The Lurker at the Threshold: Posthumous Collaborations

by August Derleth

  He opened the door, and immediately an almost nauseating stench assailed him; moreover, the room into which he walked was not only dark because of the day’s darkness, but because the windows were shuttered, and no light burned. It was only by the circumstance that he left the door partly ajar behind him that he made out the form of an old crone hunched over in a rocking chair; her white hair almost shone in the darkness of the room.

  “Set. stranger,” she said.

  “Mrs. Bishop?” he asked.

  She acknowledged that she was Mrs. Bishop, and, a little too eagerly, he launched into the tale of his quest for the descendants of the old Indian families of the region. He had been told that she might have Indian blood.

  “Yew heard right, sir. The blood uv the Narragansetts flows in my veins, an’ afore them, the Wampanaugs, who were more’n Indians.” She chuckled. “Ye hev the look uv a Billington, ye hev.”

  “So I’ve been told,” he said dryly. “That is my stock.”

  “Of a Billington cum a-lookin’ an’ a-peerin’ for Indian blood. Are yew lookin’ fer Quamis, then?”

  “Quamis!” exclaimed Dewart, startled. Immediately he conjectured that somehow the tale of Billington and his servant, Quamis, was known to Mrs. Bishop.

  “Aye, ye start an’ ye jump, Stranger. But yew needn’t tew look fer Quamis because he never cum back, and he ain’t never comin’ back. He went out there, an’ he ain’t never wantin’ tew come back here agin.”

  “What do you know about Alijah Billington?” he asked abruptly.

  “Yew may well ask. I know nothing but what was handed down from my folks. Alijah knew more’n mortal man.” She cackled with muttered laughter.

  “He knew more’n man was made to know. Magick an’ Elder rote. A wise man was Alijah Billington; ye’er uv good blood fer certain things. But ye’ll not do like Alijah did, an’ mind—yew leave the stone an’ keep the door sealed an’ locked so thet them from Outside can’t git back.”

  As the old woman talked, a strange sense of apprehension began insidiously to make itself felt in Ambrose Dewart. The enterprise upon which he had embarked with so much zest, removed now from the pale of old books and newspapers to the realm of the mundane, insofar as anything in this ancient hamlet could be so considered, began to take on an aspect not alone of the sinister, but of nameless evil. The old beldame shrouded in the self-imposed darkness of the room—a darkness which adequately concealed her features from Dewart, yet permitted her to see him and, like the two oldsters in the village, detect his resemblance to Alijah Billington—began to seem daemonic; her cackling laughter was obscene and horrible, a thin sound, like to the chittering of bats; the words she spoke with such a casual manner seemed to Dewart, who was ordinarily unimaginative, fraught with strange and terrible meaning, which, though it was his nature to refute, he found difficulty in viewing prosaically. As he sat listening, he told himself that it was to be expected that queer, other-worldly beliefs and superstitions would be rife in such out-of-the-way places as these Massachusetts hills; yet there was no aura of simple superstition about Mrs.

  Bishop, there was rather a conviction of hidden knowledge, and in addition, a most disturbing sense of secret, almost contemptuous superiority on the part of the old woman.

  “What was it they suspected my great-great-grandfather of?”

  “Yew doan’t know?”

  “Was it sorcery?”

  “Conniving with the Devil?” She tittered again. “It wus’n that. It was suthin’ nobody can tell. But It didn’t get Alijah when It was a-roamin’ the hills an’ a-screamin’ an’ all thet hellish music, too. Alijah called It an’ It came; Alijah sent It an’ It went. It went where It’s awaitin’ an’ a-lurkin’ an’ a-keepin’ Its time this hundred-year for the door tew be set open agin, so It can come out an’ go among the hills agin.”

  The old woman’s oblique references had the sound of a familiar’s description; Dewart knew a smattering of sorcery and demonology. And yet, there was something strangely alien to even this in her talk.

  “Mrs. Bishop, did you ever hear of Misquamacus?”

  “He was the great wise man uv the Wampanaugs. I heard my grandfather tell uv him.”

  So much, then, was at least of legend.

  “And this wise man, Mrs. Bishop . . .”

