The Lurker at the Threshold: Posthumous Collaborations

by August Derleth

  I was interested neither in the recent newspaper—which was two days old—nor in the other documents and papers, for the time being; but turned instantly to the leaded window. For some reason, my cousin both feared this window and took pleasure in it—or rather, as I had seen, a part of him feared it, and something other in him enjoyed it. It was not unreasonable at all to suppose that that part of my cousin Ambrose which feared the window was one with that aspect of him I had seen in my room the previous night, and the other was akin to the drive which had impelled him in his sleep just prior to that scene in my room. I studied the window from several angles. The design, of course—which was of rayed concentric circles, with colored panes, all in pastel shades save a few toward the central circle of apparently plain glass—was completely unique.

  Nothing like it existed, so far as I knew, in any of the stained glass windows of European cathedrals or American Gothics, neither in pattern, nor in color-design, for the colors were unlike the stained glass windows of Europe and America in that they were singularly harmonious, seeming to flow or fuse into one another, despite being of various shades of blue, yellow, green and lavender, very light around the outer circle of panes, and very dark—almost black—near the central “eye” of colorless glass. It was, in fact, as if the color had been either washed out from the black central frame for the circle, or washed inward from the outer edge to make that darker portion, and the colors had been so well fused that any concentrated attention invariably tricked the eyes into believing that there might be some kind of movement of the colors themselves, as if they were still running and flowing together.

  But this, manifestly, was not what had disturbed my cousin. Ambrose would certainly have reasoned this out for himself as quickly as I had done; nor would he be likely to be disturbed at the appearance of movement in the leaded circles, which was equally inevitable if one gazed at the window long enough, for the design was adroit and skilled, and it required a remarkable degree of technical ability as well as of imagination to have conceived and executed it. I was soon aware of these phenomena, which were capable of a scientific explanation, but, as I continued to gaze at this extraordinary window, I became uneasily aware of something more which did not yield quite so readily to rationalization. This was an occasional impression of a view or a portrait which appeared without any indication or warning in the window—not as if it were superimposed on it so much as if it grew out of it.

  I realized instantly that this could not be a trick of light, for the window faced westward, and was at this hour in complete shadow, with all the house between it and the sun, nor was there, as I ascertained quickly enough by mounting the bookcase and looking out through the circle of colorless glass, anything at all within range of the window to reflect light upon it. I fixed my eyes upon the window with studied intent, but nothing came clear; I was unable to outline any complete picture, but that there was something suggestive about the window was inescapable, and I resolved to examine it closely under conditions more conducive toward bringing out anything which might lie concealed in the glass until such an hour as the light of sun or moon might be most favorable.

  My cousin called from the kitchen that breakfast was ready, and I abandoned the window, knowing that I had ample time in which to complete any investigation I cared to make, since I had no intention of returning to Boston until I had learned what agitated Ambrose to so great a degree that, now I was here, he was unwilling or unable to confess it.

  “I see you have been digging up some of the stories about Alijah Billington,”

  I said with designed directness, as I sat down at the table.

  He nodded. “You know my antiquarian and genealogical pursuits. Can you contribute anything?”

  “Along the specific lines of your investigation?”

  “Yes.”

  I shook my head. “I’m afraid not. It may be that those papers might suggest something to me. Do you mind if I have a look at them?”

  He hesitated. Clearly he did mind, but with equal clarity it was evident that he did not wish to deny me sight of what I had already seen, though he did not know how much I had read.

  “Oh, you may look at them for all I care,” he said carelessly. “I can’t make very much out of them.” He swallowed some coffee, eyeing me thoughtfully.

  “As a matter of fact, Stephen, I’ve got wound up in this business and I can’t make head or tail out of it—and yet I have the strongest feeling that without knowing it, there are strange and terrible things happening here—things that might be prevented, if one knew how.”

  “What things?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re speaking in riddles, Ambrose.”

  “Yes!” he almost shouted. “It is all a riddle. It is a complex of riddles, and I can find neither the beginning nor the end. I thought it began with Alijah—but I no longer think so. And how it will end I don’t know.”

  “That’s why you sent for me?” I was delighted to see opposite me the cousin who had spoken to me in my room during the night.

  He nodded.

  “Then I had better know everything you have done.”

  He forgot his breakfast and began to talk. It came out in a rush—everything that had happened since his arrival; he told me nothing whatsoever of his suspicions, and said so; these had no place in a narrative purely of events. He summarized or outlined the papers he had found—Laban’s daybook, the newspaper accounts of Alijah’s difficulties with the people of Arkham a hundred years and more ago, the Rev. Ward Phillips’ writings, and so on; but these must be read, he said, before I could arrive at everything which he had come upon. It was indeed, as he had characterized it, a riddle, but, like him, I too felt that he had happened upon portions of a gigantic puzzle, and each piece fitted into it, no matter how unconnected they might seem to be. And, with each additional fact he told me, I became aware of the damnable suggestiveness of the trap in which my cousin Ambrose appeared to be caught. I made some attempt to calm him, and persuaded him to eat his breakfast, and to cease occupying all his waking and his sleeping hours with it, lest it become an uncontrollable obsession.

