I TOOK POSSESSION of my cousin Abel Harrops house on the last day of April, 1928, because it was plain by that time that the men from the sheriffs office at Aylesbury were either unable or unwilling to make any progress in explaining his disappearance, and I was determined therefore to carry on my own investigation. This was a matter of principle, rather than of affection, for my cousin Abel had always been somewhat apart from the rest of the family; he had had a reputation since his adolescence for being queer and had never made any effort to visit the rest of us or to invite our own visits. Nor was his plain house in a remote valley seven miles off the Aylesbury Pike out of Arkham particularly a place to excite interest in most of us, who lived in Boston and Portland. I especially want this to be clear, since subsequent events make it imperative that no other motive be ascribed to my coming to stay in the house.
My cousin Abels home was, as I have said, very plain. It was built in the conventional fashion of New England houses, many of which can be seen in scores of villages throughout and even farther south; it was a kind of rectangular house, of two storeys, with a stoop out back and a front porch set in one corner in order to complete the rectangle. This porch had at one time been efficiently screened, but there were now small tears in the screen, and it presented a general air of decay. However, the house itself, which was of wood, was neat enough; its siding had been painted white less than a year ago before my cousins disappearance, and this coat of paint had worn well enough so that the house seemed quite new, as apart from the screened porch. There was a woodshed off to the right, and a smoke-house near that. There was also an open well, with a roof over it, and a windlass with buckets on it. On the left there was another, more serviceable pump, and two smaller sheds. As my cousin did not farm, there was no place for animals.
The interior of the house was in good condition. Clearly, my cousin had always kept it well, though the furnishings were somewhat worn and faded, having been inherited from his parents, who had died two decades before. The lower floor consisted of a small, confining kitchen which opened to the stoop out back, an old-fashioned parlour, somewhat larger than most, and a room which had evidently once been a dining-room, but which had been converted into a study by my cousin Abel, and was filled with books— on crude, home-made shelves, on boxes, chairs, a secretaire, and a table. There were even piles of them on the floor, and one book lay open on the table, just as it had lain when my cousin disappeared; they had told me at the courthouse in Aylesbury that nothing had been disturbed. The second storey was a gable storey; its rooms all had sloping roofs, though there were three of them, all small, two of which were bedrooms, and the third a storeroom. Each room had one gable window, no more. One of the bedrooms was over the kitchen, one over the parlour, and the store-room was over the study. There was no reason to believe that my cousin Abel had occupied either of the bedrooms, however; indications were that he made use of a couch in the parlour, and, since the couch was softer than usual, I determined to use it also. The stairway to the second floor led up out of the kitchen, thereby contributing to the lack of room.
The events of my cousins disappearance were very simple, as any reader who may remember the spare newspaper accounts can testify. He had last been seen in Aylesbury early in April; he had bought five pounds of coffee, ten pounds of sugar, some wire, and a large amount of netting. Four days afterwards, on the seventh of April, a neighbour, passing by and failing to observe smoke coming from the chimney, went in, after some reluctance; my cousin had apparently not been very well liked, having a surly nature, and his neighbours had kept away from him; but, since the seventh was a cold day, Lem Giles had gone up to the door and rapped. When there was no answer, he pushed on the door; it was open and he went in. He found the house deserted and cold, and a lamp which had been used beside a book still open on the table had plainly burned itself out. While Giles thought this a curious state of affairs, he did not report it until three days after that, on the tenth, when he again passed by the house on his way to Aylesbury, and, stopping for a similar reason, found nothing altered in any way in the house. At that time he spoke to a store-keeper in Aylesbury about it and was advised to report the matter at the sheriff s office. With great reluctance, he did so. A deputy-sheriff drove out to my cousins place and looked around. Since there had been a thaw, there was nothing to show footprints, the snow having been quickly melted away. And since a little of the coffee and sugar my cousin had bought had been used, it was assumed that he had vanished within a day or so of his visit to Aylesbury. There was some evidence—as there still was in the loose pile of netting in a rocking-chair in one corner of the parlour—that my cousin was planning to do something with the netting he had bought; but, since it was of the type used in seines along the coast at Kingsport for the purpose of catching rough fish, his intention was obscured in some mystery.
