The Lurker at the Threshold: Posthumous Collaborations

by August Derleth

  Jonathan B.

  Evidently a considerable hiatus of time elapsed between this letter and the third, for, though the third was not marked by a date, the references to weather indicated the passage of at least a half year.

  New Dun’ch.

  Honour’d Brother:—

  I am sore press’d to explain that which I came upon in ye snow last night, be’g great footprints, or better, I shou’d not say ‘footprints’, for that they were not, be’g more like to ye prints of a claw of monstrous size, of diameter considerably more than a foot across, and of greater length, perhaps to that of two feet, and hav’g ye appearance of be’g webb’d or at least in part so, ye whole be’g most mysterious and strange. One such print was reported by Olney Bowen, who was off in ye woods a-hunting of turkeys, and, com’g back, spoke of it, none believ’g him save myself, and, not draw’g attention to myself, I listen’d and learn’d where it was ye track had been seen, thereafter go’g myself to witness it, and, see’g ye first of them, had sudden forebod'gs that others of ye like w'd be found deeper in ye woods; so mounted forthwith among ye trees and saw here and there such others, e’en as I had thought, and came upon a great number near ye stones, but had no sight of liv’g things of any nature whatsoever, but study’g ye prints, came to ye judgment that they were of winged things, for ye tracks did so lie as if they were made by creatures bear’g wings. I made ye circle around ye stones, and continu’d it in a wide manner, untill I came upon ye footprints of a lad, and these follow’d, e’en when I saw ye prints had increas’d in ye width between them, as if ye lad were runn’g, at which I was upset and alarm’d, and well I might be, for they end’d at ye edge of ye woode down ye far side of that Hill, and I saw ly’g in ye snow his gun, some feathers which had belong’d to a turkey, and a cap, by means of which I knew him for Jedediah Tyndal, a lad of fourteen summers, mak’g inquiry after whom this morn, discover’d him to be miss’g, as I had fear’d. After which judg’d that some Open’g had been left in some manner, and Something come through, but know not what It might have been, and entreat you if you know to point to whatever part of ye Booke it is I may find ye words to send It back, though it wou’d seem from ye amount of ye prints I did see that there was more than one, and all of some size, and whether invisible or not I do not know for none hath had sight of them, myself be’g includ’d, and I w’d know especially whether these might be servts. of N. or of Yogge-Sothothe, or of Some Other, and if ye like hath e’er befall’n you. I entreat yr haste in this matter lest these Be’gs ravage further, for they are apparentlie eaters of blood as are ye others, and none can say when they will again come forth from Outside and forage among us and hunt these people so they might have their food.

  Yogge-Sothothe Neblod Zin Jonathan B.

  The fourth letter was in some ways the most frightening. A kind of pall of astonished horror had been laid upon Dewart by the first three letters; but in the fourth there lay an incredible suggestion of shuddersome terror, though this was not so much evident in the words as in the implications.

  New Dun'ch, 7 Aprill.

  Honour'd Dear Friend:—

  As I was prepar'g for sleep last night I heard That which did come to my window and call out my Name and promis’d to come for me; but, be’g bold, I walk’d in ye darkness to that window and look’d out, at which, see’g noth’g, I did open ye window, and thereupon immediately smell’d such a charnel stench that it was almost o’erpower’g, and I fell back, whereupon Something com’g through ye window did touch my face as it were with ye substance of jellie, in part scal’d, and nauseous to ye touch, so that I nairlie took leave of my senses, and lay there for a time I do not know how long before I clos’d ye window again and went to my bed. But I had hardly gott into it ere ye house began to shake and I discovered it as because of ye Earth’s shak’g as were Something walk’g upon it in ye neighbourhood, close by ye house, and once again I heard my Name call’d out and ye like promise made at which I made no answer whatsoever, but I thought onlie What have I done? that first ye winged creatures of N. came through ye opening left by ye misuse of ye words of ye Arab, and now this Be'g of which I had no knowledge unless he be that Walker on ye Wind who is known by severall Names, namely Windeego, Ithaka. or Loegar, which I have ne’er seen and may not see. I am much troubl’d in spirit lest it come to pass when I go and entreat of ye stones and call out to ye Hills it is not N. who comes nor C. but this other who roll’d my Name on his tongue in accents not of this Earth; and if this come to pass, I implore you to come in ye night and close ye portal lest there come others which ought not to walk with men for ye evill of ye Great Olde Ones is too great for such as we are if e’en ye Elder Gods have not destroy’d them but onlie imprison’d them in these spaces and depths to which ye stones reach in ye time of ye Stars and ye Moon. I believe I am in Mortall Peril, and w’d rejoice if it were not so, but I have heard my Name call’d in ye Night by no Thing of this Earth, and I fear greatly my time has come. I did not read yr letter carefullie enough, and I misinterpreted yr words for I misread when you wrote: ‘Doe not calle up Any that you cannot put downe; by ye which I meane, Any that can in turn call up somewhat against you, whereby yr powerefullest Devices may not avail. Ask allways of ye Lesser, lest ye Greater shall not desire to make Answer, and shall commande more than you.’ But if I have done wrong in this Cause, I implore you to bring ye remedy in time. Yr Obt. Servt. in ye service of N.

