The Dunwich Romance (23 page)

And what he needed was ammunition.

Taking chances—or, worse, taking blessings for granted—was a sin he could not well afford, for tomorrow night, indeed, was the time. He remembered too well the guard dog near the Miskatonic library, and in spite of several physiological advantages, Wilbur knew that the dog was fortified with reflexes which surpassed his own, and harbored fangs and jaws that might very well make simpleton’s work of his tentaclettes and even his probosciduct. Wilbur, in fact, had been
plagued
by vicious dogs all his life; he could scarcely embark on a leisurely stroll without some such hostile cur, enraged by his scent, tearing after him. Grandsire’s big pistol had forestalled many a canine confrontation, much to the displeasure of the dogs’ masters.

But not only was Wilbur running out of bullets for the formidable Webley .455, the cartridges his did possess were so old as to be of questionable reliability. Twice now, he’d had to repel attacks only to have the weapon’s hammer fall on a defective primer; and though engaging the next round was but a matter of seconds, seconds were insufficient in certain instances. Wilbur was not afraid to die, but he knew that he must
not
die—or be grievously injured—before he discharged his all-important task on the night of the morrow.

Osborn’s had stopped carrying the peculiar caliber Wilbur needed; and even when they’d most recently had it in stock, they’d refused to sell to him. “Ya big ass-ugly freak! Yer face looks like the devil’s bunghole, and ye smell even
wuss!
” Tobias railed at him once. “Ye think I’m a-gonna sell ammunition to the likes of
ye?
Ya done already kilt half the dogs in the village, ya cockeyed monster! I’ll have me no truck with the blood’a Wizard Whateley! Naow git aout!” Wilbur was surprised not at all by his cousin’s hostile rant. “Yer bleach-faced ma sucked my dick onct, fer a haff-pint’a hooch,” the old misanthrope saw fit to add. “I pushed up that trash-cloth dress’a hers and gandered her pussy and—sweet Jesus!—the sight give me
nightmares,
boy! Look like a blammed
woodchuck
with a
ax-cut
in it!” Wilbur was none too pleased to hear such talk about his mother, yet he doubted the rant was invention; hence, it wouldn’t have been ethical to hex the old man for mere words.

All that aside, the young colossan could ponder no other resort but to travel hither to Aylesbury to procure the necessary bullets. The piddling lock on the ammunition cabinet came apart with a single tug, then—

Disappointment.

The .455 cartridges Wilbur so desperately needed were not in the store’s inventory. And since the establishment sold only ammunition, and not firearms as well, Wilbur’s trek had been a profitless one.

The gods be a-testin’ me,
he could only presume, for to exhibit agitation would be to reveal an absence of faith. No time remained for him to venture to another town.
I’ll jess have to hope ta Yog-Sothoth that them old bullets I got’ll fire.

Wilbur felt no fear at the prospect. He would simply discharge his task to the best of his ability, or die in the endeavor. Yes, he felt certain beyond doubt: the gods were testing him.

But when the drone came into his head only moments later, he knew that another test was upon him. He’d only just quitted the store and commenced through the woods toward the Aylesbury Pike when he’d stopped to stand stock-still. It wasn’t a seizure, nor any manner of ringing in the ears. Instead, this could be described as a
visual
drone, and he knew at once from whence it came.

His brother.

***

Wilbur, awkwardly as he appeared, ran all the way back home. It was the psychic coupling that existed between himself and his twin brother that had heralded his haste, and that same ethereal tether that showed him most of everything which had occurred back at his grandfather’s house, to a level of detail as accurate as if he’d been physically present. Wilbur’s clumsy trot foreshortened the several-hour walk to a span of under an hour; and when he arrived at the property—winded, flushed, and oozing netherworldly perspiration—he audibly cried out thanks to his Yog-Sothoth and his retinue when he found Sary asleep and unharmed in the cot. He leaned over, teary-eyed, and kissed her on the cheek. He prepared to depute with exigency to the house but found several trace scents afflicting his nostrils. A dank
reptilian
smell? And the tinge of unwashed female genitals of a particular nature as to remind him of his
mother?
Also a scent apart from all of that, much more concise: cologne. Dunwichers were not known to have much use for cologne but Wilbur could not forget the homemade fragrance his grandfather concocted—with orange-flower oil and lavender—to wear on special occasions. A slow swerve of his head showed him the
Necronomicon
where he’d left it on the desk, no longer opened to Page 751. The ancient sheets of vellum now displayed Page 415, and the transition detailing the proper execution of the Voorish Sign.

