by Tim Marquitz
“Yep. Was with him when he started the Yippies in the first place. ‘Save the world one free concert at a time,’ was his motto. Naïve if you ask me. He continued with his Youth Intervention Party and I returned here.”
“That’s one of the things I wanted to ask you. What made you start all this?” I asked while indicating the street around me. I had already started to see signs of the peaceful integration that Chifford had instilled in this place. It gladdened my heart to see because nowhere else was this happening. This was truly the heavenly condition I had heard about.
“Well, I decided to start in Dunwich because this was where I grew up. You know, I had a class with you once, about three years ago. You may not know it, but I am a fellow Miskatonic alumnus. I graduated that year, in fact.”
“Really? What class was that?”
“Archeology with Doctor Kiska. You know, I saw him just a few months ago, and he is the one that recommended you for this position.”
“Really? I didn’t know he even remembered who I am.”
“Over here we have the town hall, where I work”
The building he pointed to was a small affair. It was only one story with a bell tower, which resembled more of a church than a modern city hall.
“You know, this is not a new role for Dunwich. We use to be a secret destination of the Underground Railroad. Some people had even started calling us ‘New Haven’ except that a few people in Connecticut would have had a problem with that so we just remained plain old Dunwich.”
Looking at Chifford, I could see a devotion to serving his hometown, and his devotion to the cause of peaceful integration. It was something I could admire in the man.
“ … and if you look up there, you will see Dunwich Academy where you will be working”
Startled out of my meandering thoughts, I glanced in the direction he indicated. On the top of a lone hill stood a tall stone and masonry structure imposing to look upon even from this distance. It was grand in nature and seemed like it had been there for ages, overlooking the town below.
“Impressive, is it not? Took us five years to build, and at a pretty penny too. Hard to believe it is only three years old.”
“Three years old? It looks like it has been there for ages.”
He smiled at me knowingly and laughed.
“It’s meant to. I designed it that way. I look at some of these new schools they are building, with their red brick walls and laminated floor tiles, and I feel they are so sterile and lifeless. I wanted the students, who enter Dunwich Academy, to have the same feeling I had when I first went to Arkham Preparatory School, that of entering an austere institution where future presidents are forged, and that they could be that next president.”
“That sounds like the kind of school I would be proud to teach at.”
“That is why I hired you. I won’t lie to you. The reason I have been able to do so much with this town is the fact that I own most of it. Dunwich Realty is my family inheritance, and with us owning so much of Dunwich, I felt it was high time for us to progress beyond what we were, and move into a new future. What I didn’t want was for it to be a community for the haves. I wanted it to be a community for the have-nots. Affordable housing, good strong economy, plenty of jobs, and the finest education available for everyone is my goal.”
The more I heard, the more I respected this man. This was a vision that was sorely lacking elsewhere. Instead of insulating themselves from the lower class and heathen non-whites, barricading their world against invasion with white sheets and burning crosses, here they were inviting them in and asking them to help build a new and hopefully better world. This man was practicing what so many others in the country only talked about. If only Dr. King would have known this man. I felt a twinge of regret thinking about our fallen martyr who had been gunned down by that same white-sheeted society of bigots only a few months before. Perhaps we could fulfill his dream here.
It did not take long for me to settle into my new life in Dunwich, and as the waning days of summer ticked away to the beginning of school, I grew anxious. I had never really taught a class of my own, and I was worried I had the wherewithal to handle thirty 8th graders all in the same classroom. What would they be like? Would I have enough to teach them, and do I have the ability to prevent them from creating a Hell on Earth in my classroom? I had very few problems during my tenure as a student teacher the year before, but I had my mentor beside me helping me along the way. This was me on my own. I could feel the first day rapidly approaching.
My first view of the inside of Dunwich Academy didn’t help with my anxiety, either. Mr. Chifford had succeeded with his attempt to creating an austere and robust environment for his new school. All was grandiose in nature, and would have been well in place on the campuses of Harvard or Yale, and put the small Miskatonic campus to shame. The halls were of solid oak, a type of wood not unfamiliar to these parts, and probably milled at the factory that lay just 15 miles to the north, as I could roughly guess of its location after briefly seeing smoke from the factory far in the distance as I drove in. All I remember was thinking that it must be a large facility.
Though the school itself was a little intimidating at first, I found the faculty to be very accommodating and easy to work with. That is most of the staff. The one man who intimidated me the most was Headmaster Bishop, a stern man in his late fifties with a bald head and a face that reminded me of a bulldog. For some reason some of the older inhabitants, including some of the teachers, would call him one of the Undecayed Bishops, but I never fully understood the meaning of the term. I think it had something to do with an old tradition of some descendants of the original settlers of the area remaining “pure” from the lower class, and realized that even here that there was still that old stigma of “class” and “breeding.” but I never fully understood the meaning of the term.
