Dunwich

Old Whateley noticed the growing number of whippoorwills that would come out of Cold Spring Glen to chirp under his window at night. Sally Sawyer maintained that the glen is not a healthy or decent place, its whippoorwills and fireflies never acting like creatures of God, and that strange things could be heard rushing and talking in the air down there between the rock falls and Bear's Den. Elmer Frye's house stood on the eastern edge of the glen, and the Frye place itself stood at its head; Luther Brown's usual morning route with the cows to Ten-Acre Meadow lay between the glen and the village.

When the horror burst loose, all the trees on the glen's banks were found bent and broken, with a great avenue gouged in the underbrush, as though whatever had escaped had gone down into the ravine; monstrous tracks argued a passage in two directions between the glen and Sentinel Hill. Only a distant fetor rose from below, no sound, and dogs grew cowed and reluctant near it. Sam Hutchins later warned people not to go down into the glen because of the tracks, the smell, and whippoorwills screeching in the dark of noonday — a warning a party of State Police disregarded, and from which they never returned. At night a wind sweeping up out of the glen would bring a touch of ineffable fetor to the air, and once a forky bolt of lightning seemed to descend into the accursed place itself.

Deposits of skulls and bones found around the sizable table-like rock on Sentinel Hill sustain the popular belief that such spots were once the burial-places of the Pocumtucks. Twice a year the Whateleys would build hellish fires and chant rituals by this altar-stone, on May Eve and Hallowmass, and each such night the mountain rumblings would recur with greater violence; on Hallowe'en 1915 an underground rumbling synchronized with bursts of flame from the summit, blamed on "them witch Whateleys' doin's," a phenomenon that recurred in later years. Old Whateley once predicted that a child of Lavinny's would call its father's name on the hill's top, and Wilbur himself was once seen running up ahead of his mother just before a great blaze was noticed there.

When the horror finally broke loose, fresh monstrous tracks were found in the road skirting the hill, with a thirty-foot swath of crushed shrubbery leading steeply upward from its base; the thing proved able to scale a sheer stony cliff of almost complete verticality, and its trail ended, or reversed, at the summit. Armitage found the trail up and down Sentinel Hill of almost cataclysmic significance, and lingered over the sinister altarlike stone crowning it; grass and bushes were seen creeping slowly up the slope toward the top, and whippoorwills piped unseasonably in its underbrush.

At the climax, three figures were seen standing on the topmost ridge, level with the altar-stone but at a distance from it; a mistiness gathered around the stone in a lightning flash, and deep vocal sounds seemed to issue from that spot. A single bolt of lightning shot from the purple zenith to the altar-stone, and a great tidal wave of viewless force and stench swept down over the countryside, leaving the tarry deposit later found there and on the ruined Whateley farmhouse floor alike. The stench left quickly, but the vegetation never came right again — to this day something queer and unholy clings to the growths on and around that fearsome hill. Armitage afterward urged that men dynamite the altar-stone and pull down the rings of standing stones on the other hills.

Elmer Frye's house stood on the eastern edge of Cold Spring Glen; a frightful stench and the savage barking of dogs awakened the household there one night, and one side of the old red barn was found completely caved in, with only about a quarter of the cattle ever located and identified. When a hastily assembled group of armed men reached the place at the head of the glen, there was no longer any house at all — it had caved in like an egg-shell, and amongst the ruins nothing living or dead could be discovered, only a stench and a tarry stickiness. The Elmer Fryes had been erased from Dunwich entire.

When the men from Arkham later examined the site, the Frye ruins still showed lingering traces of the tarry stickiness and blasphemous tracks in the yard; a car belonging to a party of State Police stood empty near the ruins, its occupants never found. The visitors from Arkham nonetheless resolved to stand guard at the Frye ruins near the glen, though the Dunwich natives who saw them leave had little expectation of seeing them again.

The house was a large and partly inhabited farmhouse set against a hillside, four miles from the village and a mile and a half from any other dwelling, its rear end buried entirely in the rocky hillside; three least-ruined ground-floor rooms had long sufficed for Old Whateley and his daughter. Soon after Wilbur's birth, Old Whateley restored the unused parts, boarding up all the windows in the reclaimed upper story and converting one — in the rear of the east gable end, close against the hill — into a solid plank door, with a cleated wooden runway built up to it from the ground; a tool-shed was likewise put in order, clapboarded, and fitted with a stout fresh lock, then abandoned again once the work was done. In time, callers professed to hear sounds in the sealed upper story even when the whole family were downstairs.

Around 1923 a second siege of carpentry occurred entirely inside the sealed upper part: partitions and the attic floor were removed, leaving one vast open void between the ground story and the peaked roof, and the great central chimney was torn down and replaced with a flimsy outside tin stove-pipe. In the summer of 1927 still more carpentry followed on the ground floor, as Wilbur closed up all its doors and windows and removed its partitions, just as he and his grandfather had done upstairs four years before. Henry Armitage had once called at the farm and been sickened there by an unholy stench.

At the last, the house became a great empty shell giving off an unwonted stench and surging, lapping sounds, which local officials found excuses to avoid investigating closely. It was finally found blown open, its timbers scattered as though by dynamite, though the bottom floor remained, covered with a foul tarlike substance dripping from its edges — the same tarry stickiness later found on the altar-stone atop Sentinel Hill. Men shuddered visibly passing the site of Wilbur's wrecked abode as they followed the line of monstrous prints leading on toward that hill.