The Dunwich Romance

by Edward Lee

  The gods be a-testin’ me, he could only presume, for to exhibit agitation would be to reveal an absence of faith. No time remained for him to venture to another town. I’ll jess have to hope ta Yog-Sothoth that them old bullets I got’ll fire.

  Wilbur felt no fear at the prospect. He would simply discharge his task to the best of his ability, or die in the endeavor. Yes, he felt certain beyond doubt: the gods were testing him.

  But when the drone came into his head only moments later, he knew that another test was upon him. He’d only just quitted the store and commenced through the woods toward the Aylesbury Pike when he’d stopped to stand stock-still. It wasn’t a seizure, nor any manner of ringing in the ears. Instead, this could be described as a visual drone, and he knew at once from whence it came.

  His brother.

  ***

  Wilbur, awkwardly as he appeared, ran all the way back home. It was the psychic coupling that existed between himself and his twin brother that had heralded his haste, and that same ethereal tether that showed him most of everything which had occurred back at his grandfather’s house, to a level of detail as accurate as if he’d been physically present. Wilbur’s clumsy trot foreshortened the several-hour walk to a span of under an hour; and when he arrived at the property—winded, flushed, and oozing netherworldly perspiration—he audibly cried out thanks to his Yog-Sothoth and his retinue when he found Sary asleep and unharmed in the cot. He leaned over, teary-eyed, and kissed her on the cheek. He prepared to depute with exigency to the house but found several trace scents afflicting his nostrils. A dank reptilian smell? And the tinge of unwashed female genitals of a particular nature as to remind him of his mother? Also a scent apart from all of that, much more concise: cologne. Dunwichers were not known to have much use for cologne but Wilbur could not forget the homemade fragrance his grandfather concocted—with orange-flower oil and lavender—to wear on special occasions. A slow swerve of his head showed him the Necronomicon where he’d left it on the desk, no longer opened to Page 751. The ancient sheets of vellum now displayed Page 415, and the transition detailing the proper execution of the Voorish Sign.

  That would certainly explain the haunting redolences within the shed.

  Outside, the issuance of a chuckle could not be forborne when he discerned no physical vestige of Joe Czanek and Manny Silva. Wilbur envisioned with revel their gruesome deaths, relayed by the connexion betwixt himself and his leviathanic brother, and seen through the latter’s plethora of eyes; and he could smell their remains being digested therein. It was a rich, syrupy aroma, as often was the case of vile men who’d died inundated in fear and horror. So acute was that psychic cordage that Wilbur himself could faintly taste the reprobate scoundrels like after-flavors upon his own tongue.

  At the violated window, he made the Voorish Sign and engaged in some telepathic confabulation. His brother smiled at him—a dolorous smile, of course—and Wilbur nodded and smiled as well. The grim acknowledgment flickered between them, though said acknowledgment came as neither much of a surprise nor much of a shock to either of them.

  He boarded the window back up, then turned, cheeks still damp with tears, and he gazed at the lopsided moon. The icy light enlivened him. A beautiful world it truly was...

  He whispered praise and thanks, turning for the shed. His strides were made with confidence and resolve. He knew he would not see his brother again.

  ***

  Sary stood tense and wide-eyed when Wilbur returned to the tool-house. The carriage clock’s chime-like peals were just now expending four o’clock in the morning. Wilbur was well aware of the graveness of the situation, but the sight of Sary arrested all possibility of him speaking of it.

  Never before had he seen her so beautiful than in just that pristine wee-hour moment.

  Naked she remained, her breasts alert, even inflamed. Her body’s contours could not have been more preeminent if they’d been chiseled by a Michelangelo or a Desiderio. The flat bright-white of her belly, the curvaceous legs, the stark black wedge of private hair—all converged to project into Wilbur an alchemy of ardor, attraction, and of love more empowered than the passion which launched a thousand ships. Against the flawless skin, the lamplight wavered, suggesting a sudden complexity emerging within the simple woman. Her hair spilled about her lambent shoulders like ink blacker than any shadow cast upon the earth.

  Her lips parted to speak but a further cogitation stifled them.

  She be it, Wilbur knew.

