The Dunwich Romance

by Edward Lee

  Adoringly,

  Wilbur

  Sary felt a prickly heat of gratuity by the thoughtful last line, as well as the “Adoringly”; but reason did not take long to occur to her. Why he goin’ to Aylesbury NAOW? Their general store en’t open, and nor is any other at this hour... As had happened so many times thus far, Sary found that her exhaustion had been surmounted by inquisitiveness. And she didn’t like the idea of Wilbur being about so late. He’d implied that many in Dunwich kept him in ill-regard, so the same might be true of Aylseburians. Her svelte shadow crossed the floor as she meandered about the room; then she found herself standing before the carved bureau wherein Wilbur had examined something earlier in the day. As she recalled, it had been in the top drawer.

  I know I shouldn’t, but...

  She opened the top drawer.

  Beside the decomposed books with no bindings there sat a square tin whose top read Mavis Talcum Powder. She pulled off the top.

  Bullets...

  Pistol bullets, by the looks of them. One of them she picked up and was barely able to read the numbers .455 along the rim at the bottom of the cartridge. The bullet was crusty with tarnish, even pitted, and stained darkly from age; an examination of the remaining projectiles revealed an identical state. Had these been the things she’d heard clinking! when Wilbur had consulted the drawer?

  Sary shook her head, vexed. What her lover felt inclined to “fetch” at this hour she could not estimate. The image that kept intruding upon her curiosity, though, was the constant reminder as to just how good the sex had been before he’d left. What did he DO? she wondered. He’d seemed pain-staken to keep the light out; Sary hadn’t been able to see a thing. How could the man have possibly administered to her in so many places and so many ways? And all at the same time?

  When she focused on the quality of the orgasm—

  Ooooo!

  —her vagina lurched once very hard, in a shadow-climax itself. The involuntary spasm only reminded her just how much she adored Wilbur’s love-making; and how desperately she wished to have more of the same.

  She turned with some force, to divert herself from such libidinous thoughts. Now she stood before the big desk and all its fascinating clutter. What Wilbur had most recently been writing revealed itself to be more of the uncipherable script she’d already seen. She allowed her eyes to scan the letter slots, then the neat little drawers, but, as if driven by some unknown revenant, she was next focused on the large, hoary book with iron hinges.

  It lay open, and she read a passage:

  Curs’d be ye Ground wherein Dead Musings doth live Revigor’d and Oddly Bodied, and Evill is ye Brain which be supporteth by no Head.

  Sary stared at the words. When she’d looked at the book that first day, she’d detected desultory nauseousness, but now...

  She felt...interesting.

  She flipped a page, and read another passage:

  Negotium perambulans in tenebris. . . .

  Sary flinched at the ghost of a sensation: very nearly that of an urgent hand cupping her crotch, then squeezing her there.

  Another page:

  Ye Affair which shambleth about in ye night, ye Evil which defieth ye Elder Sign, ye Herd which stand watch at ye guard’d by-waye each tomb be known to possess, and which feedeth on that which groweth out of ye tenants therein—

  Upon finishing the bizarre passage (which she understood nothing of) Sary was surprised to find the furrow of her sex slick with lubrication; moreover, her nipples stood out, having given over to a delicious buzz. Her immediate impulse was to pinch said nipples to goad more sensation; and to stimulate her sex with her hand. Her eyes, however, seemed to move out of tandem with her brain.

  A further passage:

  Yog-Sothoth be ye key to ye gate.

  A hot gust caught in Sary’s chest. She stepped away from the book as if overwhelmed; and though her mind was blank, she could feel her right hand burrowing into her sex to the wrist. Bewildered, she drew it out, and stared at the book. It’s some kind’a magic..., she presumed, even knowing that she had little belief in such things. Her sex continued to twitch in the weird pre-climatic pulses.

  The book was having a tangible effect on her. Sary decided to flip to yet another page, and see what happened...

