The Lurker at the Threshold: Posthumous Collaborations

by August Derleth

  He turned off the main street and followed a rutted road up along the river, until he came within sight of the great old house with the mill wheel on the river-side. It was his property now, by the will of Grandfather Whateley, who had stipulated that he must settle the estate and “take such steps as may be necessary to bring about that dissolution I myself was not able to take.” A curious proviso, Abner thought. But then, everything about Grandfather Whateley had been strange, as if the decadence of Dunwich had infected him irrevocably.

  And nothing was stranger than that Abner Whateley should come back from his cosmopolitan way of life to heed his grandfather’s adjurations for property which was scarcely worth the time and trouble it would take to dispose of it. He reflected ruefully that such relatives as still lived in or near Dunwich might well resent his return in their curious inward growing and isolated rustication which had kept most of the Whateleys in this immediate region, particularly since the shocking events which had overtaken the country branch of the family on Sentinel Hill.

  The house appeared to be unchanged. The river-side of the house was given over to the mill, which had long ago ceased to function, as more and more of the fields around Dunwich had grown barren; except for one room above the mill-wheel—Aunt Sarey’s room—the entire side of the structure bordering the Miskatonic had been abandoned even in the time of his boyhood, when Abner Whateley had last visited his grandfather, then living alone in the house except for the never seen Aunt Sarey who abode in her shuttered room with her door locked, never to move about the house under prohibition of such movement by her father, from whose domination only death at last had freed her.

  A verandah, fallen in at the corner of the house, circled that part of the structure used as a dwelling; from the lattice-work under the eaves great cobwebs hung, undisturbed by anything save the wind for years. And dust lay over everything, inside as well as out, as Abner discovered when he had found the right key among the lot the lawyer had sent him. He found a lamp and lit it, for Grandfather Whateley had scorned electricity. In the yellow glow of light, the familiarity of the old kitchen with its nineteenth century appointments smote him like a blow. Its spareness, the hand-hewn table and chairs, the century-old clock on the mantel, the worn broom—all were tangible reminders of his fear-haunted childhood visits to the formidable house and its even more formidable occupant, his mother’s aged father.

  The lamplight disclosed something more. On the kitchen table lay an envelope addressed to him in handwriting so crabbed that it could only be that of a very old or infirm man—his grandfather. Without troubling to bring the rest of his things from the car, Abner sat down to the table, blowing the dust off the chair and sufficiently from the table to allow him a resting place for his elbows, and opened the envelope.

  The spidery script leapt out at him. The words were as severe as he remembered his grandfather to have been. And abrupt, with no term of endearment, not even the prosaic form of greeting.

  Grandson:

  When you read this, I will be some months dead. Perhaps more, unless they find you sooner than I believe they will. I have left you a sum of money—all I have and die possessed of—which is in the bank at Arkham under your name now. I do this not alone because you are my own and only grandson but because among all the Whateleys—we are an accursed clan, my boy—you have gone forth into the world and gathered to yourself learning sufficient to permit you to look upon all things with an inquiring mind ridden neither by the superstition of ignorance nor the superstition of science. You will understand my meaning.

  It is my wish that at least the mill section of this house be destroyed. Let it be taken apart, board by board. If anything in it lives, I adjure you solemnly to kill it. No matter how small it may be. No matter what form it may have, for if it seem to you human it will beguile you and endanger your life and God knows how many others.

  Heed me in this.

  If I seem to have the sound of madness, pray recall that worse than madness has spawned among the Whateleys. I have stood free of it. It has not been so of all that is mine. There is more stubborn madness in those who are unwilling to believe in what they know not of and deny that such exists, than in those of our blood who have been guilty of terrible practises, and blasphemy against God, and worse.

  YOUR GRANDFATHER,

  LUTHER S. WHATELEY.

  How like Grandfather! thought Abner. He remembered, spurred into memory by this enigmatic, self-righteous communication, how on one occasion when his mother had mentioned her sister Sarah, and clapped her fingers across her mouth in dismay, he had run to his grandfather to ask, “Grandpa, where’s Aunt Sarey?”

