“Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimaeras—dire stories of Celaeno and the
Harpies—may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition—but they were there
before. They are transcripts, types—the archetypes are in us, and eternal. How else
should the recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come to affect us at
all? Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity
of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? O, least of all! These terrors are of older
standing. They date beyond body—or without the body, they would have been the
same. . . . That the kind of fear here treated is purely spiritual—that
it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on earth, that it predominates in the period
of our sinless infancy—are difficulties the solution of which might afford some probable
insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence.”
—Charles Lamb: “Witches and Other Night-Fears”
I.
When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of the
Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean’s Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country.
The ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the
ruts of the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent forest belts seem too large, and
the wild weeds, brambles, and grasses attain a luxuriance not often found in settled regions.
At the same time the planted fields appear singularly few and barren; while the sparsely scattered
houses wear a surprisingly uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation. Without knowing
why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled, solitary figures spied now and then on
crumbling doorsteps or on the sloping, rock-strown meadows. Those figures are so silent and
furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden things, with which it would be better
to have nothing to do. When a rise in the road brings the mountains in view above the deep woods,
the feeling of strange uneasiness is increased. The summits are too rounded and symmetrical
to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and sometimes the sky silhouettes with especial
clearness the queer circles of tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned.

Gorges and ravines of problematical depth intersect the way, and the crude
wooden bridges always seem of dubious safety. When the road dips again there are stretches of
marshland that one instinctively dislikes, and indeed almost fears at evening when unseen whippoorwills
chatter and the fireflies come out in abnormal profusion to dance to the raucous, creepily insistent
rhythms of stridently piping bull-frogs. The thin, shining line of the Miskatonic’s upper
reaches has an oddly serpent-like suggestion as it winds close to the feet of the domed hills
among which it rises.

As the hills draw nearer, one heeds their wooded sides more than their stone-crowned
tops. Those sides loom up so darkly and precipitously that one wishes they would keep their
distance, but there is no road by which to escape them. Across a covered bridge one sees a small
village huddled between the stream and the vertical slope of Round Mountain, and wonders at
the cluster of rotting gambrel roofs bespeaking an earlier architectural period than that of
the neighbouring region. It is not reassuring to see, on a closer glance, that most of the houses
are deserted and falling to ruin, and that the broken-steepled church now harbours the one slovenly
mercantile establishment of the hamlet. One dreads to trust the tenebrous tunnel of the bridge,
yet there is no way to avoid it. Once across, it is hard to prevent the impression of a faint,
malign odour about the village street, as of the massed mould and decay of centuries. It is
always a relief to get clear of the place, and to follow the narrow road around the base of
the hills and across the level country beyond till it rejoins the Aylesbury pike. Afterward
one sometimes learns that one has been through Dunwich.

Outsiders visit Dunwich as seldom as possible, and since a certain season of
horror all the signboards pointing toward it have been taken down. The scenery, judged by any
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 unnamable 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 my self 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 cou’d
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 hill-tops, 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.
II.
It was in the township of Dunwich, in a large and partly inhabited farmhouse set against a hillside
four miles from the village and a mile and a half from any other dwelling, that Wilbur Whateley
was born at 5 A.M. on Sunday, the second of February, 1913. This date was recalled because it
was Candlemas, which people in Dunwich curiously observe under another name; and because the
noises in the hills had sounded, and all the dogs of the countryside had barked persistently,
throughout the night before. Less worthy of notice was the fact that the mother was one of the
decadent Whateleys, a somewhat deformed, unattractive albino woman of thirty-five, living with
an aged and half-insane father about whom the most frightful tales of wizardry had been whispered
in his youth. Lavinia Whateley had no known husband, but according to the custom of the region
made no attempt to disavow the child; concerning the other side of whose ancestry the country
folk might—and did—speculate as widely as they chose. On the contrary, she seemed
strangely proud of the dark, goatish-looking infant who formed such a contrast to her own sickly
and pink-eyed albinism, and was heard to mutter many curious prophecies about its unusual powers
and tremendous future.

