The Lurker at the Threshold: Posthumous Collaborations

by August Derleth

  I lay for most of that night, sleepless, filled with a nameless dread for which all explanation eluded me, and when I slept at last my sleep was filled with hideously disturbing dreams, in which beings far beyond my mundane imagination held the stage, and cataclysmic events of the utmost terror and horror took place. And when I rose next morning, I felt that somehow I had touched upon a world totally alien to my kind.

  I reached the school early that morning, but Wilbur Dunlock was there before me. His eyes met mine with sad reproach. I could not imagine what had happened to disturb this usually friendly pupil.

  “You shouldn’t a told Andrew Potter we talked about him,” he said with a kind of unhappy resignation.

  “I didn’t, Wilbur.”

  “I know I didn’t. So you must have,” he said. And then, “Six of our cows got killed last night, and the shed where they were was crushed down on ’em.”

  I was momentarily too startled to reply. “A sudden windstorm,” I began, but he cut me off.

  “Weren’t no wind last night, Mr. Williams. And the cows were smashed.”

  “You surely cannot think that the Potters had anything to do with this, Wilbur,” I cried.

  He gave me a weary look—the look of one who knows, meeting the glance of one who should know but cannot understand, and said nothing more.

  This was even more upsetting than my experience of the previous evening.

  He at least was convinced that there was a connection between our conversation about the Potter family and the Dunlock’s loss of half a dozen cows. And he was convinced with so deep a conviction that I knew without trying that nothing I could say would shake it.

  When Andrew Potter came in, I looked in vain for any sign that anything out of the ordinary had taken place since last I had seen him.

  Somehow I got through that day. Immediately after the close of the school session, I hastened into Arkham and went to the office of the Arkham Gazette, the editor of which had been kind enough, as a member of the local District Board of Education, to find my room for me. He was an elderly man, almost seventy, and might presumably know what I wanted to find out.

  My appearance must have conveyed something of my agitation, for when I walked into his office, his eyebrows lifted, and he said, “What’s got your dander up, Mr. Williams?”

  I made some attempt to dissemble, since I could put my hand upon nothing tangible, and, viewed in the cold light of day, what I might have said would have sounded almost hysterical to an impartial listener. I said only, “I’d like to know something about a Potter family that lives in Witches’ Hollow, west of the school.”

  He gave me an enigmatic glance. “Never heard of old Wizard Potter?” he asked. And, before I could answer, he went on, “No, of course, you’re from Brattleboro. We could hardly expect Vermonters to know about what goes on in the Massachusetts back country. He lived there first. An old man when I first knew him. And these Potters were distant relatives, lived in Upper Michigan, inherited the property and came to live there when Wizard Potter died.”

  “But what do you know about them?” I persisted.

  “Nothing but what everybody else knows,” he said. “When they came, they were nice friendly people. Now they talk to nobody, seldom come out—and there’s all that talk about missing animals from the farms in the district. The people tie that all up.”

  Thus begun, I questioned him at length.

  I listened to a bewildering enigma of half-told tales, hints, legends and lore utterly beyond my comprehension. What seemed to be incontrovertible was a distant cousinship between Wizard Potter and one Wizard Whateley of nearby Dunwich—“a bad lot,” the editor called him; the solitary way of life of old Wizard Potter, and the incredible length of time he had lived; the fact that people generally shunned Witches’ Hollow. What seemed to be sheer fantasy was the superstitious lore—that Wizard Potter had “called something down from the sky, and it lived with him or in him until he died”;—that a late traveller, found in a dying state along the main road, had gasped out something about “that thing with the feelers—slimy, rubbery thing with the suckers on its feelers” that came out of the woods and attacked him—and a good deal more of the same kind of lore.

  When he finished, the editor scribbled a note to the librarian at Miskatonic University in Arkham, and handed it to me. “Tell him to let you look at that book. You may learn something.” He shrugged. “And you may not. Young people now-days take the world with a lot of salt.”

  I went supperless to pursue my search for the special knowledge I felt I needed, if I were to save Andrew Potter for a better life. For it was this rather than the satisfaction of my curiosity that impelled me. I made my way to the library of Miskatonic University, looked up the librarian, and handed him the editor’s note.

  The old man gave me a sharp look, said, “Wait here, Mr. Williams,” and went off with a ring of keys. So the book, whatever it was, was kept under lock and key.

  I waited for what seemed an interminable time. I was now beginning to feel some hunger, and to question my unseemly haste—and yet I felt that there was little time to be lost, though I could not define the catastrophe I hoped to avert.

  Finally the librarian came, bearing an ancient tome, and brought it around and to a table within his range of vision. The book’s title was in Latin— Necronomicon—though its author was evidently an Arabian, Abdul Alhazred, and its text was in somewhat archaic English.

  I began to read with interest which soon turned to complete bewilderment.

  The book evidently concerned ancient, alien races, invaders of earth, great mythical beings called Ancient Ones and Elder Gods, with outlandish names like Cthulhu and Hastur, Shub-Niggurath and Azathoth, Dagon and Ithaqua and Wendigo and Cthugha, all involved in some kind of plan to dominate earth and served by some of its peoples—the Tcho-Tcho, and the Deep Ones, and the like.

