Lovecraft, H P - The Dunwich Horror

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The 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

The Dunwich Horror

of the Miskatonic's upper reaches has an oddly serpent-like suggestion as it winds close

to the feet of the domed hills among which it rises.

As the hills draw nearer, one heeds their wooded sides more than their stone-crowned

tops. Those sides loom up so darkly and precipitously that one wishes they would keep

their distance, but there is no road by which to escape them. Across a covered bridge one

sees a small village huddled between the stream and the vertical slope of Round

Mountain, and wonders at the cluster of rotting gambrel roofs bespeaking an earlier

architectural period than that of the neighbouring region. It is not reassuring to see, on a

closer glance, that most of the houses are deserted and falling to ruin, and that the broken-

steepled church now harbours the one slovenly mercantile establishment of the hamlet.

One dreads to trust the tenebrous tunnel of the bridge, yet there is no way to avoid it.

Once across, it is hard to prevent the impression of a faint, malign odour about the village

street, as of the massed mould and decay of centuries. It is always a relief to get clear of

the place, and to follow the narrow road around the base of the hills and across the level

country beyond till it rejoins the Aylesbury pike. Afterwards 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 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:

The Dunwich Horror

"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 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

The Dunwich Horror

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 born, 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 family which ended only in 1928, when the

Dunwich horror came and went; yet at no time did the ramshackle Wateley barn seem

overcrowded with livestock. There came a period when people were curious enough to

steal up and count the herd that grazed precariously on the steep hillside above the old

The Dunwich Horror

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 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. 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 its difference from the ordinary accents of the region, and

because it displayed a freedom from infantile lisping of which many children of three or

four might well be proud. The boy was not talkative, yet when he spoke he seemed to

reflect some elusive element wholly unpossessed by Dunwich and its denizens. The

strangeness did not reside in what he said, or even in the simple idioms he used; but

seemed vaguely linked with his intonation or with the internal organs that produced the

spoken sounds. His facial aspect, too, was remarkable for its maturity; for though he

shared his mother's and grandfather's chinlessness, his firm and precociously shaped nose

united with the expression of his large, dark, almost Latin eyes to give him an air of

quasi-adulthood and well-nigh preternatural intelligence. He was, however, exceedingly

ugly despite his appearance of brilliancy; there being something almost goatish or

The Dunwich Horror

animalistic about his thick lips, large-pored, yellowish skin, coarse crinkly hair, and

oddly elongated ears. He was soon disliked even more decidedly than his mother and

grandsire, and all conjectures about him were spiced with references to the bygone magic

of Old Whateley, and how the hills once shook when he shrieked the dreadful name of

Yog-Sothoth in the midst of a circle of stones with a great book open in his arms before

him. Dogs abhorred the boy, and he was always obliged to take various defensive

measures against their barking menace.

III.

Meanwhile Old Whateley continued to buy cattle without measurably increasing the size

of his herd. He also cut timber and began to repair the unused parts of his house - a

spacious, 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

The Dunwich Horror

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 she turned pale and

displayed an abnormal degree of fear when 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.

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TheDunwichHorrorTheDunwichHorrorbyH.P.LovecraftWrittenSummer1928PublishedApril1929inWeirdTales,Vol.13,No.4,481-508.GorgonsandHydras,andChimaeras-direstoriesofCelaenoandtheHarpies-mayreproducethemselvesinthebrainofsuperstition-buttheyweretherebefore.Theyaretranscripts,types-thearchtypesareinus,andete...

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