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The Black Brat of Dunwich
Stanley C.
Sargent
"In effect we have unsettled and
reversed the given configuration,
suggesting an alternative - culture/nature."
- Donald R. Burleson
At the bartender's suggestion, Jeffrey and James made their way to the rear of the dimly lit Arkham bar. They saw only one person in the smokey shadows of the back room, a thin ancient man seated alone amidst the shadows and smoke; they casually approached his table.
"Pardon me, mister," Jeffrey proffered, "my friend and I are collecting data for a book we're writing about the so-called 'Dunwich horror.' The bartender said you'd actually met Wilbur Whateley and might be willing to speak with us."
The dark, seated figure offered no immediate response. After a few moments, the two intruders looked at each other, then shrugged and turned to walk away. Their retreat was halted by a gritty voice inviting them to sit. The pair eagerly retraced their steps.
Before they could seat themselves, the mysterious figure raised an empty glass and waved it in the air. Jeffrey headed back to the bar in response to the signal while James pulled a chair up to the table. During the awkward silence that followed, James noted the excellent though somewhat old-fashioned quality of the stranger's apparel. If the fellow had really been acquainted with the Whateley boy, his comments might well prove key elements for their book. He certainly looked old enough to have been Wilbur's contemporary.
Jeffrey soon returned, bearing a trio of glasses and a bottle of whiskey. He joined the silent pair, poured three drinks, and waited for the old man to speak.
As the two researchers sipped their drinks, the old man downed his shot, then poured himself another. He coughed, then gruffly blurted out, "So somebody's finally writing a book about my old friend Wilbur, are they? Well, I reckon I knew him better than anybody. I haven't spoken to anyone about him for years, but that's 'cos nobody cares to hear what I have to say on the subject. If you boys aren't prepared to hear the truth, you might as well be on your way."
Jeffrey assured the man that he and his friend wanted only the truth, which they would not hesitate to print, assuming it could in any way be verified. They explained that they hoped to write the first definitive history of the events leading up to the series of mysterious deaths in 1928, the responsibility for which had been attributed to the Whateley family of Dunwich. To date, the pair had studied police reports, newspaper articles, the famous Armitage account, and various coroner's reports.
"The circumstances surrounding the tragedy," added James, "have become so entwined with legend that it has become impossible to separate reality from fiction. We hope to clarify some of the issues and portray the Whateleys accurately. We would also like to take notes and tape record this conversation if that's acceptable to you, sir." He placed a notebook and pen on the table as Jeffrey extracted a hand-held tape recorder from his coat.
"Whatever you want to use is fine by me," responded the man seated opposite them. "Only three people ever knew the truth of what happened in Dunwich: Wilbur Whateley, that goddamned Armitage, and me, Abe Galvin," the old man proclaimed. "Since Wilbur's gone and you'd play hell finding Armitage, I'd say it's up to me to set the record straight before I die."
Despite their surprise at the aspersions cast upon a person as widely respected as Dr. Armitage, the authors encouraged Galvin to impart his recollections. If the man proved legitimate, he was undoubtedly the only person still alive to have actually known young Whateley.
"I left Miskatonic University in the spring of 1924," Galvin began, "after spending six years in the linguistic program. Once I'd satisfied all of my commitments, I decided I'd like to wander around New England for a while, just exploring the backwater areas and maybe earning my keep by hiring myself out as a private tutor. I walked or took buses, answered newspaper ads for tutoring work, and occasionally placed an ad of my own. Between jobs, I'd sleep under the stars; the weather was warm so it was pleasurable to camp out.
"Dunwich was too small to have a newspaper of its own, but somehow Old Elezer Whateley, or 'Wizard Whateley' as most people knew him, came across my ad in the Aylesbury Transcript and made it his business to look me up. I'd never heard of Dunwich or the Whateleys, so I saw nothing unusual in an offer for room and board for the winter in exchange for helping Whateley's young grandson with some difficult translations of archaic Greek and Latin. I admit the old buzzard struck me as a might strange - his eyes were about the eeriest I'd ever seen - but with winter just around the corner, I accepted his offer and accompanied him back to Dunwich in his horse-drawn wagon that very same day.
