August Derleth: The House in the Valley

I, JEFFERSON BATES, make this deposition now, in full knowledge that, whatever the circumstances, I have not long to live. I do so in justice to those who survive me, as well as in an attempt to clear myself of the charge of which I have been so unjustly convicted. A great, if little-known American writer in the tradition of the Gothic once wrote that “the most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents,” yet I have had ample time for intense thought and reflection, and I have achieved an order in my thoughts I would never have thought possible only so little as a year ago.

For, of course, it was within the year that my “trouble” began. I put it so because I am not yet certain what other name to give it. If I had to set a precise day, I suppose in all fairness, it must be the day on which Brent Nicholson telephoned me in Boston to say he had discovered and rented for me the very place of isolation and natural beauty I had been seeking for the purpose of working at some paintings I had long had in mind.

It lay in an almost hidden valley beside a broad stream, not far from, yet well in from the Massachusetts coast, in the vicinity of the ancient settlements of Arkham and Dunwich, which every artist of the region knows for their curious gambrel structure, so pleasing to the eye, however forbidding to the spirit.

True, I hesitated. There were always fellow artists pausing for a day in Arkham or Dunwich or Kingston, and it was precisely fellow-artists I sought to escape. But in the end, Nicholson persuaded me, and within the week I found myself at the place. It proved to be a large, ancient house—certainly of the same vintage as so many in Arkham—which had been built in a little valley which ought to have been fertile but showed no sign of recent cultivation. It rose among gaunt pines, which crowded close on the house, and along one wall ran a broad, clear brook.

Despite the attractiveness it offered the eye at a distance, up close it present another face. For one thing, it was painted black. For another, it wore an air of forbidding formidableness. Its curtainless windows stared outward gloomily. All around it on the ground floor ran a narrow porch which had been stuffed and crammed with bundles of sacking tied with twine, half-rotted chairs, highboys, tables, and a singular variety of old-fashioned household objects, like a barricade designed either to keep someone or something inside or to prevent it from getting in. This barricade had manifestly been there a long time, for it showed the effects of expose to several years of weather. Its reason for being was too obscure even for the agent, to whom I wrote to ask, but it did help to lend the house a most curious air of being inhabited, though there was no sign of life, and nothing, indeed, to show that anyone had lived there for a very long time.

But this was an illusion which never left me. It was plain to see that no one had been in the house, not even Nicholson or the agent, for the barricade extended across both front and back doors of the almost square structure, and I had to pull away a section of it in order to make an entry myself.

Once inside, the impression of habitation was all the stronger. But there was a difference—all the gloom of the black-painted exterior was reversed inside. Here everything was light and surprisingly clean, considering the period of its abandonment.

Moreover, the house was furnished, scantily, true, but furnished, whereas I had received the distinct impression that everything which had once been inside had been piled up around the house on the verandah outside.

The house inside was as box-like as it appeared on the outside. There were four rooms below—a bedroom, a kitchen-pantry, a dining-room, a sitting-room; and upstairs, four of exactly the same dimensions—three bedrooms, and a storeroom. There were plenty of windows in all the rooms, and especially those facing north, which was gratifying, since the north light is best for painting.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft - August Derleth: Innsmouth clay

The facts relating to the fate of my friend, the late sculptor, Jeffrey Corey-if indeed "late" is the correct reference-must begin with his return from Paris and his decision to rent a cottage on the coast south of Innsmouth in the autumn of 1927. Corey came from an armigerous family with some distant relationship to the Marsh clan of Innsmouth-not, however, such a one as would impose upon him any obligation to consort with his distant relatives. There were, in any case, old rumors abroad about the reclusive Marshes who still lived in that Massachusetts seaport town, and these were hardly calculated to inspire Corey with any desire to announce his presence in the vicinity.

I visited him a month after his arrival in December of that year. Corey was a comparatively young man, not yet forty, six feet in height, with a fine, fresh skin, which was free of any hirsute adornment, though his hair was worn rather long, as was then the custom among artists in the Latin quarter of Paris. He had very strong blue eyes, and his lantern-jawed face would have stood out in any assemblage of people, not alone for the piercing quality of his gaze, but as much for the rather strange, wattled appearance of the skin back from his jaws, under his ears and down his neck a little way below his ears. He was not ill-favored in looks, and a queer quality, almost hypnotic, that informed his fine-featured face had a kind of fascination for most people who met him. He was well settled in when I visited him, and had begun work on a statue of Rima, the Bird-Girl, which promised to become one of his finest works.

