Thing on the doorstep pdf

The cinematography and narrative technique was compelling and eerie. This is a good story in the Cthulhu cycle which can be enjoyed even by those who have no interest in the Cthulhu mythos. The thing on the Doorstep is great. It starts with this friend recalling how a body came to be on his doorstep, and from there he unveils this long story of the occult and body snatching and evil spirits. And in the end you are left with the sense of horror at what had occured. Click Download or Read Online button to get the devil on the doorstep … H.

Lovecraft never found fame during his lifetime and died in in relative obscurity. The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories presents the definitive corrected texts of these works, along with Lovecraft critic and biographer S.

Book file PDF easily for everyone and every device. Electronic Text. Discussion Archives. Asenath brings with her three unpleasant servants from her home in Innsmouth, Massachusetts. At first I shall be called a madman-madder than the man I shot in his cell at the Arkham Sanitarium. Later some of my readers will weigh each statement, correlate it with the known facts, and ask themselves how I could have believed otherwise than I did after facing the evidence of that horror-that thing on the doorstep.

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.

The story revolves around the narrator Daniel Upton recounting the circumstances under which he was forced to kill his friend Edward Derby, who had dabbled too much in the dark arts and given up his body to an evil supernatural force with malign intentions.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft — was an American writer of supernatural horror fiction. Though his works remained largely unknown and did not furnish him with a decent living, Lovecraft is today considered to be among the most significant writers of supernatural horror fiction of the twentieth century.

During the winter of officials of the Federal government made a strange and secret investigation of certain conditions in the ancient Massachusetts seaport of Innsmouth. The public first learned of it in February, when a vast series of raids and arrests occurred, followed by the deliberate burning and dynamiting-under suitable precautions-of an enormous number of crumbling, worm-eaten, and supposedly empty houses along the abandoned waterfront.

Uninquiring souls let this occurrence pass as one of the major clashes in a spasmodic war on liquor. Keener news-followers, however, wondered at the prodigious number of arrests, the abnormally large force of men used in making them, and the secrecy surrounding the disposal of the prisoners. No trials, or even definite charges were reported; nor were any of the captives seen thereafter in the regular jails of the nation.

There were vague statements about disease and concentration camps, and later about dispersal in various naval and military prisons, but nothing positive ever developed. Now she glares that way. And I know why! He found it in the Necronomicon —the formula. 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. Listen, Dan—do you know why my wife always takes such pains with that silly backhand writing? Do you want to know why I shivered when I saw some hasty notes Asenath had jotted down? 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?

Who locked in whom? Why had he been looking for months for someone with a fine mind and a weak will? 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?

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.

I marvelled at the self-possession so soon following the spell of panic-struck muttering. My philosophy is full of bizarre concepts, and when the mind gets worn out it cooks up all sorts of imaginary concrete applications. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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 in to Boston. 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. 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. They were ugly about it, and asked questions, but they went. 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. You know, it was she you must have ridden home with. You ought to have known the difference! 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 suspected it a year and a half ago, but I know it now. 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.

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 must get out of that accursed house as soon as I can, and settle down at home. Those devilish servants, you know. Then there are certain groups of searchers—certain cults, you know—that might misunderstand our breaking up. 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. 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.

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. 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. My brain! Discussion Archives. This is a good story in the Cthulhu cycle which can be enjoyed even by those who have no interest in the Cthulhu mythos. But there they were- abandoned on his doorstep- and somebody had to care for them.

So when his lovely neighbor took the tiny charges into her heart and her home, Mitchell offered a helping hand. Lovecraft never found fame during his lifetime and died in in relative obscurity. Of course it is impossible to be entirely faithful to a literary work when adapting to film, but The Thing on the Doorstep did an excellent job.

What changes were made improved the story for the medium. The cinematography and narrative technique was compelling and eerie. Insane asylums, shallow graves and magick of the blackest kind. A basketful of babies was the last thing confirmed bachelor Mitchell Caine wanted to contend with.

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