The Lurker at the Threshold: Posthumous Collaborations

by August Derleth

  I could not help reflecting that, throughout the old woman’s part in our dialogue, I had never once entertained any doubt of her sincerity. She believed quite simply in what she said; she might not herself fully understand all the implications of her words, but she did believe in some alien force which manifested itself in different ways and was malignant insofar as mankind was concerned. Of so much I had not the slightest doubt whatever. She spoke almost religiously at times, and I was somewhat surprised to learn through further questioning, that she was a Congregationalist, even if she did not often get to church, and that she had a staunch belief in God—a belief which was evidently not at all incompatible with her fear of the extra-terrestrial beings which had such a vivid and colorful existence in her thoughts.

  When at last I took my leave of her, I was convinced that the dark waters in which both my cousin and I were swimming were too shoreless for either of us, or for both of us together. The mild schizophrenia which affected my cousin in his house and wood further complicated the matter, and it was evident that I must turn elsewhere for further assistance, or fail miserably in my quest, and bring to being God knows what forces—for I was now in such a state of mind that, even without understanding them, I was willing to concede the existence of malign forces which lay in wait somewhere in the hills—what manner of creature I knew not—to decimate the ranks of mankind.

  My drive home was a very thoughtful one, and I was lost in a maze of many openings but no egresses, presenting a complex of passages, each one of which led to a dead end. It was therefore in a sombre mood that I arrived finally at the house, where I found my cousin busy in the study. He had evidently not thought I would be home so early, for at my entrance he hastily put away the papers on which he had been working, but not before I had glimpsed curious diagrams and charts in his hand. His perplexing secrecy invited my own; I did not offer any explanation of where I had been, and I managed to evade his questions, which was manifestly to his annoyance, though he betrayed this by no word. He seemed, in fact, uncomfortable at my continued presence, and I have no doubt I must have seemed so also to him. Fortunately, the day was well gone and soon came to an end. I took the first opportunity after the evening meal to retire to my room, pleading a headache—which was not far from the truth, if one can concede that the confusion of my thoughts was indeed a psychic turmoil equivalent to a physical headache.

  In view of what took place that night, I want to make every effort to show that I was not actually ill or under any abnormal influence. My thoughts were chaotic, yes, but I was not in such a state of mind as to make possible easily accepted delusions. As a matter of fact, I was particularly alert, very possibly because of some instinctive expectation that something untoward might take place at any time.

  The evening began, as had the previous one, with the demoniac piping of the frogs, rising to deafening heights in the marsh in the midst of the Wood between the tower and the house; the sun had scarcely gone down, I had not yet gone to my room, when their piping began—not, as the naturalist has come to expect, with a first few tentative calls from here and there, and then a gradually swelling chorus—but rather with a full-bodied choir at once, as if by some prearranged signal, within a few minutes of the sun’s disappearance down the western heaven. My cousin affected not to hear their hellish piping, and I made no mention of it, not knowing what he might think if I were to pursue the subject we had undertaken on the previous evening. But in the sanctuary of my room, I was increasingly aware of their piping choir, even though it was less raucous there.

  Nevertheless, I was determined to permit my imagination no freedom to roam. I turned with premeditated deliberation to a book I have always carried with me—Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows—and began to read over again of the adventures of those lovable characters, Mole, Toad, and Rat, prepared to enjoy them, as always; and in a comparatively short time, considering the demands of the setting and the incidents which had taken place since first I had come in response to my cousin’s frantic request, I was lost in the pleasant English countryside along that eternal River which flows through the home country of Grahame’s unforgettable characters. Moreover, I read a considerable time, and, though I was never once fully unconscious of that batrachian piping, I was comparatively lost in my book. When finally I put it down, the hour was approaching midnight, and a gibbous moon had swung into the western sky from its earlier position east of the zenith. I put out the light in my room, since my eyes were somewhat tired. Yet I myself was not tired; I was relaxed, a little troubled still in the remote recesses of my mind, from which the events of the story so familiar to me had not yet receded, and in that condition I sat for some time, while the various parts of the Billington puzzle arranged themselves once more before my mind’s eye.