That would certainly explain the haunting redolences within the shed.

Outside, the issuance of a chuckle could not be forborne when he discerned no physical vestige of Joe Czanek and Manny Silva. Wilbur envisioned with revel their gruesome deaths, relayed by the connexion betwixt himself and his leviathanic brother, and seen through the latter’s plethora of eyes; and he could smell their remains being digested therein. It was a rich, syrupy aroma, as often was the case of vile men who’d died inundated in fear and horror. So acute was that psychic cordage that
Wilbur himself
could faintly taste the reprobate scoundrels like after-flavors upon his own tongue.

At the violated window, he made the Voorish Sign and engaged in some telepathic confabulation. His brother smiled at him—a dolorous smile, of course—and Wilbur nodded and smiled as well. The grim acknowledgment flickered between them, though said acknowledgment came as neither much of a surprise nor much of a shock to either of them.

He boarded the window back up, then turned, cheeks still damp with tears, and he gazed at the lopsided moon. The icy light enlivened him. A beautiful world it truly was...

He whispered praise and thanks, turning for the shed. His strides were made with confidence and resolve. He knew he would not see his brother again.

***

Sary stood tense and wide-eyed when Wilbur returned to the tool-house. The carriage clock’s chime-like peals were just now expending four o’clock in the morning. Wilbur was well aware of the graveness of the situation, but the sight of Sary arrested all possibility of him speaking of it.

Never before had he seen her so beautiful than in just that pristine wee-hour moment.

Naked she remained, her breasts alert, even inflamed. Her body’s contours could not have been more preeminent if they’d been chiseled by a Michelangelo or a Desiderio. The flat bright-white of her belly, the curvaceous legs, the stark black wedge of private hair—all converged to project into Wilbur an alchemy of ardor, attraction, and of
love
more empowered than the passion which launched a thousand ships. Against the flawless skin, the lamplight wavered, suggesting a sudden complexity emerging within the simple woman. Her hair spilled about her lambent shoulders like ink blacker than any shadow cast upon the earth.

Her lips parted to speak but a further cogitation stifled them.

She be it,
Wilbur knew.

Her wide eyes scintillated; where often they reflected naivety or confusion they now blazed a
keenness
he’d never noticed in her before, not quite the keenness of cabalistic understanding, nor even of revelation—that would arrive later—but a
thirst...

A thirst to
learn.

“Sary,” Wilbur whispered. This spectacular vision of her parched his throat.

“Sumpin’ happened,” she whispered back.

“I know it. And I know ye seen it yourself”—his eyes gestured the opened book—“by larnin’ ye haow to do the Voorish.”

“I hope yew ain’t flustered with me fer meddlin’ where I shouldn’t have been, but...
naow?
I got the feelin’ that it’s sumpin I
need
to know.”

“It ‘tis,” Wilbur affirmed. “And theer en’t no setch thing as meddlin’ when it come to one’s mind haow they got a
callin’.
A callin’ to be part’a suthin’ that be bigger’n all of us set together.”

To these words, Sary’s eyes went ever the wider.

“Them two fellas who come heer dun’t caount fer nothin’,” he explained. “Mebbe the gods sent ‘em special, so to show you suthin’. The gods work that way sometimes. They make us
earn
our blessin’s.” Wilbur pointed in the direction of the house. “That One in there, wal...it be my brother.”

This disclosure alarmed Sary not in the least; indeed, if anything, it answered some of her inner queries, of which there must be a multitude.

“It be my twin, come aout’a my ma right after me, on the Candlemas, 1915. See, I en’t old as ye must’ve supposed. The way I be, I grow fast, and that One inside? It grow ever faster. Where I went tonight was to fetch some new—”

“Bullets,” she said in a drone.

“Ee-yuh. On accaount them ones I got in the tin be real old setch that some of ‘em dun’t fire. But that place didn’t have none.”

Sary’s posture fidgeted.

“Dun’t worry. I en’t afeared. Either Yog-Sothoth’ll protect me, or he wun’t, and if he wun’t, it only mean I en’t worthy.”

“We’ll know soon,” came Sary’s cryptic remark.