  “Oh, ye needn’t tew ask. He knew. There was Billingtons in his time, tew, ye know right well. Ain’t no need fer me tew tell. But I’m an old woman; ’twon’t be long I wun’t be on airth much longer; I ain’t afeard tew say it.

  Ye’ll find it in the books.”

  “What books?”

  “The books yere great-great-gran’father read in; ye’ll find it all there.

  They’ll tell ye if ye read ’em right how It answered from the hill an’ how It cum out uv the air, right as if ’twas from the stars. But ye’ll not do as he did; if ye dew, may Him Who Is Not To Be Named hev maircy on ye! It’s awaitin’ up there, It’s awaitin’ outside right naow as if ’twere yesterday It was sent back.

  Ain’t no sich thing as time fer them things. Ain’t no sich thing es space, nuther.

  I’m a pore woman, I’m an old woman, I wun’t be on this airth long any more, but I’m tellin’ ye I see the shadows o’ them things araound ye where ye set right naow, a-hoverin’ an’ a-flutterin’, jest waitin’ an’ waitin’. Dun’t ye go a-callin’ out tew the hills.”

  Dewart listened with growing uneasiness, and with something of that phenomenon known as “crawling flesh.” The old woman herself, the setting, the sound of her voice—all were eerie; despite being enclosed by the walls of this old house, Dewart had an oppressive and foreboding sense of being invaded by the darkness and the brooding mystery of the stone-crowned hills all around; he had a furtive and uncanny conviction of something looking over his shoulder, as if the oldsters from Dunwich had followed him here, and a vast, silent company behind them, and listened to what was being said. Of a sudden, the room seemed alive with presences, and at the instant that Dewart’s imagination so trapped him, the old woman’s voice faded and gave way to a horrible tittering.

  He stood up abruptly.

  Some sense of his revulsion must have communicated itself to the old crone, for her tittering stopped immediately, and at once her voice gave forth in a servile whine. “Dun’t ye harm me, Master. I’m an old woman not long fer this airth.”

  Even more than before, this manifest evidence that he was feared filled Dewart with a strangely exhilarating alarm. He was not accustomed to servility, and there was something nauseatingly frightful about this fawning attitude, something alien to his nature, and, because he knew it grew not out of knowledge of him, but out of some legendary beliefs regarding old Alijah, there was something doubly repellent about it.

  “Where can I find Mrs. Giles?” he asked shortly.

  “T’other end o’ Dunwich. She lives alone but fer her son, an’ he’s a wild one, a mite tetched, they dew say.”

  He had hardly set foot on the porch before he was conscious that there was rising behind him once more that horrible tittering that was the laughter of Mrs. Bishop. Despite his abhorrence, he stood there for a moment, listening. The tittering subsided, and instead came the sound of mumbled words; but, to Dewart’s amazement, the old crone’s words were not in English, but in a kind of phonetic language that was infinitely startling in this rankly overgrown valley deep in the hills. He listened, somewhat unnerved, but with a rising curiosity to fix in his memory what it was the old woman mumbled to herself. As nearly as he could determine, the sounds she made were a combination of grunted half-words and aspirates, certainly not in any language with which he was familiar.

  He made some attempt to transcribe them, writing on the back of an envelope in his pocket, but when he had finished and looked at what he had written, it was clear that this gibberish could not possibly be interpreted. “N’gai, n’gha’ghaa, shoggog, y’hah, Nyarla-to, Nyarla-totep, Yog-Sotot, n-yah, n-yah.” The sounds inside went on for some ti
me before silence fell; but they seemed nothing but a repetition and rearrangement of the primal inflections. Dewart gazed at the transcription he had made in utter bafflement; the woman was obviously almost illiterate, superstitious and credulous; yet there was the suggestion of some foreign language about these curious phoneticisms, and, from what Dewart knew of his earlier college years, he was reasonably certain that they were not of Indian origin.

