Terrors (34 page)

All of Dr. Houghton’s efforts failed to preserve the poor, limited life of Zenia Whateley Sawyer, but her child survived the ordeal of birth. The next day old Zebulon Whateley and Squire
Sawyer Whateley made their way to the Sawyer house and joined Earl Sawyer in his efforts. He descended the wooden steps to the dank cellar of the house and returned carrying a plain wooden coffin that he himself had surreptitiously built some time before. The three of them placed Zenia’s shriveled, wasted body in the coffin and Earl nailed its lid in place.

They carried the wooden box to the
peak of the Devil’s Hop Yard and there, amid fearsome incantations and the making of signs with their hands unlike any seen for a decade in the Miskatonic Valley, they buried Zenia’s remains.

Then they returned to the farmhouse where the child lay in a crude wooden cradle. Squire Whateley tended the infant while its father rang up Central on the party line and placed a call to Mamie Bishop at
the rooming house in Aylesbury.

After a brief conversation with his former common-law wife, Earl Sawyer nodded to his father-in-law and to the Squire, and left them with the child. He climbed into his Model T and set out along the Aylesbury Pike to fetch Mamie back to Dunwich.

The child of Earl Sawyer and Zenia Whateley Sawyer was a girl. Her father, after consultation with his father-in-law
and distant cousin Squire Whateley, named his daughter Hester Sawyer. She was a tiny child at birth, and fear was expressed as to her own survival.

Earl contacted the Congregational minister at Arkham, asking him to baptize the infant according to rites specified by Earl. Once more the dispute as to the use of Earl’s strange scriptures—if they could be so defined—erupted, and once more the minister
refused to lend his ecclesiastical legitimacy to the ceremony. Instead, Earl, Zebulon and Sawyer Whateley carried the tiny form, wrapped in swaddling cloths, to the peak of the Devil’s Hop Yard, and on the very ground of her mother’s still-fresh grave conducted a ceremony of consecration best left undescribed.

They then returned her to the Sawyer house and the care of Mamie Bishop.

There were
comments in Dunwich and even in Aylesbury about Mamie’s surprising willingness to return to Sawyer’s ménage in the role of nursemaid and guardian to the infant Hester, but Mamie merely said that she had her reasons and refused to discuss the matter further. Under Mamie’s ministrations the infant Hester survived the crises of her first days of life, and developed into a child of surprising strength
and precocity.

Even as an infant Hester was a child of unusual beauty and—if such a phrase may be used—premature maturity. Her coloring was fair—almost, but not quite, to the point of albinism. Where Hester’s distant relative, the long-disappeared Lavinia Whateley, had had crinkly white hair and reddish-pink eyes, little Hester possessed from the day of her birth a glossy poll of the silvery
blonde shade known as platinum. Mamie Bishop tried repeatedly to put up the child’s hair in miniature curls or scallops as she thought appropriate for a little girl, but Hester’s hair hung straight and gracefully to her shoulders, refusing to lie in any other fashion.

The child’s eyes showed a flecked pattern of palest blue and the faint pink of the true albino, giving the appearance of being
a pale lavender in tint except at a very close range, when the alternation of blue and pink became visible. Her skin was the shade of new cream and was absolutely flawless.

She took her first steps at the age of five months; by this time she had her full complement of baby teeth as well. By the age of eight months, early in the spring of 1939, she began to speak. There was none of the babyish
prattle of a normally developing child; Hester spoke with precision, correctness, and a chilling solemnity from the utterance of her first word.

Earl Sawyer did not keep Mamie Bishop imprisoned in his house as he had the dead Zenia Whateley Sawyer. Indeed, Earl made it his business to teach Mamie the operation of his Model T, and he encouraged her—nay, he all but commanded her—to drive it into
Dunwich village, Dean’s Corners, or Aylesbury frequently.

On these occasions Mamie was alleged to be shopping for such necessities for herself, Earl, or little Hester as the farm did not provide. On one occasion Earl directed Mamie to drive the Model T all the way to Arkham, and there to spend three days obtaining certain items which he said were needed for Hester’s upbringing. Mamie spent two
nights at one of the rundown hotels that still persisted in Arkham, shabby
ornate reminders of that city’s more prosperous days.