  The old man had looked at him out of eyes that were basilisk and answered, “Boy, we do not speak of Sarah here.”

  Aunt Sarey had offended the old man in some dreadful way—dreadful, at least, to that firm disciplinarian—for from that time beyond even Abner Whateley’s memory, his aunt had been only the name of a woman, who was his mother’s older sister, and who was locked in the big room over the mill and kept forever invisible within those walls, behind the shutters nailed to her windows. It had been forbidden both Abner and his mother even to linger before the door of that shuttered room, though on one occasion Abner had crept up to the door and put his ear against it to listen to the snuffling and whimpering sounds that went on inside, as from some large person, and Aunt Sarey, he had decided, must be as large as a circus fat lady, for she devoured so much, judging by the great platters of food—chiefly meat, which she must have prepared herself, since so much of it was raw—carried to the room twice daily by old Luther Whateley himself, for there were no servants in that house, and had not been since the time Abner’s mother had married, after Aunt Sarey had come back, strange and mazed, from a visit to distant kin in Innsmouth.

  He refolded the letter and put it back into the envelope. He would think of its contents another day. His first need now was to make sure of a place to sleep.

  He went out and got his two remaining bags from the car and brought them to the kitchen. Then he picked up the lamp and went into the interior of the house.

  The old-fashioned parlor, which was always kept closed against that day when visitors came—and none save Whateleys called upon Whateleys in Dunwich— he ignored. He made his way instead to his grandfather’s bedroom; it was fitting that he should occupy the old man’s bed now that he, and not Luther Whateley, was master here.

  The large, double bed was covered with faded copies of the Arkham Advertiser, carefully arranged to protect the fine cloth of the spread, which had been embossed with an armigerous design, doubtless a legitimate Whateley heritage. He set down the lamp and cleared away the newspapers. When he turned down the bed, he saw that it was clean and fresh, ready for occupation; some cousin of his grandfather’s had doubtless seen to this, against his arrival, after the obsequies.

  Then he got his bags and transferred them to the bedroom, which was in that corner of the house away from the village; its windows looked along the river, though they were more than the width of the mill from the bank of the stream.

  He opened the only one of them which had a screen across its lower half, then sat down on the edge of the bed, bemused, pondering the circumstances which had brought him back to Dunwich after all these years.

  He was tired now. The heavy traffic around Boston had tired him. The contrast between the Boston region and this desolate Dunwich country depressed and troubled him. Moreover, he was conscious of an intangible uneasiness. If he had not had need of his legacy to continue his research abroad into the ancient civilizations of the South Pacific, he would never have come here. Yet family ties existed, for all that he would deny them. Grim and forbidding as old Luther Whateley had always been, he was his mother’s father, and to him his grandson owed the allegiance of common blood.

  Round Mountain loomed close outside the bedroom; he felt its presence as he had when a boy, sleeping in the room above. Trees, for long untended, pressed upon
the house, and from one of them at this hour of deep dusk, a screech owl’s bell-like notes dropped into the still summer air. He lay back for a moment, strangely lulled by the owl’s pleasant song. A thousand thoughts crowded upon him, a myriad of memories. He saw himself again as the little boy he was, always half-fearful of enjoying himself in these foreboding surroundings, always happy to come and happier to leave.

  But he could not lie here, however relaxing it was. There was so much to be done before he could hope to take his departure that he could ill afford to indulge himself in rest and make a poor beginning of his nebulous obligation.

  He swung himself off the bed, picked up the lamp again, and began a tour of the house.

  He went from the bedroom to the dining room, which was situated between it and the kitchen—a room of stiff, uncomfortable furniture, also handmade, and from there across to the parlor, the door of which opened upon a world far closer in its furniture and decorations to the eighteenth century than to the nineteenth, and far removed from the twentieth. The absence of dust testified to the tightness of the doors closing the room off from the rest of the house. He went up the open stairs to the floor above, from bedroom to bedroom—all dusty, with faded curtains, and showing every sign of having remained unoccupied for many years even before old Luther Whateley died.

