IV.
For a decade the annals of the Whateleys sink indistinguishably
into the general life of a morbid community used to their queer ways and
hardened to their May Eve and All-Hallows orgies. Twice a year they would
light fires on the top of Sentinel Hill, at which times the mountain rumblings
would recur with greater and greater violence; while at all seasons there
were strange and portentous doings at the lonely farm-house. In the course
of time callers professed to hear sounds in the sealed upper storey even
when all the family were downstairs, and they wondered how swiftly or how
lingeringly a cow or bullock was usually sacrificed. There was talk of
a complaint to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals but
nothing ever came of it, since Dunwich folk are never anxious to call the
outside world's attention to themselves.
About 1923, when Wilbur was a boy of ten whose mind, voice,
stature, and bearded face gave all the impressions of maturity, a second
great siege of carpentry went on at the old house. It was all inside the
sealed upper part, and from bits of discarded lumber people concluded that
the youth and his grandfather had knocked out all the partitions and even
removed the attic floor, leaving only one vast open void between the ground
storey and the peaked roof. They had torn down the great central chimney,
too, and fitted the rusty range with a flimsy outside tin stove-pipe.
In the spring after this event Old Whateley noticed the
growing number of whippoorwills that would come out of Cold Spring Glen
to chirp under his window at night. He seemed to regard the circumstance
as one of great significance, and told the loungers at Osborn's that he
thought his time had almost come.
'They whistle jest in tune with my breathin' naow,' he
said, 'an' I guess they're gittin' ready to ketch my soul. They know it's
a-goin' aout, an' dun't calc'late to miss it. Yew'll know, boys, arter
I'm gone, whether they git me er not. Ef they dew, they'll keep up a-singin'
an' laffin' till break o' day. Ef they dun't they'll kinder quiet daown
like. I expeck them an' the souls they hunts fer hev some pretty tough
tussles sometimes.'
On Lammas Night, 1924, Dr Houghton of Aylesbury was hastily
summoned by Wilbur Whateley, who had lashed his one remaining horse through
the darkness and telephoned from Osborn's in the village. He found Old
Whateley in a very grave state, with a cardiac action and stertorous breathing
that told of an end not far off. The shapeless albino daughter and oddly
bearded grandson stood by the bedside, whilst from the vacant abyss overhead
there came a disquieting suggestion of rhythmical surging or lapping, as
of the waves on some level beach. The doctor, though, was chiefly disturbed
by the chattering night birds outside; a seemingly limitless legion of
whippoorwills that cried their endless message in repetitions timed diabolically
to the wheezing gasps of the dying man. It was uncanny and unnatural -
too much, thought Dr Houghton, like the whole of the region he had entered
so reluctantly in response to the urgent call.
Towards one o'clock Old Whateley gained consciousness,
and interrupted his wheezing to choke out a few words to his grandson.
'More space, Willy, more space soon. Yew grows - an' that
grows faster. It'll be ready to serve ye soon, boy. Open up the gates to
Yog-Sothoth with the long chant that ye'll find on page 751 of the complete
edition, an' then put a match to the prison. Fire from airth can't
burn it nohaow.'
He was obviously quite mad. After a pause, during which
the flock of whippoorwills outside adjusted their cries to the altered
tempo while some indications of the strange hill noises came from afar
off, he added another sentence or two.
'Feed it reg'lar, Willy, an' mind the quantity; but dun't
let it grow too fast fer the place, fer ef it busts quarters or gits aout
afore ye opens to Yog-Sothoth, it's all over an' no use. Only them from
beyont kin make it multiply an' work... Only them, the old uns as wants
to come back...'
But speech gave place to gasps again, and Lavinia screamed
at the way the whippoorwills followed the change. It was the same for more
than an hour, when the final throaty rattle came. Dr Houghton drew shrunken
lids over the glazing grey eyes as the tumult of birds faded imperceptibly
to silence. Lavinia sobbed, but Wilbur only chuckled whilst the hill noises
rumbled faintly.
'They didn't git him,' he muttered in his heavy bass voice.
Wilbur was by this time a scholar of really tremendous
erudition in his one-sided way, and was quietly known by correspondence
to many librarians in distant places where rare and forbidden books of
old days are kept. He was more and more hated and dreaded around Dunwich
because of certain youthful disappearances which suspicion laid vaguely
at his door; but was always able to silence inquiry through fear or through
use of that fund of old-time gold which still, as in his grandfather's
time, went forth regularly and increasingly for cattle-buying. He was now
tremendously mature of aspect, and his height, having reached the normal
adult limit, seemed inclined to wax beyond that figure. In 1925, when a
scholarly correspondent from Miskatonic University called upon him one
day and departed pale and puzzled, he was fully six and three-quarters
feet tall.
Through all the years Wilbur had treated his half-deformed
albino mother with a growing contempt, finally forbidding her to go to
the hills with him on May Eve and Hallowmass; and in 1926 the poor creature
complained to Mamie Bishop of being afraid of him.
'They's more abaout him as I knows than I kin tell ye,
Mamie,' she said, 'an' naowadays they's more nor what I know myself. I
vaow afur Gawd, I dun't know what he wants nor what he's a-tryin' to dew.'
That Hallowe'en the hill noises sounded louder than ever,
and fire burned on Sentinel Hill as usual; but people paid more attention
to the rhythmical screaming of vast flocks of unnaturally belated whippoorwills
which seemed to be assembled near the unlighted Whateley farmhouse. After
midnight their shrill notes burst into a kind of pandemoniac cachinnation
which filled all the countryside, and not until dawn did they finally quiet
down. Then they vanished, hurrying southward where they were fully a month
overdue. What this meant, no one could quite be certain till later. None
of the countryfolk seemed to have died - but poor Lavinia Whateley, the
twisted albino, was never seen again.
In the summer of 1927 Wilbur repaired two sheds in the
farmyard and began moving his books and effects out to them. Soon afterwards
Earl Sawyer told the loungers at Osborn's that more carpentry was going
on in the Whateley farmhouse. Wilbur was closing all the doors and windows
on the ground floor, and seemed to be taking out partitions as he and his
grandfather had done upstairs four years before. He was living in one of
the sheds, and Sawyer thought he seemed unusually worried and tremulous.
People generally suspected him of knowing something about his mother disappearance,
and very few ever approached his neighbourhood now. His height had increased
to more than seven feet, and showed no signs of ceasing its development.
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