  Upon ye absence of ye ashe of Ibn Ghazi, a heartfull myrmidon shalt do good, in ordereth to take into thine eyes that whicheth maye naught be seen, thou must needs partake in ye deft pracktice of ye sign know’d most Especiall as ye Voorish Sign, which maye be done as thus:

  And here the transcription came to a surcease, to depict instead a series of similar sketches whose quality of illustration seemed the work of no unskilled artist. There were five sketches all told; the first was a sketch of a human hand (a left hand) with its ring- and middle-fingers curled downward; and the thumb touching the pinky. The four sketches remaining each featured the same undetailed male figure, showing this sequence:

  The figure brought its awkwardly configured hand to its mouth.

  Then the hand touched the left pectoral.

  Then the abdomen.

  Then the forehead.

  At once Sary recalled Wilbur making this same gesture the other day! Initially she’d been reminded of a priest making the sign of the Cross, but then saw the nullifying incongruities.

  She could perceive no harm. She stilled herself where she stood, then, consulting the diagram for guidance, manipulated her hand as designated, and then—

  Heer goes...

  —made the antediluvian Voorish Sign.

  Wal?

  Sary’s shoulders drooped several moments after she’d completed the gesture. Nothing untoward became obvious to her; the room remained unchanged. But then again—

  What effect did she expect to be made privy to?

  A more practical way to spend her time was what occurred to her next; hence, she turned—

  —gaped—

  —and froze as if caught in the glare of the Medusa.

  The lamplight well revealed a very peculiar presence on the cot: the presence of a woman (and one apparently impinged upon by a number of congenital defects), lying naked, heaving, glazed in sweat, and spread-legged upon the hand-made mattress. What’s more, the trespasser’s harrowing uncomeliness came as a shock equal to that of the inexplicable fact of her being here. First noticed was her skin, an unhealthy pinkish white, with the faintest blue veins coursing beneath. Next, her hair: ash-white, in an unkempt eruption of kinkiness, both upon her head and betwixt her legs. Four toes were evident on one foot, six on the other; and one arm was clearly longer than its counterpart. Weirder were the woman’s eyes, which alternately opened and closed from the sensory result of what she was doing: her irises were pink, while the whites shone a pale, sickish yellow. And weirder even than that? The right breast jutted plumply, but the left sagged to the mattress like a two-foot-long skin-sock. The nipples of both more resembled plops of chewed jerky. Had Sary been less distracted by the sheer alarm of her discovery, she might also have noticed suspicious configurations of scar tissue—as of scars from repeated incisions—congregated about the intruder’s throat and areolae.

  But these oddities, along with the oddity of the woman’s presence in the tool-house, were utterly superseded by the activity she now very fervently partook of. She was masturbating with a teardrop-shaped summer squash more than twelve inches in length. The woman engaged in this process in the manner of a ramrod, inserting the squash’s widest end first, and then dragging it quickly and arduously back and forth. Clearly, her vagina was well-acclimated to the admission of objects of such size. Each thrust forward caused the woman’s buttocks to clench and her malformed feet to curl; and each extraction—so wide was the squash—threatened to exteriorize her vaginal barrel. An acorn-sized clitoris protruded with each repetition.

  Beside her, arranged in a row, lay more objects which she evidently planned to insert into herself: a pickax handle, a wine bottle, a very fat dead snake.

&n
bsp; Eventually the squash’s physical integrity succumbed to the burden that had been wrought upon it; and collapsed to wedges within the woman’s sex. She hastily withdrew the pieces, then reached for the pickax handle...

  That was all. The woman disintegrated, just as campfire smoke would vanish at a modest breeze.

  What the HAIL I jess see? Sary interrogated herself.

  A ghost?

  Was she seeing things?

  Was she sick?

  But the outrageous woman had been as plain—and as real—as day. A dash to the cot, and the placement of Sary’s hand upon the mattress, supported this contention: there was a minor aggregation of dampness there, and heat, as if someone had quitted the mattress only seconds ago. Then...

  Wait a minute...

  She’d seen the woman immediately after she’d made that hand-motion from the old book.

  The Voorish Sign...

  Sary configured the fingers of her left hand, took a breath, and made the sign once more, while looking with great intent at the cot.

  The anemic woman did not make a reappearance.

  Sary went back to the tome, looked up at an inclination, then shouted, “Holy BULL-flop!”