  While I was striving to find some rationale in the problem, I became aware of the opening of my cousin’s door, and of his emergence into the hall. I believe I knew instantly that he was on his way to the stone tower; I remember having the impulse to stop him, but I did not yield to it. I heard him go down the stairs, and then for a while no further sound; and then the closing of an outer door. I crossed the hall into his room, from which I could look down to that expanse of lawn over which .Ambrose would have to pass in order to reach the fringe of wooded land between the house and the marsh and tower. I saw him walking there, and again experienced an impulse to set out after him. But I was deterred by more than reason; I was aware of something akin to fear—I had no assurance that my cousin walked in his sleep tonight, as he had done other nights; it was quite possible that he was awake, and, awake, he might certainly have resented actively my dogging his footsteps.

  I stood for some time undecided, and then determined that it might he possible to ascertain whether or not Ambrose went to the tower by the comparatively simple expedient of descending to the study and mounting to the leaded window, to look from the plain glass in its center, which was so focused on the top of the tower that it should be possible to see, in this moonlight, whether or not any figure appeared in the opening Ambrose had effected in the roof. By the time I had come to this conclusion, Ambrose had had ample time in which to reach his objective, if indeed it were the tower; so without hesitation I made my way downstairs in the darkness, having become reasonably familiar with the house during my visit, and directly into the study; so that, coming into view of the leaded window for the first time in darkness, I was amazed and startled anew by the brilliant effect of moonlight on the stained glass, lending to the window a most remarkable and vivid effect as of movement, with a vividness which disseminated something of its reflected glow throughout the study.

  I mounted the bookcase, as I had done before, though requiring somewhat more care to do so, and presently stood with my eyes peering through the circle of plain glass in the center. I have previously set forth the effect of a strange illusion I had experienced when peering through this glass on an earlier occasion.

  The effect I now achieved was on a similar plane, but at first glance, it had none of the appearance of illusion about it, rather only of undue exaggeration, for the scene which met my eye, was indeed the landscape I expected to see, but I saw it in a light which seemed to be more brilliant than that of the moon, though of a similar hue—that is, that effect as of white wine overlying everything, subtly altering shapes, colors, shadows into something alien and strange. Out of this landscape rose the tower—only, it appeared now to be very much closer than it had been at any former time; it seemed, indeed, to be no farther away than the edge of the wood; and yet the proportions and perspectives were proper and correct, so that I had at one and the same time this impression of viewing the scene through a magnifying glass and the conviction that all was as it should be.

  My attention, however, was not directed at the perspectives or even the increased light over that to be expected from the gibbous moon, but rather at the tower itself. Despite the hour, which was now past midnight. I saw quite clearly that my cousin stood
on the little platform on top of the stone steps within the tower; indeed, half his body showed quite clearly in the brightness of that illumined landscape, and at the moment of my first sight of him, he stood with both arms extended towards the heavens in the west, where at this hour shone the stars and constellations of the winter nights, very low on the horizon— Aldebaran in the Hyades, part of Orion, and, slightly higher, Sirius, Capella, Castor and Pollux, as well as the planet Saturn—though these were somewhat dimmed by the proximity of the moon. I saw my cousin far more clearly, as I later realized, than I should have seen him by all the laws of perspective and sight applied to the distance, the time, and the setting, but at the moment this did not occur to me as forcefully as it might otherwise have done for a very vivid reason—because I saw far more than these fundamentals of the setting, which seemed, as it were, little more than a frame for the utterly horrible and frightful visions which presented themselves to my view from the study window.

  For my cousin Ambrose was not alone.

