by Pete Rawlik
Mrs. Spool looked up as the key turned in the lock. “Parasites,” she announced. The door swung open and revealed a rather large dormitory easily holding over fifty beds. “Every single one of the children had a parasite of one kind or another. Lice, mostly, but tapeworms were common as well.” She was walking down the aisle that led between the beds. “We found homes for most of them. The boys were easy. The girls took a little longer, but we placed all of them in homes, all except the foundlings.”
She paused in front of a wall. “Normally the term ‘foundling’ is reserved for infants, but these five girls—they were brought in separately, but within days they had clustered together, formed a clique that none of the other girls could join, or even wanted to. Four of the girls were rather unremarkable, typical of the region, but one, the ringleader if you would, she was so strange, so small and frail, but strong willed. She couldn’t speak or write, but somehow she made her wants and needs known. At first Willis said that she might be an idiot or a moron, but she was smart as a whip, and didn’t like anyone to know it.”
“Where are they now?” pressed Megan.
Mrs. Spool was taken aback. “I thought you understood. They’re gone, been missing since this morning. We’ve asked you here to help us find them.”
“And the police didn’t want to handle this themselves?”
“We didn’t want to involve them. We aren’t fond of the authorities, at Spool House, and after we saw this we thought that you would appreciate our discretion.” Her hand darted out and flipped a switch, turning on the light.
The light splashed out over the wall, illuminating what had lain hidden in the dark. It was a mural, and clearly done by a child, but not one without some artistic skill. It ran fifteen feet from floor to ceiling, and was just as wide. It depicted a pastoral scene, but one tinged with horror. The perspective was odd, but the two investigators soon realized that it was a panoramic view looking down into the various glens and valleys surrounding a steep rise, or small mountain. Yet both Megan and Robert knew exactly what hill that was, there was no mistaking it. This was a scene of the countryside surrounding Sentinel Hill, and not just on any day, but clearly on the day of the Dunwich Horror. There in one quadrant was a gathering of villagers from Dunwich staring up the hill, their eyes filled with apprehension and terror. Partway up the hill labored three old men, with dour faces. One carried an elephant gun, while another carried a large bag. They were a gray trio, determined, but you could see that they were afraid, too. All around them the trees were bent, the brush was flat, and the tall grass seemed to whip into frenzy. In another quadrant was the image of a small cabin surrounded by a swarm of broken and shattered men, with two figures, a man and a woman, fighting them off. The scene was very familiar; the figures were all recognizable, from the besieged couple to the decapitated form holding its own head as it seemed to orchestrate the attack.
“Now you see why we thought you might appreciate that we had not involved the police.”
Peaslee stood up and looked at the woman with a sense of incredulity. “Yes, Mrs. Spool. I do appreciate it. Your discretion is appreciated, most appreciated.”
“Then I can trust that you will be equally discreet and make sure that any of what happens next will not be linked back to this institution.”
Peaslee nodded. “Of course, and of course we will handle this problem on a pro bono basis. If I may, when did they draw this? How did they draw this?”
Mrs. Spool scowled. “That obscenity wasn’t there last night when we put the girls to bed. As to how, Mr. Peaslee, I have no idea, but my man tells me that he will need a ladder and at least two days to clean it off.” With that, the old woman stalked out of the room, her footsteps echoing in the empty house.
Megan called after her, “Did the girls have names, Mrs. Spool?”
“I’m sure they did,” her voice came from the hall, “but I see no way in which they are relevant to the task at hand.”
The callous comment left Megan agasp, but Robert called her back to the mural. “You realize that this scene could only have been visualized by someone at the top of Sentinel Hill.”
“But there wasn’t anyone at the top of the hill. Not even Armitage and his group made it to the top.” As soon as she said those words, Megan realized they weren’t true. There had been someone at the top of Sentinel Hill. “We need to get to Dunwich.”