Lavinia was one who would be apt to mutter such things, for she was a lone
creature given to wandering amidst thunderstorms in the hills and trying to read the great odorous
books which her father had inherited through two centuries of Whateleys, and which were fast
falling to pieces with age and worm-holes. She had never been to school, but was filled with
disjointed scraps of ancient lore that Old Whateley had taught her. The remote farmhouse had
always been feared because of Old Whateley’s reputation for black magic, and the unexplained
death by violence of Mrs. Whateley when Lavinia was twelve years old had not helped to make
the place popular. Isolated among strange influences, Lavinia was fond of wild and grandiose
day-dreams and singular occupations; nor was her leisure much taken up by household cares in
a home from which all standards of order and cleanliness had long since disappeared.

There was a hideous screaming which echoed above even the hill noises and the
dogs’ barking on the night Wilbur was born, but no known doctor or midwife presided at
his coming. Neighbours knew nothing of him till a week afterward, when Old Whateley drove his
sleigh through the snow into Dunwich Village and discoursed incoherently to the group of loungers
at Osborn’s general store. There seemed to be a change in the old man—an added element
of furtiveness in the clouded brain which subtly transformed him from an object to a subject
of fear—though he was not one to be perturbed by any common family event. Amidst it all
he shewed some trace of the pride later noticed in his daughter, and what he said of the child’s
paternity was remembered by many of his hearers years afterward.

“I dun’t keer what folks think—ef Lavinny’s boy looked
like his pa, he wouldn’t look like nothin’ ye expeck. Ye needn’t think the
only folks is the folks hereabaouts. Lavinny’s read some, an’ has seed some things
the most o’ ye only tell abaout. I calc’late her man is as good a husban’
as ye kin find this side of Aylesbury; an’ ef ye knowed as much abaout the hills as I
dew, ye wouldn’t ast no better church weddin’ nor her’n. Let me tell ye suthin’—
some
day yew folks’ll hear a child o’ Lavinny’s a-callin’ its father’s
name on the top o’ Sentinel Hill!”

The only persons who saw Wilbur during the first month of his life were old
Zechariah Whateley, of the undecayed Whateleys, and Earl Sawyer’s common-law wife, Mamie
Bishop. Mamie’s visit was frankly one of curiosity, and her subsequent tales did justice
to her observations; but Zechariah came to lead a pair of Alderney cows which Old Whateley had
bought of his son Curtis. This marked the beginning of a course of cattle-buying on the part
of small Wilbur’s family which ended only in 1928, when the Dunwich horror came and went;
yet at no time did the ramshackle Whateley barn seem overcrowded with livestock. There came
a period when people were curious enough to steal up and count the herd that grazed precariously
on the steep hillside above the old farmhouse, and they could never find more than ten or twelve
anaemic, bloodless-looking specimens. Evidently some blight or distemper, perhaps sprung from
the unwholesome pasturage or the diseased fungi and timbers of the filthy barn, caused a heavy
mortality amongst the Whateley animals. Odd wounds or sores, having something of the aspect
of incisions, seemed to afflict the visible cattle; and once or twice during the earlier months
certain callers fancied they could discern similar sores about the throats of the grey, unshaven
old man and his slatternly, crinkly-haired albino daughter.

In the spring after Wilbur’s birth Lavinia resumed her customary rambles
in the hills, bearing in her misproportioned arms the swarthy child. Public interest in the
Whateleys subsided after most of the country folk had seen the baby, and no one bothered to
comment on the swift development which that newcomer seemed every day to exhibit. Wilbur’s
growth was indeed phenomenal, for within three months of his birth he had attained a size and
muscular power not usually found in infants under a full year of age. His motions and even his
vocal sounds shewed a restraint and deliberateness highly peculiar in an infant, and no one
was really unprepared when, at seven months, he began to walk unassisted, with falterings which
another month was sufficient to remove.

