# The Dunwich Horror (B1 edition)

*H. P. Lovecraft*

## I.

"Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimeras may appear again in the superstitious mind. So may the terrible stories of Celæno and the Harpies. *But they were there before*. They are copies, types. The originals are in us, and they are eternal. If this is not so, how can stories affect us at all? When we are awake, we know that they are false. Do we feel terror at such things because they could hurt our bodies? Oh, least of all! *These terrors are older. They date from before the body*—or without the body, they would have been the same.... The kind of fear I speak of here is purely spiritual. It is stronger the less it has a real object on earth. And it is strongest in the time of our innocent childhood. These are hard puzzles. If we solved them, we might gain some insight into our condition before the world. We might at least get a look into the shadowland of our life before birth."—Charles Lamb: *Witches and Other Night-Fears*.

A traveler in north central Massachusetts may take the wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury pike. This junction lies just beyond Dean's Corners. If he takes that wrong fork, he comes to a lonely and curious country. The ground gets higher. Stone walls with thorny bushes along them press closer and closer to the ruts of the dusty, winding road. The trees in the many belts of forest seem too large. The wild weeds, brambles and grasses grow richer and thicker than they usually do in settled places. At the same time, there are strangely few planted fields, and they look poor and empty. The houses are few and far apart. And all of them look the same: surprisingly old, dirty and falling down. Now and then one sees a twisted, lonely figure on a broken doorstep, or in a rocky hillside meadow. Without knowing why, one does not want to ask these people the way. They are so silent and secretive that one feels one is facing forbidden things. It would be better to have nothing to do with such things. Then the road rises, and one can see the mountains above the deep woods. At that moment the strange, nervous feeling grows. The tops of the mountains are too rounded and too even. They do not seem comfortable or natural. On most of them stand strange circles of tall stone pillars. Sometimes these show very clearly against the sky.

Gorges and ravines cross the road, and no one can tell how deep they are. The rough wooden bridges never seem quite safe. When the road goes down again, there are long stretches of marshland. One dislikes them without knowing why, and at evening one almost fears them. Then unseen whippoorwills chatter, and far too many fireflies come out. They dance to the loud, creepy, never-ending rhythms of the bullfrogs, which pipe sharply. The upper Miskatonic river is a thin, shining line here. It winds close to the feet of the domed hills where it begins. Strangely, it makes one think of a snake.

As the hills come nearer, one notices their wooded sides more than their stone-crowned tops. Those sides rise up so darkly and steeply 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. It is pressed close between the stream and the steep side of Round Mountain. One wonders at its cluster of rotting gambrel roofs. They come from an earlier time of building than the rest of the region. A closer look is not comforting. Most of the houses are empty and falling to ruin. The church has a broken steeple, and now it holds the one dirty shop of the village. One is afraid to trust the dark tunnel of the bridge, yet there is no way to avoid it. Once across, it is hard not to notice a faint, evil smell in the village street. It is like the mold and decay of centuries. It is always a relief to get away from the place. One follows the narrow road around the foot of the hills and across the flat country beyond. At last it joins the Aylesbury pike again. Afterward one sometimes learns that one has been through Dunwich.

Outsiders visit Dunwich as seldom as possible. Since a certain season of horror, all the signboards pointing toward it have been taken down. By any normal idea of beauty, the scenery is more beautiful than most. Yet no artists or summer tourists come there. Two hundred years ago, people did not laugh at talk of witch-blood, Satan-worship and strange presences in the forest. In those days people gave reasons for avoiding the place. Our age is more sensible. In 1928 came the Dunwich horror. It was hushed up by people who cared about the good of the town and the world. Since then, people avoid the place without knowing exactly why. Perhaps there is one reason, though it cannot apply to strangers who know nothing. The natives are now repellently decadent. They have gone far back down the road of decline, like the people of many lonely New England places. They have become a race by themselves. They show clear mental and physical signs of degeneracy and inbreeding. Their average intelligence is terribly low. Their records are full of open wickedness and of half-hidden murders. They are full of incest, too, and of deeds of violence and perversity almost too terrible to name. The old gentry come from two or three families with coats of arms. These families came from Salem in 1692. They have stayed a little above the general decay. But many of their branches have sunk deep into the dirty, common crowd. Only their names remain, and these show the fine origin that they now bring shame on. Some of the Whateleys and Bishops still send their eldest sons to Harvard and Miskatonic. But those sons seldom return to the moldering gambrel roofs where they and their ancestors were born.

No one can say just what is wrong with Dunwich. Even those who know the facts about the recent horror cannot say it. But old legends tell of evil rites and secret gatherings of the Indians. At these gatherings they called forbidden shapes of shadow out of the great rounded hills. They made wild, mad prayers, and loud cracking and rumbling from the ground below answered them. In 1747 the Reverend Abijah Hoadley had just come to the Congregational Church at Dunwich Village. That year he preached a sermon that people long remembered. It was about the close presence of Satan and his imps. In it he said:

It must be admitted that these blasphemies of a hellish band of demons are too well known to be denied. The cursed voices of *Azazel* and *Buzrael*, of *Beelzebub* and *Belial*, have been heard from under the ground. More than a score of believable witnesses now living have heard them. I myself, not more than a fortnight ago, heard evil powers talking very plainly in the hill behind my house. There was a rattling and rolling, a groaning, screeching and hissing. No things of this earth could raise up such sounds. They must have come from those caves that only black magic can discover, and only the Devil can unlock.

Mr. Hoadley disappeared soon after he gave this sermon. But the text was printed in Springfield, and it still exists. Year after year, people went on reporting noises in the hills. These noises are still a puzzle to geologists and to the scientists who study the shapes of the land.

Other traditions tell of foul smells near the circles of stone pillars on the hilltops. They tell of rushing presences in the air, too. These can be heard faintly at certain hours, from certain places at the bottom of the great ravines. Still other tales try to explain the Devil's Hop Yard. This is a bare, blasted hillside where no tree, bush or blade of grass will grow. Then, too, the natives are deadly afraid of the many whippoorwills that sing on warm nights. People swear that the birds are psychopomps, waiting for the souls of the dying. They say the birds time their strange cries to the struggling breath of the dying person. If the birds can catch the soul as it leaves the body, they fly away at once. As they go, they chitter with devilish laughter. But if they fail, they slowly fall into a disappointed silence.

These tales, of course, are old-fashioned and ridiculous, because they come down from very old times. Dunwich is indeed ridiculously old. It is far older than any of the communities within thirty miles of it. South of the village one can still see the cellar walls and chimney of the ancient Bishop house. It was built before 1700. The ruins of the mill at the falls date from 1806. They are the most modern building to be seen. Industry did not do well here, and the factory movement of the nineteenth century did not last long. Oldest of all are the great rings of rough stone columns on the hilltops. But most people say that the Indians made them, not the settlers. Skulls and bones have been found inside these circles. They have also been found around the large table-like rock on Sentinel Hill. These remains support a popular belief: that such places were once the burial places of the Pocumtucks. Yet many ethnologists ignore how absurdly unlikely this idea is. They go on believing that the remains are Caucasian.

### Glossary

- **superstitious**: believing in magic, spirits and signs of good or bad luck.
- **pike**: a large main road.
- **ruts**: deep lines in a road, made by wheels.
- **brambles**: wild bushes with thorns, like blackberry bushes.
- **ravines**: deep, narrow valleys with steep sides.
- **whippoorwills**: North American birds that sing loudly at night.
- **gambrel roofs**: old-style roofs with two slopes on each side.
- **decadent**: in moral and physical decline.
- **inbreeding**: having children within the same close family for many generations.
- **perversity**: unnatural and wicked behavior.
- **gentry**: the old upper-class families of a place.
- **imps**: small evil spirits.
- **blasphemies**: words or acts against God and holy things.
- **a score of**: about twenty.
- **a fortnight**: two weeks.
- **groaning**: making long, deep sounds, as of pain.
- **screeching**: making high, sharp, ugly cries.
- **psychopomps**: creatures that lead the souls of the dead.
- **ethnologists**: scientists who study different peoples and races.
- **Caucasian**: white, of European origin.

## II.

Wilbur Whateley was born in the township of Dunwich at 5 a.m. on Sunday, the second of February, 1913. He was born in a large farmhouse that was only partly lived in. It stood against a hillside, four miles from the village and a mile and a half from any other house. People remembered the date because it was Candlemas. The people of Dunwich keep this feast day in a strange way, under another name. They also remembered it because of the night before. All through that night the noises in the hills had sounded, and all the dogs of the countryside had barked without stopping. People noticed another fact less. The mother was one of the decadent Whateleys. She was a somewhat deformed, unattractive albino woman of 35. She lived with her aged, half-insane father. When he was young, people had whispered the most frightful tales about his wizardry. Lavinia Whateley had no known husband. But, as was the custom of the region, she did not try to deny the child. The country people could guess as freely as they liked about the father's side of his family, and they did. Lavinia, on the other hand, seemed strangely proud of the dark, goatish-looking baby. He was very different from her, with her sickly, pink-eyed albino looks. People heard her mutter many strange prophecies about his unusual powers and his great future.

Lavinia was just the kind of person to mutter such things. She was a lonely creature. She liked to wander in the hills during thunderstorms. She tried to read the great, smelly books that her father had inherited. These books had come down through two centuries of Whateleys. They were quickly falling to pieces with age and worm-holes. She had never been to school. But she was full of broken scraps of ancient lore that Old Whateley had taught her. People had always feared the lonely farmhouse because Old Whateley was known for black magic. Mrs. Whateley had died a violent death when Lavinia was twelve years old. No one could explain that death, and it did not make the place more popular. Lavinia lived cut off from others, among strange influences. She loved wild, grand daydreams and odd activities. Housework did not take up much of her free time. In that home, all order and cleanliness had disappeared long ago.

On the night Wilbur was born, there was a hideous scream. It rose even above the hill noises and the barking of the dogs. But no known doctor or midwife was there when he came into the world. The neighbors knew nothing about him until a week later. Then Old Whateley drove his sleigh through the snow into Dunwich Village. He talked in a confused way to the group of loungers at Osborn's general store. The old man seemed to have changed. There was something more secretive in his clouded brain. Before, people had been afraid of him. Now he seemed to be afraid of something himself. And he was not a man to be upset by any ordinary family event. With all this, he showed some of the pride that people later noticed in his daughter. Many of the men who heard him remembered for years what he said about the child's father.

