Yet all this was only the prologue of the actual Dunwich horror. Formalities were gone through by bewildered officials, abnormal details were duly kept from press and public, and men were sent to Dunwich and Aylesbury to look up property and notify any who might be heirs of the late Wilbur Whateley. They found the countryside in great agitation, both because of the growing rumblings beneath the domed hills, and because of the unwonted stench and the surging, lapping sounds which came increasingly from the great empty sh.e.l.l formed by Whateley"s boarded-up farmhouse. Earl Sawyer, who tended the horse and cattle during Wilbur"s absence, had developed a woefully acute case of nerves. The officials devised excuses not to enter the noisome boarded place; and were glad to confine their survey of the deceased"s living quarters, the newly mended sheds, to a single visit. They filed a ponderous report at the court-house in Aylesbury, and litigations concerning heirship are said to be still in progress amongst the innumerable Whateleys, decayed and undecayed, of the upper Miskatonic valley.
An almost interminable ma.n.u.script in strange characters, written in a huge ledger and adjudged a sort of diary because of the s.p.a.cing and the variations in ink and penmanship, presented a baffling puzzle to those who found it on the old bureau which served as its owner"s desk. After a week of debate it was sent to Miskatonic University, together with the deceased"s collection of strange books, for study and possible translation; but even the best linguists soon saw that it was not likely to be unriddled with ease. No trace of the ancient gold with which Wilbur and Old Whateley always paid their debts has yet been discovered.
It was in the dark of September 9th that the horror broke loose. The hill noises had been very p.r.o.nounced during the evening, and dogs barked frantically all night. Early risers on the 10th noticed a peculiar stench in the air. About seven o"clock Luther Brown, the hired boy at George Corey"s, between Cold Spring Glen and the village, rushed frenziedly back from his morning trip to Ten-Acre Meadow with the cows. He was almost convulsed with fright as he stumbled into the kitchen; and in the yard outside the no less frightened herd were pawing and lowing pitifully, having followed the boy back in the panic they shared with him. Between gasps Luther tried to stammer out his tale to Mrs. Corey.
"Up thar in the rud beyont the glen, Mis" Corey-they"s suthin" ben thar! It smells like thunder, an" all the bushes an" little trees is pushed back from the rud like they"d a haouse ben moved along of it. An" that ain"t the wust, nuther. They"s prints in the rud, Mis" Corey-great raound prints as big as barrel-heads, all sunk daown deep like a elephant had ben along, only they"s a sight more nor four feet could make! I looked at one or two afore I run, an" I see every one was covered with lines spreadin" aout from one place, like as if big palm-leaf fans-twict or three times as big as any they is-hed of ben paounded daown into the rud. An" the smell was awful, like what it is araound Wizard Whateley"s ol" haouse. . . ."
Here he faltered, and seemed to shiver afresh with the fright that had sent him flying home. Mrs. Corey, unable to extract more information, began telephoning the neighbours; thus starting on its rounds the overture of panic that heralded the major terrors. When she got Sally Sawyer, housekeeper at Seth Bishop"s, the nearest place to Whateley"s, it became her turn to listen instead of transmit; for Sally"s boy Chauncey, who slept poorly, had been up on the hill toward Whateley"s, and had dashed back in terror after one look at the place, and at the pasturage where Mr. Bishop"s cows had been left out all night.
"Yes, Mis" Corey," came Sally"s tremulous voice over the party wire, "Cha"ncey he just come back a-postin", and couldn"t haff talk fer bein" scairt! He says Ol" Whateley"s haouse is all blowed up, with the timbers scattered raound like they"d ben dynamite inside; only the bottom floor ain"t through, but is all covered with a kind o" tar-like stuff that smells awful an" drips daown offen the aidges onto the graoun" whar the side timbers is blown away. An" they"s awful kinder marks in the yard, tew-great raound marks bigger raound than a hogshead, an" all sticky with stuff like is on the blowed-up haouse. Cha"ncey he says they leads off into the medders, whar a great swath wider"n a barn is matted daown, an" all the stun walls tumbled every whichway wherever it goes.
"An" he says, says he, Mis" Corey, as haow he sot to look fer Seth"s caows, frighted ez he was; an" faound "em in the upper pasture nigh the Devil"s Hop Yard in an awful shape. Haff on "em"s clean gone, an" nigh haff o" them that"s left is sucked most dry o" blood, with sores on "em like they"s ben on Whateley"s cattle ever senct Lavinny"s black brat was born. Seth he"s gone aout naow to look at "em, though I"ll vaow he wun"t keer ter git very nigh Wizard Whateley"s! Cha"ncey didn"t look keerful ter see whar the big matted-daown swath led arter it leff the pasturage, but he says he thinks it p"inted towards the glen rud to the village.
"I tell ye, Mis" Corey, they"s suthin" abroad as hadn"t orter be abroad, an" I for one think that black Wilbur Whateley, as come to the bad eend he desarved, is at the bottom of the breedin" of it. He wa"n"t all human hisself, I allus says to everybody; an" I think he an" Ol" Whateley must a raised suthin" in that there nailed-up haouse as ain"t even so human as he was. They"s allus ben unseen things araound Dunwich-livin" things-as ain"t human an" ain"t good fer human folks.
