The Dunwich Romance (24 page)

Then he grabbed his canvas carry-sack and took his leave of the tool-house.

Sary’s perceptivity, however, was quite on the mark. Though Wilbur wasn’t
sure
of the evening’s outcome, some assistance would prove very advantageous. Out on the Aylesbury Pike, when his awkward form arrived at the bus stop, it was none other than Kyler the psychic who was arriving as well. “Hey, Kyler,” Wilbur greeted. “Yew a-waitin’ on the bus?” “Aye, jest as are ye,” the eccentric black-clad man replied. “Though it may not be credited by ye that I am subject to portents mysterious indeed, I’ve received it of goodly authority that it may be in ye’re best interest to have me near.”

Wilbur nodded, amused. “I never said I dun’t believe yew’re a soothsayer—”

The bright sun shined on the lame man’s bald head, though his face remained peculiarly shadowed. “For what ye be in sarch of come in the waye of letters.”

Letters, Wilbur thought with a pause. Did the cryptic man with the cane mean letters as of correspondence? Or letters, as of...the alphabet? Wilbur had no choice but to ponder this with some fascination.

“And for they who venture well into the night? Wal, oft times, when one be not on his proper guard,” Kyler went on with nonchalance, “the night comes bearing teeth.”

Teeth,
Wilbur thought.
That dang guard dog...

After a time, Wilbur said, “I be mutch obliged if ye come with me, Kyler, for I may well need ta ask a favor.”

Kyler nodded. “Aye, if I could only ask ye to pay my fare.”

“Oh, a’course, I will. ’Tis the least I can dew. As well I can offer ye this gold piece so’s ya know the extent’a my gratitude,” and then Wilbur offered him a mint-condition Saxon Offa coin struck in 1011 A.D., which would easily bring in ten dollars from a jeweler (but a thousand dollars from a qualified collector or auction house.)

“Nay, Wilbur. No money can be took by me from a friend.”

Wilbur consented to the wish, but would secret the coin into Kyler’s bag when he was unaware.

Just down the road, then, a dervish-like cloud of dust was rising. It was the bus to Arkham.

Eighteen

This portion of the narrative, as the finish approaches, might be regarded by some as disproportioned, but this can only be blamed on Fate—as the structure of life itself rarely issues in satisfactory equipoise. Wilbur Whateley did indeed encounter the end of his physical life in the early hours of August the third, in the Rare Books cove of Miskatonic Library. He was savaged by the guard dog which prowls the entire building at night, and evidently some appreciable time had lapsed between the gigantic man’s unlawful entrance and the point at which the animal detected his presence. There was evidence of a candle being lit, and of Wilbur’s effort to
write
something quickly with pen and paper. What this
something
was would remain a fair mystery to the academic trio who discovered Wilbur’s body; though one of the three, Dr. Henry Armitage, had the notion that the ungainly intruder had been translating and, hence, transcribing a section of the college’s Latin edition of
The Necronomicon,
 stanzas that might correspond to Page 751 of the 1582 English edition. However, no transcription was found, so if it existed...what had become of it? Armitage could only make an educated estimation.

After the corpse had disintegrated, one of Armitage’s associates, Professor Rice, had pointed to a canvas sack askew on the floor, and made the supposition, “He must have meant to steal
The
Necronomicon
and carry it off in that.”

“I’d think not, Warren,” came the elder’s reply, “for surely a man—or thing—as astute as Wilbur Whateley would have calculated in advance the sack’s insufficient size. No, I believe he came here to copy something from the Latin, but I can only guess—since no transcription is present—that a partner of some sort made off with it.”

“You mean a
second
perpetrator?” asked Dr. Francis Morgan.

Armitage pinched his chin in contemplation. “It seems so to me, gentlemen.” Now that much of the stench had cleared, he walked to an ancillary exit door which locked from the inside. “I unlocked the vestibule door myself, but
this
door?”

