The Mythos Tales (19 page)

“Well,” said Conrad, “if the land about the house is useless, why not rent the building itself, or sell it?”

For the first time the mayor looked embarrassed. “None of the villagers would rent or buy it, as no good land goes with it, and to tell you the truth, it has been found impossible to enter the house!”

“Impossible?”

“Well,” he amended, “the doors and windows are heavily barred and bolted, and either the keys are in possession of someone who doesn’t care to divulge the secret, or else they’ve been lost. I have thought that possibly someone was using the house for a boot-leg den and had a reason for keeping the curious out, but no light has ever been seen there, and no one is ever seen slinking about the place.”

We had passed through the circling ring of sullen oaks and stood before the building. Seen from this vantage point, the house was formidable. It had a strange air of remoteness, as if, even though we could reach out and touch it, it stood far from us in some distant place, in another age, another time.

“I’d like to get into it,” said Skuyler.

“Try,” invited the mayor.

“Do you mean it?”

“I don’t see why not. Nobody’s bothered about the house as long as I can remember. No one’s paid taxes on the property for so long that I suppose technically it belongs to the county. It could be put up for sale, but nobody’d want it.”

Skuyler tried the door perfunctorily. The mayor watched him, a smile of amusement on his lips. Then Skuyler threw himself at the door. Not so much as a tremor moved it.

“I told you—they’re locked and barred, all the doors and windows. Short of demolishing the frame, you won’t get in.”

“I could do that,” said Skuyler.

“Perhaps,” said the mayor.

Skuyler picked up a sizable oak limb that had fallen.

“Don’t,” said Conrad suddenly.

But Skuyler had already moved forward. He ignored the door and thrust at the nearest window. He missed the frame, struck the glass, and shattered it. The oak limb came up against bars beyond.

“Don’t do it,” siad Conrad again, more earnestly.

The expression on his face was baffling.

Skuyler dropped the limb in disgust.

“Don’t you feel it?” asked Conrad then.

A rush of cool air had come out of the broken window, smelling of dust and age.

“Perhaps we’d better leave it be,” said the mayor uneasily.

Skuyler backed away.

“You never can tell,” said the mayor lamely.

Conrad stood as if in a trance. Then he moved forward and bent his head in the opening in the window pane. He stood there in an attitude of listening, his eyes half closed. He braced himself against the house; I saw that his hand was trembling. “Great winds!” he whispered. “A maelstrom of winds.”

“Jim!” I said sharply.

He pulled away from the window. His face was strange. His lips were parted almost ecstatically. His eyes glittered. “I did hear something,” he said.

“You wouldn’t hear even a rat in there,” said the mayor. “They need food to stay in a place—and failing it, won’t stay.”

“Great winds,” said Conrad again, shaking his head.

“Let’s move,” said Skuyler, as if he had forgotten why we had come.

No one proposed to stay. The house had affected all of us so disagreeably that our quest was forgotten.

But Conrad had not forgotten it. As we drove away from Skuyler’s studio, after leaving the artist there, he said, “Kirowan—I’m going back there some day.”

I said nothing, neither of encouragement nor of protest, certain that he would put it out of his mind in a few days.

He said no more of Justin Geoffrey and the poet’s strange life.

II

It was a week before I saw Conrad again. I had forgotten the house in the oaks, and Justin Geoffrey as well. But the sight of Conrad’s drawn, haggard face, and the expression in his eyes brought Geoffrey and the house back with a rush, for I knew intuitively that Conrad had gone back there.

“Yes,” he admitted, whenlput ittohim. “Iwantedto duplicate Geoffrey’s experience—to spend a night near the house, in the circle of oak trees. I did it. And since then—the dreams! I have not had a night free of them. I have had little sleep. I did get into the house.”

“If that inquiry into Justin Geoffrey’s life has brought you to this, Jim—forget it, give it up.”

He gave me an almost pitying look, so that it was clear to me that he thought I did not understand.

“Too late,” he said bluntly. “I came to see whether you'd take over my affairs if—if something should happen to me.”

“Don’t talk that way,” I cried, alarmed.

“It’s no good to lecture me, Kirowan,” he said. “I’ve set my affairs pretty much in order.”

“Have you seen a doctor?” I asked.

He shook his head. “There’s nothing any doctor could do, believe me. Will you do it?”

“Of course—but I hope it will never be necessary.” He took a bulky envelope from the inner pocket of his coat. “I’ve brought you this, Kirowan. Read it when you’ve time.”

I took it. “You’ll want it back?”

“No. Keep it. Burn it when you’ve done with it. Do whatever you want with it. It doesn't matter.”

As abruptly as he had come, he took his departure. The change in him was remarkable and profoundly disturbing.

He seemed no longer the James Conrad 1 had known for so many years. I watched him go with many misgivings, but 1 knew I could not stay his course. That extraordinary abandoned house had altered his personality to an astonishing degree—if indeed it were that. A deep depression coupled with a kind of black despair had possession of him.

I tore open the envelope at once. The manuscript inside bore, in the appearance of its script, every aspect of urgent haste.

“I want you, Kirowan, to know the events of the past week. I am sure I need hardly tell an old friend who has known me as long as you have, that I lost no time going back to that house in the oaks. (Did it ever occur to you that oaks and the Druids are closely related in folklore?) I returned the next night, and I went with crowbar and sledge and everything necessary to break down the frame of door or window so that I could get into the house. I had to get in—I knew it when 1 felt that uncanny draught of cold air flowing out of it. That day was warm, you’ll remember—and the air inside that closed house might have been cool, but not cold as an Arctic wind!

‘‘It is not important to set down the agonizing details of my breaking into the house; let me say only it was as if the house fought me through every nail and splinter! But I succeeded. I took out the window Skuyler broke in his ill- advised attempt to batter his way in. (And he knew very well—he felt it, too—why he gave up so easily!)

“The interior of the house is in sharp contrast to its atmosphere. It is still furnished, and I judge that the furniture goes back at the least to the early nineteenth century; I’d guess it’s eighteenth century. All otherwise very commonplace—nothing fancy about the interior at all. But the air is cold—(I came prepared for that)—very cold, and stepping into the house was like entering another latitude. Dust, of course, and lint, and cobwebs in the comers and on the ceiling.

“Apart from the cold and the atmosphere of utter strangeness, there was one more thing—there was a skeleton sitting in a chair in what was evidently the study of the house, for there were books on the shelves. The clothes had pretty well fallen away, but what was left of them indicated that it was a man’s skeleton, as did the bones, too. I could not tell how he died, but since the house was so well locked and barred from the inside, I concluded that he had either taken his own life or had been aware that he was dying and made these preparations before death overtook him.

“But even this is not important. The presence of that skeleton there did not impress me as extraordinary—not nearly as much as the atmosphere of the house. 1 have mentioned the unnatural cold. Well, the very house was as unnatural inside as it appeared to be from the outside. It was, I felt at once, literally a house in another world, another dimension, separated from our own time and space and yet bound tenuously to it. How ambiguous this must sound to you!

“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.