"I don't care what folks think. If Lavinny's boy looked like his pa, he wouldn't look like nothin' ye'd expect. Ye needn't think the only folks is the folks around here. Lavinny's read some, an' she's seen some things that most of ye only talk about. I guess her man is as good a husband as ye can find this side of Aylesbury. Ye wouldn't ask for a better church weddin' than hers, if ye knew the hills as well as I do. Let me tell ye somethin'. *Some day ye folks'll hear a child of Lavinny's a-callin' its father's name on the top of Sentinel Hill!*"

During Wilbur's first month, only two people saw him. One was old Zechariah Whateley, of the undecayed Whateleys. The other was Earl Sawyer's common-law wife, Mamie Bishop. Mamie came simply out of curiosity, and the tales she told later did justice to what she saw. But Zechariah came leading two Alderney cows. Old Whateley had bought them from Zechariah's son Curtis. This was the beginning of a long period of cattle-buying by little Wilbur's family. It ended only in 1928, when the Dunwich horror came and went. Yet the run-down Whateley barn never seemed crowded with animals. For a time people were curious enough to sneak up and count the herd. The cattle grazed on the steep hillside above the old farmhouse, where they could hardly keep their footing. People never found more than ten or twelve thin, weak, bloodless-looking animals there. Clearly some disease was killing many of the Whateley animals. Perhaps it came from the bad pasture. Or perhaps it came from the rotten fungi and timbers of the filthy barn. The cattle that people could see had odd wounds or sores, which looked a little like cuts. Once or twice in the early months, some visitors thought they saw similar sores on two throats. One was the throat of the gray, unshaven old man. The other was that of his untidy, crinkly-haired albino daughter.

In the spring after Wilbur's birth, Lavinia went back to her usual walks in the hills. She carried the dark child in her badly shaped arms. Most of the country people had now seen the baby, and their interest in the Whateleys faded. No one bothered to talk about how fast the newcomer seemed to develop every day. And Wilbur's growth was truly amazing. Within three months of his birth he had the size and strength of a child of a full year. His movements, and even the sounds he made, were controlled and careful. This was very strange in a baby. So no one was really surprised when he began to walk alone at seven months. At first he walked a little unsteadily. But after one more month he walked perfectly.

Some time after this, on Hallowe'en, people saw a great fire at midnight on the top of Sentinel Hill. There the old table-like stone stands among its mound of ancient bones. Silas Bishop, of the undecayed Bishops, then started a lot of talk. He said he had seen the boy running strongly up that hill ahead of his mother. This was about an hour before anyone noticed the fire. Silas was rounding up a stray heifer. But he nearly forgot about it when he saw the two figures. He saw them only for a moment, in the dim light of his lantern. They ran almost silently through the bushes. Silas was amazed, and he seemed to think they were completely naked. Later he could not be sure about the boy. Perhaps the boy had some kind of fringed belt on, and a pair of dark blue trunks or trousers. After that night, no one ever saw Wilbur alive and conscious without full, tightly buttoned clothes. If his clothes were disturbed, or if anyone threatened to disturb them, he became angry and alarmed. His dirty mother and grandfather were very different in this way, and people thought it very strange. Then the horror of 1928 suggested the best of reasons.

The next January the gossips were mildly interested in one fact. "Lavinny's black brat" had started to talk, and at the age of only eleven months. His speech was remarkable for two reasons. First, it was different from the ordinary accents of the region. Second, it had no baby lisping. Many children of three or four could be proud of speech like his. The boy did not talk much. Yet when he spoke, he seemed to show something strange that Dunwich and its people did not have at all. It was hard to say what it was. The strangeness was not in what he said, or even in the simple phrases he used. It seemed to be linked to his tone of voice. Or perhaps it was linked to the organs inside him that made the sounds. His face, too, looked remarkably mature. Like his mother and grandfather, he had almost no chin. But his nose was firm and had formed early. And his eyes were large, dark and almost Latin. His nose and the look in his eyes made him seem almost grown-up. They also gave him an air of almost supernatural intelligence. Yet he was very ugly, even though he looked so brilliant. There was something almost goatish or animal about him. It was in his thick lips, his yellowish skin with large pores, his coarse crinkly hair and his strangely long ears. Soon people disliked him even more than his mother and grandfather. All the guesses about him were mixed with talk of Old Whateley's magic in the past. People told how the hills once shook when the old man shrieked the dreadful name *Yog-Sothoth*. He did it in the middle of a circle of stones, with a great book open in his arms in front of him. Dogs hated the boy. He always had to defend himself against their barking and their threats.

### Glossary

- **albino**: a person born with no color in the skin and hair, often with pink eyes.
- **goatish**: looking like a goat.
- **wizardry**: magic.
- **midwife**: a woman whose job is to help mothers when their babies are born.
- **sleigh**: a vehicle that slides over snow, pulled by a horse.
- **loungers**: men who sit around a store and talk.
- **common-law wife**: a woman who lives with a man as his wife without a legal marriage.
- **Alderney**: a breed of cow.
- **heifer**: a young cow.
- **pasture**: a field where animals eat grass.
- **lisping**: saying "s" sounds wrongly, like a small child.

## III.

Meanwhile Old Whateley went on buying cattle, but his herd did not grow any bigger. He also cut timber and began to repair the unused parts of his house. It was a large house with a peaked roof. Its back end was buried completely in the rocky hillside. Three rooms on the ground floor were less ruined than the rest. These three rooms had always been enough for him and his daughter. The old man must have had huge reserves of strength to do so much hard work. At times he still babbled like a madman. But his carpentry seemed to show careful planning. In fact, the work had begun as soon as Wilbur was born. At that time one of the many tool-sheds had suddenly been put in order. It was clapboarded and fitted with a strong new lock. Now he was restoring the abandoned upper story of the house, and he worked just as carefully. His madness showed itself in only one thing. He tightly boarded up all the windows in the restored part. But many people said that it was crazy to restore that part at all. Something else was easier to understand. He fitted up another room downstairs for his new grandson. Several visitors saw this room, though no one was ever let into the tightly boarded upper story. He lined this room with tall, strong shelves. Slowly he began to arrange on them all the rotting ancient books and parts of books. He seemed to put them in careful order. In his own day they had lain in untidy heaps in odd corners of the different rooms.

At times he would try to mend a torn page of old black-letter print. He used paste that he had made on the rusty kitchen stove. "I made some use of 'em," he would say, "but the boy's fit to make better use of 'em. He ought to have 'em as well set as he can, for they're goin' to be all of his learnin'."

In September of 1914, Wilbur was a year and seven months old. By then his size and his skills were almost alarming. He had grown as large as a child of four. He talked fluently, and he was incredibly intelligent. He ran freely about the fields and hills, and he went with his mother on all her wanderings. At home he would study the strange pictures and charts in his grandfather's books with great care. Old Whateley would teach him and question him through long, quiet afternoons. By this time the work on the house was finished. The people who had watched it wondered about one thing. One of the upper windows had been made into a solid plank door. It was a window at the back of the east gable end, close against the hill. And a cleated wooden runway had been built up to it from the ground. No one could imagine why.

At about the time this work was finished, people noticed something else. The old tool-house had been tightly locked since Wilbur's birth, and its clapboarded walls had no windows. Now it had been abandoned again. Its door swung loosely open. Earl Sawyer once stepped inside after he had been to sell cattle to Old Whateley. He was quite upset by the strange smell he found there. He said that he had never smelt such a stench in all his life, except near the Indian circles on the hills. It could not come from anything sane or of this earth, he said. But then, the homes and sheds of Dunwich people have never been famous for smelling clean.

In the following months nothing happened that anyone could see. But everyone swore that the strange hill noises were slowly and steadily getting louder. On May Eve of 1915 there were tremors that even the people of Aylesbury felt. On the next Hallowe'en there was an underground rumbling. It came at strangely the same moments as bursts of flame from the top of Sentinel Hill. People said it was "them witch Whateleys' doin's." Wilbur was growing up in an uncanny way. As he entered his fourth year, he looked like a boy of ten. He now read eagerly by himself, but he talked much less than before. He was becoming more and more silent. For the first time people began to speak openly of a look of evil in his goatish face. They said it was just beginning to appear. He would sometimes mutter words of a strange, unknown language. He would chant in odd rhythms, and these filled the listener with a cold terror that no one could explain. By now many people had noticed how much dogs hated him. He had to carry a pistol so that he could cross the countryside safely. He used the gun now and then, and this did not make him more popular with the dogs' owners.

The few visitors to the house would often find Lavinia alone on the ground floor. Meanwhile, odd cries and footsteps sounded in the boarded-up second story. She would never tell them what her father and the boy were doing up there. Once a joking fish-peddler tried the locked door that led to the stairs. Lavinia turned pale and showed a terrible fear. The peddler told the loungers at the store in Dunwich Village what had happened. He said he thought he had heard a horse stamping on the floor above. The loungers thought about this. They thought of the door and the runway, and of the cattle that disappeared so quickly. Then they shuddered. They remembered tales of Old Whateley's youth. They remembered stories about the strange things that are called out of the earth. People said these things came when a bullock was sacrificed at the right time to certain heathen gods. For some time people had noticed something more about the dogs. They now hated and feared the whole Whateley place. Their hatred and fear were as violent as their feelings about young Wilbur himself.

In 1917 the war came. Squire Sawyer Whateley was the chairman of the local draft board. He had great trouble finding enough young Dunwich men for the army. Very few were fit even to be sent to a development camp. The government was alarmed by these signs that the whole region was so decadent. It sent several officers and medical experts to look into the matter. Readers of New England newspapers may still remember their survey. The newspapers wrote about this investigation, and so reporters began to follow the trail of the Whateleys. The *Boston Globe* and the *Arkham Advertiser* printed showy Sunday stories. They wrote about young Wilbur's early development and Old Whateley's black magic. They wrote about the shelves of strange books and the sealed second story of the ancient farmhouse. And they wrote about the weirdness of the whole region and its hill noises.

Wilbur was four and a half then, and he looked like a boy of fifteen. His lip and cheek were covered with coarse, dark fuzz. His voice had begun to break. Earl Sawyer went out to the Whateley place with both groups of reporters and camera men. He told them to notice the strange stench. It now seemed to trickle down from the sealed spaces upstairs. He said it was exactly like a smell he had found in the abandoned tool-shed. That shed had been abandoned when the house was finally repaired. Sometimes he thought he noticed faint smells near the stone circles on the mountains. He said the stench was like those smells too. The Dunwich people read the stories when they came out. They grinned at the obvious mistakes. They also wondered about one thing. The writers made a great deal of the fact that Old Whateley always paid for his cattle in gold. The gold coins were extremely old. The Whateleys had received their visitors with a dislike they did not hide well. But they did not dare to fight or to refuse to talk. That would only bring them more attention from the newspapers.

### Glossary

- **herd**: a group of cattle.
- **clapboarded**: covered on the outside with long, thin boards.
- **black-letter**: an old style of printing with thick, dark letters.
- **gable**: the triangle-shaped top part of a house wall under a pointed roof.
- **cleated wooden runway**: a sloping wooden path with strips of wood across it, so that feet do not slip.
- **stench**: a very strong, bad smell.
- **loungers**: men who sit around a store and talk.
- **bullock**: a young male cow.
- **sacrificed**: killed as a gift to a god.
- **heathen**: not Christian; belonging to old, non-Christian religions.
- **draft board**: an office that chooses men for the army.
- **development camp**: an army training camp.

