H. P. Lovecraft - The Dunwich Horror

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The Dunwich Horror by H. P. LovecraftThe Dunwich Horror
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written Summer 1928
Published April 1929 in Weird Tales, Vol. 13, No. 4, 481-508.
Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimaeras - dire stories of Celaeno and the Harpies -
may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition - but they were there
before. They are transcripts, types - the archtypes 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 all? Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such
objects, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily
injury? O, least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond
body - or without the body, they would have been the same... That the kind of
fear here treated is purely spiritual - that it is strong in proportion as it
is objectless on earth, that it predominates in the period of our sinless
infancy - are difficulties the solution of which might afford some probable
insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the
shadowland of pre-existence.
- Charles Lamb: Witches and Other Night-Fears
I.
When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the
junction of Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean's Corners he comes upon a lonely and
curious country.
The ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and
closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent
forest belts seem too large, and the wild weeds, brambles and grasses attain a
luxuriance not often found in settled regions. At the same time the planted
fields appear singularly few and barren; while the sparsely scattered houses
wear a surprisingly uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation.
Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled solitary
figures spied now and then on crumbling doorsteps or on the sloping, rock-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 bull-frogs. The thin, shining line of the Miskatonic's upper
reaches has an oddly serpent-like suggestion as it winds close to the feet of
the domed hills among which it rises.
As the hills draw nearer, one heeds their wooded sides more than their
stone-crowned tops. Those sides loom up so darkly and precipitously that one
wishes they would keep their distance, but there is no road by which to escape
them. Across a covered bridge one sees a small village huddled between the
stream and the vertical slope of Round Mountain, and wonders at the cluster of
rotting gambrel roofs bespeaking an earlier architectural period than that of
the neighbouring region. It is not reassuring to see, on a closer glance, that
most of the houses are deserted and falling to ruin, and that the
broken-steepled church now harbours the one slovenly mercantile establishment of
the hamlet. One dreads to trust the tenebrous tunnel of the bridge, yet there is
no way to avoid it. Once across, it is hard to prevent the impression of a
faint, malign odour about the village street, as of the massed mould and decay
of centuries. It is always a relief to get clear of the place, and to follow the
narrow road around the base of the hips and across the level country beyond till
it rejoins the Aylesbury pike. Afterwards one sometimes learns that one has been
through Dunwich.
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Outsiders visit Dunwich as seldom as possible, and since a certain season of
horror all the signboards pointing towards it have been taken down. The scenery,
judged by an ordinary aesthetic canon, is more than commonly beautiful; yet
there is no influx of artists or summer tourists. Two centuries ago, when talk
of witch-blood, Satan-worship, and strange forest presences was not laughed at,
it was the custom to give reasons for avoiding the locality. In our sensible age
- since the Dunwich horror of 1928 was hushed up by those who had the town's and
the world's welfare at heart - people shun it without knowing exactly why.
Perhaps one reason - though it cannot apply to uninformed strangers - is that
the natives are now repellently decadent, having gone far along that path of
retrogression so common in many New England backwaters. They have come to form a
race by themselves, with the well-defined mental and physical stigmata of
degeneracy and inbreeding. The average of their intelligence is woefully low,
whilst their annals reek of overt viciousness and of half-hidden murders,
incests, and deeds of almost unnameable violence and perversity. The old gentry,
representing the two or three armigerous families which came from Salem in 1692,
have kept somewhat above the general level of decay; though many branches are
sunk into the sordid populace so deeply that only their names remain as a key to
the origin they disgrace. Some of the Whateleys and Bishops still send their
eldest sons to Harvard and Miskatonic, though those sons seldom return to the
mouldering gambrel roofs under which they and their ancestors were born.
No one, even those who have the facts concerning the recent horror, can say just
what is the matter with Dunwich; though old legends speak of unhallowed rites
and conclaves of the Indians, amidst which they called forbidden shapes of
shadow out of the great rounded hills, and made wild orgiastic prayers that were
answered by loud crackings and rumblings from the ground below. In 1747 the
Reverend Abijah Hoadley, newly come to the Congregational Church at Dunwich
Village, preached a memorable sermon on the close presence of Satan and his
imps; in which he said:
"It must be allow'd, that these Blasphemies of an infernall Train of Daemons
are Matters of too common Knowledge to be deny'd; the cursed Voices of Azazel
and Buzrael, of Beelzebub and Belial, being heard now from under Ground by
above a Score of credible Witnesses now living. I 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 could raise up, and which must needs
have come from those Caves that only black Magick can discover, and only the
Divell unlock".
Mr. Hoadley disappeared soon after delivering this sermon, but the text, printed
in Springfield, is still extant. Noises in the hills continued to be reported
from year to year, and still form a puzzle to geologists and physiographers.
