The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories

by H. P. Lovecraft

  4 HPL professed an ignorance of, and insensitivity to, classical music: “My upper limit in appreciation [of music] is defined with amusing clearness. The conventional grand opera goes over okay with Grandpa, & Dick Wagner (whose ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ I was privileg’d to hear) is just about my idea of emotion as derivable from sound—but jack the cultural bar up a bit & try to put over Debussy or Stravinsky or the subtler capers of some of the older big boys, & the Old Man’s snores run the bass-viols a close second” (SL 3.342).

  5 This remark is a reflection of HPL’s absorption of the pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), whom HPL appears to have been reading at this time. Schopenhauer had maintained that the sum total of pains in every human life greatly outweighs the sum total of pleasures, so that “Human life must be some kind of mistake.” Accordingly, “The conviction that the world and man is something which had better not have been is of a kind to fill us with indulgence toward one another.” This latter remark from Schopenhauer’s Studies in Pessimism (a volume of miscellaneous essays translated by T. Bailey Saun ders in 1893) was quoted in HPL’s essay “Nietzcheism and Realism” (1922; MW 175).

  UNDER THE PYRAMIDS

  “Under the Pyramids” was ghostwritten for the Hungarian-born magician Harry Houdini (born Ehrich Weiss, 1874-1926) in February 1924. It was first published (as “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs”) in Weird Tales (May- June-July 1924) and reprinted in Weird Tales ( June-July 1939). HPL recounts at length in letters how he came to be assigned the writing of this tale. Weird Tales was struggling financially and the owner, J. C. Henneberger, felt that the celebrated Houdini’s affiliation with the magazine might attract readers. Houdini was the reputed author of a column (“Ask Houdini”) that ran in the issues of March, April, and May-June-July 1924, as well as two short stories probably ghostwritten by other hands. In mid-February Henneberger commissioned HPL to write “Under the Pyramids.” Houdini was claiming that he had actually been bound and gagged by Arabs and dropped down a shaft in the pyramid called Campbell’s Tomb; but as HPL began exploring the historical and geographical background of the account, he came to the conclusion that it was complete fiction, and so he received permission from Henneberger to elaborate the account with his own imaginative additions. HPL received a fee of $100 for the tale, paid in advance.

  HPL’s Egyptian research was probably derived from several volumes in his library, notably The Tomb of Perneb (1916), a volume issued by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He had seen many Egyptian antiquities at first- hand at the museum in 1922. Some of the imagery of the story probably also derives from Théophile Gautier’s non-supernatural tale of Egyptian horror, “One of Cleopatra’s Nights”; HPL owned Lafcadio Hearn’s translation of One of Cleopatra’s Nights and Other Fantastic Romances (1882).

  1 Houdini became a professional magician in 1891, at the age of seventeen; by the turn of the century he was the most celebrated escape artist of his time. His pseudonym derives from Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin (1805-1871), French magician and author of Confidences d’un prestidigitateur (1859).

  2 Among Houdini’s own accounts of his escapades are the early volume The Adventurous Life of a Versatile Artist (1906) and the article “The Thrills in the Life of a Magician” (Strand Magazine, January 5, 1919).

  3 Houdini began an extensive European tour in the fall of 1908. He spent most of 1909 in England, but by the autumn he had moved on to Germany. In January 1910 he sailed from Marseilles en route to an engagement in Australia. The ship traversed the Suez Canal and Houdini did stop briefly at Port Said, but that was the extent of his Egyptian stay. By the end of January he was in Adelaide, Australia. See Kenneth Sil verman, Houdini!!! (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), pp. 137-39.

  4 Houdini married Wilhelmina Beatrice Rahner (whom he had first met earlier in 1894, when she was eighteen and still in high school) on June 22, 1894.

  5 Ferdinand Marie, Vicomte de Lesseps (1805-1894), a French diplomat, was one of the leading promoters of the Suez Canal, which opened in 1869. Lesseps founded the city of Port Said, a major Egyptian seaport at the northern end of the Suez Canal. On November 17, 1899, the thirti eth anniversary of the opening of the canal, a twenty-four-foot bronze statue of Lesseps was erected at the jetty at Port Said.

  6 Alexandria had been founded in 332 B.C.E. by Alexander the Great after his conquest of Egypt. It was the most significant Egyptian city in the Greco-Roman world.

  7 HPL’s misspelling of Shepheard’s, a hotel that was built in 1849 by the Egyptian Samuel Shepheard on the banks of a lake (subsequently filled in to form the al-Azbakiyyah Garden; see n. 10). It was demolished in 1862 and another hotel was built on the same site, becoming one of the great hotels of the world. It was destroyed in anti-British riots in 1952.

  8 Hārūn ar-Rashīd (766-809) was the fifth caliph of the Abbasid dynasty (r. 786-809), which ruled the Islamic world, then extending from the western Mediterranean to India. His reign is glorified in the Arabian Nights. HPL had in his library an old biography, Edward Henry Palmer’s The Caliph Haroun Alraschid and Saracen Civilization (1881).