## IV.

For ten years the story of the Whateleys sinks into the general life of a sick community. The people there were used to the Whateleys' strange ways. They were no longer shocked by the wild rites the Whateleys held on May Eve and All-Hallow. Twice a year the Whateleys would light fires on the top of Sentinel Hill. At those times the deep noises in the mountain came back, more and more violently. And at all seasons there were strange and threatening doings at the lonely farmhouse. As time passed, visitors said they heard sounds in the sealed upper story. They heard them even when all the family were downstairs. And they wondered how a cow or bullock was usually sacrificed. Was it killed quickly, or slowly? There was talk of a complaint to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. But nothing ever came of it. Dunwich people never want the outside world to notice them.

About 1923 there was a second great period of carpentry at the old house. Wilbur was a boy of ten then. But his mind, his voice, his height and his bearded face all made him seem like a grown man. The work was all inside the sealed upper part. People found bits of wood that had been thrown away. From these they guessed what the boy and his grandfather had done. They had knocked out all the partitions and even removed the attic floor. Now there was only one huge, empty space between the ground floor and the peaked roof. They had torn down the great central chimney too. The rusty stove now had a thin tin pipe that went up outside the house.

In the spring after this, Old Whateley noticed more and more whippoorwills. They came out of Cold Spring Glen at night to chirp under his window. He seemed to think this was very important. He told the loungers at Osborn's that he thought his time had almost come.

"They whistle just in tune with my breathin' now," he said, "an' I guess they're gettin' ready to catch my soul. They know it's a-goin' out, an' they don't mean to miss it. Ye'll know, boys, after I'm gone, whether they get me or not. If they do, they'll keep up a-singin' an' laughin' till break of day. If they don't, they'll kind of quiet down like. I expect them an' the souls they hunt for have some pretty tough fights sometimes."

On Lammas Night, 1924, Wilbur Whateley called Dr. Houghton of Aylesbury in a great hurry. He had whipped his one remaining horse through the darkness to the village. From Osborn's he had telephoned the doctor. Dr. Houghton found Old Whateley very ill. His heart and his heavy, noisy breathing showed that the end was not far off. The shapeless albino daughter and the strangely bearded grandson stood by the bed. Above them was the huge, empty space. From there came a disturbing sound of rhythmical surging or lapping. It was like waves on some flat beach. But the doctor was disturbed most by the noisy night birds outside. There seemed to be an endless army of whippoorwills. They cried their endless message again and again. Their cries were timed in a devilish way to the wheezing gasps of the dying man. It was strange and unnatural. Dr. Houghton had not wanted to come, but the call had been urgent. He thought it was too much like the whole of this region.

Toward 1 o'clock Old Whateley woke up. He stopped his wheezing to choke out a few words to his grandson.

"More space, Willy, more space soon. Ye grow—an' *that* grows faster. It'll be ready to serve 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 earth can't burn it nohow!"

He was clearly quite mad. Then there was a pause. The flock of whippoorwills outside changed their cries to match the new rhythm of his breathing. From far away came some signs of the strange hill noises. Then he said a sentence or two more.

"Feed it regular, Willy, an' mind the quantity. But don't let it grow too fast for the place. If it busts its quarters or gets out before ye open to Yog-Sothoth, it's all over an' no use. Only them from beyond can make it multiply an' work.... Only them, the old ones as want to come back...."

But his speech turned into gasps again. Lavinia screamed when she heard how the whippoorwills followed the change. It went on like this for more than an hour. Then came the final rattle in his throat. Dr. Houghton closed the shrunken lids over the gray eyes, which were already growing dull. At the same time the noise of the birds slowly faded into silence. Lavinia cried, but Wilbur only chuckled. The hill noises rumbled faintly.

"They didn't get him," he said quietly in his heavy bass voice.

By this time Wilbur was a scholar of really tremendous learning, though only in one direction. Many librarians in distant places knew him quietly through his letters. These were places where rare and forbidden books of old times are kept. Around Dunwich, people hated and feared him more and more. Certain young people had disappeared, and people vaguely suspected him. But he was always able to stop all questions. He did it through fear, or with that store of old gold. As in his grandfather's time, the gold still went out regularly for cattle-buying, and more and more of it. Wilbur now looked tremendously mature. His height had reached that of a normal grown man, but it seemed to go on growing. In 1925 a scholarly correspondent from Miskatonic University visited him one day. The visitor left pale and puzzled. At that time Wilbur was fully six and three-quarters feet tall.

All through the years Wilbur had treated his half-deformed albino mother with growing contempt. At last he did not let her go to the hills with him on May Eve and Hallowmass. In 1926 the poor creature complained to Mamie Bishop that she was afraid of him.

"There's more about him that I know than I can tell ye, Mamie," she said. "An' nowadays there's more than what I know myself. I vow before Gawd, I don't know what he wants or what he's a-tryin' to do."

That Hallowe'en the hill noises sounded louder than ever. Fire burned on Sentinel Hill as usual. But people paid more attention to something else. Huge flocks of whippoorwills seemed to have gathered near the dark Whateley farmhouse. It was strangely late in the year for them. They screamed in a regular rhythm. After midnight their shrill notes burst into a wild, devilish laughter. It filled all the countryside, and they did not quiet down until dawn. Then they vanished, hurrying south. They were a full month late in going. No one could be quite sure what this meant until later. None of the country people 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. He began to move his books and his things out to them. Soon after, 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. He also seemed to be taking out partitions. He and his grandfather had done the same upstairs four years before. Wilbur was living in one of the sheds. Sawyer thought he seemed unusually worried and shaky. Most people suspected that he knew something about his mother's disappearance. Very few people ever went near his place now. His height had grown to more than seven feet, and he showed no signs of stopping.

### Glossary

- **bullock**: a young male cow.
- **sacrificed**: killed as a gift to a god.
- **partitions**: inside walls that divide rooms.
- **whippoorwills**: North American birds that sing loudly at night. In Dunwich people believe they catch the souls of the dying.
- **glen**: a narrow, deep valley.
- **loungers**: men who sit around a store and talk.
- **Lammas Night**: the night of 1 August, an old feast day.
- **wheezing**: breathing with a noisy, whistling sound.
- **chant**: words that are sung or said again and again in a rhythm.
- **busts its quarters**: breaks out of the place where it lives.
- **correspondent**: a person who writes letters to someone.
- **contempt**: the feeling that someone is worthless.

## V.

The next winter brought an event that was just as strange as Wilbur's first trip outside the Dunwich region. He had written letters to the Widener Library at Harvard and the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. He had also written to the British Museum and the University of Buenos Aires. And he had written to the Library of Miskatonic University at Arkham. But none of them would lend him a book that he wanted very badly. So at last he went in person to see the copy at Miskatonic, which was the nearest. He was shabby, dirty and bearded, and he spoke a rough country dialect. He was almost eight feet tall, and he carried a cheap new valise from Osborn's general store. One day this dark, goatish gargoyle appeared in Arkham. He was looking for the dreaded book that the college library kept under lock and key. It was the hideous *Necronomicon* of the mad Arab Alhazred. This was the Latin version by Olaus Wormius, printed in Spain in the seventeenth century. Wilbur had never seen a city before, but he thought only of finding his way to the university grounds. There he walked past the great white-fanged watchdog without paying any attention to it. The dog barked at him with unnatural fury and hatred, and it pulled wildly at its strong chain.

Wilbur had brought with him the copy of Dr. Dee's English version that his grandfather had left him. It was priceless, but it was not complete. When he was allowed to see the Latin copy, he at once began to compare the two texts. He wanted to find a certain passage. In his own damaged book, it would have come on page 751. He could not politely avoid telling this much to the librarian. The librarian was the learned Henry Armitage (A. M. Miskatonic, Ph. D. Princeton, Litt. D. Johns Hopkins). He was the same man who had once visited the farm. Now he politely asked Wilbur many questions. Wilbur had to admit that he was looking for a kind of formula or incantation. It contained the frightful name *Yog-Sothoth*. But he was puzzled, because the texts had differences, repetitions and unclear parts. These made it far from easy to decide. At last he chose a formula and began to copy it. As he did so, Dr. Armitage looked over his shoulder at the open pages without meaning to. The left-hand page of the Latin version held terrible threats to the peace and sanity of the world.

Man is not the oldest of earth's masters \[ran the text as Armitage mentally translated it\], and not the last. And the ordinary mass of life and matter does not walk 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 calm and ancient. They have no shape in our dimensions, and to us They are 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 long ago, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have walked on earth's fields, and where They still walk there. And he knows why no one can see Them as They walk. Sometimes men can know by Their smell that They are near. But no man can know what They look like, *except in the faces of those They have fathered on mankind*. And there are many kinds of these. Their looks go from the truest image of man to that shape without sight or substance which is *They*. They walk unseen and foul in lonely places. These are places where the Words have been spoken and the Rites howled at their Seasons. The wind chatters wildly with Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their mind. They bend the forest and crush the city, but forest and city cannot see the hand that strikes. Kadath in the cold waste has known Them, and what man knows Kadath? The ice desert of the South and the sunken isles of Ocean hold stones with Their seal carved on them. But who has seen the deep frozen city, or the sealed tower long hung with seaweed and barnacles? Great Cthulhu is Their cousin, but even he can see Them only dimly. *Iä Shub-Niggurath!* As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet you do not see Them. And Their home is one with your own guarded doorstep. *Yog-Sothoth* is the key to the gate, where 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 powerful, for here They shall rule again.

Dr. Armitage connected what he was reading with what he had heard of Dunwich and its brooding presences. He also thought of Wilbur Whateley and the dim, hideous cloud around him. It stretched from a doubtful birth to a probable matricide. A wave of fear came over him. It was as real as a breath of the cold, damp air of a tomb. The bent, goatish giant in front of him seemed like the child of another planet or dimension. He seemed only partly human. He seemed linked to black gulfs of being. These stretched like giant phantoms beyond all force and matter, beyond space and time.

After a while Wilbur raised his head and began to speak. His voice was strange and resonant. It suggested that the organs that made it were not like those of other men.

"Mr. Armitage," he said, "I guess I've got to take that book home. There's things in it I've got to try under certain conditions that I can't get here. An' it would be a mortal sin to let a red-tape rule hold me up. Let me take it along, sir, an' I'll swear nobody'll know the difference. I don't need to tell ye I'll take good care of it. It wasn't me that put this Dee copy in the shape it's in...."

He stopped when he saw a firm refusal on the librarian's face, and his own goatish face became crafty. Armitage had been half ready to tell him that he could copy the parts he needed. But suddenly he thought of what might happen, and he stopped himself. It was too great a responsibility to give such a being the key to such blasphemous outer spheres. Whateley saw how things stood, and he tried to answer lightly.

