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 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:
"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.
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