory seemed to pick
itself up where it had left off, and the horror of the sight that had
prostrated him burst in upon him again.
"_Oh, oh, my Gawd, that haff face ... that haff face on top of it ...
that face with the red eyes an' crinkly albino hair, an' no chin, like
the Whateleys.... It was a octopus, centipede, spider kind o' thing,
but they was a haff-shaped man's face on top of it, an' it looked like
Wizard Whateley's, only it was yards an' yards acrost...._"
He paused exhausted, as the whole group of natives stared in a
bewilderment not quite crystallized into fresh terror. Only old Zebulon
Whateley, who wanderingly remembered ancient things but who had been
silent heretofore, spoke aloud.
"Fifteen year' gone," he rambled, "I heerd Ol' Whateley say as haow
some day we'd hear a child o' Lavinny's a-callin' its father's name on
the top o' Sentinel Hill...."
But Joe Osborn interrupted him to question the Arkham men anew.
"_What was it, anyhaow_, an' haowever did young Wizard Whateley call it
aout o' the air it come from?"
Armitage chose his words carefully.
"It was--well, it was mostly a kind of force that doesn't belong in our
part of space; a kind of force that acts and grows and shapes itself
by other laws than those of our sort of Nature. We have no business
calling in such things from outside, and only very wicked people
and very wicked cults ever try to. There was some of it in Wilbur
Whateley himself--enough to make a devil and a precocious monster of
him, and to make his passing out a pretty terrible sight. I'm going
to burn his accursed diary, and if you men are wise you'll dynamite
that altar-stone up there, and pull down all the rings of standing
stones on the other hills. Things like that brought down the beings
those Whateleys were so fond of--the beings they were going to let in
tangibly to wipe out the human race and drag the earth off to some
nameless place for some nameless purpose.
"But as to this thing we've just sent back--the Whateleys raised it for
a terrible part in the doings that were to come. It grew fast and big
from the same reason that Wilbur grew fast and big--but it beat him
because it had a greater share of the _outsideness_ in it. You needn't
ask how Wilbur called it out of the air. He didn't call it out. _It was
his twin brother, but it looked more like the father than he did._"