The Lurker at the Threshold: Posthumous Collaborations

by August Derleth

  “Well, that one is the oddest fellow we’ve met in all the while we’ve walked out,” I said.

  Her hand tightened on my arm. “Arthur, didn't you feel something—something wrong about him?”

  “Oh, I suppose there is something ‘wrong’ in that sense about all of us who are haunters of the dark,” I said. “Perhaps, in a way, we prefer to make our own reality.”

  But even as I answered her, I was aware of her meaning, and there was no need of the explanation she tried so earnestly to make in the spate of words that followed—there was something wrong in the sense that there was about Mr. Allan a profound note of error. It lay, now that I faced and accepted it, in a number of trivial things, but particularly in the lack of expressiveness in his features; his speech, limited though it had been, was without modulation, almost mechanical; he had not smiled, nor had he been given to any variation in facial expression whatsoever; he had spoken with a precision that suggested an icy detachment and aloofness foreign to most men. Even the manifest interest he showed in Rose was far more clinical than anything else. At the same time that my curiosity was quickened, a note of apprehension began to make itself manifest, as a result of which I turned our conversation into other channels and presently walked Rose to her home.

  II

  I suppose it was inevitable that I should meet Mr. Allan again, and but two nights later, this time not far from my own door. Perhaps it was absurd to think so, but I could not escape the impression that he was waiting for me, that he was as anxious to encounter me again as I was to meet him.

  I greeted him jovially, as a fellow haunter of the night, and took quick notice of the fact that, though his voice simulated my own joviality, there was not a flicker of emotion on his face; it remained completely placid—“wooden,” in the words of the romantic writers, not the hint of a smile touched his lips, not a glint shone in his dark eyes. And now that I had had it called to my attention, I saw that the resemblance to Poe was remarkable, so much so, that had Mr. Allan put forth any reasonable claim to being a descendant of Poe’s, I could have been persuaded to belief.

  It was, I thought, a curious coincidence, but hardly more, and Mr. Allan on this occasion made no mention of Poe or anything relating to him in Providence.

  He seemed, it was soon evident, more intent on listening to me; he was as singularly uncommunicative as he had been at our first meeting, and in an odd way his manner was precisely the same—as if we had not actually met before.

  But perhaps it was that he simply sought some common ground, for, once I mentioned that I contributed a weekly column on astronomy to the Providence Journal, he began to take part in our conversation; what had been for several blocks virtually a monologue on my part, became a dialogue.

  It was immediately apparent to me that Mr. Allan was not a novice in astronomical matters. Anxious as he seemed to be for my views, he entertained some distinctly different views of his own, some of them highly debatable. He lost no time in setting forth his opinion that not only was interplanetary travel possible, but that countless stars—not alone some of the planets in our own solar system—were inhabited.

  “By human beings?” I asked incredulously.

  “Need it be?” he replied. “Life is unique—not man. Even here on this planet life takes many forms.”

  I asked him then whether he had read the works of Charles Fort.

  He had not. He knew nothing of him, and, at his request, I outlined some of Fort’s theories, together with the facts Fort had adduced in support of those theories. I saw that from time to time, as we walked along, my companion’s head moved in a curt nod, though his unemotional face betrayed no expression; it was as if he agreed. And on one occasion, he broke into words.

  “Yes, it is so. What he says is so.”

  I had at the moment been speaking of the sighting of unidentified flying objects near Japan during the latter half of the nineteenth century.

  “How can you say so?” I cried.

  He launched at once into a lengthy statement, the gist of which was that every advanced scientist in the domain of astronomy was convinced that earth was not unique in having life, and that it followed therefore that, just as it could be concluded that some heavenly bodies had lower life forms than our own, so others might well support higher forms, and, accepting that premise, it was perfectly logical that such higher forms had mastered interplanetary travel and might, after decades of observation, be thoroughly familiar with earth and its inhabitants as well as with its sister planets.

  “To what purpose?” I asked. “To make war on us? To invade us?”

  “A more highly developed form of life would hardly need to use such primitive methods,” he pointed out. “They watch us precisely as we watch the moon and listen for radio signals from the planets—we here are still in the earliest stages of interplanetary communication and, beyond that, space travel, whereas other races on remote stars have long since achieved both.”

