My Dunwich Horror

My snow-white hands touch her cold, broken body. My mother is bent and twisted around at angles that no human should be capable of, around a pillar of stone. The creature, Yog-Sothoth, cries in frustration and falls back into the mist.
My father pulls the hood off his cloak and stares at me with cold, dead eyes. I wrap my cloak tight around me to protect myself from the icy wind on the mountaintop.

“It din’ take, Vinny,” said my father as he looks disappointed at my mother’s twisted frame.

“Yog-Sothoth, I offer you my daughter if you don’ wan’ me wife!” shouts my father as he shoves me into the middle of the stone circle. But the porthole has closed and there is nothing left but cold.

My father scowls at me in disgust as I pick up the giant tomb at my feet. We walk in silence back to the farmhouse. Scoliosis twisted my frame and I hobble behind him.

He locked himself up in the top room of the house to pour over the ancient tombs that lay in our house. My mother was supposed to be a vessel for Yog-Sothoth, to carry his seed. My brother was to be the savior for the beings outside of space and time, but they did not want her. They didn’t want me either, but at least they didn’t hurt me.
The next day, I went up the mountain and buried my mother. The whippoorwills sang loudly in the trees, so much so I couldn’t think. I said a prayer to Yog-Sothoth. Perhaps if he did not want her body, her spirit would serve him.

Hobbling back home through Dunwich, the villagers whisper words like witch and albino. My pale, tangled hair lies against my cloak as I go to the general store and buy bread.

Home is through a path of patchwork houses, old and dilapidated, barely standing against the bright blue sky. Even though this town is falling apart, the hills surrounding it are full of life. I must clear this life to serve the elder gods, and I will be the one to serve them. I will be their vessel.

Over the passing years, my father studied the books from tombs from the elder gods. I ran wild through the mountains and forest. These wild places are my home. Every year on Hallowmass and Walpurgis we would back up to Sentinel hill, light a bonfire in the stone circle, and dance.

Father says I am never to marry, that I must be pure for Yog-Sothoth, to be a vessel. None of the men in Dunwich want me, anyway. I keep house and farm; I study the old ways and I run wild and gather herbs and hunt.

In my twenties, I became rather ill with consumption and it took me years to recover. At thirty-five, my father said that I was ready to become the vessel for Yog-Sothoth. Although I was still sickly, my form was going to be too old to carry children soon.

My father took me to the top of the hill and stripped me naked. He tied me to the stone circle, just as he had with my mother. He opened the tomb, and we both chanted the prayer to Yog-Sothoth.

I remember pain; it felt as though my body was being split in two. I cried out by the fires in sentinel hill as the unseen force wreaked havoc on my body. I bled for weeks after and became with child.

The children grew in my womb at an extraordinary rate. My belly became huge within four months. My father carried me back to Sentinel hill on Imbolic of 1913. My body was ripped in half again as the Messenger and Savior were born. The savior to clear a path for the Old Gods and the Messenger was to call him forth.

I named the messenger Wilbur, but we would keep the savior’s existence silent. The human tongue could not speak the Savior’s true name. A family friend, Mamie Bishop, moved in to help me care for young Wilbur and the Savior.

We had built another barn and hollowed it out for our Savior to come forth. Yog-Sothoth gifted us with gold to feed our son cattle. He would occasionally nurse my blood and the blood of my father like a child nurse’s milk, leaving red welts on our bodies.

Our Messenger grew tall and strong, though the simple townfolk of Dunwich feared him. They trained their dogs to attack him and my Wilbur did not know peace as he went into Dunwich. Their close-minded ways would call him Lavinny’s black brat. But my son grows fast and strong. Village girls of Dunwich would go missing, fed to both my sons’ appetites, along with the cattle.

At three years old, he looked like a boy of ten and my father took him under his wing. They became inseparable, the Messenger and my father. He would read him all the lessons and teach him the old ways. Ways that he never taught me.
Then my father died. He became ill with a fever and whippoorwills became ever so loud again. My father whispered 751 of the complete edition to call Yog-Sothoth and end this world forever before fading into nothing.

After my father’s passing, Wilber would not speak to me. Everything I said he despised. I didn’t know what he wanted or what he was planning. On Hallowmass, he called me to go with him to Hallowmas on Sentinel Hill. It would be the last time the old ones would ever call me.

Once again I saw the stone circle, and once again I prayed to Yog-Sothoth to take this world away.

“He won’t take the world without a sacrifice,” Wilbur croaked.

A porthole opened above me, my spine twisted around the stone until it cracked. It would be over soon. My sons, find the book and call the end. I could feel Yog-Sothoth twisting my body until my spine snapped. The pain stopped and the only sound I heard was the screaming of the whippoorwills.