The Lurker at the Threshold: Posthumous Collaborations

by August Derleth

  It was while I still stood there that I heard her once again on the stairs starting up from below. For a few moments I thought her bound for my room— as once before—and I felt myself grow cold with fear—but her steps carried her past, on to the stairs that led to the attic.

  As the sound of her steps receded, my courage returned, and, emboldened, I opened the door and looked out.

  All was in darkness. But no—up at the top of the stairs, out from under the attic door, shone a blue glow.

  Even as I mounted to the attic, the blue glow began to fade.

  I stood with my ear pressed to the door, listening. There was no sound.

  Pressed by mounting courage, I threw open the door.

  There was no sign of the woman. But over against the floor, where the angle of the roof joined it, the blue light I had noticed under the door was flowing out like water through the mouse-hole there! And the painted lines all around the hole glowed as with a light all their own, which faded even as I watched.

  I lit a match and held it high.

  The clothing the woman had worn lay as before, on the chair. And the mask.

  I crossed to the chair and touched the mask.

  It was warm.

  The match burned my fingers and went out.

  All was now black as pitch. But from the direction of the mouse-hole I felt such a drawing power as must I fling myself on my knees and try to follow the blue light, if I did not at once escape—a pulsing, sensate evil—and once again the earth seemed to stop in its turning, there was a lurch in time, and a great cloud of paralyzing fear enveloped me.

  I stood as if transfixed.

  Then, from the mouse-hole, a drift of blue light like smoke came seeping into the attic. The sight of it burgeoning there broke the spell that held me—I ran, crouching, to the door, and flung myself out of the attic. I raced down the stairs to my room, looking back as if I expected some eldritch thing to be hot on my heels.

  There was nothing but blackness, nothing but the dark.

  I went into my room and threw myself upon the bed, fully clothed, and there I lay, waiting apprehensively, for whatever might come—knowing I should do as Rhoda had asked, yet curiously reluctant to leave the house on Aylesbury Street—not because it was my inheritance, but for a frightening kind of bondage, almost kinship, that kept me there.

  I waited in vain for even the ghost of a sound to disturb the quiet. Nothing whatsoever came to ear but the natural sounds the house made on a windy night, for a wind had come up—and the occasional keening of a screech owl from the direction of Hangman’s Hill.

  And presently I slept, fully clothed as I was, and in my sleep I dreamed—dreamed that the blue light burgeoned and mushroomed into the attic, came flowing down the stairs and into the room where I lay, and out of the mouse-hole at the apex of the angle of roof and floor came to swell and grow the figures of the cleaning woman, now clad and rubber-masked, now hideous with age, now naked and beautiful as a young woman, and beside her my great-uncle Uriah Garrison, invading the house and the room and at last me—a dream from which I woke bathed in perspiration on the edge of dawn which lay pale blue in the room before it gave way to the roseate hue of the morning sky.

  What kept me awake, exhausted as I was, was the pounding at the outside door. I struggled to my feet and made my way to the door.

  Rhoda stood there.

  “Adam!” she cried. “You look terrible.”

  “Go away,” I said, “We don’t need you.”

  I was momentarily shocked to hear my own words, but in a few moments I was resigned to them, I began to understand that I meant them, I resented Rhoda’s interference—as if she thought I could not take care of myself.

  “So—I’m too late then,” she said.

  “Go away,” I said again. “Just leave us alone.”

  She pushed past me and strode into the house. I went after her. She was bound for the study, and when she got there she put together my notes and manuscript for my Hardy dissertation and confronted me with them.

  “You won’t need these any more, will you?” she asked.

  “Take them,” I said. “Take them all.”

  She took them. “Goodbye, Adam,” she said.

  “Goodbye, Rhoda,” I said.

  I could hardly believe the evidence of my eyes, but Rhoda went, as meek as any lamb. And though I was still vaguely troubled by it, I was aware of a secret satisfaction at the way things were turning out.

  V

  I spent most of the rest of that day just relaxing and, in a sense, waiting upon the events of that night. It is impossible now to describe my frame of mind. All fear had left me, and I was consumed with a vivid curiosity, even with a kind of eagerness.

  The day dragged. I slept through part of it. I ate very little. My appetite now was for something no food could satisfy, and it did not trouble me that this was so.

  But the night and darkness came at last, and I set myself to waiting with keen anticipation for whatever might come from that room in the attic. I waited at first down stairs, but at last I understood that it was the room above—my great-uncle Uriah’s old room—where I must wait upon the events of night in the house; so I went there and sat in the darkness.

  I waited while the night grew older, hearing the old clock downstairs strike the hours of nine and ten and eleven. I expected to hear, soon, the step of the woman on the stair, the woman called Lilith, but it was the blue light that came first, seeping in under the door—as in my dream.

  But I was not sleeping, I was not dreaming.

  The blue light came, filling the room until I could just faintly see the naked form of the woman and the shaping form of Great-uncle Uriah looming up, with a writhing, twisting, serpentine coil reaching out from where he was taking shape to where I sat on the bed . . .

  And then something more, something that filled me with sudden terror. I smelled smoke—and I heard the crackling of flames.

