X.
In the end the three men from Arkham - old, white-bearded
Dr Armitage, stocky, iron-grey Professor Rice, and lean, youngish Dr Morgan,
ascended the mountain alone. After much patient instruction regarding its
focusing and use, they left the telescope with the frightened group that
remained in the road; and as they climbed they were watched closely by
those among whom the glass was passed round. It was hard going, and Armitage
had to be helped more than once. High above the toiling group the great
swath trembled as its hellish maker repassed with snail-like deliberateness.
Then it was obvious that the pursuers were gaining.
Curtis Whateley - of the undecayed branch - was holding
the telescope when the Arkham party detoured radically from the swath.
He told the crowd that the men were evidently trying to get to a subordinate
peak which overlooked the swath at a point considerably ahead of where
the shrubbery was now bending. This, indeed, proved to be true; and the
party were seen to gain the minor elevation only a short time after the
invisible blasphemy had passed it.
Then Wesley Corey, who had taken the glass, cried out
that Armitage was adjusting the sprayer which Rice held, and that something
must be about to happen. The crowd stirred uneasily, recalling that his
sprayer was expected to give the unseen horror a moment of visibility.
Two or three men shut their eyes, but Curtis Whateley snatched back the
telescope and strained his vision to the utmost. He saw that Rice, from
the party's point of advantage above and behind the entity, had an excellent
chance of spreading the potent powder with marvellous effect.
Those without the telescope saw only an instant's flash
of grey cloud - a cloud about the size of a moderately large building -
near the top of the mountain. Curtis, who held the instrument, dropped
it with a piercing shriek into the ankle-deep mud of the road. He reeled,
and would have crumbled to the ground had not two or three others seized
and steadied him. All he could do was moan half-inaudibly.
'Oh, oh, great Gawd... that... that...'
There was a pandemonium of questioning, and only Henry
Wheeler thought to rescue the fallen telescope and wipe it clean of mud.
Curtis was past all coherence, and even isolated replies were almost too
much for him.
'Bigger'n a barn... all made o' squirmin' ropes... hull
thing sort o' shaped like a hen's egg bigger'n anything with dozens o'
legs like hogs-heads that haff shut up when they step... nothin' solid
abaout it - all like jelly, an' made o' sep'rit wrigglin' ropes pushed
clost together... great bulgin' eyes all over it... ten or twenty maouths
or trunks a-stickin' aout all along the sides, big as stove-pipes an all
a-tossin' an openin' an' shuttin'... all grey, with kinder blue or purple
rings... an' Gawd it Heaven - that haff face on top...'
This final memory, whatever it was, proved too much for
poor Curtis; and he collapsed completely before he could say more. Fred
Farr and Will Hutchins carried him to the roadside and laid him on the
damp grass. Henry Wheeler, trembling, turned the rescued telescope on the
mountain to see what he might. Through the lenses were discernible three
tiny figures, apparently running towards the summit as fast as the steep
incline allowed. Only these - nothing more. Then everyone noticed a strangely
unseasonable noise in the deep valley behind, and even in the underbrush
of Sentinel Hill itself. It was the piping of unnumbered whippoorwills,
and in their shrill chorus there seemed to lurk a note of tense and evil
expectancy.
Earl Sawyer now took the telescope and reported the three
figures as standing on the topmost ridge, virtually level with the altar-stone
but at a considerable distance from it. One figure, he said, seemed to
be raising its hands above its head at rhythmic intervals; and as Sawyer
mentioned the circumstance the crowd seemed to hear a faint, half-musical
sound from the distance, as if a loud chant were accompanying the gestures.
The weird silhouette on that remote peak must have been a spectacle of
infinite grotesqueness and impressiveness, but no observer was in a mood
for aesthetic appreciation. 'I guess he's sayin' the spell,' whispered
Wheeler as he snatched back the telescope. The whippoorwills were piping
wildly, and in a singularly curious irregular rhythm quite unlike that
of the visible ritual.
Suddenly the sunshine seemed to lessen without the intervention
of any discernible cloud. It was a very peculiar phenomenon, and was plainly
marked by all. A rumbling sound seemed brewing beneath the hills, mixed
strangely with a concordant rumbling which clearly came from the sky. Lightning
flashed aloft, and the wondering crowd looked in vain for the portents
of storm. The chanting of the men from Arkham now became unmistakable,
and Wheeler saw through the glass that they were all raising their arms
in the rhythmic incantation. From some farmhouse far away came the frantic
barking of dogs.
The change in the quality of the daylight increased, and
the crowd gazed about the horizon in wonder. A purplish darkness, born
of nothing more than a spectral deepening of the sky's blue, pressed down
upon the rumbling hills. Then the lightning flashed again, somewhat brighter
than before, and the crowd fancied that it had showed a certain mistiness
around the altar-stone on the distant height. No one, however, had been
using the telescope at that instant. The whippoorwills continued their
irregular pulsation, and the men of Dunwich braced themselves tensely against
some imponderable menace with which the atmosphere seemed surcharged.
Without warning came those deep, cracked, raucous vocal
sounds which will never leave the memory of the stricken group who heard
them. Not from any human throat were they born, for the organs of man can
yield no such acoustic perversions. Rather would one have said they came
from the pit itself, had not their source been so unmistakably the altar-stone
on the peak. It is almost erroneous to call them sounds at all, since so
much of their ghastly, infra-bass timbre spoke to dim seats of consciousness
and terror far subtler than the ear; yet one must do so, since their form
was indisputably though vaguely that of half-articulate words. They were
loud - loud as the rumblings and the thunder above which they echoed -
yet did they come from no visible being. And because imagination might
suggest a conjectural source in the world of non-visible beings, the huddled
crowd at the mountain's base huddled still closer, and winced as if in
expectation of a blow.
