




                      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.