The Thing on the Doorstep
By H. P. Lovecraft
ONE
It is true that I have sent six bullets through
the head of my best friend, and yet I hope
to shew 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 as 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 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 inner 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 lived—witch-cursed,
legend-haunted Arkham, whose 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 daemoniac 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 overcareful 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 attempts
to raise a moustache were discernible only
with difficulty. His voice was soft and light,
and his pampered, 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 sensitivenesses 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 practice my profession—settling in the
family homestead in Saltonstall St. 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
Arkham, 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 meaninglessly
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 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 overbookish. 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 rumours about the wild
Miskatonic set were extremely singular. There
was even talk of black magic and of happenings
utterly beyond credibility.
TWO
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 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 and 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 exercise of an intense will.
About this time Edward brought the girl to
call on me, and I at once saw that his interest
was by no means one-sided. She eyed him continually
with an almost predatory air, and I perceived
that their intimacy was beyond untangling.
Soon afterward I had a visit from old Mr.
Derby, whom I had always admired and respected.
He had heard the tales of his son’s new
friendship, and had wormed the whole truth
out of “the boy”. Edward meant to marry
Asenath, and had even been looking at houses
in the suburbs. Knowing my usually great influence
with his son, the father wondered if I could
help to break the ill-advised affair off;
but I regretfully expressed my doubts. This
time it was not a question of Edward’s weak
will but of the woman’s strong will. The
perennial child had transferred his dependence
from the parental image to a new and stronger
image, and nothing could be done about it.
The wedding was performed a month later—by
a justice of the peace, according to the bride’s
request. Mr. Derby, at my advice, offered
no opposition; and he, my wife, my son, and
I attended the brief ceremony—the other
guests being wild young people from the college.
Asenath had bought the old Crowninshield place
in the country at the end of High Street,
and they proposed to settle there after a
short trip to Innsmouth, whence three servants
and some books and household goods were to
be brought. It was probably not so much consideration
for Edward and his father as a personal wish
to be near the college, its library, and its
crowd of “sophisticates”, that made Asenath
settle in Arkham instead of returning permanently
home.
When Edward called on me after the honeymoon
I thought he looked slightly changed. Asenath
had made him get rid of the undeveloped moustache,
but there was more than that. He looked soberer
and more thoughtful, his habitual pout of
childish rebelliousness being exchanged for
a look almost of genuine sadness. I was puzzled
to decide whether I liked or disliked the
change. Certainly, he seemed for the moment
more normally adult than ever before. Perhaps
the marriage was a good thing—might not
the change of dependence form a start toward
actual neutralisation, leading ultimately
to responsible independence? He came alone,
for Asenath was very busy. She had brought
a vast store of books and apparatus from Innsmouth
(Derby shuddered as he spoke the name), and
was finishing the restoration of the Crowninshield
house and grounds.
Her home in—that town—was a rather disquieting
place, but certain objects in it had taught
him some surprising things. He was progressing
fast in esoteric lore now that he had Asenath’s
guidance. Some of the experiments she proposed
were very daring and radical—he did not
feel at liberty to describe them—but he
had confidence in her powers and intentions.
The three servants were very queer—an incredibly
aged couple who had been with old Ephraim
and referred occasionally to him and to Asenath’s
dead mother in a cryptic way, and a swarthy
young wench who had marked anomalies of feature
and seemed to exude a perpetual odour of fish.
THREE
For the next two years I saw less and less
of Derby. A fortnight would sometimes slip
by without the familiar three-and-two strokes
at the front door; and when he did call—or
when, as happened with increasing infrequency,
I called on him—he was very little disposed
to converse on vital topics. He had become
secretive about those occult studies which
he used to describe and discuss so minutely,
and preferred not to talk of his wife. She
had aged tremendously since her marriage,
till now—oddly enough—she seemed the elder
of the two. Her face held the most concentratedly
determined expression I had ever seen, and
her whole aspect seemed to gain a vague, unplaceable
repulsiveness. My wife and son noticed it
as much as I, and we all ceased gradually
to call on her—for which, Edward admitted
in one of his boyishly tactless moments, she
was unmitigatedly grateful. Occasionally the
Derbys would go on long trips—ostensibly
to Europe, though Edward sometimes hinted
at obscurer destinations.
