by Peter Rawlik
The answer to my inquiry came in a manner I could never have expected. One early February morning I opened the paper to discover that Federal agents had descended on Innsmouth. A destroyer had been spotted off the coast, and state police had closed the road. There was talk of a pitched gun battle between revenuers and smugglers, as well as the bombardment of the waterfront by naval vessels. One unidentified source contended that the navy was systematically dropping depth charges along the reef that ran outside the harbor in an attempt to capture or damage a submarine vessel belonging to an unidentified foreign power. This anonymous claim, however, was simply too fantastic, and later editions of The Arkham Advertiser disavowed such wild notions.
Over the course of the next few days agents of the Federal government, treasury agents, military men and officials from innumerable other agencies and departments descended not only on Innsmouth, but on Arkham as well. The campus was cluttered with strangers who seemed intent on talking with a number of professors and examining in detail the historical and cultural documents of the area. This made the Miskatonic University Library a virtual beehive of activity, and on the few occasions I found it necessary to visit, I had nothing but sympathy for Dr. Armitage who was spending most of his time supervising the rare book rooms which were now flooded by government researchers who, he complained, knew little concerning the proper treatment of antique volumes.
Thankfully, I needed little in the way of assistance and was fully capable of finding whatever volumes I needed. The din that the strange events in Innsmouth had brought to our fair University was difficult to ignore, and created certain problems with the allocation of reading rooms and private carrels. Thus it came to pass that on one particular day I was forced to occupy a chair amongst the common space opposite the rooms set aside for the review of rare volumes and was in a position to overhear some small portion of the loud discussion that Armitage was engaged with behind closed doors. I was not alone in eavesdropping, for two young graduate students, who from their books I determined were students of mathematics, were with me, apparently keenly interested in what was going on between Armitage and his unidentified partner in conversation. Though it seemed to me they were less interested in the subject of the conversation than they were in gaining access to Armitage.
When several minutes of apparent debate ended, and there came an uncomfortable silence, my two companions rose from their chairs and moved into the hall so as to make their way toward Armitage. Just then the door to the room opened and from it stepped a monster of a man. He was easily over seven feet tall and his vast bulk was barely contained by the worn suit he had stuffed himself into. His face was long, almost goatish, and covered with coarse hair. That thick black hair was apparently endemic over his entire body, for it peeked out from his sleeves and between the buttons of his shirt. His walk was a lumbering gait, and from the way he twisted himself I suspected a significant deformity of the pelvis, spine or both.
Stunned by the appearance of the giant, the two graduate students stood dumbfounded. Even as the monstrous man reached out one of his massive hands they failed to move. Unable to move around them, the giant spoke in a low but deep voice, and said something I could not hear before gently moving one of the young men to the side. His path unblocked, the ogre was quickly gone from my sight. In the distance, somewhere outside the library, a dog howled.
When Armitage himself came out of the room he seemed flustered and mumbling under his breath. “Inbreeding? Great God, what simpletons! Shew 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’s Whateley’s father?”
Whatever it was that Armitage said next was lost to me, for I focused entirely on the name that Armitage had given to the thing that had just walked out of the library, for I knew that Wilbur Whateley, the creature that had lumbered past at more than seven feet tall, was no more than fifteen years old, and that I had inadvertently exposed his mother Lavinia to my reagent while Wilbur was still in utero. It was I who was responsible for not only his cyclopean proportions but also his congenital deformities that forced him to walk with that horrid gait. Wilbur Whateley was a monster of my own making.
I fled the library blindly. The knowledge that that creature was Wilbur Whateley was stupefying, and the possibility that I was likely responsible for his condition froze me to the core. Soon I was wandering the campus in a daze, unconsciously following the paths and walkways that wind through the University. I shudder at what people must have thought of the blank-eyed mask that gripped my face, and I was grateful that the cold had kept the common areas clear of staff and students.