'Ygnailh... ygnaiih... thflthkh'ngha.... Yog-Sothoth ...'
rang the hideous croaking out of space. 'Y'bthnk... h'ehye - n'grkdl'lh...'
The speaking impulse seemed to falter here, as if some
frightful psychic struggle were going on. Henry Wheeler strained his eye
at the telescope, but saw only the three grotesquely silhouetted human
figures on the peak, all moving their arms furiously in strange gestures
as their incantation drew near its culmination. From what black wells of
Acherontic fear or feeling, from what unplumbed gulfs of extra-cosmic consciousness
or obscure, long-latent heredity, were those half-articulate thunder-croakings
drawn? Presently they began to gather renewed force and coherence as they
grew in stark, utter, ultimate frenzy.
'Eh-y-ya-ya-yahaah - e'yayayaaaa... ngh'aaaaa... ngh'aaa...
h'yuh... h'yuh... HELP! HELP! ...ff - ff - ff - FATHER! FATHER! YOG-SOTHOTH!...'
But that was all. The pallid group in the road, still
reeling at the indisputably English syllables that had poured thickly and
thunderously down from the frantic vacancy beside that shocking altar-stone,
were never to hear such syllables again. Instead, they jumped violently
at the terrific report which seemed to rend the hills; the deafening, cataclysmic
peal whose source, be it inner earth or sky, no hearer was ever able to
place. A single lightning bolt shot from the purple zenith to the altar-stone,
and a great tidal wave of viewless force and indescribable stench swept
down from the hill to all the countryside. Trees, grass, and under-brush
were whipped into a fury; and the frightened crowd at the mountain's base,
weakened by the lethal foetor that seemed about to asphyxiate them, were
almost hurled off their feet. Dogs howled from the distance, green grass
and foliage wilted to a curious, sickly yellow-grey, and over field and
forest were scattered the bodies of dead whippoorwills.
The stench left quickly, but the vegetation never came
right again. To this day there is something queer and unholy about the
growths on and around that fearsome hill Curtis Whateley was only just
regaining consciousness when the Arkham men came slowly down the mountain
in the beams of a sunlight once more brilliant and untainted. They were
grave and quiet, and seemed shaken by memories and reflections even more
terrible than those which had reduced the group of natives to a state of
cowed quivering. In reply to a jumble of questions they only shook their
heads and reaffirmed one vital fact.
'The thing has gone for ever,' Armitage said. 'It has
been split up into what it was originally made of, and can never exist
again. It was an impossibility in a normal world. Only the least fraction
was really matter in any sense we know. It was like its father - and most
of it has gone back to him in some vague realm or dimension outside our
material universe; some vague abyss out of which only the most accursed
rites of human blasphemy could ever have called him for a moment on the
hills.'
There was a brief silence, and in that pause the scattered
senses of poor Curtis Whateley began to knit back into a sort of continuity;
so that he put his hands to his head with a moan. Memory seemed to pick
itself up where it had left off, and the horror of the sight that had prostrated
him burst in upon him again.
'Oh, oh, my Gawd, that haff face - that haff face on top
of it... that face with the red eyes an' crinkly albino hair, an' no chin,
like the Whateleys... It was a octopus, centipede, spider kind o' thing,
but they was a haff-shaped man's face on top of it, an' it looked like
Wizard Whateley's, only it was yards an' yards acrost....'
He paused exhausted, as the whole group of natives stared
in a bewilderment not quite crystallized into fresh terror. Only old Zebulon
Whateley, who wanderingly remembered ancient things but who had been silent
heretofore, spoke aloud.
'Fifteen year' gone,' he rambled, 'I heered Ol' Whateley
say as haow some day we'd hear a child o' Lavinny's a-callin' its father's
name on the top o' Sentinel Hill...'
But Joe Osborn interrupted him to question the Arkham
men anew.
'What was it, anyhaow, an' haowever did young Wizard Whateley
call it aout o' the air it come from?'
Armitage chose his words very carefully.
'It was - well, it was mostly a kind of force that doesn't
belong in our part of space; a kind of force that acts and grows and shapes
itself by other laws than those of our sort of Nature. We have no business
calling in such things from outside, and only very wicked people and very
wicked cults ever try to. There was some of it in Wilbur Whateley himself
- enough to make a devil and a precocious monster of him, and to make his
passing out a pretty terrible sight. I'm going to burn his accursed diary,
and if you men are wise you'll dynamite that altar-stone up there, and
pull down all the rings of standing stones on the other hills. Things like
that brought down the beings those Whateleys were so fond of - the beings
they were going to let in tangibly to wipe out the human race and drag
the earth off to some nameless place for some nameless purpose.
'But as to this thing we've just sent back - the Whateleys
raised it for a terrible part in the doings that were to come. It grew
fast and big from the same reason that Wilbur grew fast and big - but it
beat him because it had a greater share of the outsideness in it. You needn't
ask how Wilbur called it out of the air. He didn't call it out. It was
his twin brother, but it looked more like the father than he did.'
FINIS