It was after the first year that people began
talking about the change in Edward Derby.
It was very casual talk, for the change was
purely psychological; but it brought up some
interesting points. Now and then, it seemed,
Edward was observed to wear an expression
and to do things wholly incompatible with
his usual flabby nature. For example—although
in the old days he could not drive a car,
he was now seen occasionally to dash into
or out of the old Crowninshield driveway with
Asenath’s powerful Packard, handling it
like a master, and meeting traffic entanglements
with a skill and determination utterly alien
to his accustomed nature. In such cases he
seemed always to be just back from some trip
or just starting on one—what sort of trip,
no one could guess, although he mostly favoured
the Innsmouth road.
Oddly, the metamorphosis did not seem altogether
pleasing. People said he looked too much like
his wife, or like old Ephraim Waite himself,
in these moments—or perhaps these moments
seemed unnatural because they were so rare.
Sometimes, hours after starting out in this
way, he would return listlessly sprawled on
the rear seat of the car while an obviously
hired chauffeur or mechanic drove. Also, his
preponderant aspect on the streets during
his decreasing round of social contacts (including,
I may say, his calls on me) was the old-time
indecisive one—its irresponsible childishness
even more marked than in the past. While Asenath’s
face aged, Edward’s—aside from those exceptional
occasions—actually relaxed into a kind of
exaggerated immaturity, save when a trace
of the new sadness or understanding would
flash across it. It was really very puzzling.
Meanwhile the Derbys almost dropped out of
the gay college circle—not through their
own disgust, we heard, but because something
about their present studies shocked even the
most callous of the other decadents.
It was in the third year of the marriage that
Edward began to hint openly to me of a certain
fear and dissatisfaction. He would let fall
remarks about things ‘going too far’,
and would talk darkly about the need of ‘saving
his identity’. At first I ignored such references,
but in time I began to question him guardedly,
remembering what my friend’s daughter had
said about Asenath’s hypnotic influence
over the other girls at school—the cases
where students had thought they were in her
body looking across the room at themselves.
This questioning seemed to make him at once
alarmed and grateful, and once he mumbled
something about having a serious talk with
me later.
About this time old Mr. Derby died, for which
I was afterward very thankful. Edward was
badly upset, though by no means disorganised.
He had seen astonishingly little of his parent
since his marriage, for Asenath had concentrated
in herself all his vital sense of family linkage.
Some called him callous in his loss—especially
since those jaunty and confident moods in
the car began to increase. He now wished to
move back into the old Derby mansion, but
Asenath insisted on staying in the Crowninshield
house, to which she had become well adjusted.
Not long afterward my wife heard a curious
thing from a friend—one of the few who had
not dropped the Derbys. She had been out to
the end of High St. to call on the couple,
and had seen a car shoot briskly out of the
drive with Edward’s oddly confident and
almost sneering face above the wheel. Ringing
the bell, she had been told by the repulsive
wench that Asenath was also out; but had chanced
to look up at the house in leaving. There,
at one of Edward’s library windows, she
had glimpsed a hastily withdrawn face—a
face whose expression of pain, defeat, and
wistful hopelessness was poignant beyond description.
It was—incredibly enough in view of its
usual domineering cast—Asenath’s; yet
the caller had vowed that in that instant
the sad, muddled eyes of poor Edward were
gazing out from it.
Edward’s calls now grew a trifle more frequent,
and his hints occasionally became concrete.
What he said was not to be believed, even
in centuried and legend-haunted Arkham; but
he threw out his dark lore with a sincerity
and convincingness which made one fear for
his sanity. He talked about terrible meetings
in lonely places, of Cyclopean ruins in the
heart of the Maine woods beneath which vast
staircases lead down to abysses of nighted
secrets, of complex angles that lead through
invisible walls to other regions of space
and time, and of hideous exchanges of personality
that permitted explorations in remote and
forbidden places, on other worlds, and in
different space-time continua.
He would now and then back up certain crazy
hints by exhibiting objects which utterly
nonplussed me—elusively coloured and bafflingly
textured objects like nothing ever heard of
on earth, whose insane curves and surfaces
answered no conceivable purpose and followed
no conceivable geometry. These things, he
said, came ‘from outside’; and his wife
knew how to get them. Sometimes—but always
in frightened and ambiguous whispers—he
would suggest things about old Ephraim Waite,
whom he had seen occasionally at the college
library in the old days. These adumbrations
were never specific, but seemed to revolve
around some especially horrible doubt as to
whether the old wizard were really dead—in
a spiritual as well as corporeal sense.