"Well, all right, if ye feel that way about it. Maybe Harvard won't be so fussy as you are." Without another word he rose and strode out of the building. He had to stoop at each doorway.

Armitage heard the savage yelping of the great watchdog. From the window he watched Whateley's long, gorilla-like steps. Whateley was crossing the small part of the campus that was visible from there. He thought of the wild tales he had heard. He remembered the old Sunday stories in the *Advertiser*. He thought of these things, and of the lore of Dunwich. He had picked it up from country people and villagers during his one visit there. Unseen things that were not of earth rushed, stinking and horrible, through New England's glens. Or at least they were not of our three-dimensional earth. They also brooded obscenely on the mountain tops. He had been sure of this for a long time. But now he seemed to feel the close presence of some terrible part of this invading horror. He seemed to see a hellish advance in the black power of the ancient nightmare, which had once been passive. He locked away the *Necronomicon* with a shudder of disgust. But the room still stank with an unholy stench that he could not name. "As a foulness shall ye know them," he quoted. Yes, it was the same smell that had sickened him at the Whateley farmhouse less than three years before. Once again he thought of Wilbur, goatish and threatening. And he laughed mockingly at the village rumors about who Wilbur's father was.

"Inbreeding?" Armitage muttered half aloud to himself. "Great God, what simple fools! Show them Arthur Machen's *Great God Pan*, and they'll think it is a common Dunwich scandal! But what thing was Wilbur Whateley's father? What cursed, shapeless influence, on or off this three-dimensional earth? He was born on Candlemas—nine months after May Eve of 1912! At that time, the talk about the strange earth noises reached all the way to Arkham. What walked on the mountains that May Night? What Roodmas horror fastened itself on the world in half-human flesh and blood?"

In the weeks that followed, Dr. Armitage began to collect all the information he could. He wanted to know everything about Wilbur Whateley and the formless presences around Dunwich. He got in touch with Dr. Houghton of Aylesbury, who had cared for Old Whateley in his last illness. The doctor repeated the grandfather's last words, and Armitage found much to think about in them. A visit to Dunwich Village did not bring out much that was new. But he made a close study of the parts of the *Necronomicon* that Wilbur had wanted so eagerly. These seemed to give him new and terrible clues about the strange evil that so vaguely threatened this planet. They told him about its nature, its methods and its desires. He talked with several students of ancient lore in Boston, and he wrote letters to many others elsewhere. All this filled him with growing amazement. Slowly the amazement passed through different degrees of alarm. At last it became a really sharp spiritual fear. As the summer came nearer, he felt dimly that something ought to be done. Something had to be done about the hidden terrors of the upper Miskatonic valley. And something had to be done about the monstrous being known to the human world as Wilbur Whateley.

### Glossary

- **valise**: a small travel bag.
- **gargoyle**: an ugly stone figure of a monster on old churches; here, a very ugly person.
- **Necronomicon**: the forbidden book of the mad Arab Alhazred, full of dark magic.
- **incantation**: special words that are said or sung to make magic happen.
- **barnacles**: small sea animals with shells that stick to rocks and ships.
- **matricide**: killing one's own mother.
- **resonant**: deep, full and ringing, like a sound in a big empty room.
- **red-tape rule**: an official rule that stops people from doing things in a simple way.
- **brooded**: stayed in one place in a dark, heavy, threatening way.

## VI.

The Dunwich horror itself came between Lammas and the equinox in 1928. Dr. Armitage was among those who saw its monstrous prologue. In the meantime he had heard about Whateley's strange trip to Cambridge. Wilbur had tried wildly to borrow or copy from the *Necronomicon* at the Widener Library. But his efforts had failed. This was because Armitage had sent the strongest warnings to all the librarians in charge of the dreaded book. At Cambridge, Wilbur had been shockingly nervous. He was anxious for the book, but he was almost as anxious to get home again. It was as if he feared what would happen if he stayed away long.

Early in August the half-expected result came. In the small hours of the third, Dr. Armitage was suddenly woken. He heard the wild, fierce cries of the savage watchdog on the college campus. The deep and terrible growls and half-mad barks went on. They grew louder and louder, but there were horribly meaningful pauses between them. Then a scream rang out from a completely different throat. It was a scream that woke half the sleepers of Arkham and haunted their dreams forever after. It was a scream that could come from no being born of earth, or not wholly of earth.

Armitage quickly put on some clothes. He rushed across the street and the lawn to the college buildings. He saw that others were there before him. He heard the echoes of an alarm bell still ringing from the library. An open window showed black and wide in the moonlight. Whatever had come had really got inside. The barking and the screaming were now quickly fading into a mixed low growling and crying. And they were clearly coming from inside. Some instinct warned Armitage that this was not a thing for eyes that were not ready for it. So he pushed the crowd back with authority as he unlocked the vestibule door. Among the others he saw Professor Warren Rice and Dr. Francis Morgan. He had told these two men some of his guesses and fears. He signaled to them to come inside with him. By now the sounds inside had stopped, except for a watchful, low, steady whining from the dog. But then Armitage noticed something with a sudden start. Among the bushes, a loud chorus of whippoorwills had begun a horribly rhythmical, high calling. It was as if they were singing in time with the last breaths of a dying man.

The building was full of a horrible stench that Dr. Armitage knew too well. The three men rushed across the hall to the small genealogical reading-room. The low whining came from there. For a second nobody dared to turn on the light. Then Armitage found his courage and snapped the switch. One of the three shrieked aloud at what lay in front of them—it is not certain which one. The thing lay among tables pushed out of place and overturned chairs. Professor Rice says that he lost consciousness completely for an instant, though he did not lose his balance or fall.

The thing lay half-bent on its side in a stinking pool of greenish-yellow ichor and tarry stickiness. It was almost nine feet tall. The dog had torn off all its clothes and some of its skin. It was not quite dead. It twitched silently in sudden jerks, while its chest rose and fell. Its chest moved in monstrous time with the mad calling of the waiting whippoorwills outside. Bits of shoe-leather and pieces of clothing were scattered around the room. Just inside the window lay an empty canvas sack. It had clearly been thrown there. A revolver had fallen near the central desk. Later they found a dented cartridge in it that had not gone off. This explained why the gun had not been fired. But at the time, the thing itself pushed every other picture out of their minds. It would be a tired phrase, and not quite true, to say that no human pen could describe it. But one may fairly say this: some people could not picture it clearly at all. These are people whose ideas of shape are too closely tied to the common life-forms of this planet. Their ideas are tied to the three dimensions that we know. It was partly human, without any doubt. It had very manlike hands and a manlike head. And the goatish face with no chin had the stamp of the Whateleys on it. But the body and the lower parts were monstrous beyond belief. Only very full clothing could ever have let it walk on earth. Without it, people would have challenged it or destroyed it.

Above the waist it was half like a man. But its chest had the leathery, net-patterned skin of a crocodile or alligator. The dog's tearing paws still rested watchfully on that chest. The back was spotted with yellow and black. It looked a little like the covering of scales on certain snakes. Below the waist, though, it was worst of all. Here every likeness to a human ended, and pure fantasy began. The skin was thickly covered with rough black fur. About twenty long greenish-gray tentacles with red sucking mouths hung loosely from the belly. They were arranged in an odd way. They seemed to follow the patterns of some cosmic geometry unknown to earth or the solar system. On each hip there seemed to be a simple, half-formed eye. Each one lay deep in a kind of pinkish socket, fringed with tiny hairs. Instead of a tail, a kind of trunk or feeler hung down. It had purple rings on it. In many ways it looked like a mouth or throat that had not fully grown. The legs had black fur. Apart from this, they looked roughly like the back legs of the giant saurians of prehistoric earth. They ended in ridged, veined pads that were neither hooves nor claws. When the thing breathed, its tail and tentacles changed color in a rhythm. It seemed to come from some blood system that was normal for the non-human side of its family. In the tentacles the green color grew deeper. In the tail a yellowish color appeared. It changed back and forth with a sickly grayish-white in the spaces between the purple rings. There was no real blood at all. There was only the stinking greenish-yellow ichor. It trickled along the painted floor beyond the sticky patch, and it left a strange stain behind it.

The presence of the three men seemed to wake the dying thing. It began to speak in a low, unclear voice without turning or raising its head. Dr. Armitage did not write down what it said. But he is sure that nothing in English was spoken. At first the syllables were not like any language of earth. But toward the end came some broken pieces that were clearly taken from the *Necronomicon*. That was the monstrous, evil book which the thing had died trying to get. As Armitage remembers them, the pieces sounded something like "*N'gai, n'gha'ghaa, bugg-shoggog, y'hah; Yog-Sothoth, Yog-Sothoth....*" They faded away into nothing. Meanwhile the whippoorwills shrieked in rhythmical waves that grew louder and louder with evil expectation.

Then the gasping stopped, and the dog raised his head in a long, sad howl. A change came over the yellow, goatish face of the thing on the floor. Its great black eyes sank in horribly. Outside the window, the shrill cries of the whippoorwills had suddenly stopped. Above the low voices of the growing crowd came a panic-struck sound of beating and fluttering wings. Huge clouds of feathered watchers rose against the moon and raced out of sight. They were in a wild panic about the thing they had come to catch.

All at once the dog jumped up. It gave a frightened bark and leaped nervously out of the window through which it had come in. A cry rose from the crowd. Dr. Armitage shouted to the men outside that no one must come in until the police or medical examiner arrived. He was thankful that the windows were just too high for anyone to look in. And he carefully drew the dark curtains down over each one. By this time two policemen had arrived. Dr. Morgan met them in the vestibule. He was urging them, for their own sakes, to wait before they entered the stinking reading-room. They should wait until the examiner came and the thing on the floor could be covered up.

Meanwhile terrible changes were taking place on the floor. Dr. Armitage and Professor Rice watched the body shrink and break apart. There is no need to describe the *kind* and *speed* of these changes. But it is fair to say this much. Apart from the outer look of the face and hands, Wilbur Whateley's really human part must have been very small. When the medical examiner came, there was only a sticky, almost white mass on the painted boards. And the monstrous smell had nearly disappeared. It seemed that Whateley had had no skull or bony skeleton, at least not in any true or stable sense. He had taken somewhat after his unknown father.

### Glossary

- **equinox**: one of the two days in the year when day and night are the same length; here, about 22 September.
- **prologue**: the first part of a story or event, which comes before the main part.
- **monstrous**: like a monster; very ugly, strange and frightening.
- **vestibule**: an entrance hall.
- **genealogical**: about family history.
- **ichor**: a thick liquid that comes out of a body instead of blood.
- **tarry**: sticky and dark, like tar.
- **tentacles**: long, soft, bending arms, like an octopus has.
- **saurians**: large reptiles like dinosaurs.
- **cartridge**: a small metal case that holds the bullet and powder for a gun.
- **medical examiner**: a doctor who examines dead bodies for the police.

