Evidently some blight or distemper,
perhaps sprung from the unwholesome pasturage or the diseased fungi
and timbers of the filthy barn, caused a heavy mortality amongst the
Whateley animals. Odd wounds or sores, having something of the aspect
of incisions, seemed to afflict the visible cattle; and once or twice
during the earlier months certain callers fancied they could discern
similar sores about the throats of the gray, unshaven old man and his
slatternly, crinkly-haired albino daughter. In the spring after Wilbur's birth Lavinia resumed her customary
rambles in the hills, bearing in her misproportioned arms the swarthy
child. Public interest in the Whateleys subsided after most of the
country folk had seen the baby, and no one bothered to comment on the
swift development which that newcomer seemed every day to exhibit. Wilbur's growth was indeed phenomenal, for within three months of his
birth he had attained a size and muscular power not usually found in
infants under a full year of age. His motions and even his vocal sounds
showed a restraint and deliberateness highly peculiar in an infant,
and no one was really unprepared when, at seven months, he began to
walk unassisted, with falterings which another month was sufficient to
remove. It was somewhat after this time--on Hallowe'en--that a great blaze was
seen at midnight on the top of Sentinel Hill where the old table-like
stone stands amidst its tumulus of ancient bones. Considerable talk
was started when Silas Bishop--of the undecayed Bishops--mentioned
having seen the boy running sturdily up that hill ahead of his mother
about an hour before the blaze was remarked. Silas was rounding up a
stray heifer, but he nearly forgot his mission when he fleetingly spied
the two figures in the dim light of his lantern. They darted almost
noiselessly through the underbrush, and the astonished watcher seemed
to think they were entirely unclothed. Afterward he could not be sure
about the boy, who may have had some kind of a fringed belt and a pair
of dark blue trunks or trousers on. Wilbur was never subsequently seen
alive and conscious without complete and tightly buttoned attire, the
disarrangement or threatened disarrangement of which always seemed to
fill him with anger and alarm. His contrast with his squalid mother and
grandfather in this respect was thought very notable until the horror
of 1928 suggested the most valid of reasons. The next January gossips were mildly interested in the fact that
"Lavinny's black brat" had commenced to talk, and at the age of only
eleven months. His speech was somewhat remarkable both because of its
difference from the ordinary accents of the region, and because it
displayed a freedom from infantile lisping of which many children of
three or four might well be proud. The boy was not talkative, yet when
he spoke he seemed to reflect some elusive element wholly unpossessed
by Dunwich and its denizens. The strangeness did not reside in what he
said, or even in the simple idioms he used; but seemed vaguely linked
with his intonation or with the internal organs that produced the
spoken sounds. His facial aspect, too, was remarkable for its maturity;
for though he shared his mother's and grandfather's chinlessness, his
firm and precociously shaped nose united with the expression on his
large, dark, almost Latin eyes to give him an air of quasi-adulthood
and well-nigh preternatural intelligence. He was, however, exceedingly
ugly despite his appearance of brilliancy; there being something almost
goatish or animalistic about his thick lips, large-pored, yellowish
skin, coarse crinkly hair, and oddly elongated ears. He was soon
disliked even more decidedly than his mother and grandsire, and all
conjectures about him were spiced with references to the bygone magic
of Old Whateley, and how the hills once shook when he shrieked the
dreadful name of _Yog-Sothoth_ in the midst of a circle of stones with
a great book open in his arms before him. Dogs abhorred the boy, and
he was always obliged to take various defensive measures against their
barking menace. 3

Meanwhile Old Whateley continued to buy cattle without measurably
increasing the size of his herd. He also cut timber and began to
repair the unused parts of his house--a spacious, peaked-roofed affair
whose rear end was buried entirely in the rocky hillside, and whose
three least-ruined ground-floor rooms had always been sufficient for
himself and his daughter. There must have been prodigious reserves
of strength in the old man to enable him to accomplish so much hard
labor; and though he still babbled dementedly at times, his carpentry
seemed to show the effects of sound calculation. It had really begun
as soon as Wilbur was born, when one of the many tool-sheds had been
put suddenly in order, clapboarded, and fitted with a stout fresh lock. Now, in restoring the abandoned upper story of the house, he was a no
less thorough craftsman. His mania showed itself only in his tight
boarding-up of all the windows in the reclaimed section--though many
declared that it was a crazy thing to bother with the reclamation at
all. Less inexplicable was his fitting-up of another downstairs room
for his new grandson--a room which several callers saw, though no one
was ever admitted to the closely-boarded upper story. This chamber
he lined with tall, firm shelving; along which he began gradually to
arrange, in apparently careful order, all the rotting ancient books and
parts of books which during his own day had been heaped promiscuously
in odd corners of the various rooms. "I made some use of 'em," he would say as he tried to mend a torn
black-letter page with paste prepared on the rusty kitchen stove, "but
the boy's fitten to make better use of 'em. He'd orter hev 'em as well
sot as he kin for they're goin' to be all of his larnin'." When Wilbur was a year and seven months old--in September of 1914--his
size and accomplishments were almost alarming. He had grown as large as
a child of four, and was a fluent and incredibly intelligent talker. He ran freely about the fields and hills, and accompanied his mother
on all her wanderings. At home he would pore diligently over the queer
pictures and charts in his grandfather's books, while Old Whateley
would instruct and catechize him through long, hushed afternoons. By
this time the restoration of the house was finished, and those who
watched it wondered why one of the upper windows had been made into a
solid plank door. It was a window in the rear of the east gable end,
close against the hill; and no one could imagine why a cleated wooden
runway was built up to it from the ground. About the period of this
work's completion people noticed that the old tool-house, tightly
locked and windowlessly clapboarded since Wilbur's birth, had been
abandoned again.