The House on the Borderland

The House on the Borderland
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 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 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 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

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