The Lurker at the Threshold: Posthumous Collaborations

by August Derleth

  For some reason, his suggestion instantly alarmed me. I could not help reminding him of Alijah’s adjuration, whereat he smiled, I thought, most sinisterly and somewhat aloofly, as if to suggest that he now knew what Alijah had meant and was not disturbed by it. This unusual reaction further upset me, though I felt it necessary to conceal my feelings.

  He went on to say that he would be busy outside the house for the greater part of the day, and hoped I would not mind his absence. He had discovered work that needed to be done in the woods.

  I concealed an immediate elation, for his absence would afford me the opportunity for easy access to the papers in the study; yet I felt that I must put a good face on the matter and at least ask whether I might be of assistance to him.

  He smiled. “Now that is generous of you, Stephen. But as a matter of fact—I forgot to tell you—I have help. I hired a fellow during your absence the other day, and I should tell you about him so that you will not be alarmed. He has a quaint mode of speech, and you will find him peculiar in dress. In fact, he is an Indian.”

  My astonishment could not be concealed.

  “You seem surprised.”

  “I am astounded,” I managed to reply. “Wherever did you find an Indian in these parts?”

  “Ah, he came, and I hired him. One might be surprised at what it is possible to discover in these hills.” He got up and prepared to clear away the dishes, since I was manifestly finished eating, and, turning, added one final damning fact. “It is a curious coincidence you should appreciate—his name is Quamis.”

  III. Narrative of Winfield Phillips

  STEPHEN BATES came to Dr. Seneca Lapham’s office on the campus of Miskatonic University shortly before noon on the seventh of April, 1924, at the direction of Dr. Armitage Harper, late of the library staff. He was a man of about forty-seven years of age, well-preserved, and beginning to grey a little. Though he manifestly fought to keep himself well under control, he seemed profoundly disturbed and agitated, and I put him down for a neurotic, a potential hysteric.

  He carried a bulky manuscript, which was composed of an account in his own hand of certain experiences which had befallen him, and a group of related documents and letters copied by him. Because Dr. Harper had telephoned to announce his coming, he was taken directly in to see Dr. Lapham, who appeared most interested in him, which caused me to assume that his manuscript must concern certain aspects of anthropological research so dear to my employer.

  He introduced himself, and was encouraged to tell his story immediately, without preamble. This he proceeded to do without further urging. His story was a somewhat intense and incoherent narrative which, as nearly as I could follow his turgid manner of telling, had to do with cult-survival. It was very soon apparent to me, however, that my own reaction to Bates’ story counted for nothing; for the expression on the grave face of my employer—his pursed, grim lips, his narrowed, thoughtful eyes, his wrinkled brow, and, above all, the deep absorption with which he listened, completely unaware of the passing of the lunch hour—gave evidence that he, at least, attached some marked significance to Bates’ story, which, now he had begun, poured from him in a flood, and was not halted until he bethought himself of his manuscript, whereupon he stopped short, extended the manuscript, and urged Dr. Lapham to read it at once.

  To my further surprise, my employer complied. He opened the parcel almost eagerly, and passed me each sheet as he finished with it. No comment from me was asked, and none given. I read his extraordinary record with growing amazement, made all the keener by the sight of the occasional trembling of Dr.

  Lapham’s hands. Finishing before I did, something over an hour after he had begun reading the easy, flowing script, my employer gazed intently at our visitor and urged him to complete the tale.

  But there was no more, replied Bates. He had told all. It was plain, by their presence, that he had managed to copy the documents relating to the matter—or at least those which he thought pertained to it.

  “You were not disturbed?”

  “Not once. Only after I was through, my cousin returned. I saw the Indian.

  He was attired pretty much as I had always been taught to believe the Narragansetts would be attired. My cousin now needed my help.”

  “Ah, indeed? What was it he required of you?”

  “Why, it seemed that neither he nor the Indian nor the two of them together could manage that marked stone which my cousin had dislodged from the roof of the tower. I had not myself thought it beyond the strength of one man, and said so. My cousin thereupon dared me to lift it. He explained that he wished it transported elsewhere, and buried away from the immediate vicinity of the tower.

