I drew back, recalling only too sharply what I had seen in that house.
But my role now could not be a passive one. I had to know whether Rose was in that darkened house—perhaps in that very room with the unknown machinery and the glass case with the monster in the violet radiance.
I slipped back to the front of the house and mounted the steps to the front door.
Once again, the door was not locked. It yielded to the pressure of my hands.
Pausing only long enough to take my loaded weapon in hand, I pushed open the door and entered the vestibule. I stood for a moment to accustom my eyes to that darkness; standing there, I was even more aware of the humming sound I had heard—and of more—the same kind of chant which had put me into that hypnotic state in the course of which I had witnessed that disturbing vision purporting to be that of life in another world.
I apprehended its meaning instantly, I thought. Rose must be with Mr. Allan and his brothers, undergoing a similar experience.
Would that it had been no more!
For when I pushed my way into that large room on the far side of the house, I saw that which will be forever indelibly imprinted on my mind. Lit by the radiance from the glass case, the room disclosed Mr. Allan and his identical brothers all prone upon the floor around the twin cases, making their chanting song. Beyond them, against the far wall, lay the discarded life-size likeness of Poe I had seen beneath that weird creature in the glass case bathed in violet radiance. But it was not Mr. Allan and his brothers that so profoundly shocked and repelled me—it was what I saw in the glass cases!
For in the one that lit the room with its violently pulsating and agitated violet radiation lay Rose Dexter, fully clothed, and certainly under hypnosis—and on top of her lay, greatly elongated and with its tentacles flailing madly, the rugose cone-like figure I had last seen shrunken on the likeness of Poe. And in the connected case adjacent to it—I can hardly bear to set it down even now—lay, identical in every detail, a perfect duplicate of Rose!
What happened next is confused in my memory. I know that I lost control, that I fired blindly at the glass cases, intending to shatter them. Certainly I struck one or both of them, for with the impact the radiance vanished, the room was plunged into utter darkness, cries of fear and alarm rose from Mr. Allan and his brothers, and, amid a succession of explosive sounds from the machinery, I rushed forward and picked up Rose Dexter.
Somehow I gained the street with Rose.
Looking back, I saw that flames were appearing at the windows of that accursed house, and then, without warning, the north wall of the house collapsed, and something—an object I could not identify—burst from the now burning house and vanished aloft. I fled, still carrying Rose.
Regaining her senses, Rose was hysterical, but I succeeded in calming her, and at last she fell silent and would say nothing. And in silence I took her safely home, knowing how frightening her experience must have been, and resolved to say nothing until she had fully recovered.
*
In the week that followed, I came to see clearly what was taking place in that house on the knoll. But the charge of arson—lodged against me in lieu of a far more serious one because of the pistol I abandoned in the burning house—has blinded the police to anything but the most mundane matters. I have tried to tell them, insisting that they see Rose Dexter when she is well enough to talk—and willing to do so. I cannot make them understand what I now understand only too well. Yet the facts are there, inescapably.
They say the charred flesh found in that house is not human, most of it. But could they have expected anything else? Seven men in the likeness of Edgar Allan Poe! Surely they must understand that whatever it was in that house came from another world, a dying world, and sought to invade and ultimately take over Earth by reproducing themselves in the shape of men! Surely they must know that it must have been only by coincidence that the model they first chose was a likeness of Poe, chosen because they had no knowledge that Poe did not represent the average among men? Surely they must know, as I came to know, that the rugose, tentacled cone in the violet radiance was the source of their material selves, that the machinery and the tubing—which they say was too much damaged by the fire to identify, as if they could have identified its functions even undamaged!—manufactured from the material simulating flesh supplied by the cone in the violet light, creatures in the shape of men from the likeness of Poe!
“Mr. Allan” himself afforded me the key, though I did not know it at the time, when I asked him why mankind was the object of interplanetary scrutiny—“To make war on us? To invade us?”—and he replied: “A more highly developed form of life would hardly need to use such primitive methods.” Could anything more plainly set forth the explanation for the strange occupation of the house along the Seekonk? Of course, it is evident now that what “Mr. Allan” and his identical brothers afforded me in my own house was a glimpse of life on the planet of the cubes and rugose cones, which was their own.
And surely, finally, most damning of all—it must be evident to any unbiased observer why they wanted Rose. They meant to reproduce their kind in the guise of men and women, so that they could mingle with us, undetected, unsuspected, and slowly, over decades—perhaps centuries, while their world died,—take over and prepare our Earth for those who would come after.
God alone knows how many of them may be here, among us, even now!
Later, I have been unable to see Rose until now, tonight, and I am hesitant to call for her. For something unutterably terrible has happened to me. I have fallen prey to horrible doubts. While it did not occur to me during that frightful experience in the shambles following my shots in that violet-lit room, I have now begun to wonder, and my concern has grown hour by hour until I find it now almost unbearable. How can I be sure that, in those frenzied minutes, I rescued the real Rose Dexter? If I did, surely she will reassure me tonight. If I did not—God knows what I may unwittingly have loosed upon Providence and the world!
