Message #3513

[Zodiac]

X.

In the end the three men from Arkham--old, white-bearded Dr
Armitage, stocky, iron-grey Professor Rice, and lean, youngish Dr
Morgan, ascended the mountain alone. After much patient instruction
regarding its focusing and use, they left the telescope with the
frightened group that remained in the road; and as they climbed they
were watched closely by those among whom the glass was passed round. It
was hard going, and Armitage had to be helped more than once. High
above the toiling group the great swath trembled as its hellish maker
repassed with snail-like deliberateness. Then it was obvious that the
pursuers were gaining.

Curtis Whateley--of the undecayed branch--was holding the
telescope when the Arkham party detoured radically from the swath. He
told the crowd that the men were evidently trying to get to a
subordinate peak which overlooked the swath at a point considerably
ahead of where the shrubbery was now bending. This, indeed, proved to
be true; and the party were seen to gain the minor elevation only a
short time after the invisible blasphemy had passed it.

Then Wesley Corey, who had taken the glass, cried out that Armitage
was adjusting the sprayer which Rice held, and that something must be
about to happen. The crowd stirred uneasily, recalling that his sprayer
was expected to give the unseen horror a moment of visibility. Two or
three men shut their eyes, but Curtis Whateley snatched back the
telescope and strained his vision to the utmost. He saw that Rice, from
the party's point of advantage above and behind the entity, had an
excellent chance of spreading the potent powder with marvellous effect.

Those without the telescope saw only an instant's flash of grey
cloud--a cloud about the size of a moderately large building--near
the top of the mountain. Curtis, who held the instrument, dropped it
with a piercing shriek into the ankle-deep mud of the road. He reeled,
and would have crumbled to the ground had not two or three others
seized and steadied him. All he could do was moan half-inaudibly.

'Oh, oh, great Gawd...that...that...'

There was a pandemonium of questioning, and only Henry Wheeler
thought to rescue the fallen telescope and wipe it clean of mud. Curtis
was past all coherence, and even isolated replies were almost too much
for him.

'Bigger'n a barn...all made o' squirmin' ropes...hull thing sort
o' shaped like a hen's egg bigger'n anything with dozens o' legs like
hogs-heads that haff shut up when they step...nothin' solid abaout it
--all like jelly, an' made o' sep'rit wrigglin' ropes pushed clost
together...great bulgin' eyes all over it...ten or twenty maouths or
trunks a-stickin' aout all along the sides, big as stove-pipes an all
a-tossin' an openin' an' shuttin'...all grey, with kinder blue or
purple rings...an' Gawd it Heaven--that haff face on top...'

This final memory, whatever it was, proved too much for poor Curtis;
and 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, trembling, turned the rescued telescope on the
mountain to see what he might. Through the lenses were discernible
three tiny figures, apparently running towards the summit as fast as
the steep incline allowed. Only these--nothing more. Then everyone
noticed a strangely unseasonable noise in the deep valley behind, and
even in the underbrush of Sentinel Hill itself. It was the piping of
unnumbered whippoorwills, and in their shrill chorus there seemed to
lurk a note of tense and evil expectancy.

Earl Sawyer now took the telescope and reported the three figures as
standing on the topmost ridge, virtually level with the altar-stone but
at a considerable distance from it. One figure, he said, seemed to be
raising its hands above its head at rhythmic intervals; and as Sawyer
mentioned the circumstance the crowd seemed to hear a faint,
half-musical sound from the distance, as if a loud chant were
accompanying the gestures. The weird silhouette on that remote peak
must have been a spectacle of infinite grotesqueness and
impressiveness, but no observer was in a mood for aesthetic
appreciation. 'I guess he's sayin' the spell,' whispered Wheeler as he
snatched back the telescope. The whippoorwills were piping wildly, and
in a singularly curious irregular rhythm quite unlike that of the
visible ritual.

Suddenly the sunshine seemed to lessen without the intervention of
any discernible cloud. It was a very peculiar phenomenon, and was
plainly marked by all. A rumbling sound seemed brewing beneath the
hills, mixed strangely with a concordant rumbling which clearly came
from the sky. Lightning flashed aloft, and the wondering crowd looked
in vain for the portents of storm. The chanting of the men from Arkham
now became unmistakable, and Wheeler saw through the glass that they
were all raising their arms in the rhythmic incantation. From some
farmhouse far away came the frantic barking of dogs.

The change in the quality of the daylight increased, and the crowd
gazed about the horizon in wonder. A purplish darkness, born of nothing
more than a spectral deepening of the sky's blue, pressed down upon the
rumbling hills. Then the lightning flashed again, somewhat brighter
than before, and the crowd fancied that it had showed a certain
mistiness around the altar-stone on the distant height. No one,
however, had been using the telescope at that instant. The
whippoorwills continued their irregular pulsation, and the men of
Dunwich braced themselves tensely against some imponderable menace with
which the atmosphere seemed surcharged.

