The Dunwich Romance (16 page)

He drop that jar right away, and I never figured a man could scream like this one did, more like a sheep being gutted than a terrorfied human being. He take one lookit me with my tentaclettes all abuzzin, and I sware his eyes come half out his head! I guess the man was so clutched up in fear that it keep the blood up his dick so it stay hard, and it is reel funny seein a naykid man scream but, well, for some reeson its EVEN FUNNIER when that naykid man be screamin with a hard dick. Anyway, he keep screemin and then try to run off, but one uv my tentaclettes shoot way out and trip him so he fall flat on his face. I pull my trousers down and let my probosciduct come out, and when he see THAT I thought he would up and die. I sent its node lickety split rite up his ass and take a shit. Was a ample meal I eat last night with Sary and likewise it was an ample shit. Packed it all right up inta the middle of his bowels I guess theyre called. Would like to know what thoughts go threw his head when he realize he been filt up with another man’s shit. And filt up he was too cos when my probosciduct get done, that piss-ant skinny reprobate scumm werent skinny no more. Belly stuck out on him like Henry Wheeler! “That’s for what ye done ta Sary,” I tell him, and when he herd the name his mouth fall open, but then I add, “and so is this,” and I sent my dominant tentaclette straight down his throte. His belly then get even more bigger cos my tentaclette done empty all that cum from the jars into his stomach. “Ye be et UP with sickness of the head, mister,” I told him, “to make Sary drink your jism, and then save it up all this time sinct she leave, fixin ta make her drink it again. What be WRONG with you?” Guess he didn’t heer me thogh, cos his eyes go all crost and look like he was goin to swound.

But now was tyme to do whut I come for.

My probosciduct wrap round his chest like a snake and then constrikt, and you could heer all his rib bones crack at once. I know I hadda move fast bfore he get all cut up inside and go unconscious and die. I fold him right over, a-pushin his head inta his lap, and, see, with his ribs all broke he could be made to lean over farther than natural, and that’s when I say, “I heer ye like ta have yer dick sucked, so’s now ye can suck it yourself, and if ye dun’t, I’ll take the top off that woodstove and put you in alive.”

Know what he did then?

Yes, sir, he start to suckin his dick.

I make him do it quite a while, and his crackd ribs be grindin and he’s whimpuring fieerce and a-cryin like a liddle gurl. Gave me a good feelin to see such a evil fella doin this to hisself, but I knew I best finish up heer and get back to Sary. I keep his head down tween his legs so he keep suckin, and then I send two of my tentaclettes each into his ears, and they started gnawing through till they get to his brain, and then they start eatin his brain-meat. He be convulsin’ about then—dick still in his mouth, mind ye—and finally the tentaclettes eet up enough of his brain that he die.

That make my heart sing, it really did, cos the way I calclate it, there be a no more proper way for a fella like this to die than to die with his own dick in his mouth, a belly full of his own cum, and more of my shit up his backside than his own.

I found a can uv lamp oil and throwed it all around the place and put plenny on him too, then run a line to the kitchen. The wood stove be too hot for me to lay my hand on of corse, but not too hot for my probosciduct cuase Grandsire say there be no heat nor fire from the earth that can hurt it, so it knock the whole woodstove over and the spilt coals catch, and then that line of oil turn to fire and run rite back to Sary’s father, and that be that. Not a minnute later, I’m a-walkin through the woods at a leeshurly pace and that shitty little cabin with the shitty little man in it be all ablazin’.

Twelve

The advent of Sary into Wilbur’s life and he into hers unfolded as something essentially domestic, and inaugurated into their psyches a sense of contentedness, joy, and synergism that, to objective onlookers, would have seemed, indeed, marital. The broken pieces of one’s life were abstractly reassembled by the influence and even the mere presence of the other. To Wilbur, his personal dreams had come to be, and to Sary, she could scarcely believe that life could take place in such a train of wonder.

Though they never utilized the word, they were, for all intents and purposes, in love, and before them both blossomed all the ingredients of a wonderful life together. It was regrettable, then, that such a life would go on for but five more days. Of this, Sary hadn’t an inkling.

