VI.
The Dunwich horror itself came between Lammas and the equinox
in 1928, and Dr Armitage was among those who witnessed its monstrous prologue.
He had heard, meanwhile, of Whateley's grotesque trip to Cambridge, and
of his frantic efforts to borrow or copy from the Necronomicon at
the Widener Library. Those efforts had been in vain, since Armitage had
issued warnings of the keenest intensity to all librarians having charge
of the dreaded volume. Wilbur had been shockingly nervous at Cambridge;
anxious for the book, yet almost equally anxious to get home again, as
if he feared the results of being away long.
Early in August the half-expected outcome developed, and
in the small hours of the third Dr Armitage was awakened suddenly by the
wild, fierce cries of the savage watchdog on the college campus. Deep and
terrible, the snarling, half-mad growls and barks continued; always in
mounting volume, but with hideously significant pauses. Then there rang
out a scream from a wholly different throat - such a scream as roused half
the sleepers of Arkham and haunted their dreams ever afterwards - such
a scream as could come from no being born of earth, or wholly of earth.
Armitage, hastening into some clothing and rushing across
the street and lawn to the college buildings, saw that others were ahead
of him; and heard the echoes of a burglar-alarm still shrilling from the
library. An open window showed black and gaping in the moonlight. What
had come had indeed completed its entrance; for the barking and the screaming,
now fast fading into a mixed low growling and moaning, proceeded unmistakably
from within. Some instinct warned Armitage that what was taking place was
not a thing for unfortified eyes to see, so he brushed back the crowd with
authority as he unlocked the vestibule door. Among the others he saw Professor
Warren Rice and Dr Francis Morgan, men to whom he had told some of his
conjectures and misgivings; and these two he motioned to accompany him
inside. The inward sounds, except for a watchful, droning whine from the
dog, had by this time quite subsided; but Armitage now perceived with a
sudden start that a loud chorus of whippoorwills among the shrubbery had
commenced a damnably rhythmical piping, as if in unison with the last breaths
of a dying man.
The building was full of a frightful stench which Dr Armitage
knew too well, and the three men rushed across the hall to the small genealogical
reading-room whence the low whining came. For a second nobody dared to
turn on the light, then Armitage summoned up his courage and snapped the
switch. One of the three - it is not certain which - shrieked aloud at
what sprawled before them among disordered tables and overturned chairs.
Professor Rice declares that he wholly lost consciousness for an instant,
though he did not stumble or fall.
The thing that lay half-bent on its side in a foetid pool
of greenish-yellow ichor and tarry stickiness was almost nine feet tall,
and the dog had torn off all the clothing and some of the skin. It was
not quite dead, but twitched silently and spasmodically while its chest
heaved in monstrous unison with the mad piping of the expectant whippoorwills
outside. Bits of shoe-leather and fragments of apparel were scattered about
the room, and just inside the window an empty canvas sack lay where it
had evidently been thrown. Near the central desk a revolver had fallen,
a dented but undischarged cartridge later explaining why it had not been
fired. The thing itself, however, crowded out all other images at the time.
It would be trite and not wholly accurate to say that no human pen could
describe it, but one may properly say that it could not be vividly visualized
by anyone whose ideas of aspect and contour are too closely bound up with
the common life-forms of this planet and of the three known dimensions.
It was partly human, beyond a doubt, with very manlike hands and head,
and the goatish, chinless face had the stamp of the Whateley's upon it.
But the torso and lower parts of the body were teratologically fabulous,
so that only generous clothing could ever have enabled it to walk on earth
unchallenged or uneradicated.
Above the waist it was semi-anthropomorphic; though its
chest, where the dog's rending paws still rested watchfully, had the leathery,
reticulated hide of a crocodile or alligator. The back was piebald with
yellow and black, and dimly suggested the squamous covering of certain
snakes. Below the waist, though, it was the worst; for here all human resemblance
left off and sheer phantasy began. The skin was thickly covered with coarse
black fur, and from the abdomen a score of long greenish-grey tentacles
with red sucking mouths protruded limply.
Their arrangement was odd, and seemed to follow the symmetries
of some cosmic geometry unknown to earth or the solar system. On each of
the hips, deep set in a kind of pinkish, ciliated orbit, was what seemed
to be a rudimentary eye; whilst in lieu of a tail there depended a kind
of trunk or feeler with purple annular markings, and with many evidences
of being an undeveloped mouth or throat. The limbs, save for their black
fur, roughly resembled the hind legs of prehistoric earth's giant saurians,
and terminated in ridgy-veined pads that were neither hooves nor claws.
When the thing breathed, its tail and tentacles rhythmically changed colour,
as if from some circulatory cause normal to the non-human greenish tinge,
whilst in the tail it was manifest as a yellowish appearance which alternated
with a sickly grayish-white in the spaces between the purple rings. Of
genuine blood there was none; only the foetid greenish-yellow ichor which
trickled along the painted floor beyond the radius of the stickiness, and
left a curious discoloration behind it.
As the presence of the three men seemed to rouse the dying
thing, it began to mumble without turning or raising its head. Dr Armitage
made no written record of its mouthings, but asserts confidently that nothing
in English was uttered. At first the syllables defied all correlation with
any speech of earth, but towards the last there came some disjointed fragments
evidently taken from the Necronomicon, that monstrous blasphemy
in quest of which the thing had perished. These fragments, as Armitage
recalls them, ran something like 'N'gai, n'gha'ghaa, bugg-shoggog, y'hah:
Yog-Sothoth, Yog-Sothoth ...' They trailed off into nothingness as
the whippoorwills shrieked in rhythmical crescendos of unholy anticipation.
Then came a halt in the gasping, and the dog raised its
head in a long, lugubrious howl. A change came over the yellow, goatish
face of the prostrate thing, and the great black eyes fell in appallingly.
Outside the window the shrilling of the whippoorwills had suddenly ceased,
and above the murmurs of the gathering crowd there came the sound of a
panic-struck whirring and fluttering. Against the moon vast clouds of feathery
watchers rose and raced from sight, frantic at that which they had sought
for prey.
All at once the dog started up abruptly, gave a frightened
bark, and leaped nervously out of the window by which it had entered. A
cry rose from the crowd, and Dr Armitage shouted to the men outside that
no one must be admitted till the police or medical examiner came. He was
thankful that the windows were just too high to permit of peering in, and
drew the dark curtains carefully down over each one. By this time two policemen
had arrived; and Dr Morgan, meeting them in the vestibule, was urging them
for their own sakes to postpone entrance to the stench-filled reading-room
till the examiner came and the prostrate thing could be covered up.
Meanwhile frightful changes were taking place on the floor.
One need not describe the kind and rate of shrinkage and disintegration
that occurred before the eyes of Dr Armitage and Professor Rice; but it
is permissible to say that, aside from the external appearance of face
and hands, the really human element in Wilbur Whateley must have been very
small. When the medical examiner came, there was only a sticky whitish
mass on the painted boards, and the monstrous odour had nearly disappeared.
Apparently Whateley had had no skull or bony skeleton; at least, in any
true or stable sense. He had taken somewhat after his unknown father.
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