UNCOMMON PLACES  -- Section XIV

W. H. Pugmire, Esq.

 

I stood alone  of the summit of Sentinel Hill  and looked down at Dunwich, on that dark afternoon of February 2nd.  I stood among its tumulus of ancient bones and wondered if any of the skulls were hers.  Reaching out my  hand, I called to her tragic soul -- but it was not there, among the mound of discarded death.  And yet I sensed a touch of something, some hint of her memory, from the place below to which I began to journey -- the farmhouse where she had met with death.  How remarkable that it still stood, that hovel of misery and magick.  Of course it had been a shunned house -- wearing as it did its aura of Dunwich horror and disease.  Uneasily beats the heart that trespasses on Old Whateley's land.  The senses warn that vertain ground is sacred or accursed, as is the house one dares to build upon it -- and soon I stepped on such a ground  and walked toward such a haunt.  The day grew darker and a wind arose; and I listened as that wind pushed through the rotting boards of the old farmhouse, a wind that whispered sounds like I had never heard before.  It was almost musical, the sound, like some emanation from another world or realm of beings.  It beguiled, and beckoned.

 

The house seemed almost to shudder in the gale that grew around it, and its front door was suddenly pushed open, as if in invitation to the stranger in its midst.  I accepted and walked in.  I knew enough of the family legend to know that the place I sought was on the ground floor; and yet tantalizing curiosity tickled my brain with a desire to investigate the upper room of oddly calculated size, the room stained with Outside taint.  But that was for another time -- perhaps.  Now I would walk to the room where the sad, doomed woman had met with uneasy death.  I approached the door, which was cracked at its center, a long fissure of past violence.  Ah, the violence that quaked my soul, as I leaned my fevered head against that door, which opened to the force of my leaning.

 

It rushed to me, the scent of sacrifice and sorrow.  My mouth caught it and I had to scream it out lest it should damn my soul.  The room was small and cramped.  One entire wall had been decorated with a crudely painted replica of an illustration of the spherical Earth that originated in Gautier de Metz's L'Image du Monde -- which he had created in an era when the common belief was that the Earth was flat.  Near to me, on one tilting table of rotting wood, I saw an old and rusted armillary sphere, the design of which was strangely suggestive.  Most disturbing of all was that there was no small terrestrial globe fixed on an axis within the metallic circular rings; rather, there was a shape composed of minute bits of substance that might have been the destructive aftermath of a star's implosion.

 

I moved to the larger globe in its sturdy wooden stand and saw that it was an extremely ancient celestial globe of, I estimated, Asian design.   It, too,was very queer; for the surface was black, but of a kind of transparency that one could vaguely see through to where dim points of lights vaguely shimmered.  Some few of these minute stars had twin trails of light that suggested wing-span.  I touched my hand to its surface and shivered at the chill that crept into my flesh.

 

Looking to my right, I shuffled to the third and smallest globe, which  looked like as if  it had been composed of tanned human hide.  I saw the empty and elongated slits that might once have held eyes, at the dry slit of mouth.  Beside it, on the floor, was a battered child's coffin, and I reached for and lifted its lid.  Inside, resting on a bed of ash and tiny bits of bone, I found a handmade doll.  The hair that had been sewn into its scalp was pure white, and I knew that it had once belonged to an albino woman who had, long ago, tenated the room.  I smoothed the white hair with trembling hand.  I spoke the words of alchemy that I had learned from study of ancient tomes.  The dark room filled with moving sound.  The celestial globe began to revolve slowly as the ephemeral lights withih it moved with churning motion.  I thought that I could detect another voice accompanying my own, coming from the globe of human hide; but I was too intent on the coffin and its inhabitant to look.  I saw the effect of my occult sound, as the ash and tinyshards of bone beganto creep over and into the texture with which the doll had been composed.

 

I reached into the coffin and raised her in my hands, the tiny creature that moved and cried.  I will call her Lavinia.  I will raise her in this haunted house.  I shall teach her of the signals scratched with ink onto the pages of Mythos tomes.  Together we will wander the fields and climb Sentinel Hill, to call unto the void and usher forth the demise of brutal men.

 

[entries in Lovecraft's Commonplace Book that inspir'd this segment:

39: "Sounds--possibly musical--heard in the night from other worlds or realms of being";

52: "Calling on the dead--voice or familiar sound in adjacent room";

122:  "Horrible things whispered in the lines of Gauthier de Metz (13th cen.) 'Image du Monde'."]