“From the Manuscript, discovered in 1877 by Messrs. Tonnison and Berreggnog, in the Ruins that lie to the South of the Village of Kraighten, in the West of Ireland. Set out here, with Notes by William Hope Hodgson.”
Thus begins Hodgson’s second novel, The House on the Borderland, placing it loosely within the “found-manuscript” genre. That’s about the firmest fact one can rely upon when discussing this utterly strange work, so that’s where we’ll start.
Not before, and not in the century since, has there been a tale quite like this one, although other writers have since used the motif of a house/castle bridging multiple realities or planes of existence. Lovecraft quite naturally praised the book in his seminal essay Supernatural Horror in Literature (with some caveats that are usually omitted by publishers when quoting HPL in cover blurbs), since House could be called an early example of (if not an outright influence on) Lovecraft’s “cosmic” philosophy. More on that later.
Despite Lovecraft’s admiration, The House on the Borderland never broke out into true pop-culture consciousness. In 2000 Vertigo (a DC Comics imprint) put out a very interesting graphic novel adaptation, with a glowing introduction from Alan Moore, no less. The doom-metal band Electric Wizard put out a rare split single in 2008 with a song called “The House on the Borderland”. But apart from this, I’m hard pressed to find mention of the book outside of Lovecraft fans, horror lit blogs (much like this one is turning out to be, so far) and a few broad surveys of the gothic/fantastique tradition. Granted, not many books from the early 20th century are affecting our daily lives at this very moment, but I think House deserves somewhat more attention than it’s gotten.
I can certainly see why it’s remained a cult book, however—unlike Hodgson’s nautical tales of terror, House has always been very hard to get a grip on in terms of movie or radio adaptations. It’s just too weird, and too abstract, compared to a relatively simple story of sailors versus a Sargasso Sea swarming with monsters. There’s no real character arc, which makes a movie adaptation very dicey unless you radically change the concept, thus eliminating the reasons for adapting it in the first place. It’s just a weird, nightmarish ordeal from start to finish, which makes for sometimes interesting but seldom profitable (or profitable enough) movies. Let’s take a look.
The novel opens with two friends, Tonnison and Berreggnog (the narrator), looking for prime fishing in the remotest part of Ireland. Hodgson’s very first paragraph sets the mood in wonderfully gothic fashion:
RIGHT AWAY in the west of Ireland lies a tiny hamlet called Kraighten. It is situated, alone, at the base of a low hill. Far around there spreads a waste of bleak and totally inhospitable country; where, here and there at great intervals, one may come upon the ruins of some long desolate cottage—unthatched and stark. The whole land is bare and unpeopled, the very earth scarcely covering the rock that lies beneath it, and with which the country abounds, in places rising out of the soil in wave-shaped ridges.
The young men set up camp outside the village, near a small river. The locals are not unfriendly, but neither do they speak a word of English; rather, they speak pure Irish, which Tonnison explains is not uncommon in these parts.
After several days of swimming and fishing, the two friends venture downstream for a change. It isn’t long before they make a strange discovery: the river they had been following disappears abruptly into the ground. At a loss, they decide to continue on in the same general direction in hopes that the river resurfaces at some nearby point.
Tonnison spies a strange mist in the distance and, surmising that their elusive river has at last reemerged, leads his more reluctant friend in the search. The land changes rapidly from barren and flat to lowlands running riot with trees and bushes. Over it all hangs the mist, resplendent with multiple rainbows. The men push on into the trees, which grow so closely together that a repressive and gloomy mood falls over them. The narrator notices the trees are heavy with fruit, and discovers signs of cultivation, indicating they stand within the remains of a long abandoned garden or orchard.
Gradually the men become aware of a roaring sound. Tonnison declares it’s the sound of a waterfall, perhaps the reappearance of their missing river, and they go to investigate. Emerging from the overgrown garden, they find themselves at the very edge of an enormous chasm, a rift in the earth so deep they can’t quite make out the mist-shrouded bottom. The roaring sound that led them to the spot is indeed their missing river:
…we looked down through a boil of spray at a monster cataract of frothing water that burst, spouting, from the side of the chasm, nearly a hundred feet below.
Through the rising mist the narrator spies the ruins of some great structure, built on a great spur of rock that juts out over the chasm in a most alarming manner. Excited, Tonnison rushes to investigate, with the narrator trailing after him. Tonnison begins digging through the rubble, looking for artifacts, but it is the ruin itself that fascinates his companion. The fallen structure seems to be the last remnant of some great wall, but there is no sign of the house or castle it would have protected.
An excited cry from Tonnison brings the narrator running back. Tonnison has unearthed an old book, “much crumpled and dilapidated,” and much damaged in places. Yet most of it is readable, and so the narrator places it in his knapsack for later examination. Despite a concerted effort at excavation, nothing else is discovered, and so the men return to examining the grounds.
The chasm turns out to be almost perfectly circular, like a great well or pit sunk deep into the earth―except for the spur of rock jutting out into space. At some distance from this cataract they discover a lake, smooth and calm but for one spot where the water bubbled and gurgled.
The forest surrounding these landmarks seems suddenly oppressive; both men feel watched. A strange wailing cry startles them, followed by the sound of rustling leaves. (One is reminded of the “Land Of Lonesomeness” from The Boats of the Glen Carrig, and the terrifying, mournful cries that pierced each night.) Mindful of night’s swift approach, both men elect to quit this strange place, and make haste back to their camp.
After a late supper and a calming smoke, Tonnison calls for the narrator to read from the ancient book, and thus begins the story proper—The House on the Borderland:
“I AM an old man. I live here in this ancient house, surrounded by huge, unkempt gardens.
"The peasantry, who inhabit the wilderness beyond, say that I am mad. That is because I will have nothing to do with them. I live here alone with my old sister, who is also my housekeeper. We keep no servants—I hate them. I have one friend, a dog; yes, I would sooner have old Pepper than the rest of Creation together. He, at least, understands me—and has sense enough to leave me alone when I am in my dark moods.”
In two paragraphs we have a sense of the old man: reclusive, misanthropic, and moody—a shut-in and his spinster sister, isolating themselves from the outside world. He goes on to relate the unsavory reputation of the house, but in vague and unspecific terms:
I must have been here some ten years, before I saw sufficient to warrant any belief in the stories, current in the neighbourhood, about this house. It is true that I had, on at least a dozen occasions, seen, vaguely, things that puzzled me, and, perhaps, had felt more than I had seen. Then, as the years passed, bringing age upon me, I became often aware of something unseen, yet unmistakably present, in the empty rooms and corridors. Still, it was, as I have said, many years before I saw any real manifestations of the, so called, supernatural.”
Here we get a hint that some mysterious force is at work in the house. The presence, if we can call it that, seems to grow in intensity as the years pass—or else the man, in growing older, grows more susceptible to its influence.
One night, as the old man (as hereafter he shall be called, not to be confused with the narrator of the wraparound story) reads in his study, the candles in the room suddenly dim and change colors. It doesn’t even occur to him to be frightened until he notices Pepper whimpering at his feet, and then the only action he can think to take is no action: waiting to see what comes next.
It doesn’t take long. The candles fade out and leave the room in near-total darkness. A strange green glow fills the room, slowly turning crimson and becoming so bright the old man must shut his eyes against the glare. When he opens them again, the light is gone and he realizes he can see through the walls of his study:
I realised that I was looking out on to a vast plain, lit with the same gloomy twilight that pervaded the room. The immensity of this plain scarcely can be conceived. In no part could I perceive its confines. It seemed to broaden and spread out, so that the eye failed to perceive any limitations. Slowly, the details of the nearer portions began to grow clear; then, in a moment almost, the light died away, and the vision—if vision it were—faded and was gone.
As if in a dream, the narrator realizes he has left his chair, the study, and Pepper behind, floating up, up, up into the night. An “icy coldness” envelops him, and he turns to see the blue gem of the earth shrinking into the distance behind him:
Then, for the last time, I saw the earth—an enduring globule of radiant blue, swimming in an eternity of ether. And there I, a fragile flake of soul-dust, flickered silently across the void, from the distant blue, into the expanse of the unknown.