  It was a book filled with cabalistic lore, incantations, and what purported to be an account of a great interplanetary battle between the Elder Gods and the Ancient Ones and of the survival of cults and servitors in isolated and remote places on our planet as well as on sister planets. What this rigmarole had to do with my immediate problem, with the ingrown and strange Potter family and their longing for solitude and their anti-social way of life, was completely beyond me.

  How long I would have gone on reading, I do not know. I was interrupted presently by the awareness of being studied by a stranger, who stood not far from me with his eyes moving from the book I was busy reading to me. Having caught my eye, he made so bold as to come over to my side.

  “Forgive me,” he said, “but what in this book interests a country school teacher?”

  “I wonder now myself,” I said.

  He introduced himself as Professor Martin Keane. “I may say, sir,” he added, “that I know this book practically by heart.”

  “A farrago of superstition.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Emphatically.”

  “You have lost the quality of wonder, Mr. Williams. Tell me, if you will, what brought you to this book?”

  I hesitated, but Professor Keane’s personality was persuasive and inspired confidence.

  “Let us walk, if you don’t mind,” I said.

  He nodded.

  I returned the book to the librarian, and joined my new-found friend.

  Haltingly, as clearly as I could, I told him about Andrew Potter, the house in Witches’ Hollow, my strange psychic experience,—even the curious coincidence of Dunlock’s cows. To all this he listened without interruption, indeed, with a singular absorption. I explained at last that my motive in looking into the background of Witches’ Hollow was solely to do something for my pupil.

  “A little research,” he said, “would have informed you that many strange events have taken place in such remote places as Dunwich and Innsmouth— even Arkham and Witches’ Hollow,” he said when I had finished. “Look around you at these ancient houses with their shu
ttered rooms and ill-lit fanlights. How many strange events have taken place under those gambrel roofs! We shall never know. But let us put aside the question of belief! One may not need to see the embodiment of evil to believe in it, Mr. Williams. I should like to be of some small service to the boy in this matter. May I?”

  “By all means!”

  “It may be perilous—to you as well as to him.”

  “I am not concerned about myself.”

  “But I assure you, it cannot be any more perilous to the boy than his present position. Even death for him is less perilous.”

  “You speak in riddles, Professor.”

  “Let it be better so, Mr. Williams. But come—we are at my residence. Pray come in.”

  We went into one of those ancient houses of which Professor Keane had spoken. I walked into the musty past, for the rooms were filled with books and all manner of antiquities. My host took me into what was evidently his sitting room, swept a chair clear of books, and invited me to wait while he busied himself on the second floor.

  He was not, however, gone very long—not even long enough for me to assimilate the curious atmosphere of the room in which I waited. When he came back he carried what I saw at once were objects of stone, roughly in the shape of five-pointed stars. He put five of them into my hands.

  “Tomorrow after school—if the Potter boy is there—you must contrive to touch him with one of these, and keep it fixed upon him,” said my host. “There are two other conditions. You must keep one of these at least on your person at all times, and you must keep all thought of the stone and what you are about to do out of your mind. These beings have a telepathic sense—an ability to read your thoughts.”

  Startled, I recalled Andrew’s charging me with having talked about them with Wilbur Dunlock.

  “Should I not know what these are?” I asked.

  “If you can abate your doubts for the time being,” my host answered with a grim smile. “These stones are among the thousands bearing the Seal of R’lyeh which closed the prisons of the Ancient Ones. They are the seals of the Elder Gods.”

  “Professor Keane, the age of superstition is past,” I protested.

  “Mr. Williams—the wonder of life and its mysteries is never past,” he retorted. “If the stone has no meaning, it has no power. If it has no power, it cannot affect young Potter. And it cannot protect you.”

  “From what?”

  “From the power behind the malignance you felt at the house in Witches’

  Hollow,” he answered. “Or was this too superstition?” He smiled. “You need not answer. I know your answer. If something happens when you put the stone upon the boy, he cannot be allowed to go back home. You must bring him here to me. Are you agreed?”

  “Agreed,” I answered.

  That next day was interminable, not only because of the imminence of crisis, but because it was extremely difficult to keep my mind blank before the inquiring gaze of Andrew Potter. Moreover, I was conscious as never before of the wall of pulsing malignance at my back, emanating from the wild country there, a tangible menace hidden in a pocket of the dark hills. But the hours passed, however slowly, and just before dismissal I asked Andrew Potter to wait after the others had gone.

  And again he assented, with that casual air tantamount almost to insolence, so that I was compelled to ask myself whether he were worth “saving” as I thought of saving him in the depths of my mind.

  But I persevered. I had hidden the stone in my car, and, once the others were gone, I asked Andrew to step outside with me.

  At this point I felt both helpless and absurd. I, a college graduate, about to attempt what for me seemed inevitably the kind of mumbo-jumbo that belonged to the African wilderness. And for a few moments, as I walked stiffly from the school house toward the car I almost flagged, almost simply invited Andrew to get into the car to be driven home.

