“I bought a car in New York,” said Walters. “As long as I’m over here, I mean to see something of the States, beginning with Walden Pond, which appears to be on the way to Springfield.”
“At least in that general direction,” observed Boyle dryly. “Now, if there is anything we can do for you, please do not hesitate to call on us.”
“I’m sure I'll be able to manage,” Walters said.
Boyle looked dubious. “What will you do with the property, Mr. Walters?”
“I’ll have to make up my mind about that when I’ve seen it,” he answered.
“But I have my home in England, and it strikes my fancy. Candidly, what I’ve seen of the States so far hasn’t seemed to me encouraging.”
“I advise you not to get up any hope of selling it at even a fraction of its value,” said Boyle then. “That country is pretty decayed. Furthermore, it has an unsavory reputation.”
Walters’s interest was unaccountably quickened. “Precisely what does that mean, Mr. Boyle?”
“They tell strange tales about Dunwich.” He shrugged. “But I suppose they’re no stranger than those to be found in other remote corners of the country.
And they are very probably much exaggerated.”
It was obvious to Walters that Boyle was not inclined to repeat specific tales, if he had heard them. “How do I get there?” he asked.
“It’s off the beaten path. You take a loop from the Aylesbury Pike through Dunwich and back to the Pike again at a considerable distance from there. Quite a bit of wooded terrain there, too. It’s picturesque country. What farming is done is, I believe, largely dairying. It’s very backward country—I don’t exaggerate.
You can pick up the Aylesbury Pike near Concord, if you’re bound for Walden—or due west of Boston if you bear toward Worcester. Once on the Pike, continue west. Watch for a hamlet named Dean’s Corners. Just past it you’ll find a junction. You turn left there.” He chuckled. “It’ll be like turning into the American past, Mr. Walters—the far past.”
II
He had not traveled far from the Aylesbury Pike on the Dunwich road before Nicholas Walters understood readily what Boyle had meant in his reference to the area. As the terrain rose, many brier-bordered stone walls made their appearance, pressing upon the road; most of these were broken down in places, with field stones scattered along the foot of the walls. The road wound into hills past great old trees, bramble-covered fences, and barren fields and pastures in country that was only sparsely settled. Occasional farms could be seen; these wore an aspect of age he had not previously encountered west of Boston; many wore an air of depressing desertion, though they were architecturally of singular interest to Walters, for he had long ago made the photographing of buildings a hobby, and such farms as he could see closer to the road, though squalid, revealed curious decorative motifs hitherto unknown to him. Some of the old barns bore on their gables designs which could only have been cabalistic, though many of these seemed not to have been otherwise painted. Here and there lesser outbuildings—sheds, cribs, and storage buildings—had fallen together. Among these abandoned farms there occurred from time to time well-kept and clearly still inhabited farms, with cattle in pasture and corn in the fields and rocky meadows that gave evidence of being cropped.
He drove slowly. The mood and atmosphere of the country filled him with an odd fascination; it was as if he had been there before, as if some ancestral memory had risen up to set his own mood. Surely it was not possible that some bridge to memory had reached back to his first two years!—and yet there were vistas and turns of the road that rose before him with a disturbing familiarity.
The rounded hills brooded over the valleys; the woods were dark and crowded with trees, as if no axe or saw had ever been wielded in them; and now and then he caught sight of strange circles of tall stone pillars on the summits of the hills, reminding him of Stonehenge and the cromlechs of Devon and Cornwall. From time to time the hills were broken by deep gorges, crossed by crude wooden bridges; and openings along the base of the hills afforded glimpses of the Miskatonic River, the upper reaches of which he had seen on road maps, took rise not far west of the Dunwich country and wound serpentinely through the valley beyond and on to the seat at Arkham. Occasionally, too, he saw lesser streams emptying into the Miskatonic, hardly more than rills which very probably came from springs in the hills; and once there flashed upon his vision the blue-white column of a waterfall cascading out of the dark hills.
