The House on the Borderland
William Hope Hodgson
 Two good friends, Tonnison and Berreggnog, travel to the remote village of Kraighten in rural Ireland. On the third day of their trip, they stumble upon the ruins of a strangely-shaped house bordering a large lake. They discover the mouldering journal of the Recluse, an unidentified man who recorded his last days in the house before its destruction. The Recluse begins his journal with descriptions of how he acquired the house, along with his daily life with his sister and his faithful dog, Pepper. He confides that he is starting the diary to record the strange experiences and horrors that were occurring in and around the house. The Recluse relates a vision in which he travels to a remote and vast arena, "the plain of silence," surrounded by mountains with representations of mythological beast-gods, demons, and other "bestial horrors" on their slopes. In the center of the plain stands a house almost identical to his own, save that the house in the arena is much larger and appears to be made of a green jade-like substance. Along the way, he sees a huge, menacing humanoid swine-thing. After his vision of the "arena," he becomes fascinated with the pit adjacent to his house (Ireland), and begins to explore it. Shortly after this he is attacked by humanoid pig-like creatures that he names "the swine-things" which appear to have their origin from somewhere in the depths of a great chasm found under the house (accessed through a pit on the other side of the gardens) . The struggle with these creatures lasts for several nights of greater and greater ferocity, yet in the end, the man kills several of the swine things, and apparently drives them off. As he searches for the origin of the Swine-things, the man explores a pit in the gardens were the river ends and flows underground. There he finds a tunnel leading to a great chasm under the house. When rock slides dam the water in the pit, trapping the man, his dog Pepper rescues him. By the time that the two men find the journal, the obstructed water has overflowed the pit to create the lake. The house transports him inter-dimensionally to an unknown place called 'the sea of sleep' where he briefly reunites with his lost love. A short time later, the man notices that day and night have begun to speed up, eventually blurring into a never-ending dusk. As he watches, his surroundings decay and collapse to dust. The dead world slowly grinds to a halt as the sun goes out after several million millennia. Once the world ends, the man floats through space, seeing angelic, human, and demonic forms passing before his eyes. Later, he finds himself back in his own study on Earth, with everything apparently returned to normalcy—with the one exception of Pepper, who is dead. To make matters worse, the malicious swine-beast from his earlier journeys to the 'arena' has managed to follow him back to his own dimension. The creature infects the man's new dog with a luminous fungal disease. Although the man shoots the suffering animal, he also contracts the disease. The manuscript ends with the man locked (from the outside only) in his study as the creature comes through a trap door in the basement, that opened directly over the chasm under the house. Tonnison and Berreggnog search for information on the man and his circumstances. They find that the only knowledge of the house was that it was a place long of evil repute and had mysteriously fallen into the chasm. They leave Kraighten and never return.