At times Derby would halt abruptly in his
revelations, and I wondered whether Asenath
could possibly have divined his speech at
a distance and cut him off through some unknown
sort of telepathic mesmerism—some power
of the kind she had displayed at school. Certainly,
she suspected that he told me things, for
as the weeks passed she tried to stop his
visits with words and glances of a most inexplicable
potency. Only with difficulty could he get
to see me, for although he would pretend to
be going somewhere else, some invisible force
would generally clog his motions or make him
forget his destination for the time being.
His visits usually came when Asenath was away—‘away
in her own body’, as he once oddly put it.
She always found out later—the servants
watched his goings and comings—but evidently
she thought it inexpedient to do anything
drastic.
FOUR
Derby had been married more than three years
on that August day when I got the telegram
from Maine. I had not seen him for two months,
but had heard he was away “on business”.
Asenath was supposed to be with him, though
watchful gossips declared there was someone
upstairs in the house behind the doubly curtained
windows. They had watched the purchases made
by the servants. And now the town marshal
of Chesuncook had wired of the draggled madman
who stumbled out of the woods with delirious
ravings and screamed to me for protection.
It was Edward—and he had been just able
to recall his own name and my name and address.
Chesuncook is close to the wildest, deepest,
and least explored forest belt in Maine, and
it took a whole day of feverish jolting through
fantastic and forbidding scenery to get there
in a car. I found Derby in a cell at the town
farm, vacillating between frenzy and apathy.
He knew me at once, and began pouring out
a meaningless, half-incoherent torrent of
words in my direction.
“Dan—for God’s sake! The pit of the
shoggoths! Down the six thousand steps . . . the
abomination of abominations . . . I never
would let her take me, and then I found myself
there. . . . Iä! Shub-Niggurath! . . . The
shape rose up from the altar, and there were
500 that howled. . . . The Hooded Thing bleated
‘Kamog! Kamog!’—that was old Ephraim’s
secret name in the coven. . . . I was there,
where she promised she wouldn’t take me.
. . . A minute before I was locked in the
library, and then I was there where she had
gone with my body—in the place of utter
blasphemy, the unholy pit where the black
realm begins and the watcher guards the gate.
. . . I saw a shoggoth—it changed shape.
. . . I can’t stand it. . . . I won’t
stand it. . . . I’ll kill her if she ever
sends me there again. . . . I’ll kill that
entity . . . her, him, it . . . I’ll kill
it! I’ll kill it with my own hands!”
It took me an hour to quiet him, but he subsided
at last. The next day I got him decent clothes
in the village, and set out with him for Arkham.
His fury of hysteria was spent, and he was
inclined to be silent; though he began muttering
darkly to himself when the car passed through
Augusta—as if the sight of a city aroused
unpleasant memories. It was clear that he
did not wish to go home; and considering the
fantastic delusions he seemed to have about
his wife—delusions undoubtedly springing
from some actual hypnotic ordeal to which
he had been subjected—I thought it would
be better if he did not. I would, I resolved,
put him up myself for a time; no matter what
unpleasantness it would make with Asenath.
Later I would help him get a divorce, for
most assuredly there were mental factors which
made this marriage suicidal for him. When
we struck open country again Derby’s muttering
faded away, and I let him nod and drowse on
the seat beside me as I drove.
During our sunset dash through Portland the
muttering commenced again, more distinctly
than before, and as I listened I caught a
stream of utterly insane drivel about Asenath.
The extent to which she had preyed on Edward’s
nerves was plain, for he had woven a whole
set of hallucinations around her. His present
predicament, he mumbled furtively, was only
one of a long series. She was getting hold
of him, and he knew that some day she would
never let go. Even now she probably let him
go only when she had to, because she couldn’t
hold on long at a time. She constantly took
his body and went to nameless places for nameless
rites, leaving him in her body and locking
him upstairs—but sometimes she couldn’t
hold on, and he would find himself suddenly
in his own body again in some far-off, horrible,
and perhaps unknown place. Sometimes she’d
get hold of him again and sometimes she couldn’t.
