The Thing on the Door-Step

                          By H. P. LOVECRAFT

                _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._

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                       Weird Tales January 1937.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


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 as I did after
facing the evidence of that horror--that thing on the door-step.

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 somber, 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,
moldering, 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 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 traveled 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 mustache 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
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 practise my profession--settling in the family
homestead in Salton-stall 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 door-bell 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 fantasy 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.




                                   2


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
mediæval meta-physics 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 over-protuberant 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-gray 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
mustache, 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 _neutralization_, 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 disgusting place, but certain
objects in it had taught him some surprizing 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 odor of fish.




                                   3


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 favored 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 or 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 "gaining 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 disorganized.
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 with the car began to increase. He now
wished to move back into the old family 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 Street 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 led down to abysses of nighted secrets, of complex angles
that led 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 colored 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.




                                   4


Derby had been married more than three years on that August day when I
got that 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 gossip 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 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 five hundred 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'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!"

[Illustration: "The pit of the shoggoths! Down the six thousand
steps ... the abomination of abominations."]

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 traffic 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 for ever--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 recognized 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 back-hand 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 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
unrecognizably for a moment, while through the whole body there passed
a shivering motion--as if all the bones, organs, muscles, nerves, and
glands were re-adjusting 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 life-long 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 energized
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 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 life-long
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 marveled 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 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.




                                   5


The next two months were full of rumors. People spoke of seeing Derby
more and more in his new energized state, and Asenath was scarcely
ever in to her 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 door-bell. 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 head-quarters 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 rumors 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--apologizing for her recent absence 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 whisky 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 defenses 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 lay
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 whisky.

"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 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--for ever--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, and I know it now. Her handwriting shows it when she goes 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 has
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 connection with the strange menage at the old Crowninshield
house. One thing I did not like was what Derby's banker let fall in an
over-expansive mood at the Miskatonic Club--about the checks 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 re-acquired
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.

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 realized 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.




                                   6


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
household 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 energized 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 door-bell 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 colored my subsequent vision. I have nothing
to say on this point except that no madness of mine could account for
_all_ the evidence.




                                   7


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 furor. 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 Street just before two o'clock, and the nature of the single
footprints in certain places. I will say only that just about two the
door-bell and knocker waked me--door-bell 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 fetid 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
fetor, I seized the 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 odor 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 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 for ever, and I can't tell you what it will
    do. Keep clear of black magic, Dan--it's the devil's business.
    Good-bye--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-fibered 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.