It was somewhat after this time—on Hallowe’en—that a great
blaze was seen at midnight on the top of Sentinel Hill where the old table-like stone stands
amidst its tumulus of ancient bones. Considerable talk was started when Silas Bishop—of
the undecayed Bishops—mentioned having seen the boy running sturdily up that hill ahead
of his mother about an hour before the blaze was remarked. Silas was rounding up a stray heifer,
but he nearly forgot his mission when he fleetingly spied the two figures in the dim light of
his lantern. They darted almost noiselessly through the underbrush, and the astonished watcher
seemed to think they were entirely unclothed. Afterward he could not be sure about the boy,
who may have had some kind of a fringed belt and a pair of dark trunks or trousers on. Wilbur
was never subsequently seen alive and conscious without complete and tightly buttoned attire,
the disarrangement or threatened disarrangement of which always seemed to fill him with anger
and alarm. His contrast with his squalid mother and grandfather in this respect was thought
very notable until the horror of 1928 suggested the most valid of reasons.

The next January gossips were mildly interested in the fact that “Lavinny’s
black brat” had commenced to talk, and at the age of only eleven months. His speech was
somewhat remarkable both because of its difference from the ordinary accents of the region,
and because it displayed a freedom from infantile lisping of which many children of three or
four might well be proud. The boy was not talkative, yet when he spoke he seemed to reflect
some elusive element wholly unpossessed by Dunwich and its denizens. The strangeness did not
reside in what he said, or even in the simple idioms he used; but seemed vaguely linked with
his intonation or with the internal organs that produced the spoken sounds. His facial aspect,
too, was remarkable for its maturity; for though he shared his mother’s and grandfather’s
chinlessness, his firm and precociously shaped nose united with the expression of his large,
dark, almost Latin eyes to give him an air of quasi-adulthood and well-nigh preternatural intelligence.
He was, however, exceedingly ugly despite his appearance of brilliancy; there being something
almost goatish or animalistic about his thick lips, large-pored, yellowish skin, coarse crinkly
hair, and oddly elongated ears. He was soon disliked even more decidedly than his mother and
grandsire, and all conjectures about him were spiced with references to the bygone magic of
Old Whateley, and how the hills once shook when he shrieked the dreadful name of
Yog-Sothoth
in the midst of a circle of stones with a great book open in his arms before him. Dogs abhorred
the boy, and he was always obliged to take various defensive measures against their barking
menace.
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,
peaked-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 shew
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 story of the house, he was a no less thorough
craftsman. His mania shewed 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
story. 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 sot 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 diligently over the queer
pictures and charts in his grandfather’s books, while Old Whateley would instruct and
catechise 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 synchronised 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 toward 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 story. 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-peddler tried the locked door leading to the stairway.
That peddler 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 a 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, the shelves of strange books, the sealed second story 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 tool-shed
abandoned when the house was finally repaired; and like the faint odours which he sometimes
thought he caught near the stone circles 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.
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 farmhouse. In the course of time callers professed to hear sounds in the
sealed upper story 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 story and the peaked roof.
They had torn down the great central chimney, too, and fitted the rusty range with a flimsy
outside tin stovepipe.

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.

Toward 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 sarve 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 pandaemoniac 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 country folk 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 afterward 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’s disappearance, and very few ever approached his neighbourhood now.
His height had increased to more than seven feet, and shewed no signs of ceasing its development.
V.
The following winter brought an event no less strange than Wilbur’s first trip outside
the Dunwich region. Correspondence with the Widener Library at Harvard, the Bibliothèque Nationale
in Paris, the British Museum, the University of Buenos Ayres, and the Library of Miskatonic
University of Arkham had failed to get him the loan of a book he desperately wanted; so at length
he set out in person, shabby, dirty, bearded, and uncouth of dialect, to consult the copy at
Miskatonic, which was the nearest to him geographically. Almost eight feet tall, and carrying
a cheap new valise from Osborn’s general store, this dark and goatish gargoyle appeared
one day in Arkham in quest of the dreaded volume kept under lock and key at the college library—the
hideous
Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred in Olaus Wormius’ Latin version,
as printed in Spain in the seventeenth century. He had never seen a city before, but had no
thought save to find his way to the university grounds; where, indeed, he passed heedlessly
by the great white-fanged watchdog that barked with unnatural fury and enmity, and tugged frantically
at its stout chain.

