The Lurker at the Threshold: Posthumous Collaborations

by August Derleth

  My employer’s foreboding was realized in considerably less than three days.

  There was no public statement or announcement of Stephen Bates’ disappearance, but there came to hand by way of a rural mail carrier, a torn fragment of paper which, he said, he had picked up on the Aylesbury Pike, and which, since it appeared to be addressed to Dr. Lapham, he had brought along and turned over to my employer. Dr. Lapham read the paper in silence and passed it over to me.

  It was scrawled, apparently in fearful haste, and had the appearance of having been written while held against his knee and, later, the trunk of a tree, for the pencil had gone through the paper in various places.

  Dr. Lapham. Misk. U.—Bates. He sent IT after me. Got away first time.

  Know It will find me. First the suns and stars. Then the smell—oh, God! the smell—like something burning long time. Ran when saw unnatural lights. Got to road. Heard It after me, like wind in trees. Then the smell. And the sun exploded and the Thing came out IN PIECES THAT JOINED TOGETHER! God! I can’t . . .

  There was nothing more.

  “We are too late to save Bates, clearly,” said Dr. Lapham. “And I hope we shall not meet what got him,” he added ominously, “because against that we have poor power indeed. Our only chance will be to get Billington and the Indian while the Thing is back Outside, for It will not come unless summoned.”

  He opened a drawer in his desk as he spoke, and took from it two leather bracelets or arm bands, appearing at first to be wrist-watches, but proving to be leather bands holding an ovoid grey stone, on which had been carven a curious design—a rough star of five points, centered with a broken lozenge framing what appeared to be a pillar of flame. He handed one of them to me, and put the other on his own wrist.

  “What now?” I asked.

  “We’re going out to that house and ask for Bates. It may be dangerous.”

  He waited for me to protest, but I said nothing. I followed his example and put on the bracelet he handed me, and then opened the door for him.

  There was no sign of life at the Billington house; several of the windows were shuttered, and, despite a certain coolness in the air, no smoke rose from its chimney. We left the car in the drive before the front door, walked up the flagstones to the door, and rapped. There was no answer. We rapped again, more loudly, and again, until finally and without forewarning, the door was opened and we were confronted by a man of medium height, with a hawk nose and red hair in a flare about his head. His skin was dark, almost brown, his eyes keen and suspicious. My employer immediately introduced himself.

  “We are looking for Mr. Stephen Bates, and understand that he stays here.”

  “Sorry. He did. He set out for Boston the other day. That is where he usually lives.”

  “Can you give me his address?”

  “Seventeen Randle Place.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Dr. Lapham, and put out his hand.

  Somewhat surprised at this unnecessary courtesy, Dewart reached out to take it; but his fingers had no sooner touched my employer’s, then he gave a hoarse cry and leaped backward, clinging to the door with one hand. The transformation which came over his face was terrible to see; his previous suspicion changed to ineffable hatred and baffled rage—and, more—there was in his eyes an enlightenment. Only for one moment did he stand so; then the door was flung shut with shaking violence. In some fashion, he had become aware of the strange bracelet my employer wore.

  Dr. Lapham, with undisturbed calm, led the way back to the car. When I slipped behind the wheel, he was gazing at his watch.

  “Late afternoon. We have not much time. I expect him to go to the tower tonight.”

  “That was in the nature of a warning you gave him. Why? Surely it would have been better not to let him know.”

  “There is no reason why he should not know. It is better that he does. But let us not waste time talking. We have much to do before nightfall, for we will want to be out here before sunset. And we must get into Arkham for some things we will need tonight.”

  Half an hour before sundown, we were making our way on foot through Billington’s Wood, approaching from its Western extremity, well out of sight of the house. A kind of twilight already held the thickly overgrown woodland, further impeding our progress, for we were heavily laden. Dr. Lapham had forgotten nothing. We carried shovels, lanterns, cement, a large jug of water, a heavy crow-bar, and various other similar paraphernalia. In addition, Dr. Lapham had armed himself with a curiously old-fashioned side-arm which shot bullets of silver, and carried the sketch Bates had left with us to show just where he had buried the large block of grey stone marked with the Elder Sign.

  To avoid any needless conversation in the Woods, Dr. Lapham had explained that he expected Dewart—which is to say, Billington—and perhaps the Indian, Quamis, to come to the tower as soon as night had fallen and carry on their hellish practises. Our course up to that point was prepared in advance.

  Without delay, the stone slab must be recovered and made ready for use; cement must be mixed likewise and got ready. What happened afterward depended upon Dr. Lapham, who had instructed me rigidly to make no interference and to be prepared to obey his commands without question. This I had promised to do, though with a fearful sense of foreboding.

  We arrived finally in the vicinity of the tower, and Dr. Lapham quickly discovered the place where Bates had buried the stone bearing the seal. He dug it out easily while I mixed cement, and not long after sundown, we were ready to begin our vigil of watching and waiting while the dusk gave way to night, and from the direction of the marsh beyond the tower to the east came the demoniac pulsing and throbbing of the batrachian voices, while over the marsh a constant wild flickering and lightning betrayed the presence of myriads of fireflies, whose white and pale green lights made a constant shimmering as of an aurora in that place, and in the woods around us, the whippoorwills began to sing with a strange, unearthly cadence, and seemingly all in unison.

