The Lurker at the Threshold, page 30
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, there 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 down 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.”
Then for two days there were but commonplace entries, after which followed a guarded sentence which indicated that Alijah had discovered the Indian’s defection, and had punished him, but how, the boy had not chronicled. After seven further entries, there was another reference to the “forbidden place”; this time the boy and the Indian had been caught in a sudden snowstorm, and had lost their way. They stumbled about this way and that, the snow being very thick, and falling upon soft ground, which had opened to the late March sun, with the snow being blown into their eyes, and presently “we were come upon a place strange to me, but Quamis gave a great cry and strove to hustle me away, and I say that we had come to the brook which flowed about the isle of stones and the tower, but this time we had approached it from the far side. How we had come thither I did not know, for we had set out in the opposite direction, to the east, intending to walk over toward the Miskatonic River, unless it be that the snow so suddenly come upon us had confused us to so great a degree. The great haste and the seeming fear Quamis shewed, impelled me once again to inquire of him what caused him these qualms, but he only answered me as before, that my father ‘does not wish it’—which is to say, he does not want me in this area, though I have freedom to roam in whatever other parts of his land I choose, and may go even into Arkham, though I am forbidden to go in the direction of either Dunwich or Innsmouth, and must not pass time in the Indian village which is in the hills past Dunwich.”
Thereafter there was no further reference to the tower, but instead there were certain other curious paragraphs. Three days after the entry concerning the sudden snowstorm, the boy recorded a quick thaw which “rid the earth of snow.” And that night, as he recorded on the following morning, “I was awak’d from my sleep by strange noises in the hills, as of great cries, and I started up and went first to the east window, and there did see nothing, and then to the south, and there likewise did see nothing; after which, summoning my courage, I crept from my room and crossed the hall and rapped on my father’s door, but he made no answer and I thinking he had not heard me, dared to open the door and go into his room, where I walked straight to his bed, but was much disturbed to find him not in it, and no sign to shew that he had that night been in it; and, chancing to look from the west window of his room I was made aware of a kind of blue or green glow that shone above the trees in the Hollow of the hills lying over to the west, whereat I was much given to wonder, for it was from this direction that the sounds I had heard seemed to come and still came—as it were, great screams, but in no human voice or even in the voice of any beast known to me; and it seemed to me, as I stood there at the partly-open window transfixed by fear and wonder, that other voices similar to these came from far off in the direction of Dunwich or Innsmouth and lay in the air like great echoes high up in the sky. After a little while these came to an end, and the glowing in the heavens ended, too, and I went back to bed; but this morning, when Quamis came, I asked him what it was had made such a noise in the night; whereupon he answered me that I had been dreaming and did not know whereof I spoke, and should say nothing of it to him, and abide by my own counsel; so I did not tell him what I had seen, for he seemed in truth sore troubled at my words, as if he feared my father would hear me even as I spoke. I was of a mind to bespeak my anxiety concerning my father’s safety, but by what Quamis said, I knew my father was in the house and like to be in his room, sleeping late, so I did not press this but made pretense of forgetting what I had heard and seen, even as Quamis said I must do, whereat Quamis felt easier in spirit and no longer seemed so distressed.”
For fully a fortnight thereafter Laban’s entries concerned trivial matters, such as his studies and his reading. Then once more occurred a cryptic reference, brief and pointed. “The noises do seem to come from the west with singular persistence, but there is surely a crying of answer from the east by northeast, which is the direction of Dunwich, or the wild country around Dunwich.” Again, four days thereafter, the boy wrote that he had scarcely been put to bed, when, having arisen to watch the setting of the new moon, he saw his father outside the house. “He was accompanied by Quamis, and both carried something, but I could not make out what it was. In a short time they disappeared around the house, walking eastward, and I crossed to my father’s room to look further for them, but saw them not, though I heard my father’s voice rising in the wood.”
