It haunts my dreams even now.
THE LURKER AT THE THRESHOLD
published as a book by August Derleth, Arkham House, 1945
I. Billington’s Wood
NORTH OF ARKHAM the hills rise dark, wild and wooded, and much overgrown, an area through which the Miskatonic flows seaward, almost at one boundary of the wooded tract. Travellers in this region are seldom impelled to go beyond the outskirts of the wood, though a faint track leads into it and presumably goes through to the hills, and beyond the hills, to the Miskatonic, and beyond that into open country once more. What deserted houses have been left by the ravages of time bear a surprisingly uniform aspect of weatherbeaten squalor, and, while the wooded region itself shows signs of singular vitality, there seems to be little evidence of fertility in the country around. Indeed, a traveller on the Aylesbury Pike, which opens from River Street in Arkham, and proceeds in leisurely fashion west and northwest of the ancient, gambrel-roofed town toward the strange, lonely Dunwich country beyond Dean’s Corners, cannot help but be impressed with the remarkable degree of what, at first glance, might seem reforestation in that region, but which, on closer examination, proves to be not new growth, but ancient, hardy trees flourishing, it seems, centuries after time should have taken its toll of them.
Arkham people have forgotten almost all about it; there were legends, dark and vague, which their granddames brooded about at the fireside, some of them harking back to the time of the witchcraft fever; but, like so many similar tales, their tenuousness eventually slipped completely away, and nothing was left to be said but that the wood was “Billington’s Wood,” and the hills were “Mr. Billington’s,” and all that property around, including the great house which could not be seen but was nonetheless there, deep in that wood, on a pleasant knoll, it was said, “near the tower and the circle of stones.” The gnarled, old trees invited none of the curious, the dark wood beckoned no traveller, not even the horde of scavengers in search of antiquities of customs, legends, and household appurtenances, who might conceivably have been drawn to the old Billington house. The wood was shunned; the casual traveller hastened by, urged on by a curious dislike for which he had no explanation, by his fancies and his imagination, which left him no regrets and brought him safely home again, whether he came from Arkham or Boston or from the lost hamlets of the Massachusetts countryside.
“Old Billington” was remembered, drawn from the memory of ancients long dead in Arkham. Alijah Billington had been his name, and his station that of a country squire in the early nineteenth century. He had come to live in that house which had been his grandfather’s and his great-grandfather’s before him; and in his old age he had departed for his ancestral shores, the country south of London, in England. Thenceforth nothing was heard of him, though the taxes were duly paid by a firm of solicitors, whose address in Middle Temple Lane lent dignity to the legend of Old Billington. The decades duly passed; presumably Alijah Billington was gathered to his ancestors, and his solicitors likewise; equally certain was it that Alijah’s son Laban reached his majority and the sons of his father’s solicitors repeated the natural pattern; for, though the decades passed, the required fees to satisfy the annual tax-assessment made against the deserted property were duly deposited through a New York bank, and the property continued to bear the name of Billington, though, somewhere about the turn of the twentieth century, there was to be heard a tale that the last of the Billington men, who would have been Laban’s son, no doubt, had left no male issue, and the line had been continued by his daughter, whose name was not known, save as a “Mrs. Dewart,” but this casual of gossip was of no interest to the natives of Arkham and was soon forgotten, for what was a Mrs. Dewart whom they had never seen to them against the receding memory of Old Billington and his “noises”?
This was the thing remembered of Old Billington, and it was especially remembered by the descendants of a few old armigerous families who made a practise of accounting for the local gentry through the generations, if possible.
But so effective had been the inroads of time that no specific story survived; it was said only that noises had been heard often at dusk and in the night among the wooded hills where Billington lived, but it was not clear whether Alijah himself was responsible for them, or whether they had some other source. In plain fact, Alijah Billington would have been totally forgotten if it had not been for the forbidden wood and the wilderness of that lush growth, and for the hidden marshland deep in the heart of the wood near the house, from which arose in the spring nights such a piping and croaking of frogs as was heard nowhere else within a radius of a hundred miles of Arkham, and from which in the summer came an almost unnatural glow which flickered and danced on the low-hung clouds on nights of louring weather, coming, it was generally agreed, from the hordes of fireflies which had occupied that place, together with the frogs, and sundry other creatures and insects for unbroken time. The noises had ceased with Alijah Billington’s departure, but the piping of the frogs continued, and the glowing of the fireflies was not diminished, nor, of summer nights, was the chorus of the whippoorwills lessened to any degree.
After so many years of desertion, the news that the great old house would be opened, which came out one day in March, 1921, was a matter of increasing curiosity and interest to the dwellers of the country around. There appeared in the columns of the Arkham Advertiser a brief and succinct notice stating that Mr. Ambrose Dewart desired assistance in repairing and refurbishing the “Billington House,” and that application might be made to him in person at his room in the Hotel Miskatonic, which was actually a kind of dormitory used in connection with and on the grounds of Miskatonic University, overlooking the Quadrangle.
