Terrors

by Richard A. Lupoff

  The ancient man shook his head negatingly. “You must not put off. We will return to the Institute.”

  Half fainting from fatigue and wine, yet equally eager to be at her work, Cordelia Whateley agreed. Upon returning to the Institute, Professor Armitage produced a ring of keys from the pocket of his shabby black suit and unlocked the glass-fronted bookcase containing the largest of the volumes Cordelia Whateley had previously seen.

  He selected one and carried it to a heavy deal table beside which a wooden reading-chair had already been placed, and laid it carefully upon the table. “You will find useful information here, young miss.” Having said this he retired to a far corner and folded himself into a chair. To Cordelia Whateley he seemed to disappear.

  She examined the volume Armitage had laid out. It was a bound collection of large news pages, the paper yellowing and flaking away at the edges. “I thought everybody was transferring newspaper files to microfilm,” Cordelia Whateley said.

  From his darkened corner, Henry Armitage replied, “Many in Dunwich Town like things as they were.”

  Cordelia Whateley, examining the masthead of the bound newspaper, read aloud, “The Dunwich Daily Dispatch.”

  “Only called it a daily,” Armitage commented. “You could never tell when there’d be an issue. The editor, Ephraim Clay, used to say it was a daily, came out once a day, just not every day. I think that was some kind of joke. Never understood Ephraim very well. A strange man. But look at those issues for 1928. You’ll learn all you need to know.”

  Cordelia Whateley fumbled in her large purse and brought out a small tape recorder. She pressed a switch and began dictating segments from various 1928 issues of the Dunwich Daily Dispatch.

  One of them, reprinted from a Boston newspaper, reported the death of Cordelia’s distant cousin, Wilbur Whateley. The article bore no byline, but it described the youthful, dying giant in shuddersome detail. Cordelia’s voice quavered and shook as she spoke, but she managed to continue to the end of the article.

  Above the waist it was semi-anthropomorphic (the dispatch ran) though its chest, where the dog’s rending paws still rested watchfully, had the leathery, reticulated hide of a crocodile or alligator. The back was piebald with yellow and black, and dimly suggested the squamous covering of certain snakes. Below the waist, though, it was the worst; for here all human resemblance left off and sheer phantasy began. The skin was thickly covered with coarse black fur, and from the abdomen a score of long greenish-grey tentacles with red sucking mouths protruded limply. Their arrangement was odd, and seemed to follow the symmetries of some cosmic geometry unknown to earth or the solar system. On each of the hips, deep set in a kind of pinkish, ciliated orbit, was what seemed to be a rudimentary eye; whilst in lieu of a tail there depended a kind of trunk or feeler with purple annular markings, and with many evidences of being an undeveloped mouth or throat. The limbs, save for their black fur, roughly resembled the hind legs of prehistoric earth’s giant saurians; and terminated in ridgy-veined pads that were neither hooves nor claws. When the thing breathed, its tail and tentacles rhythmically changed colour, as if from some circulatory cause normal to the non-human side of its ancestry. In the tentacles this was observable as a deepening of the greenish tinge, whilst in the tail it was manifest as a yellowish appearance which alternated with a sickly greyish-white in the spaces between the purple rings. Of genuine blood there was none; only the foetid greenish-yellow ichor which trickled along the painted floor beyond the radius of the stickiness, and left a curious discolouration behind it.

  Cordelia Whateley collapsed into the wooden reading-chair. She pressed her hands to her chest, trying to steady her breathing. After a while she managed to raise her face and peer into the darkened corner where Armitage sat, patiently waiting for her to speak.

  Finally she managed to mumble, “It’s impossible. Impossible. I know my Cousin Wilbur was—not normal. Not like other men, even other Whateleys. But this—how could such a being exist?”

  Armitage did not respond directly. Instead, he asked, “Did you know that Wilbur was a twin?”

  “No. My parents and grandparents would never speak of the Dunwich branch of the family. Only my great-grandfather, Cain Whateley, told me stories. I remember my parents were furious with him. I used to ask them about the Whateleys, but they would never tell me anything, and when I asked about things that Great-grandfather Cain told me, they said it was all nonsense. They said he’d seen too many horror movies when he was a boy, and read too many cheap magazines, that he was so old he couldn’t distinguish what he’d read about or seen in the movies from what was real.”

