The Dunwich Romance Read Free

Instead, she sat inclined, breasts healthily plumpened, and she stared with puzzlement at the sun-halo’d black cut-out head. She could surmise no response to his explication.
    “But naow, if ye’d like, ye can come back whar I live’n have a rest, and-and, I see that black-hearted boy done tore yer gown, so’s I can stitch it back for ye on accaount my mother larnt me haow ta sew.”
    Sary felt beside herself. Any other denizen of Dunwich, she knew, would be on top of her already, but here instead was this strange fellow offering her a place to rest and to mend her gown. Can’t believe what I’m heerin’, she thought.
    The man went on in some indefinable excitement: “Oh, ee-yuh, and I’se also got a bunch’a white-tail rabbit in the smoker which I hand-rubbed fust with seasonin’ like from my grandmother’s recipe. It’s quite fine, it ‘tis, in the event that yew’re hungry.”
    And now the endowment of a free meal! Aside from some raspberries filched from Frye’s fields, and a luckily stumbled-upon radish that had most likely fallen off a motor-truck, Sary had consumed no solid food for over a day; and, hence—not taking into account the ejaculations of several oral suitors—no other sustenance. She nearly lost her breath over the giant’s charitability. “Oh, I would jess love that!” she wailed, hauling her ravaged gown back down.
    It was sensed more than espied a desperate smile come to her rescuer’s face. “Heer, lemme help ya up,” and then the hand at the end of the very long arm clasped her own. “Theer yew go—”
    But when Sary was left to stand upon her feet, she teetered in place, cried “Aw, buggers!” and would’ve fallen over had not the colossan caught her in a misproportioned arm.
    “Yew all right?”
    “My, I— I got all a-wobbly in my knees,” she replied in his embrace. “I guess what that boy were doin’ left me more shook up’n I thought—”
    “‘Tis understantable, but dun’t worry. I’ll carry ye.”
    Sary felt levitating as the giant cradled her up in his arms and, as though her weight were no more a burden than an empty potato satchel, stepped over the low stone fence and loped toward the distant easterly tree line. Sary made a pleasant moan in her throat; for once, she felt safe. She lolled in the cradle of her carrier’s arms, rocking gently with each loping step.
    As he conducted her across the field, her eyes scanned her surroundings. A more beautiful day could not have been wished for, she mused, but then when her gaze stopped upon the sheer face of the distant Round Mountain, her appreciation of natural beauty retarded a gobbet; closer in the distance, she spied the several odd round hills most of whose tops were barren of trees and displayed instead peculiar arrangements of stone columns that she’d heard went back to Indian days. She’d also heard that the loftiest of these hills— Sentinel Hill—boasted an altar of some sort, which had existed there “Sinct afore the time white folk come ta this land from acrost the Big Water,” her mother had said, “for a amaount’a time longer’n ye’re head can understant.” But when Sary made inquiry as to the precise nature of this altar, her mother had gone silent. There were several times, too, when Sary had attempted to hike all the way to the summit, to bear witness of the altar for herself, but she always fled back in the direction she’d come, for the emanation of the strangest sounds, sounds that urged her to think that words were actually being uttered beneath the ground...
    It was in a place well behind her that she put the unsettling thoughts, to enjoy this moment of comfort. The rent in her gown betrayed a breast, and when she glanced errantly up, she captured the giant’s big, dark, and somehow sensitive eyes seeming to marvel upon its shape, but then they flicked away. It was an ordinary thing for men to look approvingly at Sary’s body, a gesture which she, in secret, loathed,