H. P. Lovecraft - The Dunwich Horror

VIP免费

2024-11-19 1 0 85.08KB 23 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Desktop/New%20Folder/H.%20P.%20Lovecraft%20-%20The%20Dunwich%20Horror.txt

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

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.

file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/D...%20Lovecraft%20-%20The%20Dunwich%20Horror.txt (1 of 23) [2/24/2004 10:45:13 PM]

file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Desktop/New%20Folder/H.%20P.%20Lovecraft%20-%20The%20Dunwich%20Horror.txt

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

file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/D...%20Lovecraft%20-%20The%20Dunwich%20Horror.txt (2 of 23) [2/24/2004 10:45:13 PM]

file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Desktop/New%20Folder/H.%20P.%20Lovecraft%20-%20The%20Dunwich%20Horror.txt

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

file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/D...%20Lovecraft%20-%20The%20Dunwich%20Horror.txt (3 of 23) [2/24/2004 10:45:13 PM]

file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Desktop/New%20Folder/H.%20P.%20Lovecraft%20-%20The%20Dunwich%20Horror.txt

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.

file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/D...%20Lovecraft%20-%20The%20Dunwich%20Horror.txt (4 of 23) [2/24/2004 10:45:13 PM]

file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Desktop/New%20Folder/H.%20P.%20Lovecraft%20-%20The%20Dunwich%20Horror.txt

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

file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/D...%20Lovecraft%20-%20The%20Dunwich%20Horror.txt (5 of 23) [2/24/2004 10:45:13 PM]

file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Desktop/New%20Folder/H.%20P.%20Lovecraft%20-%20The%20Dunwich%20Horror.txt

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

file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/D...%20Lovecraft%20-%20The%20Dunwich%20Horror.txt (6 of 23) [2/24/2004 10:45:13 PM]

file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Desktop/New%20Folder/H.%20P.%20Lovecraft%20-%20The%20Dunwich%20Horror.txt

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,

file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/D...%20Lovecraft%20-%20The%20Dunwich%20Horror.txt (7 of 23) [2/24/2004 10:45:13 PM]

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Desktop/New%20Folder/H.%20P.\%20Lovecraft%20-%20The%20Du...

展开>> 收起<<

H. P. Lovecraft - The Dunwich Horror.pdf

共23页,预览7页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

H. P. Lovecraft - The Dunwich Horror

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: