The Dunwich horrorLovecraft, H. P. (Howard Phillips)
Science
The Dunwich horror
Lovecraft, H. P. (Howard Phillips)
American fiction -- 20th century; Fantasy fiction; Horror tales
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into what it was originally made of, and can never exist again.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 heerd 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 carefully.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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