  Jonathan B.

  Dewart sat for a long time contemplating these letters. It was now clear to him that his great-great-grandfather had been engaged in some devilish matters, into which he had initiated Jonathan Bishop of Dunwich, but without adequately informing his protégé. The nature of the business escaped Dewart, for the time being, but it would seem now that it had to do with sorcery and necromancy. Yet the suggestions inherent in these letters were at one and the same time so terrible and so incredible, that he more than half believed they might be part of an elaborate hoax. There was one way of finding out, though a tedious one. The library of Miskatonic University in Arkham would still be open, and he could consult the files of the Arkham weeklies to discover, if possible, the names of any persons who had disappeared or who had died strangely in the period between 1790 and 1815, which would certainly cover the time adequately enough.

  He was loath to go; for one thing, there was still some checking to be done.

  For another, he did not look forward with relish to the task of again digging into the files of the paper, though the weeklies were small in size, with few pages, and it did not take long to examine them. So presently he set out, intending to work through the supper hour and into the evening, if it were possible for him to do so.

  It was late when he finished his task.

  He had found what he sought in the papers for the year 1807, but he had found far more than he had sought. In tight-lipped horror, he had made a precise list of what he had discovered, and as soon as he reached the house in the wood, he sat down, trying to assimilate and analyze the facts he had uncovered.

  There was, first, the disappearance of Wilbur Corey. Then followed the vanishing of the boy, Jedediah Tyndal. After that there were four or five other disappearances, with some distance among them, and finally, last of all, the vanishing of Jonathan Bishop himself! But Dewart’s discoveries did not end with this series of vanishings. Even before Bishop disappeared, Corey and Tyndal had reappeared, one of them near New Plymouth, the other in the Kingsport country. Corey’s body had been much torn and mangled, but Tyndal’s bore scarcely a mark of any kind; both, however, were dead— but not long dead.

  Yet their remains had not been found until several months after their disappearance! In a hideously suggestive way, these findings lent substance to the Bishop letters. Yet, despite all this additional information, the pattern of events was far from clear, and the meaning as remote as ever.

  Dewart thought increasingly of his cousin, Stephen Bates. Bates was a scholar, and an authority on early Massachuse
tts history. More than that, he had delved into many out-of-the-way corners, and it was possible that he might be of some help to Dewart. At the same time, some note of caution asserted itself within Dewart; he felt that he must walk carefully, he must take more time and carry on his investigation as solitarily as possible, without stirring any other person’s curiosity. He was no sooner conscious of this conviction than he began to wonder why he entertained it; he thought that there was no reason why he should be so secretive, and yet, again, he had only begun to think so when he was back where he had been before, at a stubborn certainty that secrecy must be maintained, and he must have ever ready a plausible explanation of his interest in the past. This lay at hand in an antiquarian pleasure in architecture.

  He filed his newspaper findings away with the packet of Bishop letters, and went to bed that night lost in deep, puzzled thought, ever seeking some explanation for those facts he had thus far uncovered, disjointed as they were.

  Perhaps it was this concern with the things which had happened a century ago which caused him to dream that night. He had never had such dreams. He dreamed of great birds that fought and tore, birds with horribly distorted human aspects; he dreamed of monstrous beasts; and he dreamed of himself in strange roles. In his dreams he was an acolyte or priest. He garbed himself strangely and walked from the house into the Wood, around the marsh of the bullfrogs and the fireflies, to the stone tower. Lights shone, both in the tower and in the window of the study, flashing as if in signals. He came within the circle of Druidic stones and stood in the shadow of the tower and gazed up through the opening he had made, and, standing there, he called to the heavens in a hideous distortion of the Latin tongue. He recited a formula thrice and made designs on the sand, and suddenly, with a great rush, a being of horrible and repellent aspect appeared to flow through the opening from above into the tower and, filling it, flowed outward through the door, pushing Dewart aside and speaking to Dewart in a debased tongue demanding of him the sacrifice, whereupon Dewart ran fleetly to the circle of stones and directed the visitant to Dunwich, in which direction it then went, fluid as water, but of great and terrible aspect, squid-like or octopoid, passing among the trees as air, along the earth as water, of great and wonderful properties, which enabled it to seem partially or wholly invisible apparently at will. He dreamed that he stood listening there in the shadow of the tower, and soon there rose sweet to his ears the sound of screaming and crying in the night, after hearing which he waited yet a while until the thing came back bearing among its tentacles the sacrifice and departed whence it came, by way of the tower. All was then still, and he too returned the way he had come, and sought his bed.

  In this way Dewart spent his night; and, as if his dreams exhausted him, in the morning he overslept; discovering which, when at last he woke, he leapt from bed, only to start backward and come down on his bed on his haunches, for his feet pained him. Since he was not given to trouble in his pedal extremities, he bent curiously to examine them, and discovered that his soles were much bruised and somewhat swollen, and his ankles torn and lacerated, as if by many brambles and briars. He was amazed, and yet he felt he should not be.

