The Strange High House in the Mist

A visiting philosophy professor spends a Kingsport summer fixated on a cottage perched at the top of a sea-cliff no local will climb, and finally scales it uninvited to meet the bearded tenant everyone in town has opinions about but no direct experience of. A gathering of very old, very large presences arrives that evening as it apparently always does, and the professor comes back down changed in a way his colleagues mostly just find quieter.