The Dunwich Horror

n regarding its focusing and use, they left the telescope with the frightened group that remained in the road; and as they climbed they were watched closely by those among whom the glass was pa

us that the pursu

he men were evidently trying to get to a subordinate peak which overlooked the swath at a point considerably ahead of where the shrubbery was now bendi

calling that his sprayer was expected to give the unseen horror a moment of visibility. Two or three men shut their eyes, but Curtis Whateley snatched back the telescope and strained hi

he top of the mountain. Curtis, who held the instrument, dropped it with a piercing shriek into the ankle-deep mud of the road. He ree

awd . . . that .

to rescue the fallen telescope and wipe it clean of mud. Curtis was pas

. 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' a

d the rescued telescope on the mountain to see what he might. Through the lenses were discernible three tiny figures, apparently running towards the summit as fast as the steep incline allowed. Only these - nothing more. Then everyone noticed

as Sawyer mentioned the circumstance the crowd seemed to hear a faint, half-musical sound from the distance, as if a loud chant were accompanying the gestures. The weird silhouette on that remote peak must have been a spectacle of infinite grotesqueness and impressiven

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. The chanting of the men

bling hills. Then the lightning flashed again, somewhat brighter than before, and the crowd fancied that it had showed a certain mistiness around the altar-stone on the distant height. No one, however, had been usi

n 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.

Yog–Sothoth . . . rang the hideous croaking out

on the peak, all moving their arms furiously in strange gestures as their incantation drew near its culmination. From what black wells of Acherontic fear or feeling, from what unplumbed gulfs of extra-cosm

ngh'aaa . . . h'yuh . . . h'yuh . . . HELP! HELP! .

e deafening, cataclysmic peal whose source, be it inner earth or sky, no hearer was ever able to place. A single 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 under-brush were whipped

gaining consciousness when the Arkham men came slowly down the mountain in the beams of a sunlight once more brilliant and untainted. They were grave and quiet, and seemed shaken by memories and refl

al world. Only the least fraction was really matter in any sense we know. It was like its father - and most of it has gone back to him in some vague realm or dimensi

ack into a sort of continuity; so that he put his hands to his head with a moan. Memory seemed to pick it

o hair, an' no chin, like the Whateleys . . . It was a octopus, centipede, spider kind o' thing, but they was a ha

t quite crystallized into fresh terror. Only old Zebulon Whateley, who wanderi

say as haow some day we'd hear a child o' Lavinny's a-cal

upted him to question

er did young Wizard Whateley call

e his words v

ked cults ever try to. There was some of it in Wilbur Whateley himself - enough to make a devil and a precocious monster of him, and to make his passing out a pretty terrible sight. I'm going to burn his accursed diary, and if you men are wise you'll dynamite that altar-stone up there,

big from the same reason that Wilbur grew fast and big - but it beat him because it had a greater share of the outsideness in it. You needn

The End<