Paul searched his trousers for a coin. He found a silver dollar and used it to rap on the glass panel of the Peltonville Inn’s main entrance, but to no avail. He called out but his voice disappeared into the whistling, howling gale.
Stepping to the edge of the sheltered space beneath the marquee he held Delia to him, gazing at the sky. Clouds like shreds of torn black cloth swept overhead; in the breaks between them stars glared down at the couple. Never had Paul seen them so cold and seemingly malevolent. To the east a new constellation appeared, a group of eight stars of a color he had never seen before. If he had needed to name their color he would have called it red, but it was red of a shade and quality he had never previously experienced. The stars danced. Paul shuddered. An eerie auditory amalgam, part whistle, part hiss, part scraping, sounded faintly.
“There’s nobody here,” he muttered. “I can’t tell, Delia, either the inn is out of business or it’s closed for the night. Either way, we’ll find no shelter here tonight.”
“But Paul,” she replied. Paul looked into her face. Clearly she was struggling to summon her courage but there were tears in her eyes and the corners of her mouth quivered. “What will we do? Is there any place we can go? We can’t just sleep in the car, we’ll freeze.”
She was right, he realized. The wind whipped through their lightweight garments. Even beneath the marquee of the Peltonville Inn the hailstones bounced from the sidewalk and roadway and stung them like wave after wave of angry ice-hornets.
Across the street a faint light flickered in the windows of an old, two-story building. There was a momentary break in the screaming wind and a low chanting, barely audible, drifted to their ears. Paul stepped out from beneath the marquee, shielding his eyes from the pelting of hailstones as sharp and vicious as a bombardment of granite needles.
Yes, there was a light in the building.
Paul raised his gaze. The sinister constellation had disappeared from its previous location. Now it appeared once again, swooping and gyrating above the lighted building.
“There’s somebody over there,” Paul exclaimed. “Come on, Delia, they’ll have to let us in!”
Hand in hand they ran from the Peltonville Inn to the lighted building across the street. The building loomed above them. The light they had seen flickered through a circular stained glass window. Its pattern was regular in shape, oddly suggestive of a sheriff’s badge. Paul found himself wondering crazily if there wasn’t a sheriff’s station or town police headquarters here in Peltonville, if he and Delia should not have tried to find the authorities and pleaded with them for assistance against the cold and desolation of the darkness and the storm.
But it was too late for that.
Paul pounded on the heavy wooden door and found, to his surprise, that it swung open beneath his blows. He urged Delia in ahead of himself, then stepped into the shelter of the building, drawing the door shut behind them.
Clearly they were in a house of worship. The stained glass window behind them centered around a huge star formed of interlocking equilateral triangles. Paul had seen the pattern before, but there was something wrong with it this time. Each of the star’s six points was surmounted by another figure, a clutching claw, a hook, or some other disquieting image. And in the center of the hexagon formed by the major triangles he saw a face such as his most horrifying nightmare had never brought to him, a face whose inhuman features were exceeded in their fearsomeness only by the malevolence of their expression, a face surrounded by dripping tentacles that appeared for all the world to writhe and clutch even as he watched.
Hand in hand Paul and Delia advanced into the sanctuary. The chamber was illuminated by a series of gas mantles mounted on pilasters. There appeared now the massed congregants, robed figures of indeterminate gender. Human they seemed, but somehow and in some incomprehensible way, wrong. They stood in a circle, swaying rhythmically and chanting in what had to be Hebrew.
In the center of the circle towered a massive figure, broad-shouldered, bearded, wearing a skull-cap and fringed shawl embroidered with kabalistic symbols and horrifying images. The figure raised his voice and his arms, but where Paul expected to see hands emerging from the sleeves of his robe were frightening claws that clacked angrily, wreathed by tentacles that wove and snapped like miniature whips.
The robed chanters surrounding their foul leader parted ranks. More quickly than Paul could follow they formed themselves into two rows. Those closest to Paul and Delia reached and took them by the hands. Paul’s will was frozen. He stumbled forward, Delia at his side, passed from couple to couple of the frightening chanters, until they found themselves standing in the center of the newly reconstituted circle.
