The Lurker at the Threshold: Posthumous Collaborations

by August Derleth

  “But how then account for the reappearances of the bodies?” I interjected.

  “There was never any evidence adduced to show where they had been.”

  “Nor would there be—if they were, as I suspect they were—in another dimension. The implication is dreadfully and frighteningly clear—whatever came in answer to the call was not always the same—you will remember the sense of the letters and the instructions about raising various named beings—and it came out of another dimension, and retreated into that dimension again, not impossibly without carrying back an inferior creature—in short, a human being—upon which to feed, whether for life force or blood or something more obscure, we cannot conjecture. It was for that purpose, as well as to shut his mouth, that John Druven was doubtless drugged and brought back to Billington’s house and offered as a sacrifice in exactly the same vengeful manner employed by Jonathan Bishop against the prying Wilbur Corey.”

  “Granting all that—there is a certain evidence of contradiction in the known facts,” I said.

  “Ah, I hoped you would see it. Yes, it is there. It demands to be seen and recognized, and that it was not recognized by Bates was a serious flaw in his reasoning. Let me advance an hypothesis. Alijah Billington, by some means we know not of, stumbles upon certain of the lore of the Great Old Ones on the ancestral property. He investigates, continues to instruct himself, and eventually manages to put to its intended use the circle of stones and the tower on the island in the tributary to the Miskatonic—the river Dewart so strangely named the Misquamacus, out of a memory not his own. Careful as he is, however, he cannot prevent occasional raids upon the Dunwich inhabitants. Perhaps he comforts and excuses himself with the thought that it is Bishop’s work which is responsible. He carefully assimilates portions of the Necronomicon, as we have seen, from all over the world, but at the same time he is becoming somewhat nervous about the vastness and immensity of the extra-terrestrial infinity into which he has reached. His outburst against Druven’s review of the Rev. Ward Phillips’ book is symptomatic of two things—he has begun to suspect that his hand is not entirely his own, and he has begun to struggle against a compulsion that is not solely his own. The direct attack on and death of Druven brings matters to a climax. Billington takes his leave of Quamis, and, by the use of knowledge gained from the Necronomicon, he seals the ‘opening’ he has made, even as he has sealed the Bishop opening after Bishop’s disappearance, and sets out for England, to resume his own identity away from the sinister psychic forces in operation in the Wood.”

  “That sounds logical.”

  “Now, in the light of that hypothesis, let us look at the instructions Alijah Billington handed down concerning the Massachusetts estate.” He selected a sheet of paper in Bates’ hand, and propped it up before him, turning on the green-shaded light over his desk. “Here we are. First of all, he adjures ‘all who come after’ that the property should be kept in the family, and then he imparts a set of rules, deliberately obscure, though he somewhat obliquely admits that their ‘sense shall be found within such books as have been left in the house known as Billington’s house.’ He begins with this one: ‘He is not to cause the water to cease flowing about the island of the tower, nor to molest the tower in any way, nor to entreat of the stones.’ The water ceased to flow of itself, and so far as we know, no evil consequences impended. By molestation of the tower, Alijah clearly meant that it was not to be disturbed in such a way as to restore the opening he had closed. As is evident, the opening he had closed was the roof of the tower; he had closed it with a stone bearing a mark which, though I have not seen it, must and can only be the Elder Sign, the mark of those Elder Gods whose strength against the Great Old Ones is absolute, the mark the Great Old Ones fear and hate. Dewart molested this in precisely the way Alijah hoped it would not be disturbed. Finally, the entreaty to which reference is made can refer only to a formula or formulae to be recited in order to effect the primary stage of contact with the forces beyond the threshold.

  “He goes on to say: ‘He is not to open the door which leads to strange time and place, nor to invite Him Who lurks at the threshold, nor to call out to the hills.’ The first part only emphasizes again the adjuration initially made about the stone tower. The second refers for the first time to a very definite Being, a lurker at the threshold, whose identity we do not know—he may be Nyarlathotep, he may be Yog-Sothoth, he may be another. And the third must have reference to a secondary stage of the rites attendant upon a manifestation of those from outside, quite possibly to the sacrifice.

  “The third adjuration is again in the nature of a warning: ‘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 whippoorwills, lest he abandon his locks and his guards.’ Bates did begin to guess at the meaning of this adjuration—which is meant simply to say that the named creatures have shown a peculiar sensitivity to the presence of those from outside, and, by the tempo of their cries and lights, give warning and thus allow preparation. Any step taken against them, then, is presumably a step against self-interest.

