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Title: The Dunwich horror

Author: H. P. Lovecraft

Release date: October 4, 2015 [eBook #50133]
Most recently updated: September 11, 2025

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DUNWICH
HORROR ***

[Transcriber's note: This etext was produced from Weird Tales April 1929.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on
this publication was renewed.]

The Dunwich Horror

by H. P. LOVECRAFT

"Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimeras—dire stories of Celæno 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? Oh, 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.

1
When a traveler 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 surprizing 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 in the sloping, rock-strewn 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 bullfrogs. The thin, shining line of the
Miskatonic's upper reaches has an oddly serpentlike 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 neighboring 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 harbors 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 odor about the village street, as of the massed
mold 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 esthetic 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 can

not 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 wofully 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 moldering 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
Dæmons are Matters of too common Knowledge to be deny'd; the
cursed Voices of Azazel and Buzrael, of Beelzebub and Belial, being
heard from under Ground by above a Score of credible Witnesses now
living. I myself 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 odors 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 eery 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 demoniac 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 hilltops, 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 sizable 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.

2
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 35, 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
daydreams 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. Neighbors 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 showed 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 hereabouts. 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 over-crowded 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 anemic, 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 gray, 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 showed 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 blue 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 on 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.

3
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 labor; and though he still babbled
dementedly at times, his carpentry seemed to show the effects of sound
calculation. It had really 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 showed itself only in
his tight boarding-up of all the windows in the reclaimed section—though
many declared that it was a crazy thing to bother with the reclamation at all.
Less inexplicable was his fitting-up of another downstairs room for his new
grandson—a room which several callers saw, though no one was ever
admitted to the closely-boarded upper 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
catechize him through long, hushed afternoons. By this time the restoration
of the house was finished, and those who watched it wondered why one of
the upper windows had been made into a solid plank door. It was a window
in the rear of the east gable end, close against the hill; and no one could
imagine why a cleated wooden runway was built up to it from the ground.
About the period of this work's completion people noticed that the old tool-
house, tightly locked and windowlessly clapboarded since Wilbur's birth,
had been abandoned again. The door swung listlessly open, and when Earl
Sawyer once stepped within after a cattle-selling call on Old Whateley he
was quite discomposed by the singular odor he encountered—such a stench,
he averred, as he had never before smelt in all his life except near the Indian
circles on the hills, and which could not come from anything sane or of this
earth. But then, the homes and sheds of Dunwich folk have never been
remarkable for olfactory immaculateness.
The following months were void of visible events, save that everyone swore
to a slow but steady increase in the mysterious hill noises. On May Eve of
1915 there were tremors which even the Aylesbury people felt, whilst the
following Hallowe'en produced an underground rumbling queerly
synchronized with bursts of flame—"them witch Whateleys' doin's"—from
the summit of Sentinel Hill. Wilbur was growing up uncannily, so that he
looked like a boy of ten as he entered his fourth year. He read avidly by
himself now; but talked much less than formerly. A settled taciturnity was
absorbing him, and for the first time people began to speak specifically of
the dawning look of evil in his goatish face. He would sometimes mutter an
unfamiliar jargon, and chant in bizarre rhythms which chilled the listener
with a sense of unexplainable terror. The aversion displayed 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 lip and cheek 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 odors 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.

4

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-Hallow 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 stove-pipe.
In the spring after this event Old Whateley noticed the growing number of
whippoorwills that would come out of Cold Spring Glen to chirp under his
window at night. He seemed to regard the circumstance as one of great
significance, and told the loungers at Osborn's that he thought his time had
almost come.
"They whistle jest in tune with my breathin' naow," he said, "an' I guess
they're gittin' ready to ketch my soul. They know it's a-goin' aout, an' dun't
calc'late to miss it. Yew'll know, boys, arter I'm gone, whether they git me er
not. Ef they dew, they'll keep up a-singin' an' laffin' till break o' day. Ef they
dun't, they'll kinder quiet daown like. I expeck them an' the souls they hunts
fer hev some pretty tough tussles sometimes."
On Lammas Night, 1924, Dr. Houghton of Aylesbury was hastily
summoned by Wilbur Whateley, who had lashed his one remaining horse
through the darkness and telephoned from Osborn's in the village. He found
Old Whateley in a very grave state, with a cardiac action and stertorous

breathing that told of an end not far off. The shapeless albino daughter and
oddly bearded grandson stood by the bedside, whilst from the vacant abyss
overhead there came a disquieting suggestion of rhythmical surging or
lapping, as of the waves on some level beach. The doctor, though, was
chiefly disturbed by the chattering night birds outside; a seemingly limitless
legion of whippoorwills that cried their endless message in repetitions
timed diabolically to the wheezing gasps of the dying man. It was uncanny
and unnatural—too much, thought Dr. Houghton, like the whole of the
region he had entered so reluctantly in response to the urgent call.
Toward 1 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 gray eyes as the tumult of birds faded imperceptibly to silence.
Lavinia sobbed, but Wilbur only chuckled whilst the hill noises rumbled
faintly.
"They didn't git him," he muttered in his heavy bass voice.
Wilbur was by this time a scholar of really tremendous erudition in his one-
sided way, and was quietly known by correspondence to many librarians in
distant places where rare and forbidden books of old days are kept. He was
more and more hated and dreaded around Dunwich because of certain