"The graoun" was a-talkin" la.s.s night, an" towards mornin" Cha"ncey he heerd the whippoorwills so laoud in Col" Spring Glen he couldn"t sleep nun. Then he thought he heerd another faint-like saound over towards Wizard Whateley"s-a kinder rippin" or tearin" o" wood, like some big box er crate was bein" opened fur off. What with this an" that, he didn"t git to sleep at all till sunup, an" no sooner was he up this mornin", but he"s got to go over to Whateley"s an" see what"s the matter. He see enough, I tell ye, Mis" Corey! This dun"t mean no good, an" I think as all the men-folks ought to git up a party an" do suthin". I know suthin" awful"s abaout, an" feel my time is nigh, though only Gawd knows jest what it is.
"Did your Luther take accaount o" whar them big tracks led tew? No? Wal, Mis" Corey, ef they was on the glen rud this side o" the glen, an" ain"t got to your haouse yet, I calc"late they must go into the glen itself. They would do that. I allus says Col" Spring Glen ain"t no healthy nor decent place. The whippoorwills an" fireflies there never did act like they was creaters o" Gawd, an" they"s them as says ye kin hear strange things a-rushin" an" a-talkin" in the air daown thar ef ye stand in the right place, atween the rock falls an" Bear"s Den."
By that noon fully three-quarters of the men and boys of Dunwich were trooping over the roads and meadows between the new-made Whateley ruins and Cold Spring Glen, examining in horror the vast, monstrous prints, the maimed Bishop cattle, the strange, noisome wreck of the farmhouse, and the bruised, matted vegetation of the fields and roadsides. Whatever had burst loose upon the world had a.s.suredly gone down into the great sinister ravine; for all the trees on the banks were bent and broken, and a great avenue had been gouged in the precipice-hanging underbrush. It was as though a house, launched by an avalanche, had slid down through the tangled growths of the almost vertical slope. From below no sound came, but only a distant, undefinable foetor; and it is not to be wondered at that the men preferred to stay on the edge and argue, rather than descend and beard the unknown Cyclopean horror in its lair. Three dogs that were with the party had barked furiously at first, but seemed cowed and reluctant when near the glen. Someone telephoned the news to the Aylesbury Transcript; but the editor, accustomed to wild tales from Dunwich, did no more than concoct a humorous paragraph about it; an item soon afterward reproduced by the a.s.sociated Press.
That night everyone went home, and every house and barn was barricaded as stoutly as possible. Needless to say, no cattle were allowed to remain in open pasturage. About two in the morning a frightful stench and the savage barking of the dogs awakened the household at Elmer Frye"s, on the eastern edge of Cold Spring Glen, and all agreed that they could hear a sort of m.u.f.fled swishing or lapping sound from somewhere outside. Mrs. Frye proposed telephoning the neighbours, and Elmer was about to agree when the noise of splintering wood burst in upon their deliberations. It came, apparently, from the barn; and was quickly followed by a hideous screaming and stamping amongst the cattle. The dogs slavered and crouched close to the feet of the fear-numbed family. Frye lit a lantern through force of habit, but knew it would be death to go out into that black farmyard. The children and the womenfolk whimpered, kept from screaming by some obscure, vestigial instinct of defence which told them their lives depended on silence. At last the noise of the cattle subsided to a pitiful moaning, and a great snapping, crashing, and crackling ensued. The Fryes, huddled together in the sitting-room, did not dare to move until the last echoes died away far down in Cold Spring Glen. Then, amidst the dismal moans from the stable and the daemoniac piping of late whippoorwills in the glen, Selina Frye tottered to the telephone and spread what news she could of the second phase of the horror.
The next day all the countryside was in a panic; and cowed, uncommunicative groups came and went where the fiendish thing had occurred. Two t.i.tan swaths of destruction stretched from the glen to the Frye farmyard, monstrous prints covered the bare patches of ground, and one side of the old red barn had completely caved in. Of the cattle, only a quarter could be found and identified. Some of these were in curious fragments, and all that survived had to be shot. Earl Sawyer suggested that help be asked from Aylesbury or Arkham, but others maintained it would be of no use. Old Zebulon Whateley, of a branch that hovered about half way between soundness and decadence, made darkly wild suggestions about rites that ought to be practiced on the hill-tops. He came of a line where tradition ran strong, and his memories of chantings in the great stone circles were not altogether connected with Wilbur and his grandfather.
Darkness fell upon a stricken countryside too pa.s.sive to organise for real defence. In a few cases closely related families would band together and watch in the gloom under one roof; but in general there was only a repet.i.tion of the barricading of the night before, and a futile, ineffective gesture of loading muskets and setting pitchforks handily about. Nothing, however, occurred except some hill noises; and when the day came there were many who hoped that the new horror had gone as swiftly as it had come. There were even bold souls who proposed an offensive expedition down in the glen, though they did not venture to set an actual example to the still reluctant majority.