  And immediately after breakfast, I set myself the task of dutifully reading everything Ambrose had found or taken down, in the order in which he himself had come upon these matters. It took me well over an hour to read the various papers and documents Ambrose laid out for me, and some little time beyond that to assimilate what I had read. It was indeed a “complex of riddles,” as Ambrose had put it, but it was possible to draw certain general conclusions from the curious, apparently scattered facts presented in the writings and the notes.

  The one primary fact which could not be escaped was that Alijah Billington (and Richard Billington before him?—Or should it be said, Richard Billington, and Alijah after him?) had been engaged in some kind of secret business the nature of which could not be determined from the available evidence. The possibility was that it was something evil, but in admitting this, it became necessary to take into account the superstition of provincial witnesses, the calumny of gossip, and the repetition of hearsay and legend which exaggerated out of all proportion to truth some trivial event. Common talk and legend indicated that Alijah Billington was disliked and feared, very largely because speculation about “noises” heard in his woods at night was not satisfied. On the other hand, the Rev. Ward Phillips, the reviewer, John Druven, and presumably also the third of that trio who had paid a call on Alijah Billington—Deliverance Westripp, were not provincials. At least two of these gentlemen certainly believed that the business in which Alijah Billington was engaged was evil in nature.

  But what was the evidence against Alijah to support such a contention? It was entirely circumstantial, insofar as the opposing gentlemen were concerned.

  It could be summed up very shortly.—There were inexplicable “noises” resembling “cries” or “screams” of “some animal” in the woods around Billington’s house. Billington’s chief critic, John Druven
, disappeared under circumstances resembling other disappearances in the vicinity, and his body reappeared under similar circumstances. That is, there had been various disappearances, with recovery of the bodies of the missing persons a considerable time thereafter, all indicating that death had taken place shortly before discovery of the body. No explanation was ever offered to account for the weeks or months between disappearance and reappearance. Druven had left a damning note suggesting that Alijah had “put something” into the food he had offered the three men who had called on him, not alone to impair their memories, but to summon Druven back to him or at least, render him incapable of disobeying the summons, should it come. This, of course, suggested that the trio did see something. But it was not evidence—not, that is, legally admissible evidence.

  So much for the known case against Alijah Billington in his own time.

  However, a correlation of facts, suggestions, and hints, past and present, presented a picture considerably at variance with the portrait of Alijah Billington’s ardent protestations and somewhat insolent defiance as to his innocence of the imputations made by Druven and others. Even without the affording of anything in the nature of a definite clue to the concerns of Alijah, the implications of the overall facts were startling, not to say frightening. These aspects, correlated without regard to the time period between the earliest of them and the most recent, made for a certain not easily shaken uneasiness, and a growing queasiness of doubt and uncertainty, for the underlying suggestions were hideous.

  The first of these facts was in Alijah Billington’s own words, when he wrote to assail John Druven’s review of the Rev. Ward Phillips’ book, Thaumaturgical Prodigies in the New-English Canaan: “. . . there are things in existence better left alone and kept from the common speach.” Presumably Alijah Billington knew whereof he wrote, as the Rev. Ward Phillips retorted. If so, then the occasional entries in the boy, Laban’s, journal or daybook took on an added significance. From this daybook it was possible to accept the fact that something had indeed been going on in the woods, with the aid of Alijah Billington. It was not conceivable, as my cousin Ambrose had thought, that it was smuggling; for it would have been sheer idiocy to accompany smuggling with “noises” of the kind described in both the Arkham papers and also in the lad’s daybook. No, it was something far more incredible, and there was a frighteningly suggestive parallel between one of the boy’s entries and something within my own experience during the past twenty-four hours. The boy had written that he had found his Indian companion, Quamis, on his knees “saying in a loud voice words in his language which I could not understand, . . . but that had the sound of Narlato or Narlotep.” In the course of the previous night I had been roused by my cousin’s somnambulistic voice shouting, “Iä! Nyarlathotep.” That these words were one and the same, I could not doubt.

  There was, then, a suggestion of worship in the Indian’s attitude, but it remained to be admitted that the aborigines tended to worship anything which was not immediately understandable to them; this had been equally true of the American Indian as of the African Negro who had in many places set up the phonograph as an object of worship because it was completely beyond his comprehension.

  One further question occurred to me from the daybook. It seemed to me that the missing pages roughly corresponded to the period during which the investigating trio had called upon Alijah Billington. If so, had the boy seen and recorded something which might aid in discovering what had actually taken place? And had his father then subsequently discovered what he had written and summarily destroyed it? Presumably, however, Alijah would have destroyed the entire book. If he were indeed engaged in some nefarious practises in the woods, what his son had written was damning. Yet the most effective passages had occurred after the missing pages. Perhaps Alijah had destroyed the offending pages, deeming that what the boy had previously written could not by any chance be admissible as evidence, and given the book back to him, perhaps adjuring him to write no more of such matters. That seemed to me the most likely explanation and would account in full for the fact that the book had remained to be found by my cousin Ambrose, because the most telling portions would then not have been written until after his father had torn out the pages he did not like.

