I returned to my own room and lay awake, waiting for Ambrose to return, fearful that something might have happened to him. But in somewhat less than two hours he was back; I heard the door close, less loudly this time, and I heard my cousin’s deliberate footsteps on the stairs. He entered his room and closed the door behind him, after which there was silence once more, save for the distant hooting of an owl; this also was suddenly cut off in the midst of a call, and once again night and silence closed down upon the house.
In the morning I arose before Ambrose. I let myself out by the front door, since I had seen that he had gone by the back, and made a meandering circuit into the woods to meet his tracks, which, as I had suspected, led to the stone tower on the onetime island. I followed his tracks easily enough. The amount of snow that had fallen was approximately an inch, and in this his path lay as clearly marked as I dared to hope it might be. The track, as I have said, led directly to the tower, and into it. Moreover, because of the snow which had entered through the opening Ambrose had made in the roof, it was possible to see that his tracks led not only into the tower, but up the side-wall steps to the platform below the opening. I followed the same path without hesitation, and presently found myself standing where Ambrose had stood and looking out toward the house, which was visible, outlined against the rising sun on its little knoll. Having discovered the house, I lowered my eyes to look for any sign of what my cousin had been doing at the tower, and, in so doing, I saw curiously disturbing marks in the snow beyond the tower. I stared at them for a few moments, unable to determine what they were, and then, dreading what I might find, I descended the stairs, left the tower, and made my way to them.
There were three distinct types of marks, and each was fraught with suggestive horror. There was first a large indentation in the snow, approximately twelve feet in length by some twenty-five feet across, which had the appearance as of some elephantine creature’s pausing there; the air being reasonably cold, and no thaw having set in, I examined the outer edges of this depression, and was able to ascertain that whatever it was had sat there had had a smooth skin.
The second type of mark was claw-like, of the dimensions of approximately three feet across and the suggestion of being webbed; and the third was a sinister brushed patch on the snow, framing the claw-marks, as if great wings had flapped there—but what manner of wings was not apparent. I stood gazing at these marks in mounting stupefaction, for their portent was almost unmistakable, though against all reason, and, having had my shocked fill of them, I retreated the way I had come, diverging from my cousin’s path as soon as possible, and returning to the house in a very roundabout way indeed, lest he become suspicious of my absence.
Ambrose was up, as I had thought he would be, and I was relieved to see that he was once again himself. He was very weary, and somewhat querulous; he had missed me; he was tired, which he could not understand, for he had certainly slept soundly during the night; he was aware of a feeling of oppression.
Moreover, he said, since he had missed me, he had gone around looking for me, and had discovered that we had had a visitor in the night, who had come to the back door and left again, apparently unable to arouse us. I understood instantly that he had seen his own tracks but had not recognized them, and by this knew that he had not been awake during his nocturnal visit to the tower.
I explained that I had gone for a short walk. It was my custom to do so in the city, and I disliked to vary that custom too much.
“I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” he complained. “I don’t feel at all like getting breakfast.”
“Let me do it,” I suggested, and immediately got to work at it.
He assented readily enough, and sat down, rubbing his forehead with one palm. “I seem to have forgotten something. Were we planning to do anything today?”
“No. You’re just tired, that’s all.” I thought that now was as good a lime as any to propose his winter visit to my Boston home; moreover, I was myself eager to escape his house, being now horribly aware of evil and active danger.
“Hasn’t it ever occurred to you, Ambrose, that you need a change of scene?”
“I have hardly settled into this one,” he answered.
“No, I mean a temporary change. Why not spend this winter with me in Boston? Then, if you like, I’ll come up with you again in the Spring. You can study, if you like, at the Widener; there are lectures and concerts, and what’s more, there are people to meet and talk with, which you need. Any man does, I don’t care who he is.”
