The Dunwich Horror연령 맞춤판

If you take the wrong turn on a lonely country road north of Massachusetts, you might find yourself in a valley where everything seems a little too big and a little too old. The trees reach too high and stand too close together. The stone-walled fields look dead, and the houses lean crooked with rotten roofs and cracked window glass. The people sitting on their porches turn away when someone asks for directions.

Above the forest, rounded hills rise up, with ancient stone circles on their peaks like dark crowns. There are ravines and creaky bridges, and the marshes sing terribly in the evening when the night birds – they call them whippoorwills – call out and the frogs croak. The river winds under a covered bridge, and on the other side lies Dunwich, a small village that would rather be forgotten. Strangers rarely come here.

In the old days, people whispered about witch blood and secret rituals. Now they just avoid the place without quite knowing why. On the hilltops stand the old stone pillars in a ring, and some say they date from Indian times. Some say there used to be piles of bones up there.

The oldest stories tell that the Indians gathered on these peaks and called to shadows from the mounds and hollows in the hills. In some places nothing grows, and they call it the Devil's Hop Yard. The whippoorwills – little night birds – are spoken of here as soul-gatherers who lie in wait when someone is about to die. South of the village, in a lonely house pressed against

a mountainside four miles from Dunwich, Wilbur Whateley was born, early Sunday morning on the second of February 1913. It was Candlemas, a day that was marked in Dunwich in its own way. All night before the birth, sounds had rolled inside the hills, and every dog in the neighborhood barked like mad.

The mother, Lavinia Whateley, was a pale, weak-sighted albino with a crooked body who lived with her old father, a man the village whispered many ugly stories about. No one knew of any husband, but Lavinia made no secret of the child. She seemed proud of the dark, goat-like baby that stood in strange contrast to herself, and muttered prophecies that the boy would have great powers and an enormous future.

She often wandered in the hills when it thundered, with her nose in the old, foul-smelling books that her grandfather had inherited and that were falling apart. She had never gone to school, but carried fragments of ancient knowledge she didn't fully understand.

The night the child was born, something ugly screamed through all the dog barking and the deep hill sounds. No doctor or midwife came. The neighbors didn't hear about the baby until a week later, when old Whateley drove into the village with his sled and talked confusedly inside Osborn's store.

He seemed more shy and uneasy than before, but still proud. Everyone remembered what he said when someone whispered about who the father was: "You folks know less about pedigrees than you think. One day, folks, you'll hear Lavinia's boy call his father's name from the top of Sentinel Hill!"

The first to see Wilbur were Zechariah Whateley, who belonged to that branch of the family that still kept itself respectable, and Mamie Bishop, the housekeeper of Earl Sawyer. Mamie came out of curiosity. Zechariah came to fetch cows that the old man had bought.

This was the beginning of an endless string of cow deliveries. The old man bought and bought, but the herd in the pasture never grew larger than a dozen skinny, bloodless animals. Some talked about a kind of disease, for the animals got strange wounds that looked like sharp cuts. A couple of times, visitors thought they saw similar marks on the old man's neck and on Lavinia's too.

When spring came, Lavinia began to walk in the hills again, now with the dark child on her arm. The curiosity in the village calmed down a bit after most had seen the boy, but they still talked. For Wilbur grew faster than anyone had ever seen before. After three months he was the size of a one-year-old child and just as strong. At seven months he walked by himself.

On Hallowe'en that same year, at midnight, people saw a great fire on top of Sentinel Hill, where a flat, table-like stone lies in the middle of a heap of old bones. Silas Bishop told that he had seen Lavinia and the boy run up the steep slopes an hour before the fire came. They moved almost silently among the bushes. After that night, no one saw Wilbur without his clothes buttoned tightly up to his neck and his sleeves. If someone accidentally

touched and ruffled them, he became furious and scared all at once. In January after Hallowe'en, Wilbur began to speak.

He was eleven months old. He didn't talk much, but when he said something, his voice didn't sound like baby talk. The words lay differently in his mouth, as if his voice came from places in the throat that the rest of us don't have.

His face was strangely grown-up; his nose was firm and shaped, his eyes large and dark, like people from the south. But his chin was weak, like his mother's and grandfather's, his lips thick, his skin yellowish with large pores, and his curly hair hung coarsely over ears that seemed a little too long. There was something goat-like about his whole expression, and it made people dislike him.