  I had no difficulty in doing as he asked, without any help from him.”

  “Your cousin did not lend a hand?”

  “No. Nor the Indian.”

  My employer handed our visitor pencil and paper. “Will you make a diagram of the tower’s environs and indicate the approximate spot where you buried the stone?”

  Somewhat perplexed, Bates did so. Dr. Lapham took it gravely and put it carefully away with the last sheets of the manuscript, which I handed to him. He leaned back, his hands crossed over his waist, his fingertips touching.

  “It did not seem queer to you that your cousin did not offer to help?”

  “Not at all. We had made a wager. I won it. I would naturally not expect him to help me win it when he had to gain by my losing it.”

  “That was all he wanted?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see any evidence of what your cousin had been doing?”

  “Oh, yes. He and the Indian seemed to have been cleaning up around the tower. I saw that the claw-and wing-prints I had seen on that previous occasion, had been smoothed out and destroyed. I asked about them, but my cousin said only in an offhand way that I must have fancied I saw them there.”

  “Your cousin has a continuing awareness of your interest in the mystery of Billington’s Wood, then?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Will you leave this manuscript in my possession for the time being, Mr. Bates?”

  He hesitated, but finally assented, if it would in any way serve my employer, who assured him that it would. Still, he seemed reluctant to part with it, and was particularly anxious that it be not shown. All this Dr. Lapham promised him.

  “Is there anything I ought to do, Dr. Lapham?” he asked then.

  “Yes. One thing above all.”

  “I am anxious to get to the bottom of this business, and naturally want to do everything I can.”

  “Then go home.”

  “To Boston?”

  “At once.”

  “I can’t very well leave him at the mercy of whatever it is out there in the Wood,” Bates protested. “Besides, he would become suspicious.”

  “You contradict yourself, Mr. Bates. It does not matter whether or not he becomes suspicious. I believe, from what you have told me, that your cousin will prove well able to deal with anything that may menace him.”

  Bates smiled somewhat boyishly, reached into an inner pocket, and brought out a letter which he laid before my employer. “Does that sound as if he were able to cope with his problem alone?”

  Dr. Lapham read the letter slowly, folded it, and put it back into its envelope.

  “As you have indicated, he has undergone some stiffening since he wrote this letter begging you to come.”

  To this our visitor agreed. He remained reluctant, however, to alter his plan to return to his cousin’s house and remain there until some later date, at which time he might make a less hurried withdrawal.

  “I think it highly advisable that you return to Boston now. But if you insist on staying out there, I suggest you make the rest of your stay as short as possible—let us say, three days or so. On your way back to Boston, please stop off here before you take the train.”

  To this our visitor finally assented, and got up to go.

  “Just a moment, Mr. Ba
tes,” said Dr. Lapham.

  My employer crossed the room to a steel cabinet, unlocked it, took something from it, and returned to his desk. He put the object he had taken from the shelf on his desk before Bates.

  “Have you ever seen anything similar to this, Mr. Bates?”

  Bates looked at it: a small bas-relief approximately seven inches high, depicting an octopoid monster with a cephalopod head adorned with tentacle-structures, wearing on its back a pair of wings, and showing great, evil claws at its lower extremities. Bates looked at it with horrified fascination, while Dr. Lapham waited patiently.

  “It is like—and yet it is not exactly the same as those creatures I saw—or thought I saw out of the study window the other night,” said Bates at last.

  “But you have never seen a bas-relief of this nature before?” persisted Dr. Lapham.

  “No, never.”

  "Nor a drawing?"

  Bates shook his head. “It looks like the things that flew about near the tower—that might have made the clawprints—but it’s also like the thing to which my cousin was talking.”

  “Ah, you interpreted the scene in that fashion? They were talking?”

  “I never consciously thought of it that way—but it must have been that, surely?”

  “Some communication seems indicated.”

  Bates still kept his eyes fixed on the bas-relief, which, as best I could remember, had an Antarctic origin. “It is horrible,” he said at last.

