Howard Phillips Lovecraft - The Dunwich Horror, HP Lovercraft
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The Dunwich Horror
Lovecraft, Howard Phillips
Published:
1928
Categorie(s):
Fiction, Horror, Short Stories
Source:
Wikisource
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About Lovecraft:
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an American author of fantasy, horror
and science fiction. He is notable for blending elements of science fiction
and horror; and for popularizing "cosmic horror": the notion that some
concepts, entities or experiences are barely comprehensible to human
minds, and those who delve into such risk their sanity. Lovecraft has be-
come a cult figure in the horror genre and is noted as creator of the
"Cthulhu Mythos," a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a
"pantheon" of nonhuman creatures, as well as the famed Necronomicon,
a grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. His works typically had a
tone of "cosmic pessimism," regarding mankind as insignificant and
powerless in the universe. Lovecraft's readership was limited during his
life, and his works, particularly early in his career, have been criticized as
occasionally ponderous, and for their uneven quality. Nevertheless,
Lovecraft’s reputation has grown tremendously over the decades, and he
is now commonly regarded as one of the most important horror writers
of the 20th Century, exerting an influence that is widespread, though of-
ten indirect. Source: Wikipedia
Also available on Feedbooks for Lovecraft:
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(1926)
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(1931)
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(1934)
•
(1931)
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(1936)
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(1930)
•
(1927)
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(1938)
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(1932)
•
(1919)
Copyright:
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Chapter
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Gorgons and Hydras, and Chimaeras - dire stories of Celaeno 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. How else should the recital of that which we know in a
waking sense to be false come to affect us all? Is it that we naturally con-
ceive terror from such objects, considered in their capacity of being able
to inflict upon us bodily injury? O, 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 spiritu-
al - that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on earth, that it pre-
dominates in the period of our sinless infancy - are difficulties the solu-
tion of which might afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane
condition, and a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence.
- Charles Lamb: Witches and Other Night-Fears
When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork
at the junction of Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean's Corners he comes
upon a lonely and curious country.
The ground gets higher, and the brier-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
on 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 sym-
metrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and sometimes the
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sky silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circles of tall stone pil-
lars 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 dis-
likes, 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. 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-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. 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 neighbouring region. It is not reas-
suring to see, on a closer glance, that most of the houses are deserted and
falling to ruin, and that the broken-steepled church now harbours 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 odour about
the village street, as of the massed mould and decay of centuries. It is al-
ways 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 re-
joins the Aylesbury pike. Afterwards one sometimes learns that one has
been through Dunwich.
Outsiders visit Dunwich as seldom as possible, and since a certain sea-
son of horror all the signboards pointing towards it have been taken
down. The scenery, judged by an 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, 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 town's 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.
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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 vi-
ciousness and of half-hidden murders, incests, and deeds of almost un-
nameable violence and perversity. The old gentry, representing the two
or three armigerous families which came from Salem in 1692, have kept
somewhat above the general level of decay; though many branches are
sunk into the sordid populace so deeply that only their names remain as
a key to the origin they disgrace. Some of the Whateleys and Bishops still
send their eldest sons to Harvard and Miskatonic, though those sons sel-
dom return to the mouldering gambrel roofs under which they and their
ancestors were born.
No one, even those who have the facts concerning the recent horror,
can say just what is the matter with Dunwich; though old legends speak
of unhallowed rites and conclaves of the Indians, amidst which they
called forbidden shapes of shadow out of the great rounded hills, and
made wild orgiastic prayers that were answered by loud crackings and
rumblings from the ground below. In 1747 the Reverend Abijah Hoad-
ley, newly come to the Congregational Church at Dunwich Village,
preached a memorable sermon on the close presence of Satan and his
imps; in which he said:
"It must be allow'd, that these Blasphemies of an infernall Train of
Daemons are Matters of too common Knowledge to be deny'd; the
cursed Voices of Azazel and Buzrael, of Beelzebub and Belial, being
heard now from under Ground by above a Score of credible Witnesses
now living. I myself did not more than a Fortnight ago catch a very plain
Discourse of evill Powers in the Hill behind my House; wherein there
were a Rattling and Rolling, Groaning, Screeching, and Hissing, such as
no Things of this Earth could raise up, and which must needs have come
from those Caves that only black Magick can discover, and only the Div-
ell unlock".
Mr. Hoadley disappeared soon after delivering this sermon, but the
text, printed in Springfield, is still extant. Noises in the hills continued to
be reported from year to year, and still form a puzzle to geologists and
physiographers.
Other traditions tell of foul odours near the hill-crowning circles of
stone pillars, and of rushing airy presences to be heard faintly at certain
hours from stated points at the bottom of the great ravines; while still
others try to explain the Devil's Hop Yard - a bleak, blasted hillside
where no tree, shrub, or grass-blade will grow. Then, too, the natives are
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