The Dunwich Horror 2

The Dunwich Horror 2

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