evidence. With Wilbur dead, no one attends to the mysterious presence growing in the Whateley farmhouse. Early one morning, the farmhouse explodes, and the thing, a towering, invisible monster, rampages across Dunwich, leaving huge prints the size of tree trunks. The monster eventually makes forays into inhabited areas. The invisible creature terrorizes Dunwich for several days, killing two families and several policemen, until Armitage, Rice, and Morgan arrive with the knowledge and weapons needed to kill it. The use of a magic powder renders the monster visible just long enough to send one of the crew into shock. It babbles in an alien tongue, then screams for help from its father Yog-Sothoth in English just before the spell destroys it, leaving a massive burned area. In the end, its nature is revealed: it was Wilbur's twin brother, but it "looked more like the father than he [Wilbur] did." Characters Old Whateley Lavinia Whateley's "aged and half-insane father, about whom the most frightful tales of magic had been whispered in his youth". He has a large collection of "rotting ancient books and parts of books" which he uses to "instruct and catechise" his grandson Wilbur. He dies of natural causes on August 2, 1924. Whateley was given no certain first name by Lovecraft, although Fungi from Yuggoth mentions a John Whateley; he is referred to as Noah Whateley in the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game. According to S.T. Joshi, "It is not certain where Lovecraft got the name Whateley," but there is a small town called Whately in northwestern Massachusetts near the Mohawk Trail, which Lovecraft hiked several times, including in the summer of 1928. Robert M. Price's short story "Wilbur Whateley Waiting" emphasizes the obvious pun in the name. Lavinia Whateley Born circa 1878, Lavinia Whateley is the spinster daughter of Old Whateley whose mother met an "unexplained death by violence" when Lavinia was 12. She is described as a somewhat deformed, unattractive albino woman...a lone creature given to wandering amidst thunderstorms in the hills and trying to read the great odorous books which her father had inherited through two centuries of Whateleys...She had never been to school, but was filled with disjointed scraps of ancient lore that Old Whateley had taught her...Isolated among strange influences, Lavinia was fond of wild and grandiose day-dreams and singular occupations. Elsewhere, she is called "slatternly [and] crinkly-haired". In 1913, she gave birth to