The Lurker at the Threshold: Posthumous Collaborations

by August Derleth

  “Well, you have come to the right place, Mr. Walters,” said Paul. “We have some material on file on both the house to which you refer, and on the Whateleys in general. A very old family. Armigerous, too. But now sadly decadent, I believe. Our interest, though, is primarily in the past, not so much in the present.”

  He was taken to the reading-room, and there presently a county history and some voluminous files were put down before him. He tackled the county history first. It was one of those heavy tomes, filled with autobiographical and biographical accounts by various hands, usually members of the subjects’ families, and published at a profit made chiefly from the members of the families mentioned in its pages. Most of this material was factual and hopelessly prosaic.

  He found a photograph, rather poorly reproduced evidently from a poorer tintype, of Cyrus Whateley. It bore a disquietingly familiar resemblance to someone he had not long ago seen, which was patently absurd. The account of his life was disappointingly brief. He had acquired his home near Dunwich from one Dudley Ropes Glover, who was the legatee of Sir Edward Orme, who had built it in 1703, twenty years before he disappeared, after many years spent in Europe. Glover had sold the house too after long absences from it, also in Europe. So much for the house. And of Cyrus Whateley there was little more; he too had travelled; he had married twice and had fathered two sons, one from each of his wives; one son had inherited; the other had left home as a young man and had been seen no more. Nothing had been set down about Cyrus Whateley’s occupation, save that he was a “landowner” and presumably speculated in land.

  There was no independent entry on Aberath Whateley, the son of Cyrus who had inherited his property.

  The file on the Whateley family, however, was another matter. Here, if anything, the various pieces were almost too numerous. It began with a straightforward account of the Whateley family in the Dunwich area, from the time of their coming into north central Massachusetts in 1699, from Arkham, down to the date of the publication of the county history, 1920; it had evidently been assembled for inclusion in that volume, but had not been used. There was an extensive family tree, which included Aberath and his lost brother, Charles.

  There were many individual biographies, principally in the form of obituary notices clipped from the Springfield Republican or the Arkham Advertiser. But there were also unclassified clippings which Walters chose to read with more care than he read the more formal obituaries, for clearly some more imaginative soul than the average reference librarian had taken care that they be included.

  These entries dealt with country lore involving the Whateleys in one way or another. There was, for instance, a report of a fiery sermon delivered by the Reverend Jeptha Hoag, come from Arkham to take the charge of the Methodist Church at Dunwich, in 1787—“’Tis said of a certain family in these parts that they do consort with the devil and raise up monsters, both by magic means and by the sins of the flesh. But forty years ago my predecessor, the Reverend Abijah Hoadley, from the pulpit of the Congregational Church in this village, preached on this same subject in these words: ‘It must be allow’d, that these Blasphemies of an infernall Train of Daemons are Matters of too common Knowledge to be deny’d; the cursed Voices heard now from under Ground by above a Score of credible Witnesses now living. I myself did not more than a Fortnight ago catch a very plain Discourse of evil Powers in the Hill behind my House; wherein there were a Rattling and Rolling, Groaning, Screeching, and Hissing, such as no Things of this Earth cou’d raise up, and which must needs have come from those Caves that only black Magick can discover, and only the Divell unlock.’ I, too, have heard these noises in the hills, a caterwauling and a cacaphony of which not all are natural to our Earth. Be warned! You know of whom I speak!”

  There was more in this vein; indeed, the sermon was reprinted at such length that, despite his interest, Walters tired of reading it. Attached to it, however, was another, manifestly related article, which was an account of the closing of the Methodist Church, by a majority of the congregation, because of the alleged “lack of prudence” on the part of the Reverend Jeptha Hoag in the first part, and of his unexplained absence in the second, the Reverend Hoag having followed his colleague of four decades previously into limbo, for the Reverend Hoadley had also vanished within a month after delivering his sermon against the powers of darkness.

  A thick envelope proved to contain clippings of a more or less facetious nature about “Odd Happenings at Dunwich,” as one headline announced. These were largely from the Arkham Advertiser, and set forth, tongue in cheek, accounts of “monsters” which had been conjured into some kind of illusory life by the bootleg-whiskey drinkers of Dunwich. Walters read them with some amusement, but he could not escape the fact that something had indeed taken place at Dunwich, something well out of the ordinary that someone from Miskatonic University had finally succeeded in keeping out of the paper after the Advertiser had had its fun with the tales. Too, there was associated with the events at Dunwich the very real death of one Wilbur Whateley, which had taken place just prior to their occurrence, and not in Dunwich at all, but within the grounds of Miskatonic University in Arkham. Some additional clippings from the Aylesbury Transcript were no less amusing, but again, all the facetiousness did not conceal the fact that there had been rather strange occurrences at Dunwich in that summer of 1928, culminating in September of that year.

  Not quite seven years ago, thought Walters. There had been mention of one Dr. Henry Armitage, librarian at Miskatonic University, in connection with the events at Dunwich; Walters made a mental note to explore the possibility that Dr. Armitage might still be available for an interview, if he decided to go that far in his exploration of the Whateley family background. Certainly there was nothing concrete in the tales of the “Goings-On” in the Dunwich country; the only definite facts seemed to add up to the death of a large number of cattle and other livestock, and some disappearances among the country people there, but even in these instances the names were garbled and altered in one account after another, and none of these were Whateleys, though a Bishop in one instance was a cousin. But how distant, it was impossible to say; the Whateley family tree abounded with other names—Bishop, Hoag, Marsh, and more;—and it was decidedly possible that the Reverend Hoag who had so unwisely leveled his charge at one of the Dunwich families—(Walters had the strong suspicion that the object of his sermon was the Whateley family)—might himself have been a distant cousin.

