by Edward Lee
by Dr. John Dee
for Her Majesty the Queen,
Elizabeth the First
London, 1582
Strips of thin leather marked certain places in the age-plumpened book: she turned to one, and found herself on page 751. So ancient was the paper that it reminded her of the softness of felt, yet worm-holes pocked the sheet like overlarge flyspecks. Sary could only read one line before a nauseousness rushed to her stomach:
...be thee One of Fayth, thou shalt hear Their Gibbers from deepe beneath ye Ground and amid ye Stonie Places of Reverence where ye sanctified words hath been spake, and, yea, high up from ye Heavens; if thee be estimat’d to be Worthie of Their observance. Hark! Yog-sothoth be ye key, and unto ye faythfull, forsooth, yog-sothoth wilt smile...
Stalwart Venturer, keepe thy fayth, for upon this page be ye secret—yea!—the Dho and the Dho-Hna...
Something arcane about the sentences and their fancy winged letters left a sense in Sary’s brain that existed with a similitude to the taste left in her mouth several years ago when a man passing through town (Harley Warren, he’d called himself, and said he was from the South) had paid her half a dollar to suck on his anus while he partook in masturbation.
Yuck...
She closed the wretched book at once and turned away.
The recollection bothered her most, the page’s references to noises “deepe beneath ye ground” and “stonie places.”
Next, her eyes scanned the high, elaborate desk, a desk larger than any she’d been aware of. There was a newspaper—the Aylesbury Transcript—some manner of fiction magazine—Home Brew, dated February, 1922—a trade journal from January, 1928, called The Nathaniel Derby Pickman Foundation, announcing an upcoming expedition to Antarctica, a place Sary had never heard of; plus less distinct curiosa in the form of pamphlets, strips of handwritten notes, and cancelled stamps including a twenty-four-cent stamp depicting an upside-down aeroplane. While Sary had heard of these inconceivable flying machines, she’d never seen one. Were they designed to fly upside-down? But more of those odd papers of indecipherable writing lay about the sliding top in a more orderly fashion. When she innocently opened one of its miniature drawers, she squinted at a small jar unto whose lid was affixed a string; from the string pendulated a lump of some dark metal, while the jar was labeled in handwriting A. Bierce. Behind it a second jar was found, labeled t.o.m. She opened another drawer but re-closed it right away with a gasp, for it contained what appeared to be the eyes and nose-cavity of a yellowed skull. No, she’d not be opening any more drawers! Yet the desk and all its Gordian complexity held her spellbound where she stood. All those letter-slots, and letters in almost all of them! Were they letters Wilbur was writing? If so, the prospect seemed irregular, for Wilbur didn’t strike her as a man with many correspondents. More likely than not, they were old family letters. Her curiosity felt as one of perfect innocence when her fingers slipped a few envelopes out...
Wal, I’ll be...
Sary had been wrong: the giant man who’d saved her today did indeed have others to correspond with, for the letters were all addressed to Wilbur Whateley of Dunwich Village, some dating back as far as 1920. Sary knew her curiosity would have extended too far had she removed the missives from their sheaths and read of their contents, but what harm could there be in taking notice of their return addresses?
Her eyes narrowed immediately. Two were from Miskatonic University in Arkham, a town Sary had heard of and knew to be not far distant. Another from a man in Kingston, New York, named Alonzo Typer; another from a Robert Blake in someplace called Wisconsin; and yet another from someone here in Dunwich, named Septimus Bishop, though she’d never heard of this latter man, what with so many Bishops here and there. An eyebrow popped up when she read the next return address: Innsmouth, from someone named Marsh. Sary recognized the town, for it was the only town she’d ever traveled to outside of Dunwich; her mother had taken her there once to visit a friend whom she—her mother—had grown up with. The next return address owned to no location at all but only revealed: The Church of Starry Wisdom.