This was a good sign. She was learning already, simply through the transpositional effect of proximity to Wilbur’s brother. It was esoteria. It was science disguised as occult mystery—a pheromonal transduction of
knowledge
—for human sensibility did not exist broadly enough to understand. It
never
had. “We will, for sure,” he said. “I’ll tell ye what I can tonight, and if’n things go as I gotta mind they might, ye’ll larn plennie more in time. Tonight be the night I gotta go—”

“To Arkham,” she uttered. “To the college.”

“That’s right. I need to be there after midnight...when the stars are right.”

Finally, Sary moved from where she’d been standing still as an erotic chess piece. She came over and hugged Wilbur desperately.

The words gushed against Wilbur’s shirt. “I’m afraid, Wilbur.”

“En’t no reason to be,” he assured her, wrapping his great arms about her. The heat from her naked body seeped into him. “En’t no setch things as endin’s—Grandsire teached me that. An endin’ en’t nuthin’ but a beginnin’ to suthin’ else more important—least ways, I mean, for thems that prove themselves desarvin’ of the favor of the gods. Them gods? They’ve
always
been good ta me.”

She was shivering. “I’m afraid for
yew.
That somethin’ bad’ll happen.”

“En’t nuthin’ bad
can
happen ta me,” he began to assure her, but then thought it more serviceable to leave off the rest of the doctrinal explanation: the City between the magnetic poles, the Dho and the Dho-Hna, the
Spiritum
in Aeternum,
the Yr and the Nhhngr, and the Transfiguration. She would learn it all at the proper time, from the book. “Nor nuthin’ ta happen ta ye, neither,” he whispered. “That I sware afore all I hold dear.”

Wilbur leaned back and took off his shirt. Sary did not recoil—she
rejoiced
—at this full sight of his writhing, mouth-tipped tentaclettes. She seemed to turn boneless in his strong arms, her sex running with excited fluids. His probosciduct reared, then gently entered her vagina, to pulsate; while a salvo of tentaclettes converged upon her nipples and clitoris, to ever-so-gingerly suck.

Wilbur carried Sary to the cot, lowered her there, then turned out the lantern.

***

Most of the final twenty-four hours of Wilbur Whateley’s life can only be epitomized via estimation, not documentation. It can, though, be authoritatively intimated that the physical demonstrations of his love for Sary were most copious—indeed, such that for her final few hours she would spend in his proximity, she could barely stand on her own two feet. It was true that Wilbur needed to be inconspicuously deployed near the main library of Miskatonic University no later than midnight on August third, when the Moon assumed a nine-degree ecliptic belt, and Antares, Saturn, and Betelgeuse formed a Cavalieri right triangle; this would require Wilbur to part from Sary’s company by two p.m. on the second, so that he might engage the bus that would permit of his venture to Arkham. Sary struggled to stand when her lover made this information plain, demanding, “Won’t take me a speck of time to get dressed,” she asserted, “and I’ll come with yew,” but Wilbur had no choice but to disallow the offer, in spite of its kindliness. “Naw, Sary, mutch as I’d like ta have ye with me, it jess carn’t be. Yew best stay here, but with any luck, I’ll be back tomorrow afternoon, sence them’s the ways the bus work, for it only run twice a day.” “No!” she rejected, “I’m comin’ with yew! I’ve got a mind yew plan ta steal a book they got at the college, and I gotta mind tew it’ll be dangerous!” Wilbur was quite taken by the expeditiousness with which she presumed to assist him, yet still he had to say, “I wun’t let ye come with me, Sary, for ‘tis true, mebbe it ‘twill be dangerous, and there en’t no way on the airth that I’ll allow no harm ta git near ye. And it ain’t stealin’ I’m fixin’ ta do, jess...borrowin’.” Fatigued from the previous tumult of intercourse and sexual variation, Sary nearly toppled trying to get into her dress, but she managed a most indignant glare, pointed a finger, and exclaimed, “I’m a-
goin’
, Wilbur Whateley, and if yew think’a leavin’ withaout me, I will pitch a fit far wuss than any storm yew ever see!” “I got me no daoubt ye would,” Wilbur replied, and smiled deeply at her resolve. What a wonder this was. All his life he never thought the day would dawn when a woman would demand to be part of his life.
Ee-yuh, I love her sooooo mutch. Thank ye,Yog-Sothoth...
“Sorry ye carn’t have your way on this, Sary,” he began, still smiling his love for her as recited one of the Eltdown Languor Spells which made her fall asleep so fast she did so on her feet. Wilbur caught her, held her a while, and put her to bed. He looked at her with adoration, and whispered, “I love ye, Sary.”