“Wilbur was a hell of a peculiar looking fellow, certainly not what one would call handsome. A goatee covered his lack of chin, but his skin had a sallowness to its hue. He had great big ears and long, black hair that framed his face and added to his goatish look.
“I guess I’d have to say his features were coarse by traditional standards, and there was something wild about his appearance, something amazingly feral that recalled the forest satyrs of the ancient Greeks. His pupils were black as coal so it was easy as hell to get lost in those eyes—he must of caught me staring a hundred times at least!”
A dreamlike tone had entered Galvin’s voice as he recalled Wilbur’s countenance, but he forced himself to focus on the business at hand.
“I don’t think Wilbur ever got much chance to play as a child, except maybe occasionally with Lavinia. We had lots of fun, though the first time I made a joke, that booming laugh of his damn near made me jump out of my seat. He looked and sounded like an adult, but he was just a lonely kid inside. It didn’t take long for me to realize he was still growing and that, plus his shuffling walk, caused me to wonder if he’d inherited some congenital deformity. He was shamed by his difference and tried to cover it by wearing two or three pairs of pants under his old fashioned cossack breeches. People said he smelled bad too, but if he did, I never noticed it.”
Galvin lapsed into silence but did not reach for the bottle. When he spoke again, it was in softer, more intimate tones. “The few visitors we had, including Dr. Armitage, treated Wilbur like some kind of dangerous, deformed misanthrope, though some, like Earl Sawyer, did their best to overcome their qualms. I had mixed feelings about the boy myself, but only at first,” he laughed. “He confused the hell out of me! But after a while, I developed a real respect for him and was proud to call him my friend.”
An uncomfortable silence followed. Galvin’s last statement had been a revelation after all the negative descriptions the authors had heard of “the black brat of Dunwich.” James carefully reached over, grabbed the whiskey bottle, and refilled the others’ glasses as well as his own.
Jeffrey found himself trying to picture Galvin at age twenty-five. His artistic bend made it easy to visualize a younger Galvin simply by filling in the lines and darkening the hair of the grandfatherly figure before him. He concluded that Galvin had once been the good looking, though probably not the handsome, rugged type. A man of Galvin’s average height and build must have felt quite intimidated at having a student whose boyish lack of experience belied his towering visage. It suddenly occurred to Jeffrey that Galvin was reading his thoughts, and when he looked up, he saw that Galvin was looking directly at him with a knowing smile on his face. That made Jeffrey slightly uncomfortable, and he felt a certain relief when the old man resumed his account.
“Wilbur’s room also came as a great surprise. It was on the eastern side of the ground floor where the house dug into the hillside. He’d hauled an old bureau into one corner and had been using it as a desk; that’s where they later found the big ledger he used as a diary. Only one wall contained a window; every other wall was lined with shelves filled with hundreds of the rotting books that the family had collected through several generations. The majority of those books concerned various aspects of occultism, alchemy, black magic, and the like. I thought it strange that several of the volumes could be found outside the back rooms of university libraries. The rarer tomes must have been worth a fortune, even in their deteriorated condition. He owned copies of d’Erlette’s Cultes des Goules, the Liyuhh, Borellus’ forbidden text, von Junzt’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten, and others I’d never even heard of. I held Joseph Curwen’s own handwritten copy of Bryce’s Biblia Sinistre in my hands! Hell, even Miskatonic University doesn’t have a copy of that! Yet with all those treasures around him, Wilbur still craved a Latin edition of the Necronomicon printed in 17th century Spain. I was allowed freedom of his library, but I didn’t have much interest in things about ‘blasphemous outer spheres.’”
Galvin experienced a second coughing fit, this one worse than the first. In the meantime, Jeffrey managed to replace the tape in the recorder with a fresh one.
“Wilbur needed help translating certain passages from those books, only a few of which were actually written in archaic Greek and Latin. That’s the reason I was there. Wilbur spoke a crude dialect he’d picked up from his mother, but his was such a brilliant mind that he could easily translate French, German, Arabic, and even enciphered passages without my aid.”
James asked Galvin to wait until he got back from the restroom before proceeding.
Jeffrey stayed with Galvin. “Why weren’t you afraid of Wilbur like everyone else?” he asked the shadowed figure seated across from him. “His appearance must have been intimidating.”
Galvin chuckled softly and answered, “Wilbur was very special, and I guess I saw that right away. Armitage has since made Wilbur sound like a goat-faced monster, but people didn’t scream and run when he came around, so even you must realize that was an exaggeration.”
James returned. As he sat down, he tried to check the alcohol level in the whiskey bottle as inconspicuously as possible.
“You needn’t worry, son,” Galvin snidely commented, “it takes a lot more than one bottle to get me lathered.”
The dim lighting hid the blush that immediately flooded James’ face.
Jeffrey turned to James in an attempt to dispel the awkwardness of the situation. “Mr. Galvin,” he proffered, “was just about to tell me how special Wilbur was.”
Somewhat amused at his interviewers’ apprehension, Galvin resumed his discourse. “That’s right. For instance, we’d sneak out at night to chase across the countryside in the dark while the others slept. Wilbur would steer us safely around the deep ravines and gorges that I could barely see, past what they called the Devil’s Hop Yard, to the rounded hilltops where folks said the Pocumtuck Indians had buried their dead. I’d squat among circles of ancient stone pillars while he set up an odd sort of telescope of his own design. Through that telescope we’d gaze upon a sky the rest of mankind has never seen, and he’d talk for hours about the endless universes revolving above us, just as if he’d toured them personally. What we now call nebulas, he claimed were colossal sprays of blood marking the demise of entities beyond imagination. Other entities, he said, had come to Earth eons ago and more were yet to come. He taught me about Cthulhu, Dagon, and the Winged Ones, and told me the story of Qom-maq, the blender of flesh, who’d been the scourge of ancient Crete. I’d lie next to him in the cool grass while he wove his wonderful tales. He made it easy to stare into the sky and envision other worlds as he described them.”
“That’s incredible!” exclaimed Jeffrey.
“Not as incredible as Wilbur himself,” Galvin responded dreamily. After a few moments, he reluctantly moved on to the next phase of his account.
“Once he felt sure he could trust me, he told me about his twin brother, the ‘Other’ we called him, who was confined in the upper half of the house. Wilbur confessed to being only half human himself, though I didn’t really believe him until later.”
James nearly jumped out of his seat, exclaiming, “You mean you got a good look at him and even that didn’t scare you off?”
Galvin rolled his eyes. “There’s a great deal more to a person than what reveals itself to the eye, son; the ability to see beyond the physical is about the only thing that raises us above the level of monsters ourselves. All I knew was that the boy was deformed below the waist to some extent. He was always real concerned with privacy whenever he bathed, so it was obvious he was ashamed of his difference. He said the other kids had made fun of him when he’d tried to make friends; you know how cruel kids can be, and I saw the proof of pain in his eyes. He hated his difference and always fought to keep it hidden.