As the car sped down Aylesbury Pike toward Dunwich with Robert Peaslee at the wheel, Megan expounded on what she thought they had just learned. “It all makes a little more sense, doesn’t it? Yog-Sothoth is the Gate and the Key, a binary pair that have to be joined to release their father into the world. That tentacle-like tail with a rudimentary mouth that Armitage described Wilbur having, I don’t think that was a tail or mouth at all. I think that was a kind of reproductive organ meant to join him with that thing on Sentinel Hill.”
“But Armitage called the thing Wilbur’s twin brother.”
“Armitage is a librarian, not a biologist or a doctor, not that that matters. There are thousands of animals—birds, reptiles, insects, other invertebrates—in which determining the gender is nearly impossible to the untrained eye; here we’re speaking about a human bred with something completely alien, possibly not even from this universe. I wouldn’t expect anyone to be able to identify its gender simply by looking at it. It might not even have gender as we know it; that might be our own biology imprinted over its.”
Robert took the curve hard, letting the car drift from one side of the road to the other and then bringing it back. “Just one of the girls, Megan, or all five of them?”
Megan thought for a moment, letting the shadows of the trees pass over her face as they raced down the road. “Only one, I think. The others were probably enlisted, entranced somehow. She must need them for something, support perhaps, or perhaps she is like a queen bee and she has enlisted these others as her drones.”
“An interesting theory, but don’t queens have to be related to their drones?”
“Usually,” quipped Megan, “but you’ve been to Dunwich, I doubt you could find three people who weren’t related within twenty miles of that damned village.”
The car turned left onto the Dunwich Road and drove the two miles of dirt road to the covered bridge that spanned the East Creek. Twenty minutes and five miles later, the Dunwich Road hairpinned north and east. It became a sinuous track that forced Peaslee to drop his speed for another seven miles, which was only half that distance as the crow flied. The switchbacks gave way to another covered bridge, this time one that crossed the Miskatonic River and deposited the sedan carrying the two investigators into Dunwich proper.
“As you said, the damned village,” remarked Robert as he turned east and followed the north bank of the river. Within minutes they were on the decayed dirt track that led north to Sentinel Hill. All around them the evidence of what had happened here just a few weeks ago was apparent; the crowns of great trees had been snapped off, and old and fragile pines had been pushed down. In some places the branches and debris dangled precariously from branches that had been stripped of leaves. All of this was a reminder of the weird force that had been unleashed from the apex of Sentinel Hill, sending a wave of destruction careening away in all directions, like a pebble in a pond. As they drove through the rural farmland, the fallow fields revealed a landscape of barns with missing roofs, homes with missing windows, and piles of timber that had once stood upright, but were now little more than ruins.
It was as they approached what remained of the Whateley farm, in the shadow of Sentinel Hill, that Robert slowed the car. Just then, a shape darted out into the road, forcing Peaslee to slam on the brakes and twist the wheel to the right. They slid through the dirt and came to rest just inches from a rather large tree. Before they could even move to exit the vehicle, the shape, a wild-eyed local man, was there at the door, screaming at them in a whimpering, terrified voice.
“Oh, oh, great Gawd, it’s back. They sed it wa
s ded, gawn fuheveh, but they lied, they lied. I saw it marchin’ up past what’s lefta Noah Whateley’s farm, and then up through what’s lefta Sentinel Hill. It’s there, all like jelly, or a ball of wrigglin’ wurms all bound clost together. Eyes and mouths bulgin’ out everywhere. Dozens o’ legs like barrels that spread out as they step. Great belchin’ trunks on its back leavin’ a trail of black smoke behind it . . . an’ that haff face on top . . . the one that looks like Cousin Lavinia . . . Gawd in Heaven she looked daown the hill and she saw me . . . she saw me!”
And then he ran off and the darkness and the woods that surrounded the road swallowed him whole. Megan took her hand off her guns and relaxed. “So, still think we’re going to solve this without guns?”