Other traditions tell of foul odours near the hill-crowning circles of stone
pillars, and of rushing airy presences to be heard faintly at certain hours from
stated points at the bottom of the great ravines; while still others try to
explain the Devil's Hop Yard - a bleak, blasted hillside where no tree, shrub,
or grass-blade will grow. Then, too, the natives are mortally afraid of the
numerous whippoorwills which grow vocal on warm nights. It is vowed that the
birds are psychopomps lying in wait for the souls of the dying, and that they
time their eerie cries in unison with the sufferer's struggling breath. If they
can catch the fleeing soul when it leaves the body, they instantly flutter away
chittering in daemoniac laughter; but if they fail, they subside gradually into
a disappointed silence.
These tales, of course, are obsolete and ridiculous; because they come down from
very old times. Dunwich is indeed ridiculously old - older by far than any of
the communities within thirty miles of it. South of the village one may still
spy the cellar walls and chimney of the ancient Bishop house, which was built
before 1700; whilst the ruins of the mill at the falls, built in 1806, form the
most modern piece of architecture to be seen. Industry did not flourish here,
and the nineteenth-century factory movement proved short-lived. Oldest of all
are the great rings of rough-hewn stone columns on the hilltops, but these are
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more generally attributed to the Indians than to the settlers. Deposits of
skulls and bones, found within these circles and around the sizeable table-like
rock on Sentinel Hill, sustain the popular belief that such spots were once the
burial-places of the Pocumtucks; even though many ethnologists, disregarding the
absurd improbability of such a theory, persist in believing the remains
Caucasian.
II.
It was in the township of Dunwich, in a large and partly inhabited farmhouse set
against a hillside four miles from the village and a mile and a half from any
other dwelling, that Wilbur Whateley was born at 5 a.m. on Sunday, the second of
February, 1913. This date was recalled because it was Candlemas, which people in
Dunwich curiously observe under another name; and because the noises in the
hills had sounded, and all the dogs of the countryside had barked persistently,
throughout the night before. Less worthy of notice was the fact that the mother
was one of the decadent Whateleys, a somewhat deformed, unattractive albino
woman of thirty-five , living with an aged and half-insane father about whom the
most frightful tales of wizardry had been whispered in his youth. Lavinia
Whateley had no known husband, but according to the custom of the region made no
attempt to disavow the child; concerning the other side of whose ancestry the
country folk might - and did - speculate as widely as they chose. On the
contrary, she seemed strangely proud of the dark, goatish-looking infant who
formed such a contrast to her own sickly and pink-eyed albinism, and was heard
to mutter many curious prophecies about its unusual powers and tremendous
future.
Lavinia was one who would be apt to mutter such things, for she was a lone
creature given to wandering amidst thunderstorms in the hills and trying to read
the great odorous books which her father had inherited through two centuries of
Whateleys, and which were fast falling to pieces with age and wormholes. She had
never been to school, but was filled with disjointed scraps of ancient lore that
Old Whateley had taught her. The remote farmhouse had always been feared because
of Old Whateley's reputation for black magic, and the unexplained death by
violence of Mrs Whateley when Lavinia was twelve years old had not helped to
make the place popular. Isolated among strange influences, Lavinia was fond of
wild and grandiose day-dreams and singular occupations; nor was her leisure much
taken up by household cares in a home from which all standards of order and
cleanliness had long since disappeared.
There was a hideous screaming which echoed above even the hill noises and the
dogs' barking on the night Wilbur was bom, but no known doctor or midwife
presided at his coming. Neighbours knew nothing of him till a week afterward,
when Old Wateley drove his sleigh through the snow into Dunwich Village and
discoursed incoherently to the group of loungers at Osborne'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 person 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
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family which ended only in 1928, when the Dunwich horror came and went; yet at
no time did the ramshackle Wateley team seem overcrowded with livestock. There
came a period when people were curious enough to steal up and count the herd
that grazed precariously on the steep hillside above the old farm-house, and
they could never find more than ten or twelve anaemic, bloodless-looking
specimens. Evidently some blight or distemper, perhaps sprung from the
unwholesome pasturage or the diseased fungi and timbers of the filthy barn,
caused a heavy mortality amongst the Whateley animals. Odd wounds or sores,
having something of the aspect of incisions, seemed to afflict the visible
cattle; and once or twice during the earlier months certain callers fancied they
could discern similar sores about the throats of the grey, unshaven old man and
his slattemly, 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 Whateley's 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. Afterwards he could not be sure
about the boy, who may have had some kind of a fringed belt and a pair of dark
trunks or trousers on. Wilbur was never subsequently seen alive and conscious
without complete and tightly buttoned attire, the disarrangement or threatened
disarrangement of which always seemed to fill him with anger and alarm. His
contrast with his squalid mother and grandfather in this respect was thought
very notable until the horror of 1928 suggested the most valid of reasons.
