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38 pages

English

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In this supremely creepy story from horror master H.P. Lovecraft, an unspeakable horror is unleashed upon the quaint burg of Dunwich, Massachusetts in the form of a young boy named Wilbur Whateley, the son of a disfigured albino woman and a mysterious -- and possibly demonic -- father. Wilbur's birth ushers in a series of strange events in the town that only intensify as he grows older. Will the townspeople be able to contain this curse before it's too late?

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Publié par	The Floating Press
Date de parution	01 avril 2016
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781776597192
Langue	English

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THE DUNWICH HORROR
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H. P. LOVECRAFT

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The Dunwich Horror First published in 1929 Epub ISBN 978-1-77659-719-2 Also available: PDF ISBN 978-1-77659-720-8 © 2016 The Floating Press and its licensors. All rights reserved. While every effort has been used to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information contained in The Floating Press edition of this book, The Floating Press does not assume liability or responsibility for any errors or omissions in this book. The Floating Press does not accept responsibility for loss suffered as a result of reliance upon the accuracy or currency of information contained in this book. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. Many suitcases look alike. Visit www.thefloatingpress.com
Contents
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Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10
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"Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimeras—dire stories of Celæno and the Harpies—may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition— but they were there before . They are transcripts, types—the archetypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come to affect us at all? Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? Oh, least of all! These terrors are of older standing. They date beyond body —or without the body, they would have been the same.... That the kind of fear here treated is purely spiritual—that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on earth, that it predominates in the period of our sinless infancy—are difficulties the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence."—Charles Lamb: Witches and Other Night-Fears .
Chapter 1
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When a traveler in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong forkat the junction of the Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean's Corners hecomes upon a lonely and curious country. The ground gets higher, andthe brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the rutsof the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent forest beltsseem too large, and the wild weeds, brambles, and grasses attain aluxuriance not often found in settled regions. At the same time theplanted fields appear singularly few and barren; while the sparselyscattered houses wear a surprizing uniform aspect of age, squalor, anddilapidation. Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directionsfrom the gnarled, solitary figures spied now and then on crumblingdoorsteps or in the sloping, rock-strewn meadows. Those figures areso silent and furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbiddenthings, with which it would be better to have nothing to do. When arise in the road brings the mountains in view above the deep woods,the feeling of strange uneasiness is increased. The summits are toorounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, andsometimes the sky silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circlesof tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned.
Gorges and ravines of problematical depth intersect the way, and thecrude wooden bridges always seem of dubious safety. When the roaddips again there are stretches of marshland that one instinctivelydislikes, and indeed almost fears at evening when unseen whippoorwillschatter and the fireflies come out in abnormal profusion to dance tothe raucous, creepily insistent rhythms of stridently piping bullfrogs.The thin, shining line of the Miskatonic's upper reaches has an oddlyserpentlike suggestion as it winds close to the feet of the domed hillsamong which it rises.
As the hills draw nearer, one heeds their wooded sides more than theirstone-crowned tops. Those sides loom up so darkly and precipitouslythat one wishes they would keep their distance, but there is no road bywhich to escape them. Across a covered bridge one sees a small villagehuddled between the stream and the vertical slope of Round Mountain,and wonders at the cluster of rotting gambrel roofs bespeaking anearlier architectural period than that of the neighboring region. Itis not reassuring to see, on a closer glance, that most of the housesare deserted and falling to ruin, and that the broken-steepled churchnow harbors the one slovenly mercantile establishment of the hamlet.One dreads to trust the tenebrous tunnel of the bridge, yet there is noway to avoid it. Once across, it is hard to prevent the impression of afaint, malign odor about the village street, as of the massed mold anddecay of centuries. It is always a relief to get clear of the place,and to follow the narrow road around the base of the hills and acrossthe level country beyond till it rejoins the Aylesbury pike. Afterwardone sometimes learns that one has been through Dunwich.
