In
the morning, mist comes up from the sea by the cliffs beyond Kingsport.
White and feathery it comes from the deep to its brothers the clouds, full
of dreams of dank pastures and caves of leviathan. And later, in still
summer rains on the steep roofs of poets, the clouds scatter bits of those
dreams, that men shall not live without rumor of old strange secrets, and
wonders that planets tell planets alone in the night. When tales fly thick
in the grottoes of tritons, and conchs in seaweed cities blow wild tunes
learned from the Elder Ones, then great eager mists flock to heaven laden
with lore, and oceanward eyes on tile rocks see only a mystic whiteness,
as if the cliff's rim were the rim of all earth, and the solemn bells of
buoys tolled free in the aether of faery.
Now north of archaic Kingsport the crags climb lofty and curious,
terrace on terrace, till the northernmost hangs in the sky like a gray
frozen wind-cloud. Alone it is, a bleak point jutting in limitless space,
for there the coast turns sharp where the great Miskatonic pours out of
the plains past Arkham, bringing woodland legends and little quaint memories
of New England's hills. The sea-folk of Kingsport look up at that cliff
as other sea-folk look up at the pole-star, and time the night's watches
by the way it hides or shows the Great Bear, Cassiopeia and the Dragon.
Among them it is one with the firmament, and truly, it is hidden from them
when the mist hides the stars or the sun.
Some of the cliffs they love, as that whose grotesque profile they
call Father Neptune, or that whose pillared steps they term "The Causeway";
but this one they fear because it is so near the sky. The Portuguese sailors
coming in from a voyage cross themselves when they first see it, and the
old Yankees believe it would be a much graver matter than death to climb
it, if indeed that were possible. Neverthcless there is an ancient house
on that cliff, and at evening men see lights in the small-paned windows.
The ancient house has always been there, and people say One dwells
within who talks with the morning mists that come up from the deep, and
perhaps sees singular things oceanward at those times when the cliff's
rim becomes the rim of all earth, and solemn buoys toll free in the white
aether of faery. This they tell from hearsay, for that forbidding crag
is always unvisited, and natives dislike to train telescopes on it. Summer
boarders have indeed scanned it with jaunty binoculars, but have never
seen more than the gray primeval roof, peaked and shingled, whose eaves
come nearly to the gray foundations, and the dim yellow light of the little
windows peeping out from under those eaves in the dusk. These summer people
do not believe that the same One has lived in the ancient house for hundreds
of years, but can not prove their heresy to any real Kingsporter. Even
the Terrible Old Man who talks to leaden pendulums in bottles, buys groceries
with centuried Spanish gold, and keeps stone idols in the yard of his antediluvian
cottage in Water Street can only say these things were the same when his
grandfather was a boy, and that must have been inconceivable ages ago,
when Belcher or Shirley or Pownall or Bernard was Governor of His Majesty's
Province of the Massachusetts-Bay.
Then one summer there came a philosopher into Kingsport. His name
was Thomas Olney, and he taught ponderous things in a college by Narragansett
Bay. With stout wife and romping children he came, and his eyes were weary
with seeing the same things for many years, and thinking the same well-disciplined
thoughts. He looked at the mists from the diadem of Father Neptune, and
tried to walk into their white world of mystery along the titan steps of
The Causeway. Morning after morning he would lie on the cliffs and look
over the world's rim at the cryptical aether beyond, listening to spectral
bells and the wild cries of what might have been gulls. Then, when the
mist would lift and the sea stand out prosy with the smoke of steamers,
he would sigh and descend to the town, where he loved to thread the narrow
olden lanes up and down hill, and study the crazy tottering gables and
odd-pillared doorways which had sheltered so many generations of sturdy
sea-folk. And he even talked with the Terrible Old Man, who was not fond
of strangers, and was invited into his fearsomely archaic cottage where
low ceilings and wormy panelling hear the echoes of disquieting soliloquies
in the dark small hours.
Of course it was inevitable that Olney should mark the gray unvisited
cottage in the sky, on that sinister northward crag which is one with the
mists and the firmament. Always over Kingsport it hung, and always its
mystery sounded in whispers through
Kingsport's crooked alleys. The Terrible Old Man wheezed a tale that
his father had told him, of lightning that shot one night up from that
peaked cottage to the clouds of higher heaven; and Granny Orne, whose tiny
gambrel-roofed abode in Ship Street is all covered with moss and ivy, croaked
over something her grandmother had heard at second-hand, about shapes that
flapped out of the eastern mists straight into the narrow single door of
that unreachable place - for the door is set close to the edge of the crag
toward the ocean, and glimpsed only from ships at sea.