When night came again the barricading was repeated, though there was less huddling together of families. In the morning both the Frye and the Seth Bishop households reported excitement among the dogs and vague sounds and stenches from afar, while early explorers noted with horror a fresh set of the monstrous tracks in the road skirting Sentinel Hill. As before, the sides of the road shewed a bruising indicative of the blasphemously stupendous bulk of the horror; whilst the conformation of the tracks seemed to argue a pa.s.sage in two directions, as if the moving mountain had come from Cold Spring Glen and returned to it along the same path. At the base of the hill a thirty-foot swath of crushed shrubbery saplings led steeply upward, and the seekers gasped when they saw that even the most perpendicular places did not deflect the inexorable trail. Whatever the horror was, it could scale a sheer stony cliff of almost complete verticality; and as the investigators climbed around to the hill"s summit by safer routes they saw that the trail ended-or rather, reversed-there.
It was here that the Whateleys used to build their h.e.l.lish fires and chant their h.e.l.lish rituals by the table-like stone on May-Eve and Hallowma.s.s. Now that very stone formed the centre of a vast s.p.a.ce thrashed around by the mountainous horror, whilst upon its slightly concave surface was a thick and foetid deposit of the same tarry stickiness observed on the floor of the ruined Whateley farmhouse when the horror escaped. Men looked at one another and muttered. Then they looked down the hill. Apparently the horror had descended by a route much the same as that of its ascent. To speculate was futile. Reason, logic, and normal ideas of motivation stood confounded. Only old Zebulon, who was not with the group, could have done justice to the situation or suggested a plausible explanation.
Thursday night began much like the others, but it ended less happily. The whippoorwills in the glen had screamed with such unusual persistence that many could not sleep, and about 3 A.M. all the party telephones rang tremulously. Those who took down their receivers heard a fright-mad voice shriek out, "Help, oh, my Gawd! . . ." and some thought a crashing sound followed the breaking off of the exclamation. There was nothing more. No one dared do anything, and no one knew till morning whence the call came. Then those who had heard it called everyone on the line, and found that only the Fryes did not reply. The truth appeared an hour later, when a hastily a.s.sembled group of armed men trudged out to the Frye place at the head of the glen. It was horrible, yet hardly a surprise. There were more swaths and monstrous prints, but there was no longer any house. It had caved in like an egg-sh.e.l.l, and amongst the ruins nothing living or dead could be discovered. Only a stench and a tarry stickiness. The Elmer Fryes had been erased from Dunwich.
VIII.
In the meantime a quieter yet even more spiritually poignant phase of the horror had been blackly unwinding itself behind the closed door of a shelf-lined room in Arkham. The curious ma.n.u.script record or diary of Wilbur Whateley, delivered to Miskatonic University for translation, had caused much worry and bafflement among the experts in languages both ancient and modern; its very alphabet, notwithstanding a general resemblance to the heavily shaded Arabic used in Mesopotamia, being absolutely unknown to any available authority. The final conclusion of the linguists was that the text represented an artificial alphabet, giving the effect of a cipher; though none of the usual methods of cryptographic solution seemed to furnish any clue, even when applied on the basis of every tongue the writer might conceivably have used. The ancient books taken from Whateley"s quarters, while absorbingly interesting and in several cases promising to open up new and terrible lines of research among philosophers and men of science, were of no a.s.sistance whatever in this matter. One of them, a heavy tome with an iron clasp, was in another unknown alphabet-this one of a very different cast, and resembling Sanscrit more than anything else. The old ledger was at length given wholly into the charge of Dr. Armitage, both because of his peculiar interest in the Whateley matter, and because of his wide linguistic learning and skill in the mystical formulae of antiquity and the Middle Ages.
Armitage had an idea that the alphabet might be something esoterically used by certain forbidden cults which have come down from old times, and which have inherited many forms and traditions from the wizards of the Saracenic world. That question, however, he did not deem vital; since it would be unnecessary to know the origin of the symbols if, as he suspected, they were used as a cipher in a modern language. It was his belief that, considering the great amount of text involved, the writer would scarcely have wished the trouble of using another speech than his own, save perhaps in certain special formulae and incantations. Accordingly he attacked the ma.n.u.script with the preliminary a.s.sumption that the bulk of it was in English.
Dr. Armitage knew, from the repeated failures of his colleagues, that the riddle was a deep and complex one; and that no simple mode of solution could merit even a trial. All through late August he fortified himself with the ma.s.sed lore of cryptography; drawing upon the fullest resources of his own library, and wading night after night amidst the arcana of Trithemius" Poligraphia, Giambattista Porta"s De Furtivis Literarum Notis, De Vigenere"s Traite des Chiffres, Falconer"s Cryptomenysis Patefacta, Davys" and Thicknesse"s eighteenth-century treatises, and such fairly modern authorities as Blair, von Marten, and Kluber"s Kryptographik. He interspersed his study of the books with attacks on the ma.n.u.script itself, and in time became convinced that he had to deal with one of those subtlest and most ingenious of cryptograms, in which many separate lists of corresponding letters are arranged like the multiplication table, and the message built up with arbitrary key-words known only to the initiated. The older authorities seemed rather more helpful than the newer ones, and Armitage concluded that the code of the ma.n.u.script was one of great antiquity, no doubt handed down through a long line of mystical experimenters. Several times he seemed near daylight, only to be set back by some unforeseen obstacle. Then, as September approached, the clouds began to clear. Certain letters, as used in certain parts of the ma.n.u.script, emerged definitely and unmistakably; and it became obvious that the text was indeed in English.