Robert glared at her mockingly and got out of the car. He walked to the trunk and opened it. He rustled around in the compartment before sliding out the stock of a rather large shotgun. Megan watched in amazement as he moved back away from the car and the gun just kept coming. In the end, the whole monstrosity, stock and barrel, was more than five feet long and as thick as her arm.
“What in the hell is that?” she asked.
“Elephant gun.”
“And it’s in your trunk?”
“In a special compartment that keeps it slung between the seats, just in case.”
“So when you said you didn’t want to use guns on this case . . .”
“I said I hope we wouldn’t have to use guns on this case. After what that wild-eyed local just spouted off, I’ve changed my mind. Frankly, I wish I had my punt gun.”
“How exactly would you get a punt gun to the top of Sentinel Hill?”
“Oh, that’s not a problem—I mounted it on wheels.”
Megan looked up at the gray and devastated landscape of Sentinel Hill, and laughed.
It was an hour later, and the night had fallen on Dunwich in a shroud. Clouds had rolled in to cover the moon and stars, blanketing the landscape in a thick darkness that was only broken by the weak and distant lights of the distant village. A few weeks earlier the pair would have had to work their way through the trees or follow a game trail to the crest of the hill, but since the disaster, the researchers from Miskatonic had cut a trail and an army of graduate students had covered it with gravel. Throughout the month of October, most of Miskatonic University, both staff and students, had been at work in the Dunwich area as a sort of relief force. They had set up facilities at Dean’s Corners, creating makeshift medical facilities, schools, and the like, to take care of the victims of the disaster. Other members of the faculty and their students had scoured the countryside, gathering samples and data. There was talk about setting up a permanent facility to study the aftereffects of the phenomenon; the name Dunwich Institute had been mentioned. But that had been in October and as things had settled into a kind of routine, the teachers and student body had slowly drifted back into Arkham, and the future of any research into the event and the area was now only talked about at the most esoteric of academic levels.
Megan was leading the way while Robert followed a few steps behind, the elephant gun slung over his shoulder. There was no stealth involved in this approach—the noise of their feet on the gravel was simply too much. Their speed was problematic as well; the gun made it impossible to run, so they were at best trotting up the path, and as they did the sound of the gun rubbing against Robert’s coat added one more level of noise.
Megan had wanted to say something about all the noise, and about the usefulness of the elephant gun itself, but she held her tongue and instead kept watch for what she was sure was an imminent attack by one member or another of the foundlings. When they actually reached the top without being challenged she was genuinely surprised, but only for a moment. What she saw there on the crest of Sentinel Hill explained why they hadn’t been attacked on the way up.
The five girls were there, arranged in a circle around some ancient stone altar, a slab of granite supported by similar megaliths. Weird lines of energy were pouring out of the girls’ hands, forming a complex of light just above the altar. Some would have called it a ball or sphere, but Robert could see it was neither of these; it was a conglomeration of geometric shapes, of polyhedrons with innumerable faces all rotating about various vertices, merging and blending with each other in a maddening cacophony of form and facets. It was a mosaic of tessellations that hurt to look at, not because it was too bright, for it wasn’t—if anything it was pale, almost invisible in the darkness—but rather because it was a wrong thing. It didn’t belong in this universe, it was an impossible construct, with angles that were both obtuse and acute at the same time, or at least that is how it seemed. It was in a way beautiful, but that beauty was fundamentally wrong. Robert wanted to think of it as inherently evil, but that word didn’t convey the true nature of what he was seeing. It was a cosmic abomination, a thing that should not have been, an expression of laws and order, of mathematics and geometrics, but ones that weren’t part of this universe. It was a vile intrusion into our universe and it needed to be destroyed.
He spun around and dropped to a knee, positioning the oversized gun, aiming it at the shining trapezohedron that was constantly forming and reforming. Megan was entranced by the thing and didn’t realize what he was doing. Robert took his time aiming the gun; it was heavier than he thought and his hand was unused to the shape and weight. Robert was trying to make sure that his shot was on target, the object that had been summoned—he was likely to get only one shot. When he had finally shifted it into an optimum position, he called out to his partner.
