The Mythos Tales by Robert E. Howard
“Let me say that at first I was aware of nothing more than the cold and the feeling of alienation. But as the night wore on, that feeling grew. I had come prepared to spend the night; I had brought flashlights, a sleeping-bag, everything I needed, even to something to drink and eat. I wasn’t tired, so the first thing I did, I explored the house. It was as ordinary upstairs and down—just about, I estimated, like any house of that period you were apt to find anywhere in New England. And yet—yet there was something subtly different—it wasn’t in the furnishings or the architecture, it was nothing you could reach out and touch, nothing you could single out and identify.
“And it grew!
“I felt it growing when I paused to look over the books on the shelves in the study. Old books. Some in Dutch— and the name on the flyleaf—(van Hoogstraten)—indicated that their owner had been Dutch—some in Latin, some in English—all very old books, some dating back to the 1300s. Books on alchemy, metallurgy, sorcery— books on occult matters, religious beliefs, superstition, witchcraft—books about strange happenings, outer worlds—books with titles like Necronomicon—De Vermis Mysteriis—Liber Ivonie— The Shadow Kingdom— Worlds Within Worlds—Unausprechlichen Kulten—De Lapide Philosophico—Monas Hieroglyphica— What Lies Beyond?—and others of similar nature. But my attention was distracted from them by a kind of vague uneasiness, a feeling as of being watched, as if I were not alone in that house.
“I stood and listened. There was nothing but the sound of wind outside—or what I took to be w'ind outside; but of course this was the same sound 1 had heard the day we were here, as I ascertained by looking out toward the oaks, which were visible in the light of the risen full moon, revealing that no twig stirred, which indicated the stillness of the air outside. So this sound was integral to the house; you may have had the experience of standing in an absolutely soundless place, and hearing the silence-—a kind of ringing or muted humming sound—it has happened to me many times; it has happened to others; well, this was a similar sound, but it was undeniably a sound of wind or winds blowing far away, like the first intimation of a windstorm heard from far off, approaching and growing steadily louder. But there was no other sound—not a creak or a cracking of boards, so common to houses during changes in temperature; not the whisper of a mouse or the clicking of a beetle; nothing.
“I went back to the books, guided by the flashlight’s glow; and so I saw, as I passed between the seated skeleton and the fireplace, that something had been burned there—paper, evidently—and fragments of it lay at the edge of the hearth, not quite reduced to ashes; and, curious, I picked up some of them as carefully as I could, and examined them. They were fragments of a manuscript in Dutch, and though my knowledge of that language is not excessive, and despite a certain archaic nature of the script, I was able to read disjointed lines, which, though meaningless at the time, became more meaningful as the night made progress. Of course, there was no possibility of establishing any order among them.
“...what I have done...
“...In the beginning was chant— ...
...at this hour the winds gave notice of His coming...
...house is a door to that place...
“...He Who Will Come...
“...breach the wall... coterminous world... "... iron bars and recited the formulae...
“It seemed to me that the man who had died there, whoever he was—and there was nothing in the fragments of manuscript or the shreds of clothing that remained to identify him (presumably a former owner of the house)— being aware of the approach of death (or intending suicide), had reduced his manuscript to ashes. I examined the fireplace thoroughly; there was some evidence to show that other papers had been burned there, but nothing remained to indicate what they might have been, and I lacked the equipment to make anything more than the most cursory examination. And having done so, he prepared to die. I can only suppose that he was so reclusive by nature that no one troubled to look into his failure to appear; and that when someone did, the obviously locked and barred openings were presumptive evidence that he had gone away. Furthermore, if the skeleton is as old as I believe it to be, the neighborhood must have been very sparsely settled at the time.
“Throughout the period of my examination and transcribing of the fragments, I was aware of the wind’s sound growing louder and stronger—but it was as if it were an auditory hallucination, for there was no disturbance of the air save that minor current flowing toward the break in the wall where the window had been removed. Illusion or not, the rushing sound of the wind was unmistakable—it was as if it drove across great open spaces, for there was no hushing of leaves or trees in it, only the booming and echoing of wind in defiles and great ravines, the roaring of wind that coursed vast deserts. And there was a concomitant increase in the cold so integral to the house. But over and above this was the growing conviction of being watched, of being under scrutiny so intense that it was as if the very walls were aware of every movement that I made.
“Not surprisingly perhaps, uneasiness began to be edged with fear. I caught myself looking over my shoulder, and from time to time I crossed to the windows and looked out through the bars. I could not keep certain lines of Justin Geoffrey’s from recurring to mind—
‘They say foul things of Old Times still lurk
In Dark forgotten comers of the world,
And gates still gape to loose, on certain nights,
Shapes pent in hell ...’