Often he was left stranded somewhere as I
had found him . . . time and again he had
to find his way home from frightful distances,
getting somebody to drive the car after he
found it.
The worst thing was that she was holding on
to him longer and longer at a time. She wanted
to be a man—to be fully human—that was
why she got hold of him. She had sensed the
mixture of fine-wrought brain and weak will
in him. Some day she would crowd him out and
disappear with his body—disappear to become
a great magician like her father and leave
him marooned in that female shell that wasn’t
even quite human. Yes, he knew about the Innsmouth
blood now. There had been traffick with things
from the sea—it was horrible. . . . And
old Ephraim—he had known the secret, and
when he grew old did a hideous thing to keep
alive . . . he wanted to live forever . . . Asenath
would succeed—one successful demonstration
had taken place already.
As Derby muttered on I turned to look at him
closely, verifying the impression of change
which an earlier scrutiny had given me. Paradoxically,
he seemed in better shape than usual—harder,
more normally developed, and without the trace
of sickly flabbiness caused by his indolent
habits. It was as if he had been really active
and properly exercised for the first time
in his coddled life, and I judged that Asenath’s
force must have pushed him into unwonted channels
of motion and alertness. But just now his
mind was in a pitiable state; for he was mumbling
wild extravagances about his wife, about black
magic, about old Ephraim, and about some revelation
which would convince even me. He repeated
names which I recognised from bygone browsings
in forbidden volumes, and at times made me
shudder with a certain thread of mythological
consistency—of convincing coherence—which
ran through his maundering. Again and again
he would pause, as if to gather courage for
some final and terrible disclosure.
“Dan, Dan, don’t you remember him—the
wild eyes and the unkempt beard that never
turned white? He glared at me once, and I
never forgot it. Now she glares that way.
And I know why! He found it in the Necronomicon—the
formula. I don’t dare tell you the page
yet, but when I do you can read and understand.
Then you will know what has engulfed me. On,
on, on, on—body to body to body—he means
never to die. The life-glow—he knows how
to break the link . . . it can flicker on
a while even when the body is dead. I’ll
give you hints, and maybe you’ll guess.
Listen, Dan—do you know why my wife always
takes such pains with that silly backhand
writing? Have you ever seen a manuscript of
old Ephraim’s? Do you want to know why I
shivered when I saw some hasty notes Asenath
had jotted down?
“Asenath . . . is there such a person? Why
did they half think there was poison in old
Ephraim’s stomach? Why do the Gilmans whisper
about the way he shrieked—like a frightened
child—when he went mad and Asenath locked
him up in the padded attic room where—the
other—had been? Was it old Ephraim’s soul
that was locked in? Who locked in whom? Why
had he been looking for months for someone
with a fine mind and a weak will? Why did
he curse that his daughter wasn’t a son?
Tell me, Daniel Upton—what devilish exchange
was perpetrated in the house of horror where
that blasphemous monster had his trusting,
weak-willed, half-human child at his mercy?
Didn’t he make it permanent—as she’ll
do in the end with me? Tell me why that thing
that calls itself Asenath writes differently
when off guard, so that you can’t tell its
script from . . .”
Then the thing happened. Derby’s voice was
rising to a thin treble scream as he raved,
when suddenly it was shut off with an almost
mechanical click. I thought of those other
occasions at my home when his confidences
had abruptly ceased—when I had half fancied
that some obscure telepathic wave of Asenath’s
mental force was intervening to keep him silent.
This, though, was something altogether different—and,
I felt, infinitely more horrible. The face
beside me was twisted almost unrecognisably
for a moment, while through the whole body
there passed a shivering motion—as if all
the bones, organs, muscles, nerves, and glands
were readjusting themselves to a radically
different posture, set of stresses, and general
personality.
Just where the supreme horror lay, I could
not for my life tell; yet there swept over
me such a swamping wave of sickness and repulsion—such
a freezing, petrifying sense of utter alienage
and abnormality—that my grasp of the wheel
grew feeble and uncertain. The figure beside
me seemed less like a lifelong friend than
like some monstrous intrusion from outer space—some
damnable, utterly accursed focus of unknown
and malign cosmic forces.
