“But as to this thing we’ve just sent back—the Whateleys raised it for a terrible part in the doings that were to come. It grew fast and big from the same reason that Wilbur grew fast and big—but it beat him because it had a greater share of the outsideness in it. You needn’t ask how Wilbur called it out of the air. He didn’t call it out. It was his twin brother, but it looked more like the father than he did.”
1. The story was written in September 1928 and first appeared in Weird Tales 13, no. 4 (April 1929), 481–508.
2. The opening echoes Milton’s Paradise Lost, book 1, lines 624–628: “Where all life dies, death lives, and Nature breeds, / Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things, / Abominable, inutterable, and worse / Then Fables yet have feign’d, or fear conceiv’d, / Gorgons and Hydras and Chimæras dire.” In Greek mythology, the Gorgons are the three sisters Stethno, Euryale, and Medusa, the daughters of Phorcys and Ceto. Medusa was mortal. They were said to have serpents in place of hair, golden wings, claws of bronze, and glaring eyes. Most importantly, it was believed that looking at them made the observer turn to stone. Equally terrible to behold, the Hydra has many heads; slain by Hercules, it produced two more heads for each one lopped off. According to Homer, a Chimæra is “nothing human, all lion in front, all snake behind, all goat between” (Iliad, 201).
3. One of the Harpies, mentioned in Virgil’s Aeneid as prophesying to Aeneas.
4. An essay that first appeared in the London Magazine in 1821 and later was published in book form in 1823 in a collection entitled Essays of Elia. The italics were added by Lovecraft.
5. Robert D. Marten, in “Arkham Country: In Rescue of the Lost Searchers,” suggests that this is the old Springfield Pike, Route 20. This would identify Aylesbury with Springfield, with which it shares some characteristics.
6. Dean’s Corners will not be found on a regular map.
7. This is a real mountain, on the border of southwest Massachusetts and northwest Connecticut, lying partly in the towns of Mount Washington, Massachusetts, and Salisbury, Connecticut. One searches in vain, however, for the village of Dunwich.
8. Mentioned in Leviticus 16:10. Azazel is discussed in some detail in the Book of Enoch, of pre-Christian origin, where it is assigned the role of one of the chiefs of the fallen angels; in the Sefer Hekhalot (Book of Palaces), a mystical Hebrew text probably written between 200 and 500 CE, Azazel is identified as an angel who married a human woman. Beelzebub (“the lord of the flies”) and Belial (another fallen angel, though possibly another name for Beelzebub) are also mentioned in the Bible. Beelzebub and Azazel appear in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics.
9. An unknown demon; perhaps a corruption of Bezrial, one of the angelic guards of the 3rd Heaven, as reported in the Pirkei Hekhalot (Great Palaces), also known as the Hekhalot Rabbati (Rabbi’s Palaces), a Hebrew text of mysticism probably written in the first millennium CE and part of the tradition of the Kabbalah. Muslim and kabbalist texts describe seven spherical heavens, one within the other. Within the heavens dwell God and the angels.
Lovecraft was no occultist—“I am, indeed, an absolute materialist so far as actual belief goes; with not a shred of credence in any form of supernaturalism—religion, spiritualism, transcendentalism, metempsychosis, or immortality,” he wrote in an October 9, 1925, letter to Clark Ashton Smith (Selected Letters, II, 27)—but he made frequent references to occultism and occultists in his work. For example, the Esoteric Order of Dagon, mentioned in “The Call of Cthulhu” (here, above), is a parody of the late-nineteenth-century Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a prominent English occult group.
10. The town of Moodus, Connecticut, has long been associated with spooky noises such as those described for Dunwich. It is thought that several Native American cults focused on Moodus as a place where a god, Hobomock (an evil deity), was actually present. The Algonquins named it Machimoodus, the place of bad noises. Scientists attribute the noises to microearthquakes (the region has a long history of quakes).
11. Conductors of souls to the underworld.
12. Dunwich was not the only locale to experience such a phenomenon. In the Wilbraham, Massachusetts, area, similar tales were told of a residence referred to by Lovecraft as “the old Randolph Beebe house,” a structure with a lineage traceable to about 1790, where, it was said, whippoorwills clustered abnormally and were feared by locals. These were mentioned in an essay by Lovecraft in “Mrs. Miniter: Estimates and Recollections” (1934), reprinted in Miscellaneous Writings. There is much about Wilbraham to suggest Dunwich, as discussed in Robert D. Marten’s “In Search of Arkham Country: In Rescue of the Lost Searchers.”