Mr. Ambrose Dewart turned out to be a hawk-faced man of medium height, chiefly distinguished for a flare of red hair which gave him a tonsured appearance, keen of eye and tight of lip, exceedingly correct and possessed of a dry sort of humor which made a favorable impression on those laboring men whom he hired.
Before another day had dawned, it was known in Arkham that Ambrose Dewart was indeed the lineal descendant of Alijah Billington; that he had made a pilgrimage to the shores of the country his ancestors had adopted as their own for three generations or more, and now meant to return. He was a man of some fifty years of age, brown-skinned, who had lost his only son in the great war, and, having no other issue, he had turned toward America as the haven in which he desired to spend the rest of his days. He had come into Massachusetts a fortnight ago to examine his property; what he had found there evidently satisfied him, for he had made plans to restore the old house to all its former glory, though he soon learned that for the time being he would need to abate his desire for certain aspects of modernity he had sought, such as electricity, for the nearest line ran several miles away, and there were mechanical difficulties to be overcome before electricity could be installed. But, for the rest of his plans, there was no reason to delay, and all that spring the work went forward, the house was restored, a road was put through to it, and beyond it to the far side of the wood, and in the summer, Mr. Ambrose Dewart formally took possession, abandoning his lodgings in Arkham, and his laboring-men were dismissed with a handsome bonus, to return to their native places filled with awe and wonder about the appointments of Old Billington’s house and its resemblance to the Craigie House of Cambridge, long occupied by the poet, Longfellow, about the fine old staircase with its impressive carvings, and the study that was fully two storeys in height and had in one wall a great window of many-coloured glass, which looked out upon the west, about the library, which had been untouched by human hands for all those years, and about the various appurtenances which Mr. Dewart had pronounced of great value for anyone who took his simple pleasure in old things.
Soon there was talk of this and of that, and presently there was a conscious excavation for specific memories of Old Billington, who, it was said, was not unlike his descendant in appearance. In the course of the speculation which grew, t
here came from the country around Dunwich once more the tale of the “noises”
which Old Billington had brought about, and sundry other tales of somewhat sinister complexion began to be whispered about, though none could point to their source, save only that they had come from that portion of the Dunwich country where the Whateleys and the Bishops and a last few of the armigerous families lived in various degrees of decay and dissolution. Because the Whateleys and the Bishops, too, had lived in that region of Massachusetts for many generations, and were indeed contemporaneous in their ancestry with not only Old Billington but with the very first Billington—he who had built that great house with the “rose window,” as they called it, though it was not that; and it was presumed that the tales they told had come down through the generations gone by, and were at least akin to truth if not exactly factual, so that there was immediately a revival of interest in Billington’s Wood and in Mr. Dewart himself.
Ambrose Dewart, however, was happily unaware of the speculation and gossip his strange coming had aroused. He was of a solitary nature, and revelled in the solitude in which he now found himself; his primary determination was to inform himself as completely as possible of the advantages of his property, and to that end he bent himself assiduously, though, if the truth must be told, he hardly knew where to begin. His mother had told him nothing at all about his property, save that the family owned “some property” in the “Commonwealth of Massachusetts,” which it would be “wise” not to sell, but to keep in the family always, even to the extent that if something should happen to him and/or to his son, it should go to his Boston cousin, Stephen Bates, whom he had never seen.
Indeed, there had been left for him only a puzzling set of instructions, which had evidently come down to him from that Alijah Billington who had left this property behind him when he set forth for England, a series of directives for which Ambrose Dewart could not account at all, quite possibly because he was not yet familiar enough with his property to do so.
He was adjured, for instance, “not to cause the water to cease flowing about the island,” nor to “molest the tower,” nor to “entreat of the stones,” nor to “open the door which leads to strange time and place,” nor yet to “touch upon the window seeking to change it.” These instructions meant nothing to Dewart, though they fascinated him, and, once having read them, he could not get them out of his mind; they kept returning to him and running through his thoughts like a rune, and thus insidiously goaded him to poke and putter about through the house and the wood, among the hills and the marshland area, so that in time he discovered that the house was not the only building on the property he owned, but that it held also a very old stone tower, which rose upon what seemed at one time to have been a little island in the midst of a stream which had once rushed down from the hills as a tributary to the Miskatonic, but which had long since gone dry in all but the spring months.
He discovered this late one afternoon in August, and was immediately convinced that it was to this tower that his ancestor’s instructions related.
Therefore he examined it with close attention, and found it to be a cylindrical tower of stone with a conical roof, the whole being perhaps twelve feet in diameter and some twenty feet high. There had apparently been at one time a great arched opening, which suggested that the tower had originally been roofless, but this had been sealed up with masonry. Dewart, who was not ill-informed on architectural matters, was much taken up with this structure, for it required no skilled eye to ascertain that its stones were indeed very ancient, more so, it seemed, than the house itself. He had with him a small magnifying glass with which he had been studying certain very old Latin texts in the library of the house, and with this he scrutinized the stone masonry and discovered that it was dressed, and showed an odd and unknown technique, which involved the use of what appeared to be geometrical designs similar to those which had been scratched in larger drawings upon the stones which had been utilized to seal up the archway. Of singular fascination, also, was the tower’s base, which was of remarkable thickness, and gave the appearance of being fixed in the earth at a great depth; but this, Dewart reasoned, might very possibly be because the ground level had risen in the interval since last Alijah Billington had looked upon it.
