The Dunwich Romance Read Free Page A

for such glances reminded her of her father; now, however?
    The notion of this unusual man’s appraisal...charmed her.
    From the first, a shyness, a tongue-tiedness, was intimated—a gentleness, even, in spite of the potential terror that his unnaturally overgrown physique commanded. Yet, the query whirred at the most rearward portion of her cognizance: what might the day’s remainder bring?
    “Haow silly’a me!” she chirped. “Hope ya dun’t think me rude. Yew gone ta all’a that trouble helpin’ me and heer I am not even tellin’ ya my name! It’s Sary!”
    His eyes seemed to float all about her. “Ee-yuh, I know it.”
    “Yew dew?”
    “Wal, sure. I seen ye heer’n thar.”
    “Whar?”
    The man shrugged, now maintaining a forward gaze. “See ye strollin’ past Sawyer’s cow field on occasion, and Ten Acre Meadows, and comin’ out the old covered bridge a number’a times when I be up in the hills, the bridge that branch off the Aylesbury Pike.” He loped on, the large boots crunching down knee-high grass. “Maybe just a week past, I seen Doc Houghton droppin’ ye off at Dean’s Corners after givin’ yew a ride in his fancy motor.”
    “Oh, yeah, Doc Houghton. He gimme a ride ever so often,” Sary acknowledged, and to refer to his motor-car as “fancy” was no magnification of the truth; a Duesenberg, he’d called it. It was Sary’s understanding that Dr. Houghton enjoyed some success in his trade, more so than one would expect of a simple country physician. Still, rumors circulated that the good doctor supplemented his income handsomely by, one, foreshortening the lives of the elderly at the financial behest of relatives in wait of inheritance and, two, the drastically illegal termination of pregnancies. And while she did acknowledge that the doctor had given her much-needed rides in his exorbitant motor, she did not acknowledge that, with some frequency—and for a princely two dollars, no less—he bid her to his home in Aylesbury for the expressed purpose of masturbating as he half-stood on his head, while Sary slid a disturbingly stout mattock handle in and out of his anus and smacked his testicles with her opened palm. The sought-after climax involved the redeposition of his semen from his penis to his mouth.
    No. Sary did not acknowledge that.
    “I’ve know him for a spell,” was all she said in augmentation.
    “So I figgered,” said her carrier next, “and since I knowed him myself on account ‘twas him who come to the haouse when my grandsire was a-dyin’, I didn’t see no harm in my askin’ him what it ‘tis you’re called, so’s he tolt me. He tolt me ‘Sary.’ Oh, and I seen ye onct, tew, last yeer, when I was comin’ daown off’a Sentinel Hill. You were swimmin’ in the lily pond ‘tween the Corey’s’n the ole mill ruins.”
    “Yeah. I warsh there when I can, when it en’t tew cold...”
    “But it weren’t on purpose, mind ye,” the man seemed to add with some haste. “I can’t have ye thinkin’ I were watchin’ yew with any bad intentfulness. Jess happened ta see ye when I was comin’ daown.”
    The implication made her smile, and she actually touched his hand. “That’s okay. Lotta fellas seen me with nothin’ on. But I can tell, yew wouldn’t watch me on purpose, not all sneaky like.”
    The man, oddly, seemed to gulp. “Hard not tew, I’ll-I’ll admit ta ye, though, ‘cos I can’t lie to good folks. Naow, bad folks, wal, I reckon it en’t no transgression ta lie ta them ...”
    Sary peered at the words. “What’cha mean by that? ”
    “Wal, bad folks, see, they lie ta me withaout thinkin’, so’s it’s only fittin’—”
    “No, no,” came her interruption. “I lie tew bad folks ever chance I get. But what’cha mean by haow it’s hard not tew? Hard not tew what? ”
    Several more sturdy lopes of contemplative silence. Was it the heat of the day that broke beads of perspiration out on his forehead? “Hard not ta look at a