[Transcriber's note: This etext was produced from Weird Tales April

1929. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.

copyright on this publication was renewed.]









                       _The_ Dunwich Horror



                        by 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.



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

guardians.



The few callers at the house would often find Lavinia alone on the

ground floor, while odd cries and footsteps resounded in the boarded-up

second story. She would never tell what her father and the boy were

doing up there, though once she turned pale and displayed an abnormal

degree of fear when a jocose fish-peddler tried the locked door leading

to the stairway. That peddler told the store loungers at Dunwich

Village that he thought he heard a horse stamping on that floor above.

The loungers reflected, thinking of the door and runway, and of

the cattle that so swiftly disappeared. Then they shuddered as they

recalled tales of Old Whateley's youth, and of the strange things that

are called out of the earth when a bullock is sacrificed at the proper

time to certain heathen gods. It had for some time been noticed that

dogs had begun to hate and fear the whole Whateley place as violently

as they hated and feared young Wilbur personally.



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

him to find discrepancies, duplications, and ambiguities which made

the matter of determination far from easy. As he copied the formula

he finally chose, Dr. Armitage looked involuntarily over his shoulder

at the open pages; the left-hand one of which, in the Latin version,

contained such monstrous threats to the peace and sanity of the world.



    Nor is it to be thought [ran the text as Armitage mentally

    translated it] that man is either the oldest or the last of earth's

    masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone.

    The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not

    in the spaces we know, but _between_ them. They walk serene and

    primal, undimensioned and to us unseen. _Yog-Sothoth_ knows the

    gate. _Yog-Sothoth_ is the gate. _Yog-Sothoth_ is the key and

    guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in

    _Yog-Sothoth_. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old,

    and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have

    trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no

    one can behold Them as They tread. By Their smell can men sometimes

    know Them near, but of Their semblance can no man know, _saving

    only in the features of those They have begotten on mankind_; and

    of those are there many sorts, differing in likeness from man's

    truest eidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is

    _They_. They walk unseen and foul in lonely places where the Words

    have been spoken and the Rites howled through at their Seasons.

    The wind gibbers with Their voices, and the earth mutters with

    Their consciousness. They bend the forest and crush the city, yet

    may not forest or city behold the hand that smites. Kadath in the

    cold waste hath known Them, and what man knows Kadath? The ice

    desert of the South and the sunken isles of Ocean hold stones

    whereon Their seal is engraven, but who hath seen the deep frozen

    city or the sealed tower long garlanded with seaweed and barnacles?

    Great Cthulhu is Their cousin, yet can he spy Them only dimly. _Iä

    Shub-Niggurath!_ As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their hand is at

    your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one

    with your guarded threshold. _Yog-Sothoth_ is the key to the gate,

    whereby the spheres meet. Man rules now where They ruled once; They

    shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, and

    after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall

    They reign again.



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

the window the shrilling of the whippoorwills had suddenly ceased, and

above the murmurs of the gathering crowd there came the sound of a

panic-struck whirring and fluttering. Against the moon vast clouds of

feathery watchers rose and raced from sight, frantic at that which they

had sought for prey.



All at once the dog started up abruptly, gave a frightened bark, and

leaped nervously out the window by which it had entered. A cry rose

from the crowd, and Dr. Armitage shouted to the men outside that no

one must be admitted till the police or medical examiner came. He was

thankful that the windows were just too high to permit of peering

in, and drew the dark curtains carefully down over each one. By this

time two policemen had arrived; and Dr. Morgan, meeting them in the

vestibule, was urging them for their own sakes to postpone entrance to

the stench-filled reading-room till the examiner came and the prostrate

thing could be covered up.



Meanwhile frightful changes were taking place on the floor. One need

not describe the _kind_ and _rate_ of shrinkage and disintegration that

occurred before the eyes of Dr. Armitage and Professor Rice; but it is

permissible to say that, aside from the external appearance of face

and hands, the really human elements in Wilbur Whateley must have been

very small. When the medical examiner came, there was only a sticky

whitish mass on the painted boards, and the monstrous odor had nearly

disappeared. Apparently Whateley had had no skull or bony skeleton; at

least, in any true or stable sense. He had taken somewhat after his

unknown father.





7



Yet all this was only the prologue of the actual Dunwich horror.

Formalities were gone through by bewildered officials, abnormal details

were duly kept from press and public, and men were sent to Dunwich

and Aylesbury to look up property and notify any who might be heirs

of the late Wilbur Whateley. They found the countryside in great

agitation, both because of the growing rumblings beneath the domed

hills, and because of the unwonted stench and the surging, lapping

sounds which came increasingly from the great empty shell formed by

Whateley's boarded-up farmhouse. Earl Sawyer, who tended the horse and

cattle during Wilbur's absence, had developed a wofully acute case

of nerves. The officials devised excuses not to enter the noisome

boarded place; and were glad to confine their survey of the deceased's

living quarters, the newly mended sheds, to a single visit. They filed

a ponderous report at the court-house in Aylesbury, and litigations

concerning heirship are said to be still in progress amongst the

innumerable Whateleys, decayed and undecayed, of the upper Miskatonic

valley.



An almost interminable manuscript in strange characters, written in a

huge ledger and adjudged a sort of diary because of the spacing and

the variations in ink and penmanship, presented a baffling puzzle to

those who found it on the old bureau which served as its owner's

desk. After a week of debate it was sent to Miskatonic University,

together with the deceased's collection of strange books, for study

and possible translation; but even the best linguists soon saw that it

was not likely to be unriddled with ease. No trace of the ancient gold

with which Wilbur and Old Whateley always paid their debts has yet been

discovered.



It was in the dark of September ninth that the horror broke loose.