  Nevertheless, he was much puzzled as he tried to stand again, and found it somewhat easier, now that he expected a certain amount of discomfort; it was the initial shock of unexpected pain, rather than the degree of that pain, which had affected him so disagreeably.

  With some difficulty he managed his socks and shoes, and once thus protected, he found that he was able to walk with a modicum of discomfort. But how had this come about? He reasoned at once that he must have been walking in his sleep. This was in itself somewhat surprising, for he had seldom before manifested any such tendency. Moreover, he must have walked from the house into the woods, to sustain the bruises and scratches which were so plain and so easy to identify. He began, slowly, to recall his dream; it did not come clearly, but he remembered that he was at the tower; so he finished dressing and went outside to discover, if possible, whether there was anywhere a trace of his having walked there.

  He found none at first. It was not until he came to the tower itself that he saw in the pebbly sand near the circle of broken stones, the imprint of an unshod human foot which must surely be his. He followed this track, faint as it was, into the tower, and there, the better to see by, he struck a match.

  By its feeble light, he saw something else.

  He lit another and looked again, his thoughts chaotic with a sudden uprush of alarm and confusion. What he saw there was a splash against the foot of the stone steps, partly on the stair, partly on the sandy floor, a red, flaring splash which he knew before he put his finger gingerly to it was blood!

  Dewart stood staring at it, unmindful of the naked footprints around him, unaware of the match burning down until the flame touched his fingers and he dropped it. He wanted to light yet another, but he could not bring himself to do it.

  He walked somewhat shakily out of the tower and stood leaning against the wall in the warm morning sunlight. He sought some order in his thoughts; clearly he had been delving too much into the past, and his imaginative faculties were being unhealthily stimulated. The tower, after all, had been open; it was possible for a rabbit or some other such animal to have taken refuge there, and a weasel to have come upon it and a battle to the death ensued; it was possible that an owl had flown down through the opening in the roof and captured a rat or some animal of similar proportions, though he must admit that the splash of blood seemed somewhat too large for such an explanation and, then, too, there was no supporting evidence, such as tufts of feathers, hair, or fur which would have been virtually unavoidable.

  After a little while, he went resolutely back into the tower and lit another match. He looked for anything which would corroborate his theory. There was nothing. There was no evidence of a struggle which might have been explained as one of those common tragedies of nature. However, there was no evidence of anything more than that, either. It was simply a splash of what appeared to be blood in a place where there should be no such thing. Dewart tried to look at it calmly, without the instantaneous reference to that hideous dream of the night-time, which had erupted in his consciousness as a flower full-blown, the moment he had satisfied himself that it was blood in the tower. It was undeniable, but the splash was such a splash as might have been made by a dropping of blood from a little height, and something in passage. It made Dewart uneasy to admit this even to himself; because, having admitted it, he had no recourse but to admit also that he did not know how to explain either this or his dream, he could not account for a growing number of slight, but exceedingly strange incidents which had been occurring with increasing regularity.

  He went outside again and walked away from the tower, back along the marsh past the wood, and to the house. He looked at his bed-clothing, and saw on the sheets the brown marks of blood from his ankles. He almost wished that he had gashed himself severely enough to account for the stain in the tower, but by no stretch of his imagination could he thus account for it. He changed the bedding, and then set about prosaically brewing himself a pot of coffee. He continued thoughtfully, but especially so because he recognized for the first time that he was drawn now this way, now that in diametrically opposite directions, as if there were two of him, or a split-personality crisis. It was high time, he thought, for Cousin Stephen Bates to come down—or anyone, to relieve the solitude if only temporarily. But he had no sooner come to this conclusion, when he found himself arguing against it with an extraordinary zest quite alien to his nature.

  He persuaded himself finally to resume his checking, and carefully refrained from reading any further letter or document, lest his imagination be once again stimulated and he again suffer a night of dream-horror; and by mid-afternoon, he had recovered his normal joie de vivre to such an extent that he felt himself once more in routine. Resting, he turned on the radio for a program of music, but instead, he got the news-cast. He listened half-heartedly. A French spokes
man had outlined his concept of what ought to be done with the Saar, and a British statesman had issued a wonderfully ambiguous counter-statement. Rumors of starvation in Russia and China—these came with periodicity, he thought. The Governor of Massachusetts was ill. A telephone report from Arkham—he sat up to listen.

  “We have been unable to obtain verification up to this time, but a disappearance has been reported from Arkham. A Dunwich resident reported that Jason Osborn, a middle-aged farmer residing in that section, disappeared during the night. A great deal of noise was heard by neighbors, according to the rumor, but no explanation has been offered. Mr. Osborn was not a wealthy man; he lived alone, and kidnapping is not thought to have been a motive.”

  Coincidence shrieked in one corner of Ambrose Dewart’s consciousness.

  But he was filled with such alarm, that he literally tore himself from the couch where he had lain down, and fell upon the radio to shut it off. Then, almost instinctively, he sat down and wrote a frantic letter to Stephen Bates, explaining that he needed Bates’ company, and imploring him to come at no matter what cost. As soon as he had written it, he set out to mail it, but with each step he took, he felt a compulsion to retain the letter, to think again, to reconsider his position.