  And from outside came Rhoda’s voice calling, “Adam! Adam!”

  The vision collapsed. The last thing I saw was the expression of terrible rage on my great-uncle’s spectral face, the fury on the face of the woman changing in that light from that of a lissome girl to that of an ancient hag. Then I flung myself to the window and opened it.

  “Rhoda!” I cried.

  She had taken no chances. There was a ladder up against the windowsill.

  *

  The house burned to the ground with everything in it.

  Its burning did not affect my great-uncle’s will. As Mr. Saltonstall put it, I had been fulfilling his condition when circumstances beyond my control made it impossible to continue. So I did inherit the property, and I sold it, and Rhoda and I were married.

  In spite of her insistently feminine delusions.

  “I set fire to it myself,” she said. She had spent the day after she had left with my papers and books at the library of Miskatonic University, famed for its collection of arcane books, studying witchcraft lore. She had concluded that the spirit animating the house and responsible for the events in it was that of Great-uncle Uriah Garrison, and that his sole reason for the condition that I must live there was to place me within his reach so that he could usurp my own life-force and take possession of my body. The woman was a succubus, perhaps his mistress. The mouse-hole obviously an opening into another dimension.

  Trust a woman to construe some kind of romantic angle out of even the most curious events. Succubus, indeed!

  There are times even now when her notions affect me. From time to time I find myself unsure of my own identity. Am I Adam Duncan or Uriah Garrison?

  It does no good to mention it to Rhoda. I did so once and she said only, “It seems to have improved you, Adam.”

  Women are fundamentally not rational creatures. Nothing will shake her free of her notions about the house on Aylesbury Street. It annoys me that I find myself unable to come up with a more rational explanation myself, one that will satisfy all the questions
that occur to me when I sit down and think about the events in which I played such a small, if motivating, part.

  THE DARK BROTHERHOOD

  first published in The Dark Brotherhood and Other Pieces, August Derleth, Arkham House, 1966

  It is probable that the facts in regard to the mysterious destruction by fire of an abandoned house on a knoll along the shore of the Seekonk in a little habited district between the Washington and Red Bridges, will never be entirely known.

  The police have been beset by the usual number of cranks, purporting to offer information about the matter, none more insistent than Arthur Phillips, the descendant of an old East Side family, long resident of Angell Street, a somewhat confused but earnest young man who prepared an account of certain events he alleges led to the fire. Though the police have interviewed all persons concerned and mentioned in Mr. Phillips’ account, no corroboration— save for a statement from a librarian at the Athenaeum, attesting only to the fact that Mr. Phillips did once meet Miss Rose Dexter there— could be found to support Mr. Phillips’ allegations. The manuscript follows.

  *

  I

  THE NOCTURNAL streets of any city along the Eastern Seaboard afford the nightwalker many a glimpse of the strange and terrible, the macabre and outré, for darkness draws from the crevices and crannies, the attic rooms and cellar hideaways of the city those human beings who, for obscure reasons lost in the past, choose to keep the day secure in their grey niches—the misshapen, the lonely, the sick, the very old, the haunted, and those lost souls who are forever seeking their identities under cover of night, which is beneficent for them as the cold light of day can never be. These are the hurt by life, the maimed, men and women who have never recovered from the traumas of childhood or who have willingly sought after experiences not meant for man to know, and every place where the human society has been concentrated for any considerable length of time abounds with them, though they are seen only in the dark hours, emerging like nocturnal moths to move about in their narrow environs for a few brief hours before they must escape daylight once more.

  Having been a solitary child, and much left to my own devices because of the persistent ill-health which was my lot, I developed early a propensity for roaming abroad by night, at first only in the Angell Street neighborhood where I lived during much of my childhood, and then, little by little, in a widened circle in my native Providence. By day, my health permitting, I haunted the Seekonk River from the city into the open country, or, when my energy was at its height, played with a few carefully chosen companions at a “clubhouse” we had painstakingly constructed in wooded areas not far out of the city. I was also much given to reading, and spent long hours in my grandfather’s extensive library, reading without discrimination and thus assimilating a vast amount of knowledge, from the Greek philosophies to the history of the English monarchy, from the secrets of ancient alchemists to the experiments of Niels Bohr, from the lore of Egyptian papyri to the regional studies of Thomas Hardy, since my grandfather was possessed of very catholic tastes in books and, spurning specialization, bought and kept only what in his mind was good, by which he meant that which involved him.

  But the nocturnal city invariably drew me from all else; walking abroad was my preference above all other pursuits, and I went out and about at night all through the later years of my childhood and throughout my adolescent years, in the course of which I tended—because sporadic illness kept me from regular attendance at school—to grow ever more self-sufficient and solitary. I could not now say what it was I sought with such determination in the nighted city, what it was in the ill-lit streets that drew me, why I sought old Benefit Street and the shadowed environs of Poe Street, almost unknown in the vastness of Providence, what it was I hoped to see in the furtively glimpsed faces of other night-wanderers slipping and slinking along the dark lanes and byways of the city, unless perhaps it was to escape from the harsher realities of daylight coupled with an insatiable curiosity about the secrets of city life which only the night could disclose.

