Terrors (18 page)

“Why not? Is Dunwich unsafe? We have muggers in Montreal, too, you know. I think I can protect myself.”

“Muggers?” A tiny laugh escaped Armitage’s lips, but even so Cordelia Whateley noticed a reaction among the uniformed men and women at the other table. “There are no muggers
in Dunwich,” Armitage said. “No, young miss. There are no muggers.”

After a long day’s journey from her home in Montreal, Cordelia Whateley experienced a combination of hunger and fatigue. She lifted her knife and fork and prepared to slice the rare meat on her plate. Her usual preference was for meat more thoroughly roasted than this, but appetite and reluctance to provoke any disagreement in
the inn caused her to plunge the tines of her fork into the roast, and then the sharp point of her knife.

Perhaps it was the dim and unsteady illumination in the inn coupled with the effects of fatigue and several sips of wine that created an illusion, but the meat appeared to
writhe
away from Cordelia Whateley’s implements. An involuntary gasp escaped her. The uniformed diners and even the blind
musician turned their eyes toward her. She whispered, “Doctor Armitage, I’m—I’m afraid I’ve lost my appetite. If we could leave now,
and we’ll start our work in the morning….”

The ancient man shook his head negatingly. “You must not put off. We will return to the Institute.”

Half fainting from fatigue and wine, yet equally eager to be at her work, Cordelia Whateley agreed. Upon returning to
the Institute, Professor Armitage produced a ring of keys from the pocket of his shabby black suit and unlocked the glass-fronted bookcase containing the largest of the volumes Cordelia Whateley had previously seen.

He selected one and carried it to a heavy deal table beside which a wooden reading-chair had already been placed, and laid it carefully upon the table. “You will find useful information
here, young miss.” Having said this he retired to a far corner and folded himself into a chair. To Cordelia Whateley he seemed to disappear.

She examined the volume Armitage had laid out. It was a bound collection of large news pages, the paper yellowing and flaking away at the edges. “I thought everybody was transferring newspaper files to microfilm,” Cordelia Whateley said.

From his darkened
corner, Henry Armitage replied, “Many in Dunwich Town like things as they were.”

Cordelia Whateley, examining the masthead of the bound newspaper, read aloud, “The Dunwich Daily Dispatch.”

“Only called it a daily,” Armitage commented. “You could never tell when there’d be an issue. The editor, Ephraim Clay, used to say it was a daily, came out once a day, just not every day. I think that was
some kind of joke. Never understood Ephraim very well. A strange man. But look at those issues for 1928. You’ll learn all you need to know.”

Cordelia Whateley fumbled in her large purse and brought out a small tape recorder. She pressed a switch and began dictating segments from various 1928 issues of the
Dunwich Daily Dispatch
.

One of them, reprinted from a Boston newspaper, reported the death
of Cordelia’s distant cousin, Wilbur Whateley. The article bore no byline, but it described the youthful, dying giant in shuddersome detail. Cordelia’s voice quavered and shook as she spoke, but she managed to continue to the end of the article.

Above the waist it was semi-anthropomorphic (the dispatch ran) 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 side of its ancestry. In the tentacles this was observable as a deepening
of the greenish tinge, whilst in the tail it was manifest as a yellowish appearance which alternated with a sickly greyish-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 discolouration behind it
.

Cordelia Whateley collapsed into the
wooden reading-chair. She pressed her hands to her chest, trying to steady her breathing. After a while she managed to raise her face and peer into the darkened corner where Armitage sat, patiently waiting for her to speak.

Finally she managed to mumble, “It’s impossible. Impossible. I know my Cousin Wilbur was—not normal. Not like other men, even other Whateleys. But this—how could such a being
exist?”

Armitage did not respond directly. Instead, he asked, “Did you know that Wilbur was a twin?”

“No. My parents and grandparents would never speak of the Dunwich branch of the family. Only my great-grandfather, Cain Whateley, told me stories. I remember my parents were furious with him. I used to ask them about the Whateleys, but they would never tell me anything, and when I asked about
things that Great-grandfather Cain told me, they said it was all nonsense. They said he’d seen too many horror movies when he was a boy, and read too many cheap magazines, that he was so old he couldn’t distinguish what he’d read about or seen in the movies from what was real.”

Armitage made a soft sound but spoke no words.

“Even Great-grandfather Cain never mentioned Wilbur’s being a twin.”

“But still he was,” Armitage told her. “Read on.”

Cordelia Whateley felt a painful thirst, the wine she had sipped at the inn had left a dry aftertaste in her mouth and throat. But recollection of the malodoriferous water Armitage had offered her earlier militated against her renewing the request. Instead, she continued leafing through old
Dunwich Daily Dispatches
, pausing frequently to dictate
excerpts into her miniature tape recorder.

A gasp of horror and revulsion escaped her when she came to the description of another creature, but she read the words aloud from the yellowing page, first attributing them accurately to still another cousin, Curtis Whateley. The reporter, once more anonymous, seemingly had seen fit to record Curtis Whateley’s degenerate Miskatonic Valley speech in
its full phonetic peculiarity:

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 hogsheads that haff shut up when they step … nothin’ solid abaout it—all like jelly, an’ made o’ sep’rit wrigglin’ ropes pushed close 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 in Heaven—that haff face on top!

And another quotation, from another news page, attributed to the same Curtis Whateley.

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, and it looked like Wizard Whateley’s, only it was yards and yards acrost…
.

Cordelia Whateley collapsed, sobbing.

“That was Wilbur’s brother.” Henry Armitage spoke in an ancient, papery voice. “He never had a name, or if he did, no one in all the Valley ever knew it. Save, perhaps, Wilbur, or
his mother, Lavinia.” Armitage’s breath rasped. “Or mebbe his step-father, old Wizard Whateley.”