If I feared the students, I quickly found I didn’t need to. My classes were around a 60-40 mix of whites and blacks, most of the whites being locals, but I found them to be, if not the smartest tacks on the shelf, at least eager to be sharpened. Behavior-wise, they were not nearly as bad as I first imagined them to be. At least I did not have any incidents of them planning mass insurrections within the classroom.
One student in particular interested me. Over the first few months, I had noticed him remaining mostly sullen and withdrawn. It was enough for me to be able to get the name of Robert Starling from his lips. As for his attitude to me, unlike most of the other kids to whom race did not seem to have as much of an influence on their behavior, he seemed to be openly hostile, but openly hostile to everyone who tried to get close.
As for race, that is what surprised me the most. Though I expected to have a lot of racial tension within the class, outside of one or two incidences the first few days of class, race seemed to not be a factor at all. I found the locals were more than welcoming to the newer arrivals, and though they were shy at first, the out-of-towners were quick to warm up to their new friends. When all outside bigoted factors were removed, these kids were quick to tear down all walls that divided the two.
The only person that I found any semblance of the bigoted attitude was from Mr. Bishop himself. He took his job very seriously, roaming the halls like a large vulture, leering down on any student unfortunate enough to be out of the classroom. He also had the tendency to mumble to himself when he thought nobody was near, and usually what I heard were comments like, “What are these degenerates up to?” “What is Chifford doing inviting all these people here.” “Those degenerates are up to something and I don’t like it.” He would also refer to himself as the, “Only Undecayed left in Dunwich”
It wasn’t until early November that I started to notice something unusual about my classes. Though the local student population remained constant, the population of other students seemed to fluctuate. As some would leave my class, either moved to other classes, as I was told, or simply moved back out of Dunwich, others would quickly move in to take t
heir place. As I noticed this, the first of the letters was placed in my box. It simply said, “Don’t let the degenerates get to you.” Because of the use of the word degenerates, I had assumed it had come from Mr. Bishop, and I told him in response that the students have been well behaved, and I had been having no problems with them, at all.
It was at this time I finally made some headway with Robert. I had noticed he was always writing in a separate notebook he carried with him religiously, and I finally asked him after class one day what he wrote.
While covering World War II, the question was raised why the Holocaust was started in the first place. It was not an easy lesson especially since many of the wounds were still fresh in everyone’s minds.
“First of all, you must not think that everyone who was in Germany at the time were fully to blame. Some did not know the extermination camps were even there.” I explained.
“How could they not know?” came the question from one boy who was really trying to understand. “You don’t just wake up one day and ask where all the Jews went. Anyway, you told us yourself about the various campaigns, and that film, the one where they compared Jews to rats, accusing them of spreading diseases.”
“Yes, but many didn’t realize Hitler was taking that step. They were being told about the Jewish Conspiracy and how Jews were keeping them from the wealth and prosperity that they, as Aryans, were entitled to. When the orders came that all Jews were being moved to another city, where they can be with their own people, there were no complaints. When people saw the empty house down the street they said ‘Good, now they're gone where they can’t corrupt our children.’ Or they didn’t think about them at all. They’d say, ‘After all, what are they to us?’”
“You can’t believe anythin’ a white man tells you!” came a shout from the back of the room. For the first time I could remember, Robert had voluntarily said something in class.
“They tell you they need you to defend your country. They tell yous Uncle Sam is needin’ you, then they sends you out there to get killed! They tell you it’s an honor to die for yo country, and we just lap it up. I won’t believe nothin’ no white man tells me!”
I could tell this was upsetting him, but he needed to get it out.
“But both of them were white aren’t they?” another voice asked in the front.
“Race has less to do with it than just the idea of other,” I replied. “For some, all that is necessary is that it is us against them. They were just happy to have someone to tell them they were special, the chosen race, and give them an enemy to hate and blame. They were being told Jews were inferior to true Germans. Their brains were smaller and other nonsense like that. For those who knew about the killings, it was that they either did not care about what they were doing, or they believed the Jews were not even human to begin with.”
“They just wanted to kill ’em, so they did. They don’t care about nothin’ but themselves. Uncle Sam’s the same way!” I could feel the pain within. “They ask my daddy to serve his country, then ship him off to Vietnam to be shot to hell. Oh, they say yo number’s been picked so you got to go, but I don’t think they have as many numbers for white people as they do for us niggas! Why don’t some rich guy’s son get shot up for once instead o’ my ol’ man? I saw that army guy tellin’ my mother that dad won’t be commin back. ‘We are sorry for yo loss,’ they say but they aint! Marchin’ right back to their car, not turnin’ round while my mother’s on the ground, and she hasn’t stopped cryin’ since. Yeah, she can put on a face for all us but I know she’s still cryin’. I hear her at night callin’ him and cryin’.”
I took him into my arms as he broke down and let him cry into my shoulder. The outside world still had a long enough reach to find us here, and my heart ached to finally know why he was so angry.
Two weeks after that, just before winter break, Robert left my class, and I was determined to find out where he had gone.
The first person I asked was Mr. Bishop. His only response was, “The Starlings have moved, and I do not know where they have moved to.”
