The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories

by H. P. Lovecraft

  All that day and the next I racked my brain over the problem. What had happened? What sort of mind looked out through those alien eyes in Edward’s face? I could think of nothing but this dimly terrible enigma, and gave up all efforts to perform my usual work. The second morning the hospital called up to say that the recovered patient was unchanged, and by evening I was close to a nervous collapse—a state I admit, though others will vow it coloured my subsequent vision. I have nothing to say on this point except that no madness of mine could account for all the evidence.

  VII.

  It was in the night—after that second evening—that stark, utter horror burst over me and weighted my spirit with a black, clutching panic from which it can never shake free. It began with a telephone call just before midnight. I was the only one up, and sleepily took down the receiver in the library. No one seemed to be on the wire, and I was about to hang up and go to bed when my ear caught a very faint suspicion of sound at the other end. Was someone trying under great difficulties to talk? As I listened I thought I heard a sort of half-liquid bubbling noise—“glub . . . glub . . . glub”—which had an odd suggestion of inarticulate, unintelligible word and syllable divisions. I called, “Who is it?” But the only answer was “glub-glub . . . glub-glub.”32 I could only assume that the noise was mechanical; but fancying that it might be a case of a broken instrument able to receive but not to send, I added, “I can’t hear you. Better hang up and try Information.” Immediately I heard the receiver go on the hook at the other end.

  This, I say, was just before midnight. When that call was traced afterward it was found to come from the old Crowninshield house, though it was fully half a week from the housemaid’s day to be there. I shall only hint what was found at that house—the upheaval in a remote cellar storeroom, the tracks, the dirt, the hastily rifled wardrobe, the baffling marks on the telephone, the clumsily used stationery, and the detestable stench lingering over everything. The police, poor fools, have their smug little theories, and are still searching for those sinister discharged servants—who have dropped out of sight amidst the present furore. They speak of a ghoulish revenge for things that were done, and say I was included because I was Edward’s best friend and adviser.

  Idiots!—do they fancy those brutish clowns could have forged that handwriting? Do they fancy they could have brought what later came? Are they blind to the changes in that body that was Edward’s? As for me, I now believe all that Edward Derby ever told me. There are horrors beyond life’s edge that we do not suspect, and once in a while man’s evil prying calls them just within our range. Ephraim—Asenath—that devil called them in, and they engulfed Edward as they are engulfing me.

  Can I be sure that I am safe? Those powers survive the life of the physical form. The next day—in the afternoon, when I pulled out of my prostration and was able to walk and talk coherently—I went to the madhouse and shot him dead for Edward’s and the world’s sake, but can I be sure till he is cremated? They are keeping the body for some silly autopsies by different doctors—but I say he must be cremated. He must be cremated—he who was not Edward Derby when I shot him. I shall go mad if he is not, for I may be the next. But my will is not weak—and I shall not let it be undermined by the terrors I know are seething around it. One life—Ephraim, Asenath, and Edward—who now? I will not be driven out of my body . . . I will not change souls with that bullet-ridden lich in the madhouse!

  But let me try to tell coherently of that final horror. I will not speak of what the police persistently ignored—the tales of that dwarfed, grotesque, malodorous thing met by at least three wayfarers in High St. just before two o’clock, and the nature of the single footprints in certain places. I will say only that just about two the doorbell and knocker waked me—doorbell and knocker both, plied alternately and uncertainly in a kind of weak desperation, and each trying to keep to Edward’s old signal of three-and-two strokes.

  Roused from sound sleep, my mind leaped into a turmoil. Derby at the door—and remembering the old code! That new personality had not remembered it . . . was Edward suddenly back in his rightful state? Why was he here in such evident stress and haste? Had he been released ahead of time, or had he escaped? Perhaps, I thought as I flung on a robe and bounded downstairs, his return to his own self had brought raving and violence, revoking his discharge and driving him to a desperate dash for freedom. Whatever had happened, he was good old Edward again, and I would help him!

  When I opened the door into the elm-arched blackness a gust of insufferably foetid wind almost flung me prostrate. I choked in nausea, and for a second scarcely saw the dwarfed, humped figure on the steps. The summons had been Edward’s, but who was this foul, stunted parody? Where had Edward had time to go? His ring had sounded only a second before the door opened.

