The Dunwich Horror 4

The Dunwich Horror 4

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