  Armitage made a soft sound but spoke no words.

  “Even Great-grandfather Cain never mentioned Wilbur’s being a twin.”

  “But still he was,” Armitage told her. “Read on.”

  Cordelia Whateley felt a painful thirst, the wine she had sipped at the inn had left a dry aftertaste in her mouth and throat. But recollection of the malodoriferous water Armitage had offered her earlier militated against her renewing the request. Instead, she continued leafing through old Dunwich Daily Dispatches, pausing frequently to dictate excerpts into her miniature tape recorder.

  A gasp of horror and revulsion escaped her when she came to the description of another creature, but she read the words aloud from the yellowing page, first attributing them accurately to still another cousin, Curtis Whateley. The reporter, once more anonymous, seemingly had seen fit to record Curtis Whateley’s degenerate Miskatonic Valley speech in its full phonetic peculiarity:

  Bigger’n a barn … all made o’ squirmin’ ropes … hull thing sort o’ shaped like a hen’s egg bigger’n anything with dozens o’ legs like hogsheads that haff shut up when they step … nothin’ solid abaout it—all like jelly, an’ made o’ sep’rit wrigglin’ ropes pushed close together … great bulgin’ eyes all over it … ten or twenty maouths or trunks a-stickin’ aout all along the sides, big as stove-pipes, an’ all a-tossin’ an’ openin’ an’ shuttin’ … all grey, with kinder blue or purple rings … an’ Gawd in Heaven—that haff face on top!

  And another quotation, from another news page, attributed to the same Curtis Whateley.

  Oh, oh, my Gawd, that haff face—that haff face on top of it … that face with the red eyes an’ crinkly albino hair, an’ no chin, like the Whateleys…. It was a octopus, centipede, spider kind o’ thing, but they was a haff-shaped man’s face on top of it, and it looked like Wizard Whateley’s, only it was yards and yards acrost….

  Cordelia Whateley collapsed, sobbing.

  “That was Wilbur’s brother.” Henry Armitage spoke in an ancient, papery voice. “He never had a name, or if he did, no one in all the Valley ever knew it. Save, perhaps, Wilbur, or his mother, Lavinia.” Armitage’s breath rasped. “Or mebbe his step-father, old Wizard Whateley.”

  Cordelia Whateley managed to raise her eyes. She ran her fingers through her hair. She had heard superstitious tales of men or women whose hair had turned white in a single night, from sheer terror. She wondered if that was happening to her. She wondered if she was going mad.

  “What do you mean, step-father?” she croaked. “Wasn’t Lavinia’s husband the real father? Who was, then?”

  “Not old Wizard Whateley, you can be sartin.’” Armitage was lapsing into the local argot.

  “Who was the father?” Cordelia Whateley demanded.

  Armitage uttered a frightening chuckle. He rose, an elongated, shadowy figure still obscured by darkness. To Cordelia Whateley he seemed unnaturally tall, perhaps as tall as her Cousin Wilbur’s legendary stature. But maybe all was illusion, maybe all was the effect of the dim, flickering illumination of fireplace and oil-lamp.

  “Wizard Whateley was not the father of the twins. Not any more than Joseph the Carpenter was the father of Jesus of Nazareth.” He paused. “That is, of you b’lieve that Christian balderdash, o’ course. Ef you do, then the father was God, wa’nt he? An’ Joseph merely the foster-father of
the infant Jesus? Ef you believe that Christian balderdash, o’ course.”

  “Well, I—I’ve never thought about it very much, Professor.”

  “Wilbur Whateley and his giant brother, his daemon brother, were star-spawn, young miss. Their father was a bein’ from the vaults of space, a member of a civilization old beyawnd human comprehension an’ distant beawond human imagination. An’ he come here to earth—Gawd alone knows why—an’ he fathered two sons awn the blessed Lavinia Whateley. An’ the good people o’ Dunwich Town kilt ’em. Yes, the good people o’ Dunwich Town refused t’ understand, refused t’ care, refused t’ give the slightest sympathy or assistance to them two innocent children of an alien father and an earthly mother. We kilt ’em. The Romans had nothin’ on us. They kilt themselves one Son o’ Gawd. We kilt us two. An’ our punishment will be terrible, young miss. The stars are right, know it, young miss, the stars are right and our punishment will be terrible.”

