"Wolves of Darkness", a novella by Jack Williamson; first published in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, January 1932, available at the Internet Archive; reprinted in The Magazine of Horror, November, 1967, also available at the Internet Archive. You may have read it in one of these compilations.
It starts out like this:
Involuntarily I paused, shuddering, on the snow-covered station platform. A strange sound, weird, and somehow appalling, filled the ghostly moonlight of the winter night. A quavering and distant ululation, which prickled my body with chills colder than the piercing bite of the motionless, frozen air.
[. . . .]
'Howdy, Mister,' he said in a drawl that was a little strained and husky. 'You sort of scairt me. You was so long comin' in that I figured nobody got off.'
'I stopoped to listen to the wolves,' I told him. 'They sound weird, don't they?"
He searched my face with strange, fearful eyes. For a long time he did not speak. Then he said briskly, 'Well, Mister, what kin I do for ye?'
As I advanced toward the stove, he added, 'I'm Mike Connell, the station agent.'
'My name is Clovis McLaurin,' I told him. 'I want to find my father, Dr. Ford McLaurin. He lives on a ranch near here.'
'So you're Doc McLaurin's boy, eh?' Connell said, warming visibly. He rose, smiling and shifting his wad of tobacco to the other cheek, and took my hand.
'Yes,' I said. 'Have you seen him lately? Three days ago I had a strange telegram from him. He asked me to come at once. It seems that he's somehow in trouble. Do you know anything about it?'
[. . . .]
It was three years since my father had left the chair of astrophysics at an eastern university, to come here to the lonely ranch to carry on his original experiments. The legacy from his brother Tom, besides the ranch itself, had included a small fortune in money, which had made it possible for him to give up his academic position and to devote his entire time to the abstruse problem upon which he had been working.
It's a classic yarn, and it has your interdimensional portal, evil aliens, etc. More excerpts later when I have time.