Chapter 88

Gotta show my love for Lovecraft with this chapter. I wrote it the same way as Lovecraft did, hope some of you can understand it

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=Dunwich=

Lawrence finally arrived at the place. He stared at it and marveled at how creepy it was. The summits are too rounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and sometimes the sky silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circles of tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned.

Gorges and ravines of problematic depth intersect the way, and the crude wooden bridges always seem of dubious safety. When the road dips again there are stretches of marshland that one instinctively dislikes, and indeed almost fears at evening when unseen whippoorwills chatter and the fireflies come out in abnormal profusion to dance to the raucous, creepily insistent rhythms of stridently piping, bull-frogs.

As the hills draw nearer, one heeds their wooded sides more than their stone-crowned tops. Those sides loom up so darkly and precipitously that one wishes they would keep their distance, but there is no road by which to escape them.

Lawrence arrived when the day is pleasant, but even in the brightest sunlight a kind of quiet dread and portent seemed to hover about the strangely doomed hills and the deep shadowy ravines of the stricken region. However as it seems like Lawrence's arrival was a trigger, the sky immediately darken as the land was now drizzled with rain.

He observed that there are still structures in this place despite being wrecked by the said monstrosity living in the hill. Then when the sky was getting gruesomely darker, a confused babel of voices sounded down the road. "Oh, my Gawd, my Gawd" the voice choked out. "It's a-goin' agin, an' this time by day! It's aout an' a-movin' this very minute, an' only the Lord knows when it'll be on us all'!"

The speaker panted into silence as Lawrence took this as a sign to start. "Can I ask for a shortcut there?" he asked the panicking speaker. The man was startled for a second before answering, "I-I guess ye kin git there the quickest by cuttin' across the lower medder here, wadin' the brook at the low place, an' climbin' through Carrier's mowin' an' the timber-lot beyond. That comes aout on the upper rud mighty nigh Seth's- a leetle t'other side" the way the man spoke was weird but Lawrence recognized that it was normal here. He thanked the man and started to walk in the direction.

Throughout the walk, the sky began growing lighter and there were signs that the incoming storm has dissipated. Bent trees and hideously unmistakable tracks showed what had passed by. Lawrence took a few moments to survey the ruins and he has to marvel at what was left. Nothing dead or living was found in either of the collapsed shells which had been the Bishop house and barn.

Lawrence did not remain there amidst the stench and tarry stickiness, but he turned instinctively to the line of horrible prints leading on towards the wrecked Whateley farmhouse and the alter-crowned slopes of Sentinel Hill.

When Lawrence passed the site of the Whateley house he shuddered visibly, not with fear but expectancy.

He then turned his head towards the green side of the hill and saw what he came here for. He grinned and started ascending the mountain alone. What Lawrence didn't know was that his action of coming in the hill was witnessed by the town folks using their own telescope.

Curtis Whateley of the undecayed branch was holding a telescope when Lawrence started climbing the hill. He told the crowd that the man was evidently trying to get to a subordinate peak which overlooked the swath at a point considerably ahead of where the shrubbery was now bending. This, indeed, proved to be true and the man was now seen to gain the minor elevation only a short time after the invisible blasphemy had passed it.

Then Wesley Corey, who had taken the telescope, cried out that the man was fidgeting with something and something must be about to happen. The crowd stirred uneasily. Many expected the horror to appear which they forced to close their eyes. Only Curtis Whateley took the courage to strain his vision to the utmost.

He saw the man from the crowd's point of advantage above and behind the entity, had an excellent chance of being stomped by the invisible monstrosity.

Those without telescope saw only an instant flash of grey cloud, a cloud about the size of a moderately large building near the top of the mountain. Curtis, who held the instrument, dropped it with a piercing shriek into ankle-deep mud of the road. He reeled and would have crumbled to the ground had not two or three others seized and steadied him. All he could do was moan half-inaudibly.

"Oh, oh, great Gawd… that… that…" there was a pandemonium of questioning and only Henry Wheeler thought to rescue the fallen telescope and wipe it clean of mud. Curtis was past all coherence, and even isolated replies were almost too much for him.

"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 hogs-heads that haff shut up when they step… nothin' solid abaout it, all like jelly, an' made o' sep'rit wrigglin' ropes pushed clost 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 it Heaven, that haff face on top…"

This final memory, whatever it was, proved too much for poor Curtis and he collapsed completely before he could say more. Fred Farr and Will Hutchins carried him to the roadside and laid him on the damp grass. Henry Wheeler, trembling, turned the rescued telescope on the mountain to see what he might.

Through the lenses were discernible one tiny figures, apparently walking towards the summit calmly. Only these, nothing more. Then everyone noticed a strangely unseasonable noise in the deep valley behind it, and even in the underbrush of Sentinel Hill itself. It was the piping of unnumbered whippoorwills, and in their shrill chorus there seemed to lurk a note of tense and evil expectancy.