  A low moan escaped Cordelia Whateley. She had come to Professor Armitage in hopes of learning the truth about her cursed relatives, and instead had been subjected to the ravings of this madman. “It’s impossible,” she managed, “an alien and a human could never interbreed. It’s a biological impossibility.”

  “You think so?” Armitage challenged. He was growing calmer, and reverting from his Dunwich dialect into the cultured academic pronunciation he had used at first. “A mere few years ago it might have seemed impossible, but we are learning better. Most of the people of Dunwich know little of such things, and such things have been wisely kept from them. But a few of us—those ones at the Project and I alone here at the Institute—we keep abreast of modern science. And we know that genetic material from one creature can be implanted within the ovum of another, even a creature of another species. Did you know that DNA extracted from a laboratory mouse and injected into the cells of a common fruit fly has produced eyes on the legs of that fly? Eyes, young miss, eyes. Think of what you’ve just read.”

  “But—but it’s horrid. It’s blasphemous! How can you countenance such wickedness in the name of science?”

  “Ah.” Armitage seemed pleased. He advanced toward Cordelia Whateley and stood with his back to the fireplace. His dark suit now longer seemed threadbare, his white hair appeared to stand out from his scalp like a hydra’s snakes. He seemed to tower nearly to the high, echoing ceiling. He seemed simultaneously as young as an infant and as old as the continents. “Ah,” he repeated, “I suspect that you do believe in that religious nonsense. You use words like wickedness. Like blasphemy. Next you’ll accuse us of sinning.”

  “Yes,” she almost shouted. “Yes. It is sinful!”

  She thought she caught the flash of firelight glinting off Henry Armitage’s teeth as he grinned down at her. “He’s coming, you know.”

  “Nobody is coming.” She felt a growing desperation in the pit of her belly.

  “But he is. He is. He’s on his way now. You’ll see.”

  Cordelia Whateley pushed herself to her feet. “I have to leave now.” She scrambled toward the door, clutching her purse in one hand and her small tape recorder in the other. “Don’t—don’t help me—don’t see me out—I’ll find my own way.”

  Armitage seemed to loom even taller. She couldn’t understand how he managed to stay in the building without his head colliding with the rafters and beams overhead. But he did not pursue her. He merely stood with his back to the fireplace, hands balled in fists, resting on his hips.

  And he laughed. He laughed, and he roared in a voice like the voice of a blaspheming godlet, “The father is coming. He’s coming to Sentinel Hill, young miss. And he’s mad. You know what the students like to say? The few students we have left in this demon-damned town? He’s coming back, young miss, and he’s mad as hell!”

  Cordelia Whateley plunged through the door and stood panting on the portico of the Dunwich Institute.

  Behind her, through the open door, the voice of Henry Armitage boomed out, “He’ll come to Sentinel Hill. Trust me. See if you can get in. He’s coming to Sentinel Hill.”

  Cordelia Whateley managed to fumble the keys to her conservative sedan from her oversized purse. She unlocked the automobile’s door, plunged inside, started the engine after several tantalizing false attempts and switched on the lights and tore madly through deserted Dunwich streets, heading finally for the outskirts of town and the installation at Sentinel Hill.

  The grounds of the Dunwich Research Project were illuminated as glaringly as if it had been noontime on a brilliant day. Vaguely military-looking vehicles crowded the roads inside the gates and were parked helter-skelter around the buildings. The rolling gate itself had been left wide open and utterly untended, and Cordelia had no trouble driving her car onto the grounds and finding an opening near a cluster of military vehicles. They were parked halfway up Sentinel Hill, and Cordelia had to swing her sedan around the end of a row and leave it pointing downhill.

  The giant radar dishes atop Sentinel Hill swung slowly in unison as if following a single object that approached from far overhead, invisible to the naked eye. Great searchlights like props from a monochromatic motion picture about a long-concluded war sped beams of vivid white light into the black night sky.

  Men and women in the distinctive garb of the Dunwich Research Project raced past Cordelia Whateley, ignoring her utterly in their concentration on their assigned tasks.

