Dunwich

Overview

Dunwich exists where the maps grow vague and the telephone lines fail, a cluster of farms and shacks in the Miskatonic hills, connected to Arkham by a road that floods in spring and to civilization by nothing at all. The people are inbred, ill-favoured, and given to muttering in dialect that scholars transcribe as degenerate English with syllables that ought not to exist. They do not welcome strangers. They do not need to. The hills welcome for them.

Something walks on Sentinel Hill when the Whateleys call it. Something left tracks in the mud that were not quite hooves. In 1928 the university intervened; the horror was driven back, not destroyed. The hill remains. The family remains. The rites are older than the Puritan settlement and younger than the stones beneath it.

Description

The village proper is a handful of buildings: a general store that stocks ammunition and candles in equal measure; a church whose congregation has dwindled to those who still pretend Christianity covers what the hills require; farms set at distances that suggest mutual distrust. The Whateley farmhouse, now ruins and char, stood at the foot of the hills, ringed by stone circles that predate any deed.

Sentinel Hill rises behind it all, crowned with standing stones and a altar-rock that the 1928 investigators described in terms they refused to repeat in open court. The smell on the hill is ozone and manure and something organic that moves. Dogs refuse to climb. Birds refuse to nest.

Historical Record

Lavinia Whateley bore twins to an father who was not wholly present in this dimension; Wilbur grew too fast and died on the library floor at Miskatonic, seeking the complete Necronomicon; the other twin remained invisible until Armitage, Rice, and Morgan drove it back with incantation and powder. The farmhouse burned. The hill did not.

Earlier records mention sacrifices in the eighteenth century, disappearances of surveyors, and a stone circle that local Indians avoided before the white man came and built his own horrors on the same ground.

Archive Notes

No solo field work. The formula 'Yog-Sothoth' must not be tested acoustically in the valley. Personnel who hear bellowing from the hill without a visible source are to withdraw to Arkham and submit to full debrief. Dunwich is not a backwater; it is a breach. The stars may come right again any year the Whateleys find new blood.