Earl Sawyer now took the telescope and reported the figure as standing on the topmost ridge, virtually level with the altar-stone but at a considerable distance from it. The figure seemed to be smiling while raising his hand above its head. As Sawyer mentioned the circumstances the crowd seemed to hear a faint, half-musical sound from the distance, as if a loud spell is being chanted.

The weird silhouette on that remote peak must have been a spectacle of infinite grotesqueness and impressiveness, but no observer was in a mood for aesthetic appreciation. "I guess he is doin' somethin'" whispered Wheeler as he snatched back the telescope.

The whippoorwills were piping wildly, and in a singularly curious irregular rhythm quite unlike that of a visible ritual.

Suddenly the sunshine seemed to lessen without the intervention of any discernible cloud. It was very peculiar phenomenon, and was plainly marked by all. A rumbling sound seemed brewing beneath the hills, mixed strangely with a concordant rumbling which clearly came from the sky. Lightning flashed aloft, and the wondering crowd looked in vain for the portents of storm.

From some farmhouse far away came the frantic barking of the dogs during the spell casting. The change in quality of the daylight increased, and the crowd gazed about the horizon in wonder. A purplish darkness, born of nothing more than a spectral deepening of the sky's blue, pressed down upon the rumbling hills.

Then the lightning flashed again, somewhat brighter than before, and the crowed fancied that it had showed a certain mistiness around the altar-stone on the distant height. No one, however, had been using the telescope at that instant. The whippoorwills continued their irregular pulsation, and the men of Dunwich braced themselves tensely against some imponderable menace with which the atmosphere seemed surcharged.

Without warning came those deep, cracked raucous vocal sounds which will never leave the memory of the stricken group who heard them. Not from any human throat were they born, for the organs of man can yield no such acoustic perversions. Rather one would have said they came from the pit itself, had not their source been so unmistakably the altar-stone on the peak.

It is almost erroneous to call them sounds at all, since so much of their ghastly, infra-bass timbre spoke to dim seats of consciousness and terror far subtler than the ear, yet one must do so, since their form was indisputably though vaguely that of half-articulate words.

They were loud, loud as the rumblings and the thunder above which they echoed, yet did they come from no visible being. And because imagination might suggest a conjecturnal source in the world of non-visible beings, the huddled crowd at the mountain's base huddled still closer, and winced as if in expectation of a blow.

Ygnailh. . . ygnaiih. . . thflthkh'ngha. . . Yog-Sothoth. . . rang the hideous croaking out of space.

Y'bthnk. . . . h'ehye. . . . n'grkdl'lh. . . .

The speaking impulse seemed to falter here, as if some frightful psychic struggle were going on. Henry Wheeler strained his eye at the telescope, but saw only the silhouette of human figure on the peak, it was smiling as if amused by the situation. From what black wells of Acherontic fear or feeling, from what umplumbed gulfs of extra-cosmic consciousness or obscure, long-latent heredity, were those half-articulate thunder-croaking drawn?

Presently they began to gather renewed force and coherence as they grew in stark, utter, ultimate frenzy.

Eh-y-ya-ya-yahaah . . . . e'yayayaaaa. . . . . ngh'aaaaaa. . . ngh'aaa.. . h'yuh… h'yuh. . . HELP! HELP!. . . . .ff --- ff --- ff --- FATHER! FATHER! YOG-SOTHOTH!

But that was all. The pallid group in the road, still reeling at the indisputably English syllables that had poured thickly and thunderously down from the frantic vacancy beside that shocking altar-stone, were never to hear such syllables again. Instead, they jumped violently at the terrific report which seemed to rend the hills, the deafening, cataclysmic peal whose source, be it inner earth or sky, no hearer was ever to place.

A single blue lightning bolt shot from the purple zenith to the altar-stone, and a great tidal wave of viewless force and indescribable stench swept down from the hill to all the countryside. Trees, grass, and the under-brush were whipped into a fury, and the frightened crowd at the mountain's base, weakened by the lethal foetor that seemed about to asphyxiate them, were almost hurled off their feet.

Dogs howled from the distance, green grass and foliage wilted to a curious, sickly yellow-grey, and over field and forest were scattered the bodies of whippoorwills.

The crowd stared as the young man descended from the mountain still maintaining the amused smile on his face. They then heard him chuckling to himself, "Hahaha, Yog-Sothoth afraid of my family…? It's hilarious! But also maddening…" he laughed loudly almost making the crowd wonder if he fell into insanity. Nonetheless, Lawrence Ranvil fulfilled his role in this world completing his favor from the cats. He will now be following his girl's track with heart filled with anger.

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