  Now a tiny speck appeared fleetingly in a searchlight beam. A woman near Cordelia Whateley pointed at it and shouted, “He’s coming, he’s almost here!”

  Cordelia Whateley watched until the black dot was picked up by another searchlight, and another. Near her a corpulent man in dark uniform fell to his knees on the oddly-colored New England grass. He held a book in his hands, and on its cover Cordelia Whateley recognized the illustration and the title as those she had seen in a locked bookcase at the Dunwich Institute.

  Strangely, as the man knelt and opened the leather-bound volume, his costume seemed less to reflect a military origin than an ecclesiastical one. He began to read aloud, but in a language utterly unlike any that Cordelia Whateley had ever heard.

  The speck in the sky was growing perceptibly larger. Cordelia Whateley had half-expected the Dunwich Research Project to be a branch of the American military establishment, most likely a refined version of the controversial Strategic Defense Initiative of former years. She half-expected to see missile-launchers rising from Sentinel Hill, and deadly rockets rising from them to destroy the thing that was growing larger with each passing moment.

  But to her shock she realized that the open meadow beside Sentinel Hill was spread as a gigantic altar. It was covered with tapestries into which were woven depictions of blasphemous beings performing unspeakable acts upon writhing humans, their mouths open in silent screams of anguish and terror. And standing in the middle of the huge altar, naked, motionless, seemingly drugged, were men and women, boys and girls, clearly every missing person whose disappearance from the Miskatonic Valley and all of Dunwich Country for years past had gone unexplained.

  And all around Cordelia Whateley dark-clad men and women were kneeling in adoration, singing and gesturing to that which drew closer and closer to them.

  The thing was unbelievably huge. Cordelia Whateley revised her estimate of its size again and again, expecting it to land at any moment, but instead it grew, and it grew, filling the sky, blotting out the stars.

  And in the illumination of the searchlights Cordelia Whateley could make out the shape of the thing. It was like a gargantuan jellyfish, literally miles in breadth. Thousands—no, millions—of tentacles dangled from its underside, writhing and squirming, stretching eagerly toward the hapless, naked victims who awaited them below.

  The tentacles were greenish at their base, and white along their expanse, and deep crimson at their tips. And as they approached the altar those tips opened to reveal rows of glittering, triangular teeth that snapped and gnashed in anticipation of their coming feast.<
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  And among the tentacles, on thicker, longer stalks, were large, round, rolling eyeballs that flashed and shifted from victim to victim, from altar to sycophant. And around the edges of the being rows upon rows of ciliated, translucent, gelatinous extensions rippled in repulsive rhythmic sequence.

  Cordelia Whateley snapped to awareness as if awakening from a hypnotic trance. She raced across the meadow to her automobile and turned the key in the ignition. Nothing happened. But the car stood at the end of a row of vehicles halfway up Sentinel Hill, and she set the gear lever in neutral and released the parking brake, struggling with sheer will power to make the sedan roll downhill.

  It did!

  Just before the ground leveled out she shoved the gear lever into low, whispering a prayer. The engine caught and she sped through the open gate of the Dunwich Research Project. She kept the accelerator pressed to the floor, ignoring laws and obstacles equally, tears streaming down her cheeks and screams emerging from her mouth, until she reached the Aylesbury Pike.

  Here she drew up and climbed from the car. She clambered onto its hood and from there onto its roof and turned her gaze back toward Dunwich. The distinctive shape of Sentinel Hill was silhouetted against distant clouds and stars.

  The giant, jellyfish-thing was still settling. Cordelia Whateley realized now that even her greatest estimate of its size was grossly insufficient. It was larger than the altar, larger than Sentinel Hill, larger than the entire Dunwich Research Project compound.

  It was easily as large as all of Dunwich Town.

  And coming from it was a horrible, wet sound. A sucking, slithering, hungry sound. And from the ground beneath Dunwich, even as far away as the Aylesbury Pike, could be felt a terrible, trembling, rumbling.

  It could only have been a matter of minutes, perhaps even seconds, until the great creature struck the earth. All of the equipment on Sentinel Hill must have shorted in that moment, and for all that Cordelia Whateley was ever able to determine, it was the immense electrical field created by that equipment that caused all the other problems with electrical devices in Dunwich.