The hill noises had been very pronounced during the evening, and dogs

barked frantically all night. Early risers on the tenth noticed a

peculiar stench in the air. About 7 o'clock Luther Brown, the hired boy

at George Corey's, between Cold Spring Glen and the village, rushed

frenziedly back from his morning trip to Ten-Acre Meadow with the cows.

He was almost convulsed with fright as he stumbled into the kitchen;

and in the yard outside the no less frightened herd were pawing and

lowing pitifully, having followed the boy back in the panic they shared

with him. Between gasps Luther tried to stammer out his tale to Mrs.

Corey.



"Up thar in the rud beyont the glen, Mis' Corey--they's suthin' ben

thar! It smells like thunder, an' all the bushes an' little trees is

pushed back from the rud like they'd a haouse ben moved along of it.

An' that ain't the wust, nuther. They's _prints_ in the rud, Mis'

Corey--great raound prints as big as barrel-heads, all sunk daown deep

like a elephant had ben along, _only they's a sight more nor four feet

could make_. I looked at one or two afore I run, an' I see every one

was covered with lines spreadin' aout from one place, like as if big

palm-leaf fans--twict or three times as big as any they is--hed of ben

paounded daown into the rud. An' the smell was awful, like what it is

araound Wizard Whateley's ol' haouse...."



Here he faltered, and seemed to shiver afresh with the fright that had

sent him flying home. Mrs. Corey, unable to extract more information,

began telephoning the neighbors; thus starting on its rounds the

overture of panic that heralded the major terrors. When she got Sally

Sawyer, housekeeper at Seth Bishop's, the nearest place to Whateley's,

it became her turn to listen instead of transmit; for Sally's boy

Chauncey, who slept poorly, had been up on the hill toward Whateley's,

and had dashed back in terror after one look at the place, and at the

pasturage where Mr. Bishop's cows had been left out all night.



"Yes, Mis' Corey," came Sally's tremulous voice over the party wire,

"Cha'ncey he just come back a-post-in', and couldn't haff talk fer

bein' scairt! He says Ol' Whateley's haouse is all blowed up, with

the timbers scattered raound like they'd ben dynamite inside; only

the bottom floor ain't through, but is all covered with a kind o'

tarlike stuff that smells awful an' drips daown offen the aidges onto

the graoun' whar the side timbers is blowed away. An' they's awful

kinder marks in the yard, tew--great raound marks bigger raound than a

hogshead, an' all sticky with stuff like is on the blowed-up haouse.

Cha'ncey he says they leads off into the medders, whar a great swath

wider'n a barn is matted daown, an' all the stun walls tumbled every

which way wherever it goes.



"An' he says, says he, Mis' Corey, as haow he sot to look fer Seth's

caows, frighted ez he was; an' faound 'em in the upper pasture nigh the

Devil's Hop Yard in an awful shape. Haff on 'em's clean gone, an' nigh

haff o' them that's left is sucked most dry o' blood, with sores on 'em

like they's ben on Whateley's cattle ever senct Lavinny's black brat

was born. Seth he's gone aout naow to look at 'em, though I'll vaow he

wun't keer ter git very nigh Wizard Whateley's! Cha'ncey didn't look

keerful ter see whar the big matted-daown swath led arter it leff the

pasturage, but he says he thinks it p'inted towards the glen rud to the

village.



"I tell ye, Mis' Corey, they's suthin' abroad as hadn't orter be

abroad, an' I fer one think that black Wilbur Whateley, as come to

the bad eend he desarved, is at the bottom of the breedin' of it. He

wa'n't all human hisself, I allus says to everybody; an' I think he an'

Ol' Whateley must a raised suthin' in that there nailed-up haouse as

ain't even so human as he was. They's allus ben unseen things araound

Dunwich--livin' things--as ain't human an' ain't good fer human folks.



"The graoun' was a'talkin' lass night, an' towards mornin' Cha'ncey

he heerd the whippoorwills so laoud in Col' Spring Glen he couldn't

sleep none. Then he thought he heerd another faintlike saound over

towards Wizard Whateley's--a kinder rippin' or tearin' o' wood, like

some big box or crate was bein' opened fur off. What with this an'

that, he didn't git to sleep at all till sunup, an' no sooner was he

up this mornin', but he's got to go over to Whateley's an' see what's

the matter. He see enough, I tell ye, Mis' Corey! This dun't mean no

good, an' I think as all the men-folks ought to git up a party an'

do suthin'. I know suthin' awful's abaout, an' feel my time is nigh,

though only Gawd knows jest what it is.



"Did your Luther take accaount o' whar them big tracks led tew? No?

Wal, Mis' Corey, ef they was on the glen rud this side o' the glen,

an' ain't got to your haouse yet, I calc'late they must go into the

glen itself. They would do that. I allus says Col' Spring Glen ain't no

healthy nor decent place. The whippoorwills an' fireflies there never

did act like they was creaters o' Gawd, an' they's them as says ye kin

hear strange things a-rushin' an' a-talkin' in the air daown thar ef ye

stand in the right place, atween the rock falls an' Bear's Den."



       *       *       *       *       *



By that noon fully three-quarters of the men and boys of Dunwich were

trooping over the roads and meadows between the new-made Whateley ruins

and Cold Spring Glen; examining in horror the vast, monstrous prints,

the maimed Bishop cattle, the strange, noisome wreck of the farmhouse,

and the bruised, matted vegetation of the fields and road-sides.

Whatever had burst loose upon the world had assuredly gone down into

the great sinister ravine; for all the trees on the banks were bent and

broken, and a great avenue had been gouged in the precipice-hanging

underbrush. It was as though a house, launched by an avalanche, had

slid down through the tangled growths of the almost vertical slope.

