The House on the Borderland and Other Mysterious Places Read online

  The House on the Borderland and

  Other Mysterious Places

  Being The Second Volume of

  The Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson

  Edited by Jeremy Lassen

  Night Shade Books • San Francisco & Portland • 2004

  This edition of The House on the Borderland and Other Mysterious Places

  © 2004 by Night Shade Books

  Cover and interior artwork © 2004 by Jason Van Hollander

  Layout and design by Jeremy Lassen

  Introduction © 2004 by Jeremy Lassen

  A Note On the Texts © 2004 by Jeremy Lassen

  All rights reserved.

  First Edition

  ISBN 1-892389-39-8

  E-ISBN 9781597803687

  Night Shade Books

  Please visit us on the web at

  http://www.nightshadebooks.com

  This series is dedicated to the readers, editors, publishers and scholars who have worked tirelessly since William Hope Hodgson’s death to ensure that his work would not be lost or forgotten. Without their efforts, these volumes would not be possible.

  In particular, the editor would like to thank S. T. Joshi, Mike Ashley, Jack Adrian and George Locke for their generous support.

  The Cosmic Circle of

  Wonder and Imagination

  “…if you have so much as a splinter of wonder in you, you read

  Hodgson, and you know without question he is a master.”

  – China Miéville

  “This outstanding ability of Hodgson, to plunge into a dream world

  and stay there for a book-length sojourn, fits with his seriousness and

  lends to his tale a straightforward, desperate convincingness”

  – Fritz Leiber

  This, the second volume of The Collected Fiction of William Hope Hodgson brings together two of his most enduring and influential creations—The House on the Borderland, and the supernatural detective Carnacki. This book is also a detailed exploration of the duality (only hinted at in the first volume of this series) that suffuses his fiction—the “wonder” and “dream world(s)” of his prose versus its “straightforward, desperate convincingness.” To put it more simply: the Cosmic versus the Mundane.

  The House on the Borderland was Hodgson’s second published novel, and is the penultimate example of his narrative duality. Half the book is devoted to the cosmic exploration of the nature of reality, while the other half of the book is a tightly paced, suspenseful siege narrative. Critics have cited this duality as a reason for its effectiveness; or conversely, the reason for its failure. In either case, The House on the Borderland remains a stunningly memorable achievement. Like a vast, burning star at the center of the universe of fantastic literature, the influence of this novel has been felt continuously since its publication.

  Chapman & Hall (who a year earlier had published The Boats of the “Glen Carrig”) published The House on the Borderland in 1908, and like Glen Carrig, Borderland was greeted with nearly unanimous critical praise. Despite this it apparently did not sell well, and would be the last Hodgson title published by Chapman & Hall. It seems that Hodgson’s contemporary readers were not as accepting of his cosmic extravagance as were the critics and later readers such as H. P. Lovecraft, who deemed it “The greatest of all of Mr. Hodgson’s works.”

  Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder arose out of Hodgson’s desire to build a reliable market for his short fiction. A popular series character all but guaranteed regular sales to the magazine markets. Carnacki is at once an example of his pursuit of commercial markets, and at the same time, and an indication of his fascination with the fantastic. This fusion of popular formula and personal fixation resulted in one of the most enduring figures of the ghost breaker/psychic detective genre. It is also another great example of the duality that inhabits his work—a detective... of the supernatural.

  “The Gateway Monster,” “The House Among the Laurels,” “The Whistling Room,” “The Horse of the Invisible,” and “The Searcher of the End House” were published in The Idler in 1910, from January through May. “The Thing Invisible” had been scheduled to appear in the June issue, but was not published until January 1912, in The New Magazine. It would be the last Carnacki story to see publication during Hodgson’s lifetime.

  Several of these stories were slightly re-written for their 1913 republication in the Eveleigh Nash book entitled Carnacki The Ghost-Finder. In addition to rewriting them, Hodgson also reworked the order in which they were presented. In 1910, for copyright reasons, an abridged edition was published in the US. This edition was titled Carnacki, The Ghost Finder, and a Poem. It featured events of the Carnacki stories as part of a single narrative. It is an interesting and effective enough variant that it will be reprinted in the fifth volume of this series.

  The final three Carnacki stories were not published until after Hodgson’s death. “The Haunted Jarvee” was revised by Hodgson’s wife at the request of the editor of The Premier Magazine in 1919, and it eventually saw publication ten years later in the March 1929 issue. It was further (but only slightly) revised by August Derleth for its publication in the 1947 Mycroft & Moran edition of Carnacki the Ghost-Finder. “The Hog” was published for the first time (via Derleth’s efforts) in the January 1947 issue of Weird Tales, and was subsequently reprinted in the Mycroft & Moran edition, which also featured the previously unpublished story “The Find.”

