The Lurker at the Threshold: Posthumous Collaborations

by August Derleth

  There is a certain pattern in all this.”

  I granted that without argument.

  “I know there are those who will suggest that the house itself is evil, and Bates’ manuscript in places does so, too, and will propound a theory of psychic residue, but I think it is far more than that—far, far more—something incredibly more hideous and malign which is well beyond the present known events in its significance.”

  The profound gravity of Dr. Lapham’s demeanor made it impossible to doubt for a moment the importance he attached to the Bates manuscript. Clearly he meant to follow it up, and the way in which he now began to move around, gathering various volumes from his reference shelves, suggested that he was indeed, as he had said, losing no time. He paused to suggest that I go out to lunch, and on the way deliver a note to Dr. Armitage Harper, which he immediately set about to write. He seemed now tremendously exhilarated and extremely zestful, writing rapidly and in his usual flowing hand, folding his note expertly, and sealing it into an envelope to hand to me with the warning to make my lunch a heavy one for “We may be here through the dinner hour.”

  On my return from lunch three-quarters of an hour later, I found Dr. Lapham surrounded by books and papers, among them a large, sealed book which I recognized as the property of the Library of Miskatonic University, doubtless sent over at Dr. Lapham’s request. The pages of the Bates manuscript had been separated, and several of them were marked.

  “Can I help?”

  “At the moment only by keeping an open mind, Phillips. Sit down.” He got up and strode across to a window, from which he could look down to the compound before the Miskatonic University Library, and to the great dog chained there as if on guard. “I often think,” he said over his shoulder, “how fortunate most men are in their inability to correlate all the knowledge at their disposal. Bates, I believe, illustrates the point very well. He has recorded what seems to be dissociated knowledge, he constantly skirts a terrifying reality, he seldom makes any genuine attempt to face it; he is hampered by the superficial, by vestigial superstitions and credos which have no reality apart from the expected conventional behavior-and belief-patterns of the average human being.

  If the common man were even to suspect the cosmic grandeur of the universes, if he were to have a glimpse of the awesome depths of outer space, he would very likely either go mad or reject such knowledge in preference to superstition.

  It is so with other things. Bates has set down a series of events ranging over two centuries, somewhat more, and he has every opportunity to solve the mystery of Billington’s Wood, but he fails to do so. He sets forth the events, as if they were pieces of a jig-saw; he draws certain preliminary conclusions—for instance, that his ancestor, Alijah Billington, was engaged in some very strange and possibly illegal practises, which were inevitably accompanied by stranger disappearances in the vicinity—but he goes no farther. He actually sees and hears certain phenomena, and then proceeds to argue against his own senses; in short, he represents pretty much the average mind—face to face with manifestations which are not ‘in the books,’ so to speak, he finds it both simpler and more intelligent to take issue with his senses. He writes about ‘imagination’ and ‘hallucination’; yet he is honest enough to concede that his reactions are ‘normal’ enough to give the lie to his retreating arguments. In the end, though it is true he does not seem to have the final key with which to unlock the puzzle, he lacks the courage to fit what pieces he has together and obtain a solution of wider significance than the outlines at which he barely hints. So he takes flight, in effect, and lays the problem before Dr. Harper, from whom it comes to me.”

  I asked whether he proceeded on the assumption that the Bates manuscript was a scrupulously factual account.

  “I think little alternative is offered. It is either factual or it is not. If we deny its factuality, then we are in the position of denying known events which have been recorded, witnessed, and have gone into history. If we accept only those known facts, we are then likely to explain every other event it chronicles as a manifestation of ‘chance’ or ‘coincidence,’ quite regardless of the fact that the mathematical average of such a series of chances and coincidences is vastly beyond acceptance by any scientific procedure. It seems to me therefore that we have actually no alternative. Bates’ manuscript sets forth a series of events which correlate with the known history of the place and inhabitants of his narrative. If, finally, you want to suggest that certain parts of Bates’ manuscript are imaginary events, then you must feel ready to explain from what source does his extra-terrestrial imagination arise—for his descriptions are lucid, almost scholarly, and include such detail as to suggest that he did actually see something of the kind he describes, and there is nothing in the known history of man or the mutations of man to account for certain of those details. Even if, as you might further suggest, these so carefully described creatures were the product of a nightmare, you must still adduce reason to people his nightmares with such beings, for the moment you postulate that any human being’s dreams or nightmares can be inhabited by creatures wholly alien to all his actual experience in life and also all his psychic existence, your postulate is as contrary to scientific fact as are the creatures themselves. It suits our purpose only if the manuscript is accepted as a factual account; we must go on from there, and if we are in error, time will surely tell.”

  He returned to his desk and sat down. “You will remember reading during your first year here about certain curious rites performed by the natives on Ponape, in the Caroline Islands, in worship of a deity of the seas, a Water-Being, who was at first thought to be the familiar fish-god, Dagon, but at the suggestion of which the natives were agreed in declaring that He was greater than Dagon, that Dagon and his Deep Ones served Him. Such cult-survivals are common enough, and don’t often come to public notice, but this one was publicized because of certain adjunctive discoveries—the queer mutations present on the bodies of certain of the natives killed in a shipwreck just off the coast— the presence of primal gills, for instance, of vestigial tentacles arising from the torso, and in one case, of scaly eyes in an area of squamous skin near the navel of one of the victims, all of whom were known to have belonged to the Sea-God cult.