  “In the fourth, the window is mentioned for the first time. ‘He is not to touch upon the window, seeking to change it in any way.’ Why not? From everything Bates has put down, there is a malignant quality about the window. If his adjurations are protective, why not then destroy the window, since he is cognizant of its evil? I think it is simply because the window changed must be more dangerous than the window as it is.”

  “I don’t follow there,” I interrupted.

  “Does nothing of Bates’ narrative suggest anything to you?”

  “The window is strange, the glass different—it was designed that way, obviously.”

  “I suggest the window is not a window at all, but a lens or prism or mirror reflecting vision from another dimension or dimensions—in short, from time or space. It may also be designed to reflect obscure rays, not of vision, but operating on vestigial and forgotten extra senses, and its construction may not have been the work of human hands at all. It enabled Bates on two occasions to see beyond the natural landscape which lies beyond that window.”

  “Accepting that tentatively, let us go on to the last adjuration.”

  “The last is simply a reaffirmation of everything essential that has gone before, and is clear enough in the light of what the previous instructions portend.

  ‘He is not to sell or otherwise make disposition of the property without inserting a clause to hold that the island and the tower are in no wise disturbed, nor the window be alter’d except it be destroy’d.’ The suggestion is here again that the window is somehow capable of wielding an evil influence, and that, in turn, suggests that in some fashion unknown even to Alijah, it is a further opening—if not for the physical entry of those from outside, for their perceptions, and thus also for their suggestions, or influence. I think that the most likely explanation for a very patent reason—it is this: in every avenue of information open to us, it is manifest that some influence is at work in the house as well as the Wood.

  Alijah is impelled to study and experiment. Bates tells us that when Dewart took the house, he was drawn to the window, to examine it, to look out of it; and when he went into the tower in the Wood, he felt a compulsion to dislodge the block set into the roof. Bates himself sets down his reaction to the house after his first curious experience with his cousin, which he mistakenly labels ‘schizophrenic’ I have it here; let me read it to you. ‘And suddenly, as I stood there, feeling the freshness of the wind against my body, I was conscious with a rapidly mounting oppression, with a crushing sense of despair, of a horrible foulness, of a black, blasting evil of and around this woods-girt house, a cloying, infiltrating loathsomeness of the nethermost abysses of the human soul . . . The apprehension of evil, of terror and loathing, settled like a cloud in the room; I felt it pour from the walls like invisible fog.’ In addition to this, Bates, too, is drawn to the window. And final
ly, being newer in the house, he is able to observe from a comparatively unbiased perspective the active influence at work in his cousin. He diagnoses it correctly as some kind of inner ‘struggle’; he labels it, incorrectly, as ‘schizophrenia,’ which it is not.”

  “Aren’t you going out of bounds in being so positive? After all, there appears to be some evidence of split-personality.”

  “No, no, none whatsoever. That is the danger of knowing too little about a subject. None of the symptoms is present, save only the superficial conflict between moods. Ambrose Dewart is quite clearly at first a rather amiable soul, a pottering gentleman, a country squire lazily in search of something to occupy his time. Then he becomes aware of something—he knows not what—and he grows uneasy. Finally he sends for his cousin. Bates finds a further change; now Dewart is uneasy with him, and presently he becomes definitely hostile. There are brief returnings to his earlier, more natural state, and a prolonged return in the Boston sojourn during the past winter. But almost at once on the return to the house in the Wood last month the previous hostility became manifest again, and presently, as Bates does not himself seem to perceive as well as he might, this gives way to a guarded awareness. The effect on Bates is simply that one time he feels welcome, one time he does not, quite the opposite. He recognizes a conflict in his cousin, and in terms of psychiatry, of which he knows no more than you, Phillips, this suggests schizophrenia.”

  “You suggest influence, then—from outside. Of what nature?”

  “Why, I think that is fairly evident. The influence is that of a directing intelligence. It is, specifically, the same influence which went to work on Alijah but was defeated by him.”

  “One of the Great Old Ones, then?”

  “No, that is not shown.”

  “Indicated, then.”

  “No, not even indicated. The manifest suggestion is the influence of an agent of the Great Old Ones. If you will examine the Bates manuscript carefully, you will find that the suggestions, the influences implanted are of an essentially human nature. I postulate that if the Great Old Ones themselves were activating the influence at work in Billington House, the suggestions implanted would, at least on occasion, be essentially non-human. There is nothing to show that they are. If the impression conveyed to Bates of the foulness and loathsomeness and evil about the house and Wood had been conveyed by something alien, it is probable that his reaction would not have been so fundamentally human; no, he was enveloped on that occasion by a reaction which was human with almost a calculated humanity.”