This to me was odd, since I knew from my conversations with Mrs. Starling this was her last chance, and there was nowhere else for her to turn to. She would not have left.
For the rest of the teachers, Robert’s disappearance was nothing to note. As his English teacher said, “What’s one kid? They come and go. That’s one less kid to track.” This incensed me to no end. I wanted to tell the ass what I thought of his precious Dr. Samuel Johnson and where he could shove his atrocious poetry.
During the last two weeks before we were scheduled for winter holidays, I secretly pried into the school records. Though in a deplorable state, they did show a pattern that disturbed me. In the past two years the school had been in operation, over one thousand students had left mid-semester, and no records of forwarding transcripts were recorded. As I left, I found Mr. Bishop standing behind me at the open doorway.
“Well, Missus Collins, what do we have here?”
This was exactly the situation I wanted to avoid. Here I was caught with my hand in the cookie jar as you might say, and the one person I least trusted stared me right in the face.
“I must admit, you were the first person to ever take such an interest in where your students disappeared to. As for myself, I had a feeling early on that you would be the one to do it. Don’t worry, I’m not stopping you. There is little you can do about it, anyway. Come January, it will all be over. I hope those degenerates get what they deserve.”
With that, he walked out. As much as he had me dead to rights, he simply walked out the door and left me speechless.
I did not bother to pack. I simply called Chifford from home, explained my suspicions about the numerous disappearances that had been happening in the past few years, and told him I would be driving back to Arkham to look into where these people had gone. He urged me to remain calm but I could not. Not when innocent people were disappearing. Not when I did not know what happened to Robert and his family.
On the way out of town, I stopped at ol’ Joe’s and asked him a simple question. How many people did he see leaving Dunwich this past year?
“Well,” he started to say with a sidelong glance. I could tell he knew more than let on. “I’s seen many people come into Dunwich, but not many that leave.”
Above, I could see large flocks of birds flying north toward the lumber mill.
“Ah, the whippoorwills are back. It’s just about feedin’ time.”
While in Arkham, I reported what I had seen to the local police department, who graciously explained to me there was nothing they could do as Dunwich was simply not in their jurisdiction. At this time, I then called the FBI and was informed they didn’t even have a record of any town by the name of Dunwich.
With nowhere else to turn, and nobody willing to listen, I finally went for advice from the one person who I felt might help and returned to my contacts at Miskatonic University, and went first to the one person who I knew had been to Dunwich, and might listen.
I found Doctor Kiska in his office. It was exactly as I remembered, cluttered with papers. He listened patiently to what I had to say, but as I explained more, his face grew pale.
“They’re still at it,” was all he said at first.
“Still at what?” I asked puzzled.
“You came to me because you remembered I had led an expedition into the hills above Dunwich, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Well, you never asked what brought me there in the first place. I was there to investigate old ceremonial sites, ancient Native American pyramids and stones, which dotted this area. At each site, we found evidence of mass ritualistic slaughter, human sacrifices similar to those of the ancient Aztecs. What was problematic was that the site closest to Dunwich showed signs of current use.”
Dread filled my face. This was beyond anything I would have imagined.
“Did you notice anything unusual around Dunwich as you left? Specifically
, did you notice any birds?”
“Yes. There were a group of them heading toward Dunwich as I left.”
“Whippoorwills?”
“Yes.”
“Then we don’t have much time.”
“By the way, I never thanked you.”
“For what?”
“Recommending me.”
“Recommending you for what?”
“You didn’t send a recommendation for the job in Dunwich?”
“I wouldn’t send my worst enemy to Dunwich.”
“Did you have a student by the name of Thomas Chifford the same year I had you?”
“Chifford? Nope. Had a Thomas Whately.”
At the name I felt a cold chill and immediately rushed out the door and to my car.
On my last drive into Dunwich, Doctor Kiska explained to me what he had uncovered during his expedition fifty years earlier.
“Their beliefs were quite amazing. The Proto-Abenaki, as I referred to them, believed that there were two worlds, that of the spirit and of the flesh. One manifested in dreams and the intangible soul, the other of flesh and blood. As all things live and die, their life force returns to the spirit world to be then re-united with flesh again and return to this world.”
“The Guff.”
“What?”
“You’re talking about the Guff. The hall of souls where we wait to be reborn.”
“I didn’t take you for a Jew.”
“Messianic, actually. My family had its own unique form. My grandfather talked about the hall of souls where all life originated, all life returns, and all life springs from again. He used to believe the Lark’s song was the harbinger of the soul calling new life in from the Guff.”
“Interesting belief, exactly the opposite of the Whippoorwill, but I’ll talk about that later on. As for these Proto-Abenaki, they also believed in creatures from the world of spirits who feed off of the souls of the living. Of what I can gather, there were two branches of this religion, one who worshiped these creatures as gods who would grant their disciples dominion over all, and a select few who fervently believed these gods were demons who, if set free, would destroy all life.”