From below no sound came, but only a distant, undefinable fetor; and

it is not to be wondered at that the men preferred to stay on the edge

and argue, rather than descend and beard the unknown Cyclopean horror

in its lair. Three dogs that were with the party had barked furiously

at first, but seemed cowed and reluctant when near the glen. Someone

telephoned the news to the _Aylesbury Transcript_; but the editor,

accustomed to wild tales from Dunwich, did no more than concoct a

humorous paragraph about it; an item soon afterward reproduced by the

Associated Press.



That night everyone went home, and every house and barn was barricaded

as stoutly as possible. Needless to say, no cattle were allowed to

remain in open pasturage. About 2 in the morning a frightful stench and

the savage barking of the dogs awakened the household at Elmer Frye's,

on the eastern edge of Cold Spring Glen, and all agreed that they

could hear a sort of muffled swishing or lapping sound from somewhere

outside. Mrs. Frye proposed telephoning the neighbors, and Elmer was

about to agree when the noise of splintering wood burst in upon their

deliberations. It came, apparently, from the barn; and was quickly

followed by a hideous screaming and stamping amongst the cattle. The

dogs slavered and crouched close to the feet of the fear-numbed family.

Frye lit a lantern through force of habit, but knew it would be death

to go out into that black farmyard. The children and the women-folk

whimpered, kept from screaming by some obscure, vestigial instinct

of defense which told them their lives depended on silence. At last

the noise of the cattle subsided to a pitiful moaning, and a great

snapping, crashing, and crackling ensued. The Fryes, huddled together

in the sitting-room, did not dare to move until the last echoes died

away far down in Cold Spring Glen. Then, amidst the dismal moans from

the stable and the demoniac piping of late whippoorwills in the glen,

Selina Frye tottered to the telephone and spread what news she could of

the second phase of the horror.



The next day all the countryside was in a panic; and cowed,

uncommunicative groups came and went where the fiendish thing had

occurred. Two titan swaths of destruction stretched from the glen

to the Frye farmyard, monstrous prints covered the bare patches of

ground, and one side of the old red barn had completely caved in. Of

the cattle, only about a quarter could be found and identified. Some of

these were in curious fragments, and all that survived had to be shot.

Earl Sawyer suggested that help be asked from Aylesbury or Arkham, but

others maintained it would be of no use. Old Zebulon Whateley, of a

branch that hovered about half-way between soundness and decadence,

made darkly wild suggestions about rites that ought to be practised on

the hilltops. He came of a line where tradition ran strong, and his

memories of chantings in the great stone circles were not altogether

connected with Wilbur and his grandfather.



Darkness fell upon a stricken countryside too passive to organize

for real defense. In a few cases closely related families would band

together and watch in the gloom under one roof; but, in general there

was only a repetition of the barricading of the night before, and a

futile, ineffective gesture of loading muskets and setting pitchforks

handily about. Nothing, however, occurred except some hill noises; and

when the day came there were many who hoped that the new horror had

gone as swiftly as it had come. There were even bold souls who proposed

an offensive expedition down in the glen, though they did not venture

to set an actual example to the still reluctant majority.



When night came again the barricading was repeated, though there was

less huddling together of families. In the morning both the Frye and

the Seth Bishop households reported excitement among the dogs and vague

sounds and stenches from afar, while early explorers noted with horror

a fresh set of the monstrous tracks in the road skirting Sentinel Hill.

As before, the sides of the road showed a bruising indicative of the

blasphemously stupendous bulk of the horror; whilst the conformation

of the tracks seemed to argue a passage in two directions, as if the

moving mountain had come from Cold Spring Glen and returned to it along

the same path. At the base of the hill a thirty-foot swath of crushed

shrubbery and saplings led steeply upward, and the seekers gasped when

they saw that even the most perpendicular places did not deflect the

inexorable trail. Whatever the horror was, it could scale a sheer stony

cliff of almost complete verticality; and as the investigators climbed

around to the hill's summit by safer routes they saw that the trail

ended--or rather, reversed--there.



It was here that the Whateleys used to build their hellish fires and

chant their hellish rituals by the table-like stone on May Eve and

Hallowmass. Now that very stone formed the center of a vast space

thrashed around by the mountainous horror, whilst upon its slightly

concave surface was a thick fetid deposit of the same tarry stickiness

observed on the floor of the ruined Whateley farmhouse when the horror

escaped. Men looked at one another and muttered. Then they looked down

the hill. Apparently the horror had descended by a route much the same

as that of its ascent. To speculate was futile. Reason, logic, and

normal ideas of motivation stood confounded. Only old Zebulon, who

was not with the group, could have done justice to the situation or

suggested a plausible explanation.



Thursday night began much like the others, but it ended less happily.

The whippoorwills in the glen had screamed with such unusual

persistence that many could not sleep, and about 3 a. m. all the party

telephones rang tremulously. Those who took down their receivers

heard a fright-mad voice shriek out, "Help, oh, my Gawd!..." and some

thought a crashing sound followed the breaking off of the exclamation.

There was nothing more. No one dared do anything, and no one knew

till morning whence the call came. Then those who had heard it called

everyone on the line, and found that only the Fryes did not reply. The

truth appeared an hour later, when a hastily assembled group of armed

men trudged out to the Frye place at the head of the glen. It was

horrible, yet hardly a surprize. There were more swaths and monstrous

prints, but there was no longer any house. It had caved in like an

egg-shell, and amongst the ruins nothing living or dead could be

discovered--only a stench and a tarry stickiness. The Elmer Fryes had

been erased from Dunwich.





8



In the meantime a quieter yet even more spiritually poignant phase of

the horror had been blackly unwinding itself behind the closed door of

a shelf-lined room in Arkham. The curious manuscript record or diary of

Wilbur Whateley, delivered to Miskatonic University for translation,

had caused much worry and bafflement among the experts in languages

both ancient and modern; its very alphabet, notwithstanding a general

resemblance to the heavily shaded Arabic used in Mesopotamia, being

absolutely unknown to any available authority. The final conclusion of

the linguists was that the text represented an artificial alphabet,

giving the effect of a cipher; though none of the usual methods of

cryptographic solution seemed to furnish any clue, even when applied

on the basis of every tongue the writer might conceivably have used.