Without warning came those deep, cracked, raucous vocal sounds which
will never leave the memory of the stricken group who heard them. Not
from any human throat were they born, for the organs of man can yield
no such acoustic perversions. Rather would one have said they came from
the pit itself, had not their source been so unmistakably the
altar-stone on the peak. It is almost erroneous to call them sounds at
all, since so much of their ghastly, infra-bass timbre spoke to dim
seats of consciousness and terror far subtler than the ear; yet one
must do so, since their form was indisputably though vaguely that of
half-articulate words. They were loud--loud as the rumblings and the
thunder above which they echoed--yet did they come from no visible
being. And because imagination might suggest a conjectural source in
the world of non-visible beings, the huddled crowd at the mountain's
base huddled still closer, and winced as if in expectation of a blow.

Ygnailh...ygnaiih...thflthkh'ngha....Yog-Sothoth ...rang the hideous
croaking out of space. Y'bthnk...h'ehye--n'grkdl'lh...

The speaking impulse seemed to falter here, as if some frightful
psychic struggle were going on. Henry Wheeler strained his eye at the
telescope, but saw only the three grotesquely silhouetted human figures
on the peak, all moving their arms furiously in strange gestures as
their incantation drew near its culmination. From what black wells of
Acherontic fear or feeling, from what unplumbed gulfs of extra-cosmic
consciousness or obscure, long-latent heredity, were those
half-articulate thunder-croakings drawn? Presently they began to gather
renewed force and coherence as they grew in stark, utter, ultimate
frenzy.

Eh-y-ya-ya-yahaah--e'yayayaaaa...ngh'aaaaa...ngh'aaa...
h'yuh...h'yuh...HELP! HELP! ...ff--ff--ff--FATHER! FATHER!
YOG-SOTHOTH!...

But that was all. The pallid group in the road, still reeling at the
indisputably English syllables that had poured thickly and thunderously
down from the frantic vacancy beside that shocking altar-stone, were
never to hear such syllables again. Instead, they jumped violently at
the terrific report which seemed to rend the hills; the deafening,
cataclysmic peal whose source, be it inner earth or sky, no hearer was
ever able to place. A single lightning bolt shot from the purple zenith
to the altar-stone, and a great tidal wave of viewless force and
indescribable stench swept down from the hill to all the countryside.
Trees, grass, and under-brush were whipped into a fury; and the
frightened crowd at the mountain's base, weakened by the lethal foetor
that seemed about to asphyxiate them, were almost hurled off their
feet. Dogs howled from the distance, green grass and foliage wilted to
a curious, sickly yellow-grey, and over field and forest were scattered
the bodies of dead whippoorwills.

The stench left quickly, but the vegetation never came right again.
To this day there is something queer and unholy about the growths on
and around that fearsome hill Curtis Whateley was only just regaining
consciousness when the Arkham men came slowly down the mountain in the
beams of a sunlight once more brilliant and untainted. They were grave
and quiet, and seemed shaken by memories and reflections even more
terrible than those which had reduced the group of natives to a state
of cowed quivering. In reply to a jumble of questions they only shook
their heads and reaffirmed one vital fact.

'The thing has gone for ever,' Armitage said. 'It has been split up
into what it was originally made of, and can never exist again. It was
an impossibility in a normal world. Only the least fraction 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 realm or dimension outside our
material universe; some vague abyss out of which only the most accursed
rites of human blasphemy could ever have called him for a moment on the
hills.'

There was a brief silence, and in that pause the scattered senses of
poor Curtis Whateley began to knit back into a sort of continuity; so
that he put his hands to his head with a moan. Memory seemed to pick
itself up where it had left off, and the horror of the sight that had
prostrated him burst in upon him again.

'Oh, oh, my Gawd, that haff face--that haff face on top of it...
that face with the red eyes an' crinkly albino hair, an' no chin, like
the Whateleys...It was a octopus, centipede, spider kind o' thing, but
they was a haff-shaped man's face on top of it, an' it looked like
Wizard Whateley's, only it was yards an' yards acrost....'

He paused exhausted, as the whole group of natives stared in a
bewilderment not quite crystallized into fresh terror. Only old Zebulon
Whateley, who wanderingly remembered ancient things but who had been
silent heretofore, spoke aloud.

'Fifteen year' gone,' he rambled, 'I heered Ol' Whateley say as haow
some day we'd hear a child o' Lavinny's a-callin' its father's name on
the top o' Sentinel Hill...'

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

'What was it, anyhaow, an' haowever did young Wizard Whateley call it
aout o' the air it come from?'

Armitage chose his words very carefully.

'It was--well, it was mostly a kind of force that doesn't belong in
our part of space; a kind of force that acts and grows and shapes
itself by other laws than those of our sort of Nature. We have no
business calling in such things from outside, and only very wicked
people and very wicked cults ever try to. There was some of it in
Wilbur Whateley himself--enough to make a devil and a precocious
monster of him, and to make his passing out a pretty terrible sight.
I'm going to burn his accursed diary, and if you men are wise you'll
dynamite that altar-stone up there, and pull down all the rings of
standing stones on the other hills. Things like that brought down the
beings those Whateleys were so fond of--the beings they were going to
let in tangibly to wipe out the human race and drag the earth off to
some nameless place for some nameless purpose.

'But as to this thing we've just sent back--the Whateleys raised it
for a terrible part in the doings that were to come. It grew fast and
big from 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.'