The Mask of Cthulhu

by August Derleth

  But this vision came and faded, like a flashing picture on a screen, from what source I could not tell. It was so brief, so momentary, that, when it had passed, the sound of the book’s fall to the pile where I had thrown it still echoed in the room. I was shaken, for at one and the same time I knew my vision had no meaning and yet I knew it did have an importance out of all proportion to this house or this valley or even to all the world I knew.

  I turned and went out of the house into the noon-day sun, and under its beneficent rays, the dark ordeal passed from me. I looked back to the house; it shone white in the sun, with the shadow of an elm lying upon it. I went then into the southeast, striking off through the long neglected fields and pastures toward the Whateley house, which lay about a mile away in that direction. Seth Whateley was a younger of Amos’s; they had quarrelled years before, I had been told in Aylesbury, about what, no one knew, and now seldom saw or spoke to each other, despite living but two miles apart. Amos had grown close to the Dunwich Whateleys, who were, said the Aylesbury people, “the decayed branch” of one of the old armigerous families of Massachusetts.

  The majority of the distance lay over the hill, through heavily wooded slopes and into the valley beyond, and quite often I started up whippoorwills, which flew on noiseless wings, circled a little, and settled horizontally on limbs or on the ground, blending wonderfully well with bark or old leaves, gazing at me with their small black eyes. Here and there, too, I saw eggs lying among the leaves. The hills were alive with whippoorwills, but I did not need this evidence to know that. It seemed to me a singular thing, however, that they should be ten times as numerous on the slope facing into Harrop’s Valley than on those opposite. But they were. Descending the slope through the aromatic May woods to the valley where the Whateleys lived, I frightened up only one bird, which vanished noiselessly, and did not move away only a little and turn to regard me in passing. I did not think, then, that the curious attention of the whippoorwills on the near slope was frightening.

  I was apprehensive about my reception at the Whateley house, and I soon found that I had good reason to be, for I was met by Seth Whateley carrying a gun, and giving me a stony stare from above that weapon.

  “Ye got no call to bother us,” he challenged as I approached.

  Evidently he had just come from dinner, and had been on his way back to the fields when he caught sight of me; he had then retreated into the house and got his gun.

  Behind him I could see his wife, Emma, and their three children hanging on to her skirts, looking at me with fear plain in their eyes.

  “I don’t mean to bother you, Mr. Whateley,” I said, as reassuringly as I could and with determined effort to suppress the irritation I felt at this unreasoning wall of suspicion which greeted me wherever I turned. “But I do mean to know what happened to my cousin Abel.”

  He gave me his stony stare briefly before replying, “We dun’t know nuthin’. We ain’t the kind to go pryin’ araound. Whut yer cousin was a-doin’ was his own business es long es he didn’t bother us. Even if there’s some things better let alone,” he added darkly.

  “Somebody must have made away with him, Mr. Whateley.”

  “He was took. That’s whut they say my brother Amos says. He was took, body an’ soul, an’ if a man gits to lookin’ where he hadn’t oughta, that’s whut’s a-goin’ to happen ev’ry time. No man’s hand was raised agin him here—not but what there hadn’t oughta hev bin.”

  “I’m going to find out….”

  He shifted his gun menacingly. “Ye can’t do it here. I tol’ you we dun’t know nuthin’. An’ we dun’t. I ain’t meanin’ no offense, but the woman she’s upset as all gitout, an’ I don’t aim for her to be more turned out; so you git.”

  However crude Seth Whateley’s invitation was, it was effective enough.

  But matters were very much the same at Hough’s, though there I was very poignantly aware of a greater tension in the atmosphere—not alone fear, but hatred, too. They were more civil, but anxious to be rid of me, and when at last I took my leave, with no word of help from them in my quest, I was convinced that, however they reasoned, the death of Laban Hough’s wife was laid at my cousin’s door. It was not evident in what was said so much as in what was not said; the charge lay in the unspoken words lurking behind their eyes and tongues. And I knew without needing to think further, but only by remembering how Hester Hutchins had talked to her cousin Flora about the whippoorwills calling for the souls of Benjy Wheeler and Sister Hough and Annie Begbie, that the whippoorwills and my cousin Abel Harrop were linked in the primitive superstition which haunted the waking and sleeping hours of these remote and earthy people; but by what bond these events could be connected, I could not guess. It was patent, moreover, that these people looked upon me with the same fear and dislike—or loathing—as they had looked upon Abel, and whatever their reason for hating and fearing Abel had been, the same reason clearly applied to me in their limited capacity for thinking. Yet Abel, as I remembered him, had been even more sensitive than I, and, though surly by nature, he had always been essentially gentle, unwilling to hurt anyone, least of all a fellow-animal, human or otherwise. Doubtless their suspicions had taken rise in the well of dark superstition which is always rife in isolated countrysides, ever lurking ready to spark another Salem terror, and hound to death helpless victims innocent of any crime but knowledge.

  It was that night, the night of the full moon, that the horror struck the Pocket.