Rice and Morgan saw at once that the access had been—

“Unlatched,” Rice observed.

“So unless the security man was uncharacteristically lax tonight,” Morgan continued, “this door here was indeed unlocked from the inside, by Whateley himself.”

“Yes,” Armitage agreed, “which might give more credulity to my theory of a second party.”

Rice was nodding. “After violating the east window here, Whateley let his confident in through this door.”

Close examination at a later time revealed that Wilbur had arrived with full knowledge of the guard dog’s threat, as a large pistol was found near the central desk, its hammer having clearly fallen on a defective cartridge. So swift the watch dog’s reflexes had been, that the awkward giant had insufficient time to forward the cylinder to the next round.

It was as simple as that.

Not so simple was the aspect of the decedent’s body. There were few who disbelieved that an intruder had died in the room, for the repute of the three witnesses was not contestable, even as the details of the corpse remain a matter of private record, not public. It was actually better that way, for what might the masses interpret about the
aspect
of such a dead body? Better, too, in the long run, that the
corpus delecti
had actually vanished via some mode of disintegration before a camera could be procured for recording such evidence.

No description of Wilbur’s naked body will be conveyed; it will only be said instead that the dog had attacked the colossal man with the savagery expected of it, and ripped off most of the trespasser’s attire along with unpleasantly large swatches of his epidermis—if it could be
called
epidermis. Within minutes of the occult scholar’s death, no vestige of the man’s physical mass remained, save for some morbid whitish liquefaction. This too would disappear completely just as the medical examiner arrived. The man—or entity—had disappeared as if he—or it—had never existed.

In the weeks following, no clue would be imparted to Armitage as to the identity of Wilbur’s “associate”; while all ponderment over the question would disappear as effectively as Wilbur had himself, in the second week of September, when the Dunwich Horror (in the form of Wilbur’s twin brother) had erupted from its confines and gone on a futile and even pitiable rampage. After
this,
though, once the Whateley property had been certified as safe to examine, Armitage inspected the premise personally after having received, as per his instructions, all written material, letters, diaries, and books left by the departing giant.

Armitage would spend the rest of his life investigating the horrific affair, yet would receive no reward for his effort. This failure would actually haunt the academician, such that he’d often feel he had lost some abstract battle with the dead giant he’d once sent out of his library. The doctor would have wagered his life that Wilbur Whateley had indeed copied Page 751 of the Latin edition and relayed it to someone else. So the question reared with some significance, even to the point of the doctor’s own death: who had absconded with these transcriptions?

And why?

***

After wakening from the Languor Spell, Sary slept not at all for the entire night. Instead, she paced, worried, and looked repeatedly out the shed’s door in the dim hope that Wilbur might return early.

But she could not wrest away from the conviction that he would not.

At day-break, having no familiarity with the timetable for the Arkham bus route, she straggled morosely to the crude bus-stop post, and waited.

She waited some time, until past the noon-hour, in fact. Her heart gave an excited thump at sight of the rattletrap vehicle; then she jittered on her feet, hands clasped in prayer, when the smoke-belching motor slowed and stopped. The door flapped open, but the sinking feeling had already afflicted her—either a premonition or an umbra of pessimism—for she’d felt begloomed since she’d last seen Wilbur yesterday, and this feeling had worsened since a nervous nauseousness had struck her past sun-up, such that she’d reeled from a sudden, persistent headache and had even vomited. Had she been more mindful of symbolism, it might be said that she now awaited a
somatic vacua
, the very
personification
of her feelings.

Only a lone passenger alighted from the bus, and it was not Wilbur.

Over a minute was required to permit of Kyler’s safe descent from the bus step, but once his cane was properly planted, and his feet on the ground, he stepped forward toward Sary, dark of countenance but bizarrely fulgent of eye. At once he said, “Aye, fair gull, ‘tis to the gods we be all subjected, and with every shadow they may drop afore us, there come a grace ef we be so desarvin’. Of this, I believe, ye already have a bit’a mind.”

