The Watchers Out of Time

by H. P. Lovecraft

  The bridge was very old, and only the middle span stood, supported by two stone piers, one of them thickened with a large out-cropping of concrete, upon which whoever had constructed it had etched a large five-pointed star in the center of which was embedded a stone of the same general shape, though very small by comparison with the outline. The river had worn away both bridge-heads and carried down into it a span from either end, leaving the middle span to stand as a symbol of the civilization that had once flourished in this valley and had since passed away. It occurred to me that perhaps this was the very bridge that had been strengthened, though no longer used, as recorded in the Arkham Advertiser.

  Strangely, the bridge—or what was left of it—exercised a curious attraction for me, though its architecture was crude; it was a purely utilitarian structure, and had never been built as an aesthetic object; yet, like so many old things, it had now the attraction of its great age, though the concrete reinforcement detracted from it in every way, making a great blister or bulge up from the foundation almost to the top. Indeed, studying it, I could not understand how it could in fact serve as a reinforcement of the pier, though both piers were clearly very old and crumbling, and would not stand for long, what with the action of the water at their base. The Miskatonic here was seemingly not very deep, but it had a respectable width that surrounded both piers supporting the middle span.

  I stood gazing at the structure, trying to estimate its age, until the sun darkened suddenly, and, turning, I saw that great mounds of cumulo-nimbus clouds were pushing up the west and southwest, presaging rain; then I left the ruin of the bridge and went back to the house that had been the home of my great-uncle Septimus Bishop.

  It was well that I did so, for the storm broke within the hour, and was succeeded by another and another; and all night the thunder raged and the lightning flared and the rain came down in torrents hour after hour, cascading off the roof, running down the slope in scores of rills and freshets for all the hours of darkness.

  III

  Perhaps it was only natural that in the fresh, rain-washed morning, I should think again of the bridge. Perhaps it was, instead, a compulsion arising from some source unknown to me. The rain had now been done for three hours; the rills and freshets had dwindled to little trickles; the roof was drying under the morning sun, and in another hour the shrubbery and the grasses too would once again be dry.

  At noon, filled with a sense of adventurous expectancy, I went to look at the old bridge. Without knowing quite why, I expected change, and I found it—for the span was gone, the very piers had crumbled, and even the great concrete reinforcement was sundered and seared—obviously struck by lightning, a force which, coupled with the raging torrent the Miskatonic must have been in the night (for even now it was high, swollen, brown with silt; and its banks showed that in the night it had been higher by over two feet), had succeeded in bringing to final ruin the ancient bridge that had once carried men and women and children across the river into the now deserted valley on the far side.

  Indeed, the stones that had made up the piers had been carried well down river and flung up along the shores; only the concrete reinforcement, riven and broken, lay at the site of the middle span. It was while I followed with my eyes the path of the stream and the disposition of the stones that I caught sight of something white lying on the near bank, not far up out of the water. I made my way down to it, and came upon something I had not expected to see.

  Bones. Whitened bones, long immersed in the water perhaps, and now cast up by the torrent. Perhaps some farmer’s cow, drowned long ago. But the thought had hardly entered my mind before I discarded it, for the bones upon which I now looked were at least in part human, and now I saw, looking out from among them, a human skull.

  But not all were human, for there were some among them that bore no resemblance to any bones I ever saw—long whips of bones, flexible by the look of them, as of some creature but half formed, all intertwined with the human bones, so that there was hardly any definition of them. They were bones that demanded burial; but, of course, they could not be buried without notification to the proper authorities.

  I looked around for something in which to carry them, and my eye fell upon some coarse sacking, also cast up by the Miskatonic. So I walked down and took it up, wet though it still was, and brought it back and spread it out beside the bones. Then I picked them up—at first all intertwined as they were, by the handful; and then one by one to the last finger-bone—and having finished, gathered them up in the sacking by tying the four corners of it together, and in that fashion carried them back to the house, and took them down into the cellar until I could take them into Dunwich later in the day, and perhaps to Arkham and the county seat, thinking then that I had ought to have resisted the impulse to gather them up, and left them where I had found them, which no doubt the authorities would have preferred.

  I come now to that portion of my account which, by any standard, is incredible. I have said that I took the bones directly to the cellar; now, there was no reason why I could not have deposited them on the verandah or even in the study; yet without question I took them to the cellar, and there I left them while I went back to the ground floor to prepare and eat the lunch I had not troubled to eat before I walked to the old bridge. When I had finished my repast, I determined to take the bones from the river to the proper authorities, and went back down into the cellar to fetch them.

  Judge my baffled astonishment to find, when I lifted the sacking, which lay just as I had left it, to find it empty. The bones were gone. I could not believe the evidence of my own senses. I returned to the ground floor, lit a lamp, and carried it into the cellar, which I proceeded to search from wall to wall. It was futile. Nothing was changed in the cellar since first I had looked into it—the windows had not been touched, for the same cobwebs still covered them—and, as far as I could see, the trapdoor leading to the tunnel had not been lifted. Yet the bones were irrevocably gone.