  I pondered this. If Dr. Lapham’s theory were sound—and indeed it seemed so—there seemed to be a manifest flaw in it; he had suggested that the “influence” at work on Dewart and Bates had also worked on Alijah Billington.

  If that “influence” were, as he had postulated, of human origin, it would have more than spanned a century. Choosing my words carefully, I pointed out this objection.

  “Yes, I accept it. I find it not incompatible. You will bear in mind that the influence is extra-terrestrial in origin. It is also extra-dimensional, and therefore, human or not, no more subject to the laws of physical earth than the Great Old Ones. In short, if the influence is human, as I postulate it is, then it, too, exists in time and space conterminous with us, and yet not similar. It shares the ability to exist in such dimensions without experiencing the limitations time and space exercise upon any person or persons who occupy Billington House. It exists in those dimensions exactly as those poor unfortunates did who were victims of the beings called by Bishop and Billington and Dewart before they were dropped back into our dimension.”

  “Dewart!”

  “Yes, he, too.”

  “You suggest that he is responsible for those strange disappearances recently from Dunwich?” I asked in astonishment.

  He shook his head somewhat pityingly. “No, I do not suggest it; I advance it as manifest fact—unless you now want to return to the objectionable grounds of coincidence.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Very well, then. Consider it. Billington goes off to his circle of stones and his stone tower and opens the ‘door.’ Noises are heard in the woods by persons completely dissociated from Billington, as well as by his son, Laban, who writes about them in his daybook. These phenomena are always followed by a) a disappearance; b) a reappearance under certain strange, but repetitive, conditions weeks or months later—both unsolved. Jonathan Bishop writes in his letters that he went to his circle of stones and ‘call’d It to ye hill, and contain’d It in ye circle, but onlie with ye greatest difficultie and hardship, so that ’twould but seem it is not likelie that ye circle is potent enough to contain such as These for long.’ Thereafter, likewise, strange disappearances, and equally strange reappearances in circumstances paralleling those following Billington’s activities. These things of a century and more ago are repeated in our own time.

  Ambrose Dewart walks in his sleep to the tower; in his dreams he is conscious of something incredibly awesome and terrible; he is possessed by that external influence, but he is not aware of it. Surely you do not expect any impartial observer, in the light of these facts, to believe that, after Dewart’s trip to the stone tower, at which he subsequently finds what appears to be a splashing of blood, the disappearances and reappearances which follow are only ‘coincidence’?”

  I conceded that an explanation involving coincidence to explain such a series of parallel events was fully as fantastic as the explanation Dr. Lapham himself offered. I was troubled and deeply disturbed, because Dr. Seneca Lapham was a scholar of great breadth and a singular store of knowledge, and his espousal of something thus far foreign to absolute knowledge had the impact of a profound shock on one whose respect for him was unbounded. Clearly, to Dr. Lapham, the hypotheses he put forward were based on more than conjecture, and this involved a belief almost beyond credibility. Yet it was manifest that my employer had no doubt whatsoever, secure in a greater knowledge of his subject and its background.

  “I observe you are involved within your own thoughts. Let us just turn this over in our minds tonight, and return to it tomorrow or later. I want you to read some of the passages I have marked in these books, though you will have to glance at the Necronomicon here and now, so that I can return it to the Library tonight.”

  I turned at once to the ancient book in which Dr. Lapham had marked two curious passages, which I translated slowly as I read. They were passages hinting of hideous outsiders constantly lying in wait; indeed, the Arab author referred to them as “the Liers-in-Wait,” and he gave them names. A long paragraph in the midst of the first passage struck me with especial force.