The dogs couldn't stand him at all; it got so bad that the boy began to carry a pistol when he went outside, just to scare away the dogs that wanted to attack him. The grandfather continued to buy cows without any of them staying long.

At the same time he began to repair the big, old house whose back end was built right into the mountain. He nailed planks over all the windows on the second floor when he fixed up the rooms up there, as if no one should be able to see in or out. He also fixed up a room downstairs for Wilbur and put up fine, sturdy shelves all the way to the ceiling.

There he carried the rotten, ancient books and patched the pages that were falling apart. "I've

used them some," he would say, "but the boy can use them better. This will be all his learning."

Outside in the yard, an old shed was cleared out, covered with new wall planks and locked with a heavy padlock. From this shed came a smell that made people stay away – a stench like the one you knew near the ancient stone circles on the hills. Then suddenly, after a while, the shed was abandoned again.

The next years, strange sounds rose and fell in the hills like ancient breathing. On Walpurgis Night in 1915, people felt tremors in the ground, all the way to another town. On Hallowe'en it rumbled underground as flashes of fire rose from the top of Sentinel Hill.

Wilbur was about four then, but he looked like a ten-year-old. He read in his grandfather's books for hours, but became more silent and aloof. Sometimes he muttered words that no one knew, in stiff rhythms that made the hair on the back of your neck stand up. Dogs went wild when he came near, and he shot them now and then with his pistol when he couldn't stop them any other way.

That didn't make him any more popular. Sometimes, when people came by, Lavinia sat alone downstairs while there was scraping and stomping above the planks in the sealed-off second floor. She would never say what her father and the boy were doing up there. Once a fish peddler put his hand on the doorknob of the locked staircase, half as a joke, and Lavinia turned white as chalk. He later told

in the store that it sounded like a horse stamping right above their heads. Those who heard it remembered the trap door behind the house and the cows that kept disappearing, and some recalled old stories about what old Whateley had done in his youth when he carried a heavy book in his arms, stood in a stone circle and screamed a name that was not for human ears.

In 1917, when the war came, the authorities sent doctors to investigate why so many young men in the area were unfit for service. The newspapers got wind of Dunwich again. They wrote about young Wilbur's uncanny talent, about his grandfather's black magic and the sealed rooms in the house. They also wrote that the old man always paid for cows with very old gold coins. People in Dunwich read and laughed at how much the reporters got wrong, but they didn't stop looking toward the house in the hill when it got dark.

Time passed. Twice a year the fires still gleamed on Sentinel Hill. Tremors in the earth came more often, and the sounds from inside the hills grew uglier.

Around 1923, when Wilbur was about ten but looked completely grown up, more hammering was heard in the sealed-off part of the house. From the leftover cut planks and poles, people realized that the boy and his grandfather had knocked out all the partitions and taken away the attic floor, so that the whole house under the pointed roof was now one single, large, open space.

The following year, the whippoorwills began to flock outside old

Whateley's window. They called in the same rhythm as the old man breathed. On Lammas Night in 1924, Wilbur rushed through the dark to the telephone in the store and had a doctor fetched. The old man lay breathing heavily, and from the empty room above came a slow sloshing, like waves beating against a wide beach. Outside the whippoorwills chirped in time with the last, heavy groans. Just before one o'clock, the old man became clear and grabbed his grandson's hand. "More space, Willy. You're growing – others are growing faster. Soon it will be ready. Open the gates to Yog-Sothoth with the long chant. You'll find it on page 751 in the complete edition. Then set fire to the prison. Earthly fire can't burn it anyway. Remember to feed it regularly. Don't let it grow too fast for the space. If it breaks out before you open to Yog-Sothoth, everything is lost. Only those from outside can make it become many and work... only the old ones who want to return." After that came only gurgling. Lavinia screamed when the birds changed rhythm just as the breathing stopped, but Wilbur smiled strangely. "They didn't get him," he muttered. After this, Wilbur became even taller and more grown-up in expression. There were rumors about young people disappearing from the edges of town. People didn't dare ask too hard, for the old gold purse was still filled with coins. In 1925, when a scholar from the university in Arkham stopped by the farm, he stood pale and confused outside after the visit. Wilbur was then almost two meters