  Her wide eyes scintillated; where often they reflected naivety or confusion they now blazed a keenness he’d never noticed in her before, not quite the keenness of cabalistic understanding, nor even of revelation—that would arrive later—but a thirst...

  A thirst to learn.

  “Sary,” Wilbur whispered. This spectacular vision of her parched his throat.

  “Sumpin’ happened,” she whispered back.

  “I know it. And I know ye seen it yourself”—his eyes gestured the opened book—“by larnin’ ye haow to do the Voorish.”

  “I hope yew ain’t flustered with me fer meddlin’ where I shouldn’t have been, but...naow? I got the feelin’ that it’s sumpin I need to know.”

  “It ‘tis,” Wilbur affirmed. “And theer en’t no setch thing as meddlin’ when it come to one’s mind haow they got a callin’. A callin’ to be part’a suthin’ that be bigger’n all of us set together.”

  To these words, Sary’s eyes went ever the wider.

  “Them two fellas who come heer dun’t caount fer nothin’,” he explained. “Mebbe the gods sent ‘em special, so to show you suthin’. The gods work that way sometimes. They make us earn our blessin’s.” Wilbur pointed in the direction of the house. “That One in there, wal...it be my brother.”

  This disclosure alarmed Sary not in the least; indeed, if anything, it answered some of her inner queries, of which there must be a multitude.

  “It be my twin, come aout’a my ma right after me, on the Candlemas, 1915. See, I en’t old as ye must’ve supposed. The way I be, I grow fast, and that One inside? It grow ever faster. Where I went tonight was to fetch some new—”

  “Bullets,” she said in a drone.

  “Ee-yuh. On accaount them ones I got in the tin be real old setch that some of ‘em dun’t fire. But that place didn’t have none.”

  Sary’s posture fidgeted.

  “Dun’t worry. I en’t afeared. Either Yog-Sothoth’ll protect me, or he wun’t, and if he wun’t, it only mean I en’t worthy.”

  “We’ll know soon,” came Sary’s cryptic remark.

  This was a good sign. She was learning already, simply through the transpositional effect of proximity to Wilbur’s brother. It was esoteria. It was science disguised as occult mystery—a pheromonal transduction of knowledge—for human sensibility did not exist broadly enough to understand. It never had. “We will, for sure,” he said. “I’ll tell ye what I can tonight, and if’n things go as I gotta mind they might, ye’ll larn plennie more in time. Tonight be the night I gotta go—”

  “To Arkham,” she uttered. “To the college.”

  “That’s right. I need to be there after midnight...when the stars are right.”

  Finally, Sary moved from where she’d been standing still as an erotic chess piece. She came over and hugged Wilbur desperately.

  The words gushed against Wilbur’s shirt. “I’m afraid, Wilbur.”

  “En’t no reason to be,” he assured her, wrapping his great arms about her. The heat from her naked body seeped into him. “En’t no setch things as endin’s—Grandsire teached me that. An endin’ en’t nuthin’ but a beginnin’ to suthin’ else more important—least ways, I mean, for thems that prove themselves desarvin’ of the favor of the gods. Them gods? They’ve always been good ta me.”

  She was shivering. “I’m afraid for yew. That somethin’ bad’ll happen.”

  “En’t nuthin’ bad can happen ta me,” he began to assure her, but then thought it more serviceable to lea
ve off the rest of the doctrinal explanation: the City between the magnetic poles, the Dho and the Dho-Hna, the Spiritum in Aeternum, the Yr and the Nhhngr, and the Transfiguration. She would learn it all at the proper time, from the book. “Nor nuthin’ ta happen ta ye, neither,” he whispered. “That I sware afore all I hold dear.”

  Wilbur leaned back and took off his shirt. Sary did not recoil—she rejoiced—at this full sight of his writhing, mouth-tipped tentaclettes. She seemed to turn boneless in his strong arms, her sex running with excited fluids. His probosciduct reared, then gently entered her vagina, to pulsate; while a salvo of tentaclettes converged upon her nipples and clitoris, to ever-so-gingerly suck.

  Wilbur carried Sary to the cot, lowered her there, then turned out the lantern.