  “Yes, indeed it is. What is the most horrible aspect of it is the thought that it might have been sculptured from a living model!”

  Bates grimaced and shook his head. “I cannot believe it.”

  “We don’t know, Mr. Bates. But there are many of us who find it easy to believe the most casual gossip and yet deny the certain evidence of our own senses by convincing ourselves we were experiencing hallucinations.” He shrugged, and picked up the bas-relief, looking at it for a moment before putting it down again. “Who knows, Mr. Bates? The work is primitive, the concept equally so. But you will want to get back, no doubt, though I still urge Boston.”

  Bates shook his head doggedly, shook Dr. Lapham’s hand, and took his leave.

  Dr. Lapham got up and stretched his muscles a little. I waited for him to make a move to go out for lunch, though it was now mid-afternoon. He made none.

  Instead, he sat down once more, drew the Bates manuscript over to him. and began to polish his spectacles. He smiled, somewhat grimly, I thought, at my surprise.

  “I am afraid you are not taking Mr. Bates and his story very seriously.

  Phillips.”

  “Well, it is certainly the most bizarre rigmarole ever adduced to explain those mysterious disappearances.”

  “No more bizarre than the circumstances of the disappearances and reappearances themselves. I am not disposed to treat the matter with any levity whatsoever.”

  “Surely you’re not giving any credence to it?”

  He leaned back, holding his spectacles in one hand, and giving me a quieting look. “You’re young, my boy.” Thereupon he launched into a miniature lecture, to all of which I listened with respect and increasing amazement, soon quite oblivious of the pangs of hunger. I must surely be familiar enough with his work, he said, to be aware of the great volume of lore and legend regarding ancient forms of worship, particularly among primitive peoples, and the cult-survivals which have carried through in certain mutations to the present day. There were certain remote areas of Asia, for instance, which had spawned incredible cults, survivals of which turned up contemporaneously in very curious places. He reminded me that Kimmich long ago suggested that the Chimu civilization came from deep within China, though presumably at the time of its origin, China did not exist. At the risk of being banal, he recalled to memory the strange sculptures and carvings of Easter Island and Peru. Worship-patterns have no doubt persisted, sometimes in the old forms, sometimes changed, but never wholly beyond recognition. In Aryan civilization, perhaps the latest to linger with certain evidence of survival, were the Druidic rites on the one hand, and the demoniac rites of sorcery and necromancy, particularly in certain parts of France and the Balkan countries. Did it not occur to me that such worship-patterns bore certain distinct resemblances?

  I protested that fundamentally all worship-patterns were similar.

  He had reference to aspects over and above the fundamental similarities, which none would argue. He went on to suggest that the idea of beings who would come again was by no means confined to any one group, but there were certain alarming manifestations serving to indicate that there existed in out-of-the-way corners of the earth confirmed worshippers of ancient gods, or god-like beings—god-like in that they were so alien in structure to mankind and indeed to all terrestrial animal life that they attracted worshippers. And by nature, evil.

  He took up the bas-relief and held it up. “Now, you know this has come out of the Antarctic. What would you say it was meant to be?”

  “If I had to guess, I would say that it was probably some crude primitive sculptor’s concept of what the Indians called the ‘Wendigo’.”

  “Not a bad guess, except that there is very little in the lore of the Antarctic to suggest a creature parallel to the Arctic’s Wendigo. No, this was found under a portion of a glacier. Its age is very great. As a matter of fact, it would seem to predate the Chimu civilization. It is therefore unique in that one factor; it is not unique in others. It may surprise you to know that similar sculptures have cropped up in various ages. We are able to trace some of them all the way back to Cro-Magnon man, and even beyond, into the dawn of what we are fond of calling civilization; we have them from the Middle Ages, we have them from the Ming dynasty, we have them from Russia of Paul I, we have them from Hawaii and the West Indies, we have them from Java of our own day, and we have them from Massachusetts of the Puritans. You may make of that what you will. At the moment it impresses me as singular for quite another reason—because in all likelihood some representation of this figure, possibly in miniature, was what Ambrose Dewart was expected to be carrying when he stopped in Dunwich to find his way to Mrs. Bishop’s house and was accosted by the two hamlet derelicts who asked of him whether he had the ‘sign’.”