He was dubious, but he was not opposed to the idea, and I knew then that it was but a matter of time before he would consent. I was jubilant, but with caution, for I knew that I must press my advantage before his hostile mood returned and he was aroused against the idea, as he surely would be; so I kept at him relentlessly all morning, not forgetting to suggest that some of the Billington books be taken along with us for winter study, and finally, shortly after lunch, he agreed to spend the winter in Boston; and, having agreed, was so eager to get away—as if motivated by a deep-seated sense of self-preservation— that by nightfall we were actually on the way.
Late in March we returned from Boston, Ambrose with a curious eagerness, myself with apprehension, though it must be admitted that, apart from a few uneasy nights at first, during which my cousin walked somnambulistically about as if he were lost, Ambrose had been very much himself throughout the winter months, and had put forward nothing whatever in his conduct or conversation to give me the slightest reason to feel that he had not fully recovered from the oppression which had caused him initially to send for me. As a matter of record, Ambrose was socially very popular, and it was I who, lost in those queer old books from Alijah Billington’s library, proved to be somewhat lacking in the social graces. Throughout the winter, I applied myself diligently to these books; there were many more passages similar to those I have set down; there were many references to the key-names which I had come to know; there were some apparently contradictory passages also—but there was nowhere any clear, concise statement of basic credo sufficiently clear to warrant acceptance, nor was there anything like an outline of the pattern to which these monstrous allusions and sinister inferences belonged.
As the Spring approached, however, my cousin had become somewhat more restless and more than once expressed a desire to return to the house in Billington’s Wood, which, as he pointed out, was after all his “home,” where he “belonged”—this was in contrast to his indifference to certain aspects of the manuscript volumes I had sought to discuss from time to time during the winter.
Only two things of any moment took place during the winter, concerning the occurrences in the vicinity of Billington’s Wood, and these were duly reported in the Boston newspapers—these were the discovery of the bodies of two victims of uncanny vanishings from the Dunwich country, the discovery being made at different times, one of them between Christmas and New Year’s day of that winter, the other shortly after the first of February. As before, both bodies were found to have been dead but a short while, both appeared to have been dropped from a height, varying between them, both were badly mangled and torn, however recognizable, and in each case several months had intervened between the time of disappearance and the time of discovery. The papers made much of the fact that no ransom notes had ever turned up, and stressed the additional fact that the victims had had no reason to leave home, and no trace of them between the time of their vanishing and the finding of their bodies—one on an island in the Miskatonic, the other near the mouth of that river—had been recorded or uncovered, despite the diligence of newspapermen assigned to the case. I saw with some chilling fascination that my cousin seemed to take a bewildered interest in these accounts; he read them over and over, but throughout with the air of a man who feels he should know the hidden meaning of what he reads, but had somehow forgotten the proper bridge to remembrance.
I viewed this with an alarm which was, because I was incapable of understand
ing its meaning, fundamentally not perceptive. I have already set down that my cousin’s restlessness, as spring approached, developing into an eager desire to return to the house he had quitted to accompany me to Boston, filled me with misgivings and apprehension, and there is nothing to be gained by delaying the admission that my apprehension was soon justified, for almost at once on our return, my cousin began to act in a manner completely antipodal to his conduct as my winter-guest in the city.
We arrived at the house in Billington’s Wood just after sunset of an evening in late March—a mild, mellow evening, the air of which was redolent with the perfumes of flowing sap, leafing trees and flowering plants, and bore upon the light east wind a pleasant pungence of smoke. We had hardly completed our unpacking before my cousin came from his room in a high degree of excitement.
He would have passed me by, if I had not caught him by the arm.
“What is it, Ambrose?” I asked.
He gave me an immediate, hostile glance, but answered civilly enough. “The frogs—do you hear them? Listen to them sing!” He pulled his arm away. “I’m going outside to listen to them. They’re welcoming me back.”
I suppose I had been subconsciously aware of the chorus of the frogs ever since our return, but Ambrose’s reaction was alarmingly calculated to make me extremely cognizant. Divining that my company would be unwelcome, I did not follow my cousin; instead I went to his room across the hall and sat down at one of his windows, which was open, recalling swiftly that it was at this window that Laban had sat a century ago wondering about his father and the Indian, Quamis.