Somehow or another I wandered off campus and soon found myself wandering through the construction site for the new Tillinghast Building, the pride of Arkham’s so-called new skyline. The lower floors of the building were nearly done, and the site was still littered with massive earthmovers, cranes and trucks, mostly concentrated around the great pit that had been dug to construct the tunnel that would connect the railway platform in the basement to the new subterranean railway that the city was building. Each day the project consumed tons of concrete and the trucks that brought it ran through the streets all hours of the day. There was something hypnotically soothing about the construction, and I settled in to watch it and let my mind go blank.
It was sometime later that a familiar, though perhaps unwelcome face disturbed my peace. It had been some time since I had seen Dr. Ambrose Dexter, but suddenly he was beside me, smiling. I should have refused to talk with him, but he waved my request for statistics on the population of Innsmouth in my face and spoke of things that both intrigued and frightened my sensibilities. By that evening I was in my office making arrangements for an army doctor to take over my practice while I was whisked off to a Federal facility in what was left of the village of Innsmouth.
The agreement I signed with Dexter forbids me from going into detail on what I saw and did, but I am not sure that it matters much at this point. I spent six months working for Dexter and his associates, who consisted primarily of military and Bureau of Investigation agents that had seized control of Innsmouth by presidential order. The residents of Innsmouth had not been involved with the smuggling of contraband, but, rather, sometime in the late nineteenth century became enamored with the people and religion of one of their trading partners in the Pacific islands. In fact, the people of Innsmouth had not only married many of the natives of these islands, but had also adopted their religious beliefs incorporating the worship of a triumvirate of monstrous aquatic gods that fit nicely into their seafaring lifestyle. Unfortunately, this miscegenation had resulted in the expression of certain retrograde characteristics that gave the inhabitants of Innsmouth an unwholesome and even somewhat batrachian appearance. Apparently the entire community had been affected by the condition, and the Federal government had found it necessary to reach out and recruit assistance from private individuals such as myself.
Under Dexter’s guidance I was responsible for what were designated marginal cases, showing minimal defects. These included cases of ichthyosis, a skin condition that created scale-like patches, webbed fingers and toes, premature balding, and particularly Grave’s ophthalmopathy. Given the extensive malformations that my patients exhibited, I was grateful that I did not have to work with the patients that had been classified as having extensive or severe cases.
It was not my duty to develop or even suggest possible treatments for the exhibited conditions, but rather, I was to interview individuals concerning their conditions, behaviors and personal medical history, this being much of the information that I had put forth in my request to the census, and also taking skin, blood and hair samples. On the rare occasion that one of our charges suffered an injury I would undertake the menial tasks of setting broken fingers, stitching lacerations and tending to bruises. Although I will admit that such tasks were unusually rare.
I spent s
ix months at the facility, during which I discerned an incredible, almost miraculous, condition amongst my patients. As with my experimental subjects, those of Innsmouth showed an inordinate resistance to injury and disease, as well as a longevity that was to be envied. This was coupled with, and may have been directly related to, a marked difference in the rate of growth, maturation and aging. As far as I could tell, for I was never actually allowed to correlate the information that I was gathering, the children of Innsmouth grew at an astounding rate and matured quickly, often entering puberty between eight and ten years of age. However, once a state of adolesence had been achieved, individuals, particularly males, seemed to stay in this state for an entire decade, and failed to show signs of physical and mental maturity until they were well into their mid-twenties. Adulthood seemed to span from an average of twenty-five to well into the seventies, with the first signs of age, such as grey hair or arthritis, not appearing until individuals had become octogenarians.
Investigating such trends was irresistible to me, and in July when Dexter made it plain that the compound was to close and the patients to be scattered to other facilities in Utah and Arizona, I schemed to acquire samples of my patients’ tissues, particularly blood, for my own purposes. I accomplished this by collecting the blood that remained in the actual needle as opposed to the tube itself. Admittedly, this often left me with incomplete or even compromised samples, but for my purposes it was enough. Examination of these samples revealed an unfamiliar component, a kind of spindle-shaped, nucleated cell. Similar cells perform a clotting function in non-mammalian vertebrates, but this seemed somewhat different in appearance, and reminded me of the experiments Muñoz and I had performed using the extract from the glands of crocodiles and alligators.
