Collected Fiction Volume 2 (1926-1930): A Variorum Edition (69 page)

*
“Rome and Byzantium: A Study in Survival” (Waukesha, 1869), Vol. XX, p. 598. [Rome . . . study in Survival A; Rome . . . Study in Survival B]

§
“Influences Romains dans le Moyen Age” (Fond du Lac, 1877), Vol. XV, p. 720. [Influence . . . Age A; Influences . . . Age B; due Lac, 1877) A]

**
Following Procopius,
Goth.
x.y.z. [Goth. B]

§§
Following Jornandes, Codex Murat. xxj. 4144. [Jornandeds A; xxi. B]

§§§
After Pagi, 50–50.

***
Not till the appearance of Von Schweinkopf’s work in 1797 were St. Ibid and the rhetorician properly re-identified. [von . . . reidentified B]

Editor’s Note:
This comic story was presumably included in or attached to a letter to Maurice W. Moe, probably in 1928. Moe refers to the piece as “that delightful Spectator paper on the marvellous history of old man Ibid” (M. W. Moe to HPL, 3 August 1928; ms., JHL). The A.Ms. does not appear to survive, and the first published text—in the amateur journal
O-Wash-Ta-Nong
(January 1938), edited by George W. Macauley—must serve as the basis of the text. (The story was reprinted in the
Phantagraph
[June 1940], but this is irrelevant to the textual history of the tale.)

Texts: A =
O-Wash-Ta-Nong
3, No. 1 (January 1938): 11–13; B =
Beyond the Wall of Sleep
(Arkham House, 1943), 346–48. Copy-text: A.

1
. ‘Lives of the Poets’.” ¶]
Lives of the Poets.
” A, B

2
. Ibid] Ib B

3
. “Lives”] Lives A;
Lives
B

4
. “Op. Cit.”]
Op. Cit.
A, B

5
. “Geschichte . . . Italien”]
Geschichte . . . Italien
A, B

6
. Romanised] Romanized A, B

7
. A.D.] A. D. B

8
. Bêtenoir,] Betenoir, A, B

9
. shewn] shown A, B

10
. Anician] Anican A

11
. stated . . . Schweinkopf] seated . . . Schweinkopf’s A

12
. Pompeius] Pomeius A

13
. Bêtenoir] Betenoir A, B

14
. Aegidus] Ægidus B

15
. honour] honor A, B

16
. work] word A

17
. atavism] stavism B

18
. Byzantine-Roman] Bzantine-Roman A

19
. honours.] honors. A, B

20
. favour] favor A, B

21
. honour] honor A, B

22
. Arabissus,] Arabiscus, A, B

23
. poet’s] poets’ A

24
. honour] honor A, B

25
. 102nd] 102d B

26
. Spoleto,] Spolato, B

27
. Desiderius] Deniderius B

28
. Alcuin,] Alouin, B

29
. Alcuin’s] Alouin’s B

30
. kinsfolk] kinfolk A, B

31
. Alcuin] Alouin B

32
. prayers),] prayers) A, B

33
. of] to A, B

34
. 1650 (. . .),] 1650, (. . .) A

35
. Rest-in-Jehovah] Rest-in-Jehova A

36
. 1661 (. . .),] 1661, (. . .) A

37
. Canonchet’s] Cannonchet’s A

38
. recognising] recognizing A

39
. recognised] recognized A

40
. seventeenth] 17th A, B

41
. century).] century). / [
B attempts to reproduce the purported inscription: “Ibidus rhetor romanus”
]

42
. recognised] recognized A

43
. Ibide.] Ibid. B

44
. voyageur] vogageur A

45
. recognising] recognizing A

46
. nineteenth] 19th A, B

47
. Caboche,] Cabocho, B

48
. 1850] 1860 B

49
. contents,] contents A, B

50
. Anicius] Anicus A

51
. favourite] favorite A, B

52
. worshipped] worshipt B

53
. Sewers] Sowers B

54
. 2303] 2,303 A

55
. Nature,] nature, A, B

56
. roseal] roseate B

57
. to] into B

58
. roadway,] roadway A, B

59
. dome-like] dome-/like A

“Gorgons, and Hydras, and Chimaeras
^[1]
—dire stories of Celaeno 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? O,
^[2]
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 shadow-land
^[3]
of pre-existence.”
^[4]

—
Charles Lamb:
“Witches and Other Night-Fears”
^[5]

I.

When a traveller
^[6]
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 surprisingly
^[7]
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 on
^[8]
the sloping, rock-strown
^[9]
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 bull-frogs.
^[10]
The thin, shining line of the Miskatonic’s upper reaches has an oddly serpent-like
^[11]
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 neighbouring
^[12]
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 harbours
^[13]
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 odour
^[14]
about the village street, as of the massed mould
^[15]
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 aesthetic
^[16]
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 cannot 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
^[17]
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 woefully
^[18]
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 mouldering
^[19]
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 conclaves of the Indians, amidst which they called forbidden shapes of shadow out of the great rounded hills, and made wild orgiastic prayers that were answered by loud crackings and rumblings from the ground below. In 1747 the Reverend Abijah Hoadley, newly come to the Congregational Church at Dunwich Village, preached a memorable sermon on the close presence of Satan and his imps; in which he said:

“It must be allow’d,
^[20]
that these Blasphemies of an infernall Train of Daemons are Matters of too common Knowledge to be deny’d; the cursed Voices of
Azazel
and
Buzrael,
of
Beelzebub
and
Belial,
being heard now
^[21]
from under Ground by above a Score of credible Witnesses now living. I my self
^[22]
did not more than a Fortnight ago catch a very plain Discourse of evill Powers in the Hill behind my House; wherein there were a Rattling and Rolling, Groaning, Screeching, and Hissing, such as no Things of this Earth cou’d raise up, and which must needs have come from those Caves that only black Magick can discover, and only the Divell unlock.”
^[23]

Mr. Hoadley disappeared soon after delivering this sermon; but the text, printed in Springfield, is still extant. Noises in the hills continued to be reported from year to year, and still form a puzzle to geologists and physiographers.

Other traditions tell of foul odours
^[24]
near the hill-crowning circles of stone pillars, and of rushing airy presences to be heard faintly at certain hours from stated points at the bottom of the great ravines; while still others try to explain the Devil’s Hop Yard—a bleak, blasted hillside where no tree, shrub, or grass-blade will grow. Then
^[25]
too, the natives are mortally afraid of the numerous whippoorwills which grow vocal on warm nights. It is vowed that the birds are psychopomps lying in wait for the souls of the dying, and that they time their eery cries in unison with the sufferer’s struggling breath. If they can catch the fleeing soul when it leaves the body, they instantly flutter away chittering in daemoniac
^[26]
laughter; but if they fail, they subside gradually into a disappointed silence.

These tales, of course, are obsolete and ridiculous; because they come down from very old times. Dunwich is indeed ridiculously old—older by far than any of the communities within thirty miles of it. South of the village one may still spy the cellar walls and chimney of the ancient Bishop house, which was built before 1700; whilst the ruins of the mill at the falls, built in 1806, form the most modern piece of architecture to be seen. Industry did not flourish here, and the nineteenth-century
^[27]
factory movement proved short-lived. Oldest of all are the great rings of rough-hewn stone columns on the hilltops, but these are more generally attributed to the Indians than to the settlers. Deposits of skulls and bones, found within these circles and around the sizeable
^[28]
table-like rock on Sentinel Hill, sustain the popular belief that such spots were once the burial-places of the Pocumtucks; even though many ethnologists, disregarding the absurd improbability of such a theory, persist in believing the remains Caucasian.