youthful disappearances which suspicion laid vaguely at his door; but was
always able to silence inquiry through fear or through use of that fund of
old-time gold which still, as in his grandfather's time, went forth regularly
and increasingly for cattle-buying. He was now tremendously mature of
aspect, and his height, having reached the normal adult limit, seemed
inclined to wax beyond that figure. In 1925, when a scholarly correspondent
from Miskatonic University called upon him one day and departed pale and
puzzled, he was fully six and three-quarters feet tall.
Through all the years Wilbur had treated his half-deformed albino mother
with a growing contempt, finally forbidding her to go to the hills with him
on May Eve and Hallowmass; and in 1926 the poor creature complained to
Mamie Bishop of being afraid of him.
"They's more abaout him as I knows than I kin tell ye, Mamie," she said,
"an' naowadays they's more nor what I know myself. I vaow afur Gawd, I
dun't know what he wants nor what he's a-tryin' to dew."
That Hallowe'en the hill noises sounded louder than ever, and fire burned
on Sentinel Hill as usual, but people paid more attention to the rhythmical
screaming of vast flocks of unnaturally belated whippoorwills which
seemed to be assembled near the unlighted Whateley farmhouse. After
midnight their shrill notes burst into a kind of pandemoniac cachinnation
which filled all the countryside, and not until dawn did they finally quiet
down. Then they vanished, hurrying southward where they were fully a
month overdue. What this meant, no one could quite be certain till later.
None of the countryfolk seemed to have died—but poor Lavinia Whateley,
the twisted albino, was never seen again.
In the summer of 1927 Wilbur repaired two sheds in the farmyard and
began moving his books and effects out to them. Soon 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 neighborhood now. His

height had increased to more than seven feet, and showed no signs of
ceasing its development.

5
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 Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, the British Museum, the
University of Buenos Aires, and the Library of Miskatonic University at
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 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
They. 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 draft 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 fantasms
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 responsibility 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 fetid 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 odor 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 rumors of his parentage.
"Inbreeding?" Armitage muttered half aloud to himself. "Great God, what
simpletons! Show 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.

6
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 third 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 hastened into some clothing and rushed 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
showed 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 breath 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 fetid 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 visualized 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 manlike 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
fantasy began. The skin was thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from
the abdomen a score of long greenish-gray 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
color, 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 grayish-white in the spaces between the purple
rings. Of genuine blood there was none; only the fetid greenish-yellow
ichor which trickled along the painted floor beyond the radius of the
stickiness, and left a curious discoloration 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. Those 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 his 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 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 elements 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 odor 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.

7
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 wofully 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 ninth 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 tenth noticed a peculiar stench in the
air. About 7 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 neighbors; 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-post-in', 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' tarlike stuff that smells awful an'
drips daown offen the aidges onto the graoun' whar the side timbers is
blowed 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 which way 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
fer 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 none. Then
he thought he heerd another faintlike saound over towards Wizard
Whateley's—a kinder rippin' or tearin' o' wood, like some big box or 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 road-sides. 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 fetor; 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 2 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 neighbors, 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 women-folk whimpered, kept from
screaming by some obscure, vestigial instinct of defense 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 demoniac 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
about 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 practised on the hilltops. 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 organize for real
defense. 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 showed 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 and 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 center of a vast space thrashed around by
the mountainous horror, whilst upon its slightly concave surface was a thick
fetid 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 surprize. 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.

8
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 Sanskrit 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 formulæ 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 formulæ 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
Vigenere'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 second 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 showing 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's 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 can not take body without human blood.

That upstairs looks it will have the right cast. I can see it a little when I
make the Yoorish sign or blow the power 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 fourth Professor Rice and Dr. Morgan
insisted on seeing him for a while, and departed trembling and ashen-gray.
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 eons ago. At other times he would call for the
dreaded Necronomicon and the Dæmonolatreia 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 formulæ were copied with feverish
haste and in bewildering abundance. Of skepticism 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 formulæ 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 whisky 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.

9
Friday morning Armitage, Rice and Morgan set out by motor for Dunwich,
arriving at the village about 1 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 altarlike 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
formulæ he had memorized, and clutched the paper containing the
alternative ones he had not memorized. 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 fetor to the heavy night air;
such a fetor 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 gray, 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 jest 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 fust 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
bed 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 hed
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' ye could hear lots o'
folks on the wire a-gaspin'. All to onct Sally she yelled agin, an' says the
front yard picket fence bed jest crumpled 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 nuthin'
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 hoar 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 men-folks as we could get, 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
judgment 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 a 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 show 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' an' 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 show 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 showed 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 the 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 demon. 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 focused 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 fer!"
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.