I isolated the odd tissue type from several samples and concentrated it in an incubator tube where it seemed to remain stable. After several hours the tube exhibited a strange separation, with the cells settling to the bottom and a layer of pale green fluid floating above them. I extracted samples of this strange excretion, somewhat familiar in color and viscosity, and analyzed its content. As I expected, the cells were secreting a fluid that was in many ways extremely similar to my reagent; indeed, by studying the content and behavior of this organically produced version, I was able to envision ways to modify and even improve my own. Unfortunately, as with many components of blood the cells, despite being nucleated, were not self-replicating, and by the end of July my samples of the unusual cellular component had all ceased to be viable. About the same time Dexter relocated the last of the patients and the facility was shut down. I returned to my quiet and private practice, emboldened by what I had learned in Innsmouth.
I intended to initiate use of the revised formula almost immediately, but my attention was drawn away by a single event, one that would in its complexity lead to a cascading horror which would result in what is now commonly referred to as the Dunwich Horror, and although such events would serve to absolve me of a certain guilt, they would, in the end, precipitate my own personal disgrace.
In his pseudonymous account of those events, rushed to publication following his disappearance in October, Randolph Carter suggests that the Dunwich Horror began in earnest in September, but I tend to agree with Armitage, that the impetus for those later events can be tied to what occurred in the small hours of August the third in the halls of the University library. It was in these unwelcome hours that a great scream had reverberated throughout Arkham, and those closest to the campus had found themselves inextricably drawn to bear witness to whatever had occurred.
I was one of many who gathered outside the vestibule doors to the library, drawn by the whimpering howls of the watchdog that Armitage was known to nightly let roam those hallowed halls. An open window testified that someone had entered in an unorthodox manner, and from the sounds that still emanated, whomever it was had suffered from a vicious and frightful attack. Not long after the crowd gathered, Armitage was there as well, and in the company of his colleagues Rice and Morgan he unlocked the door and ordered the crowd to remain outside.
A few moments after they entered there came an unearthly and unintelligible voice that carried throughout the library and bellowed out of the open window. The sound died out quickly, and with it came a slow but pervasive stench of frightful magnitude. As it leaked out into the campus, the birds roosting amongst the buildings took wing and filled the air with the sound of whippoorwills. A pair of deputies arrived soon after, but Armitage ordered them to stay out for their own good until the medical examiner arrived.
The next day rumors spread like wildfire, and the older residents of Arkham invoked comparisons to certain events that had occurred in June of 1882 following the collection of a meteorite that had fallen on the Gardner farm. Out of curiosity I called the medical examiner and inquired concerning the events of the night before, intimating that perhaps it was one of my patients. My colleague related that Armitage had identified the so-called victim as a resident of Dunwich, though he chuckled at such a suggestion. The coroner was of the opinion that he had been the victim of an elaborate prank, for upon entering the library he had seen no body, but only a large white mass of collagen-like material not unlike the so-called globs of tissue that had been documented in various inlets and beaches, particularly in Florida. That such a mass could once have been a man was ludicrous, and to give it a name, even one as ridiculous as Wilbur Whateley, was simply flummery.
The mention of that name filled me with both dread and relief, for it seemed that the creature for which I had held myself accountable was no more. Still, I felt a measure of sympathy for the life of suffering he must have endured. I was at the same time elated that his passing finally ended any chance that his deformities could be traced back to me. That the end of Wilbur Whateley also closed the book on one of my few errors seemed fortuitous and final.
But it was not to be so simple. On the morning of September fifth I was paid a personal visit by Armitage’s wife, Helena, a with as many years as her husband, but as vibrant as a woman much younger, thanks to the effects of my treatments. She came not for herself but rather for her husband. Henry Armitage had become suddenly obsessed with the contents of a ragged journal that had been found amongst the personal effects of Wilbur Whateley, written in some fantastic code. Armitage had finally hit on the basis of the cipher on Sunday, and had since been entirely immersed in its translation, barely stopping for food, drink or sleep. Such a pace was unhealthy for a man of his age, but he refused any overtures made by his wife or friends.
