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The Dunwich horror

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Title: The Dunwich horror

Author: H. P. Lovecraft

 
Release date: October 4, 2015 [eBook #50133]
 Most recently updated: September 11, 2025

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/50133

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DUNWICH HORROR ***

[Transcriber's note: This etext was produced from Weird Tales April
1929. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed.]

 _The_ Dunwich Horror

 by H. P. LOVECRAFT

 "Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimeras--dire stories of Celæno and
 the Harpies--may reproduce themselves in the brain of
 superstition--_but they were there before_. They are transcripts,
 types--the archetypes are in us, and eternal. How else should the
 recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come
 to affect us at all? Is it that we naturally conceive terror from
 such objects, considered in their capacity of being able to
 inflict upon us bodily injury? Oh, least of all! _These terrors
 are of older standing. They date beyond body_--or without the
 body, they would have been the same.... That the kind of fear here
 treated is purely spiritual--that it is strong in proportion as it
 is objectless on earth, that it predominates in the period of our
 sinless infancy--are difficulties the solution of which might
 afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and
 a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence."--Charles
 Lamb: _Witches and Other Night-Fears_.

1

When a traveler in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork
at the junction of the Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean's Corners he
comes upon a lonely and curious country. The ground gets higher, and
the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts
of the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent forest belts
seem too large, and the wild weeds, brambles, and grasses attain a
luxuriance not often found in settled regions. At the same time the
planted fields appear singularly few and barren; while the sparsely
scattered houses wear a surprizing uniform aspect of age, squalor, and
dilapidation. Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions
from the gnarled, solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling
doorsteps or in the sloping, rock-strewn meadows. Those figures are
so silent and furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden
things, with which it would be better to have nothing to do. When a
rise in the road brings the mountains in view above the deep woods,
the feeling of strange uneasiness is increased. The summits are too
rounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and
sometimes the sky silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circles
of tall stone pillars with which most of them are crowned.

Gorges and ravines of problematical depth intersect the way, and the
crude wooden bridges always seem of dubious safety. When the road
dips again there are stretches of marshland that one instinctively
dislikes, and indeed almost fears at evening when unseen whippoorwills
chatter and the fireflies come out in abnormal profusion to dance to
the raucous, creepily insistent rhythms of stridently piping bullfrogs.
The thin, shining line of the Miskatonic's upper reaches has an oddly
serpentlike suggestion as it winds close to the feet of the domed hills
among which it rises.

As the hills draw nearer, one heeds their wooded sides more than their
stone-crowned tops. Those sides loom up so darkly and precipitously
that one wishes they would keep their distance, but there is no road by
which to escape them. Across a covered bridge one sees a small village
huddled between the stream and the vertical slope of Round Mountain,
and wonders at the cluster of rotting gambrel roofs bespeaking an
earlier architectural period than that of the neighboring region. It
is not reassuring to see, on a closer glance, that most of the houses
are deserted and falling to ruin, and that the broken-steepled church
now harbors the one slovenly mercantile establishment of the hamlet.
One dreads to trust the tenebrous tunnel of the bridge, yet there is no
way to avoid it. Once across, it is hard to prevent the impression of a
faint, malign odor about the village street, as of the massed mold and
decay of centuries. It is always a relief to get clear of the place,
and to follow the narrow road around the base of the hills and across
the level country beyond till it rejoins the Aylesbury pike. Afterward
one sometimes learns that one has been through Dunwich.

Outsiders visit Dunwich as seldom as possible, and since a certain
season of horror all the signboards pointing toward it have been taken
down. The scenery, judged by any ordinary esthetic canon, is more
than commonly beautiful; yet there is no influx of artists or summer
tourists. Two centuries ago, when talk of witch-blood, Satan-worship,
and strange forest presences was not laughed at, it was the custom to
give reasons for avoiding the locality. In our sensible age--since
the Dunwich horror of 1928 was hushed up by those who had the town's
and the world's welfare at heart--people shun it without knowing
exactly why. Perhaps one reason--though it can not apply to uninformed
strangers--is that the natives are now repellently decadent, having
gone far along that path of retrogression so common in many New England
backwaters. They have come to form a race by themselves, with the
well-defined mental and physical stigmata of degeneracy and inbreeding.
The average of their intelligence is wofully low, whilst their annals
reek of overt viciousness and of half-hidden murders, incests, and
deeds of almost unnamable violence and perversity. The old gentry,
representing the two or three armigerous families which came from
Salem in 1692, have kept somewhat above the general level of decay;
though many branches are sunk into the sordid populace so deeply that
only their names remain as a key to the origin they disgrace. Some of
the Whateleys and Bishops still send their eldest sons to Harvard and
Miskatonic, though those sons seldom return to the moldering gambrel
roofs under which they and their ancestors were born.

No one, even those who have the facts concerning the recent horror,
can say just what is the matter with Dunwich; though old legends speak
of unhallowed rites and co

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