  I returned to the study, bewildered, beginning to doubt that I had in fact found and carried home any bones. But indeed I had! As I sat trying to resolve my perplexity, one possible—if far-fetched—solution to the mystery occurred to me. Perhaps the bones had not been as firm as I had thought them; perhaps exposure to the air had reduced them to dust. But in that case surely that dust would have been in evidence. And the sacking was clean, free of the white detritus to which the bones would have been reduced.

  Manifestly, I could not go to the authorities with such a tale, for certainly they would have looked upon me as a madman. But there was nothing to prevent my making inquiries, and, accordingly, I drove into Dunwich. Perversely, I went first into Whateley’s store.

  At sight of me, Tobias glowered, “Wun’t sell yew nothin’,” he said before I had had a chance to speak, and, to another customer—a slovenly old fellow—he said pointedly, “This here’s thet Bishop!” which intelligence caused the old man to sidle quickly out the door.

  “I came to ask a question,” I said.

  “Ask it.”

  “Is there a cemetery along the Miskatonic up a piece from that old bridge above my place?”

  “Dun’t know uv any. Why?” he asked suspiciously.

  “I can’t tell you,” I said. “Except to say I found something that made me think so.”

  The proprietor’s eyes narrowed. He bit at his lower lip. Then his sallow face lost the little color it had. “Bones,” he whispered. “Yew found some bones!”

  “I didn’t say so,” I answered.

  “Where’d yew find ’em?” he demanded in an urgent voice.

  I spread my hands. “I have no bones,” I said, and walked out of the store.

  Looking back as I walked up toward the rectory of a little church I had seen on a side street, I saw that Whateley had closed his store and was hurrying along the main street of Dunwich, evidently to spread the suspicion he had voiced.

  The name of the Baptist minister, according to his mailbox, was Abraham D
unning, and he was at home—a short, rotund man, rosy-cheeked and with spectacles on his nose. He appeared to be in his middle sixties, and, gratifyingly, my name obviously meant nothing to him. He invited me into his spare parlor, which evidently served as his office.

  I explained that I had come to make inquiries of him.

  “Pray do so, Mr. Bishop,” he invited.

  “Tell me, Reverend Dunning, have you ever heard of warlocks hereabouts?”

  He tented his fingers and leaned back. An indulgent smile crossed his face. “Ah, Mr. Bishop, these people are a superstitious lot. Many of them do indeed believe in witches and warlocks and all manner of things from outside, particularly since the events of 1928, when Wilbur Whateley and the thing that was his twin brother died. Whateley fancied himself a wizard and kept talking about what he ‘called down’ from the air—but of course, it was only his brother—horribly misshapen through some accident of birth, I suppose, though the accounts given me are too garbled for me to be sure.”

  “Did you know my late great-uncle, Septimus Bishop?”

  He shook his head. “He was before my time. I do have a Bishop family in my charge, but I rather think they are a different branch. Ill-educated. And there is no facial resemblance.”

  I assured him that we were not related. It was clear, however, that he knew nothing that would be of any assistance to me; so I took my departure as soon as I decently could, for all that the Reverend Dunning was patently anxious for the company of an educated man, not commonly found in Dunwich and its environs, I gathered.

  I despaired of learning anything in Dunwich; so I made my way back to the house, where I could not prevent myself from descending once more to the cellar to make certain anew that the bones I had brought home were gone. And, of course, they were. And not even rats could have carried them, one by one, past the door of the study and out of the house without my having seen them.

  But the suggestion of rats set in mind a new train of thought. Acting on it, I went again into the cellar with the lamp and searched carefully for any opening such as rats might use, still seeking some natural explanation for the disappearance of the bones.

  There was none.

  I resigned myself to their vanishing, and spent the remainder of that day trying to keep my mind upon something else.

  But that night I was troubled by dreams—dreams in which I saw the bones I had brought reassemble themselves into a skeleton—and the skeleton clothe itself in flesh—and the whiplike bones grow into something not of this world that constantly changed shape, and was once a thing of utter horror and then a large black cat, once a tentacled monster and then a lissome naked woman, once a giant sow and then a lean bitch running at its master’s side; and, waking, I lay hearing distant sounds I could not identify—a strange snuffling and a slobbering that seemed to rise from far below, from deep in the earth, a rending and grinding that suggested something dreadful and malign.

  I rose to shake myself free of dream and hallucination, and walked the house in the dark, pausing now and then to gaze out into the moonlight night, until hallucination troubled me even there, for I thought I saw at the edge of the close-pressing wood the long lean figure of a man together with a thing of abominable shape that loped at his side—seen so for but a few minutes before both vanished into the dark wood which the moonlight did not penetrate. If ever I wished for the guiding wisdom of my great-uncle Septimus, it was then; for the hallucination was even more vivid than the dream, with which I had done now, as I had with the sounds I had fancied I heard from below.

  Nevertheless, in the clear light of day that dawned soon enough, I was persuaded to descend into the cellar, and enter the tunnel with the lamp, and go on to the subterranean room—compelled to do so by some force I did not understand and could not withstand. At the entrance to the underground room I thought that the earth was disturbed by more than my footprints at my earlier visit, disturbed not only by alien prints, but by the marks as of something dragged there from the direction of the door in the hillside, and I was apprehensive when I went down into that room. But I need not have been, for there was no one there.