On the evening of September 2nd the last major barrier gave way, and Dr. Armitage read for the first time a continuous pa.s.sage of Wilbur Whateley"s annals. It was in truth a diary, as all had thought; and it was couched in a style clearly shewing the mixed occult erudition and general illiteracy of the strange being who wrote it. Almost the first long pa.s.sage that Armitage deciphered, an entry dated November 26, 1916, proved highly startling and disquieting. It was written, he remembered, by a child of three and a half who looked like a lad of twelve or thirteen.
"Today learned the Aklo for the Sabaoth," it ran, "which did not like, it being answerable from the hill and not from the air. That upstairs more ahead of me than I had thought it would be, and is not like to have much earth brain. Shot Elam Hutchins" collie Jack when he went to bite me, and Elam says he would kill me if he dast. I guess he won"t. Grandfather kept me saying the Dho formula last night, and I think I saw the inner city at the 2 magnetic poles. I shall go to those poles when the earth is cleared off, if I can"t break through with the Dho-Hna formula when I commit it. They from the air told me at Sabbat that it will be years before I can clear off the earth, and I guess grandfather will be dead then, so I shall have to learn all the angles of the planes and all the formulas between the Yr and the Nhhngr. They from outside will help, but they cannot take body without human blood. That upstairs looks it will have the right cast. I can see it a little when I make the Voorish sign or blow the powder of Ibn Ghazi at it, and it is near like them at May-Eve on the Hill. The other face may wear off some. I wonder how I shall look when the earth is cleared and there are no earth beings on it. He that came with the Aklo Sabaoth said I may be transfigured, there being much of outside to work on."
Morning found Dr. Armitage in a cold sweat of terror and a frenzy of wakeful concentration. He had not left the ma.n.u.script all night, but sat at his table under the electric light turning page after page with shaking hands as fast as he could decipher the cryptic text. He had nervously telephoned his wife he would not be home, and when she brought him a breakfast from the house he could scarcely dispose of a mouthful. All that day he read on, now and then halted maddeningly as a reapplication of the complex key became necessary. Lunch and dinner were brought him, but he ate only the smallest fraction of either. Toward the middle of the next night he drowsed off in his chair, but soon woke out of a tangle of nightmares almost as hideous as the truths and menaces to man"s existence that he had uncovered.
On the morning of September 4th Professor Rice and Dr. Morgan insisted on seeing him for a while, and departed trembling and ashen-grey. That evening he went to bed, but slept only fitfully. Wednesday-the next day-he was back at the ma.n.u.script, and began to take copious notes both from the current sections and from those he had already deciphered. In the small hours of that night he slept a little in an easy-chair in his office, but was at the ma.n.u.script again before dawn. Some time before noon his physician, Dr. Hartwell, called to see him and insisted that he cease work. He refused; intimating that it was of the most vital importance for him to complete the reading of the diary, and promising an explanation in due course of time.
That evening, just as twilight fell, he finished his terrible perusal and sank back exhausted. His wife, bringing his dinner, found him in a half-comatose state; but he was conscious enough to warn her off with a sharp cry when he saw her eyes wander toward the notes he had taken. Weakly rising, he gathered up the scribbled papers and sealed them all in a great envelope, which he immediately placed in his inside coat pocket. He had sufficient strength to get home, but was so clearly in need of medical aid that Dr. Hartwell was summoned at once. As the doctor put him to bed he could only mutter over and over again, "But what, in G.o.d"s name, can we do?"
Dr. Armitage slept, but was partly delirious the next day. He made no explanations to Hartwell, but in his calmer moments spoke of the imperative need of a long conference with Rice and Morgan. His wilder wanderings were very startling indeed, including frantic appeals that something in a boarded-up farmhouse be destroyed, and fantastic references to some plan for the extirpation of the entire human race and all animal and vegetable life from the earth by some terrible elder race of beings from another dimension. He would shout that the world was in danger, since the Elder Things wished to strip it and drag it away from the solar system and cosmos of matter into some other plane or phase of ent.i.ty from which it had once fallen, vigintillions of aeons ago. At other times he would call for the dreaded Necronomicon and the Daemonolatreia of Remigius, in which he seemed hopeful of finding some formula to check the peril he conjured up.
"Stop them, stop them!" he would shout. "Those Whateleys meant to let them in, and the worst of all is left! Tell Rice and Morgan we must do something-it"s a blind business, but I know how to make the powder. . . . It hasn"t been fed since the second of August, when Wilbur came here to his death, and at that rate. . . ."