  It was now an ancient man who stood before her. Grayish-black crinkly hair bloomed about his head, and he had a beard identical to the hair; it was much like Wilbur’s hair and beard, along with the recessive chin. But this oldster was short, bow-backed, spindly, dressed not in the laboring-attire of the day but in black trousers, black shoes and tunic—like an outre priest. About his neck hung a flat metal pendant, depicting what Sary could only guess was a malformed head with snakes trailing from it. Spectacular gems surrounded the monstrous effigy, stones like rubies but striated with threads of obsidian-black. Also of note were several lines of scar tissue on his throat, incisions made long ago.

  The man looked at Sary crazy-eyed, though there was an undisputable shade of approval in his overall cast. His lips moved emphatically yet gave no voice. He was nodding.

  Then he, too, disintegrated.

  WHAT is goin’ ON?

  This question, a qualified one, would regrettably be commuted to uselessness in only a moment.

  Before Sary could long cogitate the meaning of what she’d just witnessed, she flinched, and her heart skipped, as—

  CRUNCH!

  —the sudden sound assaulted her ears. Did it remind her of wood planks being pried away?

  A murmur akin to voices followed the noise.

  Sary rushed to the small window.

  Outside, in moonlight more than profuse, a male figure busied himself before the saturnine house, in his hand a crowbar. Aw, noooooooo, Sary thought, for she recognized the trespasser: Joe Czanek, a local idler whose repute was that of a poacher and petty thief. Last year, the man had paid Sary a dime for sex; whereupon he’d kicked her hard as he might between the legs, choked her unconscious, copulated with her to satisfaction, revived her by urinating in her face, took his money back, and tromped off, laughing. The reason for the man’s presence here was obvious enough: he was crow-barring the planks off one of the downstairs windows of Wilbur’s house, sporting burglary as his motive.

  This, however, was not Sary’s most salient concern.

  Of late, Joe Czanek was seldom seen out of the company of his partner, a drifter and former state incarceree named Manny Silva. Mr. Silva had raped Sary on several occasions, and not without the accompaniment of some diverse violence and appalling degradation. What much troubled Sary was this: I see Joe Czanek right thar, so where might Manny Silva be?

  BAM!

  The shed door broke open, by the impact of a large, booted foot belonging to the subject of her last question. “I knowed I heerd me suthin’ inside this li’l shit-house. And look who it be!” Manny Silva guffawed. “Stew Face, weerin’ nary a stitch!”

  He was fat, had a lazy left eye and a curious hole in his right cheek. Seeing Sary so abruptly nude transformed his plump face into a portraiture of lust-soused diablerie. Before Sary could move to defend herself, the abdominous home-invader (drooling through the cheek-hole) deployed himself in a tactic which cornered Sary, and then—

  THUNK!

  Silva had lunged, slamming the prostitute against the wall, an act which deprived her of all energy and air. “Yes, sar! Jess wait’ll Joe git a gander’a yew!” he speculated, then grabbed his victim by her tuft of pubic hair and conveyed her from the tool-house out into the sultry night. Sary’s head and shoulder-blades scuffed along the ground, around the shed, and out to the front of Wilbur’s boarded-up house.

  “Hey, Joe! Take a look-see!”

  On her back, Sary wheezed breath, blinking spots out of her vision. By the time she was vaguely sensate, two moonlight-forged silhouettes stood over her, arms crossed in valuation. She heard black chuckles, and then—

  Kurrrrrrr-HOCK

  —one of them spat on her.

  “Wal what have we heer?” Czanek, the thinner criminal, posed. “Never thunk any gull would have the stomach ta take up with Wilbur Whateley.”

  “I heerd he en’t got no balls!”

  “Probably no dick, neither!”

  Dizzy, Sary croaked her proverbial two-cents’ worth. “Wilbur be double the man’a both a yew combined.”

  “Yeah?”

  “And I heerd yew fellas suck each other, then swap the cum,” Sary added.

  The men laughed. “Do we naow?”

  Belts came unfastened, trousers were lowered. Right now, Sary needed no capacity for interpreting matters beyond the range of ordinary perception; she was not surprised, in other words, when both miscreants began to urinate on her. Why destiny had seen to insist that Sary be pissed on so many times in her life was a puzzle she suspected had no solution. But she knew well that far worse was in store for her tonight.

