Then it was obvious that the
pursuers were gaining. Curtis Whateley--of the undecayed branch--was holding the telescope
when the Arkham party detoured radically from the swath. He told the
crowd that the 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 bending. This, indeed, proved to be true; and the
party were seen to gain the minor elevation only a short time after the
invisible blasphemy had passed it. Then Wesley Corey, who had taken the glass, cried out that Armitage was
adjusting the sprayer which Rice held, and that something must be about
to happen. The crowd stirred uneasily, recalling that this 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 his vision to the utmost. He saw that Rice, from the
party's point of vantage above and behind the entity, had an excellent
chance of spreading the potent powder with marvelous effect. Those without the telescope saw only an instant's flash of gray
cloud--a cloud about the size of a moderately large building--near the
top of the mountain. Curtis, who had held the instrument, dropped it
with a piercing shriek into the ankle-deep mud of the road. He reeled,
and would have crumpled to the ground had not two or three others
seized and steadied him. All he could do was moan half-inaudibly:

"Oh, oh, great Gawd ... _that ... that_...."

[Illustration: "Oh, oh, great Gawd ... that ... that."] There was a pandemonium of questioning, and only Henry Wheeler thought
to rescue the fallen telescope and wipe it clean of mud. Curtis was
past all coherence, and even isolated replies were almost too much for
him. "Bigger 'n a barn ... all made o' squirmin' ropes ... hull thing sort
o' shaped like a hen's egg bigger'n anything, with dozens o' legs like
hogsheads that haff shut up when they step ... 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' aout all along the sides, big as stovepipes, an'
all a-tossin' an' openin' an' shuttin' ... all gray, with kinder blue
or purple rings ... _an' Gawd in Heaven--that haff face on top_!..." This final memory, whatever it was, proved too much for poor Curtis,
and he collapsed completely before he could say more. Fred Farr and
Will Hutchins carried him to the roadside and laid him on the damp
grass. Henry Wheeler, trembling, turned the rescued telescope on the
mountain to see what he might. Through the lenses were discernible
three tiny figures, apparently running toward the summit as fast as the
steep incline allowed. Only these--nothing more. Then everyone noticed
a strangely unseasonable noise in the deep valley behind, and even in
the underbrush of Sentinel Hill itself. It was the piping of unnumbered
whippoorwills, and in their shrill chorus there seemed to lurk a note
of tense and evil expectancy. Earl Sawyer now took the telescope and reported the three figures as
standing on the topmost ridge, virtually level with the altar-stone
but at a considerable distance from it. One figure, he said, seemed
to be raising its hands above its head at rhythmic intervals; and
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 impressiveness, but no observer was in a mood for esthetic
appreciation. "I guess he's sayin' the spell," whispered Wheeler as
he snatched back the telescope. The whippoorwills were piping wildly,
and in a singularly curious irregular rhythm quite unlike that of the
visible ritual. Suddenly the sunshine seemed to lessen without the intervention of any
discernible cloud. It was a very peculiar phenomenon, and was plainly
marked by all. A rumbling sound seemed brewing beneath the 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 from Arkham now became
unmistakable, and Wheeler saw through the glass that they were all
raising their arms in the rhythmic incantation. From some farmhouse far
away came the frantic barking of dogs. The change in the quality of the daylight increased, and the crowd
gazed about the horizon in wonder. A purplish darkness, born of
nothing more than a spectral deepening of the sky's blue, pressed down
upon the rumbling 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 using the telescope at that instant. The
whippoorwills continued their irregular pulsation, and the men of
Dunwich braced themselves tensely against some imponderable menace with
which the atmosphere seemed surcharged. Without warning came those deep, cracked, raucous vocal sounds which
will never leave the memory of the stricken group who heard them. Not
from any human throat were they born, for the organs of man can yield
no such acoustic perversions. Rather would one have said they came
from the pit itself, had not their source been 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_. They were loud--loud as the rumblings and
the thunder above which they echoed--yet did they come from no visible
being. And because imagination might suggest a conjectural source in
the world of non-visible beings, the huddled crowd at the mountain's
base huddled still closer, and winced as if in expectation of a blow. "_Ygnaiih ... ygnaiih ... thflthkh'ngha ... Yog-Sothoth...._" rang the
hideous croaking out of space. "_Y'bthnk ... h'ehye ... n'grkdl'lh...._"

The speaking impulse seemed to falter here, as if some frightful
psychic struggle were going on. Henry Wheeler strained his eye at
the telescope, but saw only the three grotesquely silhouetted human
figures 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-cosmic consciousness or obscure, long-latent heredity, were those
half-articulate thunder-croakings drawn? Presently they began to gather
renewed force and coherence as they grew in stark, utter, ultimate
frenzy. "_Eh-ya-ya-ya-yahaah ... e'yaya-yayaaaa ... ngh'aaaa ... ngh'aaaa_ ...
h'yuh ... h'yuh ... HELP! HELP! ... _ff--ff--ff_--FATHER! FATHER!