Wilbur had with him the priceless but imperfect copy of Dr. Dee’s English
version which his grandfather had bequeathed him, and upon receiving access to the Latin copy
he at once began to collate the two texts with the aim of discovering a certain passage which
would have come on the 751st page of his own defective volume. This much he could not civilly
refrain from telling the librarian—the same erudite Henry Armitage (A.M. Miskatonic, Ph.
D. Princeton, Litt. D. Johns Hopkins) who had once called at the farm, and who now politely
plied him with questions. He was looking, he had to admit, for a kind of formula or incantation
containing the frightful name
Yog-Sothoth, and it puzzled him to find discrepancies,
duplications, and ambiguities which made the matter of determination far from easy. As he copied
the formula he finally chose, Dr. Armitage looked involuntarily over his shoulder at the open
pages; the left-hand one of which, in the Latin version, contained such monstrous threats to
the peace and sanity of the world.
“Nor is it to be thought,” ran the text as Armitage mentally translated
it, “that man is either the oldest or the last of earth’s masters, or that the common
bulk of life and substance walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones
shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, They walk serene and primal, undimensioned
and to us unseen. Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth
is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth.
He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again.
He knows where They have trod earth’s fields, and where They still tread them, and why
no one can behold Them as They tread. By Their smell can men sometimes know Them near, but of
Their semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those They have begotten
on mankind; and of those are there many sorts, differing in likeness from man’s truest
eidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is Them. They walk unseen and
foul in lonely places where the Words have been spoken and the Rites howled through at their
Seasons. The wind gibbers with Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness.
They bend the forest and crush the city, yet may not forest or city behold the hand that smites.
Kadath in the cold waste hath known Them, and what man knows Kadath? The ice desert of the South
and the sunken isles of Ocean hold stones whereon Their seal is engraven, but who hath seen
the deep frozen city or the sealed tower long garlanded with seaweed and barnacles? Great Cthulhu
is Their cousin, yet can he spy Them only dimly. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! As a foulness
shall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation
is even one with your guarded threshold. Yog-Sothoth is the key to the gate, whereby
the spheres meet. Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules
now. After summer is winter, and after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here
shall They reign again.”

Dr. Armitage, associating what he was reading with what he had heard of Dunwich
and its brooding presences, and of Wilbur Whateley and his dim, hideous aura that stretched
from a dubious birth to a cloud of probable matricide, felt a wave of fright as tangible as
a draught of the tomb’s cold clamminess. The bent, goatish giant before him seemed like
the spawn of another planet or dimension; like something only partly of mankind, and linked
to black gulfs of essence and entity that stretch like titan phantasms beyond all spheres of
force and matter, space and time. Presently Wilbur raised his head and began speaking in that
strange, resonant fashion which hinted at sound-producing organs unlike the run of mankind’s.

“Mr. Armitage,” he said, “I calc’late I’ve got
to take that book home. They’s things in it I’ve got to try under sarten conditions
that I can’t git here, an’ it ’ud be a mortal sin to let a red-tape rule hold
me up. Let me take it along, Sir, an’ I’ll swar they wun’t nobody know the
difference. I dun’t need to tell ye I’ll take good keer of it. It wa’n’t
me that put this Dee copy in the shape it is. . . .”