"The country was green and beautiful along the way, yet once we'd passed through an old tunnel bridge, things began looking pretty rustic and run-down. I was willing to put up with a lot rather than face winter without food or shelter, however, even if it meant spending time in a previous century."
The narrator poured himself another glass before resuming his tale. "Whateley's peak-roofed farmhouse came as one hell of a surprise. It was out in the middle of nowhere and smack up against a dirt incline, with one end extending right on into the hillside. The entire upper story had been boarded up, for reasons I didn't know at the time, and a wooden runway sloped right up from the ground to where a gable window had been replaced with a solid plank door.
"The old barn was a wreck and the cattle all looked diseased as hell. I was actually relieved to learn my quarters were to be in one of two unused toolsheds. The inside of the shed stunk so bad I was obliged to scrub it out with disinfectant, then it still required airing out for two days before I could stand to sleep inside with the door closed."
He stopped to address James, who was furiously writing down every word. "Am I going too fast for you, son?" Galvin asked.
James put his pencil down just long enough to take a sip of whiskey and assure Galvin that, with shorthand, he could easily keep up.
"Just thought I'd check," Galvin said, before nodding and returning to his monologue. "Old Whateley occupied three ground-floor rooms of the farmhouse along with his albino daughter, Lavinia, and grandson, Wilbur. Lavinia, or 'Lavinny' as the old boy called her, struck me as a bit 'off,' though it's hard to say exactly what was wrong with her beyond her paleness and her too-long arms. She could read, though she lacked any kind of formal education. Housework wasn't exactly her forte, but she managed to keep everybody fed. Her favorite pursuits were daydreaming and running through the hills during thunderstorms, if you can imagine. She struck me as being fidgety and afraid all the time, which tended to get on one's nerves, but I got along well enough with her. I guess you could say she spent most of her time trying to keep out of everybody's way." He paused in reflection, then added, "For some time, no one so much as hinted about who Wilbur's father might be."
The speaker suddenly burst into a fit of coughing that ended in painful wheezing and choking. Another hefty gulp of whiskey brought him temporary relief, but it was obvious his health was not good.
"Is this the kind of stuff you boys are looking for?" he asked.
The two men tripped over each other in response, agreeing that this indeed was exactly the material they were seeking. Both urged Galvin to go on with his tale, hoping to get as much information as possible before alcohol began to affect his memory.
"I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw my prospective student for the first time. Old Whateley had told me his grandson was eleven years old, then he introduces me to this fellow who looks older than me. How many eleven year olds you ever seen who are over six feet tall and fully bearded? I started to wonder if I'd been had, but I decided to play along and humor the old fool least I forfeit the promised winter provision. Wilbur and I took to each other right away, and that clinched the arrangement."
James leaned forward and asked hesitantly, "Could you tell us more about Wilbur's appearance?"
Galvin smiled. "I'll get to that. You two have a drink with me first." The tiny, wrinkled man winked at James. "Whiskey helps keep the throat and the mind lubricated, you know," he joked.
He waited patiently as the reluctant pair filled their half-empty glasses, then raised his own glass in a toast. "May you never know the true depths of loneliness!" Galvin called out. Although the sentiment seemed out of context, the pair obligingly clinked their glasses with his before downing the fiery liquid.
"Wilbur was a hell of a peculiar looking fellow, certainly not what one would call handsome. A goatee covered his lack of chin, but his skin had a sallowness to its hue. He had great big ears and long, black hair that framed his face and added to his goatish look.
"I guess I'd have to say his features were coarse by traditional standards, and there was something wild about his appearance, something amazingly feral that recalled the forest satyrs of the ancient Greeks. His pupils were black as coal so it was easy as hell to get lost in those eyes - he must of caught me staring a hundred times at least!"
A dreamlike tone had entered Galvin's voice as he recalled Wilbur's countenance, but he forced himself to focus on the business at hand.