13. The end of the nineteenth century in America saw the growth of large-scale factories—steel and other major milling operations. However, earlier in the century, the “factory movement” (as the narrator calls it) was already having a great impact on the South, with the mechanization and reorganization of southern cotton-growing plantations. These strides made possible the cotton-milling factories of the North, many of which were situated in New England.
14. There is a Sentinel Elm Farm in Athol, Massachusetts, in the “north central” part of the state, and Donald Burleson argues in H. P. Lovecraft: A Critical Study that Athol is just as much a part of the “true” Dunwich as is Wilbraham (see note 12, above). Burleson also points out, in “Humour Beneath Horror: Some Sources for ‘The Dunwich Horror’ and ‘The Whisperer in Darkness,’” that many of the names of local farmers are drawn from Athol history.
15. Also spelled “Pocumtuc.” An Indian nation native to the Connecticut River valley of western Massachussetts that likely achieved a population of about 5,000 by 1600, it was subsequently destroyed in wars, absorbed into other nations, and dispersed.
16. The Feast of the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple, also known as the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin and the Meeting of the Lord, celebrated as Candelaria in Spanish-speaking countries. Traditionally, the eve of Candlemas was the occasion of the removal of all Christmas decorations, to assure that the ill omens of berries and hollies (associated with funerals as well as Christmas) were no longer present in the home.
17. Also Groundhog Day in the United States. This unofficial holiday is based on folklore that holds that the weather that would be observed by a groundhog emerging from his or her burrow is predictive of a late or early spring. The eponymous 1993 film, starring Bill Murray as a weatherman sent to observe the holiday in a small town in Pennsylvania, is a clever story of a man given repeated chances to relive a single day to change his ill-tempered behavior.
18. A small, docile breed from Alderney, one of the British Channel Islands. There are no longer any purebred Alderney cows.
19. This is somewhat early, but in fact, many children are “cruising” (walking with assistance) at nine months and walking unassisted by twelve months.
20. The night of August 1. Lammas Day, also known as the Feast of First Fruits, is a pagan festival celebrating the wheat harvest.
21. That is, All Hallows’ Day (the day after Halloween).
22. Why a copy was to be found in Argentina remains a mystery.
23. That the Arkham-based library is “nearest to him geographically” evidences that Arkham is in central Massachusetts. Dunwich is in north-central Massachusetts, and if Arkham were in the eastern part of Massachusetts, the Miskatonic Library would be no nearer Dunwich than the Widener Library in Cambridge.
24. See “The Festival,” note 20, above.
25. Presumably Dr. John Dee (1527–1608 or 1609), an English mathematician also trained in geography, astronomy, and astrology (in which capacity he served the court of Queen Elizabeth I, for whom he cast horoscopes). He was fascinated by occult philosophy, and in 1582 he undertook the study of alchemy, which would become a consuming interest. Dee became an enormously important figure in the history of the subject, probably the most learned man of his time, and he has featured prominently in many works of contemporary fiction, including John Crowl
ey’s brilliant Ægypt quartet. The Dee translation is first mentioned in Frank Belknap Long’s Cthulhu Mythos story “The Space-Eaters,” appearing in Weird Tales in July 1928. Long (1901–1994) met Lovecraft when Long was nineteen, and for many years, Lovecraft was his close friend and mentor.
26. Armitage shares a name with the Derbyshire countryman “of some education and character” who hunts “The Terror of Blue John Gap,” in Arthur Conan Doyle’s story of the same name (first published in the Strand Magazine in 1911). The creature described in Doyle’s story and the Whateley twins bear remarkable similarities, considered in Marc A. Beherec’s “The Devil, the Terror, and the Horror: The Whateley Twins’ Further Debts to Folklore and Fiction.”
27. An archaic word for “image.”
28. Kadath is considered at some length in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. The tale depicts Kadath as a gigantic castle atop an enormous mountain range in the “cold waste.” Cf. Lovecraft’s description of the region of the South Pole in At the Mountains of Madness (here, below).