Though the hills pressed almost precipitously upon the dusty road for much of the way, there were some infrequent openings that revealed high marshland or meadows, and now and then more farms—or what remained of them. The landscape was forbidding; the enclosing hills, the looming, pillared summits of the higher ridge leaning over, the dreary, deserted farms—all combined to convey the impression of a cleavage not only in time but in place between this area and the country along the Aylesbury Pike; and, insofar as the area around Boston was concerned, the Dunwich settlement was centuries removed.
The mood of the region pervaded him oddly; he could not explain it; he was both drawn to the country through which he drove, and repelled by it, and the deeper he penetrated into it, the greater the confirmation of that mood. The conviction that he had been here before grew upon him, even as he smiled at the thought; he was not troubled at the thought, and only remotely curious. Such impressions, he knew, are common to all mankind, and only the unlettered and superstitious tend to read meaningful mystery into them.
He came out of the hills suddenly into a broader valley, and there lay the village of Dunwich, on the far side of the Miskatonic, huddling between the river and Round Mountain on the far side. A quaint covered bridge crossed the river, a relic of that distant past to which the settlement itself obviously belonged. Rotting gambrel roofs, ruined, deserted houses, dominated by a church with a broken steeple, met his eye as he emerged from the bridge. It was a place of desolation, where even the few men and women on the streets seemed gnarled and aged by more than the passage of time.
He drew his car up at the broken-steepled church, for it had patently been given over to use as a general store, and went in to inquire of the gaunt-faced storekeeper behind the counter for directions to the property he had come to inspect.
“Aberath Whateley’s place,” he repeated, staring at him. His wide-lipped mouth worked, his lips making chewing motions, as if he were masticating Walters’s inquiry. “Ye—kin? Kin to Whateley’s?”
“My name is Walters. I’ve come from England.”
The storekeeper did not seem to have heard. He studied Walters with open-faced interest and curiosity. “Ye hev the Whateley look. Walters. Never heerd none o’ my kin speak thet name.”
“The Whateley place,” Walters reminded him.
“Might be twenty sech places. Aberath’s place, ye said. It’s shet up.”
“I have the key,” Walters said, with ill-concealed impatience and some irritation at what seemed to him the storekeeper’s crooked and mocking smile.
“Go back crost the bridge, an’ turn right. Go mebbe half a mile. Can’t miss it. Stone fence in front—medder down from thet toards the river. Wood the other three sides. ’Twant Aberath’s—’twas Cyrus Whateley’s—Old Cyrus, the smart one, the eddicated one.” He said this with an arresting sneer and added, “Ye’ll be eddicated, too. Ye dress like it.”
“Oxford,” said Walters.
“Ain’t never heerd uv it.”
With that, he turned, dismissing Walters. But he could not wholly cut Walters off, for when he reached the threshold, the storekeeper spoke again.
“I’m Tobias Whateley. Ye’re likely kin. Tek keer out there. Ain’t nobody livin’ in thet house, but tek keer jest the same.”
The peculiar accent he put on “livin’” touched Walters with foreboding, though superstition was not part of his education. He left the store with an annoying edge of apprehension gnawing at him.
The house was not diff
icult to find, given Tobias Whateley’s directions. It was evident at but a glance, as Walters drove toward the stone fence that bounded the property along the rutted road, that the house was far older than the generation of Cyrus Whateley. Its dating could not have been later than early eighteenth century, and its lines were classic and utterly unlike the worn houses of the village or the farms along the road leading in from the Aylesbury Pike. It was a wooden structure, rising from a high base of brown sandstone rocks, and quite plainly thick-walled. It was of a storey and a half in height, though the central section rose somewhat taller than the wings. A broad verandah crossed the front of the central section, framing a Queen Anne door with a brass knocker. Around the door and the fanlight on top were elaborate carvings, narrow along the sides, broader above the fanlight, an ornamentation in rather odd contrast to the severity of the door itself.