The din of the frogs was really deafening—it rang in my ears, it rang in the room; it pulsed up out of that strange marshy meadow in the midst of the wood between the stone tower and the house. But as I sat listening to that deafening clamor, I was aware of something even more odd than the clamor itself.
In most areas of the temperate zone none but the hylidae—the peepers, the cricket frogs, and the tree frogs chiefly—and an occasional wood frog, calls before April, except in case of unusually mild weather, which the first week of spring had not been. Following the hylidae come the ranae, and, after them, finally, the bullfrogs. Yet, in the melee of sound rising from that marsh I could pick out with ease the voices of peepers, cricket frogs, tree frogs, toads, brown frogs, pond frogs, pickerel and leopard frogs—and even bullfrogs! My initial astonishment was tempered by the instant conviction that the clamor was so great that my auditory sense had been deceived; I had often had the experience of mistaking the shrill, piping notes of spring peepers in late April for the calling of a distant whippoorwill, and I thought this an auditory illusion of like nature; but I soon found that it was not, for I was easily able to isolate the various voices and typical notes and songs!
There was no possibility of an error, and this was most curiously disturbing.
It was disturbing not alone because it was something contrary to the pattern of nature as I had become familiar with it, but because of certain abstruse illusions to the behavior of amphibian life in the presence or proximity of either the outlandishly named “Beings” of the manuscript books in which I had read, or their followers, which is to say, their servitors or worshippers, which were often synonymous, the behavior of the amphibia being such as to give evidence of their singular awareness, which was present, hinted that writer described only as the “mad Arab,” because the amphibia were of the same primal relationship as that sect of followers of the Sea-Being known as the “Deep Ones.” The writer had intimated, in short, that the terrestrial amphibia were both unusually active and unusually vocal in the presence of their primal relatives, “be they visible or invisible, to them it maketh no difference, for they feel them, & give voice.”
I listened, therefore, to that appalling choir with feelings which were badly mixed—I had had all winter a certain assurance in my cousin’s conduct, which had truly been the height of social normalcy; now it would seem that his reversion had been instant and far more complete than before, being complete in the sense that it had been accomplished without either struggle or manifest distress; indeed, Ambrose had seemed well pleased to hear the frogs, and this in turn reminded me with the clarion alarm of bells of that adjuration in Alijah Billington’s curious “instructions”— He is not to disturb the frogs, particularly the bullfrogs of the marshland between the tower and the house, nor the fireflies, nor the birds known as whippoor-wills, lest he abandon his locks and guards. The suggestion inherent in this adjuration was not pleasant, in any way it might be regarded; if the frogs and the fireflies and the whippoorwills were “his”—presumably Ambrose’s—“locks and guards,” then what did this clamor signify? Was it meant to warn Ambrose that “something” invisible stood near, or that some alien intruder stood by?—an alien intruder who could then only be myself!
I drew away from the window and went resolutely out of the room, down the stairs, and out to where my cousin stood with his arms folded across his chest, his head tilted back slightly, so that his chin was outthrust, and a strange light glowing in his eyes. I came up to him resolved to challenge his pleasure, but at sight of him, my determination wavered and faded, and I stood at his side, saying nothing, until his continued silence troubled me and I asked him if he enjoyed the choir of voices in the fragrant evening.
Without turning to me he replied enigmatically, “Soon the whippoorwills will sing, too, and the fireflies will shine—and that will be the time.”
“For what?”
He did not answer and I moved back. In so doing, I caught sight of movement in the deepening dusk on that side of the house facing the driveway into the place, and, acting on impulse, I ran quickly in that direction—I had been a sprinter in my school days, and had lost only a little of my running ability— with the result that, just as I rounded the house, I saw an inconceivably ragged individual vanishing into the scrub growth along the side of the drive on his way out of the wood. I gave chase at once, and soon caught up with him, catching him by one arm as he ran. I found myself holding on to a young man of perhaps twenty or thereabouts, who tried desperately to tear himself loose.