No explanations. Only the inexorable logic of a dream.
Time passes, though he knows not how long. Terror fills him as he gains a true understanding of the darkness he has been cast into, a blackness beyond the stars, and he knows what it is to be truly, finally alone.
But this dream is fickle, and before long the fear relaxes as he becomes aware of a swelling redness replacing the dark. He descends into this ocean of red, and finds himself hovering above the same plain he had spied from his study.
The plain is some vast Limbo, a monotonous, featureless “waste” left in perpetual twilight by a flaming black sun. The old man gradually discerns that he is moving, floating across the plain towards a chain of towering mountains. His course alters and he finds himself drawn into a rift between two titanic peaks. The crevice is so narrow that only a thin sliver of red sky can be seen far above. In silence, he continues moving forward, until a gradually increasing glow reveals an opening into an enormous natural amphitheatre, surrounded on all sides by titanic mountains.
The “terrible grandeur” of the place is forgotten in the shock of a new discovery: an enormous structure made of green jade sits in the center of this arena… and it looks like an exact, oversize replica of the old man’s house.
Eventually, the old man tears his gaze from the jade house and studies the arena: 12 miles in diameter, and featureless but for the great House. The eternal, “abominable stillness” of the place unnerves him, but even more unsettling are the great forms he now sees looming out of the mist above him: massive, monstrous statues(?) seated on great ledges above the arena.
The old man recognizes some of the great forms as gods of ancient mythology: four-limbed Kali, the Hindu goddess of death, with her belt of skulls; and Set, Egyptian god of darkness and chaos. Hundreds of forms materialize out of the mist, now that he knows to look for them:
…The mountains were full of strange things—Beast-gods, and Horrors, so atrocious and bestial that possibility and decency deny any further attempt to describe them. And I—I was filled with a terrible sense of overwhelming horror and fear and repugnance; yet, spite of these, I wondered exceedingly. Was there then, after all, something in the old heathen worship, something more than the mere deifying of men, animals and elements?...
Although they look like huge, immobile statues, the old man senses a subtle vitality about them; they seem somehow alive, yet in some sort of “deathlike trance”. Perhaps, he reasons, they are alive, in their fashion. Perhaps this is immortality as perceived by mortals.
(This scene immediately struck me as very Dunsanian. If you’ve never heard of Lord Dunsany, he really is an interesting figure. An Irish lord belonging to one of the oldest titled families in Ireland, Dunsany found immense fame in his day for his prolific literary output. (Yeats edited a book of his fiction, and F. Scott Fitzgerald quoted some Dunsany verse in his first novel.) Dunsany is largely remembered for his fantasy tales, and it’s said he might be the first modern writer to create a completely fictitious world with its own mythology. Lovecraft idolized him, and many of his own tales, such as “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”, bear a telltale Dunsanian influence. Dunsany populated his stories with an entire pantheon of gods that influenced the daily lives of mortals, yet are but dreams forgotten by the God that created them. Hodgson’s immense arena, surrounded by ever-watchful, monstrous immortals, is a striking image, evoking the fantasies of Dunsany yet retaining a dreamlike, ageless terror that was Hodgson’s own specialty. The Gods of Pegāna, Dunsany’s fictional debut (and most celebrated work) was written in 1905, and it’s not impossible that Hodgson might have read it by the time he came to write House.)
The old man’s musings are interrupted as he discovers himself moving again, floating inexorably towards the House. Then:
…all at once, something caught my vision, something that came round one of the huge buttresses of the House, and so into full view. It was a gigantic thing, and moved with a curious lope, going almost upright, after the manner of a man. It was quite unclothed, and had a remarkable luminous appearance. Yet it was the face that attracted and frightened me the most. It was the face of a swine.
This nightmarish Thing is evidently trying to gain access to the House; the old man observes it peering into windows and furtively testing doors. Suddenly, the “Swine-creature” realizes it’s being watched. It turns to glare at him, shattering the arena’s silence with a roar. It charges towards him, its face a hideous mask of greed and malice.
Before the Thing can close the distance between them, the old man finds himself rising rapidly into the air, now staring down at the thwarted monster. In moments the House and the Swine have dwindled into nothingness, and the old man finds himself rushing towards the black sun that illuminates this twilight world.
Huge gouts of flame streak out of the blackness, but the vision fades as he passes through it. Everything fades into a dull red, and then the color itself fades, and the old man is left hurtling through the black gloom once more.
After what seems like another eternity spent in darkness the old man sees a single star appear in the distance. Then another. Then a whole galaxy. Soon he finds himself racing towards the Solar System, towards the small blue speck of Earth. He has safely returned; and the last thing he sees before sinking into unconsciousness are the familiar stars and crescent moon of his own night sky.
He wakes in his study, to the ecstatic relief of his faithful dog Pepper. Dazed, disoriented, and very hungry, the old man has a drink and some biscuits and considers the situation. He carefully observes the study, but nothing seems out of place—except that the clock shows the time as an hour earlier than when he’d first had his adventure! He puzzles briefly over this, and finally concludes he has been unconscious (or something more) for the greater part of a day. His sister confirms the date over breakfast the next morning.
Here the novel suddenly jumps forward a few months. Nothing of any import has happened to the old man since, making his strange experience even more inexplicable. One day he and Pepper are walking through the grounds, next to a ravine so dark and deep it is known locally as “The Pit”.
The sudden crash of falling rock causes Pepper to bark and growl uncontrollably. The old man decides to investigate, and cautiously navigates his way to the bottom of the Pit. At the bottom he finds a crack in the earth narrow enough to jump over, with an underground river coursing beneath. It’s a terrifying image, picturing the old man failing to make the jump and dropping into the river, to drown in absolute darkness somewhere deep beneath the earth. (This is undoubtedly the same river which brings the young men in the wraparound story to the ruins of the House.)
The old man does not fall in, however. He explores the ravine, a landscape left in perpetual gloom by the overhanging trees. There is no sign of the rockslide’s cause.
The old man hears the collapse of more falling rock—falling from the side he’d just climbed down from. A single rock hurtles down the bank and crashes into the river, drenching him and Pepper. A pig-like squeal rings out from among the trees. It’s answered by another squeal deeper in the Pit.
Pepper launches himself into the trees, and the old man hears a half-human cry of pain. Pepper’s own howls of pain follow, and he races back to his master sporting a deep claw-wound in his side. Furious, the old man charges into the brush, brandishing his walking stick. He catches a glimpse of something white retreating deeper into the woods, but he cannot catch up to it. He returns to his dog and cares for the wound as best he can.
The old man takes Pepper home, explaining to his sister that Pepper had fought with a wildcat. He keeps the truth to himself: the glimpse he’d caught was of a corpse-white thing that had run on two legs. But he had no idea what it was.
After dinner, as the old man sits reading, he suddenly looks up to see a horrible, pig-like face glaring through a window:
"'A pig, by Jove!' I said, and rose to my feet. Thus, I saw the thing more completely; but it was no pig—God alone knows what it was. It reminded me, vaguely, of the hideous Thing that had haunted the great arena. It had a grotesquely human mouth and jaw; but with no chin of which to speak. The nose was prolonged into a snout; this it was, that, with the little eyes and queer ears, gave it such an extraordinarily swine-like appearance. Of forehead there was little, and the whole face was of an unwholesome white colour.
The old man also notices its human-like hands, webbed and tipped with eagle-like talons. The Swine-thing is so unwholesome (and unholy) that it inspires “abhorrence” more than fear, but it is a solid minute before the old man can make a move towards it. The Swine-thing immediately retreats and disappears into the foliage. The old man grabs his gun and gives chase.
He spends most of the day searching the grounds, but never again sights his quarry. Troubled, he returns to the house. Inspecting the first floor, he finds every door unlocked (there had been no reason to lock them before) and quickly bolts them. The windows are heavily barred and present no problem.
Despite these precautions the old man is nervous, suddenly aware of how huge and vulnerable the house really is. He tries reading, but can’t concentrate. A sound makes him pause. Something is rubbing and bumping up against the back door, causing it to creak loudly. Terrified, he breaks out into a cold sweat. The sounds at the door soon cease, but a chorus of horrible screams takes their place:
Gradually, imperceptibly almost, something stole on my ear—a sound, that resolved itself into a faint murmur. Quickly, it developed, and grew into a muffled, but hideous, chorus of bestial shrieks. It appeared to rise from the bowels of the earth.