  The one assertion of these islanders which comes back rather vividly to my mind is the statement that their god came out of the stars. Now, you know that there is a marked resemblance among the religious beliefs and myth-patterns of the Atlanteans, the Mayans, the Druids, and others, and we are constantly finding basic similarities, particularly connecting the seas and the skies, as for instance, in the god Quetzalcoatl, who bears parallelisms to the Hellenic Atlas, in that he supposedly came from some place in the Atlantic Ocean to bear the world on his shoulders. Not only in religion, but in pure legend also, as for instance, in the extension of god-credos to human giants, whose origin is supposedly also the sea—the western seas, to be precise, as did the Greek Titans, the island giants of Spanish tales, and the Cornwall giants of sunken Lyonesse. I mention this to point the curious linkage to tradition that goes back to primal times, when it was believed that great beings resided in the depths of the sea, a belief which clearly gave rise to that secondary belief about the origin of giants.

  We ought not to be surprised at the evidence of such cult-survivals as that on Ponape, since there is every precedent for it; but we are surprised and confounded by physical mutations which have occurred there, and which are subsequently explained by dark hints—no facts, of course—that there has been carnal traffic between certain sea-dwellers and some of the natives of the Carolines. This, if true, would indeed account for the mutations. But science, lacking actual positive evidence of the existence of any such sea-dwellers, simply denies that it is true; the mutations are dismissed as ‘negative’ evidence, and hence not admissible, and an elaborate explanation is concocted to show that primitive outcroppings are not unknown, the natives are ticketed as ‘throwbacks,’ as ‘atavistic’ curiosities, and
the incident duly filed away. If you or I or anyone else once decides to lay these incidents end to end, he will find that they can encircle the globe several times, and not only that, that they will present certain disturbing similarities, in effect supporting one another and emphasizing repetitive aspects of those curious happenings. No one, however, is quite willing to undertake an impartial study of those isolated phenomena because, as in the case of Mr. Bates, there does exist a certain very real and quite human fear of what one may find. Better not to disturb the pattern of existence, for fear of what may lie just beyond, in an extension of time or space with which none of us is prepared to cope.”

  I remembered the account of the Ponape islanders and said so. I did not quite follow my employer, however, in his inference that this concerned the Bates manuscript, even remotely, though I felt certain that there was purpose in Dr. Lapham’s recalling the incident to my memory.

  He went on with meticulous detail to explain.

  In a great many of the scattered phenomena presented to anthropologists, among others, there existed a certain pattern common to all. It was a mythology of belief in primal inhabitation of earth by another race of beings who, because of certain dark practises, lost their foothold on earth and were expelled by “Elder Gods,” who sealed them away in time and space—since they were not subject to the laws of time and space as were mere mortal men and were in addition mobile in other dimensions. These other beings, despite being expelled and sealed away by fearful and hated seals, continue to live on “outside” and are frequently manifest in attempts to regain their control over and possession of earth and the “inferior” beings who now inhabit it—inferior, presumably, because of their subjectivity to lesser laws which do not affect the expelled beings who were known by various names, most common among them being the “Great Old Ones,” and who were served by many primitive peoples—such as the Ponape Islanders, as an instance. Moreover, these “Great Old Ones” are malevolent, and it should be recognized that the barriers which stand between mankind and the paralyzing horror which they represent are purely arbitrary and wholly inadequate.

  “But this might have been evolved from the Bates manuscript and the documents accompanying it!” I protested.

  “Yet it was not. It existed decades before the Bates manuscript came into existence.”

  “Bates must have discovered its lore.”

  He was unperturbed, but no whit less grave. “Even if he did, that does not explain the undisputable fact that a horrible and exceedingly rare book was written about the Great Old Ones and traffic with them in about the year A.D. 730 at Damascus by an Arab poet named Abdul Alhazred, who was commonly thought to be mad, and who titled his hook Al Azif, though it is now more widely known in certain secret circles by its Greek title of Necronomicon. I suggest that if this legend and lore has been chronicled as fact centuries ago, and certain non-human phenomena arise in our own day which would seem to corroborate certain aspects of the Arab’s writings, it is decidedly unscientific to lay these phenomena to the imagination or machination of a human being, particularly one who gives no evidence of foreknowledge in these matters.”

  “Very well. Go on.”

  The Great Old Ones, he continued, had some correspondence to the elements—as of earth, water, air, fire—these were likewise their media, over and above a certain interdependence and their supramundane faculties which rendered them insensible to the effects of time and space, so that they represented an ever-present menace to mankind and indeed to all the creatures on earth, to which their incessant strivings to come through again were aided by their primitive worshippers and followers, who were for the most part of inferior physical or mental stock, and in some cases, as was shown by the Ponape Islanders, actual physiological mutations, who effected certain “openings” through which the Great Old Ones and their extra-terrestrial minions might enter, or might be “called,” wherever in space or time they might be, by certain rites, which were in part at least chronicled by the Arab, Abdul Alhazred, and by various lesser writers who followed him and left a parallel lore of their own, stemming from the same source, but augmented by various data which had come into being since the Arab’s time.