## VII.

Yet all this was only the prologue of the real Dunwich horror. Confused officials went through the formal steps. The abnormal details were carefully kept from the press and the public. Men were sent to Dunwich and Aylesbury to look into Wilbur's property. They were also to inform anyone who might be an heir of the late Wilbur Whateley. They found the countryside very upset. One reason was that the rumblings under the domed hills were growing. Another was the strange stench and the surging, lapping sounds. These came more and more often from the great empty shell of Whateley's boarded-up farmhouse. Earl Sawyer had looked after the horse and cattle while Wilbur was away. He now had a terrible case of nerves. The officials found excuses not to enter the stinking boarded-up house. They were glad to visit the dead man's living quarters, the newly repaired sheds, only once. They filed a long, heavy report at the court-house in Aylesbury. Lawsuits about the inheritance are said to be still going on. The countless Whateleys of the upper Miskatonic valley, decayed and undecayed, are fighting over it.

Wilbur had used an old bureau as his desk. On it the finders found an almost endless manuscript in strange letters. It was written in a huge ledger. They judged it to be a kind of diary. This was because of the gaps in the writing and the changes in ink and handwriting. It was a very hard puzzle for them. After a week of debate, it was sent to Miskatonic University with the dead man's collection of strange books. There it could be studied and perhaps translated. But even the best linguists soon saw that it would not be easy to solve. No trace has yet been found of the ancient gold with which Wilbur and Old Whateley always paid their debts.

It was on the night of September ninth that the horror broke loose. The hill noises had been very loud during the evening, and dogs barked wildly all night. Early risers on the tenth noticed a strange stench in the air. At about 7 o'clock, Luther Brown came rushing back in a wild panic. He was the hired boy at George Corey's, between Cold Spring Glen and the village. He had been on his morning trip to Ten-Acre Meadow with the cows. He stumbled into the kitchen, almost shaking to pieces with fear. Outside in the yard, the herd was just as frightened. The cows were beating the ground with their feet and lowing sadly. They had followed the boy back, sharing his panic. Between quick breaths, Luther tried to tell his story to Mrs. Corey in broken words.

"Up there in the road past the glen, Mis' Corey—there's been somethin' there! It smells like thunder. An' all the bushes an' little trees are pushed back from the road, like somebody'd moved a house along it. An' that ain't the worst, neither. There's *prints* in the road, Mis' Corey. Great round prints as big as barrel-heads, all sunk down deep. It's like an elephant had been along, *only there's a lot more than four feet could make*! I looked at one or two before I run. An' I saw every one was covered with lines spreadin' out from one place. It was like big palm-leaf fans had been pounded down into the road. Them fans was two or three times as big as any there is. An' the smell was awful, like the smell around Wizard Whateley's old house...."

Here he stopped, and he seemed to shake again with the fear that had sent him flying home. Mrs. Corey could not get any more information from him. So she began to call the neighbors on the telephone. In this way she started the first wave of panic, which came before the greater terrors. Then she reached Sally Sawyer, housekeeper at Seth Bishop's, the nearest place to Whateley's. Now it was Mrs. Corey's turn to listen instead of speak. Sally's boy Chauncey slept badly, and he had been up on the hill toward Whateley's. He had run back in terror after one look at the place. He had also looked at the pasture where Mr. Bishop's cows had been left out all night.

"Yes, Mis' Corey," came Sally's shaking voice over the party line. "Chauncey just come back a-runnin', an' he couldn't half talk for bein' scared! He says Old Whateley's house is all blown up. The timbers are scattered around like there'd been dynamite inside. Only the bottom floor ain't broke through. But it's all covered with a kind of tar-like stuff that smells awful. It drips down off the edges onto the ground, where the side timbers are blown away. An' there's awful kind of marks in the yard, too. Great round marks, bigger round than a hogshead, an' all sticky with stuff like on the blown-up house. Chauncey says they lead off into the meadows. There a great swath wider than a barn is flattened down. An' all the stone walls are knocked over every which way, wherever it goes.

"An' he says, Mis' Corey, he set out to look for Seth's cows, scared as he was. An' he found 'em in the upper pasture near the Devil's Hop Yard, in an awful state. Half of 'em are clean gone. An' nearly half of them that's left are sucked almost dry of blood. They've got sores on 'em like the sores on Whateley's cattle ever since Lavinny's black brat was born. Seth's gone out now to look at 'em. But I'll swear he won't care to get very near Wizard Whateley's! Chauncey didn't look careful to see where the big flattened swath led after it left the pasture. But he says he thinks it pointed toward the glen road to the village.

"I tell ye, Mis' Corey, there's somethin' loose that oughtn't to be loose. An' I for one think black Wilbur Whateley is at the bottom of the breedin' of it. He come to the bad end he deserved. He wasn't all human himself, I always say to everybody. An' I think he an' Old Whateley must have raised somethin' in that nailed-up house. An' it ain't even as human as he was. There's always been unseen things around Dunwich—livin' things—that ain't human an' ain't good for human folks.

"The ground was a-talkin' last night. An' toward mornin' Chauncey heard the whippoorwills so loud in Cold Spring Glen he couldn't sleep at all. Then he thought he heard another faint sound over toward Wizard Whateley's. It was a kind of rippin' or tearin' of wood, like some big box or crate bein' opened far off. What with this an' that, he didn't get to sleep at all till sunup. As soon as he was up this mornin', he had to go over to Whateley's an' see what was wrong. He saw enough, I tell ye, Mis' Corey! This don't mean no good. I think all the men-folks ought to get up a party an' do somethin'. I know somethin' awful's about, an' I feel my time is near. But only Gawd knows just what it is.

"Did your Luther notice where them big tracks led to? No? Well, Mis' Corey, maybe they was on the glen road this side of the glen. An' maybe they ain't got to your house yet. If so, I guess they must go into the glen itself. They would do that. I always say Cold Spring Glen ain't a healthy or decent place. The whippoorwills an' fireflies there never did act like they was creatures of Gawd. An' there's folks that say ye can hear strange things a-rushin' an' a-talkin' in the air down there. That's if ye stand in the right place, between the rock falls an' Bear's Den."

By that noon, fully three-quarters of the men and boys of Dunwich were tramping over the roads and meadows. They walked between the new Whateley ruins and Cold Spring Glen. They looked in horror at the huge, monstrous prints and the badly hurt Bishop cattle. They looked at the strange, stinking wreck of the farmhouse. And they looked at the crushed, flattened plants of the fields and roadsides. Whatever had burst loose on the world had certainly gone down into the great sinister ravine. All the trees on the banks were bent and broken. And a great avenue had been cut through the bushes that hung on the cliff. It was as if an avalanche had pushed a house down through the thick growth of the almost vertical slope. No sound came from below, only a distant stink that no one could name. So it is no wonder that the men preferred to stay on the edge and argue. They did not want to go down and face the unknown giant horror in its lair. Three dogs were with the party. They had barked furiously at first, but near the glen they seemed frightened and unwilling. Someone telephoned the news to the *Aylesbury Transcript*. But the editor was used to wild tales from Dunwich. He did no more than write a funny paragraph about it. Soon afterward the Associated Press printed it again.

That night everyone went home, and every house and barn was barricaded as strongly as possible. Of course, no cattle were left in open pasture. At about 2 in the morning, the household at Elmer Frye's woke up. A horrible stench and the savage barking of the dogs had woken them. The Frye farm was on the eastern edge of Cold Spring Glen. They all agreed that they could hear a kind of dull, rushing or lapping sound somewhere outside. Mrs. Frye suggested calling the neighbors on the telephone. Elmer was about to agree when the noise of wood breaking apart burst in on their talk. It seemed to come from the barn. It was quickly followed by a hideous screaming and stamping among the cattle. Spit ran from the dogs' mouths. They lay low, close to the feet of the family, who were frozen with fear. Frye lit a lantern out of habit. But he knew it would be death to go out into that black farmyard. The children and the women-folk cried softly. Some dark, ancient instinct of defense kept them from screaming. It told them that their lives depended on silence. At last the noise of the cattle sank to a sad, low crying. Then came a great snapping, crashing and crackling. The Fryes stayed close together in the sitting-room. They did not dare to move until the last echoes died away far down in Cold Spring Glen. Then they heard the sad cries from the stable and the devilish high calls of late whippoorwills in the glen. Among these sounds, Selina Frye walked to the telephone on shaking legs. She spread what news she could of the second phase of the horror.

The next day all the countryside was in a panic. Frightened, silent groups came and went at the place where the devilish thing had happened. Two giant 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 caved in completely. Only about a quarter of the cattle could be found and identified. Some of these were in strange pieces, and all the animals that survived had to be shot. Earl Sawyer suggested asking for help from Aylesbury or Arkham. But others said it would be no use. Old Zebulon Whateley came from a branch of the family that was about half-way between soundness and decadence. He made dark, wild suggestions about rites that ought to be performed on the hilltops. He came from a family where traditions were strong. He remembered chantings in the great stone circles. And these memories were not all connected with Wilbur and his grandfather.

Darkness fell on a stricken countryside. The people were too passive to organize a real defense. In a few cases, closely related families came together and watched in the dark under one roof. But mostly they only barricaded their houses again, as on the night before. They also made the useless gesture of loading muskets and putting pitchforks where they could reach them. But nothing happened except some hill noises. When the day came, many people hoped that the new horror had gone as quickly as it had come. A few bold people even suggested going down into the glen to attack it. But they did not dare to set an actual example for the majority, who were still unwilling.

When night came again, the barricading was repeated, though fewer families gathered together. In the morning, both the Frye and the Seth Bishop households reported excitement among the dogs. They also reported faint sounds and stenches from far away. Early explorers found with horror a fresh set of the monstrous tracks. They were in the road that ran around Sentinel Hill. As before, the sides of the road were crushed. This showed how hugely, horribly big the horror was. The shape of the tracks seemed to show that it had gone in two directions. It was as if the moving mountain had come from Cold Spring Glen and returned along the same path. At the foot of the hill, a thirty-foot swath of crushed bushes and young trees led steeply upward. The searchers caught their breath when they saw that even the steepest places did not turn the trail aside. Whatever the horror was, it could climb a stone cliff that was almost straight up and down. The searchers climbed around to the top of the hill by safer paths. There they saw that the trail ended—or rather, turned back.

It was here that the Whateleys used to build their hellish fires. Here, by the table-like stone, they chanted their hellish rituals on May Eve and Hallowmass. Now that very stone was the center of a huge space that the mountainous horror had beaten down all around. On its slightly hollow top lay a thick, stinking layer of tarry stickiness. It was the same stuff seen on the floor of the ruined Whateley farmhouse when the horror escaped. The men looked at one another and spoke in low voices. Then they looked down the hill. It seemed that the horror had come down by much the same route as it had gone up. It was useless to guess. Reason, logic and normal ideas about why things happen were all helpless here. Only old Zebulon, who was not with the group, could have understood the situation or offered a believable explanation.