The next January gossips were mildly interested in the fact that 'Lavinny's
black brat' had commenced to talk, and at the age of only eleven months. His
speech was somewhat remarkable both because of in difference from the ordinary
accents of the region, and because it displayed a freedom from infantile lisping
of which many children of three or four might well be proud. The boy was not
talkative, yet when he spoke he seemed to reflect some elusive element wholly
unpossessed by Dunwich and its denizens. The strangeness did not reside in what
he said, or even in the simple idioms he used; but seemed vaguely linked with
his intonation or with the internal organs that produced the spoken sounds. His
facial aspect, too, was remarkable for its maturity; for though he shared his
mother's and grandfather's chinlessness, his firm and precociously shaped nose
united with the expression of his large, dark, almost Latin eyes to give him an
air of quasi-adulthood and well-nigh preternatural intelligence. He was,
however, exceedingly ugly despite his appearance of brilliancy; there being
something almost goatish or animalistic about his thick lips, large-pored,
yellowish skin, coarse crinkly hair, and oddly elongated ears. He was soon
disliked even more decidedly than his mother and grandsire, and all conjectures
about him were spiced with references to the bygone magic of Old Whateley, and
how the hills once shook when he shrieked the dreadful name of Yog-Sothoth in
the midst of a circle of stones with a great book open in his arms before him.
Dogs abhorred the boy, and he was always obliged to take various defensive
measures against their barking menace.
III.
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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, peak-roofed affair whose rear end was buried entirely in the
rocky hillside, and whose three least-ruined ground-floor rooms had always been
sufficient for himself and his daughter.
There must have been prodigious reserves of strength in the old man to enable
him to accomplish so much hard labour; and though he still babbled dementedly at
times, his carpentry seemed to show the effects of sound calculation. It had
already begun as soon as Wilbur was born,when one of the many tool sheds had
been put suddenly in order, clapboarded, and fitted with a stout fresh lock.
Now, in restoring the abandoned upper storey 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 storey. 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 so 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 dilligently 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 odour he
encountered - such a stench, he averred, as he had never before smelt in all his
life except near the Indian circles on the hills, and which could not come from
anything sane or of this earth. But then, the homes and sheds of Dunwich folk
have never been remarkable for olfactory immaculateness.
The following months were void of visible events, save that everyone swore to a
slow but steady increase in the mysterious hill noises. On May Eve of 1915 there
were tremors which even the Aylesbury people felt, whilst the following
Hallowe'en produced an underground rumbling queerly 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 towards 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 storey. She
would never tell what her father and the boy were doing up there, though once
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she turned pale and displayed an abnormal degree of fear was a jocose
fish-pedlar tried the locked door leading to the stairway. That pedlar 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
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, and
the shelves of strange books, the sealed second storey of the ancient farmhouse,
and the weirdness of the whole region and its hill noises. Wilbur was four and a
half then, and looked like a lad of fifteen. His lips and cheeks were fuzzy with
a coarse dark down, and his voice had begun to break.
Earl Sawyer went out to the Whateley place with both sets of reporters and
camera men, and called their attention to the queer stench which now seemed to
trickle down from the sealed upper spaces. It was, he said, exactly like a smell
he had found in the toolshed abandoned when the house was finally repaired; and
like the hint odours which he sometimes thought he caught near the stone circle
on the mountains. Dunwich folk read the stories when they appeared, and grinned
over the obvious mistakes. They wondered, too, why the writers made so much of
the fact that Old Whateley always paid for his cattle in gold pieces of
extremely ancient date. The Whateleys had received their visitors with
ill-concealed distaste, though they did not dare court further publicity by a
violent resistance or refusal to talk.
IV.
For a decade the annals of the Whateleys sink indistinguishably into the general
life of a morbid community used to their queer ways and hardened to their May
Eve and All-Hallows orgies. Twice a year they would light fires on the top of
Sentinel Hill, at which times the mountain rumblings would recur with greater
and greater violence; while at all seasons there were strange and portentous
doings at the lonely farm-house. In the course of time callers professed to hear
sounds in the sealed upper storey even when all the family were downstairs, and
they wondered how swiftly or how lingeringly a cow or bullock was usually
sacrificed. There was tally of a complaint to the Society for the Prevention of
Cruelty to Animals but nothing ever came of it, since Dunwich folk are never
anxious to call the outside world's attention to themselves.