The ancient books taken from Whateley's quarters, while absorbingly

interesting and in several cases promising to open up new and terrible

lines of research among philosophers and men of science, were of no

assistance whatever in this matter. One of them, a heavy tome with

an iron clasp, was in another unknown alphabet--this one of a very

different cast, and resembling Sanskrit more than anything else. The

old ledger was at length given wholly into the charge of Dr. Armitage,

both because of his peculiar interest in the Whateley matter, and

because of his wide linguistic learning and skill in the mystical

formulæ of antiquity and the Middle Ages.



Armitage had an idea that the alphabet might be something esoterically

used by certain forbidden cults which have come down from old times,

and which have inherited many forms and traditions from the wizards of

the Saracenic world. That question, however, he did not deem vital;

since it would be unnecessary to know the origin of the symbols if,

as he suspected, they were used as a cipher in a modern language. It

was his belief that, considering the great amount of text involved, the

writer would scarcely have wished the trouble of using another speech

than his own, save perhaps in certain special formulæ and incantations.

Accordingly he attacked the manuscript with the preliminary assumption

that the bulk of it was in English.



Dr. Armitage knew, from the repeated failures of his colleagues, that

the riddle was a deep and complex one, and that no simple mode of

solution could merit even a trial. All through late August he fortified

himself with the massed lore of cryptography, drawing upon the fullest

resources of his own library, and wading night after night amidst the

arcana of Trithemius' _Poligraphia_, Giambattista Porta's _De Furtivis

Literarum Notis_, De Vigenere's _Traité des Chiffres_, Falconer's

_Cryptomenysis Patefacta_, Davys' and Thicknesse's Eighteenth Century

treatises, and such fairly modern authorities as Blair, von Marten,

and Klüber's _Kryptographik_. He interspersed his study of the books

with attacks on the manuscript itself, and in time became convinced

that he had to deal with one of those subtlest and most ingenious of

cryptograms, in which many separate lists of corresponding letters are

arranged like the multiplication table, and the message built up with

arbitrary key-words known only to the initiated. The older authorities

seemed rather more helpful than the newer ones, and Armitage concluded

that the code of the manuscript was one of great antiquity, no doubt

handed down through a long line of mystical experimenters. Several

times he seemed near daylight, only to be set back by some unforeseen

obstacle. Then, as September approached, the clouds began to clear.

Certain letters, as used in certain parts of the manuscript, emerged

definitely and unmistakably; and it became obvious that the text was

indeed in English.



On the evening of September second the last major barrier gave way, and

Dr. Armitage read for the first time a continuous passage of Wilbur

Whateley's annals. It was in truth a diary, as all had thought; and

it was couched in a style clearly showing the mixed occult erudition

and general illiteracy of the strange being who wrote it. Almost the

first long passage that Armitage deciphered, an entry dated November

26, 1916, proved highly startling and disquieting. It was written, he

remembered, by a child of three and a half who looked like a lad of

twelve or thirteen.



    Today learned the Aklo for the Sabaoth, [it ran] which did not

    like, it being answerable from the hill and not from the air. That

    upstairs more ahead of me than I had thought it would be, and is

    not like to have much earth brain. Shot Elam Hutchins's collie

    Jack when he went to bite me, and Elam says he would kill me if he

    dast. I guess he won't. Grandfather kept me saying the Dho formula

    last night, and I think I saw the inner city at the 2 magnetic

    poles. I shall go to those poles when the earth is cleared off, if

    I can't break through with the Dho-Hna formula when I commit it.

    They from the air told me at Sabbat that it will be years before I

    can clear off the earth, and I guess Grandfather will be dead then,

    so I shall have to learn all the angles of the planes and all the

    formulas between the Yr and the Nhhngr. They from outside will

    help, but they can not take body without human blood. That upstairs

    looks it will have the right cast. I can see it a little when I

    make the Yoorish sign or blow the power of Ibn Ghazi at it, and it

    is near like them at May Eve on the Hill. The other face may wear

    off some. I wonder how I shall look when the earth is cleared and

    there are no earth beings on it. He that came with the Aklo Sabaoth

    said I may be transfigured, there being much of outside to work on.



Morning found Dr. Armitage in a cold sweat of terror and a frenzy of

wakeful concentration. He had not left the manuscript all night, but

sat at his table under the electric light turning page after page

with shaking hands as fast as he could decipher the cryptic text. He

had nervously telephoned his wife he would not be home, and when she

brought him a breakfast from the house he could scarcely dispose of a

mouthful. All that day he read on, now and then halted maddeningly as

a reapplication of the complex key became necessary. Lunch and dinner

were brought him, but he ate only the smallest fraction of either.

Toward the middle of the next night he drowsed off in his chair, but

soon woke out of a tangle of nightmares almost as hideous as the truths

and menaces to man's existence that he had uncovered.



On the morning of September fourth Professor Rice and Dr. Morgan

insisted on seeing him for a while, and departed trembling and

ashen-gray. That evening he went to bed, but slept only fitfully.

Wednesday--the next day--he was back at the manuscript, and began to

take copious notes both from the current sections and from those he had

already deciphered. In the small hours of that night he slept a little

in an easy-chair in his office, but was at the manuscript again before

dawn. Some time before noon his physician, Dr. Hartwell, called to see

him and insisted that he cease work. He refused, intimating that it was

of the most vital importance for him to complete the reading of the

diary, and promising an explanation in due course of time.



That evening, just as twilight fell, he finished his terrible perusal

and sank back exhausted. His wife, bringing his dinner, found him in a

half-comatose state; but he was conscious enough to warn her off with

a sharp cry when he saw her eyes wander toward the notes he had taken.

