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 fœtor, 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 Edward 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.
First page of the handwritten manuscript of “The Thing on the Doorstep.”
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. There were bones, too—and a crushed-in skull. Some dental work positively identified the skull as Asenath’s.
1. Written in 1933, it first appeared in Weird Tales 29, no. 1 (January 1937), 52–70, with the following reading line: “A powerful tale by one of the supreme masters of weird fiction—a tale in which the horror creeps and grows, to spring at last upon the reader in all its hideous totality.”
2. Asenath is named as the daughter of Potiphera, priest of On, in Genesis 41:45. Pharaoh gives her in marriage to Joseph. One of Asenath’s sons is Ephraim (here the name of her father). These connections were first made by Robert M. Price, in “Two Biblical Curiosities in Lovecraft.”
3. The first mention of the fictional poet Justin Geoffrey is to be found in Robert E. Howard’s 1931 story “The Black Stone.” The tale begins with the following sample of Geoffrey’s verse:
They say foul things of Old Times still lurk
In dark forgotten corners of the world.
And Gates still gape to loose, on certain nights.
Shapes pent in Hell.
Howard’s “The Thing on the Roof” (1932) begins with the following excerpt from another of Geoffrey’s works, Out of the Old Land:
They lumber through the night
With their elephantine tread;
I shudder in affright
As I cower in my bed.
They lift colossal wings
On the high gable roofs
Which tremble to the trample
Of their mastodonic hoofs.
4. Volunteerism swept the United States at the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, but there was little military preparedness. “Summer camps” were established to train volunteers at several locations, including, by late 1914, Plattsburg, New York (now spelled Plattsburgh). The official name of the Plattsburg camp was the Business Men’s Camp; the press lampooned it as the “Tired Businessmen’s Camp.” Many of its first graduates went on to the newly formed Military Training Camps Association (MTCA), which gained sufficient political clout to influence Congress’s approval of a full appropriation for the 1917 camps. In April, however, the United States declared war against Germany, and the civilian camps were converted into officers’ training camps. The narrator’s mention of a “commission” suggests that he was at Plattsburg in this later phase.
5. The Hall School in Bridgeport, Connecticut, founded in 1914 and named after the American Revolutionary War hero Lyman Hall, is a possible but unlikely identification of this school.
6. The Waites are mentioned, along with the Gilmans, the Eliots, and the Marshes (in “The Shadow over Innsmouth”), as one of the four “gently bred” families of Innsmouth.
7. The principal of the Hall School, presumably.
8. There is a Crowninshield-Bentley House in Salem, Massachusetts, listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Frank Crowninshield edited Vanity Fair magazine in the early twentieth century, and the family, Boston Brahmins, were prominent in seafaring, government, the military, publishing, and the arts. Lovecraft revered class status, devoting much energy to tracing his own lineage, and his Anglophilia was at times obsessive. His 1916 poem “An American to Mother England” includes these embarrassingly racist lines:
What man that springs from thy untainted line
But sees Columbia’s virtues all as thine?
Whilst nameless multitudes upon our shore
From the dim corners of creation pour,
Whilst mongrel slaves crawl hither to partake
Of Saxon liberty they could not make,
From such an alien crew in grief I turn,
And for the mother’s voice of Britain burn.
9. This concept is explored in depth in “The Dreams in the Witch House” (here, above).
10. Chesuncook Lake is in the middle of Piscataquis County, today still the least populous county in Maine. The tiny village on the northeast shore has a year-round population of only ten people.
11. Ephraim-Asenath’s plan is obscure. We learned in “The Shadow over Innsmouth” that
those who had congress with the Deep Ones would achieve immortality. What did it profit Ephraim-Asenath to trade Asenath’s immortal body for a mortal one? Edward was no physical prize, although he was in “better shape than usual.” The only possible explanation, and there are hints that this is the correct one, is that Ephraim wanted—perhaps required—a male body in order for his personality to persist.
