The Thing on the Doorstep | Page 5

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 in 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 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had glimpsed a hastily withdrawn face - a face whose expression of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 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 whisper - 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 way - "away in
her own body," as he once oddly put it. She always found out later - the
servants watched his goings and coming - but evidently she thought it
inexpedient to do anything drastic.
IV
Derby had been married more than three years on that