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 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.
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 faint 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.
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