The Lurker at the Threshold: Posthumous Collaborations

by August Derleth

  I explained that I had come to make inquiries of him.

  “Pray do so, Mr. Bishop,” he invited.

  “Tell me, Reverend Dunning, have you ever heard of warlocks hereabouts?”

  He tented his fingers and leaned back. An indulgent smile crossed his face.

  “Ah, Mr. Bishop, these people are a superstitious lot. Many of them do indeed believe in witches and warlocks and all manner of things from outside, particularly since the events of 1928, when Wilbur Whateley and the thing that was his twin brother died. Whateley fancied himself a wizard and kept talking about what he ‘called down’ from the air—but of course, it was only his brother—horribly misshapen through some accident of birth, I suppose, though the accounts given me are too garbled for me to be sure.”

  “Did you know my late great-uncle, Septimus Bishop?”

  He shook his head. “He was before my time. I do have a Bishop family in my charge, but I rather think they are a different branch. Ill-educated. And there is no facial resemblance.”

  I assured him that we were not related. It was clear, however, that he knew nothing that would be of any assistance to me; so I took my departure as soon as I decently could, for all that the Reverend Dunning was patently anxious for the company of an educated man, not commonly found in Dunwich and its environs, I gathered.

  I despaired of learning anything in Dunwich; so I made my way back to the house, where I could not prevent myself from descending once more to the cellar to make certain anew that the bones I had brought home were gone. And, of course, they were. And not even rats could have carried them, one by one, past the door of the study and out of the house without my having seen them.

  But the suggestion of rats set in mind a new train of thought. Acting on it, I went again into the cellar with the lamp and searched carefully for any opening such as rats might use, still seeking some natural explanation for the disappearance of the bones.

  There was none.

  I resigned myself to their vanishing, and spent the remainder of that day trying to keep my mind upon something else.

  But that night I was troubled by dreams—dreams in which I saw the bones I had brought reassemble themselves into a skeleton—and the skeleton clothe itself in flesh—and the whiplike bones grow into something not of this world that constantly changed shape, and was once a thing of utter horror and then a large black cat, once a tentacled monster and then a lissome naked woman, once a giant sow and then a lean bitch running at its master’s side; and, waking, I lay hearing distant sounds I could not identify—a strange snuffling and a slobbering that seemed to rise from far below, from deep in the earth, a rending and grinding that suggested something dreadful and malign.

  I rose to shake myself free of dream and hallucination, and walked the house in the dark, pausing now and then to gaze out into the moonlight night, until hallucination troubled me even there, for I thought I saw at the edge of the close-pressing wood the long lean figure of a man together with a thing of abominable shape that loped at his side—seen so for but a few minutes before both vanished into the dark wood which the moonlight did not penetrate. If ever I wished for the guiding wisdom of my great-uncle Septimus, it was then; for the hallucination was even more vivid than the dream, with which I had done now, as I had with the sounds I had fancied I heard from below.

  Nevertheless, in the clear light of day that dawned soon enough, I was persuaded to descend into the cellar, and enter the tunnel with the lamp, and go on to the subterranean room—compelled to do so by some force I did not understand and could not withstand. At the entrance to the underground room I thought that the earth was disturbed by more than my footprints at my earlier visit, disturbed not only by alien prints, but by the marks as of something dragged there from the direction of the door in the hillside, and I was apprehensive when I went down into that room. But I need not have been, for there was no one there.

  I stood with lamp held high and looked about. All was unchanged—stone benches, brick floor, altar—and yet . . . There was a stain, upon the altar, a great dark stain I could not remember having seen before. Slowly, reluctantly, I moved forward, though I had no will or inclination to do so, until the lamplight disclosed it—freshly wet and gleaming—undeniably a pool of blood.

  And I saw now, for the first time seeing the altar close, that there were other and far older stains, dark, too, and still faintly red, that must have been blood spilled there a long time ago.

