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lennia old” ( SL1.287), but no reader could ever make this deduction based solely on the textual evidence. In a late letter ( SL5.267–69) he discusses the ancient sources for the myth of Atlantis (in which, of course, he did not believe).
Terrible Old Man, The.
In “The Terrible Old Man,” the aged and eccentric former sea captain in Kingsport who is rumored by the townsfolk to be fabulously wealthy. A band of robbers who attempt to despoil the feeble old man of his supposed treasure are mysteriously and viciously despatched. He is also briefly mentioned in “The Strange High House in the Mist.”
“Terrible Old Man, The.”
Short story (1,160 words); written on January 28, 1920. First published in the Tryout(July 1921); rpt. WT(August 1926); first collected in O;corrected text in DH.
Three thieves—Angelo Ricci, Joe Czanek, and Manuel Silva—plan to rob the home of the Terrible Old Man, who is said to be both fabulously wealthy and very feeble. The Terrible Old Man dwells in Kingsport, a city somewhere in New England. In the “far-off days of his unremembered youth” he was a sea-captain, and seems to have a vast collection of ancient Spanish gold and silver pieces. He has now become very eccentric, appearing to spend hours speaking to an array of bottles in each of which a small piece of lead is suspended from a string. On the night of the planned robbery, Ricci and Silva enter the Terrible Old Man’s house while Czanek waits outside. Screams are heard from the house, but there is no sign of the two robbers. Czanek wonders whether his colleagues were forced to kill the old man and make a laborious search through his house for the treasure. But then the Terrible Old Man appears at the doorway, “leaning quietly on his knotted cane and smiling hideously.” Later three unidentifiable bodies are found washed in by the tide.
The tale is reminiscent of many stories in Lord Dunsany’s The Book of Wonder(1912), several of which similarly deal with attempted robberies that usually end badly for the perpetrators. Probably the closest analogy is with “The Probable Adventure of the Three Literary Men.” The three thieves represent the three major non-Anglo-Saxon ethnic groups in Rhode Island (Italian, Polish, and Portuguese).
The location of Kingsport is unspecified; only later, in “The Festival” (1923), did HPL identify it with the town of Marblehead and situate it in Massachusetts.
See Donald R.Burleson, “‘The Terrible Old Man’: A Deconstruction,” LSNo. 15 (Fall 1987): 65–70; Carl Buchanan, “The Terrible Old Man’: A Myth of the Devouring Father,” LSNo. 29 (Fall 1993): 19– 31.
Theunis, Constantin.
In “The Tree on the Hill,” a scholar who suffers a seizure after examining a strange photograph through a special viewing apparatus he has invented.
“Thing on the Doorstep, The.”
Novelette (10,830 words); written August 21–24, 1933. First published in WT(January 1937); first collected in O;corrected text in DH;annotated version in An2and TD.
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The narrator, Daniel Upton, tells of his young friend Edward Derby, who since boyhood has displayed a remarkable aesthetic sensitivity toward the weird, in spite—or perhaps because—of the overprotective coddling of his parents. Derby attends Miskatonic University and becomes a moderately recognized fantaisisteand poet. He frequently visits Upton, using a characteristic knock— three raps followed by two more after an interval—to announce himself. When he is thirty-eight he meets Asenath Waite, a young woman at Miskatonic, about whom strange things are whispered: she has anomalous hypnotic powers, creating the momentary impression in her subjects that they are in her body looking across at themselves. Even stranger things are whispered of her father, Ephraim Waite, who died under very peculiar circumstances. Over his father’s opposition, Derby marries Asenath—who is one of the Innsmouth Waites—and settles in a home in Arkham. They seem to undertake very recondite and perhaps dangerous occult experiments. Moreover, people observe curious changes in both of them: whereas Asenath is extremely strong-willed and determined, Edward is flabby and weak-willed; but on occasion he is seen driving Asenath’s car (even though he did not previously know how to drive) with a resolute and almost demonic expression, and conversely Asenath is seen from a window looking unwontedly meek and defeated. One day Upton receives a call from Maine: Derby is there in a crazed state, and Upton has to fetch him because Derby has suddenly lost the ability to drive. On the trip back Derby tells Upton a wild tale of Asenath forcing his mind from his body and going on to suggest that Asenath is really Ephraim, who forced out the mind of his daughter and placed it in his own dying body. Abruptly Derby’s ramblings come to an end, as if “shut off with an almost mechanical click.” Derby takes the wheel from Upton and tells him to pay no attention to what he may just have said.
Some months later Derby visits Upton again. He is in a tremendously excited state, claiming that Asenath has gone away and that he will seek a divorce. Around Christmas of that year Derby breaks down entirely. He cries out: “My brain! My brain! God, Dan—it’s tugging—from beyond—knocking— clawing—that she-devil—even now—Ephraim….” He is placed in a mental hospital and shows no signs of recovery until one day he suddenly seems to be better; but, to Upton’s disappointment and even latent horror, Derby is now in that curiously “energised” state such as he had been during the ride back from Maine. Upton is in an utter turmoil of confusion when one evening he receives a phone call. He cannot make out what the caller is saying—it sounds like “glub…glub”—but a little later someone knocks at his door, using Derby’s familiar three-and-two signal. This creature—a “foul, stunted parody” of a human being—is wearing one of Derby’s old coats, which is clearly too big for it. It hands Upton a sheet of paper that explains the whole story: Derby had killed Asenath to escape her influence and her plans to switch bodies with him permanently; but death did not extinguish Asenath/Ephraim’s mind, for it emerged from the body, thrust itself into the body of Derby, and hurled his mind into Asenath’s corpse, buried in the cellar of their home. Now, with a final burst of determination, Derby (in the body of Asenath) has climbed out of the shallow grave and is now delivering this message to Upton, since he was unable to communicate with him on the phone. Upton
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promptly goes to the madhouse and shoots the thing in Edward Derby’s body; this account is his confession and attempt at exculpation.
The story was written as part of HPL’s campaign, in the summer and fall of 1933, to rejuvenate his writing (and his entire literary outlook) by a renewed reading of the classics of weird fiction. The autograph manuscript was typed by a “delinquent revision client” ( SL4.310). This might be Hazel Heald, although it cannot be the same person who typed “The Dreams in the Witch House” for HPL: firstly, the typewriter faces on the existing typescripts are very different; secondly, the typescript for this story is extremely inaccurate, to such a degree that HPL’s chapter divisions have been overlooked, resulting in only five chapters instead of seven. These errors were not corrected until DH (1984 ed.).