He stopped as he saw firm denial on the librarian’s face, and his own
goatish features grew crafty. Armitage, half-ready to tell him he might make a copy of what
parts he needed, thought suddenly of the possible consequences and checked himself. There was
too much responsiblity in giving such a being the key to such blasphemous outer spheres. Whateley
saw how things stood, and tried to answer lightly.

“Wal, all right, ef ye feel that way abaout it. Maybe Harvard wun’t
be so fussy as yew be.” And without saying more he rose and strode out of the building,
stooping at each doorway.

Armitage heard the savage yelping of the great watchdog, and studied Whateley’s
gorilla-like lope as he crossed the bit of campus visible from the window. He thought of the
wild tales he had heard, and recalled the old Sunday stories in the
Advertiser; these
things, and the lore he had picked up from Dunwich rustics and villagers during his one visit
there. Unseen things not of earth—or at least not of tri-dimensional earth—rushed
foetid and horrible through New England’s glens, and brooded obscenely on the mountain-tops.
Of this he had long felt certain. Now he seemed to sense the close presence of some terrible
part of the intruding horror, and to glimpse a hellish advance in the black dominion of the
ancient and once passive nightmare. He locked away the
Necronomicon with a shudder of
disgust, but the room still reeked with an unholy and unidentifiable stench. “As a foulness
shall ye know them,” he quoted. Yes—the odour was the same as that which had sickened
him at the Whateley farmhouse less than three years before. He thought of Wilbur, goatish and
ominous, once again, and laughed mockingly at the village rumours of his parentage.

“Inbreeding?” Armitage muttered half-aloud to himself. “Great
God, what simpletons! Shew them Arthur Machen’s Great God Pan and they’ll think
it a common Dunwich scandal! But what thing—what cursed shapeless influence on or off
this three-dimensioned earth—was Wilbur Whateley’s father? Born on Candlemas—nine
months after May-Eve of 1912, when the talk about the queer earth noises reached clear to Arkham—
What walked on the mountains that May-Night? What Roodmas horror fastened itself on the world
in half-human flesh and blood?”

During the ensuing weeks Dr. Armitage set about to collect all possible data
on Wilbur Whateley and the formless presences around Dunwich. He got in communication with Dr.
Houghton of Aylesbury, who had attended Old Whateley in his last illness, and found much to
ponder over in the grandfather’s last words as quoted by the physician. A visit to Dunwich
Village failed to bring out much that was new; but a close survey of the
Necronomicon,
in those parts which Wilbur had sought so avidly, seemed to supply new and terrible clues to
the nature, methods, and desires of the strange evil so vaguely threatening this planet. Talks
with several students of archaic lore in Boston, and letters to many others elsewhere, gave
him a growing amazement which passed slowly through varied degrees of alarm to a state of really
acute spiritual fear. As the summer drew on he felt dimly that something ought to be done about
the lurking terrors of the upper Miskatonic valley, and about the monstrous being known to the
human world as Wilbur Whateley.
VI.
The Dunwich horror itself came between Lammas and the equinox in 1928, and Dr. Armitage was
among those who witnessed its monstrous prologue. He had heard, meanwhile, of Whateley’s
grotesque trip to Cambridge, and of his frantic efforts to borrow or copy from the
Necronomicon
at the Widener Library. Those efforts had been in vain, since Armitage had issued warnings of
the keenest intensity to all librarians having charge of the dreaded volume. Wilbur had been
shockingly nervous at Cambridge; anxious for the book, yet almost equally anxious to get home
again, as if he feared the results of being away long.

Early in August the half-expected outcome developed, and in the small hours
of the 3d Dr. Armitage was awakened suddenly by the wild, fierce cries of the savage watchdog
on the college campus. Deep and terrible, the snarling, half-mad growls and barks continued;
always in mounting volume, but with hideously significant pauses. Then there rang out a scream
from a wholly different throat—such a scream as roused half the sleepers of Arkham and
haunted their dreams ever afterward—such a scream as could come from no being born of
earth, or wholly of earth.

