THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND

William Hope Hodgson

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.

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

AUTHOR’S 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 handwriting, 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 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.

William hope Hodgson December 17, 1907

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.