The efforts of the sheriff's men from Aylesbury were, as I have hinted, only perfunctory. There was nothing to show that they were eager to investigate Abels disappearance; perhaps they were too readily discouraged by the reticence of his neighbours. I did not mean to be. If the reports of the sheriff s men were reliable—and I had no reason to believe they were not—then his neighbours had steadfastly avoided Abel and even now, after his disappearance, when he was presumed dead, they were no more willing to speak of him than they had been to associate with him before. Indeed, I had tangible evidence of the neighbours' feeling before I had been in my cousins house a day.
Though the house was not wired for electric lights, it was on a telephone line. When the telephone rang in mid-afternoon—less than two hours after my arrival at the houSfc—I went over and took the receiver off the hook, forgetting that my cousin was on a party line. I had been dilatory to answer, and when I removed the receiver, someone was already talking. Even then, I would have replaced the receiver without more ado, had it not been for mention of my cousins name. Being possessed of a natural share of curiosity, I stood still, listening. . . somebody's come to Abe Harrop's house," came a woman's voice.
"Lem come by there from town ten minutes ago and seen it."
Ten minutes, I thought. That would be Lem Giles' place, the nearest neighbour up the Pocket and over the hill.
"Oh, Mis' Giles, ye don't s'pose he's come back?"
"Hope the Lord he don't! But 'tain't him. Leastwise, Lem said it didn't look like him nohow.”
"If he comes back, I want to git aout o' here. There's been enough goin's– on for a decent body.”
"They ain't found hide nor hair of him”
"An they wun't, neither. They got him. I knowed he was a-callin 'em. Amos told him right off to git rid o' them books, but he knowed better. Asettin there night after night, readin in them devilish books."
"Don't you worry none, Hester.”
"All these goin's-on, it's a God's mercy a body's alive to worry!" This somewhat ambiguous conversation convinced me that the natives of this secluded Pocket of hill country knew far more than they had told the men from the sheriff's office. But this initial conversation was only the beginning. Thereafter the telephone rang at half-hour intervals, and my arrival at my cousin's house was the principal topic of conversation. Thereafter, too, I listened shamelessly.
The neighbours circling the Pocket where the house stood numbered seven families, none of which was in sight of any part of my cousin's house. There were in this order: up the Pocket, Lem and Abbey Giles, and their two sons, Arthur and Albert, with one daughter, Virginia, a feeble-minded girl in her late twenties; beyond them, well up into the next Pocket, Lute and Jethro Corey, bachelors, with a hired man, Curtis Begbie; east of them, deep in the hills, Seth Whateley, his wife, Emma, and their three children, Willie, Mamie, and Ella; down from them, and opposite my cousin's house about a mile to the east, Laban Hough, a widower, his children, Susie and Peter, and his sister, Lavinia; about a half mile further down, along the road that led into the Pocket, Clem Osborn and his wife, Marie, with two hired men, John and Andrew Baxter; and finally, over the hills west of my cousin's house, Rufus and Angeline Wheeler, with their sons, Perry and Nathaniel; and the three spinster Hutchins sisters, Hester, Josephine, and Amelia, with two hired men, Jesse Trumbull and Amos Whateley.
All these people were connected to the single party line which included my cousins telephone. In the course of three hours, what with one woman calling another, back and forth without any end before supper-time, everyone on the line had been informed of my coming, and, as each woman added her bit of information, each of the others learned who I was, and correctly guessed my purpose. All this was perhaps natural enough in such isolated neighbourhoods, where the most trivial event is a subject of deep concern to people who have little else to engage their attention; but what was disturbing about this fire of gossip on the party wire was the unmistakable undercurrent of fear which was omnipresent. Clearly, my cousin Abel Harrop had been shunned for some reason connected with this incredible fear of him and whatever it was he was doing. It was sobering to reflect that out of such primitive fear could very easily rise the decision to kill in order to escape that fear.
