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 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 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 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.
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