Weakly rising, he gathered up the scribbled papers and sealed them all

in a great envelope, which he immediately placed in his inside coat

pocket. He had sufficient strength to get home, but was so clearly in

need of medical aid that Dr. Hartwell was summoned at once. As the

doctor put him to bed he could only mutter over and over again, "_But

what, in God's name, can we do?_"



Dr. Armitage slept, but was partly delirious the next day. He made

no explanations to Hartwell, but in his calmer moments spoke of the

imperative need of a long conference with Rice and Morgan. His wilder

wanderings were very startling indeed, including frantic appeals

that something in a boarded-up farmhouse be destroyed, and fantastic

references to some plan for the extirpation of the entire human race

and all animal and vegetable life from the earth by some terrible elder

race of beings from another dimension. He would shout that the world

was in danger, since the Elder Things wished to strip it and drag it

away from the solar system and cosmos of matter into some other plane

or phase of entity from which it had once fallen, vigintillions of eons

ago. At other times he would call for the dreaded _Necronomicon_ and

the _Dæmonolatreia_ of Remigius, in which he seemed hopeful of finding

some formula to check the peril he conjured up.



"Stop them, stop them!" he would shout. "Those Whateleys meant to let

them in, and the worst of all is left! Tell Rice and Morgan we must do

something--it's a blind business, but I know how to make the powder....

It hasn't been fed since the second of August, when Wilbur came here to

his death, and at that rate...."



But Armitage had a sound physique despite his seventy-three years, and

slept off his disorder that night without developing any real fever. He

woke late Friday, clear of head, though sober, with a gnawing fear and

tremendous sense of responsibility. Saturday afternoon he felt able to

go over to the library and summon Rice and Morgan for a conference, and

the rest of that day and evening the three men tortured their brains

in the wildest speculation and the most desperate debate. Strange and

terrible books were drawn voluminously from the stack shelves and from

secure places of storage, and diagrams and formulæ were copied with

feverish haste and in bewildering abundance. Of skepticism there was

none. All three had seen the body of Wilbur Whateley as it lay on the

floor in a room of that very building, and after that not one of them

could feel even slightly inclined to treat the diary as a madman's

raving.



Opinions were divided as to notifying the Massachusetts State Police,

and the negative finally won. There were things involved which simply

could not be believed by those who had not seen a sample, as indeed was

made clear during certain subsequent investigations. Late at night the

conference disbanded without having developed a definite plan, but all

day Sunday Armitage was busy comparing formulæ and mixing chemicals

obtained from the college laboratory. The more he reflected on the

hellish diary, the more he was inclined to doubt the efficacy of any

material agent in stamping out the entity which Wilbur Whateley had

left behind him--the earth-threatening entity which, unknown to him,

was to burst forth in a few hours and become the memorable Dunwich

horror.



Monday was a repetition of Sunday with Dr. Armitage, for the task

in hand required an infinity of research and experiment. Further

consultations of the monstrous diary brought about various changes of

plan, and he knew that even in the end a large amount of uncertainty

must remain. By Tuesday he had a definite line of action mapped out,

and believed he would try a trip to Dunwich within a week. Then, on

Wednesday, the great shock came. Tucked obscurely away in a corner of

the _Arkham Advertiser_ was a facetious little item from the Associated

Press, telling what a record-breaking monster the bootleg whisky of

Dunwich had raised up. Armitage, half stunned, could only telephone

for Rice and Morgan. Far into the night they discussed, and the next

day was a whirlwind of preparation on the part of them all. Armitage

knew he would be meddling with terrible powers, yet saw that there was

no other way to annul the deeper and more malign meddling which others

had done before him.





9



Friday morning Armitage, Rice and Morgan set out by motor for Dunwich,

arriving at the village about 1 in the afternoon. The day was pleasant,

but even in the brightest sunlight a kind of quiet dread and portent

seemed to hover about the strangely domed hills and the deep, shadowy

ravines of the stricken region. Now and then on some mountain top a

gaunt circle of stones could be glimpsed against the sky. From the

air of hushed fright at Osborn's store they knew something hideous

had happened, and soon learned of the annihilation of the Elmer Frye

house and family. Throughout that afternoon they rode around Dunwich,

questioning the natives concerning all that had occurred, and seeing

for themselves with rising pangs of horror the drear Frye ruins with

their lingering traces of the tarry stickiness, the blasphemous tracks

in the Frye yard, the wounded Seth Bishop cattle, and the enormous

swaths of disturbed vegetation in various places. The trail up and down

Sentinel Hill seemed to Armitage of almost cataclysmic significance,

and he looked long at the sinister altarlike stone on the summit.



At length the visitors, apprised of a party of State Police which had

come from Aylesbury that morning in response to the first telephone

reports of the Frye tragedy, decided to seek out the officers and

compare notes as far as practicable. This, however, they found more

easily planned than performed; since no sign of the party could be

found in any direction. There had been five of them in a car, but now

the car stood empty near the ruins in the Frye yard. The natives, all

of whom had talked with the policemen, seemed at first as perplexed as

Armitage and his companions. Then old Sam Hutchins thought of something

and turned pale, nudging Fred Farr and pointing to the dank, deep

hollow that yawned close by.



"Gawd," he gasped, "I telled 'em not ter go daown into the glen, an' I

never thought nobody'd dew it with them tracks an' that smell an' the

whippoorwills a-screechin' daown thar in the dark o' noonday...."



A cold shudder ran through natives and visitors alike, and every ear

seemed strained in a kind of instinctive, unconscious listening.