Persuaded, I assured her that I would discuss the matter with Henry that very morning, and before noon I found myself in his office. That my presence was unwelcome was to say the least, but his appearance validated his wife’s concerns. His eyes were bloodshot and his speech slow, the pallor to his skin suggested dehydration, while the tremors in his hands were indicative of improper nutrition. I insisted that he cease whatever he was doing, and take some time to rest and properly care for himself. He waved me off, insisting that time was of the essence and promising me an explanation as soon as he was able.
Within hours I was back in his presence, summoned by his wife to their residence not far from my own. The old man had managed to return home and consume a meager amount of sustenance, but he was wild-eyed and almost hysterical. He insisted on returning to the campus, and both his wife and I agreed that some chicanery and a little force were warranted. Using a mild sedative, injected while his wife distracted him, I was finally able to calm him down enough for him to be deposited in his quarters. I spent the night by his side, while his wife retired to a spare room. There was a sense of familiarity as I recalled the time I spent a similar night with the Peaslees so many years ago.
Armitage’s sleep was fitful; he moaned and on occasion thrashed about, searching for something that seemed to be eluding him. As the night progressed he began to talk in his sleep, though much of this was unintelligible. What little I could make out hinted at things that
I wish I did not know of. Armitage regularly repeated the name Whateley, and the foreign phrases yog sothoth and bug shogog, though what these meant and in what context they were used I was unable to discern. My patient also seemed overly concerned with what was apparently a metaphorical concept of “The Gate and the Key” and in his fits seemed troubled by the lack or loss of the key. “Without the key,” he would whine, “the union is incomplete, the gate shall remain closed. But what of the gate…grow unabated?”
The next morning Armitage awoke delirious, but whether this was because of exhaustion, the medication, the esoteric and eldritch things he had been subjecting himself to, or perhaps some combination is unknowable. I pressed him for an explanation for his actions, but he refused and demanded to return to his office. Denied, he become morose, and at times spoke of apocalyptic scriptures and myths from a variety of traditions. Fearing that he could be a danger to himself or others, I kept him on a mild sedative for the rest of the day, which kept him lethargic and allowed me to return home to bathe and change.
I also used my time away from the Armitage household to summon Rice and Morgan to my office and demand an explanation. The two men were reticent at first, for Armitage had sworn them to secrecy, and they were still unclear of certain details that remained shrouded in innuendo. I reminded the two of them that I was Armitage’s physician and that he had over the last few days taken actions that endangered his own welfare. If they would not talk to me, perhaps they would care to testify concerning his mental health before a judge. This dramatic overture seemed to place the situation in perspective for the two professors and they revealed what Armitage both knew and suspected.
In light of what came later, the details of what Rice and Morgan told me need not be revealed. Let it be said that Armitage had gathered enough evidence to convince not only himself, but Rice and Morgan as well, that something of cosmic significance was brewing in the backwoods hills of Dunwich, and had been for some time. The Whateleys had done something obscene, bent the laws of space and time and let something leak into our world. Whatever it was had left its taint on Wilbur Whateley, that was obvious, for Rice and Morgan told me what they had seen as Wilbur had died that night in the library. Whatever that thing was, it had never been human or even remotely related to any species known. Armitage, informed by what he had gleaned from Wilbur’s diary, suspected much more, that the worst of it had yet to begin, and he was desperately trying to find a way to disarm what could be a volatile situation. Suddenly the two professors were no longer confessing to me but pleading, desperately begging me to allow Armitage to return to work at any cost. Convinced of the truth of things, for I recalled that fateful night that Lavinia and her father climbed Sentinel Hill, and the strange and disastrous things that had followed, I conceded to the two learned men and agreed that he should return to work as soon as possible.