  He reflected somewhat ruefully that, far from learning anything which might help to bring the portrait of his ancestor into focus, he seemed to be plunging deeper and deeper into an eddying swirl of mystery, or rather, of mysteries, for the disjointed conversation of old Mrs. Bishop pointed to hitherto unknown puzzles, none of which seemed to have any other connection save a nebulous one to Alijah Billington, or, at least, to the name of Billington, as if it were a catalytic agent precipitating a shower of memories which yet lacked a central design or intelligence to give the whole meaning.

  He folded the envelope carefully to protect his writing, put it back into his pocket, and, now that only silence came from inside to set against the hushing of wind in the trees outside the house, he made his way back to his car and started away, back the road he had come, back through the village, where he was eyed from windows and doorways with wary, half-furtive persistence by dark, silent figures, to where he reasoned Mrs. Giles’ house might be. There were three houses which might be said to fit into Mrs. Bishop’s general directive of the “other end” of Dunwich.

  He tried the middle one of the three, but, receiving no answer, went on to the last of them in the long row which occupied a distance of what would in Arkham pass for three blocks. His approach, however, had not gone unnoticed.

  He had scarcely turned in to the third house when the large, hunched figure of a man broke from the bushes beside the highway and ran toward the house, bawling lustily.

  “Maw! Maw! He’s a-comin’.”

  The door opened and engulfed him. Dewart, reflecting upon the increasing evidence of decadence and degeneracy in this forsaken hamlet, resolutely followed. The house had no porch; its front face was a bleak, unpainted wall, with a door set in the precise middle of it, less attractive than a barn and almost forbidding in its atmosphere of barrenness and squalor. He knocked.

  The door opened and a woman stood there.

  “Mrs. Giles?” He tipped his hat.

  She paled. He was conscious of a sharp annoyance, but suppressed it in favor of his curiosity.

  “I don’t mean to frighten you,” he went on. “I can’t help noticing, though, that my appearance seems to frighten Dunwich people. It did Mrs. Bishop, too.

  She was kind enough to tell me that I resembled someone—my great-great-grandfather, to be frank. She told me you had a picture I might see.”

  Mrs. Giles stepped back, her long, narrow face a little less colorless now.

  Dewart observed from the corner of his eye that the hand which the woman had held under her apron, was clenched upon a tiny figure, which, even in the brief glance he had of it when the draft lifted her apron a little, he identified as akin to the witch charms found in the Black Forest of Germany and in sections of Hungary and the Balkans: a protective charm.

  “Dun’t ye let him in, Maw.”

  “My son ain’t used to strangers,” said Mrs. Giles shortly. “If ye set a spell, I’ll git the picter. It was draw’d a plenty years ago, and it come to me from my father.”

  Dewart thanked her and sat down.

  She disappeared into an inner room, where her voice was heard in an attempt to soothe her son, whose fright was yet another manifestation of the Dunwich attitude toward him. But perhaps this attitude rose from a general ignorance of all strangers, and applied equally well to any other interloper in this long-forgotten hill country. Mrs. Giles came back and thrust the drawing into his hands.

  It was crude, but effective. Even Dewart was startled, for, allowing for the amateurishness of the artist of more than a century ago, it was plain that there was a marked resemblance between him and his great-great-grandfather. Here in this rough sketch were the same square-jawed features, the same steady eyes, the same Roman nose, though Alijah Billington’s nose wore a wen on the left side, and his eyebrows were considerably bushier. But then, thought Dewart absorbedly, he was a much older man.

  “Ye might be his son,” said Mrs. Giles.

  “We had no likeness of him at home,” said Dewart. “I was curious to see it.”

  “Ye kin hev it, if ye like.”

  Dewart’s impulse was to accept this gift, but he realized that, however little it might mean to her, it had an intrinsic value as a showing-off piece; there was no need for him to have it. He shook his head, still looking at it, taking in every detail of his great-great-grandfather’s appearance; then handed it back, thanking her gravely.

  Gingerly, with marked hesitation, the overgrown hulk of boy crept into the room and stood at the threshold, poised for instant flight before any manifestation of dislike on Dewart’s part. Dewart’s glance flickered over him, and he saw that he was no boy, but rather a man of perhaps thirty; the unkempt hair framed a wild face, out of which the eyes looked in fear and fascination at Dewart.