The leader loomed over them, far taller and more massive than any human being had the right to be. His arms were still raised, the claws and tentacles still performing their terrible gyrations. Involuntarily Paul raised his eyes, following the direction of the massive arms. Out of the corner of his vision he saw that Delia had done the same, and that even the monstrous figure before them had thrown back its head and was gazing in a state of spiritual rapture into the sky.
Yes, the sky loomed overhead. A retractable panel had been drawn back in the roof of the sanctuary. The hail had ceased to fall, but an icy wind howled through the aperture. The sound of the chanting rose, the leader began a strange and frightening dance, and in the blackness above the building, against the backdrop of faint, distant stars, the foul eight-pointed constellation appeared once more.
Only now Paul realized that the points of illumination were not distant stars but the eyes of a dreadful being, a being something like a huge spider, something like a frightening marine creature, something unholy and infinitely evil.
The eight red eyes drew nearer and the other features of the being became visible, fangs that dripped venom that steamed and sputtered as it struck the sanctuary floor, rope-like excrescencies that writhed and reached for the figures gathered beneath.
The chanting that surrounded Paul and Delia rose in pitch and urgency, the looming clergyman who stood before them lowered his arms and reached for Paul and Delia, seizing one of them in each arm, drawing them to his body that seemed to be more a chitinous shell than mere muscle and bone.
With immense and effortless strength he raised them, Paul in one horrid tentacle-circled claw, Delia in the other. Overhead the monstrous entity nodded and hissed, lowering itself toward the sacrifice that was clearly intended for it.
Paul reached for Delia, hoping in what must surely be the last moments of their lives to clasp her hand, but instead there was a monstrous crash and an icy blast as the massive doors of the building burst open and smashed to the floor. Paul was able to twist in the clergyman’s grasp.
Standing in the doorway of the sanctuary was a figure he recognized at once as belonging to Mustafa Cristopolous, the Greek-Turkish-Jewish bartender whom Paul and Delia had met earlier in the evening at Daniello’s Roadhouse.
But now Cristopolous was transformed. No longer bent over a mahogany surface, no longer clad in a brass-buttoned, red service jacket, Cristopolous seemed to have grown to a height half-again his previous size. His shoulders bulged with muscles. His features, the broken nose, the cleft chin, had assumed a nobility that Paul had not recognized in them in Daniello’s cocktail lounge. The jagged scar on his cheek was no longer a pallid reminder of a long-ago wound, but a blazing talisman of righteous rage.
The low, accented voice that Paul and Delia had heard at Daniello’s now roared its challenge in words of ancient Hebrew. Among them Paul recognized a phrase that he had previously heard, Yeshua ben Yeshua. The evil clergyman, startled, dropped Paul and Delia. The entity that writhed above the sanctuary hissed and writhed in rage, deprived, at least for the moment, of its sacrificial prey.
The chanting congregants parted in terror, scurrying to cower among the pews and against the walls of the sanctuary.
Cristopolous strode forward, passing between Paul and Delia as he appr
oached the clergyman. Cristopolous reached for the other, his massive hands clutching for the other’s throat. The two were of a size and well matched in strength. They bellowed imprecations at each other, both of them growling in the same archaic tongue that Cristopolous had used to issue his first challenge upon entering the sanctuary. But among the alien words of Yeshua ben Yeshua, Paul was sure that he heard the name Yacoub ben Yitzak.
The clergyman and Cristopolous clutched each other in a dreadful parody of a lovers’ embrace. The clergyman was clawing at Cristopolous’s face and throat; Cristopolous held the other by his waist, lifting him from the floor by main strength.
From above the writhing, seething tangle, a foul cluster of tentacles descended, dripping venom and slime. Ropelike organs wrapped themselves around the two struggling figures, then raised both, slowly, from the floor. Paul reached for Cristopolous’s heavy ankles. For a moment he secured a grip on them and felt himself actually lifted from his own feet, but a burning blob of slime spattered on one of his hands. In agony he lost his grasp on Cristopolous’s ankle with that hand; the other, alone, had not sufficient strength to maintain its grip.
