The Dunwich horrorLovecraft, H. P. (Howard Phillips)
Science
The Dunwich horror
Lovecraft, H. P. (Howard Phillips)
American fiction -- 20th century; Fantasy fiction; Horror tales
"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, an' 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
wa'n'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 wun'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
tri-dimensional earth--rushed fetid 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 odor 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 rumors 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-dimensioned 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?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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