The Dunwich Horror 3

The Dunwich Horror 3

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