  But I did not. I reached the car with Andrew at my heels, reached in, seized a stone to slip into my own pocket, seized another, and turned with lightning rapidity to press the stone to Andrew’s forehead.

  Whatever I expected to happen, it was not what took place.

  For, at the touch of the stone, an expression of the utmost horror shone in Andrew Potter’s eyes; in a trice, this gave way to poignant anguish; a great cry of terror burst from his lips. He flung his arms wide, scattering his books, wheeled as far as he could with my hold upon him, shuddered, and would have fallen, had I not caught him and lowered him, foaming at the mouth, to the ground. And then I was conscious of a great, cold wind which whirled about us and was gone, bending the grasses and the flowers, rippling the edge of the wood, and tearing away the leaves at the outer band of trees.

  Driven by my own terror, I lifted Andrew Potter into the car, laid the stone on his chest, and drove as fast as I could into Arkham, seven miles away.

  Professor Keane was waiting, no whit surprised at my coming. And he had expected that I would bring Andrew Potter, for he had made a bed ready for him, and together we put him into it, after which Keane administered a sedative.

  Then he turned to me. “Now then, there’s no time to be lost. They’ll come to look for him—the girl probably first. We must get back to the school house at once.”

  But now the full meaning and horror of what had happened to Andrew Potter had dawned upon me, and I was so shaken that it was necessary for Keane to push me from the room and half drag me out of the house. And again, as I set down these words so long after the terrible events of that night, I find myself trembling with that apprehension and fear which seize hold of a man who comes for the first time face to face with the vast unknown and knows how puny and meaningless he is against that cosmic immensity. I knew in that moment that what I had read in that forbidden book at the Miskatonic Library was not a farrago of superstition, but the key to a hitherto unsuspected revelation perhaps far, far older than mankind in the universe. I did not dare to think of what Wizard Potter had called down from the sky.

  I hardly heard Professor Keane’s words as he urged me to discard my emotional reaction and think of what had happened in scientific, more clinical fashion. After all, I had now accomplished my objective—Andrew Potter was saved. But to insure it, he must be made free of the others, who would surely follow him and find him. I thought only of what waiting horror that quartet of country people from Michigan had walked into when they came to take up possession of the solitary farm in Witches’ Hollow.

  I drove blindly back to school. There, at Professor Keane’s behest, I put on the lights and sat with the door open to the warm night, while he concealed himself behind the building to wait upon their coming. I had to steel myself in order to blank out my mind and take up that vigil.

  On the edge of night, the girl came . . .

  And after she had undergone the same experience as her brother, and lay beside the desk, the star-shaped stone on her breast, their father showed up in the doorway. All was darkness now, and he carried a gun. He had no need to ask what had happened; he knew. He stood wordless, pointed to his daughter and the stone on her breast, and raised his gun. His inference was plain—if I did not remove the stone, he meant to shoot. Evidently this was the contingency the professor expected, for he came upon Potter from the rear and touched him with the stone.

  Afterward we waited for two hours—in vain, for Mrs. Potter.

  “She isn’t coming,” said Professor Keane at last. “She harbors the seat of its intelligence—I had thought it would be the man. Very well—we have no choice—we must go to Witches’ Hollow. These two can be left here.”

  We drove through the darkness, making no attempt at secrecy, for the professor said the “thing” in the house in the Hollow “knew” we were coming but could not reach us past the talisman of the stone. We went through that close pressing forest, down the narrow lane where the queer undergrowth seemed to reach out toward us in the glow of the headlights, into the Potter yard.

  The house stood dark save for a wan glow of
lamplight in one room.

  Professor Keane leaped from the car with his little bag of star-shaped stones, and went around sealing the house—with a stone at each of the two doors, and one at each of the windows, through one of which we could see the woman sitting at the kitchen table—stolid, watchful, aware, no longer dissembling, looking unlike that tittering woman I had seen in this house not long ago, but rather like some great sentient beast at bay.

  When he had finished, my companion went around to the front, and, by means of brush collected from the yard and piled against the door, set fire to the house, heedless of my protests.

  Then he went back to the window to watch the woman, explaining that only fire could destroy the elemental force, but that he hoped, still, to save Mrs. Potter. “Perhaps you’d better not watch, Williams.”

  I did not heed him. Would that I had—and so spared myself the dreams that invade my sleep even yet! I stood at the window behind him and watched what went on in that room—for the smell of smoke was now permeating the house.

  Mrs. Potter—or what animated her gross body—started up, went awkwardly to the back door, retreated, to the window, retreated from it, and came back to the center of the room, between the table and the wood stove, not yet fired against the coming cold. There she fell to the floor, heaving and writhing.

  The room filled slowly with smoke, hazing about the yellow lamp, making the room indistinct—but not indistinct enough to conceal completely what went on in the course of that terrible struggle on the floor, where Mrs. Potter threshed about as if in mortal convulsion and slowly, half visibly, something other took shape—an incredible amorphous mass, only half glimpsed in the smoke, tentacled, shimmering, with a cold intelligence and a physical coldness that I could feel through the window. The thing rose like a cloud above the now motionless body of Mrs. Potter, and then fell upon the stove and drained into it like vapor!