Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (26 page)

I know, and Laird knows. We never speak of it.

If we had had any doubt, despite everything that had gone before, we could not forget that final, soul-searing discovery, the thing we saw when we shielded our eyes from the flames all around and looked away from those beings in the heavens, the line of footprints that led away from the lodge in the direction of that hellish slab deep in the black forest,
the footprints that began in the soft soil beyond the verandah
in the shape of a man’s footprints, and changed with each step into a hideously suggestive imprint made by a creature of incredible shape and weight, with variations of outline and size so grotesque as to have been incomprehensible to anyone who had not seen the thing on the slab—and beside them, torn and rent as if by an expanding force, the clothing that once belonged to Professor Gardner, left piece by piece along the trail back into the woods, the trail taken by the hellish monstrosity that had come out of the night, the Dweller in Darkness who had visited us in the shape and guise of Professor Gardner!

T
he 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 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 moustache and a small beard to soften the hard line of his square jaw. His eyes were dark, not overlarge, 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 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 from Massachusetts long enough 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 need someone who can be trusted.” There was nothing obviously urgent about the letter, and yet there was a queer 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 take a 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 Superior, so that it was possible on days of wind and weather to hear the water’s sound.

Frolin met me at the station. My cousin was in his late thirties then, but he had the look of someone ten years younger, with hot, intense brown eyes, and a soft, sensitive mouth that belied his inner hardness. He was singularly sober, though he had always alternated between gravity and a kind of infectious wildness—“the Irish in him,” as grandfather had once said. I met his eyes when I shook his hand, probing for some clue to his withheld distress, but I saw only that he was indeed troubled, for his eyes betrayed him, even as the roiled waters of a pond reveal disturbance below, though the surface may be as glass.

“What is it?” I asked, when I sat at his side in the coupe, riding into the country of the tall pines. “Is the old man abed?”

He shook his head. “Oh, no, nothing like that, Tony.” He shot me a queer, restrained glance. “You’ll see. You wait and see.”

“What is it then?” I pressed him. “Your letter had the damndest sound.”

“I hoped it would,” he said gravely.

“And yet there was nothing I could put my finger on,” I admitted. “But it was there, nevertheless.”

He smiled. “Yes, I knew you’d understand. I tell you, it’s been difficult—extremely difficult. I thought of you a good many times before I sat down and wrote that letter, believe me!”

“But if he’s not ill …? I thought you said he wasn’t himself.”

“Yes, yes, so I did. You wait now, Tony; don’t be so impatient; you’ll see for yourself. It’s his mind, I think.”

“His mind!” I felt a distinct wave of regret and shock at the suggestion
that grandfather’s mind had given way; the thought that that magnificent brain had retreated from sanity was intolerable, and I was loath to entertain it. “Surely not!” I cried. “Frolin—what the devil is it?”

He turned his troubled eyes on me once more. “I don’t know. But I think it’s something terrible. If it were only grandfather. But there’s the music—and then there are all the other things: the sounds and smells and—” He caught my amazed stare and turned away, almost with physical effort pausing in his talk. “But I’m forgetting. Don’t ask me anything more. Just wait. You’ll see for yourself.” He laughed shortly, a forced laugh. “Perhaps it’s not the old man who’s losing his mind. I’ve thought of that sometimes, too—with reason.”

I said nothing more, but there was beginning to mushroom up inside me now a kind of tense fear, and for some time I sat by his side, thinking only of Frolin and old Josiah Alwyn living together in that old house, unaware of the towering pines all around, and the wind’s sound, and the fragrant pungence of leaf-fire smoke riding the wind out of the northwest. Evening came early to this country, caught in the dark pines, and, though afterglow still lingered in the west, fanning upward in a great wave of saffron and amethyst, darkness already possessed the forest through which we rode. Out of the darkness came the cries of the great horned owls and their lesser cousins, the screech owls, making an eerie magic in the stillness broken otherwise only by the wind’s voice and the noise of the car passing along the comparatively little-used road to the Alwyn house.

“We’re almost there,” said Frolin.

The lights of the car passed over a jagged pine, lightning-struck years ago, and standing still with two gaunt limbs arched like gnarled arms toward the road: an old landmark to which Frolin’s words called my attention, since he knew I would remember it but half a mile from the house.