Armitage, hastening into some clothing and rushing across the street and lawn
to the college buildings, saw that others were ahead of him; and heard the echoes of a burglar-alarm
still shrilling from the library. An open window shewed black and gaping in the moonlight. What
had come had indeed completed its entrance; for the barking and the screaming, now fast fading
into a mixed low growling and moaning, proceeded unmistakably from within. Some instinct warned
Armitage that what was taking place was not a thing for unfortified eyes to see, so he brushed
back the crowd with authority as he unlocked the vestibule door. Among the others he saw Professor
Warren Rice and Dr. Francis Morgan, men to whom he had told some of his conjectures and misgivings;
and these two he motioned to accompany him inside. The inward sounds, except for a watchful,
droning whine from the dog, had by this time quite subsided; but Armitage now perceived with
a sudden start that a loud chorus of whippoorwills among the shrubbery had commenced a damnably
rhythmical piping, as if in unison with the last breaths of a dying man.

The building was full of a frightful stench which Dr. Armitage knew too well,
and the three men rushed across the hall to the small genealogical reading-room whence the low
whining came. For a second nobody dared to turn on the light, then Armitage summoned up his
courage and snapped the switch. One of the three—it is not certain which—shrieked
aloud at what sprawled before them among disordered tables and overturned chairs. Professor
Rice declares that he wholly lost consciousness for an instant, though he did not stumble or
fall.

The thing that lay half-bent on its side in a foetid pool of greenish-yellow
ichor and tarry stickiness was almost nine feet tall, and the dog had torn off all the clothing
and some of the skin. It was not quite dead, but twitched silently and spasmodically while its
chest heaved in monstrous unison with the mad piping of the expectant whippoorwills outside.
Bits of shoe-leather and fragments of apparel were scattered about the room, and just inside
the window an empty canvas sack lay where it had evidently been thrown. Near the central desk
a revolver had fallen, a dented but undischarged cartridge later explaining why it had not been
fired. The thing itself, however, crowded out all other images at the time. It would be trite
and not wholly accurate to say that no human pen could describe it, but one may properly say
that it could not be vividly visualised by anyone whose ideas of aspect and contour are too
closely bound up with the common life-forms of this planet and of the three known dimensions.
It was partly human, beyond a doubt, with very man-like hands and head, and the goatish, chinless
face had the stamp of the Whateleys upon it. But the torso and lower parts of the body were
teratologically fabulous, so that only generous clothing could ever have enabled it to walk
on earth unchallenged or uneradicated.

Above the waist it was semi-anthropomorphic; though its chest, where the dog’s
rending paws still rested watchfully, had the leathery, reticulated hide of a crocodile or alligator.
The back was piebald with yellow and black, and dimly suggested the squamous covering of certain
snakes. Below the waist, though, it was the worst; for here all human resemblance left off and
sheer phantasy began. The skin was thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdomen
a score of long greenish-grey tentacles with red sucking mouths protruded limply. Their arrangement
was odd, and seemed to follow the symmetries of some cosmic geometry unknown to earth or the
solar system. On each of the hips, deep set in a kind of pinkish, ciliated orbit, was what seemed
to be a rudimentary eye; whilst in lieu of a tail there depended a kind of trunk or feeler with
purple annular markings, and with many evidences of being an undeveloped mouth or throat. The
limbs, save for their black fur, roughly resembled the hind legs of prehistoric earth’s
giant saurians; and terminated in ridgy-veined pads that were neither hooves nor claws. When
the thing breathed, its tail and tentacles rhythmically changed colour, as if from some circulatory
cause normal to the non-human side of its ancestry. In the tentacles this was observable as
a deepening of the greenish tinge, whilst in the tail it was manifest as a yellowish appearance
which alternated with a sickly greyish-white in the spaces between the purple rings. Of genuine
blood there was none; only the foetid greenish-yellow ichor which trickled along the painted
floor beyond the radius of the stickiness, and left a curious discolouration behind it.