Paul collapsed back onto the floor. Delia knelt beside him, her arms around him, her tear-stained face pressed against his. Above them Paul saw Cristopolous and the clergyman, now wholly enveloped in a cocoon of writhing, ropelike tentacles, disappear into the gaping maw of the hideous entity that hovered briefly above the sanctuary, then rose with incredible speed until it disappeared once and for all into the starry sky above.
Again a cold wind swept into the sanctuary, and again the clatter of hailstones filled the night, this time pouring unimpeded through the open roof into the ancient building.
Taking Delia by the hand, Paul made his way from the building. The misshapen congregants whose chanting had earlier filled the building and the night had disappeared. Hand in hand, Paul and Delia made their way back to the Hudson-Terraplane.
Together, Paul and Delia turned back for one last sight of the desecrated synagogue. The monstrous creature was nowhere to be seen; it had disappeared along with both Yeshua ben Yeshua and Yacoub ben Yitzak. But from the swirling clouds overhead a single lurid shaft of shockingly ruddy lightning crackled downward. It must have struck the gas line that fed the mantles in the synagogue. There was a deafening explosion and the building disappeared, fragments clattering down for city blocks in all directions.
“We can’t stay in Peltonville,” Paul announced. This assertion drew no objection from Delia. “And we can’t get back to Springfield until the bridge is repaired. But we can press on. Aurora isn’t too much farther, and we can find accommodations there.” He paused. Then he added, “Even if we can only find one room.”
Delia leaned her head against his shoulder and wrapped her arms around him. “One room is all we’ll need, Paul,” she murmured.
THE DEVIL’S HOP YARD
It was in the autumn of 1928 that those terrible events which came to be known as the Dunwich Horror transpired. The residents of the upper Miskatonic Valley in Massachusetts, at all times a taciturn breed of country folk never known for their hospitality or communicativeness toward outsiders, became thereafter positively hostile to such few travelers as happened to trespass upon their hilly and infertile region.
The people of the Dunwich region in particular, a sparse and inbred race with few intellectual or material attainments to show for their generations of toil, gradually became fewer than ever in number. It was the custom of the region to marry late and to have few children. Those infants delivered by the few physicians and midwives who practiced thereabouts were often deformed in some subtle and undefinable way; it would be impossible for an observer to place his finger upon the exact nature of the defect, yet it was plain that something was frighteningly wrong with many of the boys and girls born in the Miskatonic Valley.
Yet, as the years turned slowly, the pale, faded folk of Dunwich continued to raise their thin crops, to tend their dull-eyed and stringy cattle, and to wring their hard existence from the poor, farmed-out earth of their homesteads.
Events of interest were few and petty; the columns of the Aylesbury Transcript, the Arkham Advertiser, and even the imposing Boston Globe were scanned for items of diversion. Dunwich itself supported no regular newspaper, not even the slim weekly sheet that subsists in many such semi-rural communities.
It was therefore a source of much local gossip and a delight to the scandal-mongers when Earl Sawyer abandoned Mamie Bishop, his common-law wife of twenty years standing, and took up instead with Zenia Whateley. Sawyer was an uncouth dirt farmer, some fifty years of age. His cheeks covered perpetually with a stubble that gave him the appearance of not having shaved for a week, his nose and eyes marked with the red lines of broken minor blood vessels, and his stoop-shouldered, shuffling gait marked him as a typical denizen of Dunwich’s hilly environs.
Zenia Whateley was a thin, pallid creature, the daughter of old Zebulon Whateley and a wife so retiring in her lifetime and so thoroughly forgotten since her death that none could recall the details of her countenance or even her given name. The latter had been painted carelessly on the oblong wooden marker that indicated the place of her burial, but the cold rains and watery sunlight of the round of Dunwich’s seasons had obliterated even this trace of the dead woman’s individuality.
Zenia must have taken after her mother, for her own appearance was unprepossessing, her manner cringing, and her speech so infrequent and so diffident that few could recall ever having heard her voice. The loafers and gossips at Osborn’s General Store in Dunwich were hard put to understand Earl Sawyer’s motives in abandoning Mamie Bishop for Zenia Whateley. Not that Mamie was noted for her great beauty or scintillating personality; on the contrary: she was known as a meddler and a snoop, and her sharp tongue had stung many a denizen hoping to see some misdemeanor pass unnoticed. Still, Mamie had within her that spark of vitality so seldom found in the folk of the upper Miskatonic, that trait of personality known in the rural argot as gumption, so that it was puzzling to see her perched beside Earl on the front seat of his rattling Model T Ford, her few belongings tied in slovenly bundles behind her, as Sawyer drove her over the dust-blowing turnpike to Aylesbury where she took quarters in the town’s sole, dilapidated rooming house.