“If grandfather should ask,” he said then, “I’d rather you said nothing about my sending for you. I don’t know that he’d like it. You can tell him you were in the Midwest and came up for a visit.”

I was curious anew, but forbore to press Frolin further. “He does know I’m coming, then?”

“Yes. I said I had word from you and was going down to meet your train.”

I could understand that if the old man thought Frolin had sent for me about his health, he would be annoyed and perhaps angry; and yet more than this was implied in Frolin’s request, more than just the simple salving of grandfather’s pride. Once more that odd, intangible alarm rose up within me, that sudden, inexplicable feeling of fear.

The house looked forth suddenly in a clearing among the pines. It
had been built by an uncle of grandfather’s in Wisconsin’s pioneering days, back in the 1850s: by one of the seafaring Alwyns of Innsmouth, that strange, dark town on the Massachusetts coast. It was an unusually unattractive structure, snug against the hillside like a crusty old woman in furbelows. It defied many architectural standards without, however, seeming ever fully free of most of the superficial facets of architecture circa 1850, making for the most grotesque and pompous appearance of structures of that day. It suffered a wide verandah, one side of which led directly into the stables where, in former days, horses, surreys, and buggies had been kept, and where now two cars were housed—the only corner of the building which gave any evidence at all of having been remodeled since it was built. The house rose two and one-half stories above a cellar floor; presumably, for darkness made it impossible to ascertain, it was still painted the same hideous brown; and judging by what light shone forth from the curtained windows, grandfather had not yet taken the trouble to install electricity, a contingency for which I had come well prepared by carrying a flashlight and an electric candle, with extra batteries for both.

Frolin drove into the garage, left the car, and carrying some of my baggage, led the way down the verandah to the front door, a massive, thick-paneled oak piece, decorated with a ridiculously large iron knocker. The hall was dark, save for a partly open door at the far end, out of which came a faint light which was yet enough to illumine spectrally the broad stairs leading to the upper floor.

“I’ll take you to your room first,” said Frolin, leading the way up the stairs, surefooted with habitual walking there. “There’s a flashlight on the newel post at the landing,” he added. “If you need it. You know the old man.”

I found the light and lit it, making only enough delay so that when I caught up with Frolin, he was standing at the door of my room, which, I noticed, was almost directly over the front entrance and thus faced west, as did the house itself.

“He’s forbidden us to use any of the rooms east of the hall up here,” said Frolin, fixing me with his eyes, as much as to say: You see how queer he’s got! He waited for me to say something, but since I did not, he went on. “So I have the room next to yours, and Hough is on the other side of me, in the southwest corner. Right now, as you might have noticed, Hough’s getting something to eat.”

“And grandfather?”

“Very likely in his study. You’ll remember that room.”

I did indeed remember that curious windowless room, built under explicit directions by Great-Uncle Leander, a room that occupied the majority of the rear of the house, the entire northwest corner and all the west width save for a small corner at the southwest, where the
kitchen was, the kitchen from which a light had streamed into the lower hall at our entrance. The study had been pushed partway back into the hill slope, so the east wall could not have windows, but there was no reason save Uncle Leander’s eccentricity for the windowless north wall. Squarely in the center of the east wall, indeed, built into the wall, was an enormous painting, reaching from the floor to the ceiling and occupying a width of over six feet. If this painting, apparently executed by some unknown friend of Uncle Leander’s, if not by my great-uncle himself, had had about it any mark of genius or even of unusual talent, this display might have been overlooked, but it did not, it was a perfectly prosaic representation of a north country scene, showing a hillside, with a rocky cave opening out into the center of the picture, a scarcely defined path leading to the cave, an impressionistic beast which was evidently meant to resemble a bear, once common in this country, walking toward it, and overhead something that looked like an unhappy cloud lost among the pines rising darkly all around. This dubious work of art completely and absolutely dominated the study, despite the shelves of books that occupied almost every available niche in what remained of the walls in that room, despite the absurd collection of oddities strewn everywhere—bits of curiously carven stone and wood, strange mementos of great-uncle’s seafaring life. The study had all the lifelessness of a museum, and yet, oddly, it responded to my grandfather like something alive, even the painting on the wall seeming to take on an added freshness whenever he entered.