  “How can you speak with such authority?” I asked then.

  “Because I am convinced of it. Surely you must have come face to face with similar conclusions.”

  I admitted that I had.

  “And you remain open-minded?”

  I admitted this as well.

  “Open-minded enough to examine certain proof if it were offered to you?”

  “Certainly,” I replied, though my skepticism could hardly have gone unnoticed.

  “That is good,” he said. “Because if you will permit my brothers and me to call on you at your home on Angell Street, we may be able to convince you that there is life in space—not in the shape of men, but life, and life possessing a far greater intelligence than that of your most intelligent men.”

  I was amused at the breadth of his claim and belief, but I did not betray it by any sign. His confidence made me to reflect again upon the infinite variety of characters to be found among the nightwalkers of Providence; clearly Mr. Allan was a man who was obsessed by his extraordinary beliefs, and, like most of such men, eager to proselytize, to make converts.

  “Whenever you like,” I said by way of invitation. “Except that I would prefer it to be later rather than early, to give my mother time to get to bed.

  Anything in the way of an experiment might disturb her.”

  “Shall we say next Monday night?”

  “Agreed.”

  My companion thereafter said no more on this subject. Indeed, he said scarcely anything on any subject, and it was left for me to do the talking. I was evidently not very entertaining, for in less than three blocks we came to an alley and there Mr. Allan abruptly bade me good night, after which he turned into the alley and was soon swallowed in its darkness.

  Could his house abut upon it? I wondered. If not, he must inevitably come out the other end. Impulsively I hurried around one end of that block and stationed myself deep in the shadows of the parallel street, where I could remain well hidden from the alley entrance and yet keep it in view.

  Mr. Allan came leisurely out of the alley before I had quite recovered my breath. I expected him to pursue his way through the alley, but he did not; he turned down the street, and, accelerating his pace a little, he proceeded on his way. Impelled by curiosity now, I followed, keeping myself as well hidden as possible. But Mr. Allan never once looked around; he set his face straight ahead of him and never, as far as I could determine, even glanced to left or right; he was clearly bound for a destination that could only be his home, for the hour was past midnight.

  I had little difficulty following my erstwhile companion, for I knew these streets well, I had known them since my childhood. Mr. Allan was bound in the direction of the Seekonk, and he held to his course without deviation until he reached a somewhat rundown section of Providence, where he made his way up a little knoll to a long-deserted house at its crest. He let himself into it and I saw him no more. I waited a while longer, expecting a light to go up in the house, but none did, and I could only conclude that he had gone dir
ectly to bed.

  Fortunately, I had kept myself in the shadows, for Mr. Allan had evidently not gone to bed. Apparently he had gone through the house and around the block, for suddenly I saw him approach the house from the direction we had come, and once more he walked on, past my place of concealment, and made his way into the house, again without turning on a light.

  This time, certainly, he had remained there. I waited for five minutes or a trifle more; then turned and made my way back toward my own home on Angell Street, satisfied that I had done no more in following Mr. Allan than he had evidently done on the night of our initial meeting in following me, for I had long since concluded that our meeting tonight had not been by chance, but by design.

  Many blocks from the Allan house, however, I was startled to see approaching me from the direction of Benefit Street, my erstwhile companion!

  Even as I wondered how he had managed to leave the house again and make his way well around me in order to enable him to come toward me, trying in vain to map the route he could have taken to accomplish this, he came up and passed me by without so much as a flicker of recognition.

  Yet it was he, undeniably—the same Poesque appearance distinguished him from any other nightwalker. Stilling his name on my tongue, I turned and looked after him. He never turned his head, but walked steadily on, clearly bound for the scene I had not long since quitted. I watched him out of sight, still trying—in vain—to map the route he might have taken among the lanes and byways and streets so familiar to me in order to meet me so once more, face to face.

  We had met on Angell Street, walked to Benefit and north, then turned riverward once more. Only by dint of hard running could he have cut around me and come back. And what purpose would he have had to follow such a course?

  It left me utterly baffled, particularly since he had given me not the slightest sign of recognition, his entire mien suggesting that we were perfect strangers!

