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.
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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.