Outsiders visit Dunwich as seldom as possible, and since a certainseason of horror all the signboards pointing toward it have been takendown. The scenery, judged by any ordinary esthetic canon, is morethan commonly beautiful; yet there is no influx of artists or summertourists. Two centuries ago, when talk of witch-blood, Satan-worship,and strange forest presences was not laughed at, it was the custom togive reasons for avoiding the locality. In our sensible age—sincethe Dunwich horror of 1928 was hushed up by those who had the town'sand the world's welfare at heart—people shun it without knowingexactly why. Perhaps one reason—though it can not apply to uninformedstrangers—is that the natives are now repellently decadent, havinggone far along that path of retrogression so common in many New Englandbackwaters. They have come to form a race by themselves, with thewell-defined mental and physical stigmata of degeneracy and inbreeding.The average of their intelligence is wofully low, whilst their annalsreek of overt viciousness and of half-hidden murders, incests, anddeeds of almost unnamable violence and perversity. The old gentry,representing the two or three armigerous families which came fromSalem in 1692, have kept somewhat above the general level of decay;though many branches are sunk into the sordid populace so deeply thatonly their names remain as a key to the origin they disgrace. Some ofthe Whateleys and Bishops still send their eldest sons to Harvard andMiskatonic, though those sons seldom return to the moldering gambrelroofs under which they and their ancestors were born.
No one, even those who have the facts concerning the recent horror,can say just what is the matter with Dunwich; though old legends speakof unhallowed rites and conclaves of the Indians, amidst which theycalled forbidden shapes of shadow out of the great rounded hills, andmade wild orgiastic prayers that were answered by loud crackings andrumblings from the ground below. In 1747 the Reverend Abijah Hoadley,newly come to the Congregational Church at Dunwich Village, preached amemorable sermon on the close presence of Satan and his imps, in whichhe said:
It must be allow'd that these Blasphemies of an infernall Train of Dæmons are Matters of too common Knowledge to be deny'd; the cursed Voices of Azazel and Buzrael , of Beelzebub and Belial , being heard from under Ground by above a Score of credible Witnesses now living. I myself did not more than a Fortnight ago catch a very plain Discourse of evill Powers in the Hill behind my House; wherein there were a Rattling and Rolling, Groaning, Screeching, and Hissing, such as no Things of this Earth cou'd raise up, and which must needs have come from those Caves that only black Magick can discover, and only the Divell unlock.
Mr. Hoadley disappeared soon after delivering this sermon; but thetext, printed in Springfield, is still extant. Noises in the hillscontinued to be reported from year to year, and still form a puzzle togeologists and physiographers.
Other traditions tell of foul odors near the hill-crowning circles ofstone pillars, and of rushing airy presences to be heard faintly atcertain hours from stated points at the bottom of the great ravines;while still others try to explain the Devil's Hop Yard—a bleak,blasted hillside where no tree, shrub, or grass-blade will grow. Then,too, the natives are mortally afraid of the numerous whippoorwillswhich grow vocal on warm nights. It is vowed that the birds arepsychopomps lying in wait for the souls of the dying, and that theytime their eery cries in unison with the sufferer's struggling breath.If they can catch the fleeing soul when it leaves the body, theyinstantly flutter away chittering in demoniac laughter; but if theyfail, they subside gradually into a disappointed silence.
These tales, of course, are obsolete and ridiculous; because they comedown from very old times. Dunwich is indeed ridiculously old—older byfar than any of the communities within thirty miles of it. South of thevillage one may still spy the cellar walls and chimney of the ancientBishop house, which was built before 1700; whilst the ruins of the millat the falls, built in 1806, form the most modern piece of architectureto be seen. Industry did not flourish here, and the Nineteenth Centuryfactory movement proved short-lived. Oldest of all are the greatrings of rough-hewn stone columns on the hilltops, but these are moregenerally attributed to the Indians than to the settlers. Deposits ofskulls and bones, found within these circles and around the sizabletable-like rock on Sentinel Hill, sustain the popular belief that suchspots were once the burial-places of the Pocumtucks; even though manyethnologists, disregarding the absurd improbability of such a theory,persist in believing the remains Caucasian.
Chapter 2
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It was in the township of Dunwich, in a large and partly inhabitedfarmhouse set against a hillside four miles from the village and a mileand a half from any other dwelling, that Wilbur Whateley was born at 5a. m. on Sunday, the second of February, 1913. T