and a sixth tall, and his voice had a rough tone that wasn't quite human. Toward his mother, Wilbur grew increasingly hard. After a while he forbade her to join him in the hills on Walpurgis and Hallowe'en. "There's more to him than I can say," Lavinia whispered desperately to Mamie Bishop. "And now there are things about him that I don't even understand myself." Hallowe'en 1926, the whippoorwills screamed unusually close to the farm. After that night, Lavinia was gone. No one saw her again. In the summer of 1927, Wilbur fixed up two outbuildings. He moved books and chests into them and closed all doors and windows on the first floor of the main house. So the walls down there also disappeared. He actually moved into one of the sheds, and those few who saw him thought he looked restless and shaky – and even taller than before, over seven feet now. He kept to himself. That winter, something happened that was unlike anything else: Wilbur left Dunwich. He had written to large libraries in Boston, Paris and London, but they wouldn't lend him the book he needed. So he traveled himself, poorly dressed and bearded, to Miskatonic University in Arkham. He was nearly eight feet tall, with a cheap suitcase, and the big guard dog at the gate howled and strained at its chain as he passed. Wilbur carried with him an English edition of a book that almost no one dares mention – the Necronomicon – translated by a Doctor Dee, but his copy was missing pages. In the library he asked to

see the Latin edition, the one kept locked away. He wanted to find the long formula his grandfather had mentioned, the one that in his book would have been on page 751. Dr. Henry Armitage, the librarian, let him sit and compare, but watched closely.

Armitage looked over his shoulder when Wilbur found the passage he was looking for and translated in his head: That man is neither the oldest nor the last ruler of the earth; that the old ones were, are, and will be; that they do not walk in the spaces we know, but between them; that Yog-Sothoth knows the gate and is himself the gate, the key and the guardian; that past, present and future are one for him; that you can only sense the old ones by the stench and never learn what they look like, except in the facial features of the children they have fathered on humans. Such are of many kinds – from those that almost resemble us to those that are completely formless. They walk unseen in desolate places where the words are spoken at the right times. Forests bow to them, cities are crushed by them, but no one sees the hand that strikes. After winter comes summer, after summer winter. Men rule now, but soon the old ones will rule again.

A chill went down Armitage's spine. The boy before him was like a shadow from another world. Wilbur asked seriously to borrow the book to take with him. "I have to try things that can only be done at home," he said, "and it would be

a shame if paper rules should stop me." Armitage shook his head. Wilbur realized the battle was lost, grinned crookedly and stood up. As he walked across the square, the dog was nearly out of its mind. Armitage locked the book away, but the smell in the room lingered – the same sweet-nauseating stench he had known at the Whateley farm. The next weeks, Armitage gathered everything he could of information about Wilbur and about all the strange things said about Dunwich. He wrote letters, read and talked with people. The alarm grew in him, but he didn't quite know what he could do before it was too late. The answer came by itself, and it began one August night in 1928. In the dark, small hours, the guard dog howled out on the lawn in front of the library. It growled in a way that made people in the whole caretaker's wing wake up, and soon the alarm bell from a broken window was also heard. Armitage rushed there, together with two colleagues, Professor Rice and Doctor Morgan. They locked themselves in. The smell hit them – the same one from the farm – and the dog's lower growling came from the genealogy reading room. No one dared turn on the light at first, but when Armitage pressed the switch, one of them screamed loudly. Before them, in a pool of green-yellow, thick liquid, lay something that had been disguised as human. The dog had torn off both clothes and skin, but it still breathed faintly. What was left was partly human: hands and head reminded you

of people in Dunwich, with the same goat-like chin. But the chest was like shell and leather from a reptile, the back had patches like snake skin, and below the waist everything turned into black, coarse fur and a tangle of gray-green tentacles with red sucking mouths. On each hip sat deep, some kind of unfinished eye, and where a tail should have been hung a hump-shaped feeler with purple rings – something that looked like a neck that hadn't been fully finished. The strange legs ended not in hooves or claws, but in broad, veined pads like those of extinct lizards.

When it breathed, the tentacles changed color. It muttered, as if their presence woke it. Armitage didn't note the sounds, but later swore that little of it was English.

Toward the end came fragments that clearly came from the same book it had been searching in: "Yog-Sothoth... Yog-Sothoth..." And then the sounds stopped. Outside, in the bushes, the whippoorwills fell silent in an instant, as if they had missed a prey they had been waiting for.