12. See note 6, above. The Gilmans and the other leading families of Innsmouth appear to have been closely tied.
13. In 1932, a year before Lovecraft wrote this story, the occultist Aleister Crowley, head of the London-based A∴A∴, a magical fraternity centered around a pantheon of Crowley’s own devising, parted company with his secretary, Israel Regardie. Regardie would go on to write several important histories of occult orders. While he did not move to New York until 1937, at some earlier date he may have temporarily taken up residence there to explore his options. (Crowley was expelled from France in 1929; after living in New York during the war years, from 1914 to 1919, he returned to England.)
14. Ambrose Bierce, in “The Death of Halpin Frayser” (an 1893 tale almost surely familiar to Lovecraft, who ranked Bierce’s work highly—see pp. xxiv–xxv, above), quotes the fictional source Hali on liches as follows: “For by death is wrought greater change than hath been shown. Whereas in general the spirit that removed cometh back upon occasion, and is sometimes seen of those in flesh (appearing in the form of the body it bore) yet it hath happened that the veritable body without the spirit hath walked. And it is attested of those encountering who have lived to speak thereon that a lich so raised up hath no natural affection, nor remembrance thereof, but only hate. Also, it is known that some spirits which in life were benign become by death evil altogether.” (The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce, edited by Ernest Jerome Hopkins [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984], 58–59.) Hali is also quoted in Bierce’s 1891 story “An Inhabitant of Carcosa,” and a Lake Hali is mentioned in Robert Chambers’s 1895 collection The King in Yellow, though it is unclear who Hali is meant to be. In Bierce’s story, the lich is the victim’s mother, returned from the dead. In modern fantasy-gaming parlance, a lich is an undead wizard of great power.
The Shadow Out of Time1
Although it is easy to dismiss this tale—one of Lovecraft’s last efforts at fiction—as just another “mind-exchange” story, it displays a scope and craft rivaled only by At the Mountains of Madness. Building slowly, and meticulously recording Peaslee’s strange experiences, it allows us to share the narrator’s struggle to avoid the obvious conclusion—that he has been possessed by another mind and has himself traveled into the far distant past. The stunning ending conveys both horror and awe, confirming humankind’s relatively minor role on the cosmic stage.
I.
After twenty-two years of nightmare and terror, saved only by a desperate conviction of the mythical source of certain impressions, I am unwilling to vouch for the truth of that which I think I found in Western Australia on the night of July 17–18, 1935. There is reason to hope that my experience was wholly or partly an hallucination—for which, indeed, abundant causes existed. And yet, its realism was so hideous that I sometimes find hope impossible.
If the thing did happen, then man must be prepared to accept notions of the cosmos, and of his own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest mention is paralysing. He must, too, be placed on guard against a specific lurking peril which, though it will never engulf the whole race, may impose monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturesome members of it.
It is for this latter reason that I urge, with all the force of my being, final abandonment of all attempts at unearthing those fragments of unknown, primordial masonry which my expedition set out to investigate.
Astounding Stories 17, no. 4 (June 1936) (artist: Howard V. Brown)
Assuming that I was sane and awake, my experience on that night was such as has befallen no man before. It was, moreover, a frightful confirmation of all I had sought to dismiss as myth and dream. Mercifully there is no proof, for in my fright I lost the awesome object which would—if real and brought out of that noxious abyss—have formed irrefutable evidence. When I came upon the horror I was alone—and I have up to now told no one about it. I could not stop the others from digging in its direction, but chance and the shifting sand have so far saved them from finding it. Now I must formulate some definitive statement—not only for the sake of my own mental balance, but to warn such others as may read it seriously.
These pages—much in whose earlier parts will be familiar to close readers of the general and scientific press—are written in the cabin of the ship that is bringing me home. I shall give them to my son, Prof. Wingate Peaslee of Miskatonic University—the only member of my family who stuck to me after my queer amnesia of long ago, and the man best informed on the inner facts of my case. Of all living persons, he is least likely to ridicule what I shall tell of that fateful night.
First page of the handwritten manuscript of “The Shadow Out of Time.”
I did not enlighten him orally before sailing, because I think he had better have the revelation in written form. Reading and re-reading at leisure will leave with him a more convincing picture than my confused tongue could hope to convey. He can do as he thinks best with this account—shewing it, with suitable comment, in any quarters where it will be likely to accomplish good. It is for the sake of such readers as are unfamiliar with the earlier phases of my case that I am prefacing the revelation itself with a fairly ample summary of its background.
