Lovecraft, H P - The Thing On The Doorstep

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The Thing on the Doorstep

by H. P. Lovecraft

Written 21-24 Aug 1933

Published January 1937 in Weird Tales, Vol. 29, No. 1, p. 52-70.

It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to

show by this statement that I am not his murderer. At first I shall be called a madman -

madder than the man I shot in his cell at the Arkham Sanitarium. Later some of my

readers will weigh each statement, correlate it with the known facts, and ask themselves

how I could have believed otherwise than I did after facing the evidence of that horror -

that thing on the doorstep.

Until then I also saw nothing but madness in the wild tales I have acted on. Even now I

ask myself whether I was misled - or whether I am not mad after all. I do not know - but

others have strange things to tell of Edward and Asenath Derby, and even the stolid

police are at their wits' ends to account for that last terrible visit. They have tried weakly

to concoct a theory of a ghastly jest or warning by discharged servants, yet they know in

their hearts that the truth is something infinitely more terrible and incredible.

So I say that I have not murdered Edward Derby. Rather have I avenged him, and in so

doing purged the earth of a horror whose survival might have loosed untold terrors on all

mankind. There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then

some evil soul breaks a passage through. When that happens, the man who knows must

strike before reckoning the consequences.

I have known Edward Pickman Derby all his life. Eight years my junior, he was so

precocious that we had much in common from the time he was eight and I was sixteen.

He was the most phenomenal child scholar I have ever known, and at seven was writing

verse of a sombre, fantastic, almost morbid cast which astonished the tutors surrounding

him. Perhaps his private education and coddled seclusion had something to do with his

premature flowering. An only child, he had organic weaknesses which startled his doting

parents and caused them to keep him closely chained to their side. He was never allowed

out without his nurse, and seldom had a chance to play unconstrainedly with other

children. All this doubtless fostered a strange secretive life in the boy, with imagination

as his one avenue of freedom.

At any rate, his juvenile learning was prodigious and bizarre; and his facile writings such

as to captivate me despite my greater age. About that time I had leanings toward art of a

somewhat grotesque cast, and I found in this younger child a rare kindred spirit. What lay

behind our joint love of shadows and marvels was, no doubt, the ancient, mouldering, and

subtly fearsome town in which we live - witch-cursed, legend-haunted Arkham, whose

The Thing on the Doorstep

huddled, sagging gambrel roofs and crumbling Georgian balustrades brood out the

centuries beside the darkly muttering Miskatonic.

As time went by I turned to architecture and gave up my design of illustrating a book of

Edward's demoniac poems, yet our comradeship suffered no lessening. Young Derby's

odd genius developed remarkably, and in his eighteenth year his collected nightmare-

lyrics made a real sensation when issued under the title Azathoth and Other Horrors. He

was a close correspondent of the notorious Baudelairean poet Justin Geoffrey, who wrote

The People of the Monolith and died screaming in a madhouse in 1926 after a visit to a

sinister, ill-regarded village in Hungary.

In self-reliance and practical affairs, however, Derby was greatly retarded because of his

coddled existence. His health had improved, but his habits of childish dependence were

fostered by over-careful parents, so that he never travelled alone, made independent

decisions, or assumed responsibilities. It was early seen that he would not be equal to a

struggle in the business or professional arena, but the family fortune was so ample that

this formed no tragedy. As he grew to years of manhood he retained a deceptive aspect of

boyishness. Blond and blue-eyed, he had the fresh complexion of a child; and his attempt

to raise a moustache were discernible only with difficulty. His voice was soft and light,

and his unexercised life gave him a juvenile chubbiness rather than the paunchiness of

premature middle age. He was of good height, and his handsome face would have made

him a notable gallant had not his shyness held him to seclusion and bookishness.

Derby's parents took him abroad every summer, and he was quick to seize on the surface

aspects of European thought and expression. His Poe-like talents turned more and more

toward the decadent, and other artistic sensitiveness and yearnings were half-aroused in

him. We had great discussions in those days. I had been through Harvard, had studied in

a Boston architect's office, had married, and had finally returned to Arkham to practise

my profession - settling in the family homestead in Saltonstall Street since my father had

moved to Florida for his health. Edward used to call almost every evening, till I came to

regard him as one of the household. He had a characteristic way of ringing the doorbell or

sounding the knocker that grew to be a veritable code signal, so that after dinner I always

listened for the familiar three brisk strokes followed by two more after a pause. Less

frequently I would visit at his house and note with envy the obscure volumes in his

constantly growing library.

Derby went through Miskatonic University in Arkahm since his parents would not let

him board away from them. He entered at sixteen and completed his course in three

years, majoring in English and French literature and receiving high marks in everything

but mathematics and the sciences. He mingled very little with the other students, though

looking enviously at the "daring" or "Bohemian" set - whose superficially "smart"

language and meaningless ironic pose he aped, and whose dubious conduct he wished he

dared adopt.

What he did do was to become an almost fanatical devotee of subterranean magical lore,

for which Miskatonic's library was and is famous. Always a dweller on the surface of

The Thing on the Doorstep

phantasy and strangeness, he now delved deep into the actual runes and riddles left by a

fabulous past for the guidance or puzzlement of posterity. He read things like the frightful

Book of Eibon, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, and the forbidden

Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, though he did not tell his parents he had

seen them. Edward was twenty when my son and only child was born, and seemed

pleased when I named the newcomer Edward Derby Upton after him.