So it seemed that fuddlement and nothing more would be her curiosity’s prize. I best mind my own business, she suggested to herself. Think I’ll have a walk aoutside, but before she got to the door, she took notice of a block-print map that read THE CAMPUS OF MISKATONIC UNIVERSITY, and crudely circled on it with pen-ink was a square which read LIBRARY. More pen-writing instructed, WATCH FER DOG and 4th WINDOW, EAST SIDE IZ CLOSEST TO RARE BOOK ROOM. Sary couldn’t imagine what these notes might mean. On a small, cherrywood end-table lay another map, but this was one folded. All she could read of its front print was HARVARD UNIVERSITY, CAMBRIDGE, MASS., EST. 1636, and more scribble, WIDENER and 2nd FLOOR SPECIAL BOOKES & MSS. ROOM. More fuddled than ever, Sary turned, opened the door, and left the tool-house.
Her bare feet glided her across plush green grass; the sun beamed down, and she nearly gasped in delight when she saw how the sun’s rays caught the countless glittering flecks that seemed imbued by magic into her black gown’s intricate fabric. She fairly beamed herself.
A trace glance showed her several other sheds in the distance, some in bad repair, then she looked again to the well-built, tin-topped smoker-house which had provided her the delectable meal. Instinct warned her to keep mindful of those awful red ants that stung her feet to no end when she walked in the wrong places, but then relief came when she remembered Wilbur telling her that no varmints or insects existed anywhere near the Whateley property. She knew this to be true now more than ever, for not a single mosquito had bitten her yet, even though this time of season they were rife. The shadow of the vast Round Mountain interestingly cast a great darkened curve upon the forest belt beyond. The woods looked so lovely in that half-dark, half-bright line of contrast, but she declined activating her idea to take a stroll amongst the trees, for something seemed...unnatural about them. Surely she’d never observed trees so twisted, stout, and gnarled. Indeed, they appeared over-nourished, glutted, as though they’d grown for their centuries of existence via the sustenance of sour minerals in the soil. Some of the trees reminded her of monstrous figures as of those in nightmares.
Now her gaze surveyed her point of vantage in a wider arch. Beyond the side of the strangely boarded-up Whateley house, she could see the dirt road that eventually took one away from Dunwich, to the Aylesbury pike. It occurred to her to amble to the road, to see if Wilbur might be on his way back—she could greet him—but next, however, it was the dilapidated house that snagged her notice. Did some ugly, dark substance leak from its boarded windows and doors? Like tar, she associated. It may have been her imagination, then, when she thought she detected a single quake of the house itself, as if something huge within—the main timbers, perhaps—had hitched and settled. Then her memory brought back to her that brief but hideous noise she’d thought she heard earlier, a noise like a monumental snort...
The great abode, like the book in the shed, caused an unpleasant throb in her belly and a minute headache, so she quickly turned to be out of sight of it. But no sooner had she traversed when she noticed another oddity...
Beneath a long rickety canopy of wood-slats, cords of firewood sat neatly stacked, surely an amount that would take months of a cruel winter to deplete. But the oddity was what sat heaped in a ten-foot-high pile next to the firewood.
Building scrap in the manner of a great tumble of house lumber: rafters, beams, doors and their frames, wall-slats, and even great chunks of whole walls. By the looks of the pile, these materials came clearly from interior construction, but they’d now become subject just as clearly to an act of deconstruction, as if aspects of the interior had been sundered. I wonder if Wilbur done knocked out all’a the walls of the big haouse... Whatever it was he stored inside must be quite large. Why a pile of wood-scrap would instill in her a sense of foreboding she didn’t know.
Pursing her lips as if at a rank sapor, she continued her meandering examination of the property
.
A number of prodigious drakeberry bushes, in long ranks, diced up the grassy region just beyond the tool-house. Amid the bush by which she walked the closest, she noticed a natural indentation, like a cove of sorts, deep and tall enough for one to enter without being seen by anyone not in close proximity, and it was into this “cove” that Sary’s curiosity took her next.
The cove curled inward in nearly a hook-shape, and at its furthest limit she noticed...
What’s them THINGS?