  “They are nearby,” whispered my employer ominously.

  The voices of birds and frogs rose to a frightful intensity, beating a mad cacophony into the night, pulsing in rhythm until I thought I could no longer tolerate that weird, infernal din. Then, when the chorus of voices had risen to its absolute wildest, there was a reassuring touch on my arm, and I knew without the necessity of hearing Dr. Lapham’s voice, that Ambrose Dewart and Quamis were approaching.

  Of the events of the remainder of that night I can hardly bring myself to write objectively, though they are now long in the past, and the countryside around Arkham has enjoyed a sense of peace and freedom unknown for more than two centuries. Those events began with the actual appearance of Dewart, or rather, Billington in Dewart’s guise, in the opening of the tower roof. Dr. Lapham had selected the place of our concealment well; from it we could see through the foliage the entire frame of the opening in the tower roof, and in this leaf-framed opening, the shape of Ambrose Dewart presently appeared, and almost instantly his voice, raised in something uncouth and terrible, began to issue from his lips, calling out primal words and sounds with his head raised up to the stars, and eyes and words directed to outer space. The words came clearly, even above the madness of the frogs and the whippoorwills— “Iä! Iä! N’ghaa, n’n’ghai-ghai! Iä! Iä! N’ghai, n-yah, n-yah, shoggog, phthaghn! Iä! Iä! Y-hah, y-nyah, y-nyah! N’ghaa, n’n’ghai, waf’l pthaghn— Yog-Sothoth! Yog-Sothoth! ...”

  A wind began to rise among the trees, a descending wind, and the air grew chill, while the voices of the frogs and the whippoorwills, and the flickering of the fireflies increased in tempo. I turned in alarm to Dr. Lapham and was just in time to see him take deliberate aim with his side-arm, and fire!

  I swiveled my head around. Dewart received the bullet; he was knocked slightly back, but struck the frame, and pitched out headfirst to the ground. At the same instant, the Indian, Quamis, appeared in the opening, and in a furious voice continued the rite begun by Billington.

&nbs
p; “Iä! Iä! Yog-Sothoth! Ossadogowah! ...”

  Dr. Lapham’s second bullet struck the Indian, who did not fall, but simply seemed to collapse together.

  “Now, then,” said my employer in a cold, grim voice, “get that block of stone back in place!”

  I seized the stone, and he followed with the cement, amidst the demoniac and terrible pulsings of frogs and whippoorwills all around us, and we ran, unmindful of underbrush, to the tower, for the wind grew in intensity, and the air chilled more rapidly. But before us loomed the tower, and in the tower the opening framed the stars—and, horror of horrors, something more!

  How we got through that unforgettable night with the memory of that horror in mind’s eye I do not know. I have only a vague recollection of the sealing of that opening—of the burial of Ambrose Dewart’s mortal remains, now at last free in death of that malign possession by Richard Billington’s evil presence— of Dr. Lapham’s reassurance that Dewart’s disappearance would be ascribed to the same unknown and undiscoverable source as the others, but that those who waited for his body to turn up as did the others would wait in vain—of the fine, age-old dust which Dr. Lapham said was all that remained of Quamis, who had been dead “more than two centuries” and walked only at Richard Billington’s evil command—of the tearing apart of that circle of stones—of the destruction and burial of the tower itself, from below, so that the dread grey stone with the Elder Sign on it would not be disturbed in its passage into the earth—of the discovery in that earth by lanternlight of curious bones many decades old, going back to that ancient “Wonder Worker . . . the Wampanaug head man Misquamacus”—of the complete breaking away of that magnificent study window—of the abstraction of valuable books and documents to be deposited in the Library of Miskatonic University—of the gathering up of our paraphernalia—of driving the car around for the books and documents from the Billington House—of our flight just before dawn. Of all this, I say, I have but the vaguest memory; I know only that it was done, for I forced myself to visit that onetime island in the tributary Misquamacus, so named in Richard Billington’s time and given being by him in Ambrose Dewart’s possessed tongue, and saw nothing, no sign remained of the tower and the circle of stones, the place of Dagon, of Ossadogowah, and of that other, that frightful Thing from Outside that lurked at the threshold waiting to be summoned.

  Of all this, only the slightest memory, because of what I saw framed in that opening where I had expected to see but stars, and the charnel, nauseating smell that poured in from Outside—not stars, but suns, the suns seen by Stephen Bates in his last moments— great globes of light massing toward the opening, and not alone these, but the breaking apart of the nearest globes, and the protoplasmic flesh that flowed blackly outward to join together and form that eldritch, hideous horror from outer space, that spawn of the blankness of primal time, that tentacled amorphous monster which was the lurker at the threshold, whose mask was as a congeries of iridescent globes, the noxious Yog-Sothoth, who froths as primal slime in nuclear chaos forever beyond the nethermost outposts of space and time!