As the presence of the three men seemed to rouse the dying thing, it began
to mumble without turning or raising its head. Dr. Armitage made no written record of its mouthings,
but asserts confidently that nothing in English was uttered. At first the syllables defied all
correlation with any speech of earth, but toward the last there came some disjointed fragments
evidently taken from the
Necronomicon, that monstrous blasphemy in quest of which the
thing had perished. These fragments, as Armitage recalls them, ran something like
“N’gai,
n’gha’ghaa, bugg-shoggog, y’hah; Yog-Sothoth, Yog-Sothoth. . . .”
They trailed off into nothingness as the whippoorwills shrieked in rhythmical crescendoes of
unholy anticipation.

Then came a halt in the gasping, and the dog raised its head in a long, lugubrious
howl. A change came over the yellow, goatish face of the prostrate thing, and the great black
eyes fell in appallingly. Outside the window the shrilling of the whippoorwills had suddenly
ceased, and above the murmurs of the gathering crowd there came the sound of a panic-struck
whirring and fluttering. Against the moon vast clouds of feathery watchers rose and raced from
sight, frantic at that which they had sought for prey.

All at once the dog started up abruptly, gave a frightened bark, and leaped
nervously out of the window by which it had entered. A cry rose from the crowd, and Dr. Armitage
shouted to the men outside that no one must be admitted till the police or medical examiner
came. He was thankful that the windows were just too high to permit of peering in, and drew
the dark curtains carefully down over each one. By this time two policemen had arrived; and
Dr. Morgan, meeting them in the vestibule, was urging them for their own sakes to postpone entrance
to the stench-filled reading-room till the examiner came and the prostrate thing could be covered
up.

Meanwhile frightful changes were taking place on the floor. One need not describe
the
kind and
rate of shrinkage and disintegration that occurred before the eyes
of Dr. Armitage and Professor Rice; but it is permissible to say that, aside from the external
appearance of face and hands, the really human element in Wilbur Whateley must have been very
small. When the medical examiner came, there was only a sticky whitish mass on the painted boards,
and the monstrous odour had nearly disappeared. Apparently Whateley had had no skull or bony
skeleton; at least, in any true or stable sense. He had taken somewhat after his unknown father.
VII.
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 shell 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 manuscript in strange characters, written in a huge
ledger and adjudged a sort of diary because of the spacing 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 pronounced 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’ lass 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 assuredly 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 Associated 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 muffled 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 titan 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 passive 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 repetition 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 passage 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 hellish fires and chant
their hellish rituals by the table-like stone on May-Eve and Hallowmass. Now that very stone
formed the centre of a vast space 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 assembled 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-shell, 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 manuscript
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 assistance 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 manuscript with the preliminary assumption 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 massed 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 Vigenère’s
Traité des Chiffres, Falconer’s
Cryptomenysis
Patefacta, Davys’ and Thicknesse’s eighteenth-century treatises, and such fairly
modern authorities as Blair, von Marten, and Klüber’s
Kryptographik. He interspersed
his study of the books with attacks on the manuscript 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 manuscript 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 manuscript, 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 passage 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 passage
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 manuscript 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 manuscript, 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 manuscript 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
God’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 entity 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. Saturday 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 Massachusetts 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 hellish diary, the more he was inclined to doubt the efficacy of
any material agent in stamping out the entity which Wilbur Whateley had left behind him—the
earth-threatening entity which, unknown to him, was to burst forth in a few hours and become
the memorable Dunwich horror.

Monday was a repetition 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 Associated
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 nobody’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
rehearsed 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 passed 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’
saound, 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 reassuring 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 passed 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 shells 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 passed 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, passing the glass 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 grass 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 entity, 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 glass was passed 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 hellish maker re-passed 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 this 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 vantage 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 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 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 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 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 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-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.
“Ygnaiih . . . 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-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, grass, 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 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 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 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.”