A pile of singularly curious...things lay on the ground; Sary’s immediate tendency was to divine the impression of pony stools, for they existed as roundish wads approximately an inch wide apiece. Size and shape, however, was where this similarity ended: pony stools, or any excrement that Sary knew of, always bore a rather universal brownish color, while the pile of things she looked at now were far more akin to the color of a peeled banana slightly overripe. This mystery-laden pile stood perhaps two feet in height, tapering as it ascended. Most would find the nature of the wad-like objects as unpleasant or even foul, yet Sary found them only objectively interesting, considering how accustomed her life had made her to the unpleasant, the foul, the disgusting, etc. And it was this curiosity which urged her to stoop and pick up between her fingers the topmost object...
A strange slimy texture registered immediately. When she lifted the thing she expected it to separate from the heap individually but this was not the case; instead, more of the off-white balls came with the first, and now she perceived that they were in some manner connected, as of a grotesque string of pearls. Fascination finnicked with her. She kept lifting the first ball but found that the entire queue of the others stopped at exactly ten balls. This led her to assume that the remainder of the pile existed similarly: a string of ten slimy balls deposited and redeposited over a period of time, comprising the entire heap...
Whatever could the things be?
Fascinated though she was, Sary ended her examination and presumed to continue visually surveying more of Wilbur’s property, in which, after taking leave of the bush’s hidden cove, she crossed it to look around.
The latrine ditch was what she glimpsed next, along with its tightly lashed frame of logs where one would sit to defecate. It reminded her that she herself needed to urinate, but she’d always been fearful of such waste-ditches, for once her father had thrown her into one after a particularly vehement session of forced intercourse. She’d been very young at the time—six or seven—and as she recalled, his reaction had not been positive when she’d refused to lap up the traces of his semen which had leaked out of her after his climax. So it was a trip to the bottom of the latrine that was her compensation for such non-compliance.
She picked another ample drakeberry bush behind which to secret herself, then raised with care her luxurious black dress, and immediately lowered herself to a squat. It was then that all of the pleasant sensations her skin had been receptive to today...had commingled, and then intensated to an effect many times more robust: the comfort of being carried in Wilbur’s strong arms, then the feel of her own hands caressing the suds of the ash soap all over her body in the shower machine, then—much more so—the feel of Wilbur’s hands sliding up and down in the cleave of her buttocks and how she cringed for the fantasy of the elongated fingers sliding into her private orifi... Even the captivating black gown itself beguiled her in some concupiscent manner, some mystery of its fabric that felt, whenever she walked, as of the hands or even the tongue of some semi-palpable wraith tenderly stroking her skin. Foggy-eyed with these muses, a few moments passed, then her bladder began to void; the stream glittered as it arced out of her and up, and then she discovered her index and middle fingers were V’d at the folds her of sex, opening it; it was such that even the mundane function of urinating pushed more lustful desires into her head. The stream declined, then ceased, yet she remained in her lewd squat, at once finding one hand slipped into the gown’s top, fondling a breast; her fingers catered to the already nerve-plump nipple which sent the most delectable sensations gusting to her privates. Then she imagined Wilbur’s fingers there, then his mouth, sucking.
Aw, durn, that feels good...
She licked the fingerpad of her other hand, stroked the pink nub of her clitoris, once very slowly, then again twice. Her body’s reaction to this meager tending was an intoxicating tension; her head rolled around. Two more quicker strokes brought a pulsing outburst to her loins whose density of pleasure caused her to fall over and cringe. She twitched there on the ground, her face overcome by a smile of delight the likes of which she’d not experienced in years. The initial impulse to masturbate had been puissant enough; however, it was the fantasy of Wilbur’s participation that had set her sexual responses off like a black-powder keg.
Sary lay sidled over awhile longer, pilfering out the last of the after-sensations, but then—
Terror came.
The unmistakable scuff of footfalls could be heard not far off. Aw, Gawd, please let it be that no one seen me! She jumped up (hoping that the bush’s partial coverage had concealed her from the interloper) and righted her gown as best she could. Either the walker was Wilbur or it was—
Wilbur said he boarded up his haouse ‘cos folks sometimes try ta break in...
Sary prayed to God that it wasn’t some foul-minded Dunwich thief trespassing upon the property. If such a man saw Sary, out here all by herself?
She knew she’d be raped most dementedly.
She peeked around the edge of the bush, yet her eyes only had time to glimpse a figure turn round the hill and disappear behind the sheds, which could only mean...