I knew it would be no easy task to break down the suspicious reserve of the neighbours, but I was determined that it must and would be done. I retired early that night, but I did not reckon with the difficulties of going to sleep in such an environment as my cousins house. Where I had expected an unbroken silence, I found instead a maddening cacophony of sound which assaulted and engulfed the house. Beginning a half hour after sundown, in mid-twilight, there was such a calling of whippoorwills as I have never heard before; where one bird had called alone for five minutes or thereabouts, in thirty minutes there were twenty birds calling, and in an hour the number of whippoorwills seemed to have risen to well over a hundred. Moreover, the configuration of the Pocket was such that the hills at one side threw back the echoes of sounds from the other, so that the voices of a hundred birds soon assumed the proportions of two, varying in intensity from a demanding scream rising with explosive force from just beyond my window to a faintly whispered call coming from far up or down the valley. Knowing a little of the habits of whippoorwills, I fully expected the calls to cease within an hour of beginning, and to start up again just before dawn. In this I was mistaken. Not only did the birds call incessantly all night long, but it was unmistakably evident that a large number of them flew in from the woods to sit on the roof of the house, as well as on the sheds and the ground around the house, making such a deafening racket that I was completely unable to sleep until dawn, when, one by one, they drifted away and were silent. I knew then that I could not long withstand this nerve-wracking cacophony of song.
I had not slept an hour before I was awakened, still exhausted, by the ringing of the telephone. I got up and took down the receiver, wondering what was wanted at this hour, and who was calling. I muttered a sleepy,
"Hello."
"Harrop?"
"This is Dan Harrop," I said.
"Got suthin' to tell ye. Air ye listenin' ?"
"Who is this?" I said.
"Listen t' me, Harrop. If you knows what's good fer ye, yell git aout o' there as fast as ye c'n git!"
Before I could register my astonishment, the line went dead. I was still somewhat drowsy from lack of sleep. I stood for a moment; then hung up the receiver. A mans voice, gruff and old. Certainly one of the neighbours; the telephone bell had rung as if it had been ground by someone on the line and not by the central.
I was half-way back to my makeshift bed in the parlour when the telephone rang again. Though it was not my ring, I turned back to it at once. The hour was now six-thirty, and the sun shone over the hill. It was Emma Whateley calling Lavinia Hough.
"Vinnie, did ye hear 'em las' night?"
"Land sakes, yes! Emma/do you s'pose it means . . . ?"
"I dont know. It was suthin turrible the way they went on. Aint heerd nuthin' like it since Abel was aout in the woods las' summer. Kept Willie and Mamie awake all night. It scares me, Vinnie."
"Me, too. Gawd, what if it starts again?"
"Hush up, Vinnie. A body cant tell who's listenin."
The telephone rang throughout the morning, and this was the topic of conversation. It was soon borne in upon me that it was the whippoorwills and their frenetic calling in the night which had excited the neighbours. I had thought it annoying, but it had not occurred to me to think it unusual. However, judging by what I overheard, it was not only unusual but ominous for the birds to call with such insistence. It was Hester Hutchins who put the superstitious fears of the neighbours into words, when she told about the whippoorwills to a cousin who had telephoned from Dunwich, some miles to the north.
"The hills was a-talkin again las' night, Cousin Flora," she said in a kind of hushed but urgent voice. "Heard 'em all night long, couldnt hardly sleep. Warn't nuthin but whippoorwills, hundreds an hundreds of 'em all night long. Come from Harrop's Pocket, but they was so loud they might's well ve been on the porch rail. They're a-waitin' to ketch somebody's soul, just the way they was when Benjy Wheeler died an sister Hough, an Curtis Begbie's wife, Annie. I know, I know—they dun't fool me none. Somebody's a-goin to die—an soon, mark my words."