Armitage, now that he had actually come upon the horror and its

monstrous work, trembled with the responsibility he felt to be

his. Night would soon fall, and it was then that the mountainous

blasphemy lumbered upon its eldritch course. _Negotium perambulans in

tenebris...._ The old librarian rehearsed the formulæ he had memorized,

and clutched the paper containing the alternative ones he had not

memorized. He saw that his electric flashlight was in working order.

Rice, beside him, took from a valise a metal sprayer of the sort used

in combating insects; whilst Morgan uncased the big-game rifle on which

he relied despite his colleague's warnings that no material weapon

would be of help.



Armitage, having read the hideous diary, knew painfully well what kind

of a manifestation to expect, but he did not add to the fright of the

Dunwich people by giving any hints or clues. He hoped that it might

be conquered without any revelation to the world of the monstrous

thing it had escaped. As the shadows gathered, the natives commenced

to disperse homeward, anxious to bar themselves indoors despite the

present evidence that all human locks and bolts were useless before a

force that could bend trees and crush houses when it chose. They shook

their heads at the visitors' plan to stand guard at the Frye ruins near

the glen; and as they left, had little expectancy of ever seeing the

watchers again.



There were rumblings under the hills that night, and the whippoorwills

piped threateningly. Once in a while a wind, sweeping up out of Cold

Spring Glen, would bring a touch of ineffable fetor to the heavy night

air; such a fetor as all three of the watchers had smelled once before,

when they stood above a dying thing that had passed for fifteen years

and a half as a human being. But the looked-for terror did not appear.

Whatever was down there in the glen was biding its time, and Armitage

told his colleagues it would be suicidal to try to attack it in the

dark.



Morning came wanly, and the night-sounds ceased. It was a gray, bleak

day, with now and then a drizzle of rain; and heavier and heavier

clouds seemed to be piling themselves up beyond the hills to the

northwest. The men from Arkham were undecided what to do. Seeking

shelter from the increasing rainfall beneath one of the few undestroyed

Frye outbuildings, they debated the wisdom of waiting, or of taking the

aggressive and going down into the glen in quest of their nameless,

monstrous quarry. The downpour waxed in heaviness, and distant peals of

thunder sounded from far horizons. Sheet lightning shimmered, and then

a forky bolt flashed near at hand, as if descending into the accursed

glen itself. The sky grew very dark, and the watchers hoped that the

storm would prove a short, sharp one followed by clear weather.



It was still gruesomely dark when, not much over an hour later, a

confused babel of voices sounded down the road. Another moment brought

to view a frightened group of more than a dozen men, running, shouting,

and even whimpering hysterically. Someone in the lead began sobbing out

words, and the Arkham men started violently when those words developed

a coherent form.



"Oh, my Gawd, my Gawd!" the voice choked out; "it's a-goin' agin, _an'

this time by day_! It's aout--it's aout an' a-movin' this very minute,

an' only the Lord knows when it'll be on us all!"



The speaker panted into silence, but another took up his message.



"Nigh on a haour ago Zeb Whateley here heerd the 'phone a-ringin', an'

it was Mis' Corey, George's wife that lives daown by the junction.

She says the hired boy Luther was aout drivin' in the caows from the

storm arter the big bolt, when he see all the trees a-bendin' at the

maouth o' the glen--opposite side ter this--an' smelt the same awful

smell like he smelt when he faound the big tracks las' Monday mornin'.

An' she says he says they was a swishin', lappin' saound, more nor

what the bendin' trees an' bushes could make, an' all on a suddent the

trees along the rud begun ter git pushed one side, an' they was a awful

stompin' an' splashin' in the mud. But mind ye, Luther he didn't see

nothin' at all, only jest the bendin' trees an' underbrush.



"Then fur ahead where Bishop's Brook goes under the rud he heerd a

awful creakin' an' strainin' on the bridge, an' says he could tell the

saound o' wood a-startin' to crack an' split. An' all the whiles he

never see a thing, only them trees an' bushes a-bendin'. An' when the

swishin' saound got very fur off--on the rud towards Wizard Whateley's

an' Sentinel Hill--Luther he had the guts ter step up whar he'd heerd

it fust an' look at the graound. It was all mud an' water, an' the sky

was dark, an' the rain was wipin' aout all tracks abaout as fast as

could be; but beginnin' at the glen maouth, whar the trees bed moved,

they was still some o' them awful prints big as bar'ls like he seen

Monday."



At this point the first excited speaker interrupted.



"But _that_ ain't the trouble naow--that was only the start. Zeb here

was callin' folks up an' everybody was a-listenin' in when a call from

Seth Bishop's cut in. His haousekeeper Sally was carryin' on fit ter

kill--she'd jest seed the trees a-bendin' beside the rud, an' says

they was a kind o' mushy saound, like a elephant puffin' an' treadin',

a-headin' fer the haouse. Then she up an' spoke suddent of a fearful

smell, an' says her boy Cha'ncey was a-screamin' as haow it was jest

like what he smelt up to the Whateley rewins Monday mornin'. An' the

dogs was all barkin' an' whinin' awful.



"An' then she let aout a turrible yell, an' says the shed daown the

rud hed jest caved in like the storm hed blowed it over, only the wind

wa'n't strong enough to dew that. Everybody was a-listenin', an' ye

could hear lots o' folks on the wire a-gaspin'. All to onct Sally she

yelled agin, an' says the front yard picket fence bed jest crumpled up,

though they wa'n't no sign o' what done it. Then everybody on the line

could hear Cha'ncey an' ol' Seth Bishop a-yellin', tew, an' Sally was

shriekin' aout that suthin' heavy hed struck the haouse--not lightnin'

nor nothin', but suthin' heavy agin' the front, that kep' a-launchin'

itself agin an' agin, though ye couldn't see nuthin' aout the front

winders. An' then ... an' then...."



Lines of fright deepened on every face; and Armitage, shaken as he was,

had barely poise enough to prompt the speaker.