“I tried to collect my thoughts. I sat down and concentrated with all my will on rejecting the nameless fear that pressed upon me. But I could not rest; I had to keep on the move; and that meant going to the windows from time to time. All this while, keep in mind, the wind’s sound roared around me, though I felt nothing but the cold; and all this while, too, a subtle change was taking place in my surroundings. Oh, the house and the walls, the room, the skeleton in the chair, the shelves of books were stable— but now as I looked outside I saw that a fog or a mist had risen, dimming the moon and the stars; and presently the moon and the stars winked out, and the house and I were enclosed in a well of utter blackness.
“But this did not remain. Presently it lightened. Yet the moon and the moonlight did not return. Rather, some strange hallucinatory effects began to make show. Though I could not say that I had memorized the landscape outside the house, I was at least familiar enough with Old Dutchtown and its general area to realize that the disturbing facets of countryside I now saw in that dim, iridescent glow were not natural to New England. Indeed, they were not. And once again lines of Geoffrey’s passed through—
‘Tread not where stony deserts hold
Lost secrets of an alien land,
And gaunt against the sunset’s gold
Colossal nightmare towers stand.’
For I saw great towers, I caught glimpses of tall spires, shifting and vanishing before my eyes as I looked from that house as from some vortex in space across eons of time, shifting and vanishing in great clouds of blowing sand—and then, most terrifying of all, there was at last something more.
“How can I set it down more effectively than Justin Geoffrey himself wrote it many years ago, aware of that which undoubtedly haunted his nights and days and led him to that same dream-haunted life? A child of ten he was then, when he slept near the house, within the circle of oaks—and to a child all things are part of his world, part of his nature; it was not until he grew older that he learned what he experienced that haunted night was not a part of his natural world, a revelation that troubled him so profoundly as to dog him throughout his scant years. What did he seeR in that dread journey to Hungary in search of the Black Stone—if it were not tied to his experience at ten? Of what else did he write in his haunting poems? And was this not the landscape of his dreams that informed his strange verses?
“‘Behind the Veil, what gulfs of Time and Space?
What blinking, mowing things to blast the sight?
I shrink before a vague, colossal Face<
Born in the mad immensities of Night.’
“Thus he wrote what lay at the heart of his experience. He saw through another world, another dimension. The house in the oaks held the key; it was the door into space and time, by what alchemy or sorcery made so none can now tell, and Justin Geoffrey touched upon it as a child and accepted it until the conventions and knowledge of his own world bade him understand that the world of his dreams was utterly alien and malign.
“And he, in effect, was as much a door to that malign place in a dimension coterminous with our own and might afford entrance to the world of men for the beings that inhabited that alien space. Was it to wonder at that he died mad? The wonder of it is that he was able to hold off madness for so long, that he could find release In his poems, those oddly disturbing lines which have come down to us to reflect the troubled mind that brought him to his ultimate end.
“For, Kirowan, I saw what he saw. I saw those great ‘blinking, mowing things’ in that weird landscape beyond the windows of that accursed house in the oaks—great, vague shapes that loomed through the blowing sand, I heard their shrieks and cries riding that wind from outer space—and, most horrible of all, I saw too the outlines of that colossal face with its eyes—eyes that flamed as with living fire—fixed upon me as certainly as I stared past the bars of the window into that alien world—saw it clearly and unmistakably, and knew it for what Geoffrey saw, before I fled that house in the early hours of the morning.
“Since then I have not slept without seeing that great face, those eyes burned on me. I know myself for its victim, as much as ever Justin Geoffrey was—but I have not had to grow into that knowledge, as he did—I know the full, cataclysmic meaning of that alien world’s impingement upon ours, and I know I cannot long sustain myself against the terrible dreams that fill the hours of my nights ...”
So, abruptly, his manuscript ended, and it was patent in the alteration of his script that his agitation had increased considerably from the time he had begun the writing of his account.
III
There is little more to tell. I made every effort to find James Conrad, but he had gone from all his accustomed haunts.
Two days later he was heard from again. The newspapers carried the story of his suicide. Before taking his own life he had traveled once more to Old Dutchtown and set fire to the house in the oaks, burning it to the ground.
I went to the site after we had buried Conrad. Nothing at all was left. It was a place of singular desolation. Even the oaks were blackened and burned. I felt, as I stood at its perimeter, an unremitting, unchanging, unearthly cold that held to it like an eternal element of the place where that forbidding house had once stood.
Robert E. Howard, The Mythos Tales