The verbiage affected Sary with confusion and even agitation. Her spirit demanded that she immediately ask where Wilbur was; however...

The words became like a mass of logs clogging a river’s course.

The bus blundered away, leaving a wake of dust which, once cleared, left the black-clad soothsayer standing at Sary’s other side. Finally, the portent which so darkened her psyche allowed for speech. She said bluntly, “He’s dead, ain’t he?”

The strange bald man did not hesitate, nor did he mince the words of his reply. “Aye, Wilbur Whateley, ye’re devot’d mate, be no more’a this airth, but who’s ta say this airth here be the only ’un? ‘Twas a dog of a most vicious sart which spell the tall man’s end—”

Sary exclaimed with some adamance: “Then where be the grace that’s s’posed ta come too! With Wilbur dead, I might’s wal be dead myself!”

“Nay, gull, for what ye feel be the end’a ye jess really be the stert.” This was idealism and foolish rhetoric which, even if Sary knew what such words meant, she suspected at once that Kyler was only attempting to dull the blade-like pain that cut into her. No condolence could appease her now, nor any mode of rationalization. Wilbur was dead, and a reversion to her previous life was the only substitute. She would resort to self-annihilation before allowing such a consequence. No more intercourse for money, no more penises in her mouth. No more ingesting semen, laving horrific anuses with her tongue, or submitting to any further manner of carnal degradation.

No more.

“Take heart, gull,” the fortune-teller offered, and into her hand he placed a sheet of paper tied in a roll. Then he began to walk away, his cane scuffing the dirt road’s surface.

“What’s this?” Sary demanded in a clap of a voice.

“‘Tis Wilbur’s legacy, thet is. And ye’re new life.”

“What?” she bellowed at the departing figure, but each time she blinked, the lame man’s progress away from her seemed to double in an impossible amount of time. Indeed, he appeared to have traversed a mile in just minutes.

Crushed, outraged, and forlorn, Sary looked at the roll in her hand, then trod in her shiny black garment back to the tool-house. It was here she sat for hours, her eyes blank upon the old wooden walls. Certainly, the roll would prove a letter from Wilbur to her which, no matter how affectionate, she could not bear to read. A final letter was nothing but the inscription upon a grave-stone. Sary did not want to be reminded that she’d never see Wilbur again, for the missive would only
verify
that and, hence, distill her misery. She even considered killing herself without ever opening the note but...

Some unknown force countermanded the notion.

Not till sundown did Sary rise from her glum seat on the cot. She struck flint and steel, lit the lamp, then arranged herself at Wilbur’s great desk. Some minutes more were expended before she untied the tube of paper.

One sheet was all she expected; what she found instead were several, the top three of which contained unintelligible scrawl arranged in numbered passages, seven in all. The writing seemed different from that of the various sheets she’d seen on his desk. No, this scrawl was penned with a seemingly greater care, as if to afford her a sharper possibility of interpretation; while the strange words were interspersed often with hyphens. She scanned a random line:
6) Guh-narl-ebb, eye shub- negg add-uk zynn nem-blud nie-ar-lat-hotep.

Sary maintained a glum stare at the sheets. What possible reason could exist for having the bald man deliver to her such bizarre lines of writing?

The fourth and fifth sheet appeared as she’d expected: lines she could read, and tightly composed as if their author we heeding space. Sary steeled herself, then began to read:

Deer Sary: I writ this ahead uv time in case things turn out less’n the way I wud prefer, which means if yew be reading this, I be dead. I take Kyler to the collige with me so’s I’d have someone to bring back this message in case I got hurt or kilt. By now, especially after using the Voorish ta see my brother, ye know well I am not from hereabouts. My father come from a place far off from the Earth, way on up in the stars. It all be part of a plan that is importint, and of which ye be a strong part if ye chooze.