Chapter 4
For a decade the annals of the Whateleys sink indistinguishably
into the general life of a morbid community used to their queer
ways and hardened to their May Eve and All-Hallows orgies. Twice a
year they would light fires on the top of Sentinel Hill, at which
times the mountain rumblings would recur with greater and greater
violence; while at all seasons there were strange and portentous
doings at the lonely farm-house. In the course of time callers
professed to hear sounds in the sealed upper storey even when all
the family were downstairs, and they wondered how swiftly or how
lingeringly a cow or bullock was usually sacrificed. There was talk
of a complaint to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Animals but nothing ever came of it, since Dunwich folk are n