The old man sits in a frightened stupor until dawn, when the chill light of day helps him work up the courage to open the back door. Cautiously, he peers outside, but the beast—whatever it was—has gone.
A week later, the old man and his sister are relaxing in the garden, she knitting and he reading a book. There have been no further sightings of the Swine-thing, and he has calmed down enough to be able to reflect on the incident.
An explosive crash startles them both, and they see a huge cloud of dust rising from the Pit. The old man retrieves his gun and goes to investigate, warning his sister to stay where she is. He approaches the edge of the Pit, but it is many minutes before the dust settles enough to make anything out.
The old man can see vague shapes climbing up the sides of the Pit. Peering into its depths for the first time, he finds himself face to face with one of the vile swine-creatures. It squeals upon seeing him, a cry that is answered many times over from the recesses of the Pit. Horrified, the old man shoots the thing in the face, sending it hurtling back in a clatter of stones and dirt.
A swarm of the things suddenly appear and give chase. The old man shoots the first, but quickly takes to his heels. On the way back to the house he sees his sister approaching, curious to know what he’s shooting at. Frantic, he warns her to run for her life, and thankfully she needs no further urging:
I think it must have been the terror in my voice, that spurred Mary to run so; for I feel convinced that she had not, as yet, seen those hell creatures that pursued.
Thus Hodgson drops the first, faint hint that things may not be what they seem. He’s setting up a little sliver of doubt in the reader, in that what the narrator sees and what his sister sees might be two very different things. He explores this idea more a little further on in the scene.
After a harrowing chase the old man manages to reach the house just ahead of the creatures, bolting the door just before the swine-men crash into it. He makes sure every other door is secure, sometimes mere moments before the creatures reach it. From their instant and unerring focus on the doors he deduces the monsters must have a certain low intelligence.
With the house safely seen to, the old man turns his attention back to his sister. He finds her in a faint on the kitchen floor, but revives her with a brandy. He reaches a hand out to steady her, but she recoils from his touch, screaming. She flees to her room, leaving the old man thunderstruck:
Could she be afraid of me? But no! Why should she? I could only conclude that her nerves were badly shaken, and that she was temporarily unhinged.
As the reader can see, Hodgson has cleverly set the stage for two possibilities: has the sister fled in panic from the monsters outside their door, or has she fled from the frightening mania suddenly exhibited by her brother? This being a Hodgson story, we can safely guess that this isn’t just a Poe-esque story of unreliable madness; but on the other hand, Hodgson’s tale follows the rule of dream-logic—which is to say there are no rules.
Night falls while the old man listens to the grunts and squeals coming from the garden. He becomes convinced there is some rudimentary language being spoken out there, but that doesn’t lessen the repulsion and loathing he feels towards the creatures.
As the darkness grows, the “cries and groans of which an old house is so full after nightfall” begin to take on a sinister cast. To the old man’s ears, every creak is the hint of a monstrous invader creeping towards him in the dark. Finally, he can stand it no longer, and he decides to check the basement once more:
I made my way from cellar to cellar, and room to room; through pantry and coal-hole—along passages, and into the hundred-and-one little blind alleys and hidden nooks that form the basement of the old house. Then, when I knew I had been in every corner and cranny large enough to conceal aught of any size, I made my way to the stairs.
Here a sound makes him pause. He returns to a nearby room he’s already checked, and again finds nothing. Just as he’s about to leave, the light from his lamp reflects off a pair of horrible eyes outside the window. The old man realizes one of the creatures is hanging on the window’s bars, watching him. Even as he watches, many other eyes join the first in glaring at him. It’s a wonderfully frightening moment, and the old man is almost hypnotized under their gaze, until the burning pain of the lamp-glass in his hand brings him back to himself. Enraged, he throws the lamp at them and retreats back upstairs.
There he bandages his hand, and, while looking at the rack of firearms on his wall, he decides to take a more proactive approach. He climbs one of the house’s towers and peers out over the yard. It’s too dark to see anything, but the grunts and squeals tell him the grounds are swarming with the things. He decides to wait for the moon, and here Hodgson gives his narrator a wonderful line:
The only thing to be done, was to wait for the moon to rise; then, I might be able to do a little execution.
An hour later, the moon ascends, and the old man gets his chance. Studying the grounds, he finds several of the swine-things directly beneath him, huddled against the wall. He takes his shot, apparently killing one. The monsters set up a chorus of angry squeals at this, and the sheer number of the things gives him pause.
Now he begins to wonder about his earlier vision, with the House, so much like his own—what was that giant Thing in the arena? What was going on? What were these creatures plaguing him now?
The creatures in the garden eventually fall silent, but the things in the Pit sound more enraged than ever. The old man decides to make another survey of the house while the things are at their war council, and he calculates his overall position as good. The windows are all barred, and the doors are heavy and impenetrable—all but one. The outside door to the study is a bit more modern than the others and not as sturdy. It’s the weakest link in his defenses, and the old man resolves to rectify this at once.
He finds some pieces of timber and braces them against the door. It’s a good thing he does so, for the monsters soon realize the door’s weakness and attack it with an unexpected ferocity. The reinforced door manages to hold off two attacks, but the old man despairs of a third attack. He suddenly decides to take matters in his own hands, and rushes up to the roof. From there he fires into the crowd assaulting the door, killing one or more.
The old man accidentally dislodges a huge stone he was leaning upon, and it crushes several of the beasts. This finally discourages the monsters from their attack on the door, but the horror only continues:
As I stared, I saw something come round, out of the shadow of the house. It was one of the Things. It went up to the stone, silently, and bent down. I was unable to see what it did. In a minute it stood up. It had something in its talons, which it put to its mouth and tore at. . . .
For the moment, I did not realise. Then, slowly, I comprehended.
The old man kills the brute, but the sound of broken glass immediately calls him to the floor below. He catches a swine-creature crawling into an empty bedroom, and shoots it. There are more clinging to the outside wall of the house, and the old man marvels at their climbing ability. Then he discovers an old gutter-pipe reaching up to the roof, which aided the things in their climbing. He dislodges it from its supports and sends it (and a swine-thing or two) crashing into the garden.
With the creatures seemingly on the retreat, the old man takes the time to make repairs to the study door’s fortifications, and then inspects the rest of the house. Satisfied that all is well, he returns to the tower to wait the coming of dawn.
The early morning sun reveals nothing but an empty garden and the debris of the previous night’s battle. There are no bodies, and the old man concludes the other creatures must have dragged them off. He returns to his study and falls into an exhausted sleep.
Waking that afternoon, the old man realizes he has slept away most of the day. But what had awakened him? He hears nothing, and is on the verge of sleep again when he hears a stealthy noise in the hallway outside. Fearful the creatures have somehow broken inside, he creeps to the door and takes a look.
Relief floods him; it’s only his sister. But what is she doing sneaking about the place while he sleeps? The old man follows her to see what she’s about. He trusts her, or course, but he doesn’t quite trust her reaction to the danger.
Hodgson, writing from an era when women were seen as irrational burdens to be coddled and saved from themselves in times of danger (a view perhaps best exemplified in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”), has the old man take exactly this sort of patriarchal stance:
…remembering her condition of mind, on the previous day, I felt that it might be best to follow, quietly—taking care not to alarm her—and see what she was going to do. If she behaved rationally, well and good; if not, I should have to take steps to restrain her. I could run no unnecessary risks, under the danger that threatened us.
But who is the rational one here? Hodgson very cleverly plays the situation both ways—for the reader, that is. The old man is absolutely sure of himself:
Quickly, I reached the head of the stairs, and paused a moment. Then, I heard a sound that sent me leaping down, at a mad rate—it was the rattle of bolts being unshot. That foolish sister of mine was actually unbarring the back door.
Just as her hand was on the last bolt, I reached her. She had not seen me, and, the first thing she knew, I had hold of her arm. She glanced up quickly, like a frightened animal, and screamed aloud.