  9 The travel guides published by the German firm of Karl Baedeker, beginning in 1829 and subsequently translated into many languages, became world-famous for their comprehensiveness and ease of use.

  10 The al-Azbakiyyah Garden in the al-Azbakiyyah district of Cairo is an immense rectangular park on the site of a lake that was filled in during the mid-nineteenth century. It remained the focal point of the tourist and business trade in Cairo until well into the twentieth century. Al-Muski is a street branching off from the southeast side of the garden.

  11 Cf. HPL’s initial conception of the god Nyarlathotep, who “was of the old native blood and looked like a Pharaoh” (“Nyarlathotep” [1920], CC 31). This conception had come to HPL in a dream (see SL 1.160-62).

  12 Heliopolis (“the city of the sun”), now in the northeast part of the Cairo metropolitan area, is one of the most ancient Egyptian cities, founded no later than the Fifth Dynasty (c. 2500 B.C.E.) and being the seat of worship for the sun-god Ré. It became the center of a Roman colony around 16 B.C.E. and is the site of several large Greco-Roman temples built in the first and second centuries C.E. The Emperor Augustus made Egypt a part of his personal estate. There were probably only two legions stationed in Egypt during his reign, neither of which was at Heliopolis.

  13 The Egyptian Museum, on the north side of al-Tahrir Square, is the oldest and largest of Cairo’s museums of Egyptian antiquities. It was built in the neoclassical style (hence HPL’s later reference to its “great Roman dome”) and opened in 1902 under the name of the Cairo Museum.

  14 Saladin (1138-1193), Sultan of Egypt and Syria, built an immense citadel (now on the eastern edge of Cairo) in the 1170s, as well as a fortified wall around what was then the entire territory of the city.

  15 More properly, Ré-Horakhty, or Re-Horus of the Horizon.

  16 Tut’ankamun, twelfth king of the Eighteenth Dynasty (r. 1333-1323 B.C.E.), died at the age of nineteen after a ten-year reign. The rediscov ery of his nearly intact tomb by Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon on November 4, 1922, was one of the most spectacular events in Egyptian archaeology.

  17 Khem (“black”) is the native ancient name for Egypt (cognate with the Biblical Ham). Cf. “The Haunter of the Dark” (1935): “Is it not an avatar of Nyarlathotep, who in antique and shadowy Khem even took the form of man?” (CC 359). Ré is the sun-god of the Egyptians. Amen (more properly Amon) is a god associated with the dynamic force of life; his name means “hidden.” Isis and Osiris are the two principal gods of the Egyptian pantheon. Isis is the mother of the gods; Osiris, the husband of Isis, was originally a god of agriculture.

  18 The Emperor Napoleon’s fleet landed in Alexandria in 1798 and left the next year, leaving a general in charge of the country; but the French were ousted by a combined Egyptian and British force in 1801.

  19 Bedouins are desert and steppe dwellers in the Middle East and North Afr
ica, chiefly Arabian Muslims.

  20 Khufu (Cheops) was the second king of the Fourth Dynasty (r. 2551- 2528 B.C.E.). He ordered the building of the Great Pyramid at Giza. It is not clear why HPL is so far off on the date of this and the other pyramids discussed in this passage.

  21 Khafre (Khephren) was the fourth king of the Fourth Dynasty (r. 2520-2494 B.C.E.), the son of Khufu. He ordered the building of the second pyramid.

  22 Menkauré (Mycerinus) was the fifth king of the Fourth Dynasty (r. 2490-2472 B.C.E.), the son of Khafre. His is the third and smallest pyramid at Giza.

  23 The Sphinx—a crouching lion with a human head—was, by tradition, built by Khafre. Some Egyptologists now believe that it may be thousands of years older than the conventional dating, but their findings are the subject of debate. There is no suggestion that the present face of the Sphinx (probably representing Khafre himself) was recarved from some previous face.

  24 Pery-Neb was lord chamberlain toward the end of the Fifth Dynasty (c. 2450 B.C.E.). At that time he built a small mastaba (tomb) for himself in the cemetery at Saqqara. In 1913 the tomb was purchased from the Egyptian government by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, dismantled, and reconstructed in the Egyptian Wing of the museum. It is still on display there today. HPL first saw it on his first trip to New York in April 1922. He owned a guidebook, The Tomb of Perneb (1916), published by the Metropolitan Museum.

  25 The Temple of the Sphinx lies directly in front (i.e., to the east) of the Sphinx and is larger in area than the Sphinx. It is built of limestone faced with granite and has two entrances in the front, leading to a colonnaded interior courtyard.

  26 The diorite statue of the seated King Khafre in Gallery 42 of the Egyptian Museum is one of its choicest holdings.

  27 Cyclopean: An ancient style of masonry in which stones of immense size were used. The term is derived from the Greeks’ belief that such structures were the work of a race of giants called the Cyclopes.