But Armitage had a sound physique despite his seventy-three years, and slept off his disorder that night without developing any real fever. He woke late Friday, clear of head, though sober with a gnawing fear and tremendous sense of responsibility. Sat.u.r.day afternoon he felt able to go over to the library and summon Rice and Morgan for a conference, and the rest of that day and evening the three men tortured their brains in the wildest speculation and the most desperate debate. Strange and terrible books were drawn voluminously from the stack shelves and from secure places of storage; and diagrams and formulae were copied with feverish haste and in bewildering abundance. Of scepticism there was none. All three had seen the body of Wilbur Whateley as it lay on the floor in a room of that very building, and after that not one of them could feel even slightly inclined to treat the diary as a madman"s raving.
Opinions were divided as to notifying the Ma.s.sachusetts State Police, and the negative finally won. There were things involved which simply could not be believed by those who had not seen a sample, as indeed was made clear during certain subsequent investigations. Late at night the conference disbanded without having developed a definite plan, but all day Sunday Armitage was busy comparing formulae and mixing chemicals obtained from the college laboratory. The more he reflected on the h.e.l.lish diary, the more he was inclined to doubt the efficacy of any material agent in stamping out the ent.i.ty which Wilbur Whateley had left behind him-the earth-threatening ent.i.ty which, unknown to him, was to burst forth in a few hours and become the memorable Dunwich horror.
Monday was a repet.i.tion of Sunday with Dr. Armitage, for the task in hand required an infinity of research and experiment. Further consultations of the monstrous diary brought about various changes of plan, and he knew that even in the end a large amount of uncertainty must remain. By Tuesday he had a definite line of action mapped out, and believed he would try a trip to Dunwich within a week. Then, on Wednesday, the great shock came. Tucked obscurely away in a corner of the Arkham Advertiser was a facetious little item from the a.s.sociated Press, telling what a record-breaking monster the bootleg whiskey of Dunwich had raised up. Armitage, half stunned, could only telephone for Rice and Morgan. Far into the night they discussed, and the next day was a whirlwind of preparation on the part of them all. Armitage knew he would be meddling with terrible powers, yet saw that there was no other way to annul the deeper and more malign meddling which others had done before him.
IX.
Friday morning Armitage, Rice, and Morgan set out by motor for Dunwich, arriving at the village about one in the afternoon. The day was pleasant, but even in the brightest sunlight a kind of quiet dread and portent seemed to hover about the strangely domed hills and the deep, shadowy ravines of the stricken region. Now and then on some mountain-top a gaunt circle of stones could be glimpsed against the sky. From the air of hushed fright at Osborn"s store they knew something hideous had happened, and soon learned of the annihilation of the Elmer Frye house and family. Throughout that afternoon they rode around Dunwich; questioning the natives concerning all that had occurred, and seeing for themselves with rising pangs of horror the drear Frye ruins with their lingering traces of the tarry stickiness, the blasphemous tracks in the Frye yard, the wounded Seth Bishop cattle, and the enormous swaths of disturbed vegetation in various places. The trail up and down Sentinel Hill seemed to Armitage of almost cataclysmic significance, and he looked long at the sinister altar-like stone on the summit.
At length the visitors, apprised of a party of State Police which had come from Aylesbury that morning in response to the first telephone reports of the Frye tragedy, decided to seek out the officers and compare notes as far as practicable. This, however, they found more easily planned than performed; since no sign of the party could be found in any direction. There had been five of them in a car, but now the car stood empty near the ruins in the Frye yard. The natives, all of whom had talked with the policemen, seemed at first as perplexed as Armitage and his companions. Then old Sam Hutchins thought of something and turned pale, nudging Fred Farr and pointing to the dank, deep hollow that yawned close by.
"Gawd," he gasped, "I telled "em not ter go daown into the glen, an" I never thought n.o.body"d dew it with them tracks an" that smell an" the whippoorwills a-screechin" daown thar in the dark o" noonday. . . ."
A cold shudder ran through natives and visitors alike, and every ear seemed strained in a kind of instinctive, unconscious listening. Armitage, now that he had actually come upon the horror and its monstrous work, trembled with the responsibility he felt to be his. Night would soon fall, and it was then that the mountainous blasphemy lumbered upon its eldritch course. Negotium perambulans in tenebris. . . . The old librarian rehea.r.s.ed the formulae he had memorised, and clutched the paper containing the alternative one he had not memorised. He saw that his electric flashlight was in working order. Rice, beside him, took from a valise a metal sprayer of the sort used in combating insects; whilst Morgan uncased the big-game rifle on which he relied despite his colleague"s warnings that no material weapon would be of help.
Armitage, having read the hideous diary, knew painfully well what kind of a manifestation to expect; but he did not add to the fright of the Dunwich people by giving any hints or clues. He hoped that it might be conquered without any revelation to the world of the monstrous thing it had escaped. As the shadows gathered, the natives commenced to disperse homeward, anxious to bar themselves indoors despite the present evidence that all human locks and bolts were useless before a force that could bend trees and crush houses when it chose. They shook their heads at the visitors" plan to stand guard at the Frye ruins near the glen; and as they left, had little expectancy of ever seeing the watchers again.
