"The Sandwin Compact"

 by August Derleth

originally published Weird Tales, November 1940

Dave, our narrator, grew up summering at his uncle Asa's house along the Innsmouth Road not far from Arkham, playing in the coastal lands with his cousin Eldon.  Now growed up and working as a librarian as Miskatonic U, he gets a call from Eldon, asking him to come out to the house pronto.  "The owls are hooting", Eldon says, invoking a childhood pact they made to use the phrase whenever one needed desperate help.  (Very charming, but being as their conversation is private, why doesn't Eldon just say "hey man I really need your help!"? More dramatic this way anyhoo).  Off Dave goes.

Its seems Uncle Asa's gotten a little weird ("he's not himself", Eldon says).  So has the house.  Weird sounds at night, like spectral music, and footsteps, and ... wet door knobs!  Like someone with wet hands tried to turn them (you ever try to turn a knob with wet hands?) and having the whole house smell like fish.

Uncle Asa is indeed getting a little weird, responding oddly to the call of a sea-bird outside (Eldon tells Dave it was no bird - something out there is speaking to Asa).  PS Uncle Asa also looks like a frog!  That night, Dave has strange dreams of flying with the winds over strange parts of the world ... an isolated plateau, a black lake... he awakens exhausted to find the house smelling like fish,  phantom footsteps, weird vocal sounds, etc. He goes to Eldon, who's talking mythos names in his sleep, and wakes him up.  They go to Uncle Asa's room and, listening outside, get to hear him arguing with something that croaks in an unknown language.  Then they hear something in the room seemingly stomp off into the distance.  Upon entry they find the room dripping and wet everywhere.  Uncle Asa has confession to make.  It seems the Sandwin family's been selling off its oldest sons for a few generations to the Cthulhoid hordes in order to stay independently wealthy.  But Unc's having none of it, thus the baddies are after him. They're threatening to send the dreaded Lloigor (not the entities from Colin Wilson's story, btw).

All of this reminds Dave of the restricted collection of Mythos-y tomes at the Miskatonic U library, which he's already delved into and which, naturally, he now goes and delves into more.  Asa boards up the windows and battens down the hatches.

When Dave returns to the house "a fortnight later", all hell breaks loose.  Howling winds (but only inside the house), subterranean stomps, voices chanting "Ia! Ia! (insert name of mythos deity here).  After much rigamarole they bust into Uncle Asa's room and find he's basically been sucked, vacuum like, right out of his clothes!

This time out Aug is bouncing off himself as much as HPL, since half the plot is cribbed from his own "Return of Hastur".  Not a terrible story, but not a particularly great one either.