Terrors (19 page)

The giant radar dishes atop Sentinel Hill swung slowly in unison as if following
a single object that approached from far overhead, invisible to the naked eye. Great searchlights like props from a monochromatic motion picture about a long-concluded war sped beams of vivid white light into the black night sky.

Men and women in the distinctive garb of the Dunwich Research Project raced past Cordelia Whateley, ignoring her utterly in their concentration on their assigned tasks.

Now a tiny speck appeared fleetingly in a searchlight beam. A woman near Cordelia Whateley pointed at it and shouted, “He’s coming, he’s almost here!”

Cordelia Whateley watched until the black dot was picked up by another searchlight, and another. Near her a corpulent man in dark uniform fell to his knees on the oddly-colored New England grass. He held a book in his hands, and on its cover Cordelia
Whateley recognized the illustration and the title as those she had seen in a locked bookcase at the Dunwich Institute.

Strangely, as the man knelt and opened the leather-bound volume, his costume seemed less to reflect a military origin than an ecclesiastical
one. He began to read aloud, but in a language utterly unlike any that Cordelia Whateley had ever heard.

The speck in the sky was growing
perceptibly larger. Cordelia Whateley had half-expected the Dunwich Research Project to be a branch of the American military establishment, most likely a refined version of the controversial Strategic Defense Initiative of former years. She half-expected to see missile-launchers rising from Sentinel Hill, and deadly rockets rising from them to destroy the thing that was growing larger with each
passing moment.

But to her shock she realized that the open meadow beside Sentinel Hill was spread as a gigantic altar. It was covered with tapestries into which were woven depictions of blasphemous beings performing unspeakable acts upon writhing humans, their mouths open in silent screams of anguish and terror. And standing in the middle of the huge altar, naked, motionless, seemingly drugged,
were men and women, boys and girls, clearly every missing person whose disappearance from the Miskatonic Valley and all of Dunwich Country for years past had gone unexplained.

And all around Cordelia Whateley dark-clad men and women were kneeling in adoration, singing and gesturing to that which drew closer and closer to them.

The thing was unbelievably huge. Cordelia Whateley revised her estimate
of its size again and again, expecting it to land at any moment, but instead it grew, and it grew, filling the sky, blotting out the stars.

And in the illumination of the searchlights Cordelia Whateley could make out the shape of the thing. It was like a gargantuan jellyfish, literally miles in breadth. Thousands—no, millions—of tentacles dangled from its underside, writhing and squirming, stretching
eagerly toward the hapless, naked victims who awaited them below.

The tentacles were greenish at their base, and white along their expanse, and deep crimson at their tips. And as they approached the altar those tips opened to reveal rows of glittering, triangular teeth that snapped and gnashed in anticipation of their coming feast.

And among the tentacles, on thicker, longer stalks, were large,
round, rolling eyeballs that flashed and shifted from victim to victim, from altar to sycophant. And around the edges of the being rows upon rows of ciliated, translucent, gelatinous extensions rippled in repulsive rhythmic sequence.

Cordelia Whateley snapped to awareness as if awakening from a hypnotic trance. She raced across the meadow to her automobile and
turned the key in the ignition.
Nothing happened. But the car stood at the end of a row of vehicles halfway up Sentinel Hill, and she set the gear lever in neutral and released the parking brake, struggling with sheer will power to make the sedan roll downhill.

It did!

Just before the ground leveled out she shoved the gear lever into low, whispering a prayer. The engine caught and she sped through the open gate of the Dunwich
Research Project. She kept the accelerator pressed to the floor, ignoring laws and obstacles equally, tears streaming down her cheeks and screams emerging from her mouth, until she reached the Aylesbury Pike.

Here she drew up and climbed from the car. She clambered onto its hood and from there onto its roof and turned her gaze back toward Dunwich. The distinctive shape of Sentinel Hill was silhouetted
against distant clouds and stars.

The giant, jellyfish-thing was still settling. Cordelia Whateley realized now that even her greatest estimate of its size was grossly insufficient. It was larger than the altar, larger than Sentinel Hill, larger than the entire Dunwich Research Project compound.