  But before I learned of what happened in the Pocket that night, I went through an ordeal of my own. It began soon after I got home from my last visit that afternoon, to the uncommunicative Osborns, across the hills to the north, after the sun had vanished beyond the western ridge, and I was at a meager supper. I began to have fancies again, and I couldn’t get it out of my head that I wasn’t alone in that house. So I left my supper and went through it, first downstairs, and then, taking the lamp—for the gable windows upstairs admitted little light—I went up. All the time I thought I could hear someone calling my name, someone calling to me in Abel’s voice, the way it used to sound when we were children and played together here at this place, when his folks were living.

  I found something in the storeroom, something I could not explain. I found it by accident because I saw that one of the panes was out of the window; I had not noticed that before. The room was filled with boxes and a little discarded furniture; it was stacked neatly enough, and in such a way that the most light could still filter into the room from the one window. Seeing the break, I went over to the window, and when I came around the boxes stacked there, I saw that there was a little space between the row of boxes and the window, enough for a chair and a man to sit in it. There was a chair there; there was no man, but there was some clothing I knew for Abel’s, and the way it lay there in the chair was enough to send a chill through me, though I don’t know why I was so oddly frightened.

  The fact was, the clothes lay there in the most peculiar manner. It was not as if somebody had laid them down like that; I don’t think anyone could lay clothing just that way. I looked and looked at it, and I could not explain it in any other way but that somebody had been sitting there and just been pulled out of his clothes, as if he had been sucked out, and the clothes just collapsed with nothing inside them. I put the lamp down and touched them; they were not dusty to any extent; so that meant they had not been there long. I wondered if the sheriff’s men had seen them, not that they could have made anything more out of them than I had; so I left them there, undisturbed, meaning to notify the sheriff the next morning. But what with one thing and another, and everything that happened in the Pocket after that, I forgot about it; so the clothes are still there, sort of fallen together on the chair, just as I found them that night of the May full moon before the window in the storeroom. And I set it down here and now, because it is evidence of what I claim, to stand against the terrible doubts that greet me on all sides.

  That night the whippoorw
ills called with maddening insistence.

  I heard them first while I was still in the storeroom; they had begun to call out of the darkly wooded slopes from which the sunlight had gone, but far down the west, the sun had not set, and, though the Pocket was already in a kind of blue-hazed twilight, the sun still shone outside it, on the road connecting Arkham and Aylesbury. It was early for the whippoorwills, very early, earlier than they had ever called before. Irritated as I was already, by the stupid superstitious fear which had repelled every advance I made during the day, I know I could not stand yet another night of sleeplessness.

  But soon the cries and calls were everywhere. Whippoorwill! Whippoorwill! Whippoorwill! Nothing but that monotonous screaming and screeching, the constant Whippoorwill! Whippoorwill! It pressed down from the hills into the valley, it crowded out of the moonlit night where the birds surrounded the house in a vast circle until it seemed that the house itself echoed their cries in a voice of its own, as if every joist and beam, every nail and stone, every board and shingle answered the thunder from outside, the horrible, the maddening Whippoorwill! Whippoorwill! Whippoorwill! rising in a cacophonous chorus which invaded and tore every fibre of my being. They made a wave of sound beating against the house, against the hills, once again as if they took part in some eldritch litany, and every cell in my body cried out in anguish at their noisome triumph.

  It was about eight o’clock that evening when I knew I must do something. I had not brought any kind of weapon with me, and my cousin’s shot-gun had been impounded by the sheriff and was still being held in the courthouse at Aylesbury; but I had found a stout cudgel under the couch where I slept—evidently my cousin’s, to be kept at hand in case he was awakened suddenly in the night—and I meant to go out and kill as many of the whippoorwills as I could, in the hope that this would drive them away for good. I did not intend to far; so I left the lamp burning in the study.

  At my first step outside the door, the whippoorwills fluttered up, fanning out and away from me. But all my pent-up irritation and wrath burst forth; I ran in among them, swinging wildly, while they fluttered noiselessly up all about me, some of them silent now, but most of them still singing horribly. I pursued them out of the yard, up the road, into the woods, down across the road, back into the woods; I ran far, but how far I do not know, and I know that I killed many of them before I stumbled back to the house at last, exhausted, with only enough energy left to put out the lamp in the study, which had burned very low, and fall upon my couch. Before the distant whippoorwills which had escaped me could converge upon the house again, I was deep in slumber.

  Because I do not know what it was when I came in, I cannot say how long I slept before the ringing of the telephone woke me. Though the sun was already up, the hour was but five-thirty. As was now my habit, I went out into the kitchen, where the telephone was, and took down the receiver. That was how I learned about the coming of the horror.

  “Mis’ Wheeler, this’s Emma Whateley. You heerd the news?”

  “No, Mis’ Whateley, ain’t heerd a thing.”