  Mrs. Giles stood quietly waiting for him to make the next move; it was obvious that she wished him to be gone; so he got up at once,—at which movement the woman’s son fled once more into the interior of the house— thanked her again, and left the house, observing that all the time he had been in it, the woman had not once relinquished her hold upon the witch-protection charm or whatever it was to which she clung with such determination.

  There was now nothing left for him to do but leave the Dunwich country. He was not loath to do so, however disappointed he had been in his mission, though the sight of his ancestor’s portrait as drawn in the old man’s own time was at least a partial repayment for his time and effort. But the fact was that his excursion into the Dunwich country had given him an unaccountable feeling of uneasiness, coupled with a kind of physical revulsion which seemed rooted in more than the bad taste the manifest decadence and degeneracy of the region left in his mouth. He could not explain it. The Dunwich people themselves were curiously repellent; it was undeniable; they were like a race unto themselves, with all the stigmata of inbreeding and some curiously different physiological variations—like the oddly flat ears, grown so close to their heads that they might have been attached over a far wider area than normal, and flaring in bat-fashion along the back; and the pale, bulging eyes, almost ichthyic; and the broad, loose mouths, batrachian by suggestion. But it was not alone the Dunwich people, nor the Dunwich country that affected him so disagreeably; it was also something more, something inherent in the very atmosphere of the region, something incredibly old and evil, something that suggested terrible ancient blasphemies and incredible horrors. Fear and terror and horror seemed to become tangible entities in this hidden valley; lust and cruelty and despair seemed to be an inevitable part of life in the Dunwich country; violence and viciousness and perversion suggested themselves as ways of life here; and over everything lay the further conviction of a madness that affected all the people of the region, without regard for age or heritage, an environmental madness which was infinitely more terrible because it carried with it the implication of self-choice.

  But there was even more than that to Dewart’s repulsion; he could not escape the fact that he had been most disagreeably affected by the very obvious fear of him that the natives had shown. However much he might tell himself that it might be a normal fear they showed every stranger in the region, he knew it was not that; he was fully aware that they feared him because he resembled Alijah Billington. Moreover, there was that disturbing suggestion made by the loafer, Seth, who had called out to his companion, Luther, that “he” had “come back” with such evident seriousness that it was plain both of the old men had actually believed that Alijah Billington could and would come back to the country he had left to die a natural death in England over a c
entury before.

  He drove home almost unconscious of the brooding darkness of the hills upon hills, of the dusky valleys and the louring clouds, of the thin shining of the Miskatonic where light reflected from it under a rift in the middle-heaven; his thoughts were occupied with a thousand possibilities, a hundred avenues for research; and, in addition, he was curiously conscious of something further beneath and beyond the immediacy of his concerns—a growing conviction that he ought to abandon any further attempt to learn why it was that Alijah Billington was so feared, not alone by the ignorant and degenerate offspring of those Dunwich people of his own time, but by the white men, educated or not, among whom he had lived.

  On the following day, Dewart was summoned to Boston by his cousin, Stephen Bates, to whom the final shipment of his belongings from England had been consigned; so for two days he was engaged in that city, arranging the transfer of those belongings to the house off the Aylesbury Pike beyond Arkham; and on the third, he occupied himself very largely in opening packing-cases and. crates, and distributing his various possessions about his house. Among these final belongings was the set of directives which had been given him by his mother, and which had come down from Alijah Billington. As a result of his recent investigations, Dewart was now doubly anxious to re-examine this paper; so, having disposed of all the larger articles, he set about searching for it, remembering that when his mother had given it to him, it was scaled in a large manila envelope, bearing her name in her father’s hand.

  After about an hour of rummaging through various documents, and what appeared to be a file of letters, he came upon the remembered manila envelope, and immediately broke the seal which his mother had put upon it after reading the instructions to him a fortnight before her death, which had taken place years ago. The paper, he decided, was not the original document penned by Alijah. but one that had been copied, probably by Laban in his old age, which would make the instructions he now held actually considerably less than a century old. Yet the signature was in Alijah’s name, and Dewart doubted that Laban had altered or changed anything in any way.