The Watchers Out of Time

by H. P. Lovecraft

  It was an old building at that time, and no doubt has since been abandoned or torn down. The school district has now been consolidated, but at that time it supported this school in somewhat niggardly a manner, skimping and saving on every necessity. Its standard readers, when I came there to teach, were still McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers, in editions published before the turn of the century. My charges added up to twenty-seven. There were Allens and Whateleys and Perkinses, Dunlocks and Abbots and Talbots—and there was Andrew Potter.

  I cannot now recall the precise circumstances of my especial notice of Andrew Potter. He was a large boy for his age, very dark of mien, with haunting eyes and a shock of touseled black hair. His eyes brooded upon me with a kind of different quality which at first challenged me but ultimately left me strangely uneasy. He was in the fifth grade, and it did not take me long to discover that he could very easily advance into the seventh or eighth, but made no effort to do so. He seemed to have only a casual tolerance for his schoolmates, and for their part, they respected him, but not out of affection so much as what struck me soon as fear. Very soon thereafter, I began to understand that this strange lad held for me the same kind of amused tolerance that he held for his schoolmates.

  Perhaps it was inevitable that the challenge of this pupil should lead me to watch him as surreptitiously as I could, and as the circumstances of teaching a one-room school permitted. As a result, I became aware of a vaguely disquieting fact; from time to time, Andrew Potter responded to some stimulus beyond the apprehension of my senses, reacting precisely as if someone had called to him, sitting up, growing alert, and wearing the air of someone listening to sounds beyond my own hearing, in the same attitude assumed by animals hearing sounds beyond the pitch-levels of the human ear.

  My curiosity quickened by this time, I took the first opportunity to ask about him. One of the eighth-grade boys, Wilbur Dunlock, was in the habit on occasion of staying after school and helping with the cursory cleaning that the room needed.

  “Wilbur,” I said to him late one afternoon, “I notice you don’t seem to pay much attention to Andrew Potter, none of you. Why?”

  He looked at me, a little distrustfully, and pondered his answer before he shrugged and replied, “He’s not like us.”

  “In what way?”

  He shook his head. “He don’t care if we let him play with us or not. He don’t want to.”

  He seemed reluctant to talk, but by dint of repeated questions I drew from him certain spare information. The Potters lived deep in the hills to the west along an all but abandoned branch of the main road that led through the hills. Their farm stood in a little valley locally known as Witches’ Hollow which Wilbur described as “a bad place.” There were only four of them—Andrew, an older sister, and their parents. They did not “mix” with other people of the district, not even with the Dunlocks, who were their nearest neighbors, living but half a mile from the school itself, and thus, perhaps, four miles from Witches’ Hollow, with woods separating the two farms.

  More than this he could not—or would not—say.

  About a week later, I asked Andrew Potter to remain after school. He offered no objection, appearing to take my request as a matter of course. As soon as the other children had gone, he came up to my desk and stood there waiting, his dark eyes fixed expectantly on me, and just the shadow of a smile on his full lips.

  “I’ve been studying your grades, Andrew,” I said, “and it seems to me that with only a little effort you could skip into the sixth—perhaps even the seventh—grade. Wouldn’t you like to make that effort?”

  He shrugged.

  “What do you intend to do when you get out of school?”

  He shrugged again.

  “Are you going to high school in Arkham?”

  He considered me with eyes that seemed suddenly piercing in their keenness, all lethargy gone. “Mr. Williams, I’m here because there’s a law says I have to be,” he answered. “There’s no law says I have to go to high school.”

  “But aren’t you interested?” I pressed him.

  “What I’m interested in doesn’t matter. It’s what my folks want that counts.”

  “Well, I’m going to talk to them,” I decided on the moment. “Come along. I’ll take you home.”

  For a moment something like alarm sprang into his expression, but in seconds it diminished and gave way to that air of watchful lethargy so typical of him. He shrugged and stood waiting while I slipped my books and papers into the schoolbag I habitually carried. Then he walked docilely to the car with me and got in, looking at me with a smile that could only be described as superior.