  Badly shaken, I fled the cellar, ran along the tunnel, and blundered up into the cellar immediately below the house. And there I stood to catch my breath until I heard a sound of footsteps above, and made my cautious way up to the ground floor.

  The steps had seemed to come from the study. I blew out the lamp, for the light from outside the house, despite the massed trees, was ample, and I made my way to the study.

  There sat a man, lean of face, saturnine of countenance, his tall body concealed by a cloak, his eyes like fire fixed upon me.

  “You are clearly a Bishop,” he said. “But which one?”

  “Ambrose,” I said, when I found my voice. “Son of William, grandson of Peter. Come to see about the property of my great-uncle Septimus. And you?”

  “I have been hidden away a long time. Nephew, I am your great-uncle Septimus.”

  Something stirred behind him, and looked out from behind his chair, though he pulled out his cloak as if to hide what was there—a squamous thing with the face of a lovely woman.

  I fainted dead away.

  As I was coming around to consciousness again, I fancied he stood near me and said to someone, “We shall have to give him a little more time.”

  Opening my eyes fearfully, I looked to where he had been.

  There was no one there.

  IV

  Four days later the first issue of the Arkham Advertiser was delivered to me, left under a stone on top of what remained of the pillar at the roadside. I had entered a six-month subscription when I had taken the opportunity of studying its files for mention of my great-uncle. I resisted my initial impulse to discard it, for I had subscribed merely as a courtesy in return for the privilege accorded me, and carried it into the house.

  Though I had no intention of reading it, a two-column heading caught my eye. Dunwich Disappearances Resume. Somewhat apprehensively, I read the story below.

  “Seth Frye, 18, employed at the Howard Cole farm immediately north of Dunwich, has been reported missing. He was last seen three nights ago walking out of Dunwich on his way home. This is the second disappearance in the Dunwich area in as many days. Harold Sawyer, 20, vanished from the outskirts of Dunwich without trace two days ago. Sheriff John Houghton and his deputies are searching the area, but as yet report no clue. Neither young man had any known reason to disappear voluntarily, and foul play is suspected.

  “It will be remembered by older readers that a rash of similar disappearances took place over twenty years ago, culminating in the vanishing of Septimus Bishop in the summer of 1929.

  “The Dunwich area is a backwater which has a curious reputation and has figured from time to time in the news, usually in a strange way, ever since the mysterious Whateley affair of 1928 . . .”

  I lowered the paper, overcome with the knowledge that events were shaping toward only one explanation, one I was loath even now to accept. It was then that I determined to set down everything that had occurred, in the hope of seeing everything that had happened in its proper relation, one event to another, for those events were hopelessly garbled in my mind, and I kept thinking of the bones that had disappeared from the cellar and of Wilbur Whateley’s words in his letter to my great-uncle—“They from the air cannot help without human blood. They take body from it. . . as you, too, will be able to do . . .” and of Great-uncle Septimus’s mysterious return and his equally mysterious vanishing again, for there had been no sign of him since the sight I had had of him in the study.

  I threw the paper to the floor, my mind a whirl with t
he lore of warlocks and familiars, the power of running water to contain ghost and witches and all such superstitious manifestations, my reason embattled, besieged. Impelled by a wild curiosity to learn more, I ran from the house; unmindful of the brambles in my path, I pushed through the lane to the car, and drove down the road to Dunwich.

  I had hardly set foot into Tobias Whateley’s shop before he confronted me, eyes ablaze.

  “Git aout! I wun’t wait on yew,” he cried fiercely. “Yew done it!”

  I found it impossible to break into his anger.

  “Git aout of taown, afore it happens again. We done it once—we kin do it again. I known thet boy, Seth, like I known my own. Yew done it—yew cursed Bishops!”

  I backed away from his naked hatred, and saw, as I retreated to my car, the way in which other inhabitants of Dunwich grouped along the street staring at me with unconcealed loathing.

