"Wentworth's Day" is a short story by August Derleth, one of his "posthumous collaborations" with H. P. Lovecraft. It was originally published in the 1957 Arkham House anthology The Survivor and Others. Though it is set in the country north of Dunwich, it is arguably not a Cthulhu Mythos story; the magic involved is of the traditional sort.
Synopsis[]
The story, set in the summer of 1927, is narrated by Fred Hadley, a Bostonian salesman delivering stoves in the country north of Dunwich. Hadley is forced by a storm to take refuge in the home of Amos Stark, which is "one of those houses which are all of a piece—house, ell, summer kitchen, barn, all in one long structure, under roofs of various heights." Hadley describes his host as
| “ | a wizened old man with a scraggly beard half covering his scrawny neck. He wore spectacles, but peered out at me over them. His hair was white, and his eyes black; seeing me, his lips drew back in a kind of feral grin, exposing the stumps of teeth. | „ |
Stark is clearly uneasy, and explains that it is Wentworth's day--the day that a five-year loan of $5,000 that Nahum Wentworth made to Stark was to come due. Only Wentworth can't collect: "because it warn’t no less’n two months after that day that he got shot out huntin’. Shotgun in the back o’ the head. Pure accident." To silence those who said he did it on purpose, Stark made out a will that left his whole estate to Genie Wentworth, Nahum's daughter.
Nahum Wentworth was evidently a wizard of some sort, as chief among the books he left to Stark is The Seventh Book of Moses, which "purported to offer all manner of spells, incantations, and charms." Waiting out the storm, Hadley idly copies out "the worst of the incantations which caught my eye...nothing less than an incantation for the assemblage of devils or spirits, or the raising of the dead." He then "say[s] it aloud several times, not for a moment expecting anything untoward to take place."
Imagine his surprise, then, when his spell summons the restless spirit of Nahum Wentworth, as Hadley discovers when he rushes to investigate a "terrible cry":
| “ | Amos Stark was spread on the floor on his back, and sitting astride him was a mouldering skeleton, its bony arms bowed above his throat, its fingers at his neck. And in the back of the skull, the shattered bones where a charge of shot had once gone through. | „ |
Lovecraft Country[]
Derleth has an evocative description of the country "north of Dunwich":
| “ | It is not an area of Massachusetts in which many people like to live.... [T]here broods eternally about this country an undeniable atmosphere not alone of age and desertion, but also of evil. There are areas of woodland in which no axe has ever fallen, as well as dark, vine-grown glens, where brooks trickle in a darkness unbroken by sunlight even on the brightest day.... [I]t had the reputation of being a country in which Hexerei—the witch-beliefs of superstitious people—was practiced. | „ |
Amos Stark's house is said to be 17 miles north of Dunwich--a distance that would put it well into New Hampshire, by most reckonings of the imaginary village's location.
External Links[]
- "Derleth Country #1: Wentworth's Day", review at Sentinel Hill Press
- "H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth; Wentworth's Day", review at Blind Read Through
- "Wentworth's Day (H. P. Lovecraft)", an illustrated version at The Horrors of It All