He had laid in supplies to keep him for a month, having gone into Innsmouth for them, and he seemed to me more than usually loquacious, principally about his distant relatives, about whom there was a considerable amount of talk, however guarded, in the shops of Innsmouth. Being reclusive, the Marshes were quite naturally the object of some curiosity; and since that curiosity was not satisfied, an impressive lore and legendry had grown up about them, reaching all the way back to an earlier generation which had been in the South Pacific trade. There was little definite enough to hold meaning for Corey, but what there was suggested all manner of arcane horror, of which he expected at some nebulous future time to learn more, though he had no compulsion to do so. It was just, he explained, that the subject was so prevalent in the village that it was almost impossible to escape it.

He spoke also of a prospective show, made references to friends in Paris and his years of study there, to the strength of Epstein's sculpture, and to the political turmoil boiling in the country. I cite these matters to indicate how perfectly normal Corey was on the occasion of this first visit to him after his return from Europe. I had, of course, seen him fleetingly in New York when he had come home, but hardly long enough to explore any subject as we were able to do that December of 1927.

Before I saw him again, in the following March, I received a curious letter from him, the gist of which was contained in the final paragraph, to which everything else in his letter seemed to mount as to a climax...

August Derleth: The Seal of R’lyeh

 MY PATERNAL GRANDFATHER, whom I never saw except in a darkened room, used to say of me to my parents, “Keep him away from the sea!” as if I had some reason to fearwater, when, in fact, I have always been drawn to it. But those born under one of thewater signs—mine is Pisces—have a natural affinity for water, so much is well known.They are said to be psychic, too, but that is another matter, perhaps. At any rate, that was my grandfather’s judgement; a strange man, whom I could not have described to save my soul—though that, in the light of day, is an ambiguity indeed! That was beforemy father was killed in an automobile accident, and afterward it was never said in vain,for my mother kept me back in the hills, well away from the sight and sound and thesmells of the sea.

But what is meant to be will be. I was in college in a mid-western city when mymother died, and the week after, my Uncle Sylvan died too, leaving everything he had to me. Him I had never seen. He was the eccentric one of the family, the queer one, theblack sheep; he was known by a variety of names, and disparaged in all of them, exceptby my grandfather, who did not speak of him at all without sighing. I was, in fact, thelast of my grandfather’s direct line; there was a great-uncle living somewhere—in Asia,I always understood, though what he did there no one seemed to know, except that ithad something to do with the sea, shipping, perhaps—and so it was only natural that Ishould inherit my Uncle Sylvan’s places.

For he had two, and both, as luck would have it, were on the sea, one in aMassachusetts town called Innsmouth, and the other isolated on the coast well abovethat town. Even after the inheritance taxes, there was enough money to make it unnecessary for me to go back to college, or to do anything I had no mind to do, and theonly thing I had a mind to do was that which had been forbidden me for these twenty-two years, to go to the sea, perhaps to buy a sailboat or a yacht or whatever I liked. But that was not quite the way it was to be. I saw the lawyer in Boston and wenton to Innsmouth. A strange town, I found it. Not friendly, though there were those whosmiled when they learned who I was, smiled with a strange, secretive air, as if theyknew something they would not say of my Uncle Sylvan. Fortunately, the place at Innsmouth was the lesser of his places; it was plain that he had not occupied it much; itwas a dreary, somber old mansion, and I discovered, much to my surprise, that it wasthe family homestead, having been built by my great-grandfather, who had been in the China trade, and lived in by my grandfather for a good share of his life, and the name of Phillips was still held in a kind of awe in that town.

No, it was the other place in which my Uncle Sylvan had spent most of his life. Hewas only fifty when he died, but he had lived much like my grandfather; he had not been seen about much, being seldom away from that darkly overgrown house which crowned a rocky bluff on the coast above Innsmouth. It was not a lovely house, not such a one as would call to the lover of beauty, but it had its own attraction, nevertheless, and I felt it at once. I thought of it as a house that belonged to the sea, for the sound of the Atlantic was always in it, and trees shut it from the land, while to the sea it was open, itswide windows looking ever east. It was not an old house, like that other—thirty years, Iwas told—though it had been built by my uncle himself on the site of a far older housethat had belonged to my great-grandfather, too.