Cordelia Whateley managed to raise her eyes. She ran her fingers through her hair. She had heard superstitious tales of men or women whose hair had turned white in a single night, from sheer terror. She wondered if that was happening to her. She wondered if she was going mad.

“What do you mean, step-father?”
she croaked. “Wasn’t Lavinia’s husband the real father? Who was, then?”

“Not old Wizard Whateley, you can be sartin.’” Armitage was lapsing into the local argot.

“Who was the father?” Cordelia Whateley demanded.

Armitage uttered a frightening chuckle. He rose, an elongated, shadowy figure still obscured by darkness. To Cordelia Whateley he seemed unnaturally tall, perhaps as tall as her Cousin
Wilbur’s legendary stature. But maybe all was illusion, maybe all was the effect of the dim, flickering illumination of fireplace and oil-lamp.

“Wizard Whateley was not the father of the twins. Not any more than Joseph the Carpenter was the father of Jesus of Nazareth.” He paused. “That is, of you b’lieve that Christian balderdash, o’ course. Ef you do, then the father was God, wa’nt he? An’
Joseph merely the foster-father of the infant Jesus? Ef you believe that Christian balderdash, o’ course.”

“Well, I—I’ve never thought about it very much, Professor.”

“Wilbur Whateley and his giant brother, his daemon brother, were star-spawn, young miss. Their father was a bein’ from the vaults of space, a member of a civilization old beyawnd human comprehension an’ distant beawond human imagination.
An’ he come here to earth—Gawd alone knows why—an’ he fathered two sons awn the blessed Lavinia Whateley. An’ the good people o’ Dunwich Town kilt ’em. Yes, the good people o’ Dunwich Town refused t’ understand, refused t’ care, refused t’ give the slightest sympathy or assistance to them two innocent children of an alien father and an earthly mother. We kilt ’em. The Romans had nothin’
on us. They kilt themselves one Son o’ Gawd. We kilt us two. An’ our punishment will be terrible, young miss. The stars are right, know it, young miss, the stars are right and our punishment will be terrible.”

A low moan escaped Cordelia Whateley. She had come to Professor Armitage in hopes of learning the truth about her cursed relatives, and instead had been subjected to the ravings of this
madman. “It’s impossible,” she managed, “an alien and a human could never interbreed. It’s a biological impossibility.”

“You think so?” Armitage challenged. He was growing calmer, and
reverting from his Dunwich dialect into the cultured academic pronunciation he had used at first. “A mere few years ago it might have seemed impossible, but we are learning better. Most of the people of Dunwich
know little of such things, and such things have been wisely kept from them. But a few of us—those ones at the Project and I alone here at the Institute—we keep abreast of modern science. And we know that genetic material from one creature can be implanted within the ovum of another, even a creature of another species. Did you know that DNA extracted from a laboratory mouse and injected into the cells
of a common fruit fly has produced eyes on the legs of that fly? Eyes, young miss, eyes. Think of what you’ve just read.”

“But—but it’s horrid. It’s blasphemous! How can you countenance such wickedness in the name of science?”

“Ah.” Armitage seemed pleased. He advanced toward Cordelia Whateley and stood with his back to the fireplace. His dark suit now longer seemed threadbare, his white hair
appeared to stand out from his scalp like a hydra’s snakes. He seemed to tower nearly to the high, echoing ceiling. He seemed simultaneously as young as an infant and as old as the continents. “Ah,” he repeated, “I suspect that you do believe in that religious nonsense. You use words like wickedness. Like blasphemy. Next you’ll accuse us of sinning.”

“Yes,” she almost shouted. “Yes. It is sinful!”

She thought she caught the flash of firelight glinting off Henry Armitage’s teeth as he grinned down at her. “He’s coming, you know.”

“Nobody is coming.” She felt a growing desperation in the pit of her belly.

“But he is. He is. He’s on his way now. You’ll see.”

Cordelia Whateley pushed herself to her feet. “I have to leave now.” She scrambled toward the door, clutching her purse in one hand
and her small tape recorder in the other. “Don’t—don’t help me—don’t see me out—I’ll find my own way.”

Armitage seemed to loom even taller. She couldn’t understand how he managed to stay in the building without his head colliding with the rafters and beams overhead. But he did not pursue her. He merely stood with his back to the fireplace, hands balled in fists, resting on his hips.

And he laughed.
He laughed, and he roared in a voice like the voice of a blaspheming godlet, “The father is coming. He’s coming to Sentinel Hill, young miss. And he’s mad. You know what the students like to say? The few students we have left in this demon-damned town?
He’s coming back, young miss, and he’s mad as hell!”

Cordelia Whateley plunged through the door and stood panting on the portico of the Dunwich
Institute.

Behind her, through the open door, the voice of Henry Armitage boomed out, “He’ll come to Sentinel Hill. Trust me. See if you can get in. He’s coming to Sentinel Hill.”

Cordelia Whateley managed to fumble the keys to her conservative sedan from her oversized purse. She unlocked the automobile’s door, plunged inside, started the engine after several tantalizing false attempts and switched
on the lights and tore madly through deserted Dunwich streets, heading finally for the outskirts of town and the installation at Sentinel Hill.

The grounds of the Dunwich Research Project were illuminated as glaringly as if it had been noontime on a brilliant day. Vaguely military-looking vehicles crowded the roads inside the gates and were parked helter-skelter around the buildings. The rolling
gate itself had been left wide open and utterly untended, and Cordelia had no trouble driving her car onto the grounds and finding an opening near a cluster of military vehicles. They were parked halfway up Sentinel Hill, and Cordelia had to swing her sedan around the end of a row and leave it pointing downhill.