The body on the floor began to change in a horrible way. They would later say that everything truly human in Wilbur Whateley must have been just a thin membrane. When the doctor and police came, there was hardly more left than a pale, sticky mass. No, he had no skeleton like we have. He had taken after his father.

This was only the prelude. The authorities did what they had to, but kept the unusual details out of the newspapers. They sent people to Dunwich to find heirs

and to look at the farm. They were met by a horrible stench and steady, deep lapping and wave-sounds from the great, empty shell of a house that was boarded up. They hurried away from there.

Inside on an old desk they found a thick book full of strange signs, almost like an account book. It was sent to Miskatonic. There it ended up with Dr. Armitage, who was already the one who understood most of what was about to happen. The gold coins that the Whateleys had always paid with were never found.

The ninth of September, in the dark before dawn, something that had grown inside the boarded-up house broke out. Luther Brown, a young farm boy working for George Corey, came storming into the kitchen, white as milk, after fetching the cows. He stammered that up by the path, behind the clearing, it smelled like thunder. Bushes and small trees were pressed flat to the sides, as if a whole house had been dragged through.

"And the tracks," he gasped. "Round, bigger than barrel lids, deep, and in every track there are lines radiating out, like from a huge palm frond hammered into the mud. And the smell... just like at old Whateley's."

People began to call each other. Sally, the housekeeper at Seth Bishop's – the nearest neighbor to the Whateleys – told that her little boy had run up toward the farm after the sounds in the hills last night. He came back trembling and said that old Whateley's house had been blown apart from inside. Only the floor was left, sticking with

something thick and black that ran down over the edges. In the yard there were large round marks covered with the same stuff, and a wide path through the grass, as if something enormous had dragged itself away.

They found Seth's cows – half the herd gone, and of those that were there, many were nearly drained of blood and had the same marks on their bodies that people had seen on the cows at Whateley's ever since Lavinia's dark boy was born. The tracks went toward the steep wooded ravine Cold Spring Glen.

At first no one dared go down into the ravine itself. The trees on the edges were broken, and the whole thicket was flattened, as if a barn door had been pushed through it. From the bottom rose only a vague stench. The dogs growled with stiff tails and wouldn't go near.

That evening people stayed inside, bolted doors and put logs against the windows. Around two o'clock, the Frye family, who lived east of the ravine, woke from the stench and a kind of squelching and slapping, as if wet netting were being dragged over planks. Then came the sound of wood splitting.

From the barn came screams from cows and heavy steps that struck the planks. Frye lit a lantern, but knew it was suicide to go out. The dogs cowered trembling by the family. After a while there was only whimpering from the cows again, before it crashed and cracked so badly that they didn't dare get up until everything was quiet, and the sounds died away down into the

ravine. The next morning those who dared go out told that a wall of the old, red barn had fallen straight down, and cows lay in pieces. The rest had to be shot. Thursday the same thing happened at Frye's again, and this time the whole house disappeared. Only the stench and the slimy film in the ruins were left. It was as if a mountain had come to visit and then gone on its way. The tracks pointed toward Sentinel Hill. While this was happening, Dr. Armitage sat hunched over the thick book that had been found at the Whateley farm. The alphabet was new to him, but he was a patient man. He used old books about codes and secret writings – Trithemius, Porta and other names few know today – and over several days he found that the text was nevertheless English, just written with foreign characters and with many letters swapped according to a key that kept changing. On September 2, a whole sentence finally broke through the confusion. He leafed further while his hands trembled. It was a diary. The words were learned and yet childish in spelling. One of the first long entries had the date November 26, 1916. The writer must then have been three and a half years old, but looked like a twelve-year-old. "Today I learned Aklo for Sabaoth," it said. "It answered me from the hill and not from the air. That up there in the other is more ahead of me than I thought, and won't have much earth brain. Shot Elam Hutchins' dog when it wanted