  However, the most disturbing of those correlated facts lay in the quotation from the curious document entitled, Of Evill Sorceries done in New England of Daemons in no Humane Shape: “’Tis said, one Richard Billington, being instructed partly by Evill Books, and partly by an antient Wonder-Worker amongst the Indian Savages ... set up in the woods a great Ring of Stones, inside which he say’d Prayers to the Divell, Place of Dagon, Namely, and sung certain Rites of Magick abominable by Scripture. . . . He privately shew’d great Fear about some Thing he had call’d out of the Sky at Night. There were in that year seven slayings in the woods near to Richard Billington’s Stones. . . .” This passage was horribly suggestive, for two inescapable reasons. Richard Billington’s time was almost two centuries ago. But, time notwithstanding, there were parallel events between that time and Alijah Billington’s, and again between Alijah Billington’s and the present. There had been a “circle of Stones” in Alijah’s time; and there had been mysterious slayings likewise. There was now still what was left of a circle of stones, and there were once again beginning what seemed to be a series of slayings. It did not seem to me that, even making every possible allowance for chance and circumstance, these parallels could be coincidence.

  But, denying coincidence, what then?

  There was Alijah Billington’s set of instructions, which adjured Ambrose Dewart and any other heir not “to call out to the hills.” To draw the parallel, there was that “Thing he had call’d out of the Sky at Night” so feared by Richard Billington. If coincidence were to be ruled out, there was this left. And this was even far more improbable than coincidence. But there was a key; however incomprehensible were the instructions Alijah had left, he had pointed out that “the sense” of those rules “shall be found within such books as have been left in the house known as Billington’s house in the woods known as Billington”—in short, here, within these walls, presumably within this study.

  The problem levied straining demands upon my credulity. Accepting the fact that Alijah Billington had been engaged in something he wished no one but the Indian, Quamis, to know about, it was possible to concede that somehow he had made away with John Druven. His practises then, must have been illegal; moreover, the precise manner of Druven’s death was something to arouse much conjecture not only about Alijah but about the methods he had used to encompass Druven’s end in a fashion similar to the slayings in the Dunwich country. The progression was a logical one from the acceptance of the fundamental premise that Alijah had managed to do away with Druven, to the secondary premise that he had also had a hand in the other slayings. The pattern was the same.

  But along this path there lay a succession of admissions and conjectures which required so major a concession to accept that anyone hoping to cope with them would shortly find himself completely at sea, unless he cast off everything he had previously believed and started afresh. If Richard Billington did indeed call some “Thing” out of the sky at night, what was it? No such “Thing” was known to science, unless it might conceivably be accepted tentatively that something related to the now extinct pterodactyl had still existed two centuries ago. But this seemed even less probable than the other explanation; science had already definitely settled the matter of the pterodactyl; science had recorded nothing of any other flying “Thing”. But then, none had anywhere written that the “Thing” had flown. How then had it come out of the sky if it had not flown?

  I shook my head in increasing bewilderment, and my cousin, coming in, smiled somewhat tensely.

  “Is it too much for you, too, Stephen?”

  “If I think overmuch about it, yes. But the instructions Alijah left indicate that the key lies in the books on these shelves. Have you looked at them?”

  “Wha
t books, then, Stephen? There is no single clue.”

  “On the contrary, I disagree with you. We have several. Nyarlathotep or Narlatop or whichever way you spell it. Yog-Sotot or Yogge-Sothothe—again, as you like to spell it. These have recurred in Laban’s journal, in Mrs. Bishop’s rambling account, in the letters from Jonathan Bishop—and there are certain other references in the Bishop letters which we might try to find in these old books.”

  I turned once more to the Bishop letters, to which Ambrose had attached his findings from the files of the Arkham papers concerning the deaths of those persons of whom Jonathan Bishop had written. There was a disturbing parallel in these, too, which I had not the heart to mention to Ambrose, since he looked unwell and ravaged as by lack of sleep; but it could not be escaped that even as meddlesome persons who had spied upon Jonathan Bishop disappeared and were subsequently found later on, so it had happened to John Druven, who meddled incontinently in the business of Alijah Billington. Moreover, whatever one might think about the improbability of events, it was undeniable that the persons of whom Jonathan Bishop had written had indeed vanished, for the accounts were in the papers for all who wished to read.

  “Even so,” said my cousin Ambrose when I looked up again, “I would not know where to begin. All these books are old, and many of them are difficult to read. Some of them, I think, are bound manuscripts.”

  “Never mind. There is plenty of time. We need not do it today.”

  He seemed relieved at this and was about to carry forward the conversation when a knock sounded on the great outer door, and he rose to answer it.

  Listening, I heard him admit someone, and hastily put the papers and documents I had been reading out of sight. But he did not bring his visitors, for there were two, into the study, and, after half an hour, he let them out again and returned to the room.