"The Keeper of Dark Point" is a short story written by John Glasby. It was originally published in the 1967 pulp magazine Supernatural Stories #107 before being printed in the anthology The New Lovecraft Circle by Fedogan & Bremer in 1996 and later in The Dark Boatman: Tales of Horror and the Cthulhu Mythos.
Synopsis[]
The story is set in the summer of 1936. A man named Stephen Delmore Ashton has disappeared, and Martin, our narrator, has some ideas as to where.
Stephen came from an ancient British family, who owned a crumbling ancestral manor, not far from an abandoned lighthouse on the Cornish coast. Martin met Ashton in college, where they shared an interest in pre-human civilizations. They remained in touch as Martin became a historian/author and Stephen traveled the world in search of rare and odd things.
Stephen approached Martin one night and, after describing the Cthulhu Mythos in detail, explained his quest to find a specific sinister book of lore. Then he disappeared. Martin journeys to Stephen's home in the hopes of finding his friend. The family manor is in ruins, having been burned down 10 years ago by neighbors who had their fill of Ashton's occultism. Discovering a trapdoor in the ruins, Martin follows its tunnel to some underground chambers, where he finds an ancient book, and a note from Stephen's mother. It seems Stephen's parents weren't mere followers but actual minions of the Great Old Ones.
"Do not fear what lives beneath the manor", the book instructs Martin. Following this discovery, Martin journeys to the nearby lighthouse and, after a fleeting encounter with some hideous green scaly creature, too quick to be fully seen, he performs the rituals in the hopes of recovering his friend. Instead, something abominable comes for him.