It was easily as large as all of Dunwich Town.

And coming from it was a horrible, wet sound. A sucking,
slithering,
hungry
sound. And from the ground beneath Dunwich, even as far away as the Aylesbury Pike, could be felt a terrible, trembling, rumbling.

It could only have been a matter of minutes, perhaps even seconds, until the great creature struck the earth. All of the equipment on Sentinel Hill must have shorted in that moment, and for all that Cordelia Whateley was ever able to determine,
it was the immense electrical field created by that equipment that caused all the other problems with electrical devices in Dunwich.

There was flash brighter than the noonday sun, and a coruscation of pulsing colors, and a strange display of chromatics that Cordelia Whateley could only describe, in the days and years that followed, as
the very sky and earth screaming in terror and in pain
.

Then all was silence and all was darkness, and Cordelia Whateley knew nothing until she opened her eyes and looked into the face of a brawny individual wearing the garb of a Massachusetts State Trooper. He was shining a flashlight into her eyes, and when she blinked and moaned he said, “Are you all right, ma’am?”

She lifted a hand to her face and said, “Yes. Yes. I just—I managed to escape from
Dunwich Town.”

The trooper frowned. “There’s been a terrible disaster there, ma’am. Looks as if some kind of giant meteor crashed on Dunwich. Wiped out the town, the hull entire town.” He shook his head. “Every man, woman and child. And there’s some kind of horrid goop all over the place, and a stench like to make you throw up. Pardon me, ma’am. Sorry about that.”

Cordelia Whateley struggled
to stand up.

The trooper assisted her gently. “Can we take you somewhere, ma’am? Is there someone we should notify?”

“No.” She shook her head. “I just want to leave. I just want to get back to Montreal and forget this—this horror.”

The trooper’s face was visible in the reflected illumination cast by his flashlight. “Should a lady your age be driving a car?” he asked. “Do you still have a driver’s
license, ma’am? I mean, I know the laws are different there in Quebec. Your car has Quebec tags, ma’am. Are you from Quebec?”

She said, “Yes. Thank you. I’m perfectly all right. I just want to get home.”

The trooper looked dubious, but finally he said, “All right, ma’am. If you’re sure you’ll be all right.”

“I’m perfectly all right,” she repeated, annoyed. The trooper released her and she climbed
into her car. Her purse lay on the seat beside her and she found the cassette player and rewound the tape and hit
play
. From the player’s speaker there emerged only a hissing and crackling, and the occasional hint of an indecipherable whisper.

Cordelia shut the player off. She tossed it into the back seat of her automobile. She switched on the engine. This time it started without hesitation.
She reached up to adjust the rear-view mirror, but on an impulse turned it first toward herself. By the domelight of the sedan she studied her image. Her hair was white and her visage was the withered, wrinkled, desiccated face of a woman three times her age.

The food here is palatable although bland, wickedly bland, I suspect by design, for our keepers do not wish us to be over-stimulated in any way. Over-stimulation means excitement and excitement leads to the stirring up of memories, hideous memories of blasphemous horrors, unnatural recollections of savage and unnatural events upon which a gibbous moon leered monstrously.

And yet they are permitting me to write this account of the terrible events that transpired in Dutchess City that horrid autumn day. They have granted me the use of this soft crayon and floppy-edged paper, that you whose blessed eyes are smitten by the impious and decayed occurrences which befell me may judge whether such things can be in this accursed and doom-clouded world, or whether it was
all a monstrous dream, a figment of a blasted mind slithering its slime-laden way down the squirming path to madness.

I have not always been the shattered and trembling husk of humanity I am today. Once I was a youthful and vigorous man, but recently graduated from the University with a degree in certain matters which excited the malicious interest of numerous prospective greedy employers. Residing
happily as I was in the great Eastern metropolis, I received the awful summons to visit a small town some miles above Gotham on the edge of the dank and fetid river.

