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THE DUNWICH HORROR

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Zodiac
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« on: February 27, 2007, 12:45:03 am »

Outsiders visit Dunwich as seldom as possible, and since a certain
season of horror all the signboards pointing towards it have been taken
down. The scenery, judged by an ordinary aesthetic canon, is more than
commonly beautiful; yet there is no influx of artists or summer
tourists. Two centuries ago, when talk of witch-blood, Satan-worship,
and strange forest presences was not laughed at, it was the custom to
give reasons for avoiding the locality. In our sensible age--since the
Dunwich horror of 1928 was hushed up by those who had the town's and
the world's welfare at heart--people shun it without knowing exactly
why. Perhaps one reason--though it cannot apply to uninformed
strangers--is that the natives are now repellently decadent, having
gone far along that path of retrogression so common in many New England
backwaters. They have come to form a race by themselves, with the
well-defined mental and physical stigmata of degeneracy and inbreeding.
The average of their intelligence is woefully low, whilst their annals
reek of overt viciousness and of half-hidden murders, incests, and
deeds of almost unnameable violence and perversity. The old gentry,
representing the two or three armigerous families which came from Salem
in 1692, have kept somewhat above the general level of decay; though
many branches are sunk into the sordid populace so deeply that only
their names remain as a key to the origin they disgrace. Some of the
Whateleys and Bishops still send their eldest sons to Harvard and
Miskatonic, though those sons seldom return to the mouldering gambrel
roofs under which they and their ancestors were born.

No one, even those who have the facts concerning the recent horror,
can say just what is the matter with Dunwich; though old legends speak
of unhallowed rites and conclaves of the Indians, amidst which they
called forbidden shapes of shadow out of the great rounded hills, and
made wild orgiastic prayers that were answered by loud crackings and
rumblings from the ground below. In 1747 the Reverend Abijah Hoadley,
newly come to the Congregational Church at Dunwich Village, preached a
memorable sermon on the close presence of Satan and his imps; in which
he said:

"It must be allow'd, that these Blasphemies of an infernall Train of
Daemons are Matters of too common Knowledge to be deny'd; the cursed
Voices of Azazel and Buzrael, of Beelzebub and Belial, being heard now
from under Ground by above a Score of credible Witnesses now living. I
myself did not more than a Fortnight ago catch a very plain Discourse
of evill Powers in the Hill behind my House; wherein there were a
Rattling and Rolling, Groaning, Screeching, and Hissing, such as no
Things of this Earth could raise up, and which must needs have come
from those Caves that only black Magick can discover, and only the
Divell unlock".

Mr. Hoadley disappeared soon after delivering this sermon, but the
text, printed in Springfield, is still extant. Noises in the hills
continued to be reported from year to year, and still form a puzzle to
geologists and physiographers.

Other traditions tell of foul odours near the hill-crowning circles
of stone pillars, and of rushing airy presences to be heard faintly at
certain hours from stated points at the bottom of the great ravines;
while still others try to explain the Devil's Hop Yard--a bleak,
blasted hillside where no tree, shrub, or grass-blade will grow. Then,
too, the natives are mortally afraid of the numerous whippoorwills
which grow vocal on warm nights. It is vowed that the birds are
psychopomps lying in wait for the souls of the dying, and that they
time their eerie cries in unison with the sufferer's struggling breath.
If they can catch the fleeing soul when it leaves the body, they
instantly flutter away chittering in daemoniac laughter; but if they
fail, they subside gradually into a disappointed silence.

These tales, of course, are obsolete and ridiculous; because they
come down from very old times. Dunwich is indeed ridiculously old--
older by far than any of the communities within thirty miles of it.
South of the village one may still spy the cellar walls and chimney of
the ancient Bishop house, which was built before 1700; whilst the ruins
of the mill at the falls, built in 1806, form the most modern piece of
architecture to be seen. Industry did not flourish here, and the
nineteenth-century factory movement proved short-lived. Oldest of all
are the great rings of rough-hewn stone columns on the hilltops, but
these are more generally attributed to the Indians than to the
settlers. Deposits of skulls and bones, found within these circles and
around the sizeable table-like rock on Sentinel Hill, sustain the
popular belief that such spots were once the burial-places of the
Pocumtucks; even though many ethnologists, disregarding the absurd
improbability of such a theory, persist in believing the remains
Caucasian.


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