  ***

  Most of the final twenty-four hours of Wilbur Whateley’s life can only be epitomized via estimation, not documentation. It can, though, be authoritatively intimated that the physical demonstrations of his love for Sary were most copious—indeed, such that for her final few hours she would spend in his proximity, she could barely stand on her own two feet. It was true that Wilbur needed to be inconspicuously deployed near the main library of Miskatonic University no later than midnight on August third, when the Moon assumed a nine-degree ecliptic belt, and Antares, Saturn, and Betelgeuse formed a Cavalieri right triangle; this would require Wilbur to part from Sary’s company by two p.m. on the second, so that he might engage the bus that would permit of his venture to Arkham. Sary struggled to stand when her lover made this information plain, demanding, “Won’t take me a speck of time to get dressed,” she asserted, “and I’ll come with yew,” but Wilbur had no choice but to disallow the offer, in spite of its kindliness. “Naw, Sary, mutch as I’d like ta have ye with me, it jess carn’t be. Yew best stay here, but with any luck, I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon, sence them’s the ways the bus work, for it only run twice a day.” “No!” she rejected, “I’m comin’ with yew! I’ve got a mind yew plan ta steal a book they got at the college, and I gotta mind tew it’ll be dangerous!” Wilbur was quite taken by the expeditiousness with which she presumed to assist him, yet still he had to say, “I wun’t let ye come with me, Sary, for ‘tis true, mebbe it ‘twill be dangerous, and there en’t no way on the airth that I’ll allow no harm ta git near ye. And it ain’t stealin’ I’m fixin’ ta do, jess...borrowin’.” Fatigued from the previous tumult of intercourse and sexual variation, Sary nearly toppled trying to get into her dress, but she managed a most indignant glare, pointed a finger, and exclaimed, “I’m a-goin’, Wilbur Whateley, and if yew think’a leavin’ withaout me, I will pitch a fit far wuss than any storm yew ever see!” “I got me no daoubt ye would,” Wilbur replied, and smiled deeply at her resolve. What a wonder this was. All his life he never thought the day would dawn when a woman would demand to be part of his life. Ee-yuh, I love her sooooo mutch. Thank ye,Yog-Sothoth... “Sorry ye carn’t have your way on this, Sary,” he began, still smiling his love for her as recited one of the Eltdown Languor Spells which made her fall asleep so fast she did so on her feet. Wilbur caught her, held her a while, and put her to bed. He looked at her with adoration, and whispered, “I love ye, Sary.”

  Then he grabbed his canvas carry-sack and took his leave of the tool-house.

  Sary’s perceptivity, however, was quite on the mark. Though Wilbur wasn’t sure of the evening’s outcome, some assistance would prove very advantageous. Out on the Aylesbury Pike, when his awkward form arrived at the bus stop, it was none other than Kyler the psychic who was arriving as well. “Hey, Kyler,” Wilbur greeted. “Yew a-waitin’ on the bus?” “Aye, jest as are ye,” the eccentric black-clad man replied. “Though it may not be credited by ye that I am subject to portents mysterious indeed, I’ve received it of goodly authority that it may be in ye’re best interest to have me near.”

  Wilbur nodded, amused. “I never said I dun’t believe yew’re a soothsayer—”

  The bright sun shined on the lame man’s bald head, though his face remained peculiarly shadowed. “For what ye be in sarch of come in the waye of letters.”

  Letters, Wilbur thought with a pause. Did the cryptic man with the cane mean letters as of correspondence? Or letters, as of...the alphabet? Wilbur had no choice but to ponder this with some fascination.

  “And for they who venture well into the night? Wal, oft times, when one be not on his proper guard,” Kyler went on with nonchalance, “the night comes bearing teeth.”

  Teeth, Wilbur thought. That dang guard dog...

  After a time, Wilbur said, “I be mutch obliged if ye come with me, Kyler, for I may well need ta ask a favor.”

  Kyler nodded. “Aye, if I could only ask ye to pay my fare.”

  “Oh, a’course, I will. ’Tis the least I can dew. As well I can offer ye this gold piece so’s ya know the extent’a my gratitude,” and then Wilbur offered him a mint-condition Saxon Offa coin struck in 1011 A.D., which would easily bring in ten dollars from a jeweler (but a thousand dollars from a qualified collector or auction house.)