Thursday night began much like the others, but it ended less happily. The whippoorwills in the glen had kept on screaming so much longer than usual that many people could not sleep. At about 3 a.m., all the party telephones rang with a weak, shaking sound. Those who picked up their receivers heard a voice that was mad with fear. It shrieked, "Help, oh, my Gawd!..." Some thought that a crashing sound followed when the cry broke off. There was nothing more. No one dared to do anything. And no one knew until morning where the call had come from. Then those who had heard it called everyone on the line. They found that only the Fryes did not answer. The truth came out an hour later. A group of armed men quickly gathered and walked out to the Frye place at the head of the glen. It was horrible, but hardly a surprise. There were more swaths and monstrous prints, but there was no longer any house. It had caved in like an eggshell. Among the ruins, nothing living or dead could be found. There was only a stench and a tarry stickiness. The Elmer Fryes had been erased from Dunwich.

### Glossary

- **heir**: a person who gets someone's property after that person dies.
- **monstrous**: like a monster; very ugly, strange and frightening.
- **ledger**: a large book with lined pages, used for records.
- **linguists**: experts in languages.
- **lowing**: the deep, long sound that cows make.
- **party line**: a telephone line shared by several houses, so neighbors can hear each other's calls.
- **hogshead**: a very large barrel.
- **swath**: a long, wide strip where everything has been pushed down or cut.
- **lair**: the hidden home of a wild animal or a monster.
- **barricaded**: with doors and windows blocked to keep something out.
- **muskets**: old guns with long barrels.

## VIII.

In the meantime, a quieter part of the horror had slowly been going on in Arkham. It was even more painful to the spirit. It happened behind the closed door of a room with shelves on every wall. Wilbur Whateley's strange handwritten record, or diary, had been sent to Miskatonic University to be translated. It had caused much worry and confusion among the experts in old and modern languages. Its alphabet looked a little like the heavily shaded Arabic used in Mesopotamia. But no expert who could be found had ever seen it before. In the end the linguists decided that it was an invented alphabet. It worked like a cipher. But none of the usual ways of breaking a code gave them any clue. They tried them with every language the writer could possibly have used, and still nothing worked.

The old books taken from Wilbur's rooms were of no help at all. They were very interesting. Several of them promised to open up new and terrible lines of study for philosophers and scientists. But they did not help with the diary. One of them was a heavy book with an iron clasp. It was written in another unknown alphabet. This one was very different, and it looked more like Sanskrit than anything else. At last the old ledger was given completely to Dr. Armitage. This was because he had a special interest in the Whateley matter. He also knew many languages, and he was skilled in the magic formulas of ancient times and the Middle Ages.

Armitage had an idea about the alphabet. It might be a secret one, used by certain forbidden cults. These cults had come down from old times. They had taken many forms and traditions from the wizards of the Saracenic world. But he did not think that question was important. He suspected that the symbols were a cipher for a modern language. If that was true, it did not matter where they came from. The text was very long. So he believed the writer would hardly have wanted the trouble of using a language other than his own. Perhaps he had done it only in certain special formulas and incantations. So Armitage began his work with one idea: most of the text was in English.

Dr. Armitage knew that his colleagues had failed again and again. So he knew the puzzle was deep and complex. No simple way of solving it was even worth trying. All through late August he filled his mind with the knowledge of cryptography. He used everything in his own large library. Night after night he worked through the secrets of old books. He read Trithemius' *Poligraphia*, Giambattista Porta's *De Furtivis Literarum Notis* and De Vigenere's *Traité des Chiffres*. He read Falconer's *Cryptomenysis Patefacta* and the eighteenth-century works of Davys and Thicknesse. He also read fairly modern experts, such as Blair, von Marten, and Klüber's *Kryptographik*. Between his reading he attacked the manuscript itself.

In time he became sure that it was one of the cleverest and most difficult kinds of code. In this kind, many separate lists of matching letters are arranged like the multiplication table. The message is built with key-words that the writer chooses freely. Only people who have been let into the secret know them. The older experts seemed more helpful than the newer ones. So Armitage decided that the code was very old. It had surely been passed down through a long line of people who experimented with magic. Several times he seemed close to the answer. Each time some problem that he had not expected pushed him back. Then, as September came near, things began to clear. Certain letters, in certain parts of the manuscript, could now be read without any doubt. And it was obvious that the text was indeed in English.

On the evening of September second the last big barrier fell. For the first time, Dr. Armitage read a long, unbroken passage of Wilbur Whateley's records. It really was a diary, as everyone had thought. Its style showed the strange mix in the writer. He knew a great deal about secret magic, but he had very little ordinary education. One of the first long passages that Armitage decoded was dated November 26, 1916. It was very surprising and disturbing. It was written, he remembered, by a child of three and a half. And that child had looked like a boy of twelve or thirteen.

Today learned the Aklo for the Sabaoth, \[it ran\] which did not like. It can be answered from the hill, not from the air. That upstairs is further ahead of me than I thought it would be. It is not likely to have much earth brain. Shot Elam Hutchins's collie Jack when he went to bite me. Elam says he would kill me if he dared. I guess he won't. Grandfather kept me saying the Dho formula last night. I think I saw the inner city at the 2 magnetic poles. I shall go to those poles when the earth is cleared off. But only if I can't break through with the Dho-Hna formula when I learn it by heart. They from the air told me at Sabbat that it will be years before I can clear off the earth. 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 cannot take body without human blood. That upstairs looks like it will have the right shape. I see it a little when I make the Yoorish sign or blow the power of Ibn Ghazi at it. It is nearly 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 is much of outside to work on.

Morning found Dr. Armitage in a cold sweat of terror. At the same time he was wide awake and wildly focused. He had not left the manuscript all night. He sat at his table under the electric light. With shaking hands he turned page after page, as fast as he could decode the secret text. He had nervously telephoned his wife to say he would not be home. When she brought him breakfast from the house, he could hardly eat a mouthful. All that day he read on. Now and then he had to stop, because the complex key had to be used again. It drove him nearly mad. Lunch and dinner were brought to him, but he ate only a tiny part of each. Toward the middle of the next night he fell asleep in his chair. But he soon woke from a tangle of nightmares. They were almost as terrible as the truths he had found, and the dangers to man's existence.

On the morning of September fourth, Professor Rice and Dr. Morgan insisted on seeing him for a while. They left trembling, with faces as gray as ashes. That evening he went to bed, but he slept badly and woke again and again. On Wednesday—the next day—he was back at the manuscript. He began to take many notes. He took them from the parts he was reading now and from the parts he had already decoded. In the small hours of that night he slept a little in an easy-chair in his office. But he was back at the manuscript before dawn. Some time before noon his doctor, Dr. Hartwell, came to see him. He insisted that Armitage must stop working. Armitage refused. He hinted that it was extremely important for him to finish reading the diary. He promised to explain everything in good time.

That evening, just as night was beginning to fall, he finished his terrible reading. He sank back in his chair, exhausted. His wife brought his dinner and found him only half conscious. But he was aware enough to see her eyes move toward the notes he had taken. He warned her away with a sharp cry. He got up weakly and gathered up the untidy papers. He sealed them all in a large envelope. At once he put it in the inside pocket of his coat. He had enough strength to get home. But he clearly needed a doctor, so Dr. Hartwell was called at once. As the doctor put him to bed, he could only mutter again and again, "*But what, in God's name, can we do?*"

Dr. Armitage slept, but the next day he was partly delirious. He explained nothing to Hartwell. But in his calmer moments he spoke of an urgent need for a long meeting with Rice and Morgan. His wilder words were very shocking indeed. He begged wildly for something in a boarded-up farmhouse to be destroyed. He spoke strangely of a plan to wipe the whole human race off the earth. All animal and plant life would be wiped out too. It was the plan of some terrible elder race of beings from another dimension. He would shout that the world was in danger. The Elder Things wanted to strip the earth bare. They wanted to drag it away from the solar system and the whole world of matter. They would take it into some other plane or form of being. The earth had once fallen from there, an unimaginably long time ago. At other times he called for the feared *Necronomicon* and the *Dæmonolatreia* of Remigius. He seemed to hope he would find a formula in them. It would stop the danger that filled his mind.

"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 strong body, although he was seventy-three years old. That night he slept off his illness without getting any real fever. He woke late on Friday with a clear head. But he was serious, and he felt a gnawing fear and a huge sense of responsibility. On Saturday afternoon he felt well enough to go over to the library. He called Rice and Morgan there for a meeting. For the rest of that day and evening the three men tortured their brains. They made the wildest guesses and argued desperately. Strange and terrible books were pulled in great numbers from the shelves and from safe places of storage. Diagrams and formulas were copied in feverish haste, and in confusing amounts. No one doubted anything. All three had seen the body of Wilbur Whateley on the floor of a room in that very building. After that, not one of them could treat the diary as the wild talk of a madman.

They did not agree about telling the Massachusetts State Police. In the end they decided not to. Some of these things simply could not be believed by people who had not seen an example. Certain later investigations showed this very clearly. Late at night the meeting ended without a definite plan. But all day Sunday Armitage was busy comparing formulas and mixing chemicals from the college laboratory. He thought more and more about the hellish diary. And the more he thought, the more he doubted that anything physical could destroy the being Wilbur had left behind. It was a being that threatened the whole earth. Armitage did not know it, but in a few hours it would burst out. It would become the Dunwich horror that people still remember.

For Dr. Armitage, Monday was the same as Sunday. The task needed endless research and experiment. More study of the terrible diary led to several changes of plan. He knew that even at the end, much would still be uncertain. By Tuesday he had a definite plan of action. He believed he would try a trip to Dunwich within a week. Then, on Wednesday, the great shock came. Hidden in a corner of the *Arkham Advertiser* was a small joking story from the Associated Press. It told what a record-breaking monster the bootleg whisky of Dunwich had produced. Armitage was half stunned. All he could do was telephone Rice and Morgan. They talked far into the night. The next day all of them were busy with a whirlwind of preparation. Armitage knew he would be meddling with terrible powers. But he saw no other way. Others had meddled before him, more deeply and more evilly, and only this could undo it.

### Glossary

- **ledger**: a large book with lined pages, used for records
- **cipher**: secret writing, where letters or signs stand for other letters
- **linguist**: an expert in languages
- **cryptography**: the study of secret writing and how to break codes
- **transfigured**: changed completely into a different form
- **delirious**: confused and talking wildly because of illness
- **a blind business**: work where you cannot see clearly what you are doing or what will happen
- **bootleg whisky**: illegal home-made alcohol; here the newspaper jokes that the monster is a drunk man's dream
- **meddling**: getting involved in something dangerous that you should leave alone

## IX.

On Friday morning Armitage, Rice and Morgan set out by car for Dunwich. They arrived at the village at about 1 in the afternoon. The day was pleasant. But even in the brightest sunlight, a kind of quiet dread seemed to hang over this suffering region. It felt like a warning of something to come. It hung over the strangely rounded hills and the deep, shadowy ravines. Now and then, on some mountain top, a bare circle of stones could be seen against the sky. At Osborn's store everyone was quiet and frightened. From this the men knew that something terrible had happened. Soon they learned that the Elmer Frye house and family had been destroyed.