“Megan, get back,” he ordered in a hushed tone.
She cast a glance in his direction, and then her gaze was drawn back to the girls and the thing that was forming between them. She thought she had figured something out. There was one girl, a slight, waifish thing, with violet eyes and a weak chin. It was a Whateley chin, she had no doubt; that thin girl on the far side of the altar was the mistress of the others. If they could take her out, all this might be stopped. It was as she thought these words that the polyhedrons suddenly collapsed and then expanded in size, doubling the volume of the weird geometries. Megan could see something inside, a coastline, the sea crashing against it, a small village in the shadow of a massive cliff. She thought she recognized it, vaguely at least. Then she realized what was happening.
“Robert, shoot, you have to stop them. Shoot!”
As Megan screamed and dove for cover, one of the girls screeched in anger. It wasn’t an animal sound, but it wasn’t human either. It was a bellowing emptiness that rolled out of the mouth of a child who was too small to be its source. The other girls turned and flew toward Robert—their eyes were black, their mouths open and echoing that horrific sound.
He pulled the trigger.
The round left the barrel at immense speed and with a tremendous roar, tearing through one of the girls, ripping a gaping hole in her chest and then continuing on to impact on that queer polyhedron. Robert didn’t have time to see what damage his attack had inflicted; one of the three remaining harpy-like children careened into him and knocked him to the ground. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the other two girls impact on Megan. He rolled with the hit and let the girl’s momentum carry her away from him. She hit the ground and in an instant was on her feet and springing back at Peaslee’s head. As she flew through the air, Robert swung the gun butt and smashed her across the face. The girl’s jaw shattered and she crumpled to the ground, unconscious.
He turned and ran toward Megan, intent on engaging her attackers, but that was not a necessity. Megan had gathered both girls, one under each arm, and with opposite hands let loose with her pearl-handled revolvers. The bodies kicked, then shuddered and joined their sister on the ground at the summit of Sentinel Hill. All four of the furies were on the ground, with blood and gore staining the earth itself. It made Robert sick to look at what he had been forced to do, but he had done it, the guns had done their duty, and the bodies never stood up again.
&
nbsp; But the glowing thing that they had summoned was still there, and so was the child that Megan thought of as the Whateley girl. She had taken cover behind the altar and was now clambering up it toward the hole that held an image of a place far distant from where they stood now. That image was rolling now, destabilizing. The girl-thing roared again and dove toward it. In that weird, unearthly light, the girl ceased to be human. There was something else, a kind of shadow that replaced the girl; it was a titanic thing, cyclopean, and entirely unearthly in its appearance. It was as that wild-eyed man had said, like a bunch of worms all squirming together with eyes and mouths everywhere.
Megan was firing her guns, but to no avail—the monstrous child impacted on the polyhedron and the two seemed to meld into each other. The monster stretched and squeezed, shrank and compressed in a thousand different directions. There was a burst of light, like a thousand snowflakes exploding. The conglomeration of shapes and light was bucking wildly, like a child’s top as it neared the end of its spin. Then, just like that, the monster was gone, and the whole thing collapsed in on itself.
Megan grabbed Robert, wrenching him off the ground, and threw him down the slope, diving after him. They hit the gravel path hard, but rolled with it, sliding about ten feet down from the crest. Robert tried to stand, but Megan grabbed him and pulled him back down.
There was a flash of light; they say even people in Aylesbury could see it, for it lit up the whole of the Dunwich valley. It was a queer light which cast white shadows and turned everything black, but only for a moment. Then there was an explosion—not an explosion: an implosion. Leaves, dirt, and loose gravel whipped up the side of the hill, forming great trails of debris as the whirligig presumably collapsed. The two investigators lay there for a moment, catching their breath and tending to minor wounds and detritus that had gotten caught in their clothes and hair.