to bite me, and Elam says he would kill me if he dared. I don't think he dares. Grandfather held me with the Dho-formula last night, and I think I saw the inner city by the two magnetic poles. I shall go there when the earth is cleared, if I don't get through with Dho-Hna when I learn it by heart. Those from the air said at sabbath that it will be years before I get the earth cleared, and I guess grandfather will be dead by then. So I must learn all the angles between the planes and all the formulas between Yr and Nhhngr. Those from outside will help, but they can't take body without human blood. That up there seems to be getting the right shape. I can see it a little when I do the Yoorish sign or blow Ibn Ghazi's powder on it, and it's almost like those I saw on Walpurgis on the hill. The other face might disappear a bit. I wonder what I'll look like when the earth is cleared and there are no earth beings here." Armitage read on through the night. When he fell asleep toward morning, he dreamed horrible things. He woke with a burning certainty that something had to be done quite soon. While he was half feverish, he called to his wife that someone had to destroy what was left in the boarded-up house. "Stop them!" he cried wildly. "The Whateleys wanted to let them in, and the worst is still left! Tell Rice and Morgan we have to do something – it's a blind

trade, but I know how to mix the powder... It hasn't been fed since August second, when Wilbur came here and died, and at that rate..." Then he came to his senses.

Saturday he, Rice and Morgan met at the library. They fetched old, strange books, drew circles and wrote down formulas with careful hands. They decided not to call the police. Who would believe them?

Sunday and Monday Armitage worked on and mixed chemicals in the laboratory. Tuesday he thought they would have to travel to Dunwich within a week. Wednesday it was too late to wait: A small notice in the Arkham newspaper, taken from a news agency column, joked that the moonlight in Dunwich must be dangerous liquor, so big were the tracks after "it" that rolled through the village.

Armitage immediately called Rice and Morgan. Thursday they prepared. Friday they left early.

When they turned into Dunwich in the morning sun, a kind of silence lay over the hills that made them shudder. The hilltop with the stone circle rose against the sky between heavy clouds. At Osborn's store, men were gathered, and their faces told the rest: The Frye family was gone.

Some state police had been by, but old Sam Hutchins pointed toward the clearing and said he had asked them not to go down there. "I didn't think anyone would do it while the tracks still lay there and the birds screamed in broad daylight..." Armitage understood that something had to be done, but he insisted on waiting until daylight if they could. That night came deep rumblings from the

hills, and now and then the stench from the clearing drifted out over the meadow. Whippoorwills chirped. But no new vandal storm came out of the forest. It was as if something lay waiting.

The next morning the sky grew darker, and a storm slid in. Lightning split the clouds, and a twisted crash came from down in the clearing. Then – when the light turned gray and dimmed a little – a flock of frightened men came running up the road.

They shouted that it was happening now, in daylight, that the trees were bending from something invisible at the mouth of the clearing. A boy had heard the bridge creak as under an elephant. The tracks were there, but the rain washed them away. Then the line rang from Seth Bishop's farm.

Sally cried and said the fence in the farmyard had collapsed like dry straw; something heavy beat and beat against the house wall. She shouted that the dogs whined and howled, just like at Whateley's, and then came a crash on the line – and then silence. All who dared followed Armitage and the two others toward Bishop's farm. They carried a long spray device – a kind of garden sprayer usually used against insects – filled with a powder Armitage had mixed. Morgan also carried a heavy rifle, though Armitage thought that nothing like that would bite on what they faced.

By Bishop's lay ruins and stench. No one wanted to stay there. The tracks in the mud pointed away from the farm and toward the hill where Sentinel Hill towered. The tracks

left the road and went steeply up the grass slope, in the same broad pattern it had made the evening before. Bushes were flattened and small trees broken. Armitage pulled out binoculars and looked up the slope. He passed them to Morgan, who nodded sharply and sent them on to Curtis Whateley – one of those from the "pure" branch – who stood in the back. "Grass and bushes are moving!" Curtis shouted with a hoarse voice. "It's crawling up toward the top! What in all the world does it want up there!" A seed of unease settled in the gathering. It was one thing to chase something you couldn't see – quite another to catch up with it. Questions flew. What did Armitage really know? Could magic formulas really work? And if they didn't? But Armitage shouted back that it was magic that had brought this here, and magic must get it away. "I know what this is," he said more firmly than he really felt. "This is the worst thing left after Wilbur. We have one to stop. It can't multiply by itself. Follow us until we say stop." Up they went, the three alone at last. The others stood and watched through the binoculars, which passed from hand to hand. On a ledge high above the wide, bent strip of crushed vegetation, the three climbed up so they could look down ahead of the unseen thing that crawled. There Armitage waved briefly to Rice. Rice lifted the sprayer and pressed. A gray veil rolled for a moment through the air at the top of

the hill, about the size of a not-too-small house. Curtis, who stood with the binoculars, dropped them in the mud and screamed. He was pale as a sheet. Two caught him under the arms so he wouldn't fall.