  When at last my graduation from high school was an accomplished fact, it might have been assumed that I would turn to other pursuits; but it was not so, for my health was too precarious to warrant matriculation at Brown University, where I would like to have gone to continue my studies, and this deprivation served only to enhance my solitary occupations—I doubled my reading hours and increased the time I spent abroad by night, by the simple expedient of sleeping during the daylight hours. And yet I contrived to lead an otherwise normal existence; I did not abandon my widowed mother or my aunts, with whom we lived, though the companions of my youth had grown away from me, and I managed to discover Rose Dexter, a dark-eyed descendant of the first English families to come into old Providence, one singularly favored in the proportions of her figure and in the beauty of her features, whom I persuaded to share my nocturnal pursuits.

  With her I continued to explore nocturnal Providence, and with new zest, eager to show Rose all I had already discovered in my wanderings about the city. We met originally at the old Athenaeum, and we continued to meet there of evenings, and from its portals ventured forth into the night. What began light-heartedly for her soon grew into dedicated habit; she proved as eager as I to inquire into hidden byways and long disused lanes, and she was soon as much at home in the night-held city as I. She was little inclined to irrelevant chatter, and thus proved admirably complementary to my person.

  We had been exploring Providence in this fashion for several months when, one night on Benefit Street, a gentleman wearing a knee-length cape over wrinkled and ill-kept clothing accosted us. He had been standing on the walk not far ahead of us when first we turned into the street, and I had observed him when we went past him; he had struck me as oddly disquieting, for I thought his moustached, dark-eyed face with the unruly hair of his hatless head strangely familiar; and, at our passing, he had set out in pursuit until, at last, catching up to us, he touched me on the shoulder and spoke.

  “Sir,” he said, “could you tell me how to reach the cemetery where once Poe walked?”

  I gave him directions, and then, spurred by a sudden impulse, suggested that we accompany him to the goal he sought; almost before I understood fully what had happened, we three were walking along together. I saw almost at once with what a calculating air the fellow scrutinized my companion, and yet any resentment I might have felt was dispelled by the ready recognition that the stranger’s interest was inoffensive, for it was rather more coolly critical than passionately involved. I took the opportunity, also, to examine him as carefully as I could in the occasional patches of streetlight through which we passed, and was increasingly disturbed at the gnawing certainty that I knew him or had known him.

  He was dressed almost uniformly in sombre black, save for his white shirt and the flowing Windsor tie he affected. His clothing was unpressed, as if it had been worn for a long time without having been attended to, but it was not unclean, as far as I could see. His brow was high, almost dome-like; under it his dark eyes looked out hauntingly, and his face narrowed to his small, blunt chin.

  His hair, too, was longer than most men of my generation wore it, and yet he seemed to be of that same generation, not more than five years past my own age.

  His clothing, however, was definitely not of my generation; indeed, it seemed, for all that it had the appearance of being new, to have been cut to a pattern of several generations before my own.

  “Are you a stranger of Providence?” I asked him presently.

  “I am visiting,” he said shortly.

  “You are interested in Poe?”

  He nodded.

  “How much do you know of him?” I asked then.

  “Little,” he replied. “Perhaps you could tell me more?”

  I needed no second invitation, but immediately gave him a biographical sketch of the father of the detective story and a master of the macabre tale whose work I had long admired, elaborating only on his romance with Mrs. Sarah
Helen Whitman, since it involved Providence and the visit with Mrs. Whitman to the cemetery whither we were bound. I saw that he listened with almost rapt attention, and seemed to be setting down in memory everything I said, but I could not decide from his expressionless face whether what I told him gave him pleasure or displeasure, and I could not determine what the source of his interest was.

  For her part, Rose was conscious of his interest in her, but she was not embarrassed by it, perhaps sensing that his interest was other than amorous. It was not until he asked her name that I realized we had not had his. He gave it now as “Mr. Allan,” at which Rose smiled almost imperceptibly; I caught it fleetingly as we passed under a street-lamp.

  Having learned our names, our companion seemed interested in nothing more, and it was in silence that we reached the cemetery at last. I had thought Mr. Allan would enter it, but such was not his intention; he had evidently meant only to discover its location, so that he could return to it by day, which was manifestly a sensible conclusion, for—though I knew it well and had walked there on occasion by night—it offered little for a stranger to view in the dark hours.

  We bade him good night at the gate and went on.

  “I’ve seen that fellow somewhere before,” I said to Rose once we had passed beyond his hearing. “But I can’t think where it was. Perhaps in the library.”

  “It must have been in the library,” answered Rose with a throaty chuckle that was typical of her. “In a portrait on the wall.”

  “Oh, come!” I cried.

  “Surely you recognized the resemblance, Arthur!” she cried. “Even to his name. He looks like Edgar Allan Poe.”

  And, of course, he did. As soon as Rose had mentioned it, I recognized the strong resemblance, even to his clothing, and at once set Mr. Allan down as a harmless idolater of Poe’s, so obsessed with the man that he must fashion himself in his likeness, even to his outdated clothing—another of the curious specimens of humanity thronging the night streets of the city.