More Tales from the Cthulhu Universe by Christopher Broschell

Author:Christopher Broschell [Broschell, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-08-24T00:00:00+00:00

Beyond the Threshold

August Derleth, Weird Tales, 1941

1.

The story is really my grandfather’s.

In a manner of speaking, however, it belongs to the entire family, and beyond them, to the world; and there is no longer any reason for suppressing the singularly terrible details of what happened in that lonely house deep in the forest places of northern Wisconsin.

The roots of the story go back into the mists of early time, far beyond the beginnings of the Alwyn family line, but of this I knew nothing at the time of my visit to Wisconsin in response to my cousin’s letter about our grandfather’s strange decline in health. Josiah Alwyn had always seemed somehow immortal to me even as a small child, and he had not appeared to change throughout the years between a barrel-chested old man, with a heavy, full face, decorated with a closely clipped mustache and a small beard to soften the hard lines of his square jaw. His eyes were dark, not over-large, and his brows were shaggy; he wore his hair long, so that his head had a leonine appearance. Though I saw little of him when I was very young, still he left an indelible impression on me in the brief visits he paid when he stopped at the ancestral country home near Arkham, in Massachusetts — those short calls he made on his way to and from the remote corners of the world: Tibet, Mongolia, the Arctic regions, and certain little-known islands in the Pacific.

I had not seen him for years when the letter came from my cousin Frolin, who lived with him in the old house grandfather owned in the heart of the forest and lake country of northern Wisconsin. “I wish you could uproot yourself long enough from Massachusetts to come out here. A great deal of water has passed under various bridges, and the wind has blown about many changes since last you were here. Frankly, I think it most urgent that you come. In present circumstances, I don’t know to whom to turn, grandfather being not himself, and I needing someone who can be trusted.” There was nothing obviously urgent about the letter, and yet there was a strange constraint, there was something between lines that stood out invisibly, intangibly to make possible only one answer to Frolin’s letter — something in his phrase about the wind, something in the way he had written grandfather being not himself, something in the need he had expressed for someone who can be trusted.

I could easily enough take leave of absence from my position as assistant librarian at Miskatonic University in Arkham and go west that September; so I went. I went, harassed by an almost uncanny conviction that the need for haste was great: from Boston by plane to Chicago, and from there by train to the village of Harmon, deep in the forest country of Wisconsin— a place of great natural beauty, not far from the shores of Lake Michigan, so that it was possible on days of wind and weather to hear the water’s sound.

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