The others shouted his name, but all he got out were breaths and a few words that cut through the ears: "Bigger than a barn... all of writhing ropes... the whole thing like a gigantic hen's egg... dozens of legs like barrels, half pulling in when they step...

nothing solid, just jelly... big, bulging eyes everywhere... ten, twenty snouts – big as stovepipes – gaping and closing..." He sobbed, grabbed his hair.

"And on top – a face... a half-human face... red eyes, frizzy, albino-white hair... without a chin... just like Whateley..."

Those without binoculars saw only the brief gray veil. Their hearts pounded. Armitage, Rice and Morgan now stood almost level with the altar stone.

All three raised their hands in steady movements. A rhythm rose from them, faint and strange, and the wind died down. The darkness thickened in the air, not from clouds, but from something else. Lightning struck without sky.

Far down in the valley, dogs barked. A thick, purple-gray twilight pressed down over the hills. Again lightning flashed, whiter and denser, and those who stared toward the altar stone thought a thin, nearly invisible haze hung around the flat slab.

Whippoorwills chirped in uneven pulses that didn't follow the song's rhythm. And then, suddenly, a voice came – deep, cracked, sputtering – from the stone itself. It was not human, but the earth seemed to

vibrate with it: "Ygnaiih... ygnaiih... thflthkh'ngha... Yog-Sothoth... Y'bthnk... h'ehye... n'grkdl'lh..." The voice stumbled, as if a violent struggle was taking place inside it. Armitage and the two others shouted louder, faster, as if they were driving something back with sound. Then the voice broke again, cut through the air and suddenly became clearer, as if a layer between us and it had torn: "Eh-ya-ya-ya-yahaah... e'yaya-yayaaaa... ngh'aaaa... h'yuh... h'yuh... HELP! HELP! ... FATHER! FATHER! YOG-SOTHOTH!" People down by the road staggered. This was not just strange language sounds; these were words. In English. Then it crashed from the sky, a single bursting thunder that set earth and mind spinning. A ray of fire moved across the sky like a sword and struck the altar stone. A wave of suffocating stench and invisible force rushed down the hill. The grass yellowed in seconds. The thicket lay flat. The dogs in the valley howled and moaned, and along the streams lay suddenly dead whippoorwills like black feathers in the fading light. When it was all over, three men stood and looked down from the top. They were pale, but stood. The sun came out again. Curtis came to his senses. He shook and put his hands to his temples. "The half face," he moaned. "On top... just like the old one, only enormous... It was a mix of octopus and centipede and spider, and then that face..." He couldn't take any more. Old Zebulon Whateley said low: "Fifteen years ago I heard old Whateley say that one day Lavinia's child would call his father's name from Sentinel Hill." Down in the

road the men stood close, and Joe Osborn asked what everyone was thinking: What was it, and how in all the world could young Wilbur have gotten it here? Armitage stepped forward. He chose his words carefully, though everything he said still lay like a raw secret in his chest: "What happened here today does not belong in our world. It doesn't belong in our spaces or in our measures of time. A few people, the worst of us, try to drag such things here with rituals. They almost succeeded here. Some of the same power was in Wilbur himself, that's why he grew as he did, and that's why he looked as he did when he died. What we just drove back was what he and the old man had tried to make ready. He didn't call from the air. It wasn't just a thing they had called down. It was his brother." A murmur went through the crowd. "Yes," said Armitage quietly. "His twin. But he took much more after his father than Wilbur did. That's why he grew faster than houses and barns could hold. They kept him up there. They tore down walls to make room. They fed him. And they waited to open the gate. If they had fully succeeded, we wouldn't have any more of the earth as we know it. Everything would have been dragged away from the sun, out into another kind of cold, to a place without name." He pointed up toward the stone circles. "We must blow up the altar stone. We must topple the pillars on

all the hilltops. I will burn the cursed diary. The spell book he wanted to steal – it will be locked away tight. We cannot let anything like this begin again."

