The House on the Borderland (Horror Classic). William Hope Hodgson

       William Hope Hodgson

      The House on the Borderland

      (Horror Classic)

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      2018 OK Publishing

      ISBN 978-80-272-4716-5

      Table of Contents

       To My Father (Whose feet tread the lost aeons)

       Author’s Introduction to the Manuscript

       I. The Finding of the Manuscript

       II. The Plain of Silence

       III. The House in the Arena

       IV. The Earth

       V. The Thing in the Pit

       VI. The Swine-Things

       VII. The Attack

       VIII. After the Attack

       IX. In the Cellars

       X. The Time of Waiting

       XI. The Searching of the Gardens

       XII. The Subterranean Pit

       XIII. The Trap in the Great Cellar

       XIV. The Sea of Sleep

       XV. The Noise in the Night

       XVI. The Awakening

       XVII. The Slowing Rotation

       XVIII. The Green Star

       XIX. The End of the Solar System

       XX. The Celestial Globes

       XXI. The Dark Sun

       XXII. The Dark Nebula

       XXIII. Pepper

       XXIV. The Footsteps in the Garden

       XXV. The Thing From the Arena

       XXVI. The Luminous Speck

       XXVII. Conclusion

       Grief

      To My Father

       (Whose feet tread the lost aeons)

       Table of Contents

      “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

       Table of Contents

      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 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