V.
The following winter brought an event no less strange than
Wilbur's first trip outside the Dunwich region. Correspondence with the
Widener Library at Harvard, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris,
the British Museum, the University of Buenos Ayres, and the Library of
Miskatonic University at Arkham had failed to get him the loan of a book
he desperately wanted; so at length he set out in person, shabby, dirty,
bearded, and uncouth of dialect, to consult the copy at Miskatonic, which
was the nearest to him geographically. Almost eight feet tall, and carrying
a cheap new valise from Osborne's general store, this dark and goatish
gargoyle appeared one day in Arkham in quest of the dreaded volume kept
under lock and key at the college library - the hideous Necronomicon
of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred in Olaus Wormius' Latin version, as printed
in Spain in the seventeenth century. He had never seen a city before, but
had no thought save to find his way to the university grounds; where indeed,
he passed heedlessly by the great white-fanged watchdog that barked with
unnatural fury and enmity, and tugged frantically at its stout chaim.
Wilbur had with him the priceless but imperfect copy of
Dr Dee's English version which his grandfather had bequeathed him, and
upon receiving access to the Latin copy he at once began to collate the
two texts with the aim of discovering a certain passage which would have
come on the 751st page of his own defective volume. This much he could
not civilly refrain from telling the librarian - the same erudite Henry
Armitage (A.M. Miskatonic, Ph.D. Princeton, Litt.D. Johns Hopkins) who
had once called at the farm, and who now politely plied him with questions.
He was looking, he had to admit, for a kind of formula or incantation containing
the frightful name
Yog-Sothoth, and it puzzled him to find discrepancies,
duplications, and ambiguities which made the matter of determination far
from easy. As he copied the formula he finally chose, Dr Armitage looked
involuntarily over his shoulder at the open pages; the left-hand one of
which, in the Latin version, contained such monstrous threats to the peace
and sanity of the world.
Nor is it to be thought (ran the text as Armitage
mentally translated it) that man is either the oldest or the last of earth's
masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone. The
Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the
spaces we know, but between them, they walk serene and primal, undimensioned
and to us unseen. Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth
is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past,
present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones
broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows
where They had trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and
why no one can behold Them as They tread. By Their smell can men sometimes
know Them near, but of Their semblance can no man know, saving only
in the features of those They have begotten on mankind; and of those
are there many sorts, differing in likeness from man's truest eidolon to
that shape without sight or substance which is Them. They walk unseen
and foul in lonely places where the Words have been spoken and the Rites
howled through at their Seasons. The wind gibbers with Their voices, and
the earth mutters with Their consciousness. They bend the forest and crush
the city, yet may not forest or city behold the hand that smites. Kadath
in the cold waste hath known Them, and what man knows Kadath? The ice desert
of the South and the sunken isles of Ocean hold stones whereon Their seal
is engraver, but who bath seen the deep frozen city or the sealed tower
long garlanded with seaweed and barnacles? Great Cthulhu is Their cousin,
yet can he spy Them only dimly. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! As a foulness
shall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not;
and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold. Yog-Sothoth
is the key to the gate, whereby the spheres meet. Man rules now where They
ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter,
after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall They
reign again.
Dr. Annitage, associating what he was reading with what he
had heard of Dunwich and its brooding presences, and of Wilbur Whateley
and his dim, hideous aura that stretched from a dubious birth to a cloud
of probable matricide, felt a wave of fright as tangible as a draught of
the tomb's cold clamminess. The bent, goatish giant before him seemed like
the spawn of another planet or dimension; like something only partly of
mankind, and linked to black gulfs of essence and entity that stretch like
titan phantasms beyond all spheres of force and matter, space and time.
Presently Wilbur raised his head and began speaking in that strange, resonant
fashion which hinted at sound-producing organs unlike the run of mankind's.
'Mr Armitage,' he said, 'I calc'late I've got to take
that book home. They's things in it I've got to try under sarten conditions
that I can't git here, en' it 'ud be a mortal sin to let a red-tape rule
hold me up. Let me take it along, Sir, an' I'll swar they wun't nobody
know the difference. I dun't need to tell ye I'll take good keer of it.
It wan't me that put this Dee copy in the shape it is...'
He stopped as he saw firm denial on the librarian's face,
and his own goatish features grew crafty. Armitage, half-ready to tell
him he might make a copy of what parts he needed, thought suddenly of the
possible consequences and checked himself. There was too much responsibility
in giving such a being the key to such blasphemous outer spheres. Whateley
saw how things stood, and tried to answer lightly.
'Wal, all right, ef ye feel that way abaout it. Maybe
Harvard won't be so fussy as yew be.' And without saying more he rose and
strode out of the building, stooping at each doorway.
Armitage heard the savage yelping of the great watchdog,
and studied Whateley's gorilla-like lope as he crossed the bit of campus
visible from the window. He thought of the wild tales he had heard, and
recalled the old Sunday stories in the Advertiser; these things,
and the lore he had picked up from Dunwich rustics and villagers during
his one visit there. Unseen things not of earth - or at least not of tridimensional
earth - rushed foetid and horrible through New England's glens, and brooded
obscenely on the mountain tops. Of this he had long felt certain. Now he
seemed to sense the close presence of some terrible part of the intruding
horror, and to glimpse a hellish advance in the black dominion of the ancient
and once passive nightmare. He locked away the Necronomicon with
a shudder of disgust, but the room still reeked with an unholy and unidentifiable
stench. 'As a foulness shall ye know them,' he quoted. Yes - the odour
was the same as that which had sickened him at the Whateley farmhouse less
than three years before. He thought of Wilbur, goatish and ominous, once
again, and laughed mockingly at the village rumours of his parentage.
'Inbreeding?' Armitage muttered half-aloud to himself.
'Great God, what simpletons! Show them Arthur Machen's Great God Pan and
they'll think it a common Dunwich scandal! But what thing - what cursed
shapeless influence on or off this three-dimensional earth - was Wilbur
Whateley's father? Born on Candlemas - nine months after May Eve of 1912,
when the talk about the queer earth noises reached clear to Arkham - what
walked on the mountains that May night? What Roodmas horror fastened itself
on the world in half-human flesh and blood?'
During the ensuing weeks Dr Armitage set about to collect
all possible data on Wilbur Whateley and the formless presences around
Dunwich. He got in communication with Dr Houghton of Aylesbury, who had
attended Old Whateley in his last illness, and found much to ponder over
in the grandfather's last words as quoted by the physician. A visit to
Dunwich Village failed to bring out much that was new; but a close survey
of the Necronomicon, in those parts which Wilbur had sought so avidly,
seemed to supply new and terrible clues to the nature, methods, and desires
of the strange evil so vaguely threatening this planet. Talks with several
students of archaic lore in Boston, and letters to many others elsewhere,
gave him a growing amazement which passed slowly through varied degrees
of alarm to a state of really acute spiritual fear. As the summer drew
on he felt dimly that something ought to be done about the lurking terrors
of the upper Miskatonic valley, and about the monstrous being known to
the human world as Wilbur Whateley.
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