  We rode through the woods in silence, which suited the mood that came upon me as soon as we had entered the hills, for the trees pressed close upon the road, and the deeper we went, the darker grew the wood, perhaps as much because of the lateness of that October day as because of the thickening of the trees. From relatively open glades, we plunged into an ancient wood, and when at last we turned down the sideroad—little more than a lane—to which Andrew silently pointed, I found that I was driving through a growth of very old and strangely deformed trees. I had to proceed with caution; the road was so little used that underbrush crowded upon it from both sides, and, oddly, I recognized little of it, for all my studies in botany, though once I thought I saw saxifrage, curiously mutated. I drove abruptly, without warning, into the yard before the Potter house.

  The sun was now lost beyond the wall of trees, and the house stood in a kind of twilight. Beyond it stretched a few fields, strung out up the valley; in one, there were cornshocks, in another stubble, in yet another pumpkins. The house itself was forbidding, low to the ground, with half a second storey, gambrel-roofed, with shuttered windows, and the outbuildings stood gaunt and stark, looking as if they had never been used. The entire farm looked deserted; the only sign of life was in a few chickens that scratched at the earth behind the house.

  Had it not been that the lane along which we had travelled ended here, I would have doubted that we had reached the Potter house. Andrew flashed a glance at me, as if he sought some expression on my face to convey to him what I thought. Then he jumped lightly from the car, leaving me to follow.

  He went into the house ahead of me. I heard him announce me.

  “Brought the teacher. Mr. Williams.”

  There was no answer.

  Then abruptly I was in the room, lit only by an old-fashioned kerosene lamp, and there were the other three Potters—the father, a tall, stoop-shouldered man, grizzled and greying, who could not have been more than forty but looked much older, not so much physically as psychically—the mother, an almost obscenely fat woman—and the girl, slender, tall, and with that same air of watchful waiting that I had noticed in Andrew.

  Andrew made the brief introductions, and the four of them stood or sat, waiting upon what I had to say, and somewhat uncomfortably suggesting in their attitudes that I say it and get out.

  “I wanted to talk to you about Andrew,” I said. “He shows great promise, and he could be moved up a grade or two if he’d study a little more.”

  My words were not welcomed.

  “I believe he’s smart enough for eighth grade,” I went on, and stopped.

  “If he ’uz in eighth grade,” said his father, “he’d be havin’ to go to high school ’fore he ’uz old enough to git outa goin’ to school. That’s the law. They told me.”

  I could not help thinking of what Wilbur Dunlock had told me of the reclusiveness of the Potters, and as I listened to the elder Potter, and thought of what I had heard, I was suddenly aware of a kind of tension among them, and a subtle alteration in their attitude. The moment the father stopped talking, there was a singular harmony of attitude—all four of them seemed to be listening to some inner voice, and I doubt that they heard my protest at all.

  “You can’t expect a boy as smart as Andrew just to come back here,” I said.

  “Here’s good enough,” said old Potte
r. “Besides, he’s ours. And don’t ye go talkin’ ’bout us now, Mr. Williams.”

  He spoke with so latently menacing an undercurrent in his voice that I was taken aback. At the same time I was increasingly aware of a miasma of hostility, not proceeding so much from any one or all four of them, as from the house and its setting themselves.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll be going.”

  I turned and went out, Andrew at my heels.

  Outside, Andrew said softly, “You shouldn’t be talking about us, Mr. Williams. Pa gets mad when he finds out. You talked to Wilbur Dunlock.”

  I was arrested at getting into the car. With one foot on the running board, I turned. “Did he say so?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “You did, Mr. Williams,” he said, and backed away. “It’s not what he thinks, but what he might do.”

  Before I could speak again, he had darted into the house.