The poor woman is frightened out of her wits… but is she frightened of the monsters outside, or something else? I think the above line, where the old man frightens his sister, indicates Hodgson’s intentions here. Read the text closely, and the reader will realize that, as of yet, the sister has given no outward indication that she’s seen anything out of the ordinary herself. Keeping that in mind, the scene takes on a slightly sinister cast:
'Come, Mary!' I said, sternly, 'what's the meaning of this nonsense? Do you mean to tell me you don't understand the danger, that you try to throw our two lives away in this fashion!'
To this, she replied nothing; only trembled, violently, gasping and sobbing, as though in the last extremity of fear.
Through some minutes, I reasoned with her; pointing out the need for caution, and asking her to be brave. There was little to be afraid of now, I explained—and, I tried to believe that I spoke the truth—but she must be sensible, and not attempt to leave the house for a few days.
At last, I ceased, in despair. It was no use talking to her; she was, obviously, not quite herself for the time being. Finally, I told her she had better go to her room, if she could not behave rationally.
Still, she took not any notice. So, without more ado, I picked her up in my arms, and carried her there. At first, she screamed, wildly; but had relapsed into silent trembling, by the time I reached the stairs.
In a few deft strokes, Hodgson has almost split the narrative into two possibilities. Is the old man simply preventing an hysterical (in the original sense of the word) woman from endangering both of their lives, or is the poor woman now held prisoner by a delusional madman? Judging by the old man’s words, either possibility is viable. I might add that this is exactly the sort of thing Edgar Allan Poe was a master at, though Poe never got this weird.
The old man locks his sister in her room, and prowls the house throughout the day, never daring to venture outside. Upon visiting his sister later, he finds her in an improved state, but she still shrinks fearfully from his approach.
Night finds the old man at his self-appointed post in the tower, and this time he’s brought plenty of firepower. He’s ready for an attack that never comes. Dawn finds him cold and troubled; the quiet has unnerved him far more than a pitched battle could. Had the creatures gone forever? Unlikely, he decides.
He examines his defenses once more, and finds all well. A thought makes him pause: he had not checked the basement since the first attack. After his lonely, fruitless vigil in the tower he is less than enthusiastic about the idea, but it must be done. Taking but a candle with him, he examines the gloomy blackness of the cellars. There are many rooms of differing sizes, and one great room with vaulted arches. The old man keeps his wine near the cellar stairs, and except for a quick search during the previous onslaught, he has seldom, if ever, ventured into the lower levels of the house.
One passage gives the reader pause for thought:
Thus, I came, at last, to the great cellar that I remembered. It is reached, through a huge, arched entrance, on which I observed strange, fantastic carvings, which threw queer shadows under the light of my candle. As I stood, and examined these, thoughtfully, it occurred to me how strange it was, that I should be so little acquainted with my own house.
What does he mean, strange carvings? It’s a throwaway detail, never further explored, but it hints that perhaps there is more to the house than the old man knows… perhaps there is a reason for the swine-things’ appearance, here of all places.
During his search of the cellar he finds a trapdoor in the stone floor. With great effort, the old man pulls the door up. Underneath he finds… nothing. No stairs, no walls, no sign of a bottom. Just a bottomless pit of blackness. Then:
…even as I stared, full of perplexity, I seemed to hear, far down, as though from untold depths, a faint whisper of sound… a soft titter, that grew into a hideous, chuckling, faint and distant. Startled, I leapt backwards, letting the trap fall, with a hollow clang, that filled the place with echoes.
For a few minutes the old man is too frightened to move. He fancies he can still hear that mocking laugh, even through the door. He dismisses this as imagination, but he still thinks it prudent to move several pieces of heavy stone onto the trapdoor, blocking (or so he hopes) any possibility of entry from below. He goes back upstairs, his heart much lighter now that the task is done.
The gardens are quiet and deserted, so the old man visits his sister. She is much better, and even responds to his questions. She volunteers to make breakfast, and after considering, the old man relents, his only stipulation being that she mustn’t leave the house. Soon, she brings him his meal, and in an effort to engage with her, he tries to cheer her up:
'Come, Mary,' I said. 'Cheer up! Things look brighter. I've seen none of the creatures since yesterday morning, early.'
She looked at me, in a curiously puzzled manner; as though not comprehending. Then, intelligence swept into her eyes, and fear; but she said nothing, beyond an unintelligible murmur of acquiescence. After that, I kept silence; it was evident that any reference to the Swine-things, was more than her shaken nerves could bear.
The old man henceforth skirts the issue, even though it’s perfectly obvious that the house lies in a state of siege. The doors remain barricaded, and he spends much of his time keeping watch in the tower. But things are looking up: days pass with no sign of the monsters, and gradually his sister’s nerves calm. Even Pepper’s wound is much improved, and soon he takes his accustomed place at his master’s side.
After nine days of quiet, the old man resolves to inspect the grounds. Very deliberately, he chooses his most powerful gun, a shotgun, and takes Pepper out for a tour. He watches the dog closely, but Pepper shows no sign of agitation. The old man searches the yard outside his study door very carefully; bullet-holes and cotton wads litter the area, but strangely, there is no physical sign of the creatures, beyond the claw marks which crisscross the door. Not a single bloodstain was to be seen, even though the stone which fell from the roof had clearly crushed several of the beasts.
Here is yet another sign that perhaps the old man imagined the whole thing, yet the thought never occurs to him. Of course, that doesn’t explain the claw marks, or Pepper’s wound, but these inconsistencies only enhance the mystery… is the old man mad or not?
The old man decides to inspect the Pit. With Pepper leading the way, he approaches very cautiously. There is no sign of the creatures, but the change in the geography is startling. The tree-lined ravine is gone; in its place is a deep chasm scoured down to the bare rock, and filled with dark water.
A great hole has opened in bottom of the chasm wall, and the old man can see several more fissures from which water gushes into the lake. He is at a loss to explain the massive upheaval necessitating these changes, but he recalls the massive crashing noise and the cloud of dust which had brought him out to the Pit in the first place. But that was no earthquake, surely. At a loss to explain any part of the whole matter, he returns home.
The old man spends days examining the pit, convinced, quite naturally, that this is where the Swine-things came from. He’s strongly curious about the tunnel, but is far too afraid of the creatures to venture into it. The feeling gradually wanes as the days pass, until one day the old man simply fetches a rope and climbs down into the Pit to inspect the hole more closely. Peering into the abyss (and here, of course, one is reminded of Nietzsche’s famous saying, and wonders whether or not Hodgson knew of it) the old man’s resolve evaporates, and he returns home.
Yet the abyss still weighs heavily on his mind, and he cannot banish the place from his thoughts. (There’s probably an essay somewhere there between Nietzsche and Hodgson, but, please, one project at a time!) At last he decides he must explore the tunnel, if only because the water in the ravine is rising, and soon the entrance will be submerged. With Pepper in tow, he returns to the chasm and climbs down once more. Pepper, in utter anguish at being left behind, howls and pulls on his sleeve, but the old man orders him to stay behind. This lasts for approximately several minutes, for before the old man can get very far into the tunnel, Pepper has rejoined his side. Grateful for the company, the old man relents.
Onward they push, and the old man realizes the tunnel must approach the house, if not reach completely under it. The trail ends soon enough, becoming a narrow ledge that circles a vast pit, some three hundred yards across. With only candlelight to go by, the ceiling and floor of the pit are lost in absolute blackness.
The old man tosses a stone into the pit, but hears nothing. He tries circling the pit with the candles he’s brought with him, but while this gives him an accurate idea of the pit’s circumference, the candles do little to dispel the gloom.
At this point Pepper begins howling. A deep, answering chuckle rises from the Pit, but the old man dismisses this as merely an echo. What interests him more is the growing trickle of water that now flows from the tunnel and into the pit. Within seconds, a huge torrent surges from the tunnel, nearly sending the old man over the edge into the pit. He can only surmise that the lake in the ravine outside has found some access to the tunnel, and he must move quickly if he is to escape before the flood traps them both beneath the earth.