There were rumblings under the hills that night, and the whippoorwills piped threateningly. Once in a while a wind, sweeping up out of Cold Spring Glen, would bring a touch of ineffable foetor to the heavy night air; such a foetor as all three of the watchers had smelled once before, when they stood above a dying thing that had pa.s.sed for fifteen years and a half as a human being. But the looked-for terror did not appear. Whatever was down there in the glen was biding its time, and Armitage told his colleagues it would be suicidal to try to attack it in the dark.
Morning came wanly, and the night-sounds ceased. It was a grey, bleak day, with now and then a drizzle of rain; and heavier and heavier clouds seemed to be piling themselves up beyond the hills to the northwest. The men from Arkham were undecided what to do. Seeking shelter from the increasing rainfall beneath one of the few undestroyed Frye outbuildings, they debated the wisdom of waiting, or of taking the aggressive and going down into the glen in quest of their nameless, monstrous quarry. The downpour waxed in heaviness, and distant peals of thunder sounded from far horizons. Sheet lightning shimmered, and then a forky bolt flashed near at hand, as if descending into the accursed glen itself. The sky grew very dark, and the watchers hoped that the storm would prove a short, sharp one followed by clear weather.
It was still gruesomely dark when, not much over an hour later, a confused babel of voices sounded down the road. Another moment brought to view a frightened group of more than a dozen men, running, shouting, and even whimpering hysterically. Someone in the lead began sobbing out words, and the Arkham men started violently when those words developed a coherent form.
"Oh, my Gawd, my Gawd," the voice choked out. "It"s a-goin" agin, an" this time by day! It"s aout-it"s aout an" a-movin" this very minute, an" only the Lord knows when it"ll be on us all!"
The speaker panted into silence, but another took up his message.
"Nigh on a haour ago Zeb Whateley here heerd the "phone a-ringin", an" it was Mis" Corey, George"s wife, that lives daown by the junction. She says the hired boy Luther was aout drivin" in the caows from the storm arter the big bolt, when he see all the trees a-bendin" at the maouth o" the glen-opposite side ter this-an" smelt the same awful smell like he smelt when he faound the big tracks las" Monday mornin". An" she says he says they was a swishin", lappin" sound, more nor what the bendin" trees an" bushes could make, an" all on a suddent the trees along the rud begun ter git pushed one side, an" they was a awful stompin" an" splashin" in the mud. But mind ye, Luther he didn"t see nothin" at all, only just the bendin" trees an" underbrush.
"Then fur ahead where Bishop"s Brook goes under the rud he heerd a awful creakin" an" strainin" on the bridge, an" says he could tell the saound o" wood a-startin" to crack an" split. An" all the whiles he never see a thing, only them trees an" bushes a-bendin". An" when the swishin" saound got very fur off-on the rud towards Wizard Whateley"s an" Sentinel Hill-Luther he had the guts ter step up whar he"d heerd it furst an" look at the graound. It was all mud an" water, an" the sky was dark, an" the rain was wipin" aout all tracks abaout as fast as could be; but beginnin" at the glen maouth, whar the trees had moved, they was still some o" them awful prints big as bar"ls like he seen Monday."
At this point the first excited speaker interrupted.
"But that ain"t the trouble naow-that was only the start. Zeb here was callin" folks up an" everybody was a-listenin" in when a call from Seth Bishop"s cut in. His haousekeeper Sally was carryin" on fit ter kill-she"d jest seed the trees a-bendin" beside the rud, an" says they was a kind o" mushy saound, like a elephant puffin" an" treadin", a-headin" fer the haouse. Then she up an" spoke suddent of a fearful smell, an" says her boy Cha"ncey was a-screamin" as haow it was jest like what he smelt up to the Whateley rewins Monday mornin". An" the dogs was all barkin" an" whinin" awful.
"An" then she let aout a turrible yell, an" says the shed daown the rud had jest caved in like the storm hed blowed it over, only the wind wa"n"t strong enough to dew that. Everybody was a-listenin", an" we could hear lots o" folks on the wire a-gaspin". All to onct Sally she yelled agin, an" says the front yard picket fence hed just crumbled up, though they wa"n"t no sign o" what done it. Then everybody on the line could hear Cha"ncey an" ol" Seth Bishop a-yellin" tew, an" Sally was shriekin" aout that suthin" heavy hed struck the haouse-not lightnin" nor nothin", but suthin" heavy agin the front, that kep" a-launchin" itself agin an" agin, though ye couldn"t see nothin" aout the front winders. An" then . . . an" then . . ."
Lines of fright deepened on every face; and Armitage, shaken as he was, had barely poise enough to prompt the speaker.
"An" then . . . Sally she yelled aout, "O help, the haouse is a-cavin" in" . . . an" on the wire we could hear a turrible crashin", an" a hull flock o" screamin" . . . jest like when Elmer Frye"s place was took, only wuss. . . ."
The man paused, and another of the crowd spoke.
