The
doctor, though, was chiefly disturbed by the chattering night birds
outside; a seemingly limitless legion of whippoorwills that cried their
endless message in repetitions timed diabolically to the wheezing gasps
of the dying man. It was uncanny and unnatural--too much, thought Dr.
Houghton, like the whole of the region he had entered so reluctantly in
response to the urgent call. Toward 1 o'clock Old Whateley gained consciousness, and interrupted his
wheezing to choke out a few words to his grandson. "More space, Willy, more space soon. Yew grows--an' _that_ grows
faster. It'll be ready to sarve ye soon, boy. Open up the gates to
Yog-Sothoth with the long chant that ye'll find on page 751 _of the
complete edition_, an' _then_ put a match to the prison. Fire from
airth can't burn it nohaow!" He was obviously quite mad. After a pause, during which the flock of
whippoorwills outside adjusted their cries to the altered tempo while
some indications of the strange hill noises came from afar off, he
added another sentence or two. "Feed it reg'lar, Willy, an' mind the quantity; but dun't let it grow
too fast fer the place, fer ef it busts quarters or gits aout afore ye
opens to Yog-Sothoth, it's all over an' no use. Only them from beyont
kin make it multiply an' work.... Only them, the old uns as wants to
come back...."

But speech gave place to gasps again, and Lavinia screamed at the
way the whippoorwills followed the change. It was the same for more
than an hour, when the final throaty rattle came. Dr. Houghton drew
shrunken lids over the glazing gray eyes as the tumult of birds faded
imperceptibly to silence. Lavinia sobbed, but Wilbur only chuckled
whilst the hill noises rumbled faintly. "They didn't git him," he muttered in his heavy bass voice. Wilbur was by this time a scholar of really tremendous erudition in
his one-sided way, and was quietly known by correspondence to many
librarians in distant places where rare and forbidden books of old days
are kept. He was more and more hated and dreaded around Dunwich because
of certain youthful disappearances which suspicion laid vaguely at his
door; but was always able to silence inquiry through fear or through
use of that fund of old-time gold which still, as in his grandfather's
time, went forth regularly and increasingly for cattle-buying. He
was now tremendously mature of aspect, and his height, having reached
the normal adult limit, seemed inclined to wax beyond that figure. In
1925, when a scholarly correspondent from Miskatonic University called
upon him one day and departed pale and puzzled, he was fully six and
three-quarters feet tall. Through all the years Wilbur had treated his half-deformed albino
mother with a growing contempt, finally forbidding her to go to the
hills with him on May Eve and Hallowmass; and in 1926 the poor creature
complained to Mamie Bishop of being afraid of him. "They's more abaout him as I knows than I kin tell ye, Mamie," she
said, "an' naowadays they's more nor what I know myself. I vaow afur
Gawd, I dun't know what he wants nor what he's a-tryin' to dew." That Hallowe'en the hill noises sounded louder than ever, and fire
burned on Sentinel Hill as usual, but people paid more attention
to the rhythmical screaming of vast flocks of unnaturally belated
whippoorwills which seemed to be assembled near the unlighted Whateley
farmhouse. After midnight their shrill notes burst into a kind of
pandemoniac cachinnation which filled all the countryside, and not
until dawn did they finally quiet down. Then they vanished, hurrying
southward where they were fully a month overdue. What this meant, no
one could quite be certain till later. None of the countryfolk seemed
to have died--but poor Lavinia Whateley, the twisted albino, was never
seen again. In the summer of 1927 Wilbur repaired two sheds in the farmyard and
began moving his books and effects out to them. Soon afterward Earl
Sawyer told the loungers at Osborn's that more carpentry was going on
in the Whateley farmhouse. Wilbur was closing all the doors and windows
on the ground floor, and seemed to be taking out partitions as he and
his grandfather had done upstairs four years before. He was living
in one of the sheds, and Sawyer thought he seemed unusually worried
and tremulous. People generally suspected him of knowing something
about his mother's disappearance, and very few ever approached his
neighborhood now. His height had increased to more than seven feet, and
showed no signs of ceasing its development. 5

The following winter brought an event no less strange than Wilbur's
first trip outside the Dunwich region. Correspondence with the Widener
Library at Harvard, the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, the British
Museum, the University of Buenos Aires, and the Library of Miskatonic
University at Arkham had failed to get him the loan of a book he
desperately wanted; so at length he set out in person, shabby, dirty,
bearded, and uncouth of dialect, to consult the copy at Miskatonic,
which was the nearest to him geographically. Almost eight feet tall,
and carrying a cheap new valise from Osborn's general store, this
dark and goatish gargoyle appeared one day in Arkham in quest of the
dreaded volume kept under lock and key at the college library--the
hideous _Necronomicon_ of the mad Arab Alhazred in Olaus Wormius' Latin
version, as printed in Spain in the Seventeenth Century. He had never
seen a city before, but had no thought save to find his way to the
university grounds; where, indeed, he passed heedlessly by the great
white-fanged watchdog that barked with unnatural fury and enmity, and
tugged frantically at its stout chain. Wilbur had with him the priceless but imperfect copy of Dr. Dee's
English version which his grandfather had bequeathed him, and upon
receiving access to the Latin copy he at once began to collate the two
texts with the aim of discovering a certain passage which would have
come on the 751st page of his own defective volume. This much he could
not civilly refrain from telling the librarian--the same erudite Henry
Armitage (A. M. Miskatonic, Ph. D. Princeton, Litt. D. Johns Hopkins)
who had once called at the farm, and who now politely plied him with
questions. He was looking, he had to admit, for a kind of formula or
incantation containing the frightful name _Yog-Sothoth_, and it puzzled
him to find discrepancies, duplications, and ambiguities which made
the matter of determination far from easy. As he copied the formula
he finally chose, Dr. Armitage looked involuntarily over his shoulder
at the open pages; the left-hand one of which, in the Latin version,
contained such monstrous threats to the peace and sanity of the world. Nor is it to be thought [ran the text as Armitage mentally
    translated it] that man is either the oldest or the last of earth's
    masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be.