At length, being avid for new strange things and held back by neither
the Kingsporter's fear nor the summer boarder's usual indolence, Olney
made a very terrible resolve. Despite a conservative training - or because
of it, for humdrum lives breed wistful longings of the unknown - he swore
a great oath to scale that avoided northern cliff and visit the abnormally
antique gray cottage in the sky. Very plausibly his saner self argued that
the place must be tenanted by people who reached it from inland along the
easier ridge beside the Miskatonic's estuary. Probably they traded in Arkham,
knowing how little Kingsport liked their habitation or perhaps being unable
to climb down the cliff on the Kingsport side. Olney walked out along the
lesser cliffs to where the great crag leaped insolently up to consort with
celestial things, and became very sure that no human feet could mount it
or descend it on that beetling southern slope. East and north it rose thousands
of feet perpendicular from the water so only the western side, inland and
toward Arkham, remained.
One early morning in August Olney set out to find a path to the inaccessible
pinnacle. He worked northwest along pleasant back roads, past Hooper's
Pond and the old brick powder-house to where the pastures slope up to the
ridge above the Miskatonic and give a lovely vista of Arkham's white Georgian
steeples across leagues of river and meadow. Here he found a shady road
to Arkham, but no trail at all in the seaward direction he wished. Woods
and fields crowded up to the high bank of the river's mouth, and bore not
a sign of man's presence; not even a stone wall or a straying cow, but
only the tall grass and giant trees and tangles of briars that the first
Indian might have seen. As he climbed slowly east, higher and higher above
the estuary on his left and nearer and nearer the sea, he found the way
growing in difficulty till he wondered how ever the dwellers in that disliked
place managed to reach the world outside, and whether they came often to
market in Arkham.
Then the trees thinned, and far below him on his right he saw the
hills and antique roofs and spires of Kingsport. Even Central Hill was
a dwarf from this height, and he could just make out the ancient graveyard
by the Congregational Hospital beneath which rumor said some terrible caves
or burrows lurked. Ahead lay sparse grass and scrub blueberry bushes, and
beyond them the naked rock of the crag and the thin peak of the dreaded
gray cottage. Now the ridge narrowed, and Olney grew dizzy at his loneness
in the sky, south of him the frightful precipice above Kingsport, north
of him the vertical drop of nearly a mile to the river's mouth. Suddenly
a great chasm opened before him, ten feet deep, so that he had to let himself
down by his hands and drop to a slanting floor, and then crawl perilously
up a natural defile in the opposite wall. So this was the way the folk
of the uncanny house journeyed betwixt earth and sky!
When he climbed out of the chasm a morning mist was gathering, but
he clearly saw the lofty and unhallowed cottage ahead; walls as gray as
the rock, and high peak standing bold against the milky white of the seaward
vapors. And he perceived that there was no door on this landward end, but
only a couple of small lattice windows with dingy bull's-eye panes leaded
in seventeenth century fashion. All around him was cloud and chaos, and
he could see nothing below the whiteness of illimitable space. He was alone
in the sky with this queer and very disturbing house; and when he sidled
around to the front and saw that the wall stood flush with the cliff's
edge, so that the single narrow door was not to be reached save from the
empty aether, he felt a distinct terror that altitude could not wholly
explain. And it was very odd that shingles so worm-eaten could survive,
or bricks so crumbled still form a standing chimney.
As the mist thickened, Olney crept around to the windows on the north
and west and south sides, trying them but finding them all locked. He was
vaguely glad they were locked, because the more he saw of that house the
less he wished to get in. Then a sound halted him. He heard a lock rattle
and a bolt shoot, and a long creaking follow as if a heavy door were slowly
and cautiously opened. This was on the oceanward side that he could not
see, where the narrow portal opened on blank space thousands of feet in
the misty sky above the waves.
Then there was heavy, deliberate tramping in the cottage, and Olney
heard the windows opening, first on the north side opposite him, and then
on the west just around the corner. Next would come the south windows,
under the great low eaves on the side where he stood; and it must be said
that he was more than uncomfortable as he thought of the detestable house
on one side and the vacancy of upper air on the other. When a fumbling
came in the nearer casements he crept around to the west again, flattening
himself against the wall beside the now opened windows. It was plain that
the owner had come home; but he had not come from the land, nor from any
balloon or airship that could be imagined. Steps sounded again, and Olney
edged round to the north; but before he could find a haven a voice called
softly, and he knew he must confront his host.
