The Watchers Out of Time by August Derleth & H. P. Lovecraft

Author:August Derleth & H. P. Lovecraft [August Derleth & H. P. Lovecraft]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780345485694
Amazon: 0345485696
Publisher: Del Rey
Published: 1974-01-01T23:00:00+00:00

IV

In the morning he drove to Springfield. After lunch in a restaurant in that city, he made his way to the public library where he introduced himself to the reference librarian, a middle-aged gentleman whose name, duly set down on a card that rested on his desk, was Clifford Paul. To him Walters explained the nature of his quest.

“Well, you have come to the right place, Mr. Walters,” said Paul. “We have some material on file on both the house to which you refer, and on the Whateleys in general. A very old family. Armigerous, too. But now sadly decadent, I believe. Our interest, though, is primarily in the past, not so much in the present.”

He was taken to the reading-room, and there presently a county history and some voluminous files were put down before him. He tackled the county history first. It was one of those heavy tomes, filled with autobiographical and biographical accounts by various hands, usually members of the subjects’ families, and published at a profit made chiefly from the members of the families mentioned in its pages. Most of this material was factual and hopelessly prosaic.

He found a photograph, rather poorly reproduced evidently from a poorer tintype, of Cyrus Whateley. It bore a disquietingly familiar resemblance to someone he had not long ago seen, which was patently absurd. The account of his life was disappointingly brief. He had acquired his home near Dunwich from one Dudley Ropes Glover, who was the legatee of Sir Edward Orme, who had built it in 1703, twenty years before he disappeared, after many years spent in Europe. Glover had sold the house too after long absences from it, also in Europe. So much for the house. And of Cyrus Whateley there was little more; he too had travelled; he had married twice and had fathered two sons, one from each of his wives; one son had inherited; the other had left home as a young man and had been seen no more. Nothing had been set down about Cyrus Whateley’s occupation, save that he was a “landowner” and presumably speculated in land. There was no independent entry on Aberath Whateley, the son of Cyrus who had inherited his property.

The file on the Whateley family, however, was another matter. Here, if anything, the various pieces were almost too numerous. It began with a straightforward account of the Whateley family in the Dunwich area, from the time of their coming into north central Massachusetts in 1699, from Arkham, down to the date of the publication of the county history, 1920; it had evidently been assembled for inclusion in that volume, but had not been used. There was an extensive family tree, which included Aberath and his lost brother, Charles. There were many individual biographies, principally in the form of obituary notices clipped from the Springfield Republican or the Arkham Advertiser. But there were also unclassified clippings which Walters chose to read with more care than he read the more formal obituaries, for

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.