It’s a frightening thought, and it sends him trudging back up the tunnel. At one point the rising water almost sweeps him back into the pit, but Pepper rescues him, and together they reach the entrance. It is raining heavily outside, causing the lake to overflow into the tunnel. Nearly exhausted, the old man climbs out of the ravine and barely manages to haul Pepper up before losing consciousness.
At dusk, the old man wakes, stiff and drenched and very sick. He manages to totter home, and falls into bed for several weeks.
When he finally manages to walk down to the Pit again, he is amazed by what greets him:
I looked out upon a great lake, whose placid surface reflected the light, coldly. The water had risen to within half a dozen feet of the Pit edge. Only in one part was the lake disturbed, and that was above the place where, far down under the silent waters, yawned the entrance to the vast, underground Pit. Here, there was a continuous bubbling; and, occasionally, a curious sort of sobbing gurgle would find its way up from the depth. Beyond these, there was nothing to tell of the things that were hidden beneath. As I stood there, it came to me how wonderfully things had worked out.
The old man is relieved that the Swine-things can torment him no longer—at least not from the Pit. And yet he is strangely disappointed that he will now never learn anything further of the Pit or the creatures that had menaced him. He ponders the interesting fact that the Pit here on the grounds corresponds to the huge, cavernous pit beneath his own house.
Naturally, he recalls the trapdoor in the cellar, and decides to examine it more closely. Taking a lantern with him, he throws open the door and has a look. This time the old man hears a constant thundering noise, and feels a fine mist blown up from the darkness. Of course it’s the water from the outside Pit rushing in to fill the yawning gulf beneath his house, which he confirms when he accidentally drops his lantern into the darkness.
Looking back, the old man realizes that the first time he’d inspected the trapdoor he must have heard the Swine-things moving about beneath the house. This makes him wonder if they were indeed all drowned, and whether the things could drown. Were they actually alive? He remembered how every trace of them had vanished—even the dead ones. Had he seen the last of them?
The old man realizes that he may be in far more danger than he thought:
One thought… impresses itself upon me, with ever growing insistence. It is, that I live in a very strange house; a very awful house. And I have begun to wonder whether I am doing wisely in staying here. Yet, if I left, where could I go…?
The narrative suddenly takes a left turn in the next chapter, “The Sea of Sleep”, when out of nowhere the old man describes his encounters with a mysterious woman. The episode begins as the old man’s story first began, with him in his study, falling asleep over a book. He wakes to see his room mysteriously fading away, and finds himself on the shore of an “immense and silent sea.”
As he watches, a bubble of foam in the water turns into the face of this mysterious woman, who looks upon him sadly. She won’t come out of the water, so he wades in to her. He seems to be in some great anguish, but the reader won’t understand why, since this woman, unmentioned until now, has been given no context. She has warned him about the house, however:
Strangely, she warned me; warned me passionately against this house; begged me to leave it; but admitted, when I questioned her, that she could not have come to me, had I been elsewhere. Yet, in spite of this, still she warned me, earnestly; telling me that it was a place, long ago given over to evil, and under the power of grim laws, of which none here have knowledge. And I—I just asked her, again, whether she would come to me elsewhere, and she could only stand, silent.
The chapter dissolves into a series of vignettes, and the editor (Hodgson himself) interrupts to explain that the manuscript is severely damaged and only fragments are still readable. The vignettes involve another strange trip through the cosmos, with some vivid descriptions of the solar system. Again, without some sort of context they lose much of their power, and the whole chapter jars unnecessarily. It is difficult to understand what Hodgson intended at this point, beyond teasing the reader with glimpses of a much more profound story than what we’re able to read. The next chapter resumes on a more solid footing.
It begins with the old man reading his Bible in the study. It is night. Suddenly, the house shakes, and there is a noise like a buzzing scream. Pepper sleeps through it all, unconcerned. Seeing a glow from the window, he opens the blinds to see a most astonishing sight: dawn has come—in the middle of the night—and the sun is rapidly rising above the horizon. Hearing a strange buzz in the room, the old man turns to see the arms of the clock spinning in circles. Shadows race across the floor as the sun hurtles across the sky:
I saw now, that the sun had risen high into the heavens, and was still visibly moving. It passed above the house, with an extraordinary sailing kind of motion. As the window came into shadow, I saw another extraordinary thing. The fine-weather clouds were not passing, easily, across the sky—they were scampering, as though a hundred-mile-an-hour wind blew. As they passed, they changed their shapes a thousand times a minute, as though writhing with a strange life; and so were gone. And, presently, others came, and whisked away likewise.
The boiling clouds make for a startling image when you think that Hodgson probably never saw time-lapse photography. (Or perhaps he did—was there such a thing, pre-World War I?).
The sun sinks below the horizon in seconds, and the old man watches a night sky fuming with heavy clouds. They soon disappear, leaving him to watch the stars streak across the sky. Then:
…It came to me now, for the first time, that, though the noise of the wind had passed, yet a constant 'blurred' sound was in my ears. Now that I noticed it, I was aware that it had been with me all the time. It was the world-noise.
The world-noise... what a straightforward yet profound description! Once again Hodgson pauses to sprinkle a simple yet telling detail that adds a haunting poetic quality to the scene.
Even as the old man watches, the revolution of the world speeds up, until light and dark meld into a dull gray flicker. Snow blankets the land, only to disappear in the next instant. The sun and moon fly so quickly across the sky they seem to leave a blurry trail like a comet.
Bewildered, the old man calls to Pepper, who is still sleeping in his bed. The dog doesn’t respond. The old man nudges him with his foot, and the dog crumbles into a pile of dust. The old man stares uncomprehendingly at the remains of his only friend, and then realizes such a thing could only happen with the passage of a great many years. While watching the millennia fly outside his window, Time’s touch has not neglected the other side of the glass.
The old man confirms this by inspecting his mirror, now coated with dust and grime. The image that stares back at him is that of an ancient. Only the eyes seem bright in a mask of white hair and wrinkles. The old man now notices the speedy decay of the study itself, with shelves collapsing and furniture rotting into nothingness. His thoughts turn fleetingly to his sister, and he wonders if she still lives. He staggers to his chair, so tired he can barely move. He collapses into it, exhausted, and falls asleep.
Sometime later, he awakes, refreshed. He goes to the window. Time is still speeding ferociously along, night and day merging into a curious half-lit flicker. His room is still there, but it is empty save a thick coating of dust, and he realizes he is looking at the remains of his furnishings. Somewhere in the dust lies Pepper’s remains—but why is he still alive? Another mystery: since waking in a pile of dust (his chair had disintegrated during his sleep) where are his footprints?
Then, for the first time, I noticed that there were no marks, in the dust, of my footprints, between it and the window. But then, ages of years had passed, since I had awaked—tens of thousands of years!
While he studies the situation he makes a strange (and chilling) discovery: an ancient corpse lies in the dust, in the same spot where he’d slept. It takes only a moment for him to intuit the truth—it is his own body huddled in the dust of an age long past. After taking a moment (which lasts thousands of years) to compose himself, he decides to survey the room itself:
Now, I saw that time was beginning its destructive work, even on this strange old building. That it had stood through all the years was, it seemed to me, proof that it was something different from any other house. I do not think, somehow, that I had thought of its decaying. Though, why, I could not have said. It was not until I had meditated upon the matter, for some considerable time, that I fully realised that the extraordinary space of time through which it had stood, was sufficient to have utterly pulverised the very stones of which it was built, had they been taken from any earthly quarry. Yes, it was undoubtedly mouldering now.
Not even this mysterious old House can withstand the ravages of an eternity beyond all human conception. Hodgson has herein opened a tiny crack in reality, and the awesome inconsequentiality of humanity to what lies beyond our limited perception would from here on out affect the philosophies of certain writers such as Lovecraft and Alan Moore.
The old man, meanwhile, watches the house dissolve before his eyes. Glass falls out of the windows, the mortar erodes into nothing. Beyond the crumbling walls of his rapidly diminishing home, the old man watches the garden fade from green to white, and he understands that an endless snow has covered the land. He knows the end of everything is coming soon:
I recollect that, about this time, I began to have a lively; though morbid, curiosity, as to what would happen when the end came—but I seemed strangely without imaginings.