  The caller had on one of Edward’s overcoats—its bottom almost touching the ground, and its sleeves rolled back yet still covering the hands. On the head was a slouch hat pulled low, while a black silk muffler concealed the face. As I stepped unsteadily forward, the figure made a semi-liquid sound like that I had heard over the telephone—“glub . . . glub . . .”—and thrust at me a large, closely written paper impaled on the end of a long pencil. Still reeling from the morbid and unaccountable foetor, I seized this paper and tried to read it in the light from the doorway.

  Beyond question, it was in Edward’s script. But why had he written when he was close enough to ring—and why was the script so awkward, coarse, and shaky? I could make out nothing in the dim half light, so edged back into the hall, the dwarf figure clumping mechanically after but pausing on the inner door’s threshold. The odour of this singular messenger was really appalling, and I hoped (not in vain, thank God!) that my wife would not wake and confront it.

  Then, as I read the paper, I felt my knees give under me and my vision go black. I was lying on the floor when I came to, that accursed sheet still clutched in my fear-rigid hand. This is what it said.“Dan—go to the sanitarium and kill it. Exterminate it. It isn’t Ed ward Derby any more. She got me—it’s Asenath—and she has been dead three months and a half. I lied when I said she had gone away. I killed her. I had to. It was sudden, but we were alone and I was in my right body. I saw a candlestick and smashed her head in. She would have got me for good at Hallowmass.

  “I buried her in the farther cellar storeroom under some old boxes and cleaned up all the traces. The servants suspected next morning, but they have such secrets that they dare not tell the police. I sent them off, but God knows what they—and others of the cult—will do.

  “I thought for a while I was all right, and then I felt the tugging at my brain. I knew what it was—I ought to have remembered. A soul like hers—or Ephraim’s—is half detached, and keeps right on after death as long as the body lasts. She was getting me—making me change bodies with her—seizing my body and putting me in that corpse of hers buried in the cellar.

  “I knew what was coming—that’s why I snapped and had to go to the asylum. Then it came—I found myself choked in the dark—in Asenath’s rotting carcass down there in the cellar under the boxes where I put it. And I knew she must be in my body at the sanitarium—permanently, for it was after Hallowmass, and the sacrifice would work even without her being there—sane, and ready for release as a menace to the world. I was desperate, and in spite of everything I clawed my way out.

  “I’m too far gone to talk—I couldn’t manage to telephone—but I can still write. I’ll get fixed up somehow and bring you this last word and warning. Kill that fiend if you value the peace and comfort of the world. See that it is cremated. If you don’t, it will live on and on, body to body forever, and I can’t tell you what it will do. Keep clear of black magic, Dan, it’s the devil’s business. Goodbye—you’ve been a great friend. Tell the police whatever they’ll believe—and I’m damnably sorry to drag all this on you. I’ll be at peace before long—this thing won’t hold together much more. Hope you can read this. And kill that thing—kill it.


  Yours—Ed.”

  It was only afterward that I read the last half of this paper, for I had fainted at the end of the third paragraph. I fainted again when I saw and smelled what cluttered up the threshold where the warm air had struck it. The messenger would not move or have consciousness any more.

  The butler, tougher-fibred than I, did not faint at what met him in the hall in the morning. Instead, he telephoned the police. When they came I had been taken upstairs to bed, but the—other mass—lay where it had collapsed in the night. The men put handkerchiefs to their noses.

  What they finally found inside Edward’s oddly assorted clothes was mostly liquescent horror.33 There were bones, too—and a crushed-in skull. Some dental work positively identified the skull as Asenath’s.

  EXPLANATORY NOTES

  Abbreviations:

  AT = The Ancient Track: Complete Poetical Works (San Francisco: Night Shade Books, 2001)

  CC = The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories (New York: Penguin, 1999)

  CNH = R. J. Lincoln and G. A. Boxshall, The Cambridge Illustrated Dictionary of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987)

  D = Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1986)

  DH = The Dunwich Horror and Others (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1984)

  HM = The Horror in the Museum and Other Revisions (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1989)

  JHL = John Hay Library, Brown University (Providence, RI)

  LR = Lovecraft Remembered, ed. Peter Cannon (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1998)

  LVW = Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000)

  MM = At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1985)

  MW = Miscellaneous Writings (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1995) OED = Oxford English Dictionary (1933 ed.)

