The Watchers Out of Time (4 page)

What I saw was incredible, horrible. It was not a man who stood there, but a travesty of a man. I know that for one cataclysmic moment I thought consciousness would leave me; but a sense of urgency coupled with an awareness of acute danger swept over me, and without a moment’s hesitation, I fired four times, at such range that I knew each shot had found harbor in the body of the bestial thing that leaned over Dr. Charriere’s desk in that darkened study.

Of what followed I have, mercifully, only the vaguest memory. A wild thrashing about—the escape of the invader—my own uncertain pursuit. I had struck him, certainly, for a trail of blood led from the study to the windows through which he had gone, tearing away glass and frame in one. Outside, the light of my flash gleamed on the drops of blood, so that I had no difficulty following them. Even without this to follow, the strong musk pervading the night air would have enabled me to trace whoever had gone ahead.

I was led—not away from the house—but deeper into the garden, straight to the curb of the well behind the house. And over the curb
into the well,
where I saw for the first time in the glow of the flashlight the cunningly fashioned steps which led down into that dark maw. So great was the discharge of blood at the well-curb, that I was confident I had mortally wounded the intruder. It was that confidence which impelled me to follow, despite the manifest danger.

Would that I had turned at the well-curb and gone away from that accursed place! For I followed down the rungs of the ladder set into the well-wall—not to the water below, as I had first thought I might be led—but to an aperture opening into a tunnel in the well-wall, leading even deeper into the garden. Compelled now by a burning desire to know the nature of my victim, I pushed into this tunnel, unmindful of the damp earth which stained my clothes, with my light thrust before me, and my weapon in instant readiness. Up ahead I could see a kind of hollowed out cavern—not any larger than enough to permit a man to kneel upright—and in the center of my flashlight’s glow stood a casket, at sight of which I hesitated momentarily, for I recognized the direction of the tunnel away from the well led toward the grave of Dr. Charriere.

But I had come too far to retreat.

The smell in this narrow opening was almost indescribable. Pervading every part of the tunnel was the nauseatingly strong musk of reptiles; indeed, it lay so thickly in the air that I had to force myself to press on toward the casket. I came up to it and saw that it lay uncovered. The trail of blood led to the edge of the casket and into it. Impelled by burning curiosity and a half-formed fear of what I might find, I rose to my knees and forced the light tremblingly into the casket.

It may well be charged that after so many years my memory is no longer to be relied upon. But what I saw there was imprinted indelibly on my memory. For there, in the glow of my light, lay a newly-dead being, the implications of whose existence overwhelmed me with horror. This was the thing I had killed. Half-man, half-saurian, it was a ghastly travesty upon what had once been a human being. Its clothes were split and torn by the horrible mutations of the flesh, by the crusted skin which had burst its bonds, its hands and unshod feet were flat, powerful in appearance, claw-like. I gazed in speechless terror at the shuddersome tail-like appendage which pushed bluntly out from the base of the spine, at the terribly elongated, crocodilian jaw, to which still grew a tuft of hair, like a goat’s beard….

All this I saw before a merciful unconsciousness overcame me,—
for I had seen enough to recognize what lay in that coffin—him who had lain there in a cataleptic torpor since 1927, waiting his turn to come back in frightfully altered form to live again—Dr. Jean-Francois Charriere, surgeon, born in Bayonne in 1636, “died” in Providence in 1927—and I knew that the survivor of whom he had written in his will was none other than himself, born again, renewed by a hellish knowledge of long-forgotten, eldritch rites more ancient than mankind, as old as that early vernal earth on which great beasts fought and tore!

W
ENTWORTH’S
D
AY

         North of Dunwich lies an all but abandoned country, one which has returned in large part—after its successive occupation by the old New Englanders, the French-Canadians who moved in after them, the Italians, and the Poles who came last—to a state perilously close to the wild. The first dwellers wrested a living from the stony earth and the forests that once covered all that land, but they were not versed in conservation of either the soil or its natural resources, and successive generations still further depleted that country. Those who came after them soon gave up the struggle and went elsewhere.

It is not an area of Massachusetts in which many people like to live. The houses which once stood proudly there have fallen into such disuse that most of them would not now support comfortable living. There are still farms on the gentler slopes, with gambrel-roofed houses on them, ancient buildings, often brooding in the lee of rocky ledges over the secrets of many New England generations; but the marks of decay are everywhere apparent—in the crumbling chimneys, the bulging side walls, the broken windows of the abandoned barns and houses. Roads crisscross it, but, once you are off the state highway which traverses the long valley north of Dunwich, you find yourself in byways which are little more than rutted lanes, as little used as most of the houses on the land.

Moreover, there broods eternally about this country an undeniable atmosphere not alone of age and desertion, but also of evil. There are areas of woodland in which no axe has ever fallen, as well as dark, vine-grown glens, where brooks trickle in a darkness unbroken by sunlight even on the brightest day. Over the entire valley there is little sign of life, though there are reclusive dwellers on some of the broken-down farms; even the hawks which soar high overhead never seem to linger long, and the black hordes of crows only cross the valley and never descend to scavenge or forage. Once, long ago, it had the reputation of being a country in which
Hexerei
—the witch-beliefs of superstitious people—was practiced, and something of this unenviable reputation lingers about it still.