As if to underscore the approaching finality, the sun starts to dim. The old man watches “belts of darkness” encircle the star, and the sky darkens in places to an eternal blanket of stars.
The nights lengthen, and the snow gathers. The floor of the study is now covered with it, and the old man senses (but not quite feels; he is somehow outside of time and space, either because of the strange old House or because his spirit remains remote from existence) “a cold, such as no living man can ever have known.”
Then:
The end came, all at once. The night had been the longest yet; and when the dying sun showed, at last, above the world's edge, I had grown so wearied of the dark, that I greeted it as a friend. It rose steadily, until about twenty degrees above the horizon. Then, it stopped suddenly, and, after a strange retrograde movement, hung motionless—a great shield in the sky. Only the circular rim of the sun showed bright—only this, and one thin streak of light near the equator.
Gradually, even this thread of light died out; and now, all that was left of our great and glorious sun, was a vast dead disk, rimmed with a thin circle of bronze-red light.
It’s a powerful, melancholy image—the old man standing in the ruins of the House, surrounded by endless frozen plains of ice, beneath a dead, black sun.
Even the stars have finally gone out, and the old man finds himself in utter darkness. A sudden flash of light from the sun catches his attention, but it quickly flares out. He puzzles over this for a moment, concluding that one of the inner planets must have fallen into the sun.
Time speeds on. Eventually the last, lingering flickers of light caused by the inner planet’s demise disappear, and darkness falls once more. Periodically the old man can hear pieces of the house’s masonry falling.
Gradually, he becomes aware of a strange green star that seems to draw closer to the earth. Its dim light briefly illuminates the land once more, until it passes behind the black husk of the sun. Then darkness falls once more, and with this darkness comes the “soft padding of many feet.” The old man turns to face a nightmarish scene—multitudes of eyes peer at him from the dark, and they are closing in.
He leaps out the window and flees into the darkness. He is soon completely lost, but the Green Star soon emerges from behind the sun, lighting the landscape for him:
It fell upon a great, ruined structure, some two hundred yards away. It was the house. Staring, I saw a fearsome sight--over its walls crawled a legion of unholy things, almost covering the old building, from tottering towers to base. I could see them, plainly; they were the Swine-creatures.
The approaching Star, now large enough to be called a Green Sun, fills the sky. As if in answer, a flaming column of red flame rises up from the House. The old man suddenly finds himself airborne again, rising up, up into that hellish green light. Far below him, the ground collapses, and the House and its monstrous occupants disappear into the bowels of the earth.
Floating in space once more, the old man watches the earth’s final plunge into the sun. Then the sun itself falls into the Green Sun, leaving him to wonder:
…whether this stupendous globe of green fire might not be the vast Central Sun—the great sun, round which our universe and countless others revolve. I felt confused. I thought of the probable end of the dead sun, and another suggestion came, dumbly—Do the dead stars make the Green Sun their grave? The idea appealed to me with no sense of grotesqueness; but rather as something both possible and probable.
Hodgson’s narrator is understandably overwhelmed; his world is gone, the Sun is dead… all absorbed into this roving cosmic cleanser. But the cycle is not over yet. The Green Sun now emits an endless procession of glowing globes, so bright they blot out their parent Sun’s green light.
These spheres seem made of “clouded crystal”, and float past the old man with a serene slowness. He perceives infrequent faces in the swirling balls of mist, but cannot be sure if they are real or imagined. The old man’s description of the scene is telling:
"For a long time, I waited, passively, with a sense of growing content. I had no longer that feeling of unutterable loneliness; but felt, rather, that I was less alone, than I had been for kalpas of years. This feeling of contentment increased, so that I would have been satisfied to float in company with those celestial globules, forever.
It seems like Hodgson is describing some form of Heaven here—or perhaps, given the faces peering at him from random globes, the access to a myriad of different Heavens and possibilities. Then, feeling himself drawn to one of the spheres (there are now millions), the old man enters one and finds himself once more on the beach of the Sea of Sleep mentioned previously.
Here once more he meets “She”, his beloved. They embrace, and talk, and the old man speaks of “prayers” and “Paradise” and “the hereafter”, making the Heaven reference even more emphatic. It’s a quiet moment of bliss, and one he hopes will last, but of course it doesn’t.
Darkness falls over the Sea of Sleep, and the old man’s “Love” seems to fade into nothingness. “I may not stay longer, Dear One,” she says. “A little while—” Then she is gone, and so is the Sea.
The narrator finds himself once more suspended in space. The Green Sun is nearby, eclipsed by some dark globe, but gouts of green flame ring its outer edge. A wondrous sight, perhaps, but the old man can think only of Her:
Was I doomed to be separated from her, always? Even in the old earth-days, she had been mine, only for a little while; then she had left me, as I thought, for ever. Since then, I had seen her but these times, upon the Sea of Sleep.
She seems to be his one true love, but the whole relationship still puzzles because Hodgson introduces her late into the story, and even then too briefly for the reader to establish some sort of sympathy. It’s simply too vague to get a handle on, but that seems to be what Hodgson was aiming for.
The old man, still angry at the forced separation, studies the Sun and its mysterious companion. He reasons that perhaps when he entered that white globe, he had crossed over into another dimension, one in which the Green Sun, the Central Sun, was but a pale white ghost of itself. Was that Heaven? Were all the other globes entrances to different Heavens? (This is speculation on my part, not the musings of the old man.)
Watching the Green Sun, the old man finally discerns a multitude of rays emanating outward, into all points of the surrounding universe. Millions of bright lights travel these rays, and the old man guesses they are some sort of messengers. But “messengers” implies some sort of intelligence, making him speculate that some sort of “Intelligence” (capital “I”) resides in the Green Sun.
The old man’s speculation is interrupted by the appearance of a “dark, dead star”, which hurtles toward the two Central Suns. Within moments it plunges into the Green Sun’s dark companion, flaring brightly before fading away. Hodgson’s wonderful description of this image closes the chapter:
The thing I had expected, came at last—suddenly, awfully. A vast flare of dazzling light. A streaming burst of white flame across the dark void. For an indefinite while, it soared outwards—a gigantic mushroom of fire. It ceased to grow. Then, as time went by, it began to sink backwards, slowly. I saw, now, that it came from a huge, glowing spot near the centre of the Dark Sun. Mighty flames, still soared outwards from this. Yet, spite of its size, the grave of the star was no more than the shining of Jupiter upon the face of an ocean, when compared with the inconceivable mass of the Dead Sun.
I may remark here, once more, that no words will ever convey to the imagination, the enormous bulk of the two Central Suns
Time still speeds along at an unbelievable rate. As the old man watches, a “dark nebula” appears, growing steadily. Soon this dark red cloud engulfs everything, and a great shadow obscures the Green Sun’s radiance. At first the old man can see nothing, but he gradually becomes aware of a procession of dull red globes floating past. This scene is obviously the hellish counterpoint to the earlier “Heaven” episode, and sure enough he sees anguished faces looking at him from within certain spheres. Unable to stop himself, he floats near one and is absorbed into it.
And what is the Hellish version of the Sea of Sleep? The Plain of Silence, which the old man visited eons ago during his first strange episode. Once more, he floats towards those fantastic, enormous mountains. Once more he passes through the narrow rift, emerging into the Arena where the jade replica of his House stands. The fearsome Beast-Gods still look down in eternal watchfulness.
The old man is carried right up to the House, and this time he notices several differences from his previous visit. Although the House is many times bigger than his own, its aspect is still identical—right down to the smashed-in door, and the fallen stone he’d dislodged in his fight with the Swine-creatures. This causes a new train of thought:
I remembered how, long ago, in the old earth-days, I had half suspected that, in some unexplainable manner, this house, in which I live, was en rapport—to use a recognised term—with that other tremendous structure, away in the midst of that incomparable Plain.
—that is, the houses are linked in some manner. Anything happening to his own house alters the reality of this House.
The gigantic doors swing open to admit him:
Here, for the first time, I was afraid… Inside, all was blackness, impalpable. In an instant, I had crossed the threshold, and the great doors closed, silently, shutting me in that lightless place.