"That"s all-not a saound nor squeak over the "phone arter that. Jest still-like. We that heerd it got aout Fords an" wagons an" raounded up as many able-bodied menfolks as we could git, at Corey"s place, an" come up here ter see what yew thought best ter dew. Not but what I think it"s the Lord"s jedgment fer our iniquities, that no mortal kin ever set aside."
Armitage saw that the time for positive action had come, and spoke decisively to the faltering group of frightened rustics.
"We must follow it, boys." He made his voice as rea.s.suring as possible. "I believe there"s a chance of putting it out of business. You men know that those Whateleys were wizards-well, this thing is a thing of wizardry, and must be put down by the same means. I"ve seen Wilbur Whateley"s diary and read some of the strange old books he used to read; and I think I know the right kind of spell to recite to make the thing fade away. Of course, one can"t be sure, but we can always take a chance. It"s invisible-I knew it would be-but there"s a powder in this long-distance sprayer that might make it shew up for a second. Later on we"ll try it. It"s a frightful thing to have alive, but it isn"t as bad as what Wilbur would have let in if he"d lived longer. You"ll never know what the world has escaped. Now we"ve only this one thing to fight, and it can"t multiply. It can, though, do a lot of harm; so we mustn"t hesitate to rid the community of it.
"We must follow it-and the way to begin is to go to the place that has just been wrecked. Let somebody lead the way-I don"t know your roads very well, but I"ve an idea there might be a shorter cut across lots. How about it?"
The men shuffled about a moment, and then Earl Sawyer spoke softly, pointing with a grimy finger through the steadily lessening rain.
"I guess ye kin git to Seth Bishop"s quickest by cuttin" acrost the lower medder here, wadin" the brook at the low place, an" climbin" through Carrier"s mowin" and the timber-lot beyont. That comes aout on the upper rud mighty nigh Seth"s-a leetle t"other side."
Armitage, with Rice and Morgan, started to walk in the direction indicated; and most of the natives followed slowly. The sky was growing lighter, and there were signs that the storm had worn itself away. When Armitage inadvertently took a wrong direction, Joe Osborn warned him and walked ahead to shew the right one. Courage and confidence were mounting; though the twilight of the almost perpendicular wooded hill which lay toward the end of their short cut, and among whose fantastic ancient trees they had to scramble as if up a ladder, put these qualities to a severe test.
At length they emerged on a muddy road to find the sun coming out. They were a little beyond the Seth Bishop place, but bent trees and hideously unmistakable tracks shewed what had pa.s.sed by. Only a few moments were consumed in surveying the ruins just around the bend. It was the Frye incident all over again, and nothing dead or living was found in either of the collapsed sh.e.l.ls which had been the Bishop house and barn. No one cared to remain there amidst the stench and tarry stickiness, but all turned instinctively to the line of horrible prints leading on toward the wrecked Whateley farmhouse and the altar-crowned slopes of Sentinel Hill.
As the men pa.s.sed the site of Wilbur Whateley"s abode they shuddered visibly, and seemed again to mix hesitancy with their zeal. It was no joke tracking down something as big as a house that one could not see, but that had all the vicious malevolence of a daemon. Opposite the base of Sentinel Hill the tracks left the road, and there was a fresh bending and matting visible along the broad swath marking the monster"s former route to and from the summit.
Armitage produced a pocket telescope of considerable power and scanned the steep green side of the hill. Then he handed the instrument to Morgan, whose sight was keener. After a moment of gazing Morgan cried out sharply, pa.s.sing the gla.s.s to Earl Sawyer and indicating a certain spot on the slope with his finger. Sawyer, as clumsy as most non-users of optical devices are, fumbled a while; but eventually focussed the lenses with Armitage"s aid. When he did so his cry was less restrained than Morgan"s had been.
"Gawd almighty, the gra.s.s an" bushes is a-movin"! It"s a-goin" up-slow-like-creepin" up ter the top this minute, heaven only knows what fur!"
Then the germ of panic seemed to spread among the seekers. It was one thing to chase the nameless ent.i.ty, but quite another to find it. Spells might be all right-but suppose they weren"t? Voices began questioning Armitage about what he knew of the thing, and no reply seemed quite to satisfy. Everyone seemed to feel himself in close proximity to phases of Nature and of being utterly forbidden, and wholly outside the sane experience of mankind.
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 focussing 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 gla.s.s was pa.s.sed around. It was hard going, and Armitage had to be helped more than once. High above the toiling group the great swath trembled as its h.e.l.lish maker re-pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed it.
Then Wesley Corey, who had taken the gla.s.s, 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 this sprayer was expected to give the unseen horror a moment of visibility. Two or three men shut their eyes, but Curtis Whateley s.n.a.t.c.hed back the telescope and strained his vision to the utmost. He saw that Rice, from the party"s point of vantage above and behind the ent.i.ty, 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 had held the instrument, dropped it with a piercing shriek into the ankle-deep mud of the road. He reeled, and would have crumpled 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 hogsheads 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 stovepipes, an" all a-tossin" an" openin" an" shuttin" . . . all grey, with kinder blue or purple rings . . . an" Gawd in 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 gra.s.s. 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 toward 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 circ.u.mstance 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 gla.s.s 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 shewed 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-ba.s.s 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.