  “Gawd! it’s awful. It’s Bert Giles. He’s bin kilt. They found him jest abaout midnight thar whar the road goes acrost Giles’ brook, near to the bridge. ’Twas Lute Corey found him, an’ they say he let out a yell that woke Lem Giles up, an’ the minute Lem heered Lute hollerin’ he knowed, he knowed all right. His ma begged Bert not to go to Arkham, but he was baound an’ determined to go, you know haow set all them Gileses is. ’Pears he was a-goin’ in with them Baxter men works Osborn’s farm, summat under three mile from Gileses, an’ he set out to walk to their place so’s he could ride with ’em. Wa’n’t no sign o’ what kilt him, but Seth, who was daown come sunup this mornin’ he says the graound’s all tore up, like as if thar was a fight. An’ he seen poor Bert, or what was left ‘o him. Gawd! Seth said his throat was all tore out an’ his wrists tore open and his clothes jest about to shreds! An’ that ain’t all, even if ’t is the worst. While Seth was a’standin’ thar, Curtis Begbie he come runnin’ up an’ he said four o’ Corey’s cows they had night pasturin’ in thet south forty was kilt, too, an’ all tore up—jest like poor Bert!”

  “Gawd!” whimpered Mrs. Wheeler, frightened. “Who will it be the next?”

  “Sheriff says ’pears to be some wild animal, but thar hain’t no tracks they could see. They bin workin’ all araound ever since they got the word, an’ Seth he says they hain’t found aout much.”

  “Oh, it’s wuss’n when Abel was here.”

  “I allus said Abel wasn’t the worst. I knowed. I knowed some of Seth’s kin-folk— thet Wilbur an’ Ol’ Whateley—an’ they’re a sight worse’n a feller like Abel Harrop was. I knowed it, Mis’ Wheeler. An’ thar’s others at Dunwich, too—the Whateleys ain’t the only ones.”

  “If it ain’t Abel….”

  “An’ Seth, he says durin’ that time he was a-standin’ thar lookin’ at poor Bert Giles, Amos come up, Amos that ain’t said ten words to Seth in ten years, an’ he jest took one look an’ he kind o’ muttered to hisself an’ Seth says he said, ‘That dam’ fool spoke the words!’ jest like that, an’ Seth, he turns to him an’ he says, ‘Whut’s thet you’re sayin’ Amos?’ An’ Amos he looks at him an’ he says, ‘Ain’t nothin’ as bad as a fool whut don’t know what he’s got!’ ”

  “Thet Amos Whateley allus was a bad one, Mis’ Whateley, an’ that’s a fact, an’ it don’t make no difference you’re related, it’s jest the same.”

  “Ain’t nobody knows it better’n I do, Mis’ Wheeler.”

  By this time other women had joined the conversation, identifying themselves. Mrs. Osborn came on the wire to say that the Baxters, tiring of waiting, and thinking that Bert had changed his mind, had gone on to Arkham. They had come back about eleven-thirty. Hester Hutchins predicted that this was “only the beginnin’. Amos said it.” Vinnie Hough cried hysterically that she was of a mind to take the children, her niece and nephew, and flee to Boston until the devil “took his stand somewhere’s else.” It was only when Hester Hutchins began to tell the rest of them, wildly, that Jesse Trumbull had come in and reported that all the blood had been sucked out of Bert Giles’ body and also out of the four Corey cows that I hung up; I could recognize the beginning of the legend and the working of superstition beginning to be constructed on the few pertinent facts.

  Throughout the day there were various reports. At noon the sheriff stopped in perfunctorily to inquire whether I had heard anything in the night, but I replied that I was incapable of hearing anything but whippoorwills. Since everyone else to whom he had talked mentioned having heard the whippoorwills, he was not surprised. He volunteered the information that Jethro Corey had awakened in the night and had heard the cows bellowing, but before he could get dressed to go down they had stopped; so he had assumed they had been disturbed by some animal passing through the pasture—the hills abounded in fox and raccoon—and had gone back to bed. Mamie Whateley had heard someone scream; she was sure that it was Bert, but, since she reported it only after having heard all the details of the killing, it was thought that this was only an imaginative afterthought, a pathetic attempt to focus a little attention on herself. After the sheriff had gone, one of his deputies stopped in, too, plainly worried, because their failure to solve the mystery of my cousin’s disappearance was already a blot on their record, and this new crime might well bring them further criticism. Apart from these visits and the steady ringing of the telephone, I was not disturbed throughout the day, and I managed to get a little sleep in anticipation of the night’s infesting whippoorwills.

  Yet that night, curiously, the whippoorwills, for all their damnable calling, did me a good turn. I had gone to sleep, surprisingly, despite their cacophonous cries, and had slept perhaps two hours, when I was awakened. I thought at first that dawn had come, but it had not, and then I realized that what had awakened me was the absence of the whippoorwills’ voices; their sudden cessation and the succeeding silence had startled me from my s
leep. This curious and unprecedented occurrence fully aroused me; I got up, pulled on my trousers, and went to the window to look out.

  I saw a man running from the yard—a big man. I thought at once of what had happened to Albert Giles the night before, and a momentary fear took possession of me, for a big man could perhaps have wreaked the night’s havoc, a big man and a homicidal maniac—but then I knew that there was only one man so big in all the valley, and that was Amos Whateley. And the direction in which he was vanishing in the moonlight was that of the Hutchins place, where he worked. My impulse to set out after him, to shout at him, was halted by what I then saw out of the corner of my eyes—a sudden, fitful orange glow. I threw up the window and craned out. Down along one corner the house was burning!