A strange superstition, surely, I thought. Nevertheless, that night, following a day too busy to permit my making inquiries of the neighbours, I set myself to listening for the whippoorwills. I sat in the darkness at the study window, but there was scarcely any need for light, for a moon but three days from the full shone into the valley and filled it with that green-white light which is the peculiar property of moonlight. Long before darkness came into the valley, it had taken possession of the wooded hills enclosing it; and it was from the dark places in the woods that the first steady whippoorwill began to sound and recur. Previous to the voices of the whippoorwills there had been strangely few of the customary evening songs of birds; only a few nighthawks had appeared against the evening sky to spiral upwards crying shrilly, and plummet down in a breathtaking sky-coast, making an odd zoom at the trough of the dive. But these were no longer visible or audible as darkness fell, and one after another, the whippoorwills began to call.
As darkness invaded the valley, the whippoorwills did likewise. Undeniably, the whippoorwills drifted down out of the hills on noiseless wings towards the house in which I sat. I saw the first one come, a dark object in the moonlight, to the roof of the woodshed; in a matter of moments, another bird followed, then another and another. Soon I saw them come to the ground between the sheds and the house, and I knew they were on the roof of the house itself. They occupied every roof, every fence post. I counted over a hundred of them before I stopped counting, being unsure about their flight-patterns, since I observed some of them moving about from one place to another.
Never once did their calling cease. I used to think that the call of the whippoorwill was a sweetly nostalgic sound, but never again. Surrounding the house, the birds made the most hellish cacophony conceivable; whereas the call of a whippoorwill heard from a distance is mellow and pleasant, the same call heard just outside the window is unbelievably harsh and noisy, a cross between a scream and an angry rattle. Multiplied by scores, the calls were truly maddening, grating on me to such an extent that after an hour of it, following the ordeal of the previous night, I took refuge in cotton stuffed into my ears. Even this afforded but temporary relief, but, with its help and the exhaustion I felt after the sleepless night just past, I was able to sleep after a fashion. My last thought before sleep overcame me was that I must go on about my business without delay, lest I be driven out of my mind by the ceaseless insistence of the whippoorwills which obviously meant to come down out of the hills every night in their season.
I was awake before dawn; the soporific of sleep had worn off, but the whippoorwills had not ceased to call. I sat up on my couch, and presently got up to look out of the window. The birds were still there, though they had moved a little farther away from the house now, and were no longer quite so numerous. A faint hint of dawn shone in the east, and there, too, taking the place of the moon, which had gone down, shone the morning stars—the planet Mars, already well up the eastern heaven, with Venus and Jupiter, less than five degrees above the eastern rim, and glowing with supernal splendour.
I dressed, made myself some breakfast, and for the first time stopped to look at the books my cousin Abel had gathered together. I had given a cursory glance at the open book on the table, but it meant nothing to me, since it appeared to be printed in a type-face which was an imitation of someone's script, and was therefore scarcely legible. Moreover, it concerned alien matters, which seemed to me the veriest fancies of someone's drug-ridden mind. My cousins other books, however, appeared to be of similar nature. A file of the Old Farmers Almanac stood out with welcome familiarity, but this alone was familiar. Though I was never a poorly-read man, I confess to a feeling of utter strangeness before my cousins library, if such it can be called.
Yet a cursory examination of it filled me with a new respect for my cousin, for his abilities certainly exceeded my own in the matter of languages, if he had been able to read all the tomes he had collected. For they were in several languages, as their titles indicated, and most of them had no meaning for me at all. I remembered having vaguely heard of the Rev. Ward Phillips' book, Thaumaturgical Prodigies in the New-English Canaan} but of such books as the Cultes des Govtles, by Comte d'Erlette, De Vermis Mysteriis, by Dr. Ludvig Prinn, Lully's Ars Magna et Ultima} the Pnakotic Manuscripts, the R'lyeh Text, Von Junzt's Unaussprechlichen Kulten, and many other similar titles I had never heard. It did not occur to me, frankly, that these books might contain a key to my cousins disappearance, until later that day, when finally I did take time to make some attempt to see the neighbours, for the purpose of making inquiry among them in the hope of accomplishing more than the men from the sheriff's office.
I went first to the Giles place, which was approximately one mile up into the hills directly south of my cousins house. My reception was not encouraging. Abbey Giles, a tall, gaunt woman, saw me from the window, and, shaking her head, refused to come to the door. As I stood in the yard, wondering how I could convince her that I was not dangerous, Lem Giles came hurriedly from the barn; the belligerence of his gaze gave me pause.