  He turned to the family tree and scrutinized it a little more attentively. He sought but did not find the Reverend Jeptha Hoag there, though there was a round dozen of Hoags listed. Plainly, too, there was considerable intermarriage within the family—cousins married cousins frequently—Elizabeth Bishop to Abner Whateley, Lavinia Whateley to Ralsa Marsh, Blessed Bishop to Edward Marsh, and so on;—thus decayed and degenerate stock would tend to increase the decadence in the family, or at least that branch of it that was in the habit of referring to the others as “the eddicated ones.”

  Walters did not know what to make of what he had read when he sat back to contemplate it. He had in reality learned little more than the lawyer, Boyle, had told him—that Dunwich was a forgotten backwater, that the Whateley family was decadent, that many odd tales came out of Dunwich, very probably much exaggerated by more superstitious neighbors, and as much derided by those who considered themselves free of superstitious beliefs. Yet it seemed to him that there was a singular variety of material recorded, in one vein or another—he did not want to undertake further reading of what appeared to him to be only variations on the same theme—but all with a dark undercurrent, an oddly disturbing one, all the more so since he felt himself irresistibly bound to what he had read in some way beyond his understanding; and while he told himself that he could not now take more time to read further in the Whateley file, he was aware of a disquieting unwillingness to read more.

  He closed the file and brought it back to the reference librarian.

  “I trust it has
been of some use to you, Mr. Walters,” said Paul.

  “Yes, indeed, it has. I thank you. I may return to study it a little further as time permits.”

  “By all means, sir.” He hesitated diffidently. “Do I take it you are related to the Whateleys?”

  “I have inherited some property there,” said Walters. “I am not aware of a relationship.”

  “Forgive me,” said the librarian hastily. “I only thought—I knew some of those people. You do bear a certain superficial resemblance, but then, I suppose, we could find equally superficial resemblances among a great many totally unrelated people.”

  “I am sure we could,” agreed Walters amiably. But he was nettled, and at the same time unpleasantly disturbed. Tobias Whateley had not troubled to conceal his conviction that there was a relationship; he had called him “cousin”—though with an edge of scorn in his voice. Mr. Paul’s casual suggestion had been made with utmost deference, however. The librarian looked so apologetic that he was moved to add, “Of course, there may be some distant connection. That family tree is quite extensive, and I am not informed as to why my late father came into the property.”

  “May I ask which property it is?”

  “They call it the old Cyrus Whateley place.”

  Mr. Paul’s face cleared. “That Mr. Whateley was . . .”

  Walters interrupted, smiling. “Don’t tell me. The natives in Dunwich would have called him one of ‘the eddicated’ Whateleys.”

  “I was about to say so,” rejoined the librarian.

  “And I can see that that puts a different face on the presumed relationship, Mr. Paul. You needn’t deny it.”

  “I won’t. There really are some terrible stories about the other branch, sir.

  You’ll uncover them, I have no doubt. I know those clippings you examined treat them all lightly, but there is more than a grain of truth in them, and I am convinced that there are very strange—and I fear, hideous—things happening in the remoter parts of the Dunwich country.”

  “As there are in many remote areas of the world,” said Walters.

  He left the library with mixed emotions. The possibility of a relationship to the Whateley clan could not be readily dismissed. His father had said little about his family background, though he had not concealed the family’s American origin. He did not feel particularly pleased at the thought; but on the other hand he was not conscious of any viable antipathy, either.

  The ambivalence of his attitude troubled him. He felt at one and the same time involved and withdrawn. The England he had left but so short a while ago seemed infinitely more remote than he would have thought possible; the Dunwich country toward which he drove, held for him an indefinable attraction, not alone in its wildness that presented a dark attractiveness to the eye and the imagination, but as well in its curious alienation from the surrounding world that pressed ever more hastily and madly toward some looming goal that must, at man’s ever-increasing pace, be utterly destructive to humanity and civilization.

  The house, when he reached it, seemed to anticipate him, as were it waiting upon his return. Its presence was tangible, yet he could not isolate its source, though it seemed to him anew that the central room was the heart of the house, and he almost consciously expected to hear the same odd pulsing he had been aware of in the night. This absurd impression passed, but, as he entered the central room, he was prey to another.

  The room, now that he saw it, seemed to have been arranged for company, with the chair drawn up to the table and the ledgers lying there. He crossed over and sat down to the table. He had looked into the ledgers before. Now he lifted the cover of the top one, and saw before him a thin envelope across the face of which had been scrawled, “For Him Who Will Come.”

  It was unsealed. He picked it up, and drew out the thin sheet of paper folded inside.

  “For Charles,” he read, “or the son of Charles, or the grandson of Charles, or Who Comes After . . .

  “Read, that you may know, that you may prepare to wait for Those Who

  Watch, and fulfill that which is meant to be.”

  There was no signature, but the writing was crabbed and uncertain.

  *

  (Unfinished at the time of August Derleth’s death, July 4, 1971.)