I had faltered only a moment, but before another
moment was over my companion had seized the
wheel and forced me to change places with
him. The dusk was now very thick, and the
lights of Portland far behind, so I could
not see much of his face. The blaze of his
eyes, though, was phenomenal; and I knew that
he must now be in that queerly energised state—so
unlike his usual self—which so many people
had noticed. It seemed odd and incredible
that listless Edward Derby—he who could
never assert himself, and who had never learned
to drive—should be ordering me about and
taking the wheel of my own car, yet that was
precisely what had happened. He did not speak
for some time, and in my inexplicable horror
I was glad he did not.
In the lights of Biddeford and Saco I saw
his firmly set mouth, and shivered at the
blaze of his eyes. The people were right—he
did look damnably like his wife and like old
Ephraim when in these moods. I did not wonder
that the moods were disliked—there was certainly
something unnatural and diabolic in them,
and I felt the sinister element all the more
because of the wild ravings I had been hearing.
This man, for all my lifelong knowledge of
Edward Pickman Derby, was a stranger—an
intrusion of some sort from the black abyss.
He did not speak until we were on a dark stretch
of road, and when he did his voice seemed
utterly unfamiliar. It was deeper, firmer,
and more decisive than I had ever known it
to be; while its accent and pronunciation
were altogether changed—though vaguely,
remotely, and rather disturbingly recalling
something I could not quite place. There was,
I thought, a trace of very profound and very
genuine irony in the timbre—not the flashy,
meaninglessly jaunty pseudo-irony of the callow
“sophisticate”, which Derby had habitually
affected, but something grim, basic, pervasive,
and potentially evil. I marvelled at the self-possession
so soon following the spell of panic-struck
muttering.
“I hope you’ll forget my attack back there,
Upton,” he was saying. “You know what
my nerves are, and I guess you can excuse
such things. I’m enormously grateful, of
course, for this lift home.
“And you must forget, too, any crazy things
I may have been saying about my wife—and
about things in general. That’s what comes
from overstudy in a field like mine. My philosophy
is full of bizarre concepts, and when the
mind gets worn out it cooks up all sorts of
imaginary concrete applications. I shall take
a rest from now on—you probably won’t
see me for some time, and you needn’t blame
Asenath for it.
“This trip was a bit queer, but it’s really
very simple. There are certain Indian relics
in the north woods—standing stones, and
all that—which mean a good deal in folklore,
and Asenath and I are following that stuff
up. It was a hard search, so I seem to have
gone off my head. I must send somebody for
the car when I get home. A month’s relaxation
will put me back on my feet.”
I do not recall just what my own part of the
conversation was, for the baffling alienage
of my seatmate filled all my consciousness.
With every moment my feeling of elusive cosmic
horror increased, till at length I was in
a virtual delirium of longing for the end
of the drive. Derby did not offer to relinquish
the wheel, and I was glad of the speed with
which Portsmouth and Newburyport flashed by.
At the junction where the main highway runs
inland and avoids Innsmouth I was half afraid
my driver would take the bleak shore road
that goes through that damnable place. He
did not, however, but darted rapidly past
Rowley and Ipswich toward our destination.
We reached Arkham before midnight, and found
the lights still on at the old Crowninshield
house. Derby left the car with a hasty repetition
of his thanks, and I drove home alone with
a curious feeling of relief. It had been a
terrible drive—all the more terrible because
I could not quite tell why—and I did not
regret Derby’s forecast of a long absence
from my company.
FIVE
The next two months were full of rumours.
People spoke of seeing Derby more and more
in his new energised state, and Asenath was
scarcely ever in to her few callers. I had
only one visit from Edward, when he called
briefly in Asenath’s car—duly reclaimed
from wherever he had left it in Maine—to
get some books he had lent me. He was in his
new state, and paused only long enough for
some evasively polite remarks. It was plain
that he had nothing to discuss with me when
in this condition—and I noticed that he
did not even trouble to give the old three-and-two
signal when ringing the doorbell. As on that
evening in the car, I felt a faint, infinitely
deep horror which I could not explain; so
that his swift departure was a prodigious
relief.
In mid-September Derby was away for a week,
and some of the decadent college set talked
knowingly of the matter—hinting at a meeting
with a notorious cult-leader, lately expelled
from England, who had established headquarters
in New York. For my part I could not get that
strange ride from Maine out of my head. The
transformation I had witnessed had affected
me profoundly, and I caught myself again and
again trying to account for the thing—and
for the extreme horror it had inspired in
me.