  For a moment I stood undecided. But my decision was made for me. Suddenly, in the twilight, the house seemed to burgeon with menace, and all the surrounding woods seemed to stand waiting but to bend upon me. Indeed, I was aware of a rustling, like the whispering of wind, in all the wood, though no wind stirred, and from the house itself came a malevolence like the blow of a fist. I got into the car and drove away, with that impression of malignance at my back like the hot breath of a ravaging pursuer.

  I reached my room in Arkham at last, badly shaken. Seen in retrospect, I had undergone an unsettling psychic experience; there was no other explanation for it. I had the unavoidable conviction that, however blindly, I had thrust myself into far deeper waters than I knew, and the very unexpectedness of the experience made it the more chilling. I could not eat for the wonder of what went on in that house in Witches’ Hollow, of what it was that bound the family together, chaining them to that place, preventing a promising lad like Andrew Potter even from the most fleeting wish to leave that dark valley and go out into a brighter world.

  I lay for most of that night, sleepless, filled with a nameless dread for which all explanation eluded me, and when I slept at last my sleep was filled with hideously disturbing dreams, in which beings far beyond my mundane imagination held the stage, and cataclysmic events of the utmost terror and horror took place. And when I rose next morning, I felt that somehow I had touched upon a world totally alien to my kind.

  I reached the school early that morning, but Wilbur Dunlock was there before me. His eyes met mine with sad reproach. I could not imagine what had happened to disturb this usually friendly pupil.

  “You shouldn’t a told Andrew Potter we talked about him,” he said with a kind of unhappy resignation.

  “I didn’t, Wilbur.”

  “I know I didn’t. So you must have,” he said. And then, “Six of our cows got killed last night, and the shed where they were was crushed down on ’em.”

  I was momentarily too startled to reply. “A sudden windstorm,” I began, but he cut me off.

  “Weren’t no wind last night, Mr. Williams. And the cows were smashed.”

  “You surely cannot think that the Potters had anything to do with this, Wilbur,” I cried.

  He gave me a weary look—the look of one who knows, meeting the glance of one who should know but cannot understand, and said nothing more.

  This was even more upsetting than my experience of the previous evening. He at least was convinced that there was a connection between our conversation about the Potter family and the Dunlock’s loss of half a dozen cows. And he was convinced with so deep a conviction that I knew without trying that nothing I could say would shake it.

  When Andrew Potter came in, I looked in vain for any sign that anything out of the ordinary had taken place since last I had seen him.

  Somehow I got through that day. Immediately after the close of the school session, I hastened into Arkham and went to the office of the Arkham Gazette, the editor of which had been kind enough, as a member of the local District Board of Education, to find my room for me. He was an elderly man, almost seventy, and might presumably know what I wanted to find out.

  My appearance must have conveyed something of my agitation, for when I walked into his office, his eyebrows lifted, and he said, “What’s got your dander up, Mr. Williams?”

  I made some attempt to dissemble, since I could put my hand upon nothing tangible, and, viewed in the cold light of day, what I might have said would have sounded almost hysterical to an impartial listener. I said only, “I’d like to know something about a Potter family that lives in Witches’ Hollow, west of the school.”

  He gave me an enigmatic glance. “Never heard of old Wizard Potter?” he asked. And, before I could answer, he went on, “No, of course, you’re from Brattleboro. We could hardly expect Vermonters to know about what goes on in the Massachusetts back country. He lived there first. An old man when I first knew him. And these Potters were distant relatives, lived in Upper Michigan, inherited the property and came to live there when Wizard Potter died.”

  “But what do you know about them?” I persisted.

  “Nothing but what everybody else knows,” he said. “When they came, they were nice friendly people. Now they talk to nobody, seldom come out—and there’s all that talk about missing animals from the farms in the district. The people tie that all up.”

  Thus begun, I questioned him at length.