*
From The Providence Journal—July 17
LOCAL GIRL SLAYS ATTACKER
Rose Dexter, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Elisha Dexter of 127
Benevolent Street, last night fought off and killed a young man she
charged with attacking her. Miss Dexter was apprehended in an
hysterical condition as she fled down Benefit Street in the vicinity of the
Cathedral of St. John, near the cemetery attached to which the attack took place.
Her attacker was identified as an acquaintance, Arthur Phillips . . .
THE HORROR FROM THE MIDDLE SPAN
first published in Travellers by Night, August Derleth, Arkham House, 1967
I
The Bishop Manuscript was found by authorities investigating the disappearance of Ambrose Bishop. It was enclosed in a bottle evidently thrown wide into the woods at the rear of the burning house. It is still being held in the office of the sheriff in Arkham, Massachusetts.
IT WAS ON my seventh day out of London that I reached the place in America to which my ancestors had come from England over two centuries before. It lay in the heart of wild, lonely country above Dunwich, Massachusetts, along the upper reaches of the Miskatonic River, and well away here even from the brier-bordered stone walls that line so much of the road away from the Aylesbury Pike—a country of great old trees, pressed darkly together, many brambles, and here and there—though rarely seen for the underbrush grown up about them—the ruins of a dwelling abandoned long ago. I might easily have missed the place, for the lane leading to the house—now totally concealed by trees and bushes—was long overgrown, but the remains of a stone pillar next to the road still bore the last four letters of Bishop, and thus I knew I had reached my goal, from which my great-uncle Septimus Bishop had vanished in his middle years, almost two decades before. I fought my way up the lane, through brier and bramble, over fallen limbs of the trees that lined it, up the slope for half a mile.
The house
stood on the side of a hill—squat, though it was of two storeys, and hybrid in construction, being partly of stone, and partly of wood that had once, long ago, been painted white, but had now lost all but traces of its original color and had long since reverted to its natural state. I observed its most unusual aspect at once— unlike the other houses I had espied along the road wholly or partly in ruins, it stood intact, stone upon stone, and not a window-pane broken, though the weather had had its way with the wood of its superstructure, particularly the circular cupola that crowned it, in which I could detect several apertures surrounded by what was clearly rotten wood.
The door stood ajar, but the pillared verandah opening outward from it had protected the interior from the worst of the weather. Moreover, though dust lay thickly inside, it was quickly apparent that nothing had disturbed the interior— no vandal had laid hands upon so much as a stick of furniture, nor disturbed the still open book on the desk in the study, though mildew was everywhere, and the house smelled of damp and mustiness, which perhaps no amount of airing out would dissipate, and no intensiveness in cleaning would entirely eradicate.
Nevertheless, I undertook to try, a decision that made necessary a return journey to Dunwich; so I made my way back to the main road—though that road was little more than a rutted lane—where I had left the car I had rented in New York, and drove back to Dunwich, a squalid hamlet crouched between the dark waters of the Miskatonic and the brooding mass of Round Mountain, which seemed eternally to shadow the village. There I went to the only general store the settlement offered, one that occupied an abandoned church and boasted the proprietorship of one Tobias Whateley.
Though I had had some experience with the rustics of remote comers of the earth, I was hardly prepared for my reception by the bearded, gaunt-faced old man who advanced to wait upon me, and who produced almost all the articles I wanted without a word, until I had finished and paid him.
Then he looked me full in the face for the first time. “Ye’ll be a stranger here?”
“I—yes,” I said. “Come from England. But I once had relatives here. Name of Bishop.”
“Bishop,” he said in a voice that had fallen to a whisper. “Yew said ‘Bishop’?” Then, as if to reassure himself of something beyond my knowledge, he added in a stronger voice, “There be Bishops still hereabouts. Yew’ll likely belong to them?”
“Not likely,” I said. “My uncle was Septimus Bishop.”
At mention of the name, Whateley went a shade paler than his normal pallor.
Then he made a move to sweep the articles I had bought back from the counter.
“No, you don’t,” I said. “I paid you for these things.”
“Ye kin have ye’re money back,” he said. “I don’t want truck with any kin o’ Septimus Bishop’s.”
I had little trouble taking from him the articles I had bought for he had no strength in his lean arms. He backed away from the counter and stood over against the shelves behind.
“Ye’ll not be goin’ to that house?” he asked, again in a whisper, and with some alarm manifest on his old face.
“There’s nobody to stop me,” I said.
“Ain’t nobody from Dunwich’d set foot on that ground—let alone the house,” he said fervently.
“Why?” I demanded.
“Don’t yew know?” he asked.
“If I did, I wouldn’t ask. All I know is that my great-uncle disappeared from his home nineteen years ago, and I’m here to lay claim to his property.
Wherever he is, he must be dead by now.”
“He was dead then,” said the proprietor, again in little more than a whisper.
“Kilt.”
“Who killed him?”
“The people. Them as lived all around. Him and his.”
“My great-uncle lived alone.”
I had begun to tire of this yokel’s fears and superstitions, and at his manifest lack of knowledge about Great-uncle Septimus, I felt justified in concluding that his attitude represented the typical response of the illiterate and ignorant to knowledge and education, such as my great-uncle Septimus had possessed.