It is not a country in which to linger overlong, and certainly not a place in which to be found by night. Yet it was night in that summer of 1927 when I made my last trip into the valley, on my way from delivering a stove not far from Dunwich. I should never have chosen to drive through the region north of that decayed town, but I had one more delivery to make, and, rather than follow my impulse to go around the valley and come in from the far end, I drove into it at late dusk. In the valley itself the dusk which still prevailed at Dunwich had given way to a darkness which was soon to be profound, for the sky was heavily overcast, and the clouds were so low as almost to touch upon the enclosing hills, so that I rode, as it were, in a kind of tunnel. The highway was little traveled; there were other roads to take to reach points on both sides of the valley, and the side-roads were so overgrown and virtually abandoned in this place that few drivers wanted to take the risk of having to use them.

All would have been well, for my course led straight through the valley to the farther end, and there was no need for me to leave the state highway, had it not been for two unforeseen factors. Rain began to fall soon after I left Dunwich; it had been hanging heavy over the earth throughout that afternoon, and now at last the heavens opened and the torrent came down. The highway was soon agleam in the glow of my headlamps. And that glow, too, soon shone upon some thing other. I had gone perhaps fifteen miles into the valley when I was brought up short by a barrier on the highway, and a well-marked directive to detour. Beyond the barrier I could see that the highway had been torn up to such an extent that it was truly impassable.

I turned off the highway with misgivings. If I had only followed my impulse to return to Dunwich and take another road, I might be free of the accursed nightmares which have troubled my sleep since that night of horror! But I did not. Having gone so far, I had no wish to waste the time it would take to return to Dunwich. The rain was still coming down as a wall of water, and driving was extremely difficult. So I turned off the highway, and immediately found myself on a road which was only partially surfaced with gravel. The highway crew had been along this way, and had widened the detour a little by cutting away overhanging limbs which had all but shut off the road before, but they had done little for the road itself, and I had not gone very far before I realized that I was in trouble.

The road on which I traveled was rapidly worsening because of the rain; my car, though one of the sturdiest of Fords, with relatively high, narrow wheels, cut deep ruts where it passed along, and from time to time, splashed into rapidly deepening puddles of water, which caused my motor to sputter and cough. I knew that it was only a question of time before the downpour would seep through the hood of the car and stop my engine altogether, and I began to look around for any sign of habitation, or, at least, some cover which would afford shelter for the car and myself. Indeed, knowing the loneliness of this isolated valley, I would have preferred an abandoned barn, but, in truth, it was impossible to make out any structure without some guidance, and thus I came at last to a pale window square of light shining not far off the road, and by a lucky chance found the driveway in the fading glow of my headlamps.

I turned in, passing a mailbox on which the owner’s name had been crudely painted; it stood out, fading now:
Amos Stark.
The headlamps’ glow swept the face of the dwelling there, and I saw that it was ancient, indeed, one of those houses which are all of a piece—house, ell, summer kitchen, barn, all in one long structure, under roofs of various heights. Fortunately, the barn stood wide open to the weather and, seeing no other shelter, I drove my car under that cover, expecting to see cattle and horses. But the barn wore an air of long-time desertion, for there were neither cattle nor horses, and the hay which filled it with its aroma of past summers must have been several years old.

I did not linger in the barn, but made my way to the house through the driving rain. From the outside, the house, as much as I could see of it, had the same appearance of desolation as the barn. It was of but one storey, with a low verandah out in front, and the floor of that verandah was, as I discovered just in time, broken here and there, with dark gaps to show where there had once been boards.

I found the door and pounded on it.

For a long time there was no sound but the voice of the rain falling upon the roof of the porch and into the water gathered in the yard just beyond. I knocked again and raised my voice to shout, “Is anybody home?”

Then a quavering voice rose from inside. “Who be ye?”

I explained that I was a salesman seeking shelter.

The light began to move inside, as a lamp was picked up from where it stood. The window grew dim, and from under the door a line of yellow grew stronger. There was the sound of bolts and chains being withdrawn, and then the door was opened, and my host stood there, holding a lamp high; he was a wizened old man with a scraggly beard half covering his scrawny neck. He wore spectacles, but peered out at me over them. His hair was white, and his eyes black; seeing me, his lips drew back in a kind of feral grin, exposing the stumps of teeth.

“Mr. Stark?” I asked.

“Storm ketched ye, eh?” he greeted me. “Come right in the haouse an’ dry off. Don’t reckon the rain’ll last long naow.”

I followed him into the inner room from which he had started away, though not before he had carefully bolted and locked the door behind us, a procedure which touched me with a faint unease. He must have seen my look of inquiry, for, once he had set the lamp down on a thick book which lay on a round table in the center of the room to which he led me, he turned and said with a dry chuckle, “This be Wentworth’s day. I thought yew might be Nahum.”