29. Shub-Niggurath is a “cloud-like entity,” according to Lovecraft (Lovecraft to Willis Conover, September 1, 1936, Selected Letters, V, 303), a fertility goddess symbolized as the “black Goat of the Woods” or the “Goat with a Thousand Young.” Shub-Niggurath, Lovecraft informed Conover, was Yog-Sothoth’s wife, and “[b]y her he has two monstrous offspring—the evil twins Nug and Yeb” (see “Genealogy of the Elder Races,” Appendix 4, below). That the Hellenes were her early worshippers is indicated by the cry “Iä!,” identified with the Bacchantes, according to Robert M. Price, in “Lovecraft’s ‘Artificial Mythology.’” However, the “Black Goat” is a separate entity from Shub-Niggurath; instead, the Goat is somehow sacred to Shub-Niggurath. See “The Question of Shub-Niggurath,” by Rodolfo A. Ferraresi.
30. Machen’s story The Great God Pan, published in 1894, tells of the offspring of the mating of a mortal woman and the god Pan. Lovecraft thought very highly of Machen’s work and this story in particular, addressing the topics in some detail in his seminal 1927 essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature.”
31. See The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, note 138, above.
32. That is, September 23, 1928.
33. The fluid that ran in the veins of the gods. It is mentioned in Homer’s Iliad as well as in the works of Alexander Pope and Lord Byron.
34. Teratology is the study of physiological abnormalities, from the Greek teras, monster.
35. Cross-hatched.
36. Scaly.
37. With long, thin hairs, like eyelashes.
38. Ringed.
39. As Robert D. Marten points out, in “Arkham Country: In Rescue of the Lost Searchers,” it may be inferred that Aylesbury is the county seat of the county in which Dunwich is located.
40. Donald R. Burleson, in “Humour Beneath Horror,” notes that Lovecraft visited the site—which Burleson describes as a deep rocky ravine with curious fissures in a place he calls North New Salem (actually, southwest of Athol, Massachusetts)—with H. Warner Munn in late June 1928.
41. Although it may be hard to credit, in the 1920s, telephones were found in less than 20 percent of American households, and of course there were fewer in rural areas. Prior to World War II, most American residential telephones were on “party lines,” multiparty shared telephone lines, though some cities, such as New York and Washington, had all but eliminated them. Operators would distinguish the intended caller by distinctive ringing patterns. Party-line customers could of course listen to other customers’ calls. This editor recalls an early telephone company instructional film emphasizing courtesy on party lines, desisting from improperly listening to others’ calls, and keeping the length of one’s calls to a minimum (to keep the party line open for other users).
42. S. T. Joshi suggests that this may refer to Kufic script, used from the eighth century to the twelfth century in countries where Arabic was spoken. The script is named after Kufa, Iraq, but it was first found in Mesopotamia.
43. These works are all described in the Cryptography article of the Encyclopædia Britannica (9th ed.). John Trithemius, the abbot of Sponheim, was the first important writer on cryptography, and his Poligraphia, published in 1500, has been reprinted in many editions and is the foundation stone of most later work. Porta’s book appeared in 1563; De Vigenère’s in 1587. Falconer’s book appeared in 1685, Davys’s in 1737, and Thicknesse’s in 1772. Blair’s work, a comprehensive article on ciphers for Rees’s Cyclopædia, appeared forty-seven years later, in 1819; von Marten’s book appeared in 1801. According to the Britannica, the “best modern work” on the subject is J. L. Klüber’s Kryptographik, published in 1809. The survey of the field was unchanged in the 11th edition of the Britannica. Of course, cryptanalysis (the deciphering of codes) would have been more relevant to Dr. Armitage, and it is surprising that he did not consult the important work Die Geheimschriften und die Dechiffrierkunst, by Friedrich W. Kasiski (1863), which described for the first time the solution of the Vigenère cipher, previously regarded as a problem that was not solvable.
44. A secret language first mentioned by Arthur Machen, in his 1899 short story “The White People,” a tale greatly admired by Lovecraft (see note 30, above).
45. “Sabaoth” is a Hebrew word for “hosts” or “armies,” usually used in the phrase “Lord of Hosts.” See The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, note 157, above.
46. Another word drawn from Machen’s “The White People.” Machen refers to a voor as something drawn over the hills.
47. See “The Festival,” note 19, above.
48. Roughly, “The business that passes through in the dark. . . .” Verses 5 and 6 of the 91st Psalm (King James Version) read, “Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day; / Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.”