The house had at one time been painted white, but many years had passed since last a coat of paint had been applied to it; now its general appearance suggested brown rather than white, for the house had weathered without paint for many decades. Walters saw outbuildings to the rear of the house, among them what must certainly be a spring house of fieldstone, for a rill ran from under it toward the Miskatonic beyond the meadow on the other side of the road.
Along the left side of the house, but some two yards removed from it, ran a lane that had once been a driveway, leading toward the outbuildings; but this had been for so long unused that trees grew in it. Walters could drive no farther than just in from the road.
The key Boyle had given him fitted the front door. The door stuck a little, which was not surprising, for presumably it had not been opened since the death of the last resident, Aberath’s companion. It opened into a hallway that ran the length of the front of the house, as far as Walters could determine at a glance; and it faced upon a pair of handsome double-doors, made of mahogany. These, too, were locked, but in the circlet of lesser keys Boyle had given him, Walters found the key to it.
Walters had been surprised at the lack of vandalism at sight of the house, so remote from a well-traveled highway; now, opening the double doors, he was even more astounded to find the room fully furnished and in excellent condition, save for minimal dust and lint; patently, nothing had been disturbed here, and it struck him as odd indeed, considering the remoteness of the house in an almost deserted countryside, it should have escaped the vandalism commonly done to abandoned buildings. Moreover, the furniture was almost all period, antique and of far greater value than pieces ordinarily on offer in shops specializing in such furniture.
This central room was that around which all the rest of the house had been built. It accounted for the tallness of the central section of the house, for its ceiling was at least ten feet from the floor. The far wall, that facing the double doors, was occupied by a fireplace framed by woodwork, exquisitely panelled, which masked on the right a hidden pullout desk and cabinet above it. The chimney wall was crowned by an extensive carved ornament in the center of which had been placed a convex glass circle a trifle more than half a foot in diameter. The ornament itself was triangular in shape, its apex reaching almost to the ceiling.
From the fireplace area bookshelves encircled the room, broken only by doors; these shelves were laden with what, Walters saw at a glance, were very old books. He crossed to the opposite wall, and examined some of them.
Nothing more recent than Dickens stood among the leather-bound tomes, and many of them were in Latin and other languages. High atop a bookcase lay a telescope; here and there small ornaments broke the even rows of books— carvings, small statuary, and what appeared to be ancient artifacts. On the massive table that occupied the middle of the room lay papers, pen and ink, and several ledgers, lying as if but recently left there, and but waiting to be put to use again.
Walters could not imagine what manner of accounts might have been kept by the previous occupant of the house. He crossed to the table and opened one of the ledgers. There was no accounting in it, he saw at a glance; the pages were filled with a fine script, very small—so much so that two lines of script occupied each rule on the page. He read a line on one page—“taken the boy and gone, leaving no word; but it will not matter; They will know where he has gone . . .”
He opened an older ledger and read: “no question but she is gone, and Wilbur could tell if he will; the fires on Sentinel Hill, and the whippoorwills screeching all night long as on the night the Old Man died.” The presence of dates suggested that the ledgers held some kind of journal or diary. He closed the book and turned away, and at that moment was aware of a small sound that had been present in the house, he recognized, from the beginning. It was the ticking of a clock.
A clock! And no one had lived here for at least three years. He was astonished. Someone must have had entrance to the house and set it. He looked around and saw in an alcove close to the door by which he had entered a curious, obviously hand-carved clock standing almost three feet tall, its face covered with strange designs—of serpentine coils and primitive creatures belonging clearly to some prehuman era, he thought, utterly alien—and yet the sight of them filled him with a disturbing, almost shocking, mushrooming of familiar terror, as if in some remote corner of his memory, lost in the murky years of his childhood, he had known their like—not in the face of a clock, but in a vague, misty reality. Nevertheless, the clock fascinated him, drew him, and he stared at it long enough to conclude that it was intended to tell more than time, for the numerals and lettering on its face clearly pertained to more than minutes and hours. Or days, for that matter.
