Walters was disconcerted. “Locked up as tight as it was, it’s not likely the house would be much run down. Three years isn’t a long time. Aberath Whateley’s been dead seven. Who was Increase?”
“Increase Brown, they said his name was,” answered Whateley. “I dun’t know who he was—or what he was.” He gave Walters a hard, challenging stare as he spoke. “Nor where he come from. He belonged to Aberath.”
What a strange way to put it! thought Walters.
“One day he was jist thar. An’ then he was allus thar! Follered Aberath around like a dog. An’ then he wasn’t thar. So they said he died.”
“Who claimed his body, then?”
“No body to claim,” said Whateley brusquely.
It seemed plain to Walters, however much to his astonishment, that Tobias Whateley regarded him with something akin to contempt; he looked upon Walters as at someone unaware of some basic knowledge he ought to have. This was galling, for Whateley was unmistakably a bumpkin, with an education that was halted somewhere in the grades; that he should look upon him with such ill-concealed scorn was irritating, particularly since it was patent that his attitude was not that of the ignorant yokel by temperament antipathetic to the educated man, and Walters was as much perplexed as he was irritated; indeed, his irritation washed away as his perplexity grew; for Whateley continued to talk, and his talk was filled with odd allusions and puzzling references, and he kept glancing at Walters from time to time almost hopefully as if to catch some sign of comprehension that Walters might not otherwise be willing to betray.
As he listened to Whateley, his mystification increased. It was obvious from what Whateley said as he went about putting Walters’s order together that Aberath Whateley, though one of “the eddicated ones,” was nevertheless as shunned by the educated Whateleys as by the decayed branch of the family. As for Increase Brown, who remained a somewhat shadowy figure whose description in the course of Whateley’s monologue painted him as “gaunt” and “brown” of skin with black eyes and bony hands—“never seen him eat—never come after Aberath died for food”—but “thar was allus chickens and onct a hog and twict a cow gone” and people said “dark things”—the sum total of what he had to say of Increase Brown was that he was loathed and feared, and fearsomely avoided—not that he was ever about much to be avoided. Walters could not escape the conclusion that the Dunwichers were manifesting considerably more than the ignorant countryman’s resentment of the outsider in their attitude toward Brown; but what was it that Whateley sought in his sometimes guarded, sometimes frank glances at Walters’s eyes, what reaction was he looking for? Whateley succeeded in giving Walters a profoundly uneasy conviction that he not only was expected to react in a certain way, but ought to so react.
His uneasiness did not drain away when he left the store and drove out of Dunwich; and when he came to a stop at the house in the woods it was, if anything, compounded.
III
After a light repast, he walked outside in the dusk, considering what he ought to do. It would be folly, he thought, to offer the property for sale as far away as Boston, for the Dunwich country was too far from that urban center, and had nothing to attract a potential buyer from the coastal towns; it would be better to advertise it for sale in Springfield, for Dunwich was not too far from that city, though it was quite likely that the reputation Dunwich had must have reached Springfield, and that might deter an investor. Even as he turned the problem over in his thoughts, he was conscious of a failure of conviction; he was not yet certain that he wished to move so precipitously; something about the house and its reputation interested him to the verge of obsession; the hints and suggestions thrown out by Tobias Whateley, added to those so casually dropped by the lawyer, Boyle, were beginning to persuade Walters that there was considerably more to be learned about the house before he offered it for sale. Furthermore, the property was his, he need not make haste to dispose of it, however much part of him wanted to be off to England once more.
As he walked, turning the problem over and over in his mind, the dusk deepened toward night; stars began to glimmer among the treetops and over the house—Acturus and Spica, with Vega rising in the northeast—and the last of the winter constellations low in the west, Capella and the Heavenly Twins following Taurus and great Orion with the Dogs under the western rim. The evening was fragrant with the exhalation of the woods, an herb-like musk, added to that of the Miskatonic not far away, and the fresh-water smell of the nearby brook, and there was a rising tide of sound emanating from the near woods and, more distantly, from the hilltops around Dunwich, at first but the voices of birds—the diminishing songs and cries of day-birds, the increasing voices of nocturnal birds.
He reflected upon the differences between night in the American countryside and night in the England where he had grown up. Neither cuckoo nor nightingale was to be heard here in north central Massachusetts, but whippoorwills seemed to be vociferous indeed, and the harsh cries of what must be the American equivalent of nightjars rang out from above now and then, accompanied by the booming sound of wind in their wings as they plummetted downward and vaulted up again. And of batrachian voices there was no dearth; they seemed to rise not only from the river but also from every pond and bog within range, a piping, ululant chorus marking the season’s height.
But now, as he listened, he was aware of other sounds that did not seem to emanate from either avian or batrachian throats. The cries and booming of the nighthawks fell away; stranger sounds took their place—piping or fluting cries, but certainly not of frog or toad. He gave over walking and stood to listen. He heard voices, however distorted, which were surely those of men crying out, shouting; but at some distance away, and from on high. He decided presently that they came from the hilltops; and on the crest of round hill behind Dunwich there was a glow in the now dark heavens, as of a bonfire burning there. What could be taking place there?
