The door swung listlessly open, and when Earl Sawyer
once stepped within after a cattle-selling call on Old Whateley he was
quite discomposed by the singular odor he encountered--such a stench,
he averred, as he had never before smelt in all his life except near
the Indian circles on the hills, and which could not come from anything
sane or of this earth. But then, the homes and sheds of Dunwich folk
have never been remarkable for olfactory immaculateness. The following months were void of visible events, save that everyone
swore to a slow but steady increase in the mysterious hill noises. On
May Eve of 1915 there were tremors which even the Aylesbury people
felt, whilst the following Hallowe'en produced an underground rumbling
queerly synchronized with bursts of flame--"them witch Whateleys'
doin's"--from the summit of Sentinel Hill. Wilbur was growing up
uncannily, so that he looked like a boy of ten as he entered his
fourth year. He read avidly by himself now; but talked much less than
formerly. A settled taciturnity was absorbing him, and for the first
time people began to speak specifically of the dawning look of evil in
his goatish face. He would sometimes mutter an unfamiliar jargon, and
chant in bizarre rhythms which chilled the listener with a sense of
unexplainable terror. The aversion displayed toward him by dogs had now
become a matter of wide remark, and he was obliged to carry a pistol
in order to traverse the countryside in safety. His occasional use of
the weapon did not enhance his popularity amongst the owners of canine
guardians. The few callers at the house would often find Lavinia alone on the
ground floor, while odd cries and footsteps resounded in the boarded-up
second story. She would never tell what her father and the boy were
doing up there, though once she turned pale and displayed an abnormal
degree of fear when a jocose fish-peddler tried the locked door leading
to the stairway. That peddler told the store loungers at Dunwich
Village that he thought he heard a horse stamping on that floor above. The loungers reflected, thinking of the door and runway, and of
the cattle that so swiftly disappeared. Then they shuddered as they
recalled tales of Old Whateley's youth, and of the strange things that
are called out of the earth when a bullock is sacrificed at the proper
time to certain heathen gods. It had for some time been noticed that
dogs had begun to hate and fear the whole Whateley place as violently
as they hated and feared young Wilbur personally. In 1917 the war came, and Squire Sawyer Whateley, as chairman of the
local draft board, had hard work finding a quota of young Dunwich men
fit even to be sent to a development camp. The government, alarmed at
such signs of wholesale regional decadence, sent several officers and
medical experts to investigate; conducting a survey which New England
newspaper readers may still recall. It was the publicity attending this
investigation which set reporters on the track of the Whateleys, and
caused the _Boston Globe_ and _Arkham Advertiser_ to print flamboyant
Sunday stories of young Wilbur's precociousness, Old Whateley's black
magic, the shelves of strange books, the sealed second story of the
ancient farmhouse, and the weirdness of the whole region and its hill
noises. Wilbur was four and a half then, and looked like a lad of
fifteen. His lip and cheek were fuzzy with a coarse dark down, and his
voice had begun to break. Earl Sawyer went out to the Whateley place
with both sets of reporters and camera men, and called their attention
to the queer stench which now seemed to trickle down from the sealed
upper spaces. It was, he said, exactly like a smell he had found in the
tool-shed abandoned when the house was finally repaired, and like the
faint odors which he sometimes thought he caught near the stone circles
on the mountains. Dunwich folk read the stories when they appeared, and
grinned over the obvious mistakes. They wondered, too, why the writers
made so much of the fact that Old Whateley always paid for his cattle
in gold pieces of extremely ancient date. The Whateleys had received
their visitors with ill-concealed distaste, though they did not dare
court further publicity by a violent resistance or refusal to talk. 4

For a decade the annals of the Whateleys sink indistinguishably into
the general life of a morbid community used to their queer ways and
hardened to their May Eve and All-Hallow orgies. Twice a year they
would light fires on the top of Sentinel Hill, at which times the
mountain rumblings would recur with greater and greater violence; while
at all seasons there were strange and portentous doings at the lonely
farmhouse. In the course of time callers professed to hear sounds
in the sealed upper story even when all the family were downstairs,
and they wondered how swiftly or how lingeringly a cow or bullock
was usually sacrificed. There was talk of a complaint to the Society
for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; but nothing ever came of
it, since Dunwich folk are never anxious to call the outside world's
attention to themselves. About 1923, when Wilbur was a boy of ten whose mind, voice, stature,
and bearded face gave all the impressions of maturity, a second great
siege of carpentry went on at the old house. It was all inside the
sealed upper part, and from bits of discarded lumber people concluded
that the youth and his grandfather had knocked out all the partitions
and even removed the attic floor, leaving only one vast open void
between the ground story and the peaked roof. They had torn down the
great central chimney, too, and fitted the rusty range with a flimsy
outside tin stove-pipe. In the spring after this event Old Whateley noticed the growing number
of whippoorwills that would come out of Cold Spring Glen to chirp under
his window at night. He seemed to regard the circumstance as one of
great significance, and told the loungers at Osborn's that he thought
his time had almost come. "They whistle jest in tune with my breathin' naow," he said, "an' I
guess they're gittin' ready to ketch my soul. They know it's a-goin'
aout, an' dun't calc'late to miss it. Yew'll know, boys, arter I'm
gone, whether they git me er not. Ef they dew, they'll keep up
a-singin' an' laffin' till break o' day. Ef they dun't, they'll kinder
quiet daown like. I expeck them an' the souls they hunts fer hev some
pretty tough tussles sometimes." On Lammas Night, 1924, Dr. Houghton of Aylesbury was hastily summoned
by Wilbur Whateley, who had lashed his one remaining horse through the
darkness and telephoned from Osborn's in the village. He found Old
Whateley in a very grave state, with a cardiac action and stertorous
breathing that told of an end not far off. The shapeless albino
daughter and oddly bearded grandson stood by the bedside, whilst from
the vacant abyss overhead there came a disquieting suggestion of
rhythmical surging or lapping, as of the waves on some level beach.