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Файл:The Dunwich Horror and Other Stories
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THE DUNWICH HORROR
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.
Ygnailh . . . ygnaiih . . . thfl thkh’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 fi gures 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-y-ya-ya-yahaah – e’yayayaaaa . . . ngh’aaaaa . . . ngh’aaa . . .
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 terrifi c report
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HOWARD LOVECRAFT
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 under-brush were whipped
into a fury; and the frightened crowd at the mountain’s base,
weakened by the lethal foetor that seemed about to asphyxiate them, were almost hurled off their feet. Dogs howled from
the distance, green grass and foliage wilted to a curious, sickly
yellow-grey, and over fi eld 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 refl ections 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 reaffi rmed 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
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THE DUNWICH HORROR
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 heered Ol’ Whateley say
as haow some day we’d hear a child o’ Lavinny’s a-callin’ its
father’s name on the top o’ Sentinel Hill . . . ’
But Joe Osborn interrupted him to question the Arkham
men anew.
‘What was it, anyhaow, an’ haowever did young Wizard
Whateley call it aout o’ the air it come from?’
Armitage chose his words very carefully.
‘It was – well, it was mostly a kind of force that doesn’t
belong in our part of space; a kind of force that acts and
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HOWARD LOVECRAFT
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.’
THE STRANGE
HIGH HOUSE
IN THE MIST
In the morning, mist comes up from the sea by the cliffs
beyond Kingsport. White and feathery it comes from
the deep to its brothers the clouds, full of dreams of dank
pastures and caves of leviathan. And later, in still summer
rains on the steep roofs of poets, the clouds scatter bits of
those dreams, that men shall not live without rumor of
old strange secrets, and wonders that planets tell planets alone in the night. When tales fly thick in the grottoes of tritons, and conchs in seaweed cities blow wild
tunes learned from the Elder Ones, then great eager mists
flock to heaven laden with lore, and oceanward eyes on
the rocks see only a mystic whiteness, as if the cliff’s rim
were the rim of all earth, and the solemn bells of buoys
tolled free in the aether of faery.
Now north of archaic Kingsport the crags climb lofty and
curious, terrace on terrace, till the northernmost hangs in
the sky like a gray frozen wind-cloud. Alone it is, a bleak
point jutting in limitless space, for there the coast turns
sharp where the great Miskatonic pours out of the plains
past Arkham, bringing woodland legends and little quaint
memories of New England’s hills. The sea-folk of Kingsport
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HOWARD LOVECRAFT
look up at that cliff as other sea-folk look up at the polestar, and time the night’s watches by the way it hides or
shows the Great Bear, Cassiopeia and the Dragon. Among
them it is one with the firmament, and truly, it is hidden
from them when the mist hides the stars or the sun.
Some of the cliffs they love, as that whose grotesque profile they call Father Neptune, or that whose pillared steps
they term “The Causeway”; but this one they fear because
it is so near the sky. The Portuguese sailors coming in from
a voyage cross themselves when they first see it, and the old
Yankees believe it would be a much graver matter than
death to climb it, if indeed that were possible. Nevertheless
there is an ancient house on that cliff, and at evening men
see lights in the small-paned windows.
The ancient house has always been there, and people
say One dwells within who talks with the morning mists
that come up from the deep, and perhaps sees singular
things oceanward at those times when the cliff’s rim becomes the rim of all earth, and solemn buoys toll free in
the white aether of faery. This they tell from hearsay, for
that forbidding crag is always unvisited, and natives dislike to train telescopes on it. Summer boarders have indeed scanned it with jaunty binoculars, but have never
seen more than the gray primeval roof, peaked and shingled, whose eaves come nearly to the gray foundations, and
the dim yellow light of the little windows peeping out from
under those eaves in the dusk. These summer people do not
believe that the same One has lived in the ancient house
for hundreds of years, but can not prove their heresy to any
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THE STRANGE HIGH HOUSE IN THE MIST
real Kingsporter. Even the Terrible Old Man who talks to
leaden pendulums in bottles, buys groceries with centuried
Spanish gold, and keeps stone idols in the yard of his antediluvian cottage in Water Street can only say these things
were the same when his grandfather was a boy, and that
must have been inconceivable ages ago, when Belcher or
Shirley or Pownall or Bernard was Governor of His Majesty’s Province of the Massachusetts–Bay.
Then one summer there came a philosopher into Kingsport. His name was Thomas Olney, and he taught ponderous things in a college by Narragansett Bay. With stout
wife and romping children he came, and his eyes were
weary with seeing the same things for many years, and
thinking the same well-disciplined thoughts. He looked at
the mists from the diadem of Father Neptune, and tried to
walk into their white world of mystery along the titan
steps of The Causeway. Morning after morning he would
lie on the cliffs and look over the world’s rim at the cryptical aether beyond, listening to spectral bells and the wild
cries of what might have been gulls. Then, when the mist
would lift and the sea stand out prosy with the smoke of
steamers, he would sigh and descend to the town, where he
loved to thread the narrow olden lanes up and down hill,
and study the crazy tottering gables and odd-pillared doorways which had sheltered so many generations of sturdy
sea-folk. And he even talked with the Terrible Old Man,
who was not fond of strangers, and was invited into his
fearsomely archaic cottage where low ceilings and wormy
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HOWARD LOVECRAFT
panelling hear the echoes of disquieting soliloquies in
the dark small hours.
Of course it was inevitable that Olney should mark
the gray unvisited cottage in the sky, on that sinister northward crag which is one with the mists and the firmament.
Always over Kingsport it hung, and always its mystery
sounded in whispers through Kingsport’s crooked alleys.
The Terrible Old Man wheezed a tale that his father had
told him, of lightning that shot one night up from that
peaked cottage to the clouds of higher heaven; and Granny
Orne, whose tiny gambrel-roofed abode in Ship Street is
all covered with moss and ivy, croaked over something her
grandmother had heard at second-hand, about shapes that
flapped out of the eastern mists straight into the narrow
single door of that unreachable place – for the door is set
close to the edge of the crag toward the ocean, and glimpsed
only from ships at sea.
At length, being avid for new strange things and held
back by neither the Kingsporter’s fear nor the summer
boarder’s usual indolence, Olney made a very terrible resolve. Despite a conservative training – or because of
it, for humdrum lives breed wistful longings of the unknown – he swore a great oath to scale that avoided northern cliff and visit the abnormally antique gray cottage in
the sky. Very plausibly his saner self argued that the place
must be tenanted by people who reached it from inland
along the easier ridge beside the Miskatonic’s estuary. Probably they traded in Arkham, knowing how little Kingsport
liked their habitation or perhaps being unable to climb
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