But there were other sounds that were oddly disturbing—animal sounds of some kind, but the kind of which he had never heard before, though he had visited zoos and was familiar with the cries and gutturals and trumpetings of many animals foreign to England’s shores, animals taken from the entire range of the British Commonwealth; and these sounds were utterly alien and filled the darkness with hideous suggestiveness. Now and then they rose to crescendo, but soon fell back again into a more normal pattern, blending with the voices of the dark woods and the marshes, and making a troubling harmony with the incessant calling of the whippoorwills and the frogs.
He concluded finally that Boyle’s casual references to the strangeness and remoteness of Dunwich might have been in reference to certain customs of the inhabitants; and of these whatever was going on in the hills by night might well be one. He shrugged himself free of further concern, and went into the house, intent upon developing the photographs he had taken. He had already foreseen that he might spend the evening in this fashion, and to that end had moved in his materials at the same time he had brought his camera. A cistern pump in the kitchen would be a source of water, and any room in the house would serve as a dark-room, for the house was darker than the starlit woods outside. Still, in the absence of electricity, it would take some doing.
He persevered, though it took him longer than he had estimated to complete a set of photographs and hang them to dry. His skill had not deserted him, though he was not satisfied with the views he had taken of the interior of the house, particularly that of the study, that curious central room that was so much a vortex around which the remainder of the house seemed to have been constructed. And his photograph of the decoration on the wall above the fireplace struck him as uncommonly odd; he took it, wet, from the line, and carried it into an adjoining room where he could look at it in a stronger light.
The wall and the carving on it were beautifully clear. But the glass eye seemed oddly clouded. He studied it for a while, growing somewhat disquieted; he did not believe what he fancied he saw, and he disliked what he fancied. He retu
rned to the improvised dark-room, sought out the negative of the fireplace wall, and set out enlarging the section centered on the ornament. This done, he repaired once again to the adjoining room and peered closely at the result.
There was no mistaking what he saw. The “clouding” he had seen was the unmistakable outline of two human faces—the one, of an old man, bearded, looked directly out of the glass; the other, a lean, hawklike face, with the skin drawn tight over its bones, looked out from behind the first, his face slightly tilted as if he were deferring to the older man, though the age of the one was no greater to the eye than the age of the other, for all that the one wore a beard and the other’s leathery, parchment-like face was free of any hirsute adornment.
Walters’s baffled astonishment knew no bounds; in any other medium he would have dismissed what he saw as an optical illusion—but the photograph could not lie, and the outlines could not be dismissed as illusion. It was odd that he had not seen these outlines when he had looked at the ornament; but perhaps he had been too hasty, perhaps the light had reflected from the glass in such a way as to blur the outlines beyond recognition.
He went forthwith to the study, carrying one of the lamps he had lit. As he approached the open doors, he was further surprised to see light flickering in the room, as if he had left a lamp burning there; but he had not been in the room at all in his transit from outside to the dark-room. He put down the lamp he carried and walked forward quietly in its reflected glow to the threshold of the study.
There he stood, transfixed.
The source of the glow he had seen was the glass eye in the carved triangle above the fireplace. It was clouded, opalescent; it seethed and swirled with movement, spilling a pale light into and across the room; it was as if some life within reached out to make itself manifest. Though the eye was as milky as a moonstone, it flashed with hidden colors suddenly disclosed, as in an opal— roseate, pale green, blue, red, yellow. He stood and watched the swirling colors, the seething clouds in the glass eye; then he turned abruptly and went back to where he had put down the lamp.
With it in hand, he advanced confidently into the room. But its light seemed to have a diminishing effect on the glow of the eye in the wall. The swirling clouds settled, grew still; the light faded; the glinting colors became motionless.
He waited upon it. Nothing happened. All was now still.
There was in one corner of the room a small stepladder manifestly for use in reaching books on the top shelves of the cases around the walls. Walters went over and got it. He put it up against the fireplace wall, caught up the lamp again, and climbed the ladder, lamp in hand, until he stood almost abreast of the uncommon ornament.
He examined it, looking first at the eye itself. After a few moments of scrutiny, about all of which he could be reasonably certain was that it was assuredly not any common form of glass. He could not be sure that it was indeed glass, at all. Were it not for its uncommon size, it might in appearance alone have been an opal. But it was not that, either.
The carving which framed it was fully as baffling. The eye appeared in what was almost its optical center. The outer frame was a triangular pediment. At first glance, the carving appeared to be classically conventional in design. But now, in the light of the lamp Walters held, it bore a disquieting resemblance to a huge octopus-like being, yet unearthly to look upon; in it the convex circle of glass lay like a huge, central eye, opaque to sight now, but still cloudy with pale light that shifted oddly even now.
The whole exerted a strong fascination on Walters, who felt it difficult to take his eyes from it. He could not put down the expectation of something’s appearing in the glass, and wherever his eye wandered, following the tentacular lines of the carving, he invariably returned to the convex glass, as if he anticipated some further change. But there was nothing. That it was luminous of itself could hardly be denied, but the source of that luminosity was a mystery, one incapable of solution at this point.
