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THE DUNWICH HORROR

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Author Topic: THE DUNWICH HORROR  (Read 559 times)
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« on: February 27, 2007, 12:47:40 am »

IV.

For a decade the annals of the Whateleys sink indistinguishably into
the general life of a morbid community used to their queer ways and
hardened to their May Eve and All-Hallows orgies. Twice a year they
would light fires on the top of Sentinel Hill, at which times the
mountain rumblings would recur with greater and greater violence; while
at all seasons there were strange and portentous doings at the lonely
farm-house. In the course of time callers professed to hear sounds in
the sealed upper storey even when all the family were downstairs, and
they wondered how swiftly or how lingeringly a cow or bullock was
usually sacrificed. There was talk of a complaint to the Society for
the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals but nothing ever came of it, since
Dunwich folk are never anxious to call the outside world's attention to
themselves.

About 1923, when Wilbur was a boy of ten whose mind, voice, stature,
and bearded face gave all the impressions of maturity, a second great
siege of carpentry went on at the old house. It was all inside the
sealed upper part, and from bits of discarded lumber people concluded
that the youth and his grandfather had knocked out all the partitions
and even removed the attic floor, leaving only one vast open void
between the ground storey and the peaked roof. They had torn down the
great central chimney, too, and fitted the rusty range with a flimsy
outside tin stove-pipe.

In the spring after this event Old Whateley noticed the growing
number of whippoorwills that would come out of Cold Spring Glen to
chirp under his window at night. He seemed to regard the circumstance
as one of great significance, and told the loungers at Osborn's that he
thought his time had almost come.

'They whistle jest in tune with my breathin' naow,' he said, 'an' I
guess they're gittin' ready to ketch my soul. They know it's a-goin'
aout, an' dun't calc'late to miss it. Yew'll know, boys, arter I'm
gone, whether they git me er not. Ef they dew, they'll keep up
a-singin' an' laffin' till break o' day. Ef they dun't they'll kinder
quiet daown like. I expeck them an' the souls they hunts fer hev some
pretty tough tussles sometimes.'

On Lammas Night, 1924, Dr Houghton of Aylesbury was hastily summoned
by Wilbur Whateley, who had lashed his one remaining horse through the
darkness and telephoned from Osborn's in the village. He found Old
Whateley in a very grave state, with a cardiac action and stertorous
breathing that told of an end not far off. The shapeless albino
daughter and oddly bearded grandson stood by the bedside, whilst from
the vacant abyss overhead there came a disquieting suggestion of
rhythmical surging or lapping, as of the waves on some level beach. The
doctor, though, was chiefly disturbed by the chattering night birds
outside; a seemingly limitless legion of whippoorwills that cried their
endless message in repetitions timed diabolically to the wheezing gasps
of the dying man. It was uncanny and unnatural--too much, thought Dr
Houghton, like the whole of the region he had entered so reluctantly in
response to the urgent call.

Towards one o'clock Old Whateley gained consciousness, and interrupted
his wheezing to choke out a few words to his grandson.

'More space, Willy, more space soon. Yew grows--an' that grows
faster. It'll be ready to 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 airth
can't burn it nohaow.'

He was obviously quite mad. After a pause, during which the flock of
whippoorwills outside adjusted their cries to the altered tempo while
some indications of the strange hill noises came from afar off, he
added another sentence or two.

'Feed it reg'lar, Willy, an' mind the quantity; but dun't let it
grow too fast fer the place, fer ef it busts quarters or gits aout
afore ye opens to Yog-Sothoth, it's all over an' no use. Only them from
beyont kin make it multiply an' work...Only them, the old uns as wants
to come back...'

But speech gave place to gasps again, and Lavinia screamed at the
way the whippoorwills followed the change. It was the same for more
than an hour, when the final throaty rattle came. Dr Houghton drew
shrunken lids over the glazing grey eyes as the tumult of birds faded
imperceptibly to silence. Lavinia sobbed, but Wilbur only chuckled
whilst the hill noises rumbled faintly.

'They didn't git him,' he muttered in his heavy bass voice.

Wilbur was by this time a scholar of really tremendous erudition in
his one-sided way, and was quietly known by correspondence to many
librarians in distant places where rare and forbidden books of old days
are kept. He was more and more hated and dreaded around Dunwich because
of certain youthful disappearances which suspicion laid vaguely at his
door; but was always able to silence inquiry through fear or through
use of that fund of old-time gold which still, as in his grandfather's
time, went forth regularly and increasingly for cattle-buying. He was
now tremendously mature of aspect, and his height, having reached the
normal adult limit, seemed inclined to wax beyond that figure. In 1925,
when a scholarly correspondent from Miskatonic University called upon
him one day and departed pale and puzzled, he was fully six and
three-quarters feet tall.

Through all the years Wilbur had treated his half-deformed albino
mother with a growing contempt, finally forbidding her to go to the
hills with him on May Eve and Hallowmass; and in 1926 the poor creature
complained to Mamie Bishop of being afraid of him.

'They's more abaout him as I knows than I kin tell ye, Mamie,' she
said, 'an' naowadays they's more nor what I know myself. I vaow afur
Gawd, I dun't know what he wants nor what he's a-tryin' to dew.'

That Hallowe'en the hill noises sounded louder than ever, and fire
burned on Sentinel Hill as usual; but people paid more attention to the
rhythmical screaming of vast flocks of unnaturally belated
whippoorwills which seemed to be assembled near the unlighted Whateley
farmhouse. After midnight their shrill notes burst into a kind of
pandemoniac cachinnation which filled all the countryside, and not
until dawn did they finally quiet down. Then they vanished, hurrying
southward where they were fully a month overdue. What this meant, no
one could quite be certain till later. None of the countryfolk seemed
to have died--but poor Lavinia Whateley, the twisted albino, was never
seen again.

In the summer of 1927 Wilbur repaired two sheds in the farmyard and
began moving his books and effects out to them. Soon afterwards Earl
Sawyer told the loungers at Osborn's that more carpentry was going on
in the Whateley farmhouse. Wilbur was closing all the doors and windows
on the ground floor, and seemed to be taking out partitions as he and
his grandfather had done upstairs four years before. He was living in
one of the sheds, and Sawyer thought he seemed unusually worried and
tremulous. People generally suspected him of knowing something about
his mother disappearance, and very few ever approached his
neighbourhood now. His height had increased to more than seven feet,
and showed no signs of ceasing its development.
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