  SL = Selected Letters (Sauk City, WI: Arkham House, 1965-76; 5 vols.)

  INTRODUCTION

  1 H. P. Lovecraft to August Derleth, November 20, 1931 (SL 3.434).

  2 See Lovecraft’s late comment (in a letter to J. Vernon Shea, August 7, 1931): “There is no field other than the weird in which I have any aptitude or inclination for fictional composition. Life has never interested me so much as the escape from life.” SL 3.395.

  3 H. P. Lovecraft to Rheinhart Kleiner, September 14, 1919 (SL 1.87).

  4 Letter to Rheinhart Kleiner, March 7, 1920 (SL 1.110).

  5 Sonia H. Davis, “Lovecraft as I Knew Him” (LR 258).

  6 Letter to Rheinhart Kleiner, September 27, 1919; LVW 82. 367

  7 Letters to Anne Tillery Renshaw ( June 4, 1921) and Rheinhart Kleiner (June 12, 1921); LVW 84-85.

  8 Letter to to Maurice W. Moe, April 5, 1931 (SL 3.370).

  9 Letter to Lillian D. Clark, August 1, 1924 (SL 1.337).

  10 W. Paul Cook, In Memoriam: Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1941; LR 116).

  11 Letter to Carl Jacobi, February 27, 1932 (SL 4.24).

  12 Letter to Frank Belknap Long, February 27, 1931 (SL 3.295-96).

  13 Letter to E. Hoffmann Price, August 15, 1934 (SL 5.19).

  14 Letter to E. Hoffmann Price, December 7, 1932 (SL 4.117-18).

  THE TOMB

  “The Tomb” was written in June 1917, the first story HPL had written since 1908. It was first published in W. Paul Cook’s amateur journal, the Vagrant (March 1922), and reprinted in Weird Tales ( January 1926). HPL noted that the genesis of the story occurred in June 1917, when he was walking with his aunt Lillian Clark through Swan Point Cemetery and came upon a tombstone dating to 1711. “Why could I not talk with him, and enter more intimately into the life of my chosen age? What had left his body, that it could no longer converse with me? I looked long at that grave, and the night after I returned home I began my first story of the new series—‘The Tomb’ ” (HPL to the Gallomo, [January] 1920; LVW 67). The tombstone is evidently one of a distant ancestor of Mrs. Clark, Simon Smith (died March 4, 1711). The grave had been transferred to Swan Point from the Christopher Smith lot in Warwick. The tale is one of straightforward psychic possession; and in its suggestion of the anomalous influence of an eighteenth-century psyche upon a twentieth-century individual, it is also an anticipation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927), although that novel does not involve psychic possession in the strictest sense. The story also features a number of autobiographical details, especially relating to HPL’s childhood.

  Further Reading

  William Fulwiler, “ ‘The Tomb’ and ‘Dagon’: A Double Dissection,” Crypt of Cthulhu No. 38 (Eastertide 1986): 8-14.

  Will Murray, “A Probable Source for the Drinking Song from ‘The Tomb,’ ” Lovecraft Studies No. 15 (Fall 1987): 77-80.

  1 “So that I may at least, in death, repose in a placid resting-place.” From Virgil’s Aeneid 6.371. The line is spoken by Palinurus, Aeneas’s helmsman, who had fallen overboard to his death, his body never being recovered. Aeneas meets him in the underworld, and Palinurus’s shade begs Aeneas to hold a funeral service for him so that Charon will let him cross the river Styx and thereby find peace.

  2 Cf. HPL’s comment about his own childhood: “At home all the main bookcases in library, parlours, dining-room, and elsewhere were full of standard Victorian junk, most of the brown-leather old-timers . . . having been banished to a windowless third-story trunk-room which had sets of shelves. But what did I do? What, pray, but go with candles and kerosene lamp to that obscure and nighted aërial crypt—leaving the sunny downstairs 19th century flat, and boring my way back through the decades into the late 17th, 18th and early 19th century . . .” (SL 3.407-8).