  Here he paused and gazed intently at me. “Do you follow me, Phillips?”

  I assured him that I did.

  “Very well. Now, these Great Old Ones, as I have said, have been given various names. There were certain inferior ones, who are in numerical superiority. These are not quite as free as the remaining few, and many of them are subject to many of the same laws which govern mankind. The first among them is Cthulhu, who lies supposedly ‘dead but dreaming’ in the unknown sunken city of R’lyeh, which some writers have thought to be in Atlantis, some in Mu, and some few in the sea not far off the coast of Massachusetts. Second among them is Hastur, sometimes called Him Who Is Not To Be Named and Hastur the Unspeakable, who supposedly resides in Hali in the Hyades. Third is Shub-Niggurath, a horrible travesty on a god or goddess of fertility. Next comes one who is described as the ‘Messenger of the Gods’—Nyarlathotep—and particularly of the most powerful extension of the Great Old Ones, the noxious Yog-Sothoth, who shares the dominion of Azathoth, the blind and idiot chaos at the center of infinity. I see by the expression of your eyes that you are beginning to recognize some of these names.”

  “Yes, of course; they were in the manuscript.”

  “And likewise in the documents. It should give you pause to learn that Nyarlathotep is often accompanied in his faceless manifestations by creatures described as ‘idiot flute-players.’”

  “What Bates saw!”

  “Yes.”

  “But then—what were those others?”

  “That we can only conjecture. But if Nyarlathotep is always accompanied by the idiot flute-players, presumably one of those manifestations was he. The Great Old Ones have to some degree the ability to appear in mutations, though each presumably has his own identity and shape. Abdul Alhazred describes him as ‘faceless,’ while Ludvig Prinn, in his De Vermis Mysteriis, has it that Nyarlathotep was the ‘all-seeing eye,’ and von Junzt, writing in Unaussprechlichen Kulten, says he was, in common with another of the Great Old Ones—which is presumably Cthulhu—‘adorned with tentacles.’ These various descriptions certainly cover the manifestations that Bates saw as an ‘excresence’ or ‘extension.’”

  I was astonished at the lore which was apparently available in connection with these primitive or primal cults and religions. I had never before heard my employer speak of these books, and certainly he did not own them. Where then had he learned of them?

  “Why, they are under lock and key at the Miskatonic, Phillips. They are seldom seen. This book—” he tapped the strange book I had seen on my return from lunch—“is the most famous of them, and I must return it tonight. It is the Latin version by Olaus Wormius of the Necronomicon, printed in Spain in the seventeenth century. This, in point of fact, is the ‘Book’ referred to in the Bates manuscript and the documents, and it was this book from which pages and paragraphs were copied by correspondents of Alijah Billington’s in various places of the world—for there are. copies in whole or in part only at the Widener, at the British Museum, the Universities of Buenos Aires and Lima, the Bibliotheque Nationale of Paris, and our own Miskatonic. Some say that a hidden copy exists in Cairo, and another in the Vatican Library in Rome; some also believe that portions of this book, copied laboriously, exist in various private hands, and this has to some extent been substantiated in what Bates found in his cousin’s library, which had been Alijah Billington’s. If Billington managed it, then others could manage it as well.”

  He got up and took a bottle of old wine from a cupboard and poured himself a glass to sip appreciatively. He stood for a while at the window once more, while outside darkness began to gather, and the evening noises of the somewhat provincial city of Arkham rose. Then he turned and came back again.

  “That should suffice for the background,” he said.

 
; “Do you expect me to believe it?” I asked.

  "Not at all; of course not. But suppose we accept it as a provisional hypothesis and pass on to an examination of the Billington mystery itself.”

  I agreed.

  “Very well, then. Let us start with Alijah Billington—that, it appears, is where both Dewart and Bates began. I think we can agree without cavil that Alijah Billington was engaged in some kind of nefarious practise which may or may not have been akin to sorcery, which I suspect the Rev. Ward Phillips and John Druven thought it was. We have certain evidence connecting Alijah’s activity to the Wood—specifically, to the peculiar stone tower in the Wood, and we know that it was done at night—‘after the hour at which the supper is served,’ according to Alijah’s son, Laban. Into this business, whatever it was, the Indian Quamis was likewise initiated, though apparently in a more servile capacity. The Indian once mentions in awed tones in the boy’s hearing a name which is that of Nyarlathotep. At the same time, we have the evidence of the Bishop letters to indicate that Jonathan Bishop of Dunwich was engaged in similar practises. These letters are fairly clear on the subject. Jonathan had learned enough to call something out of the sky, but not enough to close the opening against others, or to protect himself. The inference is plain that whatever it was came in answer to such a summons had some use for human beings, and the suggestion is, also quite clearly, that that use was as food of some kind. If we can accept that, we can thus account for the multiple disappearances, no one of which was ever solved.”