  “Now thar’s haow it’s done,” Czanek’s black words blared. “En’t nuthin’ more finer’n pissin’ on a gull a’fore ya fuck her.”

  “Yes, sar!” cracked Silva (whose urine, for whatever arcane reason, tasted spicy). “My pa tolt me the same thing yeers ago!”

  “Weren’t my pa who told me,” Czanek recollected. “‘Twas my ma. ‘Tis a good rasher’a kidney juice what make a woman know her place.”

  Both men maintained their urine streams for a full minute without so much as a decline; to Sary, however, it felt more like an hour. When she summoned some strength, and made to lunge away—

  THWUP!

  —one of the interlopers stomped on her belly.

  Sary again was pilfered of all her wind. She could do nothing but gasp and cringe as her two visitors continued to urinate with a copiousness which seemed more equine than human. But when they at last had no more “kidney juice” at their disposal, Sary remained sufficiently paralyzed from the abdominal blow. What she heard, with the hard moonlight in her eyes, were sounds akin to those of men undressing in anticipatory haste. Then?

  A causerie, since the debauched chat which followed could not be dignified by the word “conversation.”

  “Dang, talk about some dandy luck. Fust we see Wilbur headin’ daown the rud toward Aylesbury”—he pronounced the word “toward” as terd—“and then we find this ‘un buck naked in his shed.”

  “And with Wilbur goin’ all the way aout thar, it en’t likely he’ll be back a’fore marnin’.”

  “Plenny a time ta search that big ole pile’a shit haouse of his, and find all the gold he got hid in thar.”

  “Yes, sar! An’ plenny’a time ta fuck this hoo-uh raw!”

  A chuckle. “Wonder what ole Wilbur’ll think when he come home’n find his tramp full’a our cum!”

  This was the manner of colloquy that Sary’s dizzied attention rewarded her with. So it was the gold they hoped to find within the house? Sary knew it was not there, but instead somewhere in the woods, for that’s from whence Wilbur had trekked when he’d given her the coin...

  She began the grim speculation in her mind, When they dun’t find it in
the haouse..., but there was no advantage in finishing, for it would be granted that the likes of these two would torture her with an unprecedented vigor in order to be apprized of where the gold might be.

  The truth made her feel gypped, as it often did in her life. Wilbur wun’t be back fer quite a spell, and likely as not, I’ll be dead when he git heer. Rogues such as Czanek and Silva would hardly leave a living witness to their crimes.

  If only she could somehow slip away long enough to regain the tool-house, secure a knife or other weapon, and at least die fighting.

  “I fucked this one a’fore,” Czanek remarked. His shadow appeared to be flapping its penis.

  “Aw, yeah. Me, too, bunch’a times. Didn’t piss on her, mind ya, but I shore as hail shit on her, and rubbed her face in it tew. Then I gave her a boot shampoo as to go with it.”

  “Watch this,” Czanek suggested. “See, what I always do ‘fore a fuck a gull, see, I give her a good hard kick in the cunt.”

  “Yew dew?”

  Czanek’s gaunt silhouette nodded. “Reason ta dew that is on accaount when ya cunt-kick her hard enough? It make her pussy swell all up inside, and get’cha a tighter hole up in ‘nar for ya to get your dick in.”

  Silva’s silhouette stared still as if the entirety of Immanuel Kant’s doctrine on Transcendental Idealism had just been imparted to him with full comprehension. “Why...I never thunk’a that.”

  “Aw, yeah. Always cunt-kick a gull ‘fore ya fuck her. ‘Tis a waste not tew,” and with this, Cnazek walked around to Sary’s feet, bent over, grabbed her heels, pushed her legs far back, and—

  “Gander this, Manny. I’se gonna cunt-kick her so hard, her baby-maker’ll come up her maouth!”

  Sary still could scarcely move. The prospect of Wilbur arriving for a rescue as timely as he had at Osborn’s seemed to present a very low order of probability. Instead, she resigned to this atrocity, remembering well her short time with Wilbur and how happy he’d made her. She turned her head aside, staring barrenly. Waiting...