Oh cosmic
evil, wherefore art thou? Ahh, a deep
pit in the fields of rural Ireland, just where I thought. At least, this is the dish William Hope
Hodgson would serve. His 1908 The House on the Borderland is the story
of an Irish recluse’s encounter with inexplicable forces of the malign in the
fields outside his home. Even stranger
is that the evil bears the head of a pig.
(I would have thought goat given all the pagan stereotypes, red eyes,
horns, etc., but, what do I know of cosmic evil…)
The House on the Borderland opens with two fishermen
going to the countryside for a little sport.
Encountering a strange house at the edge of a small gorge, rifling
through the interior they discover a manuscript, and over a meal begin reading
it. The framing device effective, the
tale the manuscript tells is one that requires that extra bit of narrative
distance to work properly. An unnamed
narrator, living in the countryside with only his sister and dog, experiences
the most bizarre happenstance one day.
Seemingly swept out of the Earthly dimension, he arrives in a massive
field, and in the center sits a house—a house that bears strong resemblance to
his own, yet made of jade and much bigger.
An evil swine entity making its presence felt more than seen in the
ether surrounding the house, the narrator’s return home sees several of the
swine beasts trying to break into his house.
Though defending himself with a shotgun, his inter-dimensional
experiences are only just beginning.
Looking out his window one evening, time begins to shift from fast, to
faster, to dying Earth. And that is only
one stop of the cosmic clock.