49. The Acheron was one of the five rivers of the Greek underworld.
Still from The Dunwich Horror starring Dean Stockwell and Sandra Dee, shown here (American International Pictures, 1970).
Poster from The Dunwich Horror (American International Pictures, 1970).
The Whisperer in Darkness1
This story may be seen as a more mature version of “Beyond the Wall of Sleep,” achieving much greater depth by providing a detailed provenance for an alien race known as the Outer Ones instead of the vague history implied in the prior tale. Lovecraft here expands the panoply of beings of which humans form only a small part, and the story’s documentary style, despite the narrator’s almost unbelievable naïvete, gives it the ring of credibility and enhances its shocking final revelation.
I.
Bear in mind closely that I did not see any actual visual horror at the end. To say that a mental shock was the cause of what I inferred—that last straw which sent me racing out of the lonely Akeley farmhouse and through the wild domed hills of Vermont in a commandeered motor at night—is to ignore the plainest facts of my final experience. Notwithstanding the deep extent to which I shared the information and speculations of Henry Akeley, the things I saw and heard, and the admitted vividness of the impression produced on me by these things, I cannot prove even now whether I was right or wrong in my hideous inference. For after all, Akeley’s disappearance establishes nothing. People found nothing amiss in his house despite the bullet-marks on the outside and inside. It was just as though he had walked out casually for a ramble in the hills and failed to return. There was not even a sign that a guest had been there, or that those horrible cylinders and machines had been stored in the study. That he had mortally feared the crowded green hills and endless trickle of brooks among which he had been born and reared, means nothing at all, either; for thousands are subject to just such morbid fears. Eccentricity, moreover, could easily account for his strange acts and apprehensions toward the last.
The whole matter began, so far as I am concerned, with the historic and unprecedented Vermont floods of November 3,
1927.2 I was then, as now, an instructor of literature at Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts, and an enthusiastic amateur student of New England folklore. Shortly after the flood, amidst the varied reports of hardship, suffering, and organised relief which filled the press, there appeared certain odd stories of things found floating in some of the swollen rivers; so that many of my friends embarked on curious discussions and appealed to me to shed what light I could on the subject. I felt flattered at having my folklore study taken so seriously, and did what I could to belittle the wild, vague tales which seemed so clearly an outgrowth of old rustic superstitions. It amused me to find several persons of education who insisted that some stratum of obscure, distorted fact might underlie the rumours.
The tales thus brought to my notice came mostly through newspaper cuttings; though one yarn had an oral source and was repeated to a friend of mine in a letter from his mother in Hardwick, Vermont. The type of thing described was essentially the same in all cases, though there seemed to be three separate instances involved—one connected with the Winooski River near Montpelier, another attached to the West River in Windham County beyond Newfane, and a third centring in the Passumpsic in Caledonia County above Lyndonville.3 Of course many of the stray items mentioned other instances, but on analysis they all seemed to boil down to these three. In each case country folk reported seeing one or more very bizarre and disturbing objects in the surging waters that poured down from the unfrequented hills, and there was a widespread tendency to connect these sights with a primitive, half-forgotten cycle of whispered legend which old people resurrected for the occasion.
What people thought they saw were organic shapes not quite like any they had ever seen before. Naturally, there were many human bodies washed along by the streams in that tragic period; but those who described these strange shapes felt quite sure that they were not human, despite some superficial resemblances in size and general outline. Nor, said the witnesses, could they have been any kind of animal known to Vermont. They were pinkish things about five feet long; with crustaceous bodies bearing vast pairs of dorsal fins or membraneous wings and several sets of articulated limbs, and with a sort of convoluted ellipsoid, covered with multitudes of very short antennæ, where a head would ordinarily be. It was really remarkable how closely the reports from different sources tended to coincide; though the wonder was lessened by the fact that the old legends, shared at one time throughout the hill country, furnished a morbidly vivid picture which might well have coloured the imaginations of all the witnesses concerned. It was my conclusion that such witnesses—in every case naive and simple backwoods folk—had glimpsed the battered and bloated bodies of human beings or farm animals in the whirling currents; and had allowed the half-remembered folklore to invest these pitiful objects with fantastic attributes.
The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft Page 61