Walters backed down the stepladder with reluctance. He stood below and looked back up at the triangular frame. The carving was undeniably octopoid, but equally certain not in the same way that common octopi were.
He put out the light and waited upon the effect of darkness.
At first all was black, so much so that it was impossible to distinguish even the walls. But in moments a wan iridescence became apparent. Not very much to Walters’s surprise, it emanated from the convex eye in the ornament on the fireplace wall. And presently the room was once more aglow, as it had been when first Walters had entered it from the dark-room. The convex eye was again agitated, and its appearance was that of a cloudscape in the grip of a violent wind, save only that its colors were more brilliant.
Watching it and trying to find some explanation of its extraordinary properties, Walters was insidiously aware of a kind of compulsion in his interest; it was as if his attention to the eye in the wall was not entirely voluntary, as if something outside himself impelled him to gaze at it, some influence he could not define. At the same time, his thoughts took an amazing turn; he was less concerned with the glass and its properties, and more with an ambiguous, ill-defined concept of vast dimensions and spaces beyond the terrestrial scenes familiar to him; and he felt himself being drawn into some vortex of dream and speculation that profoundly disturbed him. It was as if he were falling into a bottomless pit.
He relit the lamp.
It took a few moments for his equilibrium to return. The glow of the convex eye had once again vanished, and insofar as it was possible for the room to become prosaic, prosaic it had become. He was consciously relieved. Indeed, he discovered that a fine beading of perspiration had begun to form on his forehead.
He wiped it away.
Whatever its source, his experience had been extraordinary. He sat down somewhat shakily and tried to think how it had come about, and why.
Obviously, the eye in the wall had far more than ornamental significance. Who had put it there?
He climbed the stepladder again and studied the carving with greater care in the lamplight. He could find nothing to indicate its age. Presumably it had been put in at the time the house had been built. He must therefore learn something about its construction; and since it was very probably older than any living inhabitant of Dunwich, he would have to search elsewhere. He must also discover what he could about the previous inhabitants. Perhaps they had had similar experiences with the eye in the carving? Perhaps their experiences had transcended his? The thought filled him with apprehension and also a sense of excitement and discovery simultaneously.
It was borne in upon him that if he meant to accomplish the research that clearly impended, his stay in Aberath Whateley’s house would be of appreciably longer duration than he had intended. Somewhat sobered, he descended the ladder once more.
Resolutely putting the extraordinary eye in the wall from his thoughts, he returned to the dark-room to look at his drying photographs, and then climbed the stairs to the gable room in which he had chosen to sleep. It was now past mid-evening and he was tired. He put down the lamp and opened the window; outside all was as before—the whippoorwills, the frogs, the unusual cries and sounds from the dark hills. The gable faced toward the village of Dunwich; looking out, he saw that the fire on Round Mountain had gone out; but another crowned a different hill across the valley to the left, on the far side of the road that led in from the Aylesbury Pike, and the sounds that were so unusual to his ears now seemed to come from that direction.
He undressed and got into bed. But, tired though he was, he was not yet ready for sleep. A multitude of thoughts churned in his mind, all to the obbligato of the sounds from outside. Tobias Whateley might have more to tell him. But if he could find one of the “eddicated” Whateleys, he might learn more fact and less superstition, compounded by leering hints and scornful, dark references.
The library in Springfield might offer some data about the building of the house; in any case, some Whateley family history could be
found there, since the family had been so prominent for several generations in the Dunwich country.
As he lay there, he grew slowly conscious of the presence of the house, as it were—as of an entity that suffered him as a guest, perhaps—as something alive on its own terms, and of its heart that was unmistakably the study below, which was the source of the anima that gave the house its being; he felt it like a force drawing all to itself, and he had to exert some effort of will to prevent himself from leaving his bed and descending to that room once more. How extraordinary it was! He felt himself prey to fascination, apprehension, alarm, fear—and a kind of supranormal awareness, as if he lay on the edge of some momentous discovery and waited only upon the turning of the hour to bring him to some supreme knowledge that would confer upon him a kind of immortality.
At last, past midnight, he slept. At that hour the whippoorwills had fallen silent; a few frogs still piped; the night was still, for after midnight the sounds that fell so strangely to his ear from the surrounding hills had ceased. But his sleep was troubled by many strange dreams of a sort that he had never before experienced—dreams of his remote childhood—of someone he knew as his grandfather—but only in dream, for he had but a vestigial memory of that old man, his father’s father, and he had no waking knowledge of him—dreams of vast, megalithic buildings, of alien landscapes, of cold spaces far out in the universe among the stars. And, waking between dreams, he was constantly aware of a kind of pulsing in the house, as if its secret heartbeat throbbed in its very walls.
IV
In the morning he drove to Springfield. After lunch in a restaurant in that city, he made his way to the public library where he introduced himself to the reference librarian, a middle-aged gentleman whose name, duly set down on a card that rested on his desk, was Clifford Paul. To him Walters explained the nature of his quest.
The Lurker at the Threshold: Posthumous Collaborations Page 50