  “Are you suggesting, in a roundabout way, that there actually was a live model for this bas-relief?” I asked.

  “I was not standing at the artist’s elbow,” he rejoined with exasperating gravity, “but I am not arrogant enough to deny the possibility.”

  “In short, you believe the story this man Bates just told us?”

  “I am very much afraid that it is true, within certain limitations.”

  “Psychiatric, then!” I retorted.

  “Faith comes readily without any evidence whatever, and very hard in the face of evidence that should not be there.” He shook his head. “I trust you noted the recurrence of the name of one of your own ancestors—the Rev. Ward Phillips?”

  “I did.”

  “I don’t want to seem opportune, but can you look back far enough into your family’s history to give me a biographical sketch of the clerical gentleman after his difference of opinion with Alijah Billington?”

  “I’m afraid his life was nothing remarkable. He didn’t live very long after, and brought a lot of discredit on himself by trying to gather together copies of his book on the curiosa of New England—the Thaumaturgical Prodigies— and burn them.”

  “That suggests nothing to you in the light of Mr. Bates’ manuscript?”

  “It is surely a coincidence.”

  “I suggest it is more than that. The actions of your ancestor are akin to those of a man who has seen the devil and wishes to recant.”

  Dr. Lapham was not much given to levity, and, during the period of my employment by him, I had encountered many strange occurrences and credos.

  That these manifestations had taken place for the most part in remote, almost inaccessible corners of earth did not preclude the possibility of the
occurrence of something similar in our immediate vicinity. In addition, I remembered previous occasions on which Dr. Lapham had seemed to touch upon some monstrous survival-myths, skirting a concept of paralyzing dimensions which hinted at something numbingly frightful in its essence.

  “Are you suggesting that Alijah Billington corresponded to the devil?” I asked.

  “I could answer in both affirmative and negative. From the known evidence—as devil’s advocate, certainly. Alijah Billington was quite clearly a man well ahead of his time, more intelligent than most men of his generation, and capable of recognizing the extremities of danger when he encountered them.

  He practised rites and ceremonies which undoubtedly harked back to the beginnings of mankind, but he knew how to escape the consequences. So it would seem. I believe that a thorough study of these documents and this manuscript would be advisable. I am going to lose no time.”

  “I think you may be attaching too much importance to this rigmarole.”

  He shook his head. “The scientific attitude of labeling many things we do not immediately understand, or which do not fit into some already-conceived scientific credo, as ‘coincidence,’ ‘hallucination,’ or something similar is deplorable. In regard to the things which have taken place in Billington’s Wood and in the surrounding terrain, notably Dunwich, I would say it is beyond the bounds of credibility that it can be passed off as coincidence that, each time there is activity in Billington’s Wood, there are strange disappearances in Dunwich and that country. We need not take heed of Mr. Bates’ manuscript at all, except insofar as he has quoted contemporaneous accounts, the originals of which we can look up for ourselves without trouble if we choose to disregard what Bates has written. These phenomena have recurred at least three times in generations more than two hundred years apart. I have no doubt that on their initial occurrence they were laid to sorcery, and there is every likelihood that some luckless person or persons suffered and died for events which were brought about completely beyond his or their ken. The witch-hunting and witch-burning days were not then too distant, and hysterics and the conniving we have always with us. In Alijah’s time some glimmer of the truth in the matter must have penetrated to the Rev. Ward Phillips and the reviewer, John Druven, and they were actually led to visit Billington, whereupon something happened to them—Druven disappeared and followed the customary course of the victims out of Dunwich, the Rev. Ward Phillips could not remember anything of his visit to Billington save that it had been made, and subsequently tried to destroy his book, which—mark this—contained references to events of a somewhat similar nature which had taken place decades before. In our own time, we find our Mr. Bates encountering the inexplicable hostility of Ambrose Dewart, after his cousin has sent for him in a rather frantic letter imploring his assistance.