  3 HPL claimed to have had a “religious” experience as a result of his absorption of Greco-Roman myth as a child: “When about seven or eight I was a genuine pagan, so intoxicated with the beauty of Greece that I acquired a half-sincere belief in the old gods and nature-spirits. I have in literal truth built altars to Pan, Apollo, Diana, and Athena, and have watched for dryads and satyrs in the woods and fields at dusk. Once I firmly thought I beheld some of these sylvan creatures dancing under autumnal oaks . . .” “A Confession of Unfaith” (1922; MW 534-35).

  4 As William Fulwiler (see Further Reading) points out, the name is a tip of the hat to the dominant literary influence on the tale, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886).

  5 The Vitae (Lives) of Greek writer L. Mestrius Plutarchus (50?-120? C.E.) were a series of parallel lives comparing the exploits of celebrated Greeks and Romans. HPL alludes to an incident in the life of the Greek mythic hero Theseus: “Ægeus [Theseus’s father] afterwards, knowing her whom he had lain with to be Pittheus’s daughter, and suspecting her to be with child by him, left a sword and a pair of shoes, hiding them under a great stone that had a hollow in it exactly fitting them; and went away making her only privy to it, and commanding her, if she brought forth a son who, when he came to man’s estate, should be able to lift up the stone and take away what he had left there, she should send him away to him with those things in all secrecy . . . Theseus displaying not only great strength of body, but equal bravery, and a quickness alike and force of understanding, his mother Æthra, conducting him to the stone, and informing him who was his true father, commanded him to take from thence the tokens that Ægeus had left, and sail to Athens. He without any difficulty set himself to the stone and lifted it up . . .” Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans, trans. John Dryden, rev. Arthur Hugh Clough (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), pp. 4-5. HPL owned a five-volume edition of the Dryden-Clough translation of the Lives.

  6 See introductory note for the significance of this date in inspiring HPL to write the story.

  7 Cf. HPL’s recollections of his sensations when he was forced to leave his birthplace in 1904 and move into a smaller house: “How could an old man of 14 (& I surely felt that way!) readjust his existence to a skimpy flat & new household programme & inferior outdoor setting in which almost nothing remained
familiar?” (LVW 30).

  8 HPL’s lifelong teetotalism is well known. He wrote several poems condemning the consumption of alcoholic liquor—“The Power of Wine” (1914), “Temperance Song” (1916), et cetera.

  9 Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth earl of Chesterfield (1694-1773) gained celebrity with his urbane Letters to His Son (1774), which were long regarded as a manual of etiquette for sophisticated gentlemen. HPL owned a volume of Chesterfield’s Works (1860), although he acquired it only in 1931. John Wilmot, second earl of Rochester (1647-1680), poet and satirist, was notorious for the bawdiness of his lyrics. HPL himself was an atheist.

  10 John Gay (1685-1732), friend of Alexander Pope and author of The Beggar’s Opera (1728) and other poetic and dramatic works. Cf. HPL’s poem “To Mr. Kleiner, on Receiving from Him the Poetical Works of Addison, Gay, and Somerville” (1918). Matthew Prior (1664-1721) was a minor Augustan poet. HPL owned an 1858 edition of his Poetical Works.

  11 The poem exists in a separate manuscript (probably predating the story by several years) titled “Gaudeamus,” and appears to be HPL’s attempt to write a better version of a drinking song than one of the same name (by an unnamed amateur writer) he had received from a correspondent. In the manuscript (apparently a fragment of a letter) HPL prefaces the poem with the remark: “As for ‘Gaudeamus’ [by the unnamed writer], the best I can say is, that its rather too Epicurean subject is as ancient as literature itself, and its treatment mediocre. I believe, without any egotism, that I could do better myself . . .” Will Murray (see Further Reading) suggests that HPL was imitating Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan (1637), but a more likely candidate might be the drinking song found in act 3, scene 3 of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The School for Scandal (1780), as this would correspond better with “Georgian [i.e., mid- to late-eighteenth century] playfulness.”