He drew away from the clock and withdrew from the room. There was more of the house to be seen, and he set about to examine it. If he had hoped to discover anything other in the building that held the odd fascination of its central room, he was disappointed; for the remainder of the house was ordinary, its rooms were sparely furnished, if completely. There were two bedrooms, a kitchen, a pantry, a dining-room, a storeroom, and, under the gables upstairs, three cramped rooms used for additional storage and a fourth as a bedroom, the second storey of the house being interrupted here and there by the slope of the roof. These gable rooms were intimately cozy, with one window in each— commodious too, for they were dormer windows of a sort, shaped to repeat the design of the gable in a fashion he had not previously encountered.
He must, he reflected, add photographs of the house to his extensive collection; the architectural details of the gables with their dormer windows were unique. But there were other aspects of the house, too, that aroused his professional interest, and there was no time like the present to take a sequence of pictures, before the sun slipped down the western heavens and the shadows of the woods pressed upon the building.
He went back down the narrow stairway and out to his car, got out his paraphernalia, and made it ready for use. He began with exteriors, taking pictures of the house from every elevation, and particularly of the dormered gables; then he went inside, and took photographs of the great central room—of the clock, with a close-up of its strange face, and at last of the glass ornament in its carved setting above the fireplace, to complete a record for his future reference.
By this time the day was drawing to its close, and he had to decide whether he would drive to a nearby town for the night or whether he would stay here. In view of the evident cleanliness of the house, it seemed foolish to go elsewhere to spend the night. He would sleep, he decided, in the cozy gable bedroom.
Accordingly, he brought in his luggage, and having done this, he decided that he would need some minimal supplies—a modicum of groceries, preferably nothing that necessitated extensive preparation: cookies and crackers, perhaps, cereal, milk, bread and butter, together with some fruit, if that were available, and cheese, for he had not seen even a lunch counter on his brief visit to the village, to say nothing of a restaurant, of which the reclusive rural inhabitants of this remote area clearly had no need. And he would need, above all else, some kind of fuel for
the kerosene lamps that stood empty in the pantry, unless he were to use some of the candles that were to be seen in all the rooms and showed every sign of having been used.
He needed to return to Dunwich for his supplies, and he felt a curious compulsion to get there and back before darkness closed down on the countryside. He locked the house and set out at once.
Tobias Whateley had a look of anticipation on his gaunt face when Walters mounted the steps to his store. It disconcerted Walters a little; Tobias had evidently been expecting him, but for what reason mystified and troubled Walters.
“I need some groceries and kerosene,” said Walters, and without giving Whateley an opportunity to reply, rattled off the things he wanted.
Whateley stood unmoving, staring at Walters in a speculative manner.
“Yew aim to stay?” he asked finally.
“Overnight at least,” Walters said. “Maybe a little longer. Until I can make up my mind what to do with the property.”
“What to do?” repeated Whateley in manifest astonishment.
“I may put it up for sale.”
Whateley gave him a baffled look. “Ain’t even a Whateley’d buy it. None a the eddicated Whateleys’d want a thing to do with it—an’ the others—wal, the others ’re tied down to places all their own. Ye’ll have to git in an outsider.”
He said this as if the possibility were too unlikely to contemplate, nettling Walters, who said curtly, “I’m an outsider.”
Whateley gave a short bark that was like a derisive laugh. “Ye kin tell it!
Ye’ll not be stayin’ long, I reckon. Ye kin sell it from Springfield or Arkham or Boston—but ye wun’t find a buyer in these parts.”
“That house is in perfect condition, Mr. Whateley.”
He gave Walters a fierce, blazing stare. “Ain’t ye been aksin’ yerself who kep’ it thet way? Nobody’s lived in thet house since Increase died. Nobody’s bin near it. Three years naow. Cousin, I couldn’t git a body around here to so much as bring yer groceries up thar.”
The Lurker at the Threshold: Posthumous Collaborations Page 49