Then he told the rest, as clearly as he dared: The old ones from outside could not take body without human blood. The plan in the diary was to cleanse the earth of people. "After summer comes winter," it said in the book, "and after winter summer. They wait patiently, and they will rule here again."

Wilbur had tried to find the great formula that opened the gate – "Yog-Sothoth is the gate" – but didn't make it. Instead he came here to steal the whole book, and the dog tore him to pieces so his truth became visible to all who dared to see.

It was hardly luck. Such dogs know smells. They can't stand what they smell.

It became quiet on the road when Armitage was finished. Men and boys stood with flat hands against their legs, as if they needed to feel wood to be sure the world was still hard. He added a last, strange comfort: "What happened struck most those of us who stood nearest or who had learned to hear.

Most of what crawled and screamed up here was not matter of the kind we know. We broke it apart again. It went home."

Dunwich slowly went back to its own shadows. The bushes on the hill never turned green the same way again. In the grass, children found white-green spots that wouldn't go away. "Little ghosts after a big shadow,"

said some mother, before she took her child's hand and went inside. The night birds chirped less here than in other valleys. But otherwise it became quiet.

The store put up its sign again. The bridge over the river got new planks. And the signs that pointed to Dunwich stayed standing – or maybe they were long ago taken down and just put back up with old nails for show. Either way, people avoided driving there if they could.

All of this was still part of a life. It began with a baby being born to the sound of barking dogs and rumbling hills. It continued with an old man who nailed shut windows and taught a child songs that should never have been sung. A mother disappeared. Cows were thinned out.

A boarded-up house breathed like a sleeping whale in the dark. A boy with too grown-up eyes and too fast growth carried a pistol to keep dogs away. A guard dog nevertheless stood its duty and tore open a secret. Three scholars mixed powder and learned words they hoped they would never have to say again.

And on a hilltop, among ancient rings of stone, something that was not a boy, but that still knew the word "father," called out just before the light struck and sent it away. No one knows which stories become real and which are just comfort when adults whisper to each other after bedtime. But on that hilltop, on that day when the sky flashed purple and everything smelled rotten and heavy, someone asked for help with a voice that

was both near and terribly far away. That voice was perhaps the only completely human thing in everything. It got no answers. Still, it was heard by those who needed to hear. And perhaps that was enough for some more to understand that the world is bigger than it looks, and that it must therefore be guarded more carefully.

That autumn, Armitage, Rice and Morgan sometimes went out into the stacks and looked up at shelf after shelf of old books. They talked little about what had been. One day a workman came to borrow a hammer. Armitage asked him to put it on the counter and pointed to the sign that said "No admittance." "We have a bit left to clean up," he said. "And some things that are best kept in place."

He took a bundle of paper from his inner pocket – everything he had noted from the diary – put it carefully back and locked the cabinet. On a note he fastened a short sentence: "Do not open. Do not copy. Do not even read if you can help it."

He looked out the window. For a moment he thought he sensed a faint wind from the hills to the north and a distant, uncanny tone from a bird that chirped at the wrong time of day. Then it was gone. He blinked at the light and stood up to put on a pot of tea.

Outside, up in Dunwich, winter crept slowly in. The snow muffled everything that could creak. The planks on an old house gave way under the weight of time

and slid aside. The hills still stood, a little too rounded, a little too symmetrical, with their rings of stone. Now and then a brave boy took a shortcut home at dusk and stopped, heart in his throat, when he saw a pale stripe in the grass where nothing would grow. Then he spat into his mitten, pressed his hat harder down over his ears and ran as fast as he could.

Some secrets remain. They lie like a mild pressure in the air just as day ends, like a smell you can't name, but that makes you walk a little faster until you see a light in a window. Dunwich lives with such secrets.

Whether you think they are old as the stones on the hill or new as the pinholes in the planks of a door, they are there. And if you ever come driving north where the road takes a strange, unmarked turn, and the wind suddenly smells old and damp and a little like something you don't want to say out loud, it might be best to turn around before the bridge. No one will blame you. Those who live there get along fine without company.

They have their hills. They have their silence. And they have a story that most would rather not hear – but that deserves to be remembered anyway.

For there are nights when birds listen to your breathing. There are words that should not be sung. And there is a stone on a hilltop where something once cried out "FATHER! YOG-SOTHOTH!" – and then became completely, completely still again.