About 1923, when Wilbur was a boy of ten whose mind, voice, stature, and bearded
face gave all the impressions of maturity, a second great siege of carpentry
went on at the old house. It was all inside the sealed upper part, and from bits
of discarded lumber people concluded that the youth and his grandfather had
knocked out all the partitions and even removed the attic floor, leaving only
one vast open void between the ground storey and the peaked roof. They had torn
down the great central chimney, too, and fitted the rusty range with a flimsy
outside tin stove-pipe.
In the spring after this event Old Whateley noticed the growing number of
whippoorwills that would come out of Cold Spring Glen to chirp under his window
at night. He seemed to regard the circumstance as one of great significance, and
told the loungers at Osborn's that he thought his time had almost come.
'They whistle jest in tune with my breathin' naow,' he said, 'an' I guess
they're gittin' ready to ketch my soul. They know it's a-goin' aout, an' dun't
calc'late to miss it. Yew'll know, boys, arter I'm gone, whether they git me er
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not. Ef they dew, they'll keep up a-singin' an' lapin' 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 Larnmas Night, 1924, Dr Houghton of Aylesbury was hastily summoned by Wilbur
Whateley, who had lashed his one remaining horse through the darkness and
telephoned from Osborn's in the village. He found Old Whateley in a very grave
state, with a cardiac action and stertorous breathing that told of an end not
far off. The shapeless albino daughter and oddly bearded grandson stood by the
bedside, whilst from the vacant abyss overhead there came a disquieting
suggestion of rhythmical surging or lapping, as of the waves on some level
beach. The doctor, though, was chiefly disturbed by the chattering night birds
outside; a seemingly limitless legion of whippoorwills that cried their endless
message in repetitions timed diabolically to the wheezing gasps of the dying
man. It was uncanny and unnatural - too much, thought Dr Houghton, like the
whole of the region he had entered so reluctantly in response to the urgent
call.
Towards one o'clock Old Whateley gained consciousness, and interrupted his
wheezing to choke out a few words to his grandson.
'More space, Willy, more space soon. Yew grows- an' that grows faster. It'll be
ready to serve ye soon, boy. Open up the gates to Yog-Sothoth with the long
chant that ye'll find on page 751 of the complete edition, an then put a match
to the prison. Fire from airth can't burn it nohaow.'
He was obviously quite mad. After a pause, during which the flock of
whippoorwills outside adjusted their cries to the altered tempo while some
indications of the strange hill noises came from afar off, he added another
sentence or two.
'Feed it reg'lar, Willy, an' mind the quantity; but dun't let it grow too fast
fer the place, fer ef it busts quarters or gits aout afore ye opens to
Yog-Sothoth, it's all over an' no use. Only them from beyont kin make it
multiply an' work... Only them, the old uns as wants to come back...'
But speech gave place to gasps again, and Lavinia screamed at the way the
whippoorwills followed the change. It was the same for more than an hour, when
the final throaty rattle came. Dr Houghton drew shrunken lids over the glazing
grey eyes as the tumult of birds faded imperceptibly to silence. Lavinia sobbed,
but Wilbur only chuckled whilst the hill noises rumbled faintly.
'They didn't git him,' he muttered in his heavy bass voice.
Wilbur was by this time a scholar of really tremendous erudition in his
one-sided way, and was quietly known by correspondence to many librarians in
distant places where rare and forbidden books of old days are kept. He was more
and more hated and dreaded around Dunwich because of certain youthful
disappearances which suspicion laid vaguely at his door; but was always able to
silence inquiry through fear or through use of that fund of old-time gold which
still, as in his grandfather's time, went forth regularly and increasingly for
cattle-buying. He was now tremendously mature of aspect, and his height, having
reached the normal adult limit, seemed inclined to wax beyond that figure. In
1925, when a scholarly correspondent from Miskatonic University called upon him
one day and departed pale and puzzled, he was fully six and three-quarters feet
tall.
Through all the years Wilbur had treated his half-deformed albino mother with a
growing contempt, finally forbidding her to go to the hills with him on May Eve
and Hallowmass; and in 1926 the poor creature complained to Mamie Bishop of
being afraid of him.
'They's more abaout him as I knows than I kin tell ye, Mamie,' she said, 'an'
naowadays they's more nor what I know myself. I vaow afur Gawd, I dun't know
what he wants nor what he's a-tryin' to dew.'
That Hallowe'en the hill noises sounded louder than ever, and fire burned on
Sentinel Hill as usual; but people paid more attention to the rhythmical
screaming of vast flocks of unnaturally belated whippoorwills which seemed to be
assembled near the unlighted Whateley farmhouse. After midnight their shrill
notes burst into a kind of pandemoniac cachinnation which filled all the
countryside, and not until dawn did they finally quiet down. Then they vanished,
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