  There extended outward from him an excrescence—no other word seems as apt—which seemed to have neither beginning nor end, but appeared to be in a state of flux, and yet conveyed the unmistakable impression of being alive; an excrescence, I say, that bore at one and the same time vague resemblances to a serpent, a bat, and a vast, amorphous monster in that stage of the world’s growth when creatures had not yet wholly emerged from primal slime. Nor was this alone visible to my sight, for all around Ambrose, on the tower’s roof, and in the air .above it, were others that defy description. On the roof, as it were one on each side of him, were two toad-like creatures which seemed constantly to be changing shape and appearance, and from whom emanated, by some means I could not distinguish, a ghastly ululation, a piping which was matched only by the shrill choir of the frogs, now risen to a truly cacophonous height. And in the air about him were great viperine creatures, which had curiously distorted heads, and grotesquely great clawed appendages, supporting themselves with ease by the aid of black rubbery wings of singularly monstrous dimensions. Indeed, the sight, which in any ordinary circumstance would have sent me reeling back, was so incredible, that my instant reaction was that I had taken leave of my senses, that my concern about the problem of Billington’s Wood and the events of the past years in this area had so affected me that such hallucination as this was only to be expected. It is, of course, as I now see, evidence of the plainest sort that, if I could rationalize to such a degree, the things I saw had an existence quite apart from my imagination.

  Furthermore, there was out there at the tower a constant flux and flowing; the bat-winged creatures were sometimes to be seen, and sometimes invisible, abruptly vanishing, as if they slipped away into another dimension; the amorphous flute-players on the roof were now great and monstrous, now small and dwarf-like; and the extension in space before my cousin, which I have described as an excrescence, was so hideously in flux that I could not bear to take my eyes from it, convinced as I was that at any moment this illusion and all else would pass, and present once more the calm, moonlit landscape as I had expected to see it; and by describing it as “in flux” I know that I fall far short of adequately describing what took place before my horrified and incredible eyes, for the Thing, which first appeared before me as an angular extension into space, with its focal point before my cousin Ambrose at the tower, became in succession a great amorphous mass of changing flesh, squamous as certain snakes, and putting forth and drawing back constantly and without cessation innumerable tentacular appendages of all lengths and shapes; a horrible, blackly furred thing with great red eyes that opened from all portions of its body; a hellish monstrosity which was octopoid in seeming to have become a small, shriveled mass of torso with tentacles hundreds of times its size and weight which whipped backward in a fanning motion into space, and the ends of which were literally sloughed or melted away into distance, while the empurpled body opened a great eye to look upon my cousin, and disclosed beneath it a great pit of mouth from which issued a terrible, if muted, screaming, at the sound of which the flute-players on the tower and the piping singers in the marsh increased their wild music in unbearable volume, and my cousin gave voice to terrible, ululant sounds which drifted unmistakably to my ears as a horrible mockery of something less than human, and filled me with such terror and abysmal fright as I have never known before, for among the sounds he made, he uttered one of the dread names which had occurred so often, always fraught with terror unbelievable, in the history of this accursed region — “N'gai, n'gha'ghaa, y'hah— Yog-Sothoth!” —all this making such an eldritch and bestial tumult that I thought surely all the world must hear it, and fell away from the window, once again overcome by that terrible malignance, flowing toward me not so much this time from the walls as from that strange window.

  I tumbled, in short, to the floor, falling on one knee, and for a moment remained in that position, while my senses rallied; then I stood up, shakily, and listened—fearful of what sounds would reach inward; but I heard nothing, and, now, terribly confused and unable to comprehend what had happened, I began to climb back up to the top of the bookcase, despite the strongest inner urgings to take flight. My thoughts were chaotic; it seemed that I had been subjected to an incredibly ghastly hallucination; I felt that I must look once more toward the stone tower in the Wood. Thus, impelled forward and yet torn backward, I once more achieved my former position, and opened my eyes slowly upon the dread scene.