But the oddest rumours were those about the
sobbing in the old Crowninshield house. The
voice seemed to be a woman’s, and some of
the younger people thought it sounded like
Asenath’s. It was heard only at rare intervals,
and would sometimes be choked off as if by
force. There was talk of an investigation,
but this was dispelled one day when Asenath
appeared in the streets and chatted in a sprightly
way with a large number of acquaintances—apologising
for her recent absences and speaking incidentally
about the nervous breakdown and hysteria of
a guest from Boston. The guest was never seen,
but Asenath’s appearance left nothing to
be said. And then someone complicated matters
by whispering that the sobs had once or twice
been in a man’s voice.
One evening in mid-October I heard the familiar
three-and-two ring at the front door. Answering
it myself, I found Edward on the steps, and
saw in a moment that his personality was the
old one which I had not encountered since
the day of his ravings on that terrible ride
from Chesuncook. His face was twitching with
a mixture of odd emotions in which fear and
triumph seemed to share dominion, and he looked
furtively over his shoulder as I closed the
door behind him.
Following me clumsily to the study, he asked
for some whiskey to steady his nerves. I forbore
to question him, but waited till he felt like
beginning whatever he wanted to say. At length
he ventured some information in a choking
voice.
“Asenath has gone, Dan. We had a long talk
last night while the servants were out, and
I made her promise to stop preying on me.
Of course I had certain—certain occult defences
I never told you about. She had to give in,
but got frightfully angry. Just packed up
and started for New York—walked right out
to catch the 8:20 in to Boston. I suppose
people will talk, but I can’t help that.
You needn’t mention that there was any trouble—just
say she’s gone on a long research trip.
“She’s probably going to stay with one
of her horrible groups of devotees. I hope
she’ll go west and get a divorce—anyhow,
I’ve made her promise to keep away and let
me alone. It was horrible, Dan—she was stealing
my body—crowding me out—making a prisoner
of me. I laid low and pretended to let her
do it, but I had to be on the watch. I could
plan if I was careful, for she can’t read
my mind literally, or in detail. All she could
read of my planning was a sort of general
mood of rebellion—and she always thought
I was helpless. Never thought I could get
the best of her . . . but I had a spell or
two that worked.”
Derby looked over his shoulder and took some
more whiskey.
“I paid off those damned servants this morning
when they got back. They were ugly about it,
and asked questions, but they went. They’re
her kind—Innsmouth people—and were hand
and glove with her. I hope they’ll let me
alone—I didn’t like the way they laughed
when they walked away. I must get as many
of Dad’s old servants again as I can. I’ll
move back home now.
“I suppose you think I’m crazy, Dan—but
Arkham history ought to hint at things that
back up what I’ve told you—and what I’m
going to tell you. You’ve seen one of the
changes, too—in your car after I told you
about Asenath that day coming home from Maine.
That was when she got me—drove me out of
my body. The last thing of the ride I remember
was when I was all worked up trying to tell
you what that she-devil is. Then she got me,
and in a flash I was back at the house—in
the library where those damned servants had
me locked up—and in that cursed fiend’s
body . . . that isn’t even human. . . . You
know, it was she you must have ridden home
with . . . that preying wolf in my body. . . . You
ought to have known the difference!”
I shuddered as Derby paused. Surely, I had
known the difference—yet could I accept
an explanation as insane as this? But my distracted
caller was growing even wilder.
“I had to save myself—I had to, Dan! She’d
have got me for good at Hallowmass—they
hold a Sabbat up there beyond Chesuncook,
and the sacrifice would have clinched things.
She’d have got me for good . . . she’d
have been I, and I’d have been she . . . forever
. . . too late. . . . My body’d have been
hers for good. . . . She’d have been a man,
and fully human, just as she wanted to be.
. . . I suppose she’d have put me out of
the way—killed her own ex-body with me in
it, damn her, just as she did before—just
as she, he, or it did before. . . .”
Edward’s face was now atrociously distorted,
and he bent it uncomfortably close to mine
as his voice fell to a whisper.
“You must know what I hinted in the car—that
she isn’t Asenath at all, but really old
Ephraim himself. I suspected it a year and
a half ago, but I know it now. Her handwriting
shews it when she’s off guard—sometimes
she jots down a note in writing that’s just
like her father’s manuscripts, stroke for
stroke—and sometimes she says things that
nobody but an old man like Ephraim could say.