  I got into the car and drove back out of Dunwich, knowing for the first time a spreading fear of the unknown against which all rationalization was powerless.

  And once back at the Bishop house, I lit the lamp and descended to the cellar. I entered the tunnel and walked along it to the trapdoor into the subterranean room. I lifted it, and such a charnel odor rose up from it—perhaps from that other opening I had never looked into below, for the room, as much as could be seen in the glow from my lamp, was unchanged from the last time I had looked into it—that I could not bring myself to descend.

  I dropped the trapdoor and fled back the way I had come.

  Against all reason, I knew now what horror I had unwittingly loosed upon the countryside—I and the blind forces of nature—the horror from the middle span . . .

  *

  Later, Great-uncle Septimus has just awakened me from my dream-haunted sleep, a firm hand on my shoulder. I opened my eyes to see him dimly in the dark, and behind him the white, unclothed body of a long-haired woman, whose eyes shone as if with fire.

  “Nephew, we are in danger,” said my great-uncle. “Come.”

  He and his companion turned and left the study.

  I swung off the couch where I had fallen asleep fully dressed to set these last words to the account I have written.

  Outside, I can see the flickering of many torches. I know who is there at the woods’ edge—the hateful inhabitants of Dunwich and the country around—I know what they mean to do.

  Great-uncle Septimus and his companion are waiting for me in the tunnel.

  There is no other course for me.

  If only they do not know of the door in the hillside . . . .

  *

  The Bishop manuscript ends at this point.

  By way of coincidence, seekers after curiosa will find in the inside pages of the Arkham Advertiser dated eleven days after the destruction by fire of the old Bishop house, this paragraph: “The Dunwichers have been at it again.

  “Hard upon the disappearance of Ambrose Bishop, the Dunwichers have been building again. The old Crary Road bridge, which was recently completely destroyed during a flash flood on the Miskatonic, apparently holds some charm for the Dunwichers, who have quietly rebuilt one of the central piers in concrete, and crowned it with what old-timers in the area call ‘the Elder Sign.’ No one in Dunwich, approached by our reporter, would admit any knowledge of the old bridge . . .”

  INNSMOUTH CLAY

  first published in Dark Things, August Derleth, Arkham House, 1971

  THE FACTS relating to the fate of my friend, the late sculptor, Jeffrey Corey—if indeed “late” is the correct reference—must begin with his return from Paris and his decision to rent a cottage on the coast south of Innsmouth in the autumn of 1927. Corey came from an armigerous family with some distant relationship to the Marsh clan of Innsmouth—not, however, such a one as would impose upon him any obligation to consort with his distant relatives. There were, in any case, old rumors abroad about the reclusive Marshes who still lived in that Massachusetts seaport town, and these were hardly calculated to inspire Corey with any desire to announce his presence in the vicinity.

  I visited him a month after his arrival in December of that year. Corey was a comparatively young man, not yet forty, six feet in height, with a fine, fresh skin, which was free of any hirsute adornment, though his hair was worn rather long, as was then the custom among artists in the Latin quarter of Paris. He had very strong blue eyes, and his lantern-jawed face would have stood out in any assemblage of people, not alone for the piercing quality of his gaze, but as much for the rather strange, wattled appearance of the skin back from his jaws, under his ears and down his neck a little way below his ears. He was not ill-favored in looks, and a queer quality, almost hypnotic, that informed his fine-featured face had a kind of fascination for most people who met him. He was well settled in when I visited him, and had begun work on a statue of Rima, the Bird-Girl, which promised to become one of his finest works.

  He had laid in supplies to keep him for a month, having gone into Innsmouth for them, and he seemed to me more than usually loquacious, principally about his distant relatives, about whom there was a considerable amount of talk, however guarded, in the shops of Innsmouth. Being reclusive, the Marshes were quite naturally the object of some curiosity; and since that curiosity was not satisfied, an impressive lore and legendry had grown up about them, reaching all the way back to an earlier generation which had been in the South Pacific trade.