"What re ye wantin here, Stranger?" he asked.
Though he called me "Stranger," I felt that he knew me perfectly well. I introduced myself and explained that I was endeavouring to learn the truth about my cousins disappearance. Could he tell me anything about Abel?
"Cant tell ye nutin," he said shortly. "Go ast the sheriff; I tol' him everything I got to say."
"I think people hereabouts know more than they are saying," I said firmly.
"Might be. But they ain't sayin' it, and that's a fact."
More than this I could not get out of Lem Giles. I went on to the Corey place, but no one was at home there; so I took a ridge path I was confident would lead me to the Hutchins place, as it did. But before I could get to the house, I was seen from one of the hill fields, someone hailed me, and I found myself confronting a barrel-chested man half a head taller than myself, who demanded truculently to know where I was going.
"I'm on my way to Hutchins," I said.
"No need your goin, then," he said. "They ain't to home. I work for 'em. Name's Amos Whateley.”
But I had spoken to Amos Whateley before; I recognized his voice as t hat of the man who early that morning told me to "git aout o' there as fast as ye c'n git!" I looked at him for a minute in silence.
"I'm Dan Harrop," I said finally. "I came up here to find out what happened to my cousin Abel, and I mean to find out."
I could see that he had known who I was. He stood considering me for a moment before he spoke. "An if ye find out, ye'll go?"
"I have no other reason for staying."
He seemed indecisive, still, as if he did not trust me. "Ye'll sell the haouse?" he wanted to know.
"I cant use it."
"I'll tell ye then," he said with abrupt decision. "Yer cousin, him as was Abel Harrop, was took off by Them from Aoutside. He called 'em an They come." He paused suddenly as he had begun to speak, his dark eyes searching my face.
"Ye dun't believe," he cried. "Ye dun't know!"
"Know what?" I asked.
"Abaout Them from Aoutside." He looked distressed. "I hadn't to a tol' ye, then. Ye'll pay no mind to me."
I tried to be patient, and explained once more that I wanted only to know what had happened to Abel.
But he was no longer interested in my cousin's fate. Still searching my face keenly, he demanded, "The books! Hev ye read the books?”
I shook my head.
"I tell ye to burn 'em—burn 'em all, afore it's too late!" He spoke with almost fanatic insistence. "I know whut's in 'em, summat.”
It was this strange adjuration which ultimately sent me to the books my cousin had left.
That evening I sat down at the table where my cousin must so often have sat, by the light of the same lamp, with the chorus of whippoorwills already rising outside, to look with greater care at the book my cousin had been reading. I discovered almost at once, to my astonishment, that the print which I had mistaken for an imitation of script was indeed script, and I had, further, the uncomfortable conviction that the manuscript, which had no title, was bound in human skin. Certainly it was very old, and it had the appearance of having been put together of scattered sheets of paper, on which its compiler had copied sentences and pages from books not his to own. Some of it was in Latin, some in French, some in English; though the writer s script was too execrable to permit any assurance in reading the Latin or French, I could make out the English after some study.
Most of it was plainly gibberish, but there were two pages which my cousin—or some previous reader—had marked in red crayon, and these I deemed must have been of some signal importance to Abel. I set about to make some sort of clarity out of the crabbed script. The first of them was fortunately short.
"To summon Yogge-Sothothe from the Outside, be wise to wait upon the Sun in the Fifth House, when Saturn is in trine; draw the pentagram of fire, and speak the Ninth Verse thrice, repeating which each Roodemas and Hallow s Eve causeth the Thing to breed in the Outside Spaces beyond the gate, of which Yogge-Sothothe is the Guardian. The once will not bring Him, but may bring Another Who is likewise desirous of growth, and if He have not the blood of Another, He may seek thine own. Therefore be not unwise in these things."
