The Dunwich Horror 1

The Dunwich Horror 1

The Dunwich Horror

 

Author: 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.