  “Ubbo-Sathla is that unforgotten source whence came those daring to oppose the Elder Gods who ruled from Betelgueze, the Great Old Ones who fought against the Elder Gods; and these Old Ones were instructed by Azathoth, who is the blind idiot god, and by Yog-Sothoth, who is the All-in-One and One-in-All, and upon whom are no strictures of time or space, and whose aspects on earth are ’Umr At-Tawil and the Ancient Ones. The Great Old Ones dream forever of that coming time when they shall once more rule Earth and all that Universe of which it is part. . . . Great Cthulhu shall rise from R’lyeh; Hastur, who is Him Who Is Not To Be Named, shall come again from the dark star which is near Aldebaran in the Hyades; Nyarlathotep shall howl forever in darkness where he abideth; Shub-Niggurath, who is the Black Goat With a Thousand Young, shall spawn and spawn again, and shall have dominion over all wood nymphs, satyrs, leprechauns, and the Little People; Lloigor, Zhar, and Ithaqua shall ride the spaces among the stars and shall ennoble those who are their followers, who are the Tcho-Tcho; Cthugha shall encompass his dominion from Fomalhaut; Tsathoggua shall come from N’kai. . . . They wait forever at the Gates, for the time draws near, the hour is soon at hand, while the Elder Gods sleep, dreaming, unknowing there are those who know the spells put upon the Great Old Ones by the Elder Gods, and shall learn how to break them, as already they can command the followers waiting b
eyond the doors from Outside.”

  The second passage occurred somewhat later, and was equally potent:

  “Armor against witches and daemons, against the Deep Ones, the Dholes, the Voormis, the Tcho-Tcho, the Abominable Mi-Go, the Shoggoths, the Ghasts, the Valusians and all such peoples and beings who serve the Great Old Ones and their Spawn lies within the five-pointed star carven of grey stone from ancient Mnar, which is less strong against the Great Old Ones themselves. The possessor of the stone shall find himself able to command all beings which creep, swim, crawl, walk, or fly even to the source from which there is no returning. In Yhe as in great R’lyeh, in Y’ha-nthlei as in Yoth, in Yuggoth as in Zothique, in N’kai as in K’n-yan, in Kadath in the Cold Waste as at the Lake of Hali, in Carcosa as in Ib, it shall have power; yet, even as stars wane and grow cold, even as suns die and the spaces between stars grow more wide, so wanes the power of all things— of the five-pointed star-stone as of the spells put upon the Great Old Ones by the benign Elder Gods, and there cometh a time as once was a time, when it shall be shown that

  That is not dead which can eternal lie.

  And with strange eons even death may die.”

  I took the other books and certain photostat copies of manuscript books which were forbidden egress from the Miskatonic Library home with me, and throughout most of that night I dipped into strange and terrible pages. I read in the Pnakotic Manuscript, in the Celaeno Fragments, in Professor Shrewsbury’s An Investigation into the Myth-Patterns of Latter-day Primitives with Especial Reference to the R’lyeh Text, in the R’lyeh Text itself, in Comte d’Erlette's Cultes des Goules, the Libor Ivonis, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, the De Vermis Mysteriis of Ludwig Prinn, the Book of Dzyan, the Dhol Chants, and the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan. I read of terrible and blasphemous cults of ancient, prehuman eras which had survived in certain unmentionable forms to our own day in remote corners of the earth; I poured over cryptic accounts of obscure, prehuman languages which bore such names as Aklo, Naacal, Tsatho-yo and Chian; I came upon horrible hints of abysmally evil rites and “games,” such as the Mao and the Lloyathic; I found repeated mention of place-names of incredible antiquity—of the Vale of Pnath, or Ulthar, of N’gai and Ngranek, of Ooth-Nargai and Sarnath-the-Doomed, of Throk and Inganok, of Kythamil and Lemuria, of Hatheg-Kla and Chorazin, of Carcosa and Yaddith, of Lomar and Yian-Ho; and I came upon other Beings, whose names were set forth in a nightmare of unbelievably, shuddersome horror, made all the more terrible by accompanying accounts of certain strange and incredible terrestrial happenings, explicable only in the light of this hellish lore— I found strange names and familiar ones, awful descriptions and mere hints of terror unimaginable in accounts of Yig, the terrible snake-god, of Atlach-Nacha of the spider-shape, of Gnoph-Hek, the “hairy thing” otherwise known as Rhan-Tegoth, of Chaugnar Faugn, the vampiric “feeder,” of the hell-hounds of Tindalos, which prowl the angles of time, and again and again of the monstrous Yog-Sothoth, the “All-in-One and One-in-All,” whose deceptive disguise is as a congeries of iridescent globes concealing the primal horror beneath. I read such things as mortal man is not meant to know, such things as would blast the sanity of the imaginative reader, such things as are best destroyed, for the knowledge of them may be as grave a danger to mankind as the fearful consequences of a return to terrestrial dominion of those Great Old Ones who were exiled forever from the star-kingdom of Betelgueze by the Elder Gods whose rule these evil ones had defied.