  Then he came to the passage which led to the shuttered room—Aunt Sarey’s hideaway—or prison—he could now never learn what it might have been, and, on impulse, he went down and stood before that forbidden door. No snuffling, no whimpering greeted him now—nothing at all, as he stood before it, remembering, still caught in the spell of the prohibition laid upon him by his grandfather.

  But there was no longer any reason to remain under that adjuration. He pulled out the ring of keys, and patiently tried one after another in the lock, until he found the right one. He unlocked the door and pushed; it swung protestingly open. He held the lamp high.

  He had expected to find a lady’s boudoir, but the shuttered room was startling in its condition—bedding scattered about, pillows on the floor, the remains of food dried on a huge platter hidden behind a bureau. An odd, icthyic smell pervaded the room, rushing at him with such musty strength that he could hardly repress a gasp of disgust. The room was in shambles; moreover, it wore the aspect of having been in such wild disorder for a long, long time.

  Abner put the lamp on a bureau drawn away from the wall, crossed to the window above the mill wheel, unlocked it, and raised it. He strove to open the shutters before he remembered that they had been nailed shut. Then he stood back, raised his foot, and kicked the shutters out to let a welcome blast of fresh, damp air into the room.

  He went around to the adjoining outer wall and broke away the shutters from the single window in that wall, as well. It was not until he stood back to survey his work that he noticed he had broken a small corner out of the pane of the window above the mill wheel. His quick regret was as quickly repressed in the memory of his grandfather’s insistence that the mill and this room above it be torn down or otherwise destroyed. What mattered a broken pane!

  He returned to take up the lamp again. As he did so, he gave the bureau a shove to push it back against the wall once more. At the same moment he heard a small, rustling sound along the baseboard, and, looking down, caught sight of a long-legged frog or toad—he could not make out which—vanishing under the bureau. He was tempted to rout the creature out, but he reflected that its presence could not matter—if it had existed in these locked quarters for so long on such cockroaches and other insects as it had managed to uncover, it merited being left alone.

  He went out of the room, locked the door again, and returned to the master bedroom downstairs. He felt, obscurely, that he had made a beginning, however trivial; he had scouted the ground, so to speak. And he was twice as tired for his brief look around as he had been before. Though the hour was not late, he decided to go to bed and get an early start in the morning. There was the old mill yet to be gone through—perhaps some of the machinery could be sold, if any remained—and the mill wheel was now a curiosity, having continued to exist beyond its time.

  He stood for a few minutes on the verandah, marking with surprise the welling stridulation of the crickets and katydids, and the almost overwhelming choir of the whippoorwills and frogs, which rose on all sides to assault him with a deafening insistence of such proportion as to drown out all other sounds, even such as might have risen from Dunwich. He stood there until he could tolerate the voices of the night no longer; then he retreated, locking the door, and made his way to the bedroom.

  He undressed and got into bed, but he did not sleep for almost an hour, bedevilled by the chorus of natural sounds outside the house and from within himself by a rising confusion about what his grandfather had meant by the “dissolution” he himself had not been able to make. But at last he drifted into a troubled sleep.

  II

  He woke with the dawn, little rested. All night he had dreamed of strange places and beings that filled him with beauty and wonder and dread—of swimming in the ocean’s depths and up the Miskatonic among fish and amphibia and strange men, half batrachian in aspect—of monstrous entities that lay sleeping in an eerie stone city at the bottom of the sea—of utterly outré music as of flutes accompanied by weird ululations from throats far, far from human—of Grandfather Luther Whateley standing accusingly before him and thundering forth his wrath at him for having dared to enter Aunt Sarey’s shuttered room.

