Howard Phillips Lovecraft - The Thing on the Doorstep, HP Lovercraft
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The Thing on the Doorstep
Lovecraft, Howard Phillips
Published:
1931
Categorie(s):
Fiction, Horror, Short Stories
Source:
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About Lovecraft:
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an American author of fantasy, horror
and science fiction. He is notable for blending elements of science fiction
and horror; and for popularizing "cosmic horror": the notion that some
concepts, entities or experiences are barely comprehensible to human
minds, and those who delve into such risk their sanity. Lovecraft has be-
come a cult figure in the horror genre and is noted as creator of the
"Cthulhu Mythos," a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a
"pantheon" of nonhuman creatures, as well as the famed Necronomicon,
a grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. His works typically had a
tone of "cosmic pessimism," regarding mankind as insignificant and
powerless in the universe. Lovecraft's readership was limited during his
life, and his works, particularly early in his career, have been criticized as
occasionally ponderous, and for their uneven quality. Nevertheless,
Lovecraft’s reputation has grown tremendously over the decades, and he
is now commonly regarded as one of the most important horror writers
of the 20th Century, exerting an influence that is widespread, though of-
ten indirect. Source: Wikipedia
Also available on Feedbooks for Lovecraft:
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(1926)
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(1931)
•
(1928)
•
(1934)
•
(1931)
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(1936)
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(1930)
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(1927)
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(1938)
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(1932)
Copyright:
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Chapter
1
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 ac-
ted 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 con-
coct a theory of a ghastly jest or warning by discharged servants, yet
they know in their hearts that the truth is something infinitely more ter-
rible 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 surviv-
al 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 juni-
or, 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. Per-
haps 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
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this doubtless fostered a strange secretive life in the boy, with imagina-
tion 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 huddled, sagging gambrel roofs and crumbling Georgi-
an balustrades brood out the centuries beside the darkly muttering
Miskatonic.
As time went by I turned to architecture and gave up my design of il-
lustrating 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 sen-
sation 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 mad-
house in 1926 after a visit to a sinister, ill-regarded village in Hungary.
In self-reliance and practical affairs, however, Derby was greatly re-
tarded 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 as-
sumed 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 shy-
ness 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 stud-
ied in a Boston architect's office, had married, and had finally returned to
Arkham to practise my profession - settling in the family homestead in
4
Saltonstall Street since my father had moved to Florida for his health. Ed-
ward 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 par-
ents would not let him board away from them. He entered at sixteen and
completed his course in three years, majoring in English and French liter-
ature 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 con-
duct he wished he dared adopt.
What he did do was to become an almost fanatical devotee of subter-
ranean magical lore, for which Miskatonic's library was and is famous.
Always a dweller on the surface of 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 for-
bidden 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 new-
comer 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 top-
ics, 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, iner-
tia, 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
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