Had Alijah then built it? It seemed, at least in part, of greater age, and since this was so, by whose hands had it been erected? The problem intrigued Dewart, and, since he had already been made aware of many old papers among the volumes of his ancestor’s library, he dared to hope that some reference to the tower would be found therein, and to the end of examining them, he finally turned back toward the house, though not, however, before he had stood off at a little distance and scrutinized the tower, seeing then for the first time that it rose in what must at one time have been a circle of stones, which to his delight he identified as similar in many ways to the Druidic remains at Stonehenge. Water had clearly once flowed on both sides of the little island, and evidently in some quantity, for the marks of erosion were not yet worn away, despite the encroachment of the thick undergrowth, and the inevitable excoriation of countless rains and winds which found no barrier to keep them away, as had the somewhat superstitious natives.
Dewart made haste slowly. It was dusk when he arrived back at the house, owing in large part to the necessity of skirting the marshy area, which lay between the site of the tower and the knoll upon which the house stood. He prepared himself a repast, and while he ate it, he considered how best he might embark upon that investigation upon which he had now fixed his course. The papers left in the study were for the most part very old; it would be impossible to read some of them, for they would crumble to nothing. Fortunately, however, some scattered sheets were of parchment, and thus possible to handle without fear of destruction, and there was also a small, leather-bound book inscribed in a childish hand, “Laban B.,” which must presumably be the son of that Alijah who had departed this land for England more than a century ago. After due thought, Dewart determined to begin with the child’s daybook, for such it proved to be.
He read by lamplight, the problem of electricity having been engulfed in a morass of officialdom in some remote corner of the Commonwealth, from which it was promised that a workable solution would eventually emerge. The lamplight, together with the yellow glowing from the hearth—for he had lit a fire there, the night being somewhat cool—gave the study a comfortable feeling of intimacy, and Dewart was soon lost in the past as it rose out of the scrawl on the yellowed pages before him. The child, Laban, who was, Dewart determined, his own great-grandfather, was evidently precocious, for his age at the beginning of the book was given as nine, and at the end, as Dewart ascertained by turning there, as eleven; and he had clearly a good eye for detail, insofar that his chroniclings were not solely devoted to the happenings of the household.
It was soon manifest that the boy was motherless, and that his only companion appeared to be an Indian, a Narragansett, who was in Alijah Billington’s service. His name was given alternately as Quamus or Quamis, the boy apparently not being certain which it was, and he was evidently closer to Alijah’s age than to the boy’s, for the attitude of respect which was manifest in Laban’s large-lettered chroniclings was not of proportion to what it would have been if his companion were of his own age. The daybook began with a recital of the boy’s routine, but, once having set his routine down, the boy did not afterward refer to it except as something accomplished. Instead, he devoted his writing to accounts of what had been done by him in the few hours of the afternoon during which he was free of his studies, and might roam as he pleased in the house, or, provided that he was companioned by the Indian, in the woods, though he set down that he had been discouraged from wandering far from the house.
The Indian was obviously either very silent and uncommunicative, or he was loquacious in repeating to the boy some of the legends of his tribe; the boy, being imaginative, took pleasure in his company no matter what the Indian’s mood, and occasionally put d
own in his daybook something of the narratives told him by his companion, who, it became plain from the account as it progressed, also did some kind of work for Alijah, “after the hour at which the supper is served.”
Along about the middle of the daybook, an hiatus occurred; several pages had been torn out and not replaced, so that there was a period for which there was no accounting in Laban’s handwriting. Immediately thereafter occurred an entry under date of March seventeenth (the year not given), which Dewart read with mounting interest and speculation, since the absence of the preceding pages emphasized the suggestiveness of the account.
“Today, following the hour of last study, we went out into the snowfall, and Quamis went around the marsh, leaving me to wait for him on a fallen bole, which I did not much like and as a result, I concluded it would be as good if not better to follow him; so I set forth upon the trail he left in the new-fallen snow, which descended last night, and presently came upon him once more where Father has forbidden us to go, on the banks of the stream across from that place where the tower rises. He was on his knees and had his arms raised up, and he was saying in a loud voice words in his language which I could not understand, having been taught too little of it, but that had the sound of Narlato, or Narlotep. I was about to call out to him, when he saw. me, and, immediately getting up to his feet, he came to where I was and took me by the hand and led me away from that place; whereupon I inquired of him whether he prayed, or what he had done, and why he did not pray in that chapel built by the men of the white race who were missionaries among his people; but he did not answer, save only to say to me that I must not tell my father where we had been, lest he, Quamis, be punished for having gone to that place against the orders of his employer. But the place being barren among the rocks and inaccessible for the waters around it, holds for me no attraction, whatever it is that Quamis finds to draw him thither against my father’s wishes.”
The Lurker at the Threshold: Posthumous Collaborations Page 30