79: The Dunwich Horror

the dunwich horror by hp lovecraft gorgons and hydras and chimeras dire stories of seleno and the harpies may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition but they were there before they are transcripts types the archetypes are in us and eternal and how else should the recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come to affect us at all is it that we naturally conceive terror from such objects considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury oh least of all these terrors are of older standing they date beyond body or without the body they would have been the same that the kind of fear here treated is purely spiritual that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on earth that it predominates in the period of our sinless infancy are difficulties the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our anti-mundane condition and a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence charles lamb witches and other night fears When a traveler in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury Pike just beyond Dean's Corners, he comes upon a lonely and curious country.

The ground gets higher, and the briar-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road.

The trees of the frequent forest belts seem too large, and the wild weeds, brambles, and grasses attain a luxuriance not often found in settled regions.

At the same time, the planted fields appear singularly few and barren, while the sparsely scattered houses wear a surprisingly uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation.

Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled, solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling doorsteps or in the sloping, rock-strewn meadows.

Those figures are so silent and furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden things, with which it would be better to have nothing to do.

When a rise in the road brings the mountains in view above the deep woods, the feeling of strange uneasiness is increased.

The summits are too rounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort or naturalness, and sometimes the sky silhouettes with a special clearness the queer circles of tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned.

Gorges and ravines of problematical 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 the raucous, creepily insistent rhythms of stridently piping bullfrogs.

The thin, shining line of the Miskatonic's upper reaches has an oddly serpent-like suggestion as it winds close to the feet of the domed hills among which it rises.

As the hills draw nearer, one heeds their wooded sides more than their stone crown 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.

Across a covered bridge one sees a small village huddled between the stream and the vertical slope of Round Mountain, and wonders at the cluster of rotting gambrel roofs bespeaking an earlier architectural period than that of the neighboring region.

It is not reassuring to see, on a closer glance, that most of the houses are deserted and falling to ruin, and that the broken-steepled church now harbors the one slovenly mercantile establishment of the hamlet.

One dreads to trust the tenebrous tunnel of the bridge, yet there is no way to avoid it.

Once across, it is hard to prevent the impression of a faint, malign odor about the village street, as of massed mold and decay of centuries.

It is always a relief to get clear of the place, and to follow the narrow road around the base of the hills and across the level country beyond, till it rejoins the Aylesbury Pike.

Afterward, one sometimes learns that one has been through Dunwich.

Outsiders visit Dunwich as seldom as possible, and since a certain season of horror all the signboards pointing toward it have been taken down.

The scenery, judged by any ordinary aesthetic canon, is more than commonly beautiful.

yet there is no influx of artists or summer tourists two centuries ago when talk of witch-blood satan worship and strange forest presences was not laughed at and it was the custom to give reasons for avoiding the locality In our sensible age, since the Dunwich Horror of 1928 was hushed up by those who had the towns and the world's welfare at heart, people shun it without knowing exactly why.

Perhaps one reason, though it cannot apply to uninformed strangers, is that the natives are now repellently decadent, having gone far along that path of retrogression so common in many New England backwaters.

They have come to form a race by themselves, with the well-defined mental and physical stigmata of degeneracy and inbreeding.

The average of their intelligence is woefully low, whilst their annals reek of overt viciousness and of half-hidden murders, incests, and deeds of almost unnameable violence and perversity.