There was a hideous screaming which echoed above even the hill noises
and the dogs’ barking on the night Wilbur was born, but no known doctor
or midwife presided at his coming. Neighbors knew nothing of him till
a week afterward, when Old Whateley drove his sleigh through the snow
into Dunwich Village and discoursed incoherently to the group of
loungers at Osborn’s general store. There seemed to be a change in the
old man–an added element of furtiveness in the clouded brain which
subtly transformed him from an object to a subject of fear–though he
was not one to be perturbed by any common family event. Amidst it all
he showed some trace of the pride later noticed in his daughter, and
what he said of the child’s paternity was remembered by many of his
hearers years afterward.

“I dun’t keer what folks think–ef Lavinny’s boy looked like his pa, he
wouldn’t look like nothin’ ye expeck. Ye needn’t think the only folks
is the folks hereabouts. Lavinny’s read some, an’ has seed some things
the most o’ ye only tell abaout. I calc’late her man is as good a
husban’ as ye kin find this side of Aylesbury; an’ ef ye knowed as much
abaout the hills as I dew, ye wouldn’t ast no better church weddin’ nor
her’n. Let me tell ye suthin’–_some day yew folks’ll hear a child o’
Lavinny’s a-callin’ its father’s name on the top o’ Sentinel Hill!_”

The only persons who saw Wilbur during the first month of his life
were old Zechariah Whateley, of the undecayed Whateleys, and Earl
Sawyer’s common-law wife, Mamie Bishop. Mamie’s visit was frankly one
of curiosity, and her subsequent tales did justice to her observations;
but Zechariah came to lead a pair of Alderney cows which Old Whateley
had bought of his son Curtis. This marked the beginning of a course of
cattle-buying on the part of small Wilbur’s family which ended only
in 1928, when the Dunwich horror came and went; yet at no time did
the ramshackle Whateley barn seem over-crowded with livestock. There
came a period when people were curious enough to steal up and count
the herd that grazed precariously on the steep hillside above the old
farmhouse, and they could never find more than ten or twelve anemic,
bloodless-looking specimens. Evidently some blight or distemper,
perhaps sprung from the unwholesome pasturage or the diseased fungi
and timbers of the filthy barn, caused a heavy mortality amongst the
Whateley animals. Odd wounds or sores, having something of the aspect
of incisions, seemed to afflict the visible cattle; and once or twice
during the earlier months certain callers fancied they could discern
similar sores about the throats of the gray, unshaven old man and his
slatternly, crinkly-haired albino daughter.

In the spring after Wilbur’s birth Lavinia resumed her customary
rambles in the hills, bearing in her misproportioned arms the swarthy
child. Public interest in the Whateleys subsided after most of the
country folk had seen the baby, and no one bothered to comment on the
swift development which that newcomer seemed every day to exhibit.
Wilbur’s growth was indeed phenomenal, for within three months of his
birth he had attained a size and muscular power not usually found in
infants under a full year of age. His motions and even his vocal sounds
showed a restraint and deliberateness highly peculiar in an infant,
and no one was really unprepared when, at seven months, he began to
walk unassisted, with falterings which another month was sufficient to
remove.

It was somewhat after this time–on Hallowe’en–that a great blaze was
seen at midnight on the top of Sentinel Hill where the old table-like
stone stands amidst its tumulus of ancient bones. Considerable talk
was started when Silas Bishop–of the undecayed Bishops–mentioned
having seen the boy running sturdily up that hill ahead of his mother
about an hour before the blaze was remarked. Silas was rounding up a
stray heifer, but he nearly forgot his mission when he fleetingly spied
the two figures in the dim light of his lantern. They darted almost
noiselessly through the underbrush, and the astonished watcher seemed
to think they were entirely unclothed. Afterward he could not be sure
about the boy, who may have had some kind of a fringed belt and a pair
of dark blue trunks or trousers on. Wilbur was never subsequently seen
alive and conscious without complete and tightly buttoned attire, the
disarrangement or threatened disarrangement of which always seemed to
fill him with anger and alarm. His contrast with his squalid mother and
grandfather in this respect was thought very notable until the horror
of 1928 suggested the most valid of reasons.