"I don't think Wilbur ever got much chance to play as a child, except maybe occasionally with Lavinia. We had lots of fun, though the first time I made a joke, that booming laugh of his damn near made me jump out of my seat. He looked and sounded like an adult, but he was just a lonely kid inside. It didn't take long for me to realize he was still growing and that, plus his shuffling walk, caused me to wonder if he'd inherited some congenital deformity. He was shamed by his difference and tried to cover it by wearing two or three pairs of pants under his old fashioned cossack breeches. People said he smelled bad too, but if he did, I never noticed it."
Galvin lapsed into silence but did not reach for the bottle. When he spoke again, it was in softer, more intimate tones. "The few visitors we had, including Dr. Armitage, treated Wilbur like some kind of dangerous, deformed misanthrope, though some, like Earl Sawyer, did their best to overcome their qualms. I had mixed feelings about the boy myself, but only at first," he laughed. "He confused the hell out of me! But after a while, I developed a real respect for him and was proud to call him my friend."
An uncomfortable silence followed. Galvin's last statement had been a revelation after all the negative descriptions the authors had heard of "the black brat of Dunwich." James carefully reached over, grabbed the whiskey bottle, and refilled the others' glasses as well as his own.
Jeffrey found himself trying to picture Galvin at age twenty-five. His artistic bend made it easy to visualize a younger Galvin simply by filling in the lines and darkening the hair of the grandfatherly figure before him. He concluded that Galvin had once been the good looking, though probably not the handsome, rugged type. A man of Galvin's average height and build must have felt quite intimidated at having a student whose boyish lack of experience belied his towering visage. It suddenly occurred to Jeffrey that Galvin was reading his thoughts, and when he looked up, he saw that Galvin was looking directly at him with a knowing smile on his face. That made Jeffrey slightly uncomfortable, and he felt a certain relief when the old man resumed his account.
"Wilbur's room also came as a great surprise. It was on the eastern side of the ground floor where the house dug into the hillside. He'd hauled an old bureau into one corner and had been using it as a desk; that's where they later found the big ledger he used as a diary. Only one wall contained a window; every other wall was lined with shelves filled with hundreds of the rotting books that the family had collected through several generations. The majority of those books concerned various aspects of occultism, alchemy, black magic, and the like. I thought it strange that several of the volumes could be found outside the back rooms of university libraries. The rarer tomes must have been worth a fortune, even in their deteriorated condition. He owned copies of d'Erlette's Cultes des Goules, the Liyuhh, Borellus' forbidden text, Von Junzt's Unaussprechlichen Kulten, and others I'd never even heard of. I held Joseph Curwen's own handwritten copy of Bryce's Biblia Sinistre in my hands! Hell, even Miskatonic University doesn't have a copy of that! Yet with all those treasures around him, Wilbur still craved a Latin edition of the Necronomicon printed in 17th century Spain. I was allowed freedom of his library, but I didn't have much interest in things about 'blasphemous outer spheres.'"
Galvin experienced a second coughing fit, this one worse than the first. In the meantime, Jeffrey managed to replace the tape in the recorder with a fresh one.
"Wilbur needed help translating certain passages from those books, only a few of which were actually written in archaic Greek and Latin. That's the reason I was there. Wilbur spoke a crude dialect he'd picked up from his mother, but his was such a brilliant mind that he could easily translate French, German, Arabic, and even enciphered passages without my aid."
James asked Galvin to wait until he got back from the restroom before proceeding.
Jeffrey stayed with Galvin. "Why weren't you afraid of Wilbur like everyone else?" he asked the shadowed figure seated across from him. "His appearance must have been intimidating."
Galvin chuckled softly and answered, "Wilbur was very special, and I guess I saw that right away. Armitage has since made Wilbur sound like a goat-faced monster, but people didn't scream and run when he came around, so even you must realize that was an exaggeration."
Copyright © 1997 Peter A. Worthy
Illustration, "Wilbur" © 1997 by Stanley C. Sargent
