Message #3506

[Zodiac]

III.

Meanwhile Old Whateley continued to buy cattle without measurably
increasing the size of his herd. He also cut timber and began to repair
the unused parts of his house--a spacious, peak-roofed affair whose
rear end was buried entirely in the rocky hillside, and whose three
least-ruined ground-floor rooms had always been sufficient for himself
and his daughter.

There must have been prodigious reserves of strength in the old man
to enable him to accomplish so much hard labour; and though he still
babbled dementedly at times, his carpentry seemed to show the effects
of sound calculation. It had already begun as soon as Wilbur was born,
when one of the many tool sheds had been put suddenly in order,
clapboarded, and fitted with a stout fresh lock. Now, in restoring the
abandoned upper storey of the house, he was a no less thorough
craftsman. His mania showed itself only in his tight boarding-up of all
the windows in the reclaimed section--though many declared that it was
a crazy thing to bother with the reclamation at all.

Less inexplicable was his fitting up of another downstairs room for
his new grandson--a room which several callers saw, though no one was
ever admitted to the closely-boarded upper storey. This chamber he
lined with tall, firm shelving, along which he began gradually to
arrange, in apparently careful order, all the rotting ancient books and
parts of books which during his own day had been heaped promiscuously
in odd corners of the various rooms.

'I made some use of 'em,' he would say as he tried to mend a torn
black-letter page with paste prepared on the rusty kitchen stove, 'but
the boy's fitten to make better use of 'em. He'd orter hev 'em as well
so as he kin, for they're goin' to be all of his larnin'.'

When Wilbur was a year and seven months old--in September of 1914--
his size and accomplishments were almost alarming. He had grown as
large as a child of four, and was a fluent and incredibly intelligent
talker. He ran freely about the fields and hills, and accompanied his
mother on all her wanderings. At home he would pore dilligently over
the queer pictures and charts in his grandfather's books, while Old
Whateley would instruct and catechize him through long, hushed
afternoons. By this time the restoration of the house was finished, and
those who watched it wondered why one of the upper windows had been
made into a solid plank door. It was a window in the rear of the east
gable end, close against the hill; and no one could imagine why a
cleated wooden runway was built up to it from the ground. About the
period of this work's completion people noticed that the old
tool-house, tightly locked and windowlessly clapboarded since Wilbur's
birth, had been abandoned again. The door swung listlessly open, and
when Earl Sawyer once stepped within after a cattle-selling call on Old
Whateley he was quite discomposed by the singular odour he encountered
--such a stench, he averred, as he had never before smelt in all his
life except near the Indian circles on the hills, and which could not
come from anything sane or of this earth. But then, the homes and sheds
of Dunwich folk have never been remarkable for olfactory immaculateness.

The following months were void of visible events, save that everyone
swore to a slow but steady increase in the mysterious hill noises. On
May Eve of 1915 there were tremors which even the Aylesbury people
felt, whilst the following Hallowe'en produced an underground rumbling
queerly synchronized with bursts of flame--'them witch Whateleys'
doin's'--from the summit of Sentinel Hill. Wilbur was growing up
uncannily, so that he looked like a boy of ten as he entered his fourth
year. He read avidly by himself now; but talked much less than
formerly. A settled taciturnity was absorbing him, and for the first
time people began to speak specifically of the dawning look of evil in
his goatish face. He would sometimes mutter an unfamiliar jargon, and
chant in bizarre rhythms which chilled the listener with a sense of
unexplainable terror. The aversion displayed towards him by dogs had
now become a matter of wide remark, and he was obliged to carry a
pistol in order to traverse the countryside in safety. His occasional
use of the weapon did not enhance his popularity amongst the owners of
canine guardians.

The few callers at the house would often find Lavinia alone on the
ground floor, while odd cries and footsteps resounded in the boarded-up
second storey. She would never tell what her father and the boy were
doing up there, though once she turned pale and displayed an abnormal
degree of fear when a jocose fish-pedlar tried the locked door leading
to the stairway. That pedlar told the store loungers at Dunwich Village
that he thought he heard a horse stamping on that floor above. The
loungers reflected, thinking of the door and runway, and of the cattle
that so swiftly disappeared. Then they shuddered as they recalled tales
of Old Whateley's youth, and of the strange things that are called out
of the earth when a bullock is sacrificed at the proper time to certain
heathen gods. It had for some time been noticed that dogs had begun to
hate and fear the whole Whateley place as violently as they hated and
feared young Wilbur personally.

In 1917 the war came, and Squire Sawyer Whateley, as chairman of the
local draft board, had hard work finding a quota of young Dunwich men
fit even to be sent to development camp. The government, alarmed at
such signs of wholesale regional decadence, sent several officers and
medical experts to investigate; conducting a survey which New England
newspaper readers may still recall. It was the publicity attending this
investigation which set reporters on the track of the Whateleys, and
caused the Boston Globe and Arkham Advertiser to print flamboyant
Sunday stories of young Wilbur's precociousness, Old Whateley's black
magic, and the shelves of strange books, the sealed second storey of
the ancient farmhouse, and the weirdness of the whole region and its
hill noises. Wilbur was four and a half then, and looked like a lad of
fifteen. His lips and cheeks were fuzzy with a coarse dark down, and
his voice had begun to break.

Earl Sawyer went out to the Whateley place with both sets of
reporters and camera men, and called their attention to the queer
stench which now seemed to trickle down from the sealed upper spaces.
It was, he said, exactly like a smell he had found in the toolshed
abandoned when the house was finally repaired; and like the faint
odours which he sometimes thought he caught near the stone circle on
the mountains. Dunwich folk read the stories when they appeared, and
grinned over the obvious mistakes. They wondered, too, why the writers
made so much of the fact that Old Whateley always paid for his cattle
in gold pieces of extremely ancient date. The Whateleys had received
their visitors with ill-concealed distaste, though they did not dare
court further publicity by a violent resistance or refusal to talk.