Stuck out of the west window was a great black-bearded face whose
eyes were phosphorescent with the imprint of unheard-of sights. But the
voice was gentle, and of a quaint olden kind, so that Olney did not shudder
when a brown hand reached out to help him over the sill and into that low
room of black oak wainscots and carved Tudor furnishings. The man was clad
in very ancient garments, and had about him an unplaceable nimbus of sea-lore
and dreams of tall galleons. Olney does not recall many of the wonders
he told, or even who he was; but says that he was strange and kindly, and
filled with the magic of unfathomed voids of time and space. The small
room seemed green with a dim aqueous light, and Olney saw that the far
windows to the east were not open, but shut against the misty aether with
dull panes like the bottoms of old bottles.
That bearded host seemed young, yet looked out of eyes steeped in
the elder mysteries; and from the tales of marvelous ancient things he
related, it must be guessed that the village folk were right in saying
he had communed with the mists of the sea and the clouds of the sky ever
since there was any village to watch his taciturn dwelling from the plain
below. And the day wore on, and still Olney listened to rumors of old times
and far places, and heard how the kings of Atlantis fought with the slippery
blasphemies that wriggled out of rifts in ocean's floor, and how the pillared
and weedy temple of Poseidon is still glimpsed at midnight by lost ships,
who knew by its sight that they are lost. Years of the Titans were recalled,
but the host grew timid when he spoke of the dim first age of chaos before
the gods or even the Elder Ones were born, and when the other gods
came to dance on the peak of Hatheg-Kia in the stony desert near Ulthar,
beyond the River Skai.
It was at this point that there came a knocking on the door; that
ancient door of nail-studded oak beyond which lay only the abyss of white
cloud. Olney started in fright, but the bearded man motioned him to be
still, and tiptoed to the door to look out through a very small peephole.
What he saw he did not like, so pressed his fingers to his lips and tiptoed
around to shut and lock all the windows before returning to the ancient
settle beside his guest. Then Olney saw lingering against the translucent
squares of each of the little dim windows in succession a queer black outline
as the caller moved inquisitively about before leaving; and he was glad
his host had not answered the knocking. For there are strange objects in
the great abyss, and the seeker of dreams must take care not to stir up
or meet the wrong ones.
Then the shadows began to gather; first little furtive ones under
the table, and then bolder ones in the dark panelled corners. And the bearded
man made enigmatical gestures of prayer, and lit tall candles in curiously
wrought brass candle-sticks. Frequently he would glance at the door as
if he expected some one, and at length his glance seemed answered by a
singular rapping which must have followed some very ancient and secret
code. This time he did not even glance tbrough the peep-hole, but swung
the great oak bar and shot the bolt, unlatching the heavy door and flinging
it wide to the stars and the mist.
And then to the sound of obscure harmonies there floated into that
room from the deep all the dreams and memories of earth's sunken Mighty
Ones. And golden flames played about weedy locks, so that Olney was dazzled
as he did them homage. Trident-bearing Neptune was there, and sportive
tritons and fantastic nereids, and upon dolphins' backs was balanced a
vast crenulate shell wherein rode the gay and awful form of primal Nodens,
Lord of the Great Abyss. And the conchs of the tritons gave weird blasts,
and the nereids made strange sounds by striking on the grotesque resonant
shells of unknown lurkers in black seacaves. Then hoary Nodens reached
forth a wizened hand and helped Olney and his host into the vast shell,
whereat the conchs and the gongs set up a wild and awesome clamor. And
out into the limitless aether reeled that fabulous train, the noise of
whose shouting was lost in the echoes of thunder.
All night in Kingsport they watched that lofty cliff when the storm
and the mists gave them glimpses of it, and when toward the small hours
the little dim windows went dark they whispered of dread and disaster.
And Olney's children and stout wife prayed to the bland proper god of Baptists,
and hoped that the traveller would borrow an umbrella and rubbers unless
the rain stopped by morning. Then dawn swam dripping and mist-wreathed
out of the sea, and the buoys tolled solemn in vortices of white aether.
And at noon elfin horns rang over the ocean as Olney, dry and lightfooted,
climbed down from the cliffs to antique Kingsport with the look of far
places in his eyes. He could not recall what he had dreamed in the skyperched
hut of that still nameless hermit, or say how he had crept down that crag
untraversed by other feet. Nor could he talk of these matters at all save
with the Terrible Old Man, who afterward mumbled queer things in his long
white beard; vowing that the man who came down from that crag was not wholly
the man who went up, and that somewhere under that gray peaked roof, or
amidst inconceivable reaches of that sinister white mist, there lingered
still the lost spirit of him who was Thomas Obey.