My name is Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, and those who recall the newspaper tales of a generation back—or the letters and articles in psychological journals six or seven years ago—will know who and what I am.2 The press was filled with the details of my strange amnesia in 1908–13, and much was made of the traditions of horror, madness, and witchcraft which lurk behind the ancient Massachusetts town then and now forming my place of residence. Yet I would have it known that there is nothing whatever of the mad or sinister in my heredity and early life. This is a highly important fact in view of the shadow which fell so suddenly upon me from outside sources. It may be that centuries of dark brooding had given to crumbling, whisper-haunted Arkham a peculiar vulnerability as regards such shadows—though even this seems doubtful in the light of those other cases which I later came to study. But the chief point is that my own ancestry and background are altogether normal. What came, came from somewhere else—where, I even now hesitate to assert in plain words.
I am the son of Jonathan and Hannah (Wingate) Peaslee, both of wholesome old Haverhill stock. I was born and reared in Haverhill—at the old homestead in Boardman Street near Golden Hill—and did not go to Arkham till I entered Miskatonic University at the age of eighteen. That was in 1889. After my graduation, I studied economics at Harvard and came back to Miskatonic as Instructor of Political Economy in 1895. For thirteen years more my life ran smoothly and happily. I married Alice Keezar of Haverhill in 1896, and my three children, Robert K., Wingate, and Hannah, were born in 1898, 1900, and 1903, respectively. In 1898 I became an associate professor, and in 1902 a full professor. At no time had I the least interest in either occultism or abnormal psychology.
It was on Thursday, May 14, 1908, that the queer amnesia came. The thing was quite sudden, though later I realised that certain brief, glimmering visions of several hours previous—chaotic visions which disturbed me greatly because they were so unprecedented—must have formed premonitory symptoms. My head was aching, and I had a singular feeling—altogether new to me—that someone else was trying to get possession of my thoughts.
The collapse occurred about 10:20 a.m., while I was conducting a class in Political Economy VI—history and present tendencies of economics—for juniors and a few sophomores. I began to see strange shapes before my eyes, and to feel that I was in a grotesque room other than the classroom. My thoughts and speech wandered from my subject, and the students saw that something
was gravely amiss. Then I slumped down, unconscious in my chair, in a stupor from which no one could arouse me. Nor did my rightful faculties again look out upon the daylight of our normal world for five years, four months, and thirteen days.
It is, of course, from others that I have learned what followed. I shewed no sign of consciousness for sixteen and a half hours, though removed to my home at 27 Crane St. and given the best of medical attention.
At 3 A.M. May 15 my eyes opened and I began to speak, but before long the doctors and my family were thoroughly frightened by the trend of my expression and language. It was clear that I had no remembrance of my identity or of my past, though for some reason I seemed anxious to conceal this lack of knowledge. My eyes gazed strangely at the persons around me, and the flexions of my facial muscles were altogether unfamiliar.
Even my speech seemed awkward and foreign. I used my vocal organs clumsily and gropingly, and my diction had a curiously stilted quality, as if I had laboriously learned the English language from books. The pronunciation was barbarously alien, whilst the idiom seemed to include both scraps of curious archaism and expressions of a wholly incomprehensible cast. Of the latter one in particular was very potently—even terrifiedly—recalled by the youngest of the physicians twenty years afterward. For at that late period such a phrase began to have an actual currency—first in England and then in the United States—and though of much complexity and indisputable newness, it reproduced in every least particular the mystifying words of the strange Arkham patient of 1908.
Physical strength returned at once, although I required an odd amount of re-education in the use of my hands, legs, and bodily apparatus in general. Because of this and other handicaps inherent in the mnemonic lapse, I was for some time kept under strict medical care. When I saw that my attempts to conceal the lapse had failed, I admitted it openly, and became eager for information of all sorts. Indeed, it seemed to the doctors that I had lost interest in my proper personality as soon as I found the case of amnesia accepted as a natural thing. They noticed that my chief efforts were to master certain points in history, science, art, language, and folklore—some of them tremendously abstruse, and some childishly simple—which remained, very oddly in many cases, outside my consciousness.
The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft Page 103