Mamie’s sharp tongue had its opportunities during these shopping expeditions, and she was heard frequently to utter harsh comments about Earl, Zebulon, and Squire Whateley. She never made direct reference to the dead Zenia, but uttered cryptic and unsettling remarks
about little Hester Sawyer, her charge, whom she referred to most often as “Zenia’s white brat.”

As has been mentioned, Dunwich village supported no regular newspaper of its own, but the publications of other communities in the Miskatonic Valley gave space to events in this locale. The Aylesbury
Transcript
in particular devoted a column in its weekly pages to news from Dunwich. This news was
provided by Joe Osborn, the proprietor of Osborn’s General Store, in return for regular advertisement of his establishment’s wares.

A review of the Dunwich column in the Aylesbury
Transcript
for the period between August of 1938 and the end of April of 1943 shows a series of reports of rumblings, crackings, and unpleasant odors emanating from the area of Sawyer’s farm, and particularly from the
Devil’s Hop Yard. Two features of these reports are worthy of note.

First, the reports of the sounds and odors occur at irregular intervals, but a check of the sales records of the establishments in Dunwich, Aylesbury, Dean’s Corners and Arkham where Mamie Bishop traded, will show that the occurrences at the Devil’s Hop Yard coincide perfectly with the occasions of Mamie’s absence from Sawyer’s
farm. Second, while the events took place at irregular intervals, ranging from as close together as twice in one week to as far apart as eight months, their severity increased steadily. The earliest of the series are barely noted in the Dunwich column of the
Transcript
. By the end of 1941 the events receive lead position in Osborn’s writings. By the beginning of 1943 they are no longer relegated
to the Dunwich column at all, but are treated as regular news, suggesting that they could be detected in Aylesbury itself—a distance of nearly 15 miles from Dunwich.

It was also noted by the loafers at Osborn’s store that on those occasions when Mamie Bishop absented herself from the Sawyer farm, Earl’s two favorite in-laws and cronies, Zebulon Whateley and Squire Sawyer Whateley, visited him.
There were no further reports of odd goings-on at the Sawyer place such as that made by Luther Brown in 1938.

Perhaps Luther’s unfortunate demise in an accident on George
Corey’s silo roof, where he was placing new shingles, had no connection with his seeing the rites atop the Devil’s Hop Yard, but after Luther’s death and with the new series of rumblings and stenches, others began to shun the
Sawyer place from 1939 onward.

In September of 1942 a sad incident transpired. Hester Sawyer, then aged four, had been educated up to that time primarily by her father, with the assistance of the two elder Whateleys and of Mamie Bishop. She had never been away from the Sawyer farm and had never seen another child.

Mamie Bishop’s second cousin Elsie, the maiden sister of Silas Bishop (of the
undecayed Bishops), caught Mamie’s ear on one of Mamie’s shopping expeditions away from the Sawyer place. Elsie was the mistress of a nursery school operated under the auspices of the Dunwich Congregational Church, and she somehow convinced Mamie that it was her duty to give little Hester exposure to other children of her own age. Mamie spoke disparagingly of “Zenia’s white brat,” but following Elsie’s
insistence Mamie agreed to discuss the matter with Earl Sawyer.

On the first day of the fall term, Mamie drove Earl’s Model T into Dunwich village, little Hester perched on the seat beside her. This was the first look that Hester had at Dunwich—and the first that Dunwich had at Hester.

Although Mamie had bundled the child into loose garments that covered her from neck to ankles, it was obvious
that something was abnormal about her. Hester was astonishingly small for a child of four. She was hardly taller than a normal infant. It was as if she had remained the same size in the four years since her birth, not increasing an inch in stature.

But that was only half the strangeness of Hester’s appearance, for while her size was the same as a new-born infant’s, her development was that of
a fully mature and breathtakingly beautiful woman. The sun shone brilliantly on the long platinum hair that hung defiantly around the edges of the bonnet Mamie had forced onto Hester’s head. Her strange lavender eyes seemed to hold the secrets of an experienced voluptuary. Her face was mature, her lips full and sensual. And when a sudden gust of wind pressed her baggy dress against her torso this
revealed the configuration of a Grecian eidolon.

