The Lurker at the Threshold by August Derleth & H. P. Lovecraft

Author:August Derleth & H. P. Lovecraft [August Derleth & H. P. Lovecraft]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Horror
ISBN: 9780786711888
Google: E20s5P-ve5gC
Amazon: 0786711884
Publisher: Running Press
Published: 2003-06-11T07:00:00+00:00

Late in March we returned from Boston, Ambrose with a curious eagerness, myself with apprehension, though it must be admitted that, apart from a few uneasy nights at first, during which my cousin walked somnambulistically about as if he were lost, Ambrose had been very much himself throughout the winter months, and had put forward nothing whatever in his conduct or conversation to give me the slightest reason to feel that he had not fully recovered from the oppression which had caused him initially to send for me. As a matter of record, Ambrose was socially very popular, and it was I who, lost in those queer old books from Alijah Billington’s library, proved to be somewhat lacking in the social graces. Throughout the winter, I applied myself diligently to these books; there were many more passages similar to those I have set down; there were many references to the key-names which I had come to know; there were some apparently contradictory passages also—but there was nowhere any clear, concise statement of basic credo sufficiently clear to warrant acceptance, nor was there anything like an outline of the pattern to which these monstrous allusions and sinister inferences belonged.

As the Spring approached, however, my cousin had become somewhat more restless and more than once expressed a desire to return to the house in Billington’s Wood, which, as he pointed out, was after all his “home,” where he “belonged”—this was in contrast to his indifference to certain aspects of the manuscript volumes I had sought to discuss from time to time during the winter. Only two things of any moment took place during the winter, concerning the occurrences in the vicinity of Billington’s Wood, and these were duly reported in the Boston newspapers—these were the discovery of the bodies of two victims of uncanny vanishings from the Dunwich country, the discovery being made at different times, one of them between Christmas and New Year’s day of that winter, the other shortly after the first of February. As before, both bodies were found to have been dead but a short while, both appeared to have been dropped from a height, varying between them, both were badly mangled and torn, however recognizable, and in each case several months had intervened between the time of disappearance and the time of discovery. The papers made much of the fact that no ransom notes had ever turned up, and stressed the additional fact that the victims had had no reason to leave home, and no trace of them between the time of their vanishing and the finding of their bodies—one on an island in the Miskatonic, the other near the mouth of that river—had been recorded or uncovered, despite the diligence of newspapermen assigned to the case. I saw with some chilling fascination that my cousin seemed to take a bewildered interest in these accounts; he read them over and over, but throughout with the air of a man who feels he should know the hidden meaning of what he reads, but had somehow forgotten the proper bridge to remembrance.

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