  There was little definite enough to hold meaning for Corey, but what there was suggested all manner of arcane horror, of which he expected at some nebulous future time to learn more, though he had no compulsion to do so. It was just, he explained, that the subject was so prevalent in the village that it was almost impossible to escape it.

  He spoke also of a prospective show, made references to friends in Paris and his years of study there, to the strength of Epstein’s sculpture, and to the political turmoil boiling in the country. I cite these matters to indicate how perfectly normal Corey was on the occasion of this first visit to him after his return from Europe. I had, of course, seen him fleetingly in New York when he had come home, but hardly long enough to explore any subject as we were able to do that December of 1927.

  Before I saw him again, in the following March, I received a curious letter from him, the gist of which was contained in the final paragraph, to which everything else in his letter seemed to mount as to a climax— “You may have read of some strange goings-on at Innsmouth in February. I have no very clear information about it, but it must surely have been in the papers somewhere, however silent our Massachusetts papers seem to have been.

  All I can gather about the affair is that a large band of federal officers of some kind descended upon the town and spirited away some of the citizens—among them some of my own relatives, though which I am at a loss to say since I’ve never troubled to ascertain how many of them there are—or were, as the case may be. What I can pick up in Innsmouth has reference to some kind of South Pacific trade in which certain shipping interests in the town were still evidently engaged, though this seems to be pretty far-fetched, insofar as the docks are all but abandoned, and actually largely useless for the ships now plying the Atlantic, most of which go to the larger and more modern ports. Quite apart from the reasons for the federal action—and considerably of more importance to me, as you will see—is the indisputable fact that, coincident with the raid on Innsmouth, some naval vessels appeared off the coast in the vicinity of what is known as Devils’ Reef, and there dropped a power of depth charges! These set off such turmoil in the depths that a subsequent storm washed ashore all manner of debris, of which a peculiar blue clay came in along the water’s edge here. It seemed to me very much like that moulding clay of similar color found in various parts of interior America and often used for the manufacture of bricks, particularly years ago when more modern methods of brick-making were not available to builders. Well, what is important about all this is that I gathered up the clay I could find before the sea took it back again,
and I have been working on an entirely new piece I’ve tentatively titled ‘Sea Goddess’—and I am wildly enthusiastic about its possibilities. You will see it when you come down next week, and I am certain you will like it even more than my ‘Rima’.”

  Contrary to his expectations, however, I found myself oddly repelled at my first sight of Corey’s new statue. The figure was lissome, save for rather heavier pelvic structure than I thought fitting, and Corey had chosen to alter the feet with webbing between the toes.

  “Why?” I asked him.

  “I really don’t know,” he said. “The fact is I hadn’t planned to do it. It just happened.”

  “And those disfiguring marks on the neck?” He was apparently still at work in that area.

  He gave an embarrassed laugh, and a strange expression came into his eyes.

  “I wish I could explain those marks to my own satisfaction, Ken,” he said. “I woke up yesterday morning to find that I must have been working in my sleep, for there were slits in the neck below her ears—on both sides—slits like—well, like gills. I’m repairing the damage now.”

  “Perhaps a ‘sea goddess’ ought to have gills,” I said.

  “I’d guess it came about as a result of what I picked up in Innsmouth day before yesterday when I went in for some things I needed. More talk of the Marsh clan. It boiled down to the suggestion that members of the family were reclusive by choice because they had some kind of physical deformity that related to a legend tying them to certain South Sea islanders. This is the kind of fairy tale that ignorant people take up and embellish—though I grant that this one is more unusual than the kind one commonly picks up, related to the Judaeo-Christian morality pattern. I dreamed about it that night—and evidently walked in my sleep and worked out some part of the dream on my ‘Sea goddess’.”

  However strange I thought it, I made no further comment on the incident.

  What he said was logical, and I confess that I was appreciably more interested in the Innsmouth lore than in the disfigurement of the “Sea Goddess.”