  It has been suggestioned that these last two stories might have been fabricated by Mycroft & Moran/Arkham House publisher August Derleth. However, noted Hodgson scholar Sam Moskowitz confirmed the existence of the manuscript for “The Find” and has noted that Derleth changed “virtually nothing.” Moskowitz also found several notes from Hodgson’s letters that refer to the submission of a story called “The Hog.” Without a doubt, these two stories were revised and edited by Derleth, but at their core, they are Hodgson’s work. The editorial changes make them stand out from the earlier Carnacki stories, but they are an artifact of their time—edited and published posthumously due to Hodgson’s inability to find a venue for their publication during his lifetime.

  The last section of this volume captures another facet of the duality of Hodgson’s writing—the seemingly supernatural story with a natural explanation. Hodgson could lead his readers to the brink of the fantastic and then, teasingly, frustratingly, reel them back down to earth. This formula found its way into a Carnacki story, and also reappeared in several of his mystery and adventure pieces. Whether straight mystery, adventure, or the formula described above, the stories in the final section of this book are a revealing strata that spans his career... from his first published story, “The Goddess Death,” to several that did not see publication until more then sixty years after his death.

  Whether on land, at sea, or in the places beyond and between, Hodgson kept one foot firmly planted in the real world and one foot in the ether. From popular mystery fiction to ghost breakers to cosmic visions, Hodgson knew how to give the reader glimpses into the unseen vistas of the universe. These flights of cosmic fantasy... these explorations that begin here and go elsewhere, have been inspiring readers and writers for generations. From H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, to Fritz Leiber and China Miéville, with hundreds of others in between—the cosmic circle of fantastic fiction that began with William Hope Hodgson remains unbroken.

  Jeremy Lassen

  San Francisco,

  November, 2003

  The House on the Borderland

  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

  To My Father

  (Whose Feet Tread The Lost Aeons)

  “Open the door,

  And listen!

  Only the wind’s muffled roar,

  And the glisten

  Of tears round the moon.

  And, in fancy, the tread

  Of vanishing shoon—

  Out in the night with the Dead.

  “Hush! and hark

  To the sorrowful cry

  Of the wind in the dark.

  Hush and hark, without murmur or sigh,

  To shoon that tread the lost aeons:

  To the sound that bids you to die.

  Hush and hark! Hush and Hark!”

  Shoon of the Dead

  Introduction to the Manuscript

  Many are the hours in which I have pondered upon the story that is set forth in the following pages. I trust that my instincts are not awry when they prompt me to leave the account, in simplicity, as it was handed to me.

  And the MS. itself—You must picture me, when first it was given into my care, turning it over, curiously, and making a swift, jerky examination. A small book it is; but thick, and all, save the last few pages, filled with a quaint but legible hand-writing, and writ very close. I have the queer, faint, pit-water smell of it in my nostrils now as I write, and my fingers have subconscious memories of the soft, “cloggy” feel of the long-damp pages.

  I recall, with just a slight effort, my first impression of the worded contents of the book—an impression of the fantastic, gathered from casual glances, and an unconcentrated attention.

  Then, conceive of me comfortably a-seat for the evening, and the little, squat book and I, companions for some close, solitary hours. And the change that came upon my judgements! The emergence of a half-belief. From a seeming “fantasia” there grew, to reward my unbiassed concentration, a cogent, coherent scheme of ideas that gripped my interest more securely than the mere bones of the account or story, whichever it be, and I confess to an inclination to use the first term. I found a greater story within the lesser—and the paradox is no paradox.

  I read, and, in reading, lifted the Curtains of the Impossible, that blind the mind, and looked out into the unknown. Amid stiff, abrupt sentences I wandered; and, presently, I had no fault to charge against their abrupt tellings; for, better far than my own ambitious phrasing, is this mutilated story capable of bringing home all that the old Recluse, of the vanished house, had striven to tell.

  Of the simple, stiffly given account of weird and extraordinary matters, I will say little. It lies before you. The inner story must be uncovered, personally, by each reader, according to ability and desire. And even should any fail to see, as now I see, the shadowed picture and conception of that, to which one may well give the accepted titles of Heaven and Hell; yet can I promise certain thrills, merely taking the story as a story.

  On final impression, and I will cease from troubling. I cannot but look upon the account of the Celestial Globes as a striking illustration (how nearly had I said “proof”!) of the actuality of our thoughts and emotions among the Realities. For, without seeming to suggest the annihilation of the lasting reality of Matter, as the hub and framework of the Machine of Eternity, it enlightens one with conceptions of the existence of worlds of thought and emotion, working in conjunction with, and duly subject to, the scheme of material creation.