For awhile, I seemed to hang, motionless; suspended amid the darkness. Then, I became conscious that I was moving again; where, I could not tell. Suddenly, far down beneath me, I seemed to hear a murmurous noise of Swine-laughter. It sank away, and the succeeding silence appeared clogged with horror.
A door opens, and he floats through it. The room is familiar, but it takes him a moment to realize where he is—back in his study.
Apparently the room is now the appropriate size, despite the House’s gigantic exterior. Utterly disoriented, the old man looks out the window and watches the dawn sun rise over his own garden. The Arena with its audience of Beast-Gods is nowhere to be seen.
A thought makes him turn. He calls for Pepper, but there is no answering bark. He sees the dog sleeping beneath the table, and tries to rouse him:
Now, as I stooped, I took my breath, shortly. There was no Pepper; instead, I was reaching towards an elongated, little heap of grey, ash-like dust…
The next chapter begins with the old man mourning poor Pepper. Everything else seems to be as he left it. He seems to be back in his own time and place. And yet… what to make of Pepper’s ashes? But for that, the whole story so far might have been a dream.
He ponders the Green Sun, the death of the earth and its Sun, the Sea of Sleep, the dark nebula. Had he truly seen any of it? What was the purpose of it all?
Amidst all these unanswered questions, the old man senses that something terrible is coming, and that death is near. He buys a new dog, but it’s hardly a replacement for Pepper, and he keeps it chained in the yard. Weeks pass.
One night we find the old man working in his study. The door to the garden is half-open, and he can hear the dog in its kennel, trailing its chain behind him. Tip, his sister’s cat (never mentioned before now), sits outside on the windowsill. The old man suddenly fancies he can hear a stealthy padding noise coming from outside. He peers out into the night, but sees nothing. He dismisses the thought with some unease and resumes writing.
Minutes later, the dog howls out in fear, and the old man curses him. He’s more annoyed than frightened, until he hears the padding noise again—this time, from right outside the open door. Here, in a terrifying scene, the old man watches as some unseen force approaches:
…As I looked, (the cat) sprang to its feet, its tail swelling, visibly. For an instant it stood thus; seeming to stare, fixedly, at something, in the direction of the door. Then, quickly, it began to back along the sill; until, reaching the wall at the end, it could go no further. There it stood, rigid, as though frozen in an attitude of extraordinary terror.
Hodgson has the old man match the cat’s movement, retreating until he, too, is backed up against the study’s wall. It’s a clever bit of identification between the reader, the old man, and the cat—and it ends badly:
Suddenly, from the cat, there came a fierce, long screech. I glanced, jerkily, in its direction—Something, luminous and ghostly, encircled it, and grew upon my vision. It resolved into a glowing hand, transparent, with a lambent, greenish flame flickering over it. The cat gave a last, awful caterwaul, and I saw it smoke and blaze. My breath came with a gasp, and I leant against the wall. Over that part of the window there spread a smudge, green and fantastic. It hid the thing from me, though the glare of fire shone through, dully. A stench of burning, stole into the room.
Pad, pad, pad—Something passed down the garden path, and a faint, mouldy odour seemed to come in through the open door, and mingle with the burnt smell.
The dog yelps in pain, and then falls silent. The old man listens, far more frightened than he’s been at any other time in the story. He hears a distant gate open and shut. Once he musters enough courage, he locks the door, and flees to bed.
The next morning the old man does a careful inspection of the grounds. There are no footprints to be seen, no sign that the previous night’s monstrous visitor was more than just a dream. It is only when he calls the dog to him that he notices a strange, greenish wound on the dog’s flank. It is a burn mark in the shape of a large talon—or a hand. Seeing it, he remembers the cat, and his eyes fall on the smoky stain on the windowsill. He feels slightly guilty for the deaths of Pepper and Tip and now the wounding of this poor dog, and he pets him kindly. He doesn’t bring him inside, though, fearing the inside of the house may be no safer.
He checks on the dog throughout that day and the next, seeing no improvement in the wound. He checks him that night, and notices a strange thing: the wound glows in the dark.
He is still wondering what it can mean when he hears a noise outside the door. Waiting quietly, he hears the door latch tested. Badly frightened now, he collapses into a chair. Nothing else happens for a few minutes, and he allows himself to relax a little. Then:
Suddenly, I turn, and look at the window on my right… I am looking at a vast, misty swine-face, over which fluctuates a flamboyant flame, of a greenish hue. It is the Thing from the arena.
The Thing sees him. Like an automaton, the old man rises and heads towards door. The Thing leaves the window and pads over to the door. The old man fights with all his strength the strange compulsion to unlock the door:
I glance down, quickly, and realise, with an unspeakable terror, that my foot is pushing back the lower bolt. An awful sense of helplessness assails me. . . The bolt comes out of its hold, with a slight, ringing sound and I stagger on my feet, grasping at the great, central bolt, for support. A minute passes, an eternity; then another. . . . My God, help me! I am being forced to work upon the last fastening. I will not! Better to die, than open to the Terror, that is on the other side of the door. Is there no escape? . . . God help me, I have jerked the bolt half out of its socket! My lips emit a hoarse scream of terror, the bolt is three parts drawn, now, and still my unconscious hands work towards my doom. Only a fraction of steel, between my soul and That.
The agony and effort of resisting that terrible compulsion takes all the old man’s strength, and he falls to the floor in a faint.
When he awakes, the Thing is gone. All is quiet once more. He bolts the door and crawls to the staircase on his hands and knees, to keep “safe from observation from the window”. He climbs up to his bedroom to spend a fitful night.
He rises at dawn, full of gloom:
The wintry dawn is beginning to creep through the windows, and shows the bare discomfort of the old room. Strange, that, through all these years, it has never occurred to me how dismal the place really is.
He listens to his sister making the breakfast, and once again he wonders at how unconcerned she is despite the dangers that have beset the house. It still hasn’t occurred to him that perhaps he is the deluded one.
He goes down to check on the dog, and his sister joins him. He notes with unease that the wound is larger and now has a “fungoid” appearance. The old man’s sister wants to console the dog but he prevents her, citing the need to be cautious about this unknown malady.
That night the old man sits watch again. After spending half a fruitless night waiting for something to happen, he turns in.
As the next, penultimate chapter begins, it is still night. The old man wakes, head aching, his temperature veering from hot to cold. He reaches out to light a candle, and then halts upon seeing a sliver of phosphorescence in the blackness. He realizes the source stems from his own wrist. He lights a match, but sees only a small scratch on his arm. When the match winks out, he again sees the glowing fleck of light. He lights the candle and examines the scratch more closely:
Then a thought comes to me. I remember the morning after the Thing appeared. I remember that the dog licked my hand. It was this one, with the scratch on it; though I have not been even conscious of the abrasement, until now. A horrible fear has come to me. It creeps into my brain—the dog's wound, shines at night. With a dazed feeling, I sit down on the side of the bed, and try to think; but cannot. My brain seems numbed with the sheer horror of this new fear.
The old man spends the rest of the night and the following day shivering in bed. The next morning he shoots the dog and buries it. Although the growth has almost covered the dog’s side, it is really his growing fear that makes him act out. His own wound, slight at first, grows by the hour.
The old man starkly describes his own torment:
Six days, and I have eaten nothing. It is night. I am sitting in my chair. Ah, God! I wonder have any ever felt the horror of life that I have come to know? I am swathed in terror. I feel ever the burning of this dread growth. It has covered all my right arm and side, and is beginning to creep up my neck. To-morrow, it will eat into my face. I shall become a terrible mass of living corruption. There is no escape.
The old man looks at his gun-rack, tempted to end his misery. He prays to God for His understanding that any death is better than this slow, green rot.
The end of the manuscript comes swiftly:
Hush! I hear something, down--down in the cellars. It is a creaking sound. My God, it is the opening of the great, oak trap. What can be doing that? The scratching of my pen deafens me. . . . . . . I must listen. . . . . . . There are steps on the stairs; strange padding steps, that come up and nearer. . . . Jesus, be merciful to me, an old man. There is something fumbling at the door-handle. O God, help me now! Jesus—The door is opening—slowly. Somethi—“
Here the unnamed recluse’s manuscript ends, cut off in mid-sentence like some of Lovecraft’s more histrionic work. That’s not to say Hodgson (or Lovecraft) is unsuccessful; indeed, there is a sense of impending doom that Hodgson skillfully builds upon until it crescendos in a keening note of terror… I can almost see this as a movie, with Malcolm McDowell as the stricken narrator shivering in anticipation of the stealthy, creeping Thing at his bedroom door.