By the time he was twenty-five Edward Derby was a prodigiously learned man and a

fairly well known poet and fantaisiste though his lack of contacts and responsibilities had

slowed down his literary growth by making his products derivative and over-bookish. I

was perhaps his closest friend - finding him an inexhaustible mine of vital theoretical

topics, while he relied on me for advice in whatever matters he did not wish to refer to his

parents. He remained single - more through shyness, inertia, and parental protectiveness

than through inclination - and moved in society only to the slightest and most perfunctory

extent. When the war came both health and ingrained timidity kept him at home. I went

to Plattsburg for a commission but never got overseas.

So the years wore on. Edward's mother died when he was thirty four and for months he

was incapacitated by some odd psychological malady. His father took him to Europe,

however, and he managed to pull out of his trouble without visible effects. Afterward he

seemed to feel a sort of grotesque exhilaration, as if of partial escape from some unseen

bondage. He began to mingle in the more "advanced" college set despite his middle age,

and was present at some extremely wild doings - on one occasion paying heavy blackmail

(which he borrowed of me) to keep his presence at a certain affair from his father's

notice. Some of the whispered rumors about the wild Miskatonic set were extremely

singular. There was even talk of black magic and of happenings utterly beyond

credibility.

Edward was thirty-eight when he met Asenath Waite. She was, I judge, about twenty-

three at the time; and was taking a special course in mediaeval metaphysics at

Miskatonic. The daughter of a friend of mine had met her before - in the Hall School at

Kingsport - and had been inclined to shun her because of her odd reputation. She was

dark, smallish, and very good-looking except for overprotuberant eyes; but something in

her expression alienated extremely sensitive people. It was, however, largely her origin

and conversation which caused average folk to avoid her. She was one of the Innsmouth

Waites, and dark legends have clustered for generations about crumbling, half-deserted

Innsmouth and its people. There are tales of horrible bargains about the year 1850, and of

a strange element "not quite human" in the ancient families of the run-down fishing port -

tales such as only old-time Yankees can devise and repeat with proper awesomeness.

Asenath's case was aggravated by the fact that she was Ephraim Waite's daughter - the

child of his old age by an unknown wife who always went veiled. Ephraim lived in a

half-decayed mansion in Washington Street, Innsmouth, and those who had seen the

place (Arkham folk avoid going to Innsmouth whenever they can) declared that the attic

The Thing on the Doorstep

windows were always boarded, and that strange sounds sometimes floated from within as

evening drew on. The old man was known to have been a prodigious magical student in

his day, and legend averred that he could raise or quell storms at sea according to his

whim. I had seen him once or twice in my youth as he came to Arkham to consult

forbidden tomes at the college library, and had hated his wolfish, saturnine face with its

tangle of iron-grey beard. He had died insane - under rather queer circumstances - just

before his daughter (by his will made a nominal ward of the principal) entered the Hall

School, but she had been his morbidly avid pupil and looked fiendishly like him at times.

The friend whose daughter had gone to school with Asenath Waite repeated many

curious things when the news of Edward's acquaintance with her began to spread about.

Asenath, it seemed, had posed as a kind of magician at school; and had really seemed

able to accomplish some highly baffling marvels. She professed to be able to raise

thunderstorms, though her seeming success was generally laid to some uncanny knack at

prediction. All animals markedly disliked her, and she could make any dog howl by

certain motions of her right hand. There were times when she displayed snatches of

knowledge and language very singular - and very shocking - for a young girl; when she

would frighten her schoolmates with leers and winks of an inexplicable kind, and would

seem to extract an obscene zestful irony from her present situation.

Most unusual, though, were the well-attested cases of her influence over other persons.

She was, beyond question, a genuine hypnotist. By gazing peculiarly at a fellow-student

she would often give the latter a distinct feeling of exchanged personality - as if the

subject were placed momentarily in the magician's body and able to stare half across the

room at her real body, whose eyes blazed and protruded with an alien expression.

Asenath often made wild claims about the nature of consciousness and about its

independence of the physical frame - or at least from the life-processes of the physical

frame. Her crowning rage, however, was that she was not a man; since she believed a

male brain had certain unique and far-reaching cosmic powers. Given a man's brain, she

declared, she could not only equal but surpass her father in mastery of unknown forces.

Edward met Asenath at a gathering of "intelligentsia" held in one of the students' rooms,

and could talk of nothing else when he came to see me the next day. He had found her

full of the interests and erudition which engrossed him most, and was in addition wildly

taken with her appearance. I had never seen the young woman, and recalled casual

references only faintly, but I knew who she was. It seemed rather regrettable that Derby

should become so upheaved about her; but I said nothing to discourage him, since

infatuation thrives on opposition. He was not, he said, mentioning her to his father.

In the next few weeks I heard of very little but Asenath from young Derby. Others now

remarked Edward's autumnal gallantry, though they agreed that he did not look even

nearly his actual age, or seem at all inappropriate as an escort for his bizarre divinity. He

was only a trifle paunchy despite his indolence and self-indulgence, and his face was

absolutely without lines. Asenath, on the other hand, had the premature crow's feet which

come from the exercises of an intense will.

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摘要：

TheThingontheDoorstepTheThingontheDoorstepbyH.P.LovecraftWritten21-24Aug1933PublishedJanuary1937inWeirdTales,Vol.29,No.1,p.52-70.IItistruethatIhavesentsixbulletsthroughtheheadofmybestfriend,andyetIhopetoshowbythisstatementthatIamnothismurderer.AtfirstIshallbecalledamadman-madderthanthemanIshotinhisc...

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