All that afternoon they drove around Dunwich. They asked the natives about everything that had happened. With growing horror, they saw it all for themselves. They saw the sad Frye ruins, with traces of the tarry stickiness still on them. They saw the unholy tracks in the Frye yard and the wounded Seth Bishop cattle. They saw the huge swaths of crushed plants in various places. The trail up and down Sentinel Hill seemed terribly important to Armitage. To him it seemed almost a sign of a great disaster. He looked for a long time at the evil-looking, altar-like stone on the top.

At last the visitors heard about a party of State Police. The police had come from Aylesbury that morning, after the first telephone reports of the Frye tragedy. The Arkham men decided to find the officers and share what they knew, as far as possible. But this was easier to plan than to do. No sign of the police could be found anywhere. There had been five of them in a car. Now the car stood empty near the ruins in the Frye yard. All the natives had talked with the policemen. At first they seemed as puzzled as Armitage and his friends. Then old Sam Hutchins thought of something and turned pale. He nudged Fred Farr and pointed to the damp, deep hollow that opened close by.

"Gawd," he gasped, "I told 'em not to go down into the glen. An' I never thought nobody'd do it. Not with them tracks an' that smell, an' the whippoorwills a-screechin' down there in the dark of noonday...."

A cold shudder went through natives and visitors alike. Without meaning to, everyone seemed to listen hard. Armitage had now really met the horror and its terrible work. He trembled with the responsibility that he felt was his. Night would soon fall. That was when the huge, unholy thing moved heavily along its unearthly way. *Negotium perambulans in tenebris....* The old librarian went over the formulas he had learned by heart. He held tightly the paper with the other formulas, which he had not learned. He checked that his electric flashlight was working. Beside him, Rice took a metal sprayer out of a valise. It was the kind that people use against insects. Morgan took the big-game rifle out of its case. He trusted it, although his colleague had warned him that no material weapon would help.

Armitage had read the terrible diary. He knew painfully well what kind of thing to expect. But he did not add to the fear of the Dunwich people by giving them hints or clues. He hoped the thing could be beaten without the world ever learning about it. Then the world would never know what a terrible thing it had escaped. As the shadows grew longer, the natives began to leave for home. They wanted to lock themselves indoors. Yet they had just seen proof that human locks and bolts were useless. This force could bend trees and crush houses whenever it wanted. They shook their heads at the visitors' plan to keep watch at the Frye ruins near the glen. As they left, they hardly expected to see the watchers again.

That night there were deep sounds under the hills, and the whippoorwills sang in a threatening way. Now and then a wind blew up out of Cold Spring Glen. It brought a touch of an indescribable stench into the heavy night air. All three watchers had smelled that stench once before. They had stood over a dying thing that had passed for a human being for fifteen and a half years. But the terror they expected did not come. Whatever was down there in the glen was waiting for its time. Armitage told his colleagues it would be suicide to try to attack it in the dark.

Morning came weakly, and the night sounds stopped. It was a gray, cold day, with light rain now and then. Heavier and heavier clouds seemed to be piling up beyond the hills to the northwest. The men from Arkham could not decide what to do. The rain was getting heavier. So they took shelter under one of the few Frye outbuildings that were still standing. There they argued about what was wise. Should they wait? Or should they attack, and go down into the glen after the nameless, terrible thing they were hunting? The rain grew heavier still, and thunder sounded from far away. Sheet lightning shone across the sky. Then a forked bolt flashed close by, as if it was going down into the cursed glen itself. The sky grew very dark. The watchers hoped the storm would be short and sharp, and that clear weather would follow.

It was still horribly dark a little over an hour later. Then a confused noise of voices came from down the road. A moment later a frightened group of more than a dozen men came into view. They were running and shouting, and some were even crying wildly. Someone at the front began to sob out words. The Arkham men jumped when those words began to make sense.

"Oh, my Gawd, my Gawd!" the voice choked out. "It's a-goin' again, *an' this time by day*! It's out—it's out an' a-movin' this very minute, an' only the Lord knows when it'll be on us all!"

The speaker stopped, out of breath, and another man went on with the news.

"Nearly an hour ago Zeb Whateley here heard the phone a-ringin'. It was Mis' Corey, George's wife, that lives down by the junction. She says the hired boy Luther was out drivin' in the cows from the storm after the big bolt. Then he saw all the trees a-bendin' at the mouth of the glen—on the opposite side from here. An' he smelt the same awful smell like he smelt when he found the big tracks last Monday mornin'. An' she says he says there was a swishin', lappin' sound, more than the trees an' bushes could make. Then all of a sudden the trees along the road began to get pushed to one side. An' there was an awful stompin' an' splashin' in the mud. But mind ye, Luther didn't see nothin' at all, only just the bendin' trees an' bushes.

"Then far ahead, where Bishop's Brook goes under the road, he heard an awful creakin' an' strainin' on the bridge. He says he could tell the sound of wood a-startin' to crack an' split. An' all the while he never saw a thing, only them trees an' bushes a-bendin'. Then the swishin' sound got very far off, on the road toward Wizard Whateley's an' Sentinel Hill. So Luther had the guts to step up where he'd heard it first an' look at the ground. It was all mud an' water, an' the sky was dark. An' the rain was wipin' out all the tracks about as fast as could be. But startin' at the glen mouth, where the trees had moved, there was still some of them awful prints. They was big as barrels, like the ones he saw Monday."

At this point the first excited speaker broke in.

"But *that* ain't the trouble now—that was only the start. Zeb here was callin' folks up, an' everybody was a-listenin' in. Then a call from Seth Bishop's cut in. His housekeeper Sally was carryin' on fit to kill. She'd just seen the trees a-bendin' beside the road. She says there was a kind of soft, wet sound, like an elephant puffin' an' treadin', a-headin' for the house. Then all of a sudden she spoke of a fearful smell. An' she says her boy Chauncey was a-screamin'. He said it was just like what he smelt at the Whateley ruins Monday mornin'. An' the dogs was all barkin' an' whinin' awful.

"An' then she let out a terrible yell. She says the shed down the road had just caved in, like the storm had blowed it over. Only the wind wasn't strong enough to do that. Everybody was a-listenin', an' ye could hear lots of folks on the wire a-gaspin'. All at once Sally yelled again. She says the front-yard picket fence had just crumpled up, though there wasn't no sign of what done it. Then everybody on the line could hear Chauncey an' old Seth Bishop a-yellin', too. An' Sally was shriekin' out that somethin' heavy had struck the house. Not lightnin' or nothin', but somethin' heavy against the front. It kept a-throwin' itself at the house again an' again. But ye couldn't see nothin' out the front windows. An' then ... an' then...."

The lines of fear grew deeper on every face. Armitage was shaken, but he was just calm enough to ask the speaker to go on.

"An' then ... Sally she yelled out, 'O help, the house is a-cavin' in!' ... An' on the wire we could hear a terrible crashin' an' a whole lot of screamin'.... It was just like when Elmer Frye's place was took, only worse...."

The man stopped, and another man in the crowd spoke.

"That's all—not a sound or a squeak over the phone after that. Just still-like. We that heard it got out the Fords an' the wagons. We got together as many strong men-folks as we could at Corey's place. An' we come up here to see what ye thought best to do. Mind ye, I think it's the Lord's judgment for our sins, an' no man can ever set it aside."

Armitage saw that the time had come to act firmly. He spoke with decision to the frightened, unsure group of country people.

"We must follow it, boys." He made his voice as calm and comforting as he could. "I believe there's a chance of putting an end to it. You men know that those Whateleys were wizards. Well, this thing is a thing of wizardry, and it must be put down in the same way. I've seen Wilbur Whateley's diary. I've read some of the strange old books he used to read. And I think I know the right kind of spell to say 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 terrible 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 still do a lot of harm, though. So we mustn't wait to free the people here from 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 have an idea there might be a shorter way across the fields. How about it?"

The men moved their feet about for a moment. Then Earl Sawyer spoke softly. He pointed with a dirty finger through the rain, which was slowly growing lighter.

"I guess ye can get to Seth Bishop's quickest by cuttin' across the lower meadow here. Then ye wade the brook at the low place. An' ye climb through Carrier's mowin' an' the timber-lot past it. That comes out on the upper road real near Seth's—a little the other side."

Armitage, Rice and Morgan began to walk the way he had pointed. Most of the natives followed slowly. The sky was growing lighter, and the storm seemed to have worn itself out. Once Armitage took a wrong direction by mistake. Joe Osborn warned him and walked ahead to show the right way. The men grew braver and more confident. But near the end of their short cut was a wooded hill that was almost straight up and down. It was dim there, like twilight. They had to climb among its strange old trees as if up a ladder. This tested their courage and confidence hard.

At last they came out on a muddy road, and the sun was coming out. They were a little past the Seth Bishop place. But bent trees and terrible tracks showed clearly what had passed by. No one could mistake them. They spent only a few moments looking at the ruins just around the bend. It was the Frye incident all over again. Nothing dead or living was found in either of the two fallen shells. They had once been the Bishop house and barn. No one wanted to stay there among the stench and the tarry stickiness. Without thinking, they all turned to the line of horrible prints. It led on toward the wrecked Whateley farmhouse and the slopes of Sentinel Hill, with the altar-stone on top.

As the men passed the place where Wilbur Whateley had lived, they shuddered openly. Again they seemed both eager and unsure. It was no joke to track something as big as a house that you could not see. And this thing had all the cruel evil of a demon. Opposite the foot of Sentinel Hill, the tracks left the road. There was the broad swath that marked the monster's earlier route to and from the top. Along it, the plants were freshly bent and pressed flat.

Armitage took out a powerful pocket telescope and looked carefully over the steep green side of the hill. Then he handed it to Morgan, whose eyes were sharper. Morgan looked for a moment and then cried out sharply. He passed the glass to Earl Sawyer and pointed with his finger at a certain spot on the slope. Sawyer was as clumsy as most people who never use such instruments. He fumbled with it for a while. But at last, with Armitage's help, he got the lenses into focus. When he did, his cry was louder and wilder than Morgan's.

"Gawd almighty, the grass an' bushes is a-movin'! It's a-goin' up—slow-like—creepin' up to the top this minute, heaven only knows what for!"

Then panic seemed to spread among the searchers like a disease. It was one thing to chase the nameless thing, but quite another to find it. Spells might be all right—but what if they weren't? Voices began asking Armitage what he knew about the thing. No answer seemed to satisfy them. Everyone seemed to feel very close to parts of nature and of being that were completely forbidden. These things were wholly outside the sane experience of mankind.