To this my cousin had written a postcript: "Cf. page 71 in Text" Putting aside this reference, I turned to the other marked page, but no matter how carefully I read it, I could not make out of it anything but a highly fanciful rigmarole evidently copied faithfully from a far older manuscript—
" Concern g ye Old Ones, 'tis writ, they wait evr at ye Gate, & ye Gate is all places at all times, for They know noth'g of time or place but are in all time & in all place togethr without appearg to be, & there are those amongst Them which can assume divers Shapes & Featurs & any gi'n Shape & any giv'n Face & ye Gates are for Them everywhere, but ye 1st, was that which I caus'd to be op'd, Namely, in Irem, ye City of Pillars, ye City under ye Desert, but wher r men sayeth ye forbidd'n Words, they shall cause there a Gate to be established & shall wait upon Them Who Come through ye Gate, ev'n as ye Dhols, & ye Abomin. Mi-Go, & ye Tcho-Tcho peop., & ye Deep Ones. & ye Gugs, & ye Gaunts of ye Night & ye Shoggoths & ye Voormis, & ye Shantaks which guard Kadath in ye Colde Waste & ye Plateau Leng. All are alike ye Children of ye Elder Gods, but ye Great Race of Yith & ye Gr. Old Ones fail'g to agree, one with another, & boath with ye Elder Gods, separat'd, leav'g ye Gr. Old Ones in possession of ye Earth, while ye Great Race, return’g from Yith took up Their Abode forward in Time in Earth-Land not yet known to those who walk ye Earth today, & there wait till there shall come again ye winds & ye Voices which drove Them forth before & That which Walketh on ye Winds over ye Earth & in ye spaces that are among ye Stars forev'r."
I read this with amazement and wonder, but since it meant nothing to me, I returned to the original marked page and attempted to puzzle meaning out of that. I could not, save that I had an uneasy memory of Amos Whateley's reference to "Them Outside." I guessed, finally, that my cousins appended note referred to the Riyeh Text; so I took up this slender volume and looked to the indicated page.
My language-study was unfortunately not thorough enough to read the page with any sure meaning, but it appeared to be a formula or chant summoning some ancient being in which some primitive peoples had evidently once believed. I went through it uncertainly in silence; then I read it slowly aloud, but it seemed to have no greater meaning audibly, except only as a curious aspect of ancient religious credos, for to such facets of existence I deemed it was related.
By the time I rose wearily from the books, the whippoorwills had once again taken possession of the valley. I put out the light and looked into the moonlit darkness beyond the house. The birds were there, as before; they made dark shadows on the grass, on the roofs. In the moonlight they had a strange appearance of being uncannily distorted, and they were certainly abnormally large birds. I had thought of whippoorwills as not more than ten inches in length, but these birds were easily twelve and fourteen inches long, and of an equivalent thickness, so that they appeared singularly large. Doubtless, however, this was due to some trick of moonlight and shadow, acting upon a tired and already overburdened imagination. But there was no gainsaying the fact that the vehemence and loudness of their calls was in ratio to their apparently abnormal size. There was considerably less movement among them that night, however, and I had an uneasy conviction that they sat there calling as if calling to someone or something or as if waiting for something to happen, so that Hester Hutchins' hushed urgent voice came back to my mind with disturbing persistence, "They're a-waitin to ketch somebody's soul. . ."
2
THE STRANGE EVENTS which subsequently took place at my cousins house date from that night. Whatever it was that set it in motion, some malign force seemed to possess the entire valley. Sometime during that night I woke, convinced that something more than the ceaseless storming of the whippoorwills gave voice in the moonlit dark. I lay listening, almost instantly wide awake, listening for whatever it was, listening until the endless whippoorwill screaming from a thousand throats seemed to mark the very pulsing of my blood, the throbbing of the spheres!
Then I heard it—and listened—and doubted the evidence of my own ears.
A kind of chanting, rising momentarily to ululation, but certainly in a tongue I did not know. Even now I cannot describe it with any adequacy. Perhaps, if one could imagine turning on several radio stations at once and listening to alien languages pouring forth from each one, hopelessly jumbled, it might establish a sort of parallel. Yet, there seemed to be a kind of pattern, and, try as I migh