  THE WATCHERS OUT OF TIME

  first published in The Watchers out of Time and Others, August Derleth, Arkham House, 1974

  I

  ON A SPRING day in 1935, there arrived at the home of Nicholas Walters in Surrey a communication from Stephen Boyle, of Boyle, Monahan, Prescott & Bigelow, 37 Beacon Street, Boston, Massachusetts, addressed to his father, Charles Walters, seven years dead. The letter, couched in rather old-fashioned legal terminology, puzzled Nicholas, a solitary young man, almost as old as the century; it made reference to “ancestral property” situated in Massachusetts, to which the addressee had fallen heir seven years before, though, because of the uncertain health of one Ambrose Boyle of Springfield—“my late cousin”—there had been a failure to notify the heir, accounting for a delay of seven years, during which the property—“a house and various outbuildings, set in north central Massachusetts, the entire land area of the property comprising fifty acres more or less,” had been untenanted.

  Nicolas Walters had no memory of his father’s ever making mention of any such property. Indeed, the elder Walters had been a close-mouthed man, and, after the death of his wife a decade before his own passing, had grown increasingly reclusive and morose, much given to solitary introspection and very little communication with anyone. What Nicholas chiefly remembered about him was his father’s habit on occasion of studying Nicholas’s features, always with some faint apprehension and a disturbing habit of shaking his head forbiddingly as if he did not like something of what he saw—certainly not the finely-chiseled nose, but perhaps the wide mouth, or the curious lobeless ears, or the large pale blue slightly bulging eyes behind the spectacles Nicholas had worn since he was a child, to facilitate his favorite pastime of reading. Nicholas could not recall that his father had even so much as made a passing reference to the United States, though his mother had told Nicholas that he had been born in that same state of Massachusetts to which the solicitor’s letter referred.

  He pondered the matter for two days. His initial perplexity gave place to curiosity; his reluctance to stir thinned, and an odd kind of anticipation rose in him, investing the American property in a mysterious haze that made it seem attractive; so that, by the third day after his receipt of the letter addressed to his father, he cabled Stephen Boyle and announced his coming. Within the day he booked a flight to New York, and within the week he presented himself at the offices of Boyle, Monahan, Prescott & Bigelow.

  Stephen Boyle, the senior partner, proved to be a tall, thin gentleman of some seventy years; he was quite grey, but nevertheless carried a full head of hair and long sideboards. He wore a pince-nez on a long black silk ribbon, his face was somewhat pinched with wrinkles, his thin lips were pursed, and his blue eyes very sharp. There was about him that general air of preoccupation, so common to men of affairs, suggesting that his mind was so busy with various matters that the problem in hand was almost too trivial to command his attention. His manner, however, was extremely courteous.

  After the exchange of the customary pleasantries, he plunged directly into the matter of the estate. “You will forgive me, Mr. Walters, if I come straight to the point. We know very little of this matter. It was inherited from my cousin Ambrose—as I believe I wrote your father. He maintained an office in Springfield, and when we took it over on his death we discovered among folders pertaining to unsettled estates one devoted to the property in question, with a clear notation that it belonged, following the death of your father’s—we could not make that out, but it appeared to be ‘stepbrother’—to your father, whose name was appended to the documents, together with a notation in my cousin’s execrable Latin which we could not satisfactorily read, but which seemed to be a paragraph referring to an alteration in name—but whose name is not clear. In any case, the estate is known locally in the Dunwich area, not far from Springfield, where it lies, as the old Cyrus Whateley estate, and your father’s stepbrother— if that is what he was—was the late Aberath Whateley.”

  “I’m afraid those names mean nothing to me,” Walters said. “I was scarcely two years old when we reached England—so my mother told me. I don’t recall my father ever mentioning any of his relatives on this side, and there was very little if any correspondence with them except in the last year of his life. I have some reason to believe that he intended to tell me something of the family background, but he was stricken with what the medical profession now calls a cerebral accident, which deprived him not only of virtually all mobility, but also of speech, and though the expression in his eyes indicated that he wanted desperately to speak, he died without ever regaining the power to do so. And of course he could not set down anything in writing.”

  “I see.” Boyle looked thoughtful, as if coming to a decision in regard to the problem, before he continued. “Well, Mr. Walters, we’ve made some inquiries, but they haven’t come to much. That country around Dunwich—which is north central
Massachusetts, as I wrote,—is a sort of backwater. In Aylesbury they call it ‘Whateley country’—and many of the old farms there do still carry mailboxes that show the onetime presence of many members of that family, though these farms are now largely deserted—following some sort of trouble there in 1928 or thereabouts—and the area itself seems to be quite decadent. But you will see that for yourself. The estate in question still stands, and is apparently in remarkably good shape, for Aberath Whateley’s been dead only about seven years and a companion who lived there with him only three.

  Ambrose should have written at once on Whateley’s death, but he was in precarious health for years before he died, and I suppose it was for that reason the matter slipped from mind. I take it you have your own means of transportation?”