“Leave me go!” he half-sobbed. “I ain’t done nothin’.”
“What were you doing?” I asked sternly.
“Jist wanted to see if He was back, an’ I seed ’im. They said he was back.”
“Who said?”
“Can’t ye hear? The frogs—that’s who!”
I was shaken, and in my involuntary reaction, I held him tighter than I meant to do, so that he cried out in pain. Relaxing my grip a little, I demanded his name under promise of freeing him.
“Don't ye tell ’im,” he begged.
“I won’t.”
“I’m Lem Whately, that’s who.”
I released him, and he darted away at once, clearly not believing that 1 did not mean to pursue him again. But, seeing that I had indeed meant what I had said, he hesitated some twenty yards away, turned, and came hurriedly back, making no sound. He caught hold of my coat-sleeve urgently, and in a low voice commanded my attention.
“Ye doan’t ack like one of them, ye doan’t. Better git aout a here afore anythin’ happens.”
Then he darted away once more, but this time he was really gone, vanishing with consummate ease into the growing darkness now shrouding the woods.
Behind me the clamor of the frogs still rose to maddening proportions, and I was grateful that my room opened on to the east side of the house, away from the marsh; even so, the choir would be audible enough. But, fully as loudly ringing in my ears, were Lem Whately’s words, which had aroused a feeling of unreasonable terror within me, terror which lies always in wait in any man faced with the unknown, and is inextricably bound up with the urgence toward flight in the face of the inexplicable. I managed, after a few moments, to quell this terror and also the impulse to heed Lem Whately’s adjuration, and turned back toward the house, turning over and over in mind the problem of the Dunwich people—for this new oc
currence added on to everything else served to convince me that some further key to the things which were taking place here might be found among those people, and, if I could manage to obtain my cousin’s car, it might be worth while to pursue inquiries of my own in that region beyond Dean’s Corners.
Ambrose still stood where I had left him; he did not seem to have noticed my absence at all, and, so concluding, I refrained from rejoining him, but repaired to the house, where he presently joined me.
“Surely it is unusual for so many frogs to call so early in the year?” I asked.
“Not here,” he said again, curtly, as if to say that this would put an end to the matter.
I had no wish to continue, for I felt as if my cousin were growing visibly stranger before my eyes, and his hostility was far too easily aroused; by pressing the issue, I might well have aroused more than hostility, and he might summarily show me the door, at the thought of which I realized quite clearly that in large part I would be quite willing to take my leave of him, but duty compelled me to stand by as long as it was possible to do so.
That evening was passed in strained silence, and I took the first opportunity to retire to my room. Instinct warned me that I had better not turn at this time to those old books in the library; so I took yesterday’s paper, picked up in Arkham, instead, and settled down in my room to read it. As it happened, that was not a wise choice, for the paper contained an anonymous account on the editorial page, in a space devoted to letters from readers, to the effect that there was an old woman in Dunwich who had several times been awakened in the night by the voice of Jason Osborn. Now, Osborn was one of the disappearance victims whose bodies had been found during the winter; he had vanished just prior to my coming to visit Ambrose in the first place; and an autopsy performed on the body had indicated that Osborn had been subjected to severe temperature changes, wherever he had been, but that otherwise nothing but the curious mangling and tearing of the flesh had been discovered as an indication of the cause of death. The anonymous letter-writer was not particularly literate, and charged that the old lady’s story had been “suppres’d” because it “seem’d beyond belief” and went on at some length to describe how the old lady had got up and answered and looked in vain for the source of the voice which she heard clearly, and decided finally that it came from somewhere “beside her, or out of the space or the sky overhead.”
The Lurker at the Threshold: Posthumous Collaborations Page 41