### Glossary

- **glen**: a narrow, deep valley
- **swath**: a long, wide strip where everything has been pushed down or cut
- **tarry stickiness**: a dark, sticky mess, like tar
- **Negotium perambulans in tenebris**: Latin words meaning "the thing that walks in darkness"
- **valise**: a small travel bag
- **sprayer**: a device that blows liquid or powder out in a cloud
- **on the wire / on the line**: listening on a telephone line that several houses share
- **picket fence**: a low fence made of pointed wooden posts
- **mowing**: a field where grass is grown and cut for hay
- **glass**: here, the telescope

## X.

In the end the three men from Arkham climbed the mountain alone. They were old, white-bearded Dr. Armitage, stocky, iron-gray Professor Rice, and lean, youngish Dr. Morgan. First they explained patiently and at length how to focus and use the telescope. Then they left it with the frightened group that stayed in the road. As they climbed, the people below passed the glass around and watched them closely. It was hard going, and Armitage had to be helped more than once. High above the climbing men, the great swath shook. Its hellish maker was passing along it again, as slowly as a snail. Then it was clear that the hunters were getting closer.

Curtis Whateley came from the branch of the family that had not gone downhill. He was holding the telescope when the Arkham party turned sharply away from the swath. He told the crowd what the men were clearly trying to do. They wanted to reach a smaller peak that looked down on the swath. It looked down on it at a point well ahead of where the bushes were now bending. This proved to be true. The party were seen to reach the lower height a short time after the invisible horror had passed it.

Then Wesley Corey, who had taken the glass, cried out. Armitage was adjusting the sprayer that Rice held, he said. Something must be about to happen. The crowd moved about nervously. They remembered that this sprayer was supposed to make the unseen horror visible for a moment. Two or three men shut their eyes. But Curtis Whateley grabbed back the telescope and strained his eyes as hard as he could. The party was above and behind the thing, in a very good position. Curtis saw that Rice had an excellent chance. He could spread the strong powder with wonderful effect.

Those without the telescope saw only a flash of gray cloud for an instant. It was about the size of a fairly large building, near the top of the mountain. Curtis had been holding the instrument. With a piercing shriek, he dropped it into the ankle-deep mud of the road. He lost his balance. He would have fallen if two or three others had not caught him and held him up. All he could do was moan, so quietly that he could hardly be heard:

"Oh, oh, great Gawd ... *that ... that*...."

Everyone began asking questions at once, in wild confusion. Only Henry Wheeler thought to save the fallen telescope and wipe the mud off it. Curtis could no longer make sense. Even single answers were almost too much for him.

"Bigger than a barn.... All made of twistin' ropes.... The whole thing sort of shaped like a hen's egg, bigger than anything. It had dozens of legs like hogsheads that half shut up when they step.... Nothin' solid about it—all like jelly, an' made of separate wrigglin' ropes pushed close together.... Great bulgin' eyes all over it.... Ten or twenty mouths or trunks a-stickin' out all along the sides, big as stovepipes. An' all a-tossin' an' openin' an' shuttin'.... All gray, with kind of blue or purple rings ... *an' Gawd in Heaven—that half face on top*!..."

This last memory, whatever it was, was too much for poor Curtis. 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 was shaking. He turned the rescued telescope on the mountain to see what he could. Through the lenses he could make out three tiny figures. They seemed to be running toward the top as fast as the steep slope allowed. Only these—nothing more. Then everyone noticed a strange noise that was wrong for the time of year. It came from the deep valley behind, and even from the bushes of Sentinel Hill itself. It was the calling of countless whippoorwills. In their high chorus there seemed to hide a note of tense, evil expectation.

Earl Sawyer now took the telescope. He reported that the three figures were standing on the highest ridge. They were almost level with the altar-stone, but quite far away from it. One figure, he said, seemed to be raising its hands above its head again and again, in a regular rhythm. As Sawyer said this, the crowd seemed to hear a faint, half-musical sound from far away. It was as if a loud chant was going with the movements. That strange shape against the sky, on the far peak, must have been a very weird and powerful sight. But no one watching was in the mood to enjoy it. "I guess he's sayin' the spell," whispered Wheeler as he grabbed back the telescope. The whippoorwills were calling wildly. Their rhythm was very strange and irregular, and quite unlike the rhythm of the ritual they could see.

Suddenly the sunshine seemed to grow weaker, although no cloud could be seen. It was a very strange thing, and everyone noticed it. A deep sound seemed to be building under the hills. It was strangely mixed with a matching sound that clearly came from the sky. Lightning flashed high up. The puzzled crowd looked for signs of a storm, but there were none. Now the chanting of the men from Arkham could be heard clearly. Through the glass, Wheeler saw that all three were raising their arms in the rhythm of the incantation. From some farmhouse far away came the wild barking of dogs.

The light of the day kept changing more and more, and the crowd looked around the horizon in wonder. A purple darkness pressed down on the hills, where the deep sounds were rolling. It came from nothing but a ghostly darkening of the blue of the sky. Then the lightning flashed again, a little brighter than before. The crowd thought it had shown a kind of mist around the altar-stone on the far height. But no one had been using the telescope at that moment. The whippoorwills kept up their irregular beat. The men of Dunwich held themselves tense against some danger that they could not understand or measure. The air seemed full of it.

Without warning came those deep, cracked, harsh sounds of a voice. The shaken group who heard them will never forget them. They were not born in any human throat. Human organs cannot make such twisted sounds. You would have said they came from the pit itself. But their source was clearly the altar-stone on the peak. It is almost wrong to call them *sounds* at all. Their terrible, extremely deep tone spoke to dark parts of the mind and of terror. These parts are much finer than the ear. Yet one must call them sounds, because their form was clearly, though vaguely, that of half-formed *words*. They were loud—as loud as the deep noises and the thunder that they echoed above. Yet they came from no being that could be seen. Imagination might suggest that they came from the world of invisible beings. So the crowd at the foot of the mountain, already close together, pressed even closer. They pulled back as if they expected a blow.

"*Ygnaiih ... ygnaiih ... thflthkh'ngha ... Yog-Sothoth....*" rang the terrible, harsh voice out of space. "*Y'bthnk ... h'ehye ... n'grkdl'lh....*"

The speaking seemed to falter here, as if some terrible struggle of the mind was going on. Henry Wheeler strained his eye at the telescope. But he saw only the three human figures on the peak, strange and dark against the sky. They were all moving their arms wildly in strange gestures. Their incantation was coming near its climax. Where did those half-formed sounds, loud as thunder, come from? From what black wells of hellish fear or feeling? From what deep, unknown gulfs of mind beyond the universe? Or from what dark family line, long hidden? Soon the sounds began to gather new force and clearness. They grew into a wild, total, final 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 pale group in the road were still shaken by those words, which were *clearly English*. They had poured down thickly, like thunder, from the wild emptiness beside that terrible altar-stone. The group would never hear such words again. Instead, they jumped violently at a terrible crash that seemed to tear the hills apart. It was a deafening, violent peal, like the sound of a great disaster. No one who heard it could ever say where it came from, the inner earth or the sky. A single lightning bolt shot from the purple sky overhead to the altar-stone. Then a great tidal wave of invisible force and indescribable stench swept down from the hill over all the countryside. Trees, grass and bushes were whipped into a fury. The frightened crowd at the foot of the mountain were almost thrown off their feet. They were weak from the deadly stench, which seemed about to choke them. Dogs howled in the distance. The green grass and leaves dried up and turned a strange, sickly yellow-gray. And over field and forest lay the bodies of dead whippoorwills.

The stench left quickly, but the plants never came right again. To this day there is something strange and unholy about the things that grow on and around that fearful hill. Curtis Whateley was only just waking up when the Arkham men came slowly down the mountain. The sunlight was bright and clean once more. The men were serious and quiet. They seemed shaken by memories and thoughts even more terrible than those of the natives. The natives had been left shaking and afraid. The crowd asked them many confused questions. They only shook their heads and stated one vital fact again.

"The thing has gone for ever," Armitage said. "It has been split up into what it was first made of, and it can never exist again. It was an impossibility in a normal world. Only the smallest part of it 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 place or dimension outside our material universe. It is a vague, bottomless place. Only the most cursed rites of human blasphemy could ever have called him out of it. And even then, only for a moment, on the hills."

There was a short silence. In that pause, poor Curtis Whateley's scattered senses began to join together again. He put his hands to his head and made a low, sad sound. His memory seemed to pick up where it had stopped. The horror of the sight that had knocked him down burst in on him again.

"*Oh, oh, my Gawd, that half face ... that half face on top of it.... That face with the red eyes an' crinkly albino hair, an' no chin, like the Whateleys.... It was an octopus, centipede, spider kind of thing. But there was a half-shaped man's face on top of it. An' it looked like Wizard Whateley's, only it was yards an' yards across....*"

He stopped, exhausted. The whole group of natives stared at him. They were confused, but their confusion had not yet turned into new terror. Only old Zebulon Whateley spoke aloud. He had a wandering memory of ancient things, but he had been silent until now.

"Fifteen years gone," he said in a wandering voice, "I heard Old Whateley say it. He said some day we'd hear a child of Lavinny's a-callin' its father's name on the top of Sentinel Hill...."

But Joe Osborn interrupted him to question the Arkham men again.

"*What was it, anyhow*, an' however did young Wizard Whateley call it out of 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. It acts and grows and shapes itself by laws that are different from the laws of our Nature. We have no business calling in such things from outside. Only very wicked people and very wicked cults ever try to. There was some of it in Wilbur Whateley himself. It was enough to make a devil of him, and a monster who grew up far too fast. And it was enough to make his death a pretty terrible sight. I'm going to burn his cursed diary. And if you men are wise, you'll blow up that altar-stone up there with dynamite. You'll pull down all the rings of standing stones on the other hills, too. Things like that brought down the beings those Whateleys loved so much. They were going to let those beings in, in solid form. Then the beings would wipe out the human race. They would drag the earth off to some nameless place, for some nameless purpose.

"But now, about this thing we've just sent back. The Whateleys raised it for a terrible part in the things that were to come. It grew fast and big for 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.*"

### Glossary

- **swath**: a long, wide strip where everything has been pushed down or cut
- **sprayer**: a device that blows liquid or powder out in a cloud
- **hogshead**: a very large barrel
- **stovepipe**: the metal pipe that carries smoke from a stove out of a house
- **wriggling**: twisting and turning quickly, like a worm
- **albino**: a person born with no color in the skin and hair, often with pink eyes
- **incantation**: special words said or sung to make magic happen
- **the pit**: hell; a deep place of evil under the earth
- **blasphemy**: something that insults God or holy things; something deeply unholy
- **outsideness**: the quality of coming from outside our world
- **twin**: one of two children born to the same mother at the same time