  He was troubled, but he shrugged his unease away before the necessity of walking into Dunwich for the provisions he had neglected to bring with him in his haste. The morning was bright and sunny; pewees and thrushes sang, and dew pearled on leaf and blade reflected the sunlight in a thousand jewels along the winding path that led to the main street of the village. As he went along, his spirits rose; he whistled happily, and contemplated the early fulfillment of his obligation, upon which his escape from this desolate, forgotten pocket of ingrown humanity was predicated.

  But the main street of Dunwich was no more reassuring under the light of the sun than it had been in the dusk of the past evening. The village huddled between the Miskatonic and the almost vertical slope of Round Mountain, a dark and brooding settlement which seemed somehow never to have passed 1900, as if time had ground to a stop before the turn of the last century. His gay whistle faded and died away; he averted his eyes from the buildings falling into ruin; he avoided the curiously expressionless faces of passersby, and went directly to the old church with its general store, which he knew he would find slovenly and ill-kept, in keeping with the village itself.

  A gaunt-faced storekeeper watched his advance down the aisle, searching his features for any familiar lineament.

  Abner strode up to him and asked for bacon, coffee, eggs and milk.

  The storekeeper peered at him. He made no move. “Ye’ll be a Whateley,” he said at last. “I dun’t expeck ye know me. I’m yer cousin Tobias. Which one uv ’em are ye?”

  “I’m Abner—Luther's grandson.” He spoke reluctantly.

  Tobias Whateley’s face froze. “Libby’s boy—Libby, that married cousin

  Jeremiah. Yew folks ain’t back—back at Luther’s? Yew folks ain’t a-goin’ to start things again?”

  “There’s no one but me,” said Abner shortly. “What things are you talking about?”

  “If ye dun’t know, tain’t fer me to say.”

  Nor would Tobias Whateley speak again. He put together what Abner

  wanted, took his money sullenly, and watched him out of the store with ill-concealed animosity.

  Abner was disagreeably affected. The brightness of the morning had

  dimmed for him, though the sun shone from the same unclouded heaven. He hastened away from the store and main street, and hurried along the lane toward the house he had but recently quitted.

  He was even more disturbed to discover, standing before the house, an

  ancient rig drawn by an old workhors
e. Beside it stood a boy, and inside it sat an old, white-bearded man, who, at sight of Abner’s approach, signalled to the boy for assistance, and by the lad’s aid, laboriously descended to the ground and stood to await Abner.

  As Abner came up, the boy spoke, unsmiling. “Great-grampa’ll talk to yew.”

  “Abner,” said the old man quaveringly, and Abner saw for the first time how very old he was.

  “This here’s Great-grampa Zebulon Whateley,” said the boy.

  Grandfather Luther Whateley’s brother—the only living Whateley of his

  generation. “Come in, sir,” said Abner, offering the old man his arm.

  Zebulon Whateley took it.

  The three of them made slow progress toward the verandah, where the old man halted at the foot of the steps, turning his dark eyes upon Abner from under their bushy white brows, and snaking his head gently.

  “Naow, if ye’ll fetch me a cheer, I’ll set.”

  “Bring a chair from the kitchen, boy,” said Abner.

  The boy sped up the steps and into the house. He was out as fast with a chair for the old man, and helped to lower him to it, and stood beside him while Zebulon Whateley caught his breath.

  Presently he turned his eyes full upon Abner and contemplated him, taking in every detail of his clothes, which, unlike his own, were not made by hand.

  “Why have ye come, Abner?” he asked, his voice firmer now.

  Abner told him, as simply and directly as he could.

  Zebulon Whateley shook his head. “Ye know no more’n the rest, and less’n some,” he said. “What Luther was abaout, only God knowed. Naow Luther’s gone, and ye’ll have it to dew. I kin tell ye, Abner, I vaow afur God, I dun’t know why Luther took on so and locked hisself up and Sarey that time she come back Innsmouth—but I kin say it was suthin’ turrible, turrible—and the things what happened was turrible. Ain’t nobody left to say Luther was to blame, nor poor Sarey—but take care, take care, Abner.”