He be headin’ for the big house...
A daring not typically known to her had her quickly dart from the bush, past the latrine, and to the wall of the smoking-house. It was a deep breath she drew into her lungs, then... She peeked around the smoker’s corner.
Thank yew, Gawd...
Relief assailed her when she easily identified the “interloper” as Wilbur himself. She was about to call out a greeting but impulse at the last moment caused her to forbear the gesture. Impulse, but also...observation.
What’s that over his back?
Indeed, a sack of some kind seemed to be slung across the gargantuan man’s back as he walked with deliberance toward the boarded-up house. However, Sary now discerned that one of the house’s doors stood absent of the nailed planks and beams that sealed all the others and windows. Instead, it was barred by upper and lower iron struts fixed across the egress by two large and ponderous old locks. Wilbur, still not at all cognizant of Sary’s vigilance, extracted a key, unfastened the locks, and opened the door...
The young woman’s angle of observation afforded her a fair view into the domicile’s east end, and the sunlight, though partially truncated, showed her only vast emptiness inside. Whatever it ‘tis Wilbur keep stored in thar, it gotta all be at the other end, she deduced.
She naturally expected Wilbur to enter the leaning abode, but this he did not do. Instead, and most curiously, he remained where he stood outside, and then it looked as though he were talking...
Who the hail he talkin’ tew if thar en’t no one livin’ inside? The extended distance prevented Sary’s deciphering any of what her rescuer was saying.
And next?
Wilbur made the oddest gesture with his hand: at first Sary believed him to be crossing himself the way a priest or minister would, but the motions that were made indicated something far more complicated. It was only a moment later, then, that the colossan unslung the burden across his back and flung it into the house. Then he re-barred and locked the entry.
Sary’s plentiful curiosity took on a tinge of something not unlike dread, for in the few seconds before Wilbur had resecured the door, she’d verified that it was no sack at all that he’d tossed within. It was a dead dog.
A dead collie, to be more unequivocal.
Same exact dog that awful Hutchins boy sicked on me, she knew, and how could any do
ubt exist? She’d seen Wilbur blow the barbarous animal’s brains out with a pistol.
More strangeness, in a manner by which she could make no deductions.
She expected Wilbur to return to the tool-shed, but instead he loped straight away from the big house and into the twisted woods. Whar’s he goin’ naow? Sary meandered about the property, looking errantly at the splotches of grass and wild beds of flowers, noting again nary a sign of insect activity, and no bees rummaging for pollen. “Wal, hey thar!” Wilbur greeted her when he’d reappeared some twenty minutes later. “Hi, Wilbur. I was gettin’ ta miss yew,” she said, acknowledging now that his departure, admixed with the inexplicable observations she’d made, had left her vaguely unnerved. But Wilbur’s big, angular face seemed to betray a hint of happiness when she’d said she missed him. “Sorry, I took a tad longer’n I thought. Ran into that bald fella, Kyler be his name—he abaout the only Dunwicher who’ll share a good word with me. A soothsayer is what he claim he is.”
The word perplexed Sary. “A sooth—what?”
“One who tell fortunes, like I heerd they got at curnivals. Dun’t know haow true it ‘tis, though.”
All she could think to say was, “Carn’t say I’se heerd of him, but I’m glad you got a friend.” Her expression cheered. “Wal, naow ya got two friends, me bein’ the second.”
Wilbur’s approach slowed, as more inner happiness seemed to dawn within him.
“We’ll be friends, always, Sary,” he replied in a solemn tone.
Wilbur was so tall that Sary unconsciously stood on tiptoes to see what he had now on his shoulder. Not another dead dog, she hoped, but in a moment identified a trap rope.
“So that’s what yew were doin’ in the woods,” she observed. “Checkin’ yer traps.”
“Ee-yuh.” He’d reached her by now and unshouldered the cord, attached to which were several squirrels, a muskrat, and a woodchuck. “A more than midland ketch today,” his dark, warble of a voice reported. “En’t ketched a woodchuck in spell. But like I told ye, I gotta walk aout in the wood a good distance ‘cos critters dun’t come near the haouse.”