  I saw the tower; I saw the Wood with the moonlight on it, and the moon, too, lowering down the west, and from one of the stars what appeared to be a tenuous wavering line of mist that extended briefly outward and vanished, an ectoplasmic extension, as it were—but of that which had impressed itself indelibly upon my consciousness but a few moments before, I saw nothing whatsoever! The tower stood deserted and, though the frog choir still sounded in rhythmic cadence, all other sound had ceased; there was nothing on or about the tower, and of my cousin Ambrose there was no sign. I stood for a moment with my face pressed to the glass, gazing incredulously out; then I realized that my cousin must be on his way back—might even now be approaching the house— for I had lost all sense of time, and I retreated hastily, with only a quick, furtive, apprehensive glance out that circular window at the quiet, deserted scene beyond.

  I dropped lightly to the floor, retired from the study, and made my way rapidly up the stairs to my room, which I had barely reached before I heard the sound of the door below, and the approaching footsteps of my cousin. But, listening, I started. What footsteps were these? Surely more than of but one man!

  And how slowly, how draggingly! And what voices rose in whispers from the foot of the stairs!

  “A long time!”—guttural, but undoubtedly my cousin Ambrose’s voice.

  “Aye, Master.”

  “Dost find me changed?”

  “Nay, save in thy face and garment.”

  “Hast gone far?”

  “To Mnar, and Carcosa. And thee, Master?”

  “In many places, by many faces. Of time past, and time to come. Speak lightly, for there is danger here. There is an outsider of my blood within these walls.”

  “Shall I sleep?”

  “Hast need of it?”

  “None.”

  “Rest, then, and wait. By morning it will be as always.”

  “Aye, Master. When thou hast need of me, I will be in the cubicle of the kitchen, as before.”

  “Stay. Dost know the year as men mark it?”

  “Nay, Master. Have I been long gone? Two years? Ten?”

  Ambrose’s chuckle was audible and terrible to hear. “But a breath of time!

  More than twenty times ten. Great changes have come, even as the Old Ones foresaw and we were given to know. You will see them.”

  “Good night, Master.”

  “Aye, say it well—a long time since last you spoke it here. Rest well, for we have work to do to make ready for Them and open the way.”

  Silence, save
for the slowly ascending steps of my cousin. I heard him advance with a casual sound all the more terrible because of its commonplaceness coming after what I had seen—if indeed I had seen anything at all—through the study window, after what I had heard rising from the foot of the stairs—if indeed I had heard that oblique, suggestive dialogue, for already I was beginning to doubt the evidence of my senses! My cousin came on down the hall; he entered his room and closed his door. In a little while I heard the creaking of his bed, and then all was still.

  My initial impulse then was to immediate flight—but flight would arouse my cousin’s suspicion without satisfying his hostility, and I knew that would be impossible. But together with the impulse came a secondary reaction—the feeling that I was deserting Ambrose. Whatever was destined to take place next, however, I assured myself of one thing that must be done; I must see Dr. Harper once more, I must lay before him in chronological sequence everything that had taken place, even to reproducing or copying the documents in my cousin’s library. At this post-midnight hour, I had little stomach for such a task; yet I knew it must be done. Before leaving the house, I must manage to prepare a statement for the guidance of anyone whose services might be enlisted to solve the riddle of Billington’s Wood—and, yes, of the strange and horrible happenings of Dunwich.

  I did not sleep that night.

  In the morning I waited until my cousin went downstairs before I left my room, and then I did so with trepidation, fearful of what I might see. My fears, however, were ill-founded; I found Ambrose busy making breakfast. He seemed quite cheerful, in fact, and his appearance completely lulled my fears, even if it did nothing whatever to disturb the residue of my nocturnal experiences.

  Moreover, he was singularly voluble. He hoped the choir from the marsh had not kept me awake beyond my usual hour.

  I assured him that it had not.

  The frogs had been unusually loud, he thought, and perhaps some method might possibly be found to diminish their ranks.