The year was 1938 when Earl Sawyer and Mamie Bishop parted ways. It had been a decade since the death of the poor, malformed giant Wilbur Whateley and the dissolution — for this word, rather than death, best characterizes the end of that monster — of his even more gigantic and even more shockingly made twin brother. But now it was the end of May, and the spring thaw had come late and grudgingly to the hard-pressed farmlands of the Miskatonic Valley this year.
When Earl Sawyer returned, alone, to Dunwich, he stopped in the center of the town, such as it was, parking his Model T opposite Osborn’s. He crossed the dirty thoroughfare and climbed onto the porch of old Zebulon Whateley’s house, pounding once upon the grey, peeling door while the loafers at Osborn’s stared and commented behind his back.
The door opened and Earl Sawyer disappeared inside for a minute. The loafers puzzled over what business Earl might have with Zebulon Whateley, and their curiosity was rewarded shortly when Sawyer reappeared leading Zenia Whateley by one flaccid hand. Zenia wore a thin cotton dress, and through its threadbare covering it was obvious even from the distance of Osborn’s that she was with child.
Earl Sawyer drove home to his dusty farm, bringing Zenia with him, and proceeded to install her in place of Mamie Bishop. There was little noticeable change in the routine at Sawyer’s farm with the change in its female occupant. Each morning Earl and Zenia would rise, Zenia would prepare and serve a meagre repast for them, and they would breakfast in grim silence. Earl would thereafter leave the house, carefully locking the door behind him with Zenia left inside to tend to the chores of housekeeping, and Earl would spend the entire day working out-of-doors.
The Sawyer farm contained just enough
arable land to raise a meager crop of foodstuffs and to support a thin herd of the poor cattle common to the Miskatonic region. The bleak hillside known as the Devil’s Hop Yard was also located on Sawyer’s holdings. Here had grown no tree, shrub or blade of grass for as far back as the oldest archives of Dunwich recorded, and despite Earl Sawyer’s repeated attempts to raise a crop on its unpleasant slopes, the Hop Yard resisted and remained barren. Even so there persisted reports of vague, unpleasant rumblings and cracklings from beneath the Hop Yard, and occasionally shocking odors were carried from it to adjoining farms when the wind was right.
On the first Sunday of June, 1938, Earl Sawyer and Zenia Whateley were seen to leave the farmhouse and climb into Sawyer’s Model T. They drove together into Dunwich village, and, leaving the Model T in front of old Zebulon Whateley’s drab house, walked across the churchyard, pausing to read such grave markers as remained there standing and legible, then entered the Dunwich Congregational Church that had been founded by the Reverend Abijah Hoadley in 1747. The pulpit of the Dunwich Congregational Church had been vacant since the unexplained disappearance of the Reverend Isaiah Ashton in the summer of 1912, but a circuit-riding Congregational minister from the city of Arkham conducted services in Dunwich from time to time.
This was the first occasion of Earl Sawyer’s attendance at services within memory, and there was a nodding of heads and a hissing of whispers up and down the pews as Earl and Zenia entered the frame building. Earl and Zenia took a pew to themselves at the rear of the congregation and when the order of service had reached its conclusion they remained behind to speak with the minister. No witness was present, of course, to overhear the conversation that took place, but later the minister volunteered his recollection of Sawyer’s request and his own responses.
Sawyer, the minister reported, had asked him to perform a marriage. The couple to be united were himself (Sawyer) and Zenia Whateley. The minister had at first agreed, especially in view of Zenia’s obvious condition, and the desirability of providing for a legitimate birth for her expected child. But Sawyer had refused to permit the minister to perform the usual marriage ceremony of the Congregational Church, insisting instead upon a ceremony involving certain foreign terms to be provided from some ancient documents handed down through the family of the bride.
The Doom That Came to Dunwich Page 12