Whateley had begun to mumble “. . . In the night . . . buried him and that other alive . . . cursed ’em . . . an’ their houses fell an’ they died one after t’ other . . .”
On this disagreeable note I left the store, determined to do any further shopping I needed to do in Arkham. Yet the aged proprietor’s words had stirred sufficient doubt to impel me forthwith to drive to Arkham, there to consult the files of the Arkham Advertiser—an impulse that was but ill-rewarded, for the entire month of June carried but two stories date-lined Dunwich—the one concerning Septimus—
“Nothing has been heard of Septimus Bishop, who apparently vanished from his home in the country above Dunwich ten days ago. Mr. Bishop was a recluse and a bachelor, to whom the folk of Dunwich were in the habit of ascribing many superstitious abilities, calling him at various times, a ‘healer’ and a ‘warlock.’ Mr. Bishop was a tall, spare man, aged about 57 at the time of his disappearance.”
—and the other an amusing account of the strengthening of one of the piers, that supported the middle span of a disused bridge over the Miskatonic above Dunwich, evidently by private initiative, since the county in charge stoutly denied—refuting the voluble criticism directed at it for repairing a bridge no longer in use—having had anything to do with it.
Nevertheless, I reflected on my return drive toward and beyond Dunwich that the superstitions of the natives doubtless accounted for the attitude of Tobias Whateley, who only reflected the general beliefs, however laughable they might be to someone decently educated in this scientific age, when all such ridiculous concepts as healing by the laying on of hands or any other method and of witchcraft were known to be but the product of ignorance. My great-uncle Septimus had been educated at Harvard, and was known to the English branch of the Bishop family as a bookish man, profoundly inimical to any form of superstition, surely. It was dusk when I returned to the old Bishop place. My great-uncle had evidently never laid in electricity or gas, but there were both candles and kerosene lamps—some of the latter still containing kerosene. I lit one of the lamps and made myself a frugal meal, after which I cleared a place in the study where I could lie down without too much discomfort, and readily fell asleep.
II
In the morning I set about tidying up the place, though there was little that could be done about the mildewed books in my great-uncle’s library, other than to get a roaring fire going in the fireplace—for all that it was midsummer and there was no lack of warmth—and so drying out this area of the house.
In time I had dusted and swept the lower floor—which consisted of the study, a bedroom adjacent, a small kitchen, a pantry, and a room that was obviously intended as a dining-room but clearly used for more, for mounds of books and papers indicated some kind of storage. I mounted to the second storey, but before beginning work there, I continued to the cupola, by way of a narrow stairs which permitted only one person at a time to move along it.
The cupola proved to be somewhat larger than I had thought it, with ample room for a man to stand and move about without impediment. It had patently been used for astronomical observation, for there was a telescope there, and the floor, for some reason I could not fathom, was covered with all manner of designs, in which circles, pentacles, and stars predominated, and there were, quaintly, in addition to texts on astronomy, some on astrology and divination, all quite old, one dating to 1623, some of them in German, but the majority in Latin, which certainly were the property of my great-uncle, though I could not conceive of any use to which he could put them. There was, in addition to a sky-light on the north, an opening through which the telescope could be thrust, once its covering was removed.
This cupola was surprisingly free of dust and lint, for all that there were openings in its wall, where some of the wood had rotted away, as I had observed on my approach to the house; at these openings there was so
me manifest water damage from rain and snow, but none of this was beyond repair, and it seemed to me—if I did ultimately conclude to make my home here for even a short time—that such repair could be accomplished with but comparatively little cost.
I had yet, however, to ascertain the condition of the foundation of the house; and, leaving the second storey—which consisted, I saw in a brief examination, of but two bedrooms, two closets, and a storeroom, only one bedroom being furnished and looking as if it had never been put to the use for which it was intended—I descended again to the ground floor and made my way to the cellar below through the door that opened to it off the kitchen.
Somewhat to my surprise I saw by the light of the lamp I carried that the floor of the cellar, which extended to only about half of the area covered by the house, was of laid brick, while the walls were of limestone all of a foot and a half thick, as the window embrasures showed. I had expected a floor of earth, as was commonly to be found in the cellars of old houses; but on closer examination, I concluded that the brick had been laid considerably after the building of the house, quite probably by my great-uncle Septimus.
In this floor, at opposite corners, there were two square trapdoors with large iron rings in them, the one, I judged by the evidence of a drainage pipe leading from the side of the wall to it, and the presence of a pump rising out of it, to cover a cistern. The other, however, gave no indication of its purpose, though I assumed that it might cover a fruit or root cellar, and went over confidently to lift it and prove my assumption correct.
Much to my astonishment, however, there was disclosed a succession of brick steps leading downward—certainly not, as the rays of the lamp revealed when I thrust it into the stairwell—any kind of cellar, but rather a passageway of some sort, into which I promptly climbed to find myself in a tunnel leading away from the house and, as nearly as I could determine, into the hill and away from the house along the slope to the northwest. I walked, crouching, a little way along this tunnel, following a turn, and then hesitated, unsure of the tunnel’s purpose.
The Lurker at the Threshold: Posthumous Collaborations Page 26