He changed forms with her when he felt death
coming—she was the only one he could find
with the right kind of brain and a weak enough
will—he got her body permanently, just as
she almost got mine, and then poisoned the
old body he’d put her into. Haven’t you
seen old Ephraim’s soul glaring out of that
she-devil’s eyes dozens of times . . . and
out of mine when she had control of my body?”
The whisperer was panting, and paused for
breath. I said nothing, and when he resumed
his voice was nearer normal. This, I reflected,
was a case for the asylum, but I would not
be the one to send him there. Perhaps time
and freedom from Asenath would do its work.
I could see that he would never wish to dabble
in morbid occultism again.
“I’ll tell you more later—I must have
a long rest now. I’ll tell you something
of the forbidden horrors she led me into—something
of the age-old horrors that even now are festering
in out-of-the-way corners with a few monstrous
priests to keep them alive. Some people know
things about the universe that nobody ought
to know, and can do things that nobody ought
to be able to do. I’ve been in it up to
my neck, but that’s the end. Today I’d
burn that damned Necronomicon and all the
rest if I were librarian at Miskatonic.
“But she can’t get me now. I must get
out of that accursed house as soon as I can,
and settle down at home. You’ll help me,
I know, if I need help. Those devilish servants,
you know . . . and if people should get too
inquisitive about Asenath. You see, I can’t
give them her address. . . . Then there are
certain groups of searchers—certain cults,
you know—that might misunderstand our breaking
up . . . some of them have damnably curious
ideas and methods. I know you’ll stand by
me if anything happens—even if I have to
tell you a lot that will shock you. . . .”
I had Edward stay and sleep in one of the
guest-chambers that night, and in the morning
he seemed calmer. We discussed certain possible
arrangements for his moving back into the
Derby mansion, and I hoped he would lose no
time in making the change. He did not call
the next evening, but I saw him frequently
during the ensuing weeks. We talked as little
as possible about strange and unpleasant things,
but discussed the renovation of the old Derby
house, and the travels which Edward promised
to take with my son and me the following summer.
Of Asenath we said almost nothing, for I saw
that the subject was a peculiarly disturbing
one. Gossip, of course, was rife; but that
was no novelty in connexion with the strange
ménage at the old Crowninshield house. One
thing I did not like was what Derby’s banker
let fall in an overexpansive mood at the Miskatonic
Club—about the cheques Edward was sending
regularly to a Moses and Abigail Sargent and
a Eunice Babson in Innsmouth. That looked
as if those evil-faced servants were extorting
some kind of tribute from him—yet he had
not mentioned the matter to me.
I wished that the summer—and my son’s
Harvard vacation—would come, so that we
could get Edward to Europe. He was not, I
soon saw, mending as rapidly as I had hoped
he would; for there was something a bit hysterical
in his occasional exhilaration, while his
moods of fright and depression were altogether
too frequent. The old Derby house was ready
by December, yet Edward constantly put off
moving. Though he hated and seemed to fear
the Crowninshield place, he was at the same
time queerly enslaved by it. He could not
seem to begin dismantling things, and invented
every kind of excuse to postpone action. When
I pointed this out to him he appeared unaccountably
frightened. His father’s old butler—who
was there with other reacquired family servants—told
me one day that Edward’s occasional prowlings
about the house, and especially down cellar,
looked odd and unwholesome to him. I wondered
if Asenath had been writing disturbing letters,
but the butler said there was no mail which
could have come from her.
SIX
It was about Christmas that Derby broke down
one evening while calling on me. I was steering
the conversation toward next summer’s travels
when he suddenly shrieked and leaped up from
his chair with a look of shocking, uncontrollable
fright—a cosmic panic and loathing such
as only the nether gulfs of nightmare could
bring to any sane mind.
“My brain! My brain! God, Dan—it’s tugging—from
beyond—knocking—clawing—that she-devil—even
now—Ephraim—Kamog! Kamog!—The pit of
the shoggoths—Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Goat
with a Thousand Young! . . .
“The flame—the flame . . . beyond body,
beyond life . . . in the earth . . . oh, God!
. . .”