The final chapter takes us back to the wraparound story of the two friends, Tonnison and Berreggnog, pouring over their found manuscript. They are subdued and thoughtful after finishing it. Berreggnog, the narrator, is inclined to think it madness, but Tonnison is matter-of-factly convinced of its truth.
Though the story has cast a pall over the pair, they soon slough it off and resume fishing. When the time to leave finally comes, the two ask a few of the natives what they know of the House and its owner. No living man has seen the House, but there are stories of its reputation:
It was a place shunned by the people of the village, as it had been shunned by their fathers before them. There were many things said about it, and all were of evil. No one ever went near it, either by day or night. In the village it was a synonym of all that is unholy and dreadful.
Many years before, an old man and woman had passed through the village and taken up residence in the House, but their names and identities were still unknown to that day. A worker was hired to bring monthly supplies from a nearby town, but no other contact was allowed by the old man. One day, as the story went, the worker rushed back to the village to announce the House had disappeared, and a “Great Pit” stood in its place. The villagers were so intrigued by this that they all went to look and verified that the man’s story was indeed true: the House was gone.
This was all any of the villagers knew. Tonnison and Berreggnog finally leave the village of Kraighten, never to return. None of their questions are answered satisfactorily, but the story clearly stays with them. And as Berreggnog relates, so does the memory of that haunted place:
Sometimes, in my dreams, I see that enormous pit, surrounded, as it is, on all sides by wild trees and bushes. And the noise of the water rises upwards, and blends—in my sleep—with other and lower noises; while, over all, hangs the eternal shroud of spray.
Even with a nice little ending like that, Hodgson can’t let it be—he includes a final five-stanza poem (titled “Grief”) at the end, purported to be written on foolscap and tucked behind the manuscript’s fly-leaf. I’ll leave it to the reader to discover, though the subject matter does deal vaguely with the themes of the book.
And what of the theme? The title says it all: The House On The Borderland. “Borderland” itself is evocative, poetic. It suggests many things, perhaps best captured in these dictionary definitions:
Land located on or near a frontier.
The fringe.
An indeterminate area, situation, or condition.
An indeterminate region.
This one, although dry, to me sums it up quite nicely:
(A) district consisting of the area on either side of a border or boundary of a country or an area.
An area, in other words, which is defined by the lands it separates—the lands it keeps apart. It is neither wholly one nor the other, yet it necessarily takes on some of the characteristics of both. Decades later Rod Serling would give his borderland the utterly perfect name: The Twilight Zone. Not that I’m saying Hodgson’s Borderland has anything to do with the Twilight Zone, but conceptually both men occupy the same wild country.
The old man’s House (and the grounds surrounding it) is of our world, but it rests on thin ground. It lies perched over endless, pitch-black gulfs… and spans eternities, as we have seen. Is it a nexus point for our world and the next, and the next after that? Is it a door? Or is it some kind of pivot or axis, like Stephen King’s Dark Tower? Or is it a barrier, holding back forces antithetical to our existence?
The reader, like Hodgson’s reclusive old man, never finds the answers. He is reactive through most of the story—he watches. It is only during the siege on his home that he is forced to action and violence, but even so he is still reacting to outside threats, not altering the story in any meaningful manner. The old man’s sister is practically superfluous to the story. She serves no narrative function at all… neither as confidant, muse, fatal weakness or love interest. Her sole purpose (aside from the housekeeping) seems to be that she briefly casts doubts in the readers’ minds as to the old man’s sanity—a very minor subplot which is abandoned soon after Hodgson introduced it, save for a brief musing near the end.
This is but a minor quibble, though. House’s only real flaw is in its episodic nature, and since the reader can choose to see that as just part of the story’s structure, rather than a fault, it’s not a huge concern. In fact, it adds to the book’s dreamlike quality. But as a consequence, to me the book never quite coheres into a unified whole. The first part seems like a hallucinatory trip through space to an Arena surrounded by Dunsanian gods… yet we never discover whether these gods are even alive and sentient, let alone whether or not they affect the rest of the novel.
That may be the whole point. We only know as much as the narrator does, and much of The House On The Borderland’s power comes from its mystery. Perhaps Hodgson was trying to create a meditation on sustained, cosmic dread, rather than adhering to any formulaic necessities of plot. Perhaps it is for this very reason that House remains shadowed in obscurity.
As I mentioned earlier, the graphic novel remains the only substantial adaptation as of this writing. While it concentrates mostly on the Swine-Things’ siege of the house, and adds a lurid incestual tone to the brother-sister relationship, it does try and produce a cohesive narrative out of the book’s succession of nightmarish incidents. For a comic that’s less than a hundred pages long, they mostly succeed. Whether a movie could be made out of the book remains to be seen… it’s possible, but it would take a major studio budget, guided by a visionary, with the artistic autonomy of an indie production. And how likely is that?
I said at the beginning the book was “cosmic” in the Lovecraftian sense, and hopefully after this examination the reader can see why. Spanning eons and light-years, the book was a rare early example of Lovecraft’s ultimate goal: to portray mankind as no more than a mere speck of dust in an indifferent universe. This was certainly more ambitious that the type of stories that carried the day both then and now, with Man front stage center, seeking to triumph against vampires, ghosts and other monsters. True, the Swine-Things are creatures extremely hostile to the old man, but I read them not as simple monsters but as intrinsic opposites to the old man and his sister. Not just subhuman, but anti-humans, if you will… inimical to all life as we know it. They are residents of the Borderland, or, more likely, the places beyond the Borderland. The House resides at the nexus of these places, where our reality is thin and other realities draw closer to the limits of our perception.
Hodgson’s Borderland is a wild place, an outpost of the known intruding into the unknown beyond. It’s a “thin place”, a Celtic concept describing a place where the veil between Earth and Heaven is especially thin, and Divinity is more readily felt. A Google search even turns up lists of such places in Ireland. It doesn’t take a very dark turn of mind to see the more ominous possibilities. I wonder if Hodgson, an English writer born in Essex, knew of the concept. The fact that he set the novel in a remote Irish locale says as much. Even if he didn’t, he surely understood the idea, as shown in much of his nautical fiction. To Hodgson, the entire sea was a thin place, once the last sliver of land slipped over the horizon. It was his genius to recognize that proximity to the Divine might not necessarily be a good thing. It might, in fact, be very, very bad. I’m not knocking religion here; I’m just recognizing that as mortals we are only equipped to deal with the finite. Literature is full of tales of what happens to those who venture too close, who are lucky/unlucky enough to catch a glimpse of the infinite. They are fundamentally changed—some are driven insane; some burn out like an overloaded light bulb.
Is Hodgson’s recluse one of these few? Has he seen too much? If so, who showed it to him, and why? Remember the scenes of him plucked from his study and hurled across the universe or through eternity to be shown strange sites? It seems some agency wanted him to bear witness to it all, and pay the price for gaining such knowledge. Did he deserve such a fate, for merely occupying an old House in the remote Irish hills? Or did he somehow bring it on himself by his hatred of his fellow men and his self-imposed isolation? Perhaps his hermitry in some way prepared him to receive this knowledge?
The lack of answers fuels this rampant speculation. Hodgson’s Borderland resists answers. Its horrors resist explanation. Perhaps that is why the novel stays with us long after we have come to the end. Or perhaps it is that we are drawn to the wild places, real and imagined, attracted to the merest hint of the infinite like moths to the flame. And Hodgson was very good at giving us those hints.
As Hodgson’s second published novel, House is leagues ahead of The Boats of the Glen Carrig in terms of scope. Boats was virtually all plot, though quite poetic for all that. House is something quite else, and the fact that both books came in succession from the same author is extraordinary.
For whatever reason, Hodgson’s next novel was a retreat back into nautical horror, but as we’ll see, The Ghost Pirates is one of the most terrifying ghost stories in his canon. Until next time!