Wilbur, on the other hand, was in possession of a fair idea that he would be wise to cherish his time with Sary, for time was as of vapor, or of a bird on a wire.

***

It needs to be retailed, however, that the pair’s newfound domesticity, contentedness, and compatibility ensued along with a veritable
extravaganza
of sexual intercourse.

***

Though many bridges of dubious safety existed in Dunwich, the one worthy of the most remark was the covered, log-spanned bridge just beyond Dean’s Corners. If anything of a “landmark” might be referred to in that sordid little carbuncle of a village, this was it. The bridge extended across a more than meager brook which joined the Miskatonic a mile downstream, just as it canted away from the precipitous Round Mountain. In 1694, before the first incarnation of the bridge had been constructed, the men of the settlement’s earliest colonists had poisoned the water with carrion and Paris Green, knowing that said water flowed directly through the camp of the aboriginal Pocumtuck Indians, sickening and/or killing scores of squaws and infants, as the adult male contingent of the tribe was out on the hunt. In 1701, the first bridge was built, the same year that the village’s original designation, “New Dunnich,” had been changed boldly to
Dunwich,
a more direct reference to a legend-cursed hamlet in south eastern England (which had had a fierce repute for black magic and children gone missing) before it was ordered razed in the late sixteenth century by a Court of the Oyer and Terminer; but the accuracy of this information is open to debate. Another questionable rumor persisted as well (regarding the bridge itself, in fact): that the larch logs which comprised its first crossing platform had come from a not-far-off woodland in which still more of the Pocumtucks had been slaughtered via an ambush perpetrated by the next generation of Dunwich men, in 1719. Several of the comeliest squaws had been abducted, lashed to the trees of this wood, and barbarously tortured (with much attention paid to their sexual parts), such that their screams had traveled with sufficient tenor; hence, the “bait” of the “trap” had been set. When the warriors had embarked on what they perceived as a rescue, the Dunwich militia had been waiting with flintlocks, pitch and torches, and blunderbusses. This massacre had effectuated the extinction of the Pocumtuck tribe in His Majesty’s Colony of the Massachusetts-Bay.

The fact that, in after-years, more than a few Dunwichers had hanged themselves from the coupling spikes of the bridge gave further fuel to the legend of its provenance. It was beneath this bridge that the Reverend Abijah Hoadley had performed the town’s first Congregational christening, in 1746; and in the same water, a year later, that the reverend himself had been drowned quite protractedly. His body, after much violent molestation, had then been fed to swine by what some regarded as the local “coven,” presided over by one Silas Ephriam Whateley, a darkly prominent ancestor to Wilbur, and lineal progenitor of those of the Whateley Clan who would choose occultism, incest, and fervid isolation over Puritan society; and Lammas Night, Roodmas, and All Hallows Even over Easter, Advent, and the Yule. During the hours of darkness, a fair number of girls, women, and, lo, even a few boys had been raped on the bridge; and more than seldom had been the time when backwater strumpets (such as Sary) had plied the enterprises of their trade, only to receive, as the goes the adage, a bit “more than they bargained for.” Persons had been murdered on this bridge as well, by the highwaymen of olden times and occasional transients afflicted by malignancies of the brain. Three men had been gelded on the bridge; and one woman, the wife of a bean farmer named Saltonstall, had been “...confront’d b’fore her, while yet behind, and tooke against her Will unto ye Bridge which be know’d as ye
Deane’s Corners Bridge,
and then promptlie and with overmuch Violence
strip’d
of all Garment, and thereby forc’d unto Carnal Knowledge with more than severall Men not recognizable to her; where next, she be held down whilst severall barking curs be brung to this most Hideous Scene which then did procede, likewise, to engage in
Unnaturall Consorte
most offensive to God and Abominable in the uttermost to Scripture, upon much Goading and Urging, whilst ye Divellish Perpetrators did Hoot, and did make Exclamations of Laughter, and did clappe their Hands in Plutonian Glee; whereupon—horrid to convey!—this Pore Woman, devout’d Servant of God, be by Knife divorc’d of her Naturall Bosom and then—Lord, protect us!—scalp’d in ye Manner of ye Savages, (yet
not
by Savages so did she spake), not of any Hair upon ye Crown of her Head but yet of her most
Privat Hair,
which be then Made Away With amid Laughter and Revell worthie of Lucifer ye Morning Star himself,” asserted the criminal complaint filed with the Scrivener and Clerk of the High-Sheriff. The victim, whose name was Charity Saltonstall, survived for more than a year after the excruciating crime, well long enough to bear the child wrought by the rape, a female-child who would be given the name Melany. Melany, later at the tender age of thirteen, would step onto the bridge and cut her own throat from one jaw-corner to the other, but only after setting fire to the schoolhouse, in which five of her classmates perished. Her teacher perished as well, a Mr. Peaslee, whom diary entries would posthumously reveal to have been sexually seduced by Melany for several years.