"An' then ... Sally she yelled aout, 'O help, the haouse is a-cavin'

in' ... an' on the wire we could hoar a turrible crashin', an' a hull

flock o' screamin' ... jest like when Elmer Frye's place was took, only

wuss...."



The man paused, and another of the crowd spoke.



"That's all--not a saound nor squeak over the 'phone arter that. Jest

still-like. We that heerd it got aout Fords an' wagons an' raounded

up as many able-bodied men-folks as we could get, at Corey's place,

an' come up here ter see what yew thought best ter dew. Not but what I

think it's the Lord's judgment fer our iniquities, that no mortal kin

ever set aside."



Armitage saw that the time for positive action had come, and spoke

decisively to the faltering group of frightened rustics.



"We must follow it, boys." He made his voice as reassuring as possible.

"I believe there's a chance of putting it out of business. You men

know that those Whateleys were wizards--well, this thing is a thing

of wizardry, and must be put down by the same means. I've seen Wilbur

Whateley's diary and read some of the strange old books he used to

read, and I think I know the right kind of a spell to recite to make

the thing fade away. Of course, one can't be sure, but we can always

take a chance. It's invisible--I knew it would be--but there's a powder

in this long-distance sprayer that might make it show up for a second.

Later on we'll try it. It's a frightful thing to have alive, but it

isn't as bad as what Wilbur would have let in if he'd lived longer.

You'll never know what the world has escaped. Now we've only this one

thing to fight, and it can't multiply. It can, though, do a lot of

harm; so we mustn't hesitate to rid the community of it.



"We must follow it--and the way to begin is to go to the place that has

just been wrecked. Let somebody lead the way--I don't know your roads

very well, but I've an idea there might be a shorter cut across lots.

How about it?"



The men shuffled about a moment, and then Earl Sawyer spoke softly,

pointing with a grimy finger through the steadily lessening rain.



"I guess ye kin git to Seth Bishop's quickest by cuttin' acrost the

lower medder here, wadin' the brook at the low place, an' climbin'

through Carrier's mowin' an' the timber-lot beyont. That comes aout on

the upper rud mighty nigh Seth's--a leetle t'other side."



Armitage, with Rice and Morgan, started to walk in the direction

indicated; and most of the natives followed slowly. The sky was growing

lighter, and there were signs that the storm had worn itself away. When

Armitage inadvertently took a wrong direction, Joe Osborn warned him

and walked ahead to show the right one. Courage and confidence were

mounting; though the twilight of the almost perpendicular wooded hill

which lay toward the end of their short cut, and among whose fantastic

ancient trees they had to scramble as if up a ladder, put these

qualities to a severe test.



At length they emerged on a muddy road to find the sun coming out.

They were a little beyond the Seth Bishop place, but bent trees and

hideously unmistakable tracks showed what had passed by. Only a few

moments were consumed in surveying the ruins just around the bend. It

was the Frye incident all over again, and nothing dead or living was

found in either of the collapsed shells which had been the Bishop house

and barn. No one cared to remain there amidst the stench and the tarry

stickiness, but all turned instinctively to the line of horrible prints

leading on toward the wrecked Whateley farmhouse and the altar-crowned

slopes of Sentinel Hill.



As the men passed the site of Wilbur Whateley's abode they shuddered

visibly, and seemed again to mix hesitancy with their zeal. It was

no joke tracking down something as big as a house that one could not

see, but that had all the vicious malevolence of a demon. Opposite the

base of Sentinel Hill the tracks left the road, and there was a fresh

bending and matting visible along the broad swath marking the monster's

former route to and from the summit.



Armitage produced a pocket telescope of considerable power and scanned

the steep green side of the hill. Then he handed the instrument to

Morgan, whose sight was keener. After a moment of gazing Morgan cried

out sharply, passing the glass to Earl Sawyer and indicating a certain

spot on the slope with his finger. Sawyer, as clumsy as most non-users

of optical devices are, fumbled a while; but eventually focused the

lenses with Armitage's aid. When he did so his cry was less restrained

than Morgan's had been.



"Gawd almighty, the grass an' bushes is a-movin'! It's a-goin'

up--slow-like--creepin' up ter the top this minute, heaven only knows

what fer!"



Then the germ of panic seemed to spread among the seekers. It was one

thing to chase the nameless entity, but quite another to find it.

Spells might be all right--but suppose they weren't? Voices began

questioning Armitage about what he knew of the thing, and no reply

seemed quite to satisfy. Everyone seemed to feel himself in close

proximity to phases of nature and of being utterly forbidden, and

wholly outside the sane experience of mankind.





10



In the end the three men from Arkham--old, white-bearded Dr.

Armitage, stocky, iron-gray Professor Rice, and lean, youngish Dr.

Morgan--ascended the mountain alone. After much patient instruction

regarding its focusing and use, they left the telescope with the

frightened group that remained in the road; and as they climbed they

were watched closely by those among whom the glass was passed around.

It was hard going, and Armitage had to be helped more than once. High

above the toiling group the great swath trembled as its hellish maker

repassed with snail-like deliberateness. Then it was obvious that the

pursuers were gaining.



Curtis Whateley--of the undecayed branch--was holding the telescope

when the Arkham party detoured radically from the swath. He told the

crowd that the men were evidently trying to get to a subordinate peak

which overlooked the swath at a point considerably ahead of where the

shrubbery was now bending. This, indeed, proved to be true; and the

party were seen to gain the minor elevation only a short time after the

invisible blasphemy had passed it.



Then Wesley Corey, who had taken the glass, cried out that Armitage was

adjusting the sprayer which Rice held, and that something must be about

to happen. The crowd stirred uneasily, recalling that this sprayer was

expected to give the unseen horror a moment of visibility. Two or three

men shut their eyes, but Curtis Whateley snatched back the telescope

and strained his vision to the utmost. He saw that Rice, from the

party's point of vantage above and behind the entity, had an excellent

chance of spreading the potent powder with marvelous effect.