  I listened to a bewildering enigma of half-told tales, hints, legends, and lore utterly beyond my comprehension. What seemed to be incontrovertible was a distant cousinship between Wizard Potter and one Wizard Whateley of nearby Dunwich—“a bad lot,” the editor called him; the solitary way of life of old Wizard Potter, and the incredible length of time he had lived; the fact that people generally shunned Witches’ Hollow. What seemed to be sheer fantasy was the superstitious lore—that Wizard Potter had “called something down from the sky, and it lived with him or in him until he died”—that a late traveller, found in a dying state along the main road, had gasped out something about “that thing with the feelers—slimy, rubbery thing with the suckers on its feelers” that came out of the woods and attacked him—and a good deal more of the same kind of lore.

  When he finished, the editor scribbled a note to the librarian at Miskatonic University in Arkham, and handed it to me. “Tell him to let you look at that book. You may learn something.” He shrugged. “And you may not. Young people now-days take the world with a lot of salt.”

  I went supperless to pursue my search for the special knowledge I felt I needed, if I were to save Andrew Potter for a better life. For it was this rather than the satisfaction of my curiosity that impelled me. I made my way to the library of Miskatonic University, looked up the librarian, and handed him the editor’s note.

  The old man gave me a sharp look, said, “Wait here, Mr. Williams,” and went off with a ring of keys. So the book, whatever it was, was kept under lock and key.

  I waited for what seemed an interminable time. I was now beginning to feel some hunger, and to question my unseemly haste—and yet I felt that there was little time to be lost, though I could not define the catastrophe I hoped to avert. Finally the librarian came, bearing an ancient tome, and brought it around and to a table within his range of vision. The book’s title was in Latin—Necronomicon— though its author was evidently an Arabian, Abdul Alhazred, and its text was in somewhat archaic English.

  I began to read with interest which soon turned to complete bewilderment. The book evidently concerned ancient, alien races, invaders of earth, great mythical beings called Ancient Ones and Elder Gods, with outlandish names like Cthulhu and Hastur, Shub-Niggurath and Azathoth, Dagon and Ithaqua and Wendigo and Cthugha, all involved in some kind of plan to dominate earth and served by some of its peoples—the TchoTcho, and the Deep Ones, and the like. It was a book filled with cabalistic lore, incantations, and what purported to be an account of a great interplanetary battle between the Elder Gods and the Ancient Ones and of the survival of cults and servitors in isolated a
nd remote places on our planet as well as on sister planets. What this rigmarole had to do with my immediate problem, with the ingrown and strange Potter family and their longing for solitude and their anti-social way of life, was completely beyond me.

  How long I would have gone on reading, I do not know. I was interrupted presently by the awareness of being studied by a stranger, who stood not far from me with his eyes moving from the book I was busy reading to me. Having caught my eye, he made so bold as to come over to my side.

  “Forgive me,” he said, “but what in this book interests a country school teacher?”

  “I wonder now myself,” I said.

  He introduced himself as Professor Martin Keane. “I may say, sir,” he added, “that I know this book practically by heart.”

  “A farrago of superstition.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Emphatically.”

  “You have lost the quality of wonder, Mr. Williams. Tell me, if you will, what brought you to this book?”

  I hesitated, but Professor Keane’s personality was persuasive and inspired confidence.

  “Let us walk, if you don’t mind,” I said.

  He nodded.

  I returned the book to the librarian, and joined my new-found friend. Haltingly, as clearly as I could, I told him about Andrew Potter, the house in Witches’ Hollow, my strange psychic experience,—even the curious coincidence of Dunlock’s cows. To all this he listened without interruption, indeed, with a singular absorption. I explained at last that my motive in looking into the background of Witches’ Hollow was solely to do something for my pupil.

  “A little research,” he said, “would have informed you that many strange events have taken place in such remote places as Dunwich and Innsmouth—even Arkham and Witches’ Hollow,” he said when I had finished. “Look around you at these ancient houses with their shuttered rooms and ill-lit fanlights. How many strange events have taken place under those gambrel roofs! We shall never know. But let us put aside the question of belief! One may not need to see the embodiment of evil to believe in it, Mr. Williams. I should like to be of some small service to the boy in this matter. May I?”