  I stood with lamp held high and looked about. All was unchanged—stone benches, brick floor, altar—and yet…There was a stain upon the altar, a great dark stain I could not remember having seen before. Slowly, reluctantly, I moved forward, though I had no will or inclination to do so, until the lamplight disclosed it—freshly wet and gleaming—undeniably a pool of blood.

  And I saw now, for the first time seeing the altar close, that there were other and far older stains, dark, too, and still faintly red, that must have been blood spilled there a long time ago.

  Badly shaken, I fled the cellar, ran along the tunnel, and blundered up into the cellar immediately below the house. And there I stood to catch my breath until I heard a sound of footsteps above, and made my cautious way up to the ground floor.

  The steps had seemed to come from the study. I blew out the lamp, for the light from outside the house, despite the massed trees, was ample, and I made my way to the study.

  There sat a man, lean of face, saturnine of countenance, his tall body concealed by a cloak, his eyes like fire fixed upon me.

  “You are clearly a Bishop,” he said. “But which one?”

  “Ambrose,” I said, when I found my voice. “Son of William, grandson of Peter. Come to see about the property of my great-uncle Septimus. And you?”

  “I have been hidden away a long time. Nephew, I am your great-uncle Septimus.”

  Something stirred behind him, and looked out from behind his chair, though he pulled out his cloak as if to hide what was there—a squamous thing with the face of a lovely woman.

  I fainted dead away.

  As I was coming around to consciousness again, I fancied he stood near me and said to someone, “We shall have to give him a little more time.”

  Opening my eyes fearfully, I looked to where he had been.

  There was no one there.

  IV

  Four days later the first issue of the Arkham Advertiser was delivered to me, left under a stone on top of what remained of the pillar at the roadside. I had entered a six-month subscription when I had taken the opportunity of studying its files for mention of my great-uncle. I resisted my initial impulse to discard it, for I had subscribed merely as a courtesy in return for the privilege accorded me, and carried it into the house.

  Though I had no intention of reading it, a two-column heading caught my eye. Dunwich Disappearances Resume. Somewhat apprehensively, I read the story below.

  “Seth Frye, 18, employed at the Howard Cole farm immediately north of Dunwich, has been reported missing. He was last seen three nights ago walking out of Dunwich on his way home. This is the second disappearance in the Dunwich area in as many days. Harold Sawyer, 20, vanished from the outskirts of Dunwich without trace two days ago. Sheriff John Houghton and his deputies are searching the area, but as yet report no clue. Neither young man had any known reason to disappear voluntarily, and foul play is suspected.

  “It will be remembered by older readers that a rash of similar disappearances took place over twenty years ago, culminating in the vanishing of Septimus Bishop in the summer of 1929.

  “The Dunwich area is a backwater which has a curious reputation and has figured from time to time in the news, usually in a strange way, ever since the mysterious Whateley affair of 1928….”

  I lowered the paper, overcome with the knowledge that events were shaping toward only one explanation, one I was loath even now to accept. It was then that I determined to set down everything that had occurred, in the hope of seeing everything that had happened in its proper relation, one event to another, for those events were hopelessly garbled in my mind, and I kept thinking of the bones that had disappeared from the cellar and of Wilbur Whateley’s words in his letter to my great-uncle—“They from the air cannot help without human blood. They take body from it…as you, too, will be able to do….” and of Gr
eat-uncle Septimus’s mysterious return and his equally mysterious vanishing again, for there had been no sign of him since the sight I had had of him in the study.

  I threw the paper to the floor, my mind a whirl with the lore of warlocks and familiars, the power of running water to contain ghosts and witches and all such superstitious manifestations, my reason embattled, besieged. Impelled by a wild curiosity to learn more, I ran from the house; unmindful of the brambles in my path, I pushed through the lane to the car, and drove down the road to Dunwich.

  I had hardly set foot into Tobias Whateley’s shop before he confronted me, eyes ablaze.

  “Git aout! I wun’t wait on yew,” he cried fiercely. “Yew done it!”

  I found it impossible to break into his anger.

  “Git aout of taown, afore it happens again. We done it once—we kin do it again. I known thet boy, Seth, like I known my own. Yew done it—yew cursed Bishops!”

  I backed away from his naked hatred, and saw, as I retreated to my car, the way in which other inhabitants of Dunwich grouped along the street staring at me with unconcealed loathing.

  I got into the car and drove back out of Dunwich, knowing for the first time a spreading fear of the unknown against which all rationalization was powerless.

  And once back at the Bishop house, I lit the lamp and descended to the cellar. I entered the tunnel and walked along it to the trapdoor into the subterranean room. I lifted it, and such a charnel odor rose up from it—perhaps from that other opening I had never looked into below, for the room, as much as could be seen in the glow from my lamp, was unchanged from the last time I had looked into it—that I could not bring myself to descend.

  I dropped the trapdoor and fled back the way I had come.

  Against all reason, I knew now what horror I had unwittingly loosed upon the countryside—I and the blind forces of nature—the horror from the middle span….