And ever since that hour, through dull dragging years of grayness
and weariness, the philosopher has labored and eaten and slept and done
uncomplaining the suitable deeds of a citizen. Not any more does he long
for the magic of farther hills, or sigh for secrets that peer like green
reefs from a bottomless sea. The sameness of his days no longer gives him
sorrow and well-disciplined thoughts have grown enough for his imagination.
His good wife waxes stouter and his children older and prosier and more
useful, and he never fails to smile correctly with pride when the occasion
calls for it. In his glance there is not any restless light, and all he
ever listens for solemn bells or far elfin horns it is only at night when
old dreams are wandering. He has never seen Kingsport again, for his family
disliked the funny old houses and complained that the drains were impossibly
bad. They have a trim bungalow now at Bristol Highlands, where no tall
crags tower, and the neighbors are urban and modern.
But in Kingsport strange tales are abroad, and even the Terrible
Old Man admits a thing untold by his grandfather. For now, when the wind
sweeps boisterous out of the north past the high ancient house that is
one with the firmament, there is broken at last that ominous, brooding
silence ever before the bane of Kingsport's maritime cotters. And old folk
tell of pleasing voices heard singing there, and of laughter that swells
with joys beyond earth's joys; and say that at evening the little low windows
are brighter than formerly. They say, too, that the fierce aurora comes
oftener to that spot, shining blue in the north with visions of frozen
worlds while the crag and the cottage hang black and fantastic against
wild coruscations. And the mists of the dawn are thicker, and sailors are
not quite so sure that all the muffled seaward ringing is that of the solemn
buoys.
Worst of all, though, is the shrivelling of old fears in the hearts
of Kingsport's young men, who grow prone to listen at night to the north
wind's faint distant sounds. They swear no harm or pain can inhabit that
high peaked cottage, for in the new voices gladness beats, and with them
the tinkle of laughter and music. What tales the sea-mists may bring to
that haunted and northernmost pinnacle they do not know, but they long
to extract some hint of the wonders that knock at the cliff-yawning door
when clouds are thickest. And patriarchs dread lest some day one by one
they seek out that inaccessible peak in the sky, and learn what centuried
secrets hide beneath the steep shingled roof which is part of the rocks
and the stars and the ancient fears of Kingsport. That those venturesome
youths will come back they do not doubt, but they think a light may be
gone from their eyes, and a will from their hearts. And they do not wish
quaint Kingsport with its climbing lanes and archaic gables to drag listless
down the years while voice by voice the laughing chorus grows stronger
and wilder in that unknown and terrible eyrie where mists and the dreams
of mists stop to rest on their way from the sea to the skies.
They do not wish the souls of their young men to leave the pleasant
hearths and gambrel-roofed taverns of old Kingsport, nor do they wish the
laughter and song in that high rocky place to grow louder. For as the voice
which has come has brought fresh mists from the sea and from the north
fresh lights, so do they say that still other voices will bring more mists
and more lights, till perhaps the olden gods (whose existence they hint
only in whispers for fear the Congregational parson shall hear} may come
out of the deep and from unknown Kadath in the cold waste and make their
dwelling on that evilly appropriate crag so close to the gentle hills and
valleys of quiet, simple fisher folk. This they do not wish, for to plain
people things not of earth are unwelcome; and besides, the Terrible Old
Man often recalls what Olney said about a knock that the lone dweller feared,
and a shape seen black and inquisitive against the mist through those queer
translucent windows of leaded bull's-eyes.
All these things, however, the Elder Ones only may decide; and meanwhile
the morning mist still comes up by that lovely vertiginous peak with the
steep ancient house, that gray, low-eaved house where none is seen but
where evening brings furtive lights while the north wind tells of strange
revels. white and feathery it comes from the deep to its brothers the clouds,
full of dreams of dank pastures and caves of leviathan. And when tales
fly thick in the grottoes of tritons, and conchs in seaweed cities blow
wild tunes learned from the Elder Ones, then great eager vapors flock to
heaven laden with lore; and Kingsport, nestling uneasy in its lesser cliffs
below that awesome hanging sentinel of rock, sees oceanward only a mystic
whiteness, as if the cliff's rim were the rim of all earth, and the solemn
bells of the buoys tolled free in the aether of faery.