  But if I was mystified at the occurrences of the night, I was even more puzzled at my meeting with Rose at the Athenaeum the following night. She had clearly been waiting for me, and hastened to my side as soon as she caught sight of me.

  “Have you seen Mr. Allan?” she asked.

  “Only last night,” I answered, and would have gone to recount the circumstances had she not spoken again.

  “So did I! He walked me out from the library and home.”

  I stifled my response and heard her out. Mr. Allan had been waiting for her to come out of the library. He had greeted her and asked whether he might walk with her, after having ascertained that I was not with her. They had walked for an hour with but little conversation, and this only of the most superficial— relative to the antiquities of the city, the architecture of certain houses, and similar matters, just such as one interested in the older aspects of Providence would find of interest—and then he had walked her home. She had, in short, been with Mr. Allan in one part of the city at the same time that I had been with him in another; and clearly neither of us had the slightest doubt of the identity of our companions.

  “I saw him after midnight,” I said, which was part of the truth but not all the truth.

  This extraordinary coincidence must have some logical explanation, though I was not disposed to discuss it with Rose, lest I unduly alarm her. Mr. Allan had spoken of his “brothers”; it was therefore entirely likely that Mr. Allan was one of a pair of identical twins. But what explanation could there be for what was an obvious and designed deception? One of our companions was not, could not have been the same Mr. Allan with whom he we had previously walked. But which? I was satisfied that my companion was identical with Mr. Allan met but two nights before.

  In as casual a manner as I could assume in the circumstances, I asked such questions of Rose as were designed to satisfy me in regard to the identity of her companion, in the anticipation that somewhere in our dialogue she would reveal some doubt of the identity of hers. She betrayed no such doubt; she was innocently convinced that her companion was the same man who had walked with us two nights ago, for he had obviously made references to the earlier nocturnal walk, and Rose was completely convinced that he was the same man.

  She had no reason for doubt, however, for I held my tongue; there was some perplexing mystery here, for the brothers had some obscure reason for interesting themselves in us—certainly other than that they shared our interest in the nightwalkers of the city and the hidden aspects of urban life that appeared only with the dusk and vanished once more into their seclusion with the dawn.

  My companion, however, had made an assignation with me, whereas Rose said nothing to indicate that her companion had planned a further meeting with her. And why had he waited to meet her in the first place? But this line of inquiry was lost before the insistent cognizance that neither of the meetings I had had after leaving my companion at his residence last night could have been Rose’s companion, for Rose lived rather too far from the place of my final meeting last night to have permitted her companion to meet me at the point we met. A disquieting sense of uneasiness began to rise in me. Perhaps there were three Allans—all identical—triplets? Or four? But no, surely the second Mr. Allan encountered on the previous night had been identical with the first, even if the third encounter could not have been the same man.

  No matter how much thought I applied to it, the riddle remained insoluble. I was, therefore, in a challenging frame of mind for my Monday night appointment with Mr. Allan, not but two days away.

  III

  Even so, I was ill-prepared for the visit of Mr. Allan and his brothers on the following Monday night. They came at a quarter past ten o’clock; my mother had just gone upstairs to bed. I had expected, at most, three of them; there were seven—and they were as alike as peas in a pod, so much so that I could not pick from among them the Mr. Allan with whom I had twice walked the nocturnal streets of Providence, though I assumed it was he who was the spokesman for the group.

  They filed into the living room, and Mr. Allan immediately set about arranging chairs in a semi-circle with the help of his brothers, murmuring something about the “nature of the experiment,” though, to tell the truth, I was still much too amazed and disquieted at the appearance of seven identical men, all of whom bore so strong a resemblance to Edgar Allan Poe as to startle the beholder, to assimilate what was being said. Moreover, I saw now by the light of my Welsbach gas-lamp, that all seven of them were of a pallid, waxen complexion, not of such a nature as to give me any doubt of their being flesh and bone like myself, but rather such as to suggest that one and all were afflicted with some kind of disease—anemia, perhaps, or some kindred illness which would leave their faces colourless; and their eyes, which were very dark, seemed to stare fixedly and yet without seeing, though they suffered no lack of perception and seemed to perceive by means of some extra sense not visible to me. The sensation that rose in me was not predominantly one of fear, but one of overwhelming curiosity tinged with a spreading sense of something utterly alien not only to my experience but to my existence.