His chuckle deepened into the ghost of a laugh.

“No, sir. My name is Fred Hadley. I’m from Boston.”

“Ain’t never been ta Boston,” said Stark. “Never been as fur as Arkham, even. Got my farm work ta keep me ta home.”

“I hope you don’t mind. I took the liberty of driving my car into your barn.”

“The caows won’t mind.” He cackled with laughter at his little joke, for he knew full well that no cow was in the barn. “Wouldn’t drive one a them new-fangled contraptions myself, but yew taown people are all alike. Got ta hev yer automobiles.”

“I didn’t imagine I looked like a city slicker,” I said, in an attempt to meet his mood.

“I kin tell a taown man right off—onct in a while we get one movin’ inta the deestrick but they move out suddent; guess they daon’t like it here. Ain’t never been ta no big taown; ain’t sure I want ta go.”

He rambled on in this fashion for such an interminable time that I was able to look around me and make a kind of inventory of the room. In those years the time I did not spend on the road I put in at the warehouse in Boston, and there were few of us who could be counted better at inventory than myself; so it took me no time at all to see that Amos Stark’s living room was filled with all kinds of things that the antique collectors would pay well to get their hands on. There were pieces of furniture that went back close to two hundred years, if I were any judge, and fine bric-a-brac, whatnots, and some wonderful blown glass and Haviland china on the shelves and on the whatnots. And there were many of the old handiwork pieces of the New England farm of decades before—candle-snuffers, wooden-pegged cork inkwells, candle-molds, a book rest, a turkey-call of leather, pitchpine and tree gum, calabashes, samplers—so that it was plain to see that the house had stood there for many years.

“Do you live alone, Mr. Stark?” I asked, when I could get a word in.

“Naow I do, yes. Onct thar was Molly an’ Dewey. Abel went off when he war a boy, an’ Ella died with lung fever. I bin alone naow for nigh on ta seven years.”

Even as he spoke, I observed about him a waiting, watchful air. He seemed constantly to be listening for some sound above the drumming of the rain. But there was none, save one small crepitant sound, where a mouse gnawed away somewhere in the old house—none but this and the ceaseless rune of the rain. Still he listened, his head cocked a little, his eyes narrowed as if against the glow of the lamp, and his head agleam at the bald crown which was ringed round by a thin, straggly tonsure of white hair. He might have been eighty years old, he might have been only sixty with his narrow, reclusive way of life having prematurely aged him.

“Ye war alaone on the road?” he asked suddenly.

“Never met a soul this side of Dunwich. Seventeen miles, I figure.”

“Give or take a half,” he agreed. Then he began to cackle and chuckle, as with an outburst of mirth that could no longer be held within. “This be Wentworth’s day. Nahum Wentworth.” His eyes narrowed again for a moment. “Yew been a salesman in these parts long naow? Yew must a knowed Nahum Wentworth?”

“No, sir. I never knew him. I sell mostly in the towns. Just once in a while in the country.”

“Might’ near everybody knowed Nahum,” he went on. “But thar weren’t none knowed him as well as I did. See that thar book?” He pointed to a well thumbed paper-covered book I could just make out in the ill-lit room. “That thar’s the
Seventh Book a Moses
—it’s got a sight more larnin’ in it than any other book I ever seen. That thar was Nahum’s book.”

He chuckled at some memory. “Oh, that Nahum was a queer one, all right. But mean—an’ stingy, too. Don’t see as haow ye could miss knowin’ him.”

I assured him I had never heard of Nahum Wentworth before, though I admitted privately to some curiosity about the object of my host’s preoccupation, insofar as he had been given to reading the
Seventh Book of Moses,
which was a kind of Bible for the supposed hexes, since it purported to offer all manner of spells, incantations, and charms to those readers who were gullible enough to believe in them. I saw, too, within the circle of lamplight, certain other books I recognized—a Bible, worn as much as the textbook of magic, a compendious edition of Cotton Mather’s works, and a bound volume of the
Arkham Advertiser.
Perhaps these, too, had once belonged to Nahum Wentworth.

“I see ye lookin’ at his books,” said my host, as if he had indeed divined my thoughts. “He said as haow I could have ’em; so I took ’em. Good books, too. Only that I need glasses, I’d a read ’em. Yew’re welcome ta look at ’em, though.”

I thanked him gravely and reminded him that he had been talking of Nahum Wentworth.

“Oh, that Nahum!” he replied at once, renewing his chuckle. “I don’t reckon he’d a lent me all that money if he a knowed what was ta happen ta him. No, sir, I don’t reckon he would. An’ never ta take a note fer it, neither. Five thousand it was. An’ him tellin’ me he didn’t have no need fer a note or any kind of paper, so thar warn’t no proof I ever had the money off’n him, not a-tall, jest the two of us knowin’ it, and he settin’ a day five years after fer him ta come fer his money an’ his due. Five years, an’ this is the day, this is Wentworth’s day.”