10
In the end the three men from Arkham—old, white-bearded Dr. Armitage,
stocky, iron-gray Professor Rice, and lean, youngish Dr. Morgan—ascended
the mountain alone. After much patient instruction regarding its focusing
and use, they left the telescope with the frightened group that remained in
the road; and as they climbed they were watched closely by those among
whom the glass was passed 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 repassed with snail-like deliberateness. Then it
was obvious that the pursuers were gaining.
Curtis Whateley—of the undecayed branch—was holding the telescope
when the Arkham party detoured radically from the swath. He told the
crowd that the men were evidently trying to get to a subordinate peak which
overlooked the swath at a point considerably ahead of where the shrubbery
was now bending. This, indeed, proved to be true; and the party were seen
to gain the minor elevation only a short time after the invisible blasphemy
had passed it.
Then Wesley Corey, who had taken the glass, cried out that Armitage was
adjusting the sprayer which Rice held, and that something must be about to
happen. The crowd stirred uneasily, recalling that 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 marvelous effect.
Those without the telescope saw only an instant's flash of gray 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...."

"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 gray, 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
esthetic appreciation. "I guess he's sayin' the spell," whispered Wheeler as
he snatched back the telescope. The whippoorwills were piping wildly, and
in a singularly curious irregular rhythm quite unlike that of the visible
ritual.
Suddenly the sunshine seemed to lessen without the intervention of any
discernible cloud. It was a very peculiar phenomenon, and was plainly
marked by all. A rumbling sound seemed brewing beneath the hills, mixed

strangely with a concordant rumbling which clearly came from the sky.
Lightning flashed aloft, and the wondering crowd looked in vain for the
portents of storm. The chanting of the men from Arkham now became
unmistakable, and Wheeler saw through the glass that they were all raising
their arms in the rhythmic incantation. From some farmhouse far away
came the frantic barking of dogs.
The change in the quality of the daylight increased, and the crowd gazed
about the horizon in wonder. A purplish darkness, born of nothing more
than a spectral deepening of the sky's blue, pressed down upon the rumbling
hills. Then the lightning flashed again, somewhat brighter than before, and
the crowd fancied that it had showed a certain mistiness around the altar-
stone on the distant height. No one, however, had been using the telescope
at that instant. The whippoorwills continued their irregular pulsation, and
the men of Dunwich braced themselves tensely against some imponderable
menace with which the atmosphere seemed surcharged.
Without warning came those deep, cracked, raucous vocal sounds which
will never leave the memory of the stricken group who heard them. Not
from any human throat were they born, for the organs of man can yield no
such acoustic perversions. Rather would one have said they came from the
pit itself, had not their source been so unmistakably the altar-stone on the
peak. It is almost erroneous to call them sounds at all, since so much of
their ghastly, infra-bass timbre spoke to dim seats of consciousness and
terror far subtler than the ear; yet one must do so, since their form was
indisputably though vaguely that of half-articulate words. They were loud—
loud as the rumblings and the thunder above which they echoed—yet did
they come from no visible being. And because imagination might suggest a
conjectural source in the world of non-visible beings, the huddled crowd at
the mountain's base huddled still closer, and winced as if in expectation of a
blow.
"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'yaya-yayaaaa ... ngh'aaaa ... 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 fetor 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-gray, and over field and forest
were scattered the bodies of dead whippoorwills.
The stench left quickly, but the vegetation never came right again. To this
day there is something queer and unholy about the growths on and around
that fearsome hill. Curtis Whateley was only just regaining consciousness
when the Arkham men came slowly down the mountain in the beams of a
sunlight once more brilliant and untainted. They were grave and quiet, and
seemed shaken by memories and reflections even more terrible than those
which had reduced the group of natives to a state of cowed quivering. In
reply to a jumble of questions they only shook their heads and reaffirmed
one vital fact.
"The thing has gone for ever," Armitage said. "It has been split up into what
it was originally made of, and can never exist again. It was an impossibility
in a normal world. Only the least fraction was really matter in any sense we
know. It was like its father—and most of it has gone back to him in some

vague realm or dimension outside our material universe; some vague abyss
out of which only the most accursed rites of human blasphemy could ever
have called him for a moment on the hills."
There was a brief silence, and in that pause the scattered senses of poor
Curtis Whateley began to knit back into a sort of continuity; so that he put
his hands to his head with a moan. Memory seemed to pick itself up where
it had left off, and the horror of the sight that had prostrated him burst in
upon him again.
"Oh, oh, my Gawd, that haff face ... that haff face on top of it ... that face
with the red eyes an' crinkly albino hair, an' no chin, like the Whateleys.... It
was a octopus, centipede, spider kind o' thing, but they was a haff-shaped
man's face on top of it, an' it looked like Wizard Whateley's, only it was
yards an' yards acrost...."
He paused exhausted, as the whole group of natives stared in a
bewilderment not quite crystallized into fresh terror. Only old Zebulon
Whateley, who wanderingly remembered ancient things but who had been
silent heretofore, spoke aloud.
"Fifteen year' gone," he rambled, "I 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 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."

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