"Ygnaiih . . . ygnaiih . . . thflthkh"ngha . . . Yog-Sothoth . . ." rang the hideous croaking out of s.p.a.ce. "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-ya-ya-ya-yahaah-e"yayayayaaaa . . . ngh"aaaaa . . . ngh"aaaa . . . 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, gra.s.s, and underbrush 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 gra.s.s 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 forever," 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 crystallised 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 heerd 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 s.p.a.ce; 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 pa.s.sing 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."
The Whisperer in Darkness.
(1930).
I.
Bear in mind closely that I did not see any actual visual horror at the end. To say that a mental shock was the cause of what I inferred-that last straw which sent me racing out of the lonely Akeley farmhouse and through the wild domed hills of Vermont in a commandeered motor at night-is to ignore the plainest facts of my final experience. Notwithstanding the deep extent to which I shared the information and speculations of Henry Akeley, the things I saw and heard, and the admitted vividness of the impression produced on me by these things, I cannot prove even now whether I was right or wrong in my hideous inference. For after all, Akeley"s disappearance establishes nothing. People found nothing amiss in his house despite the bullet-marks on the outside and inside. It was just as though he had walked out casually for a ramble in the hills and failed to return. There was not even a sign that a guest had been there, or that those horrible cylinders and machines had been stored in the study. That he had mortally feared the crowded green hills and endless trickle of brooks among which he had been born and reared, means nothing at all, either; for thousands are subject to just such morbid fears. Eccentricity, moreover, could easily account for his strange acts and apprehensions toward the last.
The whole matter began, so far as I am concerned, with the historic and unprecedented Vermont floods of November 3, 1927. I was then, as now, an instructor of literature at Miskatonic University in Arkham, Ma.s.sachusetts, and an enthusiastic amateur student of New England folklore. Shortly after the flood, amidst the varied reports of hardship, suffering, and organised relief which filled the press, there appeared certain odd stories of things found floating in some of the swollen rivers; so that many of my friends embarked on curious discussions and appealed to me to shed what light I could on the subject. I felt flattered at having my folklore study taken so seriously, and did what I could to belittle the wild, vague tales which seemed so clearly an outgrowth of old rustic superst.i.tions. It amused me to find several persons of education who insisted that some stratum of obscure, distorted fact might underlie the rumours.
The tales thus brought to my notice came mostly through newspaper cuttings; though one yarn had an oral source and was repeated to a friend of mine in a letter from his mother in Hardwick, Vermont. The type of thing described was essentially the same in all cases, though there seemed to be three separate instances involved-one connected with the Winooski River near Montpelier, another attached to the West River in Windham County beyond Newfane, and a third centring in the Pa.s.sumpsic in Caledonia County above Lyndonville. Of course many of the stray items mentioned other instances, but on a.n.a.lysis they all seemed to boil down to these three. In each case country folk reported seeing one or more very bizarre and disturbing objects in the surging waters that poured down from the unfrequented hills, and there was a widespread tendency to connect these sights with a primitive, half-forgotten cycle of whispered legend which old people resurrected for the occasion.
What people thought they saw were organic shapes not quite like any they had ever seen before. Naturally, there were many human bodies washed along by the streams in that tragic period; but those who described these strange shapes felt quite sure that they were not human, despite some superficial resemblances in size and general outline. Nor, said the witnesses, could they have been any kind of animal known to Vermont. They were pinkish things about five feet long; with crustaceous bodies bearing vast pairs of dorsal fins or membraneous wings and several sets of articulated limbs, and with a sort of convoluted ellipsoid, covered with mult.i.tudes of very short antennae, where a head would ordinarily be. It was really remarkable how closely the reports from different sources tended to coincide; though the wonder was lessened by the fact that the old legends, shared at one time throughout the hill country, furnished a morbidly vivid picture which might well have coloured the imaginations of all the witnesses concerned. It was my conclusion that such witnesses-in every case naive and simple backwoods folk-had glimpsed the battered and bloated bodies of human beings or farm animals in the whirling currents; and had allowed the half-remembered folklore to invest these pitiful objects with fantastic attributes.
The ancient folklore, while cloudy, evasive, and largely forgotten by the present generation, was of a highly singular character, and obviously reflected the influence of still earlier Indian tales. I knew it well, though I had never been in Vermont, through the exceedingly rare monograph of Eli Davenport, which embraces material orally obtained prior to 1839 among the oldest people of the state. This material, moreover, closely coincided with tales which I had personally heard from elderly rustics in the mountains of New Hampshire. Briefly summarised, it hinted at a hidden race of monstrous beings which lurked somewhere among the remoter hills-in the deep woods of the highest peaks, and the dark valleys where streams trickle from unknown sources. These beings were seldom glimpsed, but evidences of their presence were reported by those who had ventured farther than usual up the slopes of certain mountains or into certain deep, steep-sided gorges that even the wolves shunned.