  “Nay, Wilbur. No money can be took by me from a friend.”

  Wilbur consented to the wish, but would secret the coin into Kyler’s bag when he was unaware.

  Just down the road, then, a dervish-like cloud of dust was rising. It was the bus to Arkham.

  Eighteen

  This portion of the narrative, as the finish approaches, might be regarded by some as disproportioned, but this can only be blamed on Fate—as the structure of life itself rarely issues in satisfactory equipoise. Wilbur Whateley did indeed encounter the end of his physical life in the early hours of August the third, in the Rare Books cove of Miskatonic Library. He was savaged by the guard dog which prowls the entire building at night, and evidently some appreciable time had lapsed between the gigantic man’s unlawful entrance and the point at which the animal detected his presence. There was evidence of a candle being lit, and of Wilbur’s effort to write something quickly with pen and paper. What this something was would remain a fair mystery to the academic trio who discovered Wilbur’s body; though one of the three, Dr. Henry Armitage, had the notion that the ungainly intruder had been translating and, hence, transcribing a section of the college’s Latin edition of The Necronomicon, stanzas that might correspond to Page 751 of the 1582 English edition. However, no transcription was found, so if it existed...what had become of it? Armitage could only make an educated estimation.

  After the corpse had disintegrated, one of Armitage’s associates, Professor Rice, had pointed to a canvas sack askew on the floor, and made the supposition, “He must have meant to steal The Necronomicon and carry it off in that.”

  “I’d think not, Warren,” came the elder’s reply, “for surely a man—or thing—as astute as Wilbur Whateley would have calculated in advance the sack’s insufficient size. No, I believe he came here to copy something from the Latin, but I can only guess—since no transcription is present—that a partner of some sort made off with it.”

  “You mean a second perpetrator?” asked Dr. Francis Morgan.

  Armitage pinched his chin in contemplation. “It seems so to me, gentlemen.” Now that much of the stench had cleared, he walked to an ancillary exit door which locked from the inside. “I unlocked the vestibule door myself, but this door?”

  Rice and Morgan saw at once that the access had been—

  “Unlatched,” Rice observed.

  “So unless the security man was uncharacteristically lax tonight,” Morgan continued, “this door here was indeed unlocked from the inside, by Whateley himself.”

  “Yes,” Armitage agreed, “which might give more credulity to my theory of a second party.”

  Rice was nodding. “After violating the east window here, Whateley let his confident in through this door.”

  Close examination at a later time revealed that Wilbur had arrived with full knowledge of the guard dog’s threat, as a large pistol was found near the central desk, its hammer having clearly falle
n on a defective cartridge. So swift the watch dog’s reflexes had been, that the awkward giant had insufficient time to forward the cylinder to the next round.

  It was as simple as that.

  Not so simple was the aspect of the decedent’s body. There were few who disbelieved that an intruder had died in the room, for the repute of the three witnesses was not contestable, even as the details of the corpse remain a matter of private record, not public. It was actually better that way, for what might the masses interpret about the aspect of such a dead body? Better, too, in the long run, that the corpus delecti had actually vanished via some mode of disintegration before a camera could be procured for recording such evidence.

  No description of Wilbur’s naked body will be conveyed; it will only be said instead that the dog had attacked the colossal man with the savagery expected of it, and ripped off most of the trespasser’s attire along with unpleasantly large swatches of his epidermis—if it could be called epidermis. Within minutes of the occult scholar’s death, no vestige of the man’s physical mass remained, save for some morbid whitish liquefaction. This too would disappear completely just as the medical examiner arrived. The man—or entity—had disappeared as if he—or it—had never existed.

  In the weeks following, no clue would be imparted to Armitage as to the identity of Wilbur’s “associate”; while all ponderment over the question would disappear as effectively as Wilbur had himself, in the second week of September, when the Dunwich Horror (in the form of Wilbur’s twin brother) had erupted from its confines and gone on a futile and even pitiable rampage. After this, though, once the Whateley property had been certified as safe to examine, Armitage inspected the premise personally after having received, as per his instructions, all written material, letters, diaries, and books left by the departing giant.