Those without the telescope saw only an instant's flash of gray

cloud--a cloud about the size of a moderately large building--near the

top of the mountain. Curtis, who had held the instrument, dropped it

with a piercing shriek into the ankle-deep mud of the road. He reeled,

and would have crumpled to the ground had not two or three others

seized and steadied him. All he could do was moan half-inaudibly:



"Oh, oh, great Gawd ... _that ... that_...."



[Illustration: "Oh, oh, great Gawd ... that ... that."]



There was a pandemonium of questioning, and only Henry Wheeler thought

to rescue the fallen telescope and wipe it clean of mud. Curtis was

past all coherence, and even isolated replies were almost too much for

him.



"Bigger 'n a barn ... all made o' squirmin' ropes ... hull thing sort

o' shaped like a hen's egg bigger'n anything, with dozens o' legs like

hogsheads that haff shut up when they step ... nothin' solid abaout

it--all like jelly, an' made o' sep'rit wrigglin' ropes pushed clost

together ... great bulgin' eyes all over it ... ten or twenty maouths

or trunks a-stickin' aout all along the sides, big as stovepipes, an'

all a-tossin' an' openin' an' shuttin' ... all gray, with kinder blue

or purple rings ... _an' Gawd in Heaven--that haff face on top_!..."



This final memory, whatever it was, proved too much for poor Curtis,

and he collapsed completely before he could say more. Fred Farr and

Will Hutchins carried him to the roadside and laid him on the damp

grass. Henry Wheeler, trembling, turned the rescued telescope on the

mountain to see what he might. Through the lenses were discernible

three tiny figures, apparently running toward the summit as fast as the

steep incline allowed. Only these--nothing more. Then everyone noticed

a strangely unseasonable noise in the deep valley behind, and even in

the underbrush of Sentinel Hill itself. It was the piping of unnumbered

whippoorwills, and in their shrill chorus there seemed to lurk a note

of tense and evil expectancy.



Earl Sawyer now took the telescope and reported the three figures as

standing on the topmost ridge, virtually level with the altar-stone

but at a considerable distance from it. One figure, he said, seemed

to be raising its hands above its head at rhythmic intervals; and

as Sawyer mentioned the circumstance the crowd seemed to hear a

faint, half-musical sound from the distance, as if a loud chant

were accompanying the gestures. The weird silhouette on that

remote peak must have been a spectacle of infinite grotesqueness

and impressiveness, but no observer was in a mood for esthetic

appreciation. "I guess he's sayin' the spell," whispered Wheeler as

he snatched back the telescope. The whippoorwills were piping wildly,

and in a singularly curious irregular rhythm quite unlike that of the

visible ritual.



Suddenly the sunshine seemed to lessen without the intervention of any

discernible cloud. It was a very peculiar phenomenon, and was plainly

marked by all. A rumbling sound seemed brewing beneath the hills, mixed

strangely with a concordant rumbling which clearly came from the sky.

Lightning flashed aloft, and the wondering crowd looked in vain for

the portents of storm. The chanting of the men from Arkham now became

unmistakable, and Wheeler saw through the glass that they were all

raising their arms in the rhythmic incantation. From some farmhouse far

away came the frantic barking of dogs.



The change in the quality of the daylight increased, and the crowd

gazed about the horizon in wonder. A purplish darkness, born of

nothing more than a spectral deepening of the sky's blue, pressed down

upon the rumbling hills. Then the lightning flashed again, somewhat

brighter than before, and the crowd fancied that it had showed a

certain mistiness around the altar-stone on the distant height. No

one, however, had been using the telescope at that instant. The

whippoorwills continued their irregular pulsation, and the men of

Dunwich braced themselves tensely against some imponderable menace with

which the atmosphere seemed surcharged.



Without warning came those deep, cracked, raucous vocal sounds which

will never leave the memory of the stricken group who heard them. Not

from any human throat were they born, for the organs of man can yield

no such acoustic perversions. Rather would one have said they came

from the pit itself, had not their source been so unmistakably the

altar-stone on the peak. It is almost erroneous to call them _sounds_

at all, since so much of their ghastly, infra-bass timbre spoke to

dim seats of consciousness and terror far subtler than the ear; yet

one must do so, since their form was indisputably though vaguely that

of half-articulate _words_. They were loud--loud as the rumblings and

the thunder above which they echoed--yet did they come from no visible

being. And because imagination might suggest a conjectural source in

the world of non-visible beings, the huddled crowd at the mountain's

base huddled still closer, and winced as if in expectation of a blow.



"_Ygnaiih ... ygnaiih ... thflthkh'ngha ... Yog-Sothoth...._" rang the

hideous croaking out of space. "_Y'bthnk ... h'ehye ... n'grkdl'lh...._"



The speaking impulse seemed to falter here, as if some frightful

psychic struggle were going on. Henry Wheeler strained his eye at

the telescope, but saw only the three grotesquely silhouetted human

figures on the peak, all moving their arms furiously in strange

gestures as their incantation drew near its culmination. From what

black wells of Acherontic fear or feeling, from what unplumbed gulfs of

extra-cosmic consciousness or obscure, long-latent heredity, were those

half-articulate thunder-croakings drawn? Presently they began to gather

renewed force and coherence as they grew in stark, utter, ultimate

frenzy.



"_Eh-ya-ya-ya-yahaah ... e'yaya-yayaaaa ... ngh'aaaa ... ngh'aaaa_ ...

h'yuh ... h'yuh ... HELP! HELP! ... _ff--ff--ff_--FATHER! FATHER!

YOG-SOTHOTH!..."



But that was all. The pallid group in the road, still reeling at

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._"