  — William Hope Hodgson

  “Glaneifoin,” Borth, Cardiganshire,

  December 17, 1907

  Grief 1

  “Fierce hunger reigns within my breast,

  I had not dreamt that this whole world,

  Crushed in the hand of God, could yield

  Such bitter essence of unrest,

  Such pain as Sorrow now hath hurled

  Out of its dreadful heart, unsealed!

  “Each sobbing breath is but a cry,

  My heart-strokes knells of agony,

  And my whole brain has but one thought

  That nevermore through life shall I

  (Save in the ache of memory)

  Touch hands with thee, who now art naught!

  “Through the whole void of night I search,

  So dumbly crying out to thee;

  But thou are not; and night’s vast throne

  Becomes an all stupendous church

  With star-bells knelling unto me

  Who in all space am most alone!

  “An hungered, to the shore I creep,

  Perchance some comfort waits on me

  From the old Sea’s eternal heart;

  But lo! from all the solemn deep,

  Far voices out of mystery

  Seem questioning why we are apart!

  “Where’er I go I am alone

  Who once, through thee, had all the world.

  My breast is one whole raging pain

  For that which was, and now is flown

  Into the Blank where life is hurled

  Where all is not, nor is again!”

  1 These stanzas I found, in pencil, upon a piece of foolscap gummed in behind the fly-leaf of the MS. They have all the appearance of having been written at an earlier date than the Manuscript.—Ed.

  I

  The Finding of the Manuscript

  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.

  Yet, in spite of its desolation, my friend Tonnison and I had elected to spend our vacation there. He had stumbled on the place, by mere chance, the year previously, during the course of a long walking tour, and discovered the possibilities for the angler, in a small and unnamed river that runs past the outskirts of the little village.

  I have said that the river is without name; I may add that no map that I have hitherto consulted has shown either village or stream. They seem to have entirely escaped observation: indeed, they might never exist for all that the average guide tells one. Possibly, this can be partly accounted for by the fact that the nearest railway-station (Ardrahan) is some forty miles distant.

  It was early one warm evening when my friend and I arrived in Kraighten. We had reached Ardrahan the previous night, sleeping there in rooms hired at the village post-office, and leaving in good time on the following morning, clinging insecurely to one of the typical jaunting cars.

  It had taken us all day to accomplish our journey over some of the roughest tracks imaginable, with the result that we were thoroughly tired and somewhat bad tempered. However, the tent had to be erected, and our goods stowed away, before we could think of food or rest. And so we set to work, with the aid of our driver, and soon had the tent up, upon a small patch of ground just outside the little village, and quite near to the river.

  Then, having stored all our belongings, we dismissed the driver, as he had to make his way back as speedily as possible, and told him to come across to us at the end of a fortnight. We had brought sufficient provisions to last us for that space of time, and water we could get from the stream. Fuel we did not need, as we had included a small oil-stove among our outfit, and the weather was fine and warm.

  It was Tonnison’s idea to camp out instead of getting lodgings in one of the cottages. As he put it, there was no joke in sleeping in a room with a numerous family of healthy Irish in one corner, and the pig-sty in the other, while over-head a ragged colony of roosting fowls distributed th
eir blessings impartially, and the whole place so full of peat smoke that it made a fellow sneeze his head off just to put it inside the doorway.

  Tonnison had got the stove lit now, and was busy cutting slices of bacon into the frying-pan; so I took the kettle and walked down to the river for water. On the way, I had to pass close to a little group of the village people, who eyed me curiously, but not in any unfriendly manner, though none of them ventured a word.

  As I returned with my kettle filled, I went up to them and, after a friendly nod, to which they replied in like manner, I asked them casually about the fishing; but, instead of answering, they just shook their heads silently, and stared at me. I repeated the question, addressing more particularly a great, gaunt fellow at my elbow; yet again I received no answer. Then the man turned to a comrade and said something rapidly in a language that I did not understand; and, at once, the whole crowd of them fell to jabbering in what, after a few moments, I guessed to be pure Irish. At the same time they cast many glances in my direction. For a minute, perhaps, they spoke among themselves thus; then the man I had addressed, faced round at me, and said something. By the expression of his face I guessed that he, in turn, was questioning me; but now I had to shake my head, and indicate that I did not comprehend what it was they wanted to know; and so we stood looking at one another, until I heard Tonnison calling to me to hurry up with the kettle. Then, with a smile and a nod, I left them, and all in the little crowd smiled and nodded in return, though their faces still betrayed their puzzlement.