I pulled him back to his chair and poured
some wine down his throat as his frenzy sank
to a dull apathy. He did not resist, but kept
his lips moving as if talking to himself.
Presently I realised that he was trying to
talk to me, and bent my ear to his mouth to
catch the feeble words.
“ . . . again, again . . . she’s trying
. . . I might have known . . . nothing can
stop that force; not distance, nor magic,
nor death . . . it comes and comes, mostly
in the night . . . I can’t leave . . . it’s
horrible . . . oh, God, Dan, if you only knew
as I do just how horrible it is. . . .”
When he had slumped down into a stupor I propped
him with pillows and let normal sleep overtake
him. I did not call a doctor, for I knew what
would be said of his sanity, and wished to
give nature a chance if I possibly could.
He waked at midnight, and I put him to bed
upstairs, but he was gone by morning. He had
let himself quietly out of the house—and
his butler, when called on the wire, said
he was at home pacing restlessly about the
library.
Edward went to pieces rapidly after that.
He did not call again, but I went daily to
see him. He would always be sitting in his
library, staring at nothing and having an
air of abnormal listening. Sometimes he talked
rationally, but always on trivial topics.
Any mention of his trouble, of future plans,
or of Asenath would send him into a frenzy.
His butler said he had frightful seizures
at night, during which he might eventually
do himself harm.
I had a long talk with his doctor, banker,
and lawyer, and finally took the physician
with two specialist colleagues to visit him.
The spasms that resulted from the first questions
were violent and pitiable—and that evening
a closed car took his poor struggling body
to the Arkham Sanitarium. I was made his guardian
and called on him twice weekly—almost weeping
to hear his wild shrieks, awesome whispers,
and dreadful, droning repetitions of such
phrases as “I had to do it—I had to do
it . . . it’ll get me . . . it’ll get
me . . . down there . . . down there in the
dark. . . . Mother, mother! Dan! Save me . . . save
me. . . .”
How much hope of recovery there was, no one
could say; but I tried my best to be optimistic.
Edward must have a home if he emerged, so
I transferred his servants to the Derby mansion,
which would surely be his sane choice. What
to do about the Crowninshield place with its
complex arrangements and collections of utterly
inexplicable objects I could not decide, so
left it momentarily untouched—telling the
Derby housemaid to go over and dust the chief
rooms once a week, and ordering the furnace
man to have a fire on those days.
The final nightmare came before Candlemas—heralded,
in cruel irony, by a false gleam of hope.
One morning late in January the sanitarium
telephoned to report that Edward’s reason
had suddenly come back. His continuous memory,
they said, was badly impaired; but sanity
itself was certain. Of course he must remain
some time for observation, but there could
be little doubt of the outcome. All going
well, he would surely be free in a week.
I hastened over in a flood of delight, but
stood bewildered when a nurse took me to Edward’s
room. The patient rose to greet me, extending
his hand with a polite smile; but I saw in
an instant that he bore the strangely energised
personality which had seemed so foreign to
his own nature—the competent personality
I had found so vaguely horrible, and which
Edward himself had once vowed was the intruding
soul of his wife. There was the same blazing
vision—so like Asenath’s and old Ephraim’s—and
the same firm mouth; and when he spoke I could
sense the same grim, pervasive irony in his
voice—the deep irony so redolent of potential
evil. This was the person who had driven my
car through the night five months before—the
person I had not seen since that brief call
when he had forgotten the old-time doorbell
signal and stirred such nebulous fears in
me—and now he filled me with the same dim
feeling of blasphemous alienage and ineffable
cosmic hideousness.
He spoke affably of arrangements for release—and
there was nothing for me to do but assent,
despite some remarkable gaps in his recent
memories. Yet I felt that something was terribly,
inexplicably wrong and abnormal. There were
horrors in this thing that I could not reach.
This was a sane person—but was it indeed
the Edward Derby I had known? If not, who
or what was it—and where was Edward? Ought
it to be free or confined . . . or ought it
to be extirpated from the face of the earth?
There was a hint of the abysmally sardonic
in everything the creature said—the Asenath-like
eyes lent a special and baffling mockery to
certain words about the ‘early liberty earned
by an especially close confinement’. I must
have behaved very awkwardly, and was glad
to beat a retreat.
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.
SEVEN
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.” 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 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.
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.