  Thus far, little had passed between us, but now that the semi-circle had been completed, and my visitors had seated themselves, their spokesman beckoned me forward and indicated a chair placed within the arc of the semi-circle facing the seated men.

  “Will you sit here, Mr. Phillips?” he asked.

  I did as he asked, and found myself the object of all eyes, but not essentially so much their object as their focal point, for the seven men seemed to be looking not so much at me as through me.

  “Our intention, Mr. Phillips,” explained their spokesman—whom I took to be the gentleman I had encountered on Benefit Street—“is to produce for you certain impressions of extra-terrestrial life. All that is necessary for you to do is to relax and to be receptive.”

  “I am ready,” I said.

  I had expected that they would ask for the light to be lowered, which seems to be integral to all such seance-like sessions, but they did not do so. They waited upon s
ilence, save for the ticking of the hall clock and the distant hum of the city, and then they began what I can only describe as singing—a low, not unpleasant, almost lulling humming, increasing in volume, and broken with sounds I assumed were words though I could not make out any of them. The song they sang and the way they sang it was indescribably foreign; the key was minor, and the tonal intervals did not resemble any terrestrial musical system with which I was familiar, though it seemed to me more Oriental than Occidental.

  I had little time to consider the music, however, for I was rapidly overcome with a feeling of profound malaise, the faces of the seven men grew dim and coalesced to merge into one swimming face, and an intolerable consciousness of unrolled aeons of time swept over me. I concluded that some form of hypnosis was responsible for my condition, but I did not have any qualms about it; it did not matter, for the experience I was undergoing was utterly novel and not unpleasant, though there was inherent in it a discordant note, as of some lurking evil looming far behind the relaxing sensations that crowded upon me and swept me before them. Gradually, the lamp, the walls, and the men before me faded and vanished and, though I was still aware of being in my quarters on Angell Street, I was also cognizant that somehow I had been transported to new surroundings, and an element of alarm at the strangeness of these surroundings, together with one of repulsion and alienation began to make themselves manifest. It was as if I feared losing consciousness in an alien place without the means of returning to earth—for it was an extra-terrestrial scene that I witnessed, one of great and magnificent grandeur in its proportions, and yet one completely incomprehensible to me.

  Vast vistas of space whirled before me in an alien dimension, and central in them was an aggregation of gigantic cubes, scattered along a gulf of violet and agitated radiation—and other figures moving among them—enormous, iridescent, rugose cones, rising from a base almost ten feet wide to a height of over ten feet, and composed of ridgy, scaly, semi-elastic matter, and sporting from their apexes four flexible, cylindrical members, each at least a foot thick, and of a similar substance, though more fleshlike, as that of the cones, which were presumably bodies for the crowning members, which, as I watched, had an ability to contract or expand, sometimes to lengthen to a distance equal to the height of the cone to which they adhered. Two of these members were terminated with enormous claws, while a third wore a crest of four red, trumpetlike appendages, and the fourth ended in a great yellow globe two feet in diameter, in the center of which were three enormous eyes, darkly opalescent, which, because of their position in the elastic member, could be turned in any direction whatsoever. It was such a scene as exercised the greatest fascination upon me and yet at the same time spread in me a repellance inspired by its total alienation and the aura of fearful disclosures which alone could give it meaning and a lurking terror. Moreover, as I saw the moving figures, which seemed to be tending the great cubes, with greater clarity and more distinctness, I saw that their strange heads were crowned by four slender grey stalks carrying flowerlike appendages, as well as, from its nether side, eight sinuous, elastic tentacles, moss green in colour, which seemed to be constantly agitated by serpentine motion, expanding and contracting, lengthening and shortening and whipping around as if with life independent of that which animated, more sluggishly, the cones themselves. The whole scene was bathed in a wan, red glow, as from some dying sun which, failing its planet, now took second place to the violet radiation from the gulf. The scene had an indescribable effect on me; it was as if I had been permitted a look into another world, one incredibly vaster than our own, distinguished from our own by antipodally different values and life-forms, and remote from ours in time and space, and as I gazed at this far world, I became aware—as were this intelligence being funnelled into me by some psychic means— that I looked upon a dying race which must escape its planet or perish.