Sundry other mutilations, emasculations, disfigurements, and less precise mayhem had also taken place on or in vicinity to the bridge, most with no motives whatever; and during the times of the witch-panics, a drove of women (most of whom were perfectly innocent) had been first branded with Our Savior’s mark upon the bosom and the privates, and then dunked into the rushing water below, urged to confess. Given all of this, the perpetual hearthside whispers of grandams was no wonder: that the bridge and its surrounding wood was ghoulishly and indelibly haunted.

Wilbur, however, harbored no such preposterous beliefs.

But it is more than incidental to point out that his first
kiss
had occurred on that very bridge, and the sensation of Sary’s lips pressed so unreservedly to his may have caused him to actually weep. Sary’s heart—indeed, her very
spirit
—revolved around Wilbur as surely as the moon revolved around the God’s Earth. For the first instance in his life, Wilbur was held with unflinching acceptance, not repugnance; and this seemed more than he could believe. Yet believe it he did, for the young woman’s devotion was so plain that its authenticity could not be questioned. Not only his unnatural height, nor his shocking visual aspect, but far more intricate characteristics had been, one way or another, observed by his young paramour. The presence of his twenty tentaclettes beneath his shirt, for example, and the snakelike bulge of his probosciduct running down his left pant leg: these traits had surely come to Sary’s notice, just as his unrepresentative genitals and semen had already, yet she shewed no sign of revulsion, shock, or alarm. And now, upon the noontime of July’s thirtieth day, they kissed quite heatedly under the bridge’s rickety wooden awning, which provided but a few openings to permit the entrance of fresh air. When Sary’s tongue delved into Wilbur’s mouth, it did not hesitate when it came into contact with his own tongue, which was, in fact, forked. She even moaned when the oral investigation made this discovery, almost as if Wilbur’s atypicalities
enhanced
the moxie of her arousal.

It needs to be established that Wilbur was not, by any stretch of interpretation, intellectually challenged, though most took him to be due to his countrified manner, regional vernacular, and speech impediment. On the contrary, aspects of his paternity very much left him equipped to cogitate the length, breadth, and depth of the geometrical sciences, quantum calculus and its inherent syntactic systems, and, indeed, the furthest reaches of even the most combinatoric mathematical thesis—even to the extent that the likes of Wilhelm Gottfried Leibniz and Sir Isaac Newton would feel wholly inept. Similarly, the giant’s powers of intellect could be questioned even less due to the fact that he’d taught himself fluent Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, German (along with many participles no longer in use), multiple provincials of Arabic, and also the Alko, Pnakotic, and Eltdown tongues and several more languages with no cradle to the earth. As he’d grown older, in his own personal journal writings—however brilliantly ciphered via an artificial alphabet of his own invention—he elected to scribe in local dialect, in order to leave a shadow of his personality for any who might follow his reverential footsteps, and he had taken up the rather lazy habit of spelling words incorrectly in his haste, but this was but a quibble. The fact remained: Wilbur Whateley was an uncompromised genius of all objective sciences his calling required.