The loafers at Osborn’s, who had clustered about and craned their necks for a look at the mysterious “white brat” were torn between an impulse to turn away from this unnatural sight and a fascination with
the image of what seemed a living manikin, a woman of voluptuous bodily form and astonishing facial beauty, the size of a day-old infant, sitting
primly beside Mamie Bishop.

Elsie Bishop welcomed her cousin Mamie and her charge, Hester Sawyer, to the nursery school at the Congregational Church. Elsie chose to make no comment on Hester’s unusual appearance, but instead introduced her to the children already present. These included her own nephew Nahum Bishop, Silas’s five-year-old son. Nahum was a perfectly normal boy, outgoing and playful,
one of the few such to appear in the blighted Miskatonic Valley.

He took one look at Hester Sawyer and fell madly in love with her, with the total, enraptured fascination that only a child can feel when first he discovers the magic of the female sex. He lost all interest in the other children in the school and in their games. He wished only to be with Hester, to gaze at her, to hold her miniature
woman’s hand in his own pudgy boy’s fingers. Any word that Hester spoke was as music to his ears, and any favor she might ask, any task that she might set for him, was his bounden duty and his greatest joy to perform.

In a short while the various children of the nursery school were playing happily, some of them scampering up and down the aisle leading between the two banks of pews in the main
body of the church. The two cousins, Mamie and Elsie, retired to the chancel kitchen to prepare a pot of tea for themselves. Although they could not see the school children from this position, they could hear them happily playing in the semi-abandoned church.

Suddenly there was a terrible thump from the roof of the church, then a second similar sound from the burying-ground outside, then a series
of panic-stricken and terrified screams from the children. Mamie and Elsie ran from the chancel and found nothing, apparently, amiss in the church itself, but the children were clustered at an open window staring into the churchyard, pointing and exclaiming in distress.

The two women shoved their way through the panic-stricken children until they could see. What they beheld was the body of Elsie’s
nephew Nahum Bishop, grotesquely broken over an old tombstone upon which it had fallen when it bounced from the roof of the church. There was no question that the child was dead, the sightless eyes apparently gazing upward at the steeple of the church.

Before they could even turn away from the window, the two women were able to hear a light tread, one so light that, except for the total
hush
that had descended upon the church as the children’s screams subsided, it would not have been heard at all, calmly descending the wooden staircase from the steeple. In a moment Hester Sawyer emerged from the stairwell, her manner one of complete self-possession, the expression on her beautiful little face one of mockery and amusement.

When the state police arrived Hester explained, with total
self-assurance, that she and Nahum had climbed the steeple together, up the narrow wooden staircase that ran from the church’s floor to its belfry. Nahum had averred that he would do anything to prove his love for Hester, and she had asked him to fly from the steeple. In attempting to do so he had fallen to the roof, bounced once, then crashed onto the old grave marker in the yard.

The police
report listed Nahum’s death as accidental, and Hester was returned to the Sawyer farm in charge of Mamie Bishop. Needless to say, the child did not return to the nursery school at the Dunwich Congregational Church; in fact, she was not seen again in Dunwich, or anywhere else away from her father’s holdings.

The final chapter in the tragedy of the Devil’s Hop Yard, if indeed tragedy is the proper
designation for such a drama, was played out in the spring of 1943. As in so many years past, the warmth of the equinox had given but little of itself to the upper Miskatonic Valley; winter instead still clung to the barren peaks and the infertile bottomlands of the region, and the icy dark waters of the Miskatonic River passed only few meadows on their way southeasterward to Arkham and Innsmouth
and the cold Atlantic beyond.

In Dunwich the bereaved Silas Bishop and his maiden sister Elsie had recovered as best they could from the death of young Nahum. Elsie’s work with the nursery school continued and only the boarding-up of the stairwell that led to the steeple and belfry of the Congregational Church testified to the accident of the previous September.

Early on the evening of April
30 the telephone rang in the Bishop house in Dunwich village, and Elsie lifted the receiver to hear a furtive whisper on the line. The voice she barely recognized, so distorted it was with terror, belonged to her second cousin Mamie.

“They’ve locked me in the house naow,” Mamie whispered into the telephone. “Earl always sent me away before, but this time they’ve locked me in and I’m afeared.
Help me, Elsie! I daon’t knaow what
they’re a-fixin’ ta do up ta the Hop Yard, but I’m afeared!”