Why I chose to accept that accursed invitation I will never know. Perhaps it was in the mistaken belief that a day’s excursion into the rank and weed-choked countryside would assuage the ennui provoked by the mad whirl of metropolitan
existence, perhaps it was a desire to
immerse myself in the ancient towns and countryside where my ancestors, blue-eyed, pale-skinned and roman-nosed, had settled incredible lustra ago, forsaking the looming towers and hideously shrieking boulevards of the city to the ill-spoken mongrel immigrant hordes who pollute its dreadful towers and disgusting byways with their evil-smelling viands and uncouth
speech.

O, how I curse the mad impulse that made me accept that accursed invitation, and yet, as I boarded the grimy and deteriorating coach at the rail terminus I felt only a slight foreboding of the doom-laden malign fate which lurked in that northern hamlet waiting to snare the innocent and unwary in its scaly claws.

The car made its uneven way, swaying and lurching evilly with each hideous
curve and devilish bump of the ancient and unholy rails, wicker seats that looked balefully out at archaic passengers in a forgotten past creaking cacophonically and ceiling lights in their ancient fluted cones faltering and dimming as the train rattled ever farther on its evil way to the indescribable terrors of the ancient exurb which was my ill-fated destination.

At length, weary of peering
anxiously through yellowed and cracking windows coated with savage centuries of black grime, I felt my blond-tousled and pure-bred head fall upon my cleanly garbed chest, my clear blue eyes closed and I dreamed. I dreamed a hideous and dreadful dream, a somnambulism in which certain awful shapes capered and howled beneath a leering moon and winking stars whose ancient malignity showered hollowly
down upon a stench-ridden and blasphemous throng.

It was the lurch of the car which awakened me, trembling and hot-eared, from my terrible dream. With grateful hands I took my hat from the high and terrifying rack and jammed it fearfully upon my aristocratic head, and with feet that quivered and jounced with relief I made my fearsome way from that terrible old car, watching gladly as the train
pulled out and continued along its terrible route to the northward.

I ascended an ancient and decaying stairway, drawing shudderingly away from the archaic creatures that seemed more to
slither
or to
climb
the stairs all about me than they did to walk as any natural creature would do. At incredible and weary length I found myself at the dizzying top of the terrible stairway, and forced to enter
a gigantic room whose towering roof and vaulted windows seemed to smirk down
evilly upon those of us who crept fearfully about on the frigidly
dry
flagging upon the floor.

Involuntarily I crouched against a cruel and superannuated wall, my Anglo-Saxon fingers anxiously and without conscious will tracing the old scrollery that remained under untold eras of accumulated foetor. As I drew away from
the horrible pediment I saw that my white patrician fingers were
marked a grimy shade where they had contacted that dreadful wood!

Screaming in terror I capered madly across the cold stones, crashing cacophonously into the ominously
heavy
and garment-clad figures that clustered and gibbered there in that awful room. Even as I burst through the tarnished portals the vaulted ceiling threw back
my shrieks unmercifully, the dread portents of my own cries echoing horridly in my small and well-positioned ears.

Not daring to stand exposed beneath the pollenous and smirking sky I hurled my trembling form into the back seat of an ancient but incredibly ill-preserved hack that stood beside the doors of that cursed and horrible building, never even taking note of the unholy coven of terrible
creatures already inhabiting the passenger section of the dreadful vehicle.

Recoiling in horror from them and sending another scream of monstrous fear crashing to the baleful roof of the hack I threw my entire weight upon the mouldy door and, gibbering a prayer of gratitude to whatever malign deity had seen fit to provide me with even the momentary succour of release, tumbled painfully upon the
cruelly gravel-encrusted turf upon which the hack rested.

Staring frantically in all directions in desperate hope of visioning an alternative means of transportation, I reached the harrowing conclusion that
only that single hack stood ready to carry passengers from the station
. Had I but noticed this evil and maxillary anomaly my keen Caucasian suspicions had inevitably driven me to flee madly
across the ancient fields and decrepit roadways that mark Dutchess City.

But, terrified by the black and inescapable fate that seemed, with a tacit and noisome persistency to seek to ensnare me, I lurched despairingly around the rusted and grime-coated rear of the hack and made my unhappy way to the blasphemous door which let onto a seat beside that already occupied by the driver.