  28 Thutmose IV was the eighth king of the Eighteenth Dynasty (r. 1412- 1403 B.C.E.). His restoration of the Sphinx is recorded in a “Dream Stela” placed between the two paws of the statue. In it he declares that as a prince he had a dream in which the sun-god (of whom, at that time, the Sphinx was believed to be a representation) came to him and begged him to remove the sand that then covered most of the statue.

  29 Now called the Tomb of Pakap, lying between the Sphinx and the Great Pyramid. It was named after Col. Patrick Campbell by Col. Richard Vyse, who discovered it in 1837.

  30 The step pyramid of Zozer at Saqqara is the oldest of the pyramids, having been constructed during the reign of Zozer, second king of the Third Dynasty (r. 2667-2648 B.C.E.).

  31 All these names (except the last) refer to individuals whose lives were at least tangentially associated with Egypt. “Rameses” denotes eleven kings of that name during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties (1307-1070 B.C.E.). Mark Twain (1835-1910) visited Egypt and the Holy Land in 1867 and wrote of his travels in The Innocents Abroad (1869). Financier John Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) traveled to Egypt on several occasions from 1876 to the end of his life. Minnehaha is the American Indian maiden who marries Hiawatha in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, The Song of Hiawatha (1855).

  32 This anecdote about Queen Nitokris (ruling in the Sixth Dynasty, c. 2180 B.C.E.) is found in Herodotus, Histories 2.100. It was also used as the basis of Lord Dunsany’s play The Queen’s Enemies (1916), which HPL heard Dunsany recite in Boston in 1919 (see SL 1.91).

  33 From Thomas Moore (1779-1852), Alciphron (1839), Letter IV, ll. 28-30.

  34 Although many mummified animals have been found in Egyptian tombs, no composite mummies of the sort described by HPL are known to exist.

  35 HPL had a distinctly low opinion of the films of his day, even though he enjoyed the films of Charlie Chaplin (and even wrote a poem to him, “To Charlie of the Comics” [1915]) and works such as D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (see SL 1.89). See S. T. Joshi, “Lovecraft and the Films of His Day,” Crypt of Cthulhu No. 77 (Eastertide 1991): 8-10.

  36 A sambuke (more properly sambuca) is a triangular stringed instrument with a shrill tone; a sistrum is a metal tambourine; a tympanum is a drum.

  37 aegipanic: noun form of aegipan. Neither word is found in the OED; but the proper noun Aigipan (“goat-Pan,” or goat-footed Pan) is found in Eratosthenes and Plutarch. Cf. “The Horror at Red Hook” (1925): “. . . aegipans chased endlessly after misshapen fauns over rocks twisted like swollen toads” (D 260), where the reference appears to be to a certain type of fantastic monster. Here the word is perhaps meant to suggest Pan-pipes.

  38 The term is meant to signify the immensity of the door by referring to Polyphemus, the Cyclops that threatens Odysseus in the Odyssey. Cf. “Dagon”: “Vast, Polyphemus-like, and loathsome, it darted like a stupendous monster of nightmares . . .” (CC 5).

  39 Horus is the Greek name for Hor, a solar deity in the form of a falcon. Anubis is the Greek name for Anpu or Anup, the guide of the afterlife, usually depicted in the form of a jackal-headed man.

  40 A similar “surprise ending” is found in “The Shunned House” (written later in 1924), where what looks like a “doubled-up human figure” in the basement of an old house in Providence proves to be the “titan elbow ” (MM 239, 261) of an immensely larger creature.

  41 In a letter written shortly after the completion of the story, HPL explains the need to conclude the tale in this manner: “To square it with the character of a popular showman, I tacked on the ‘it-was-all-a-dream’ bromide . . .” (SL 1.326).

  PICKMAN’S MODEL

  “Pickman’s Model” was probably written in early September 1926. It was first published in Weird Tales (October 1927) and reprinted in Weird Tales (November 1936). Although relatively conventional in its supernatural manifestation, the story is of interest in expressing, in fictionalized form, many of the aesthetic principles on weird fiction that HPL had just outlined in “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (written sporadically in 1925-27). The setting in the North End of Boston is—or, rather, was—portrayed quite faithfully, right down to many of the street names; but, less than a year after writing the story, HPL was disappointed to find that much of the area had been razed to make way for new development. HPL’s comment at the time (when he took his friend Donald Wandrei to the scene) is of interest: “the actual alley & house of the tale [had been] utterly demolished; a whole crooked line of buildings having been torn down” (HPL to Lilian D. Clark, [ July 17, 1927]; ms., JHL). This suggests that HPL had an actual house in mind for Pickman’s North End studio.

  “Pickman’s Model” was adapted by Alvin Sapinsley for Rod Serling’s “Night Gallery” television series (December 1, 1971). Indeed, it is possible that the overall set design for that show—in which Serling is shown wandering amid a succession of bizarre paintings—was inspired by Lovecraft’s tale.

  Further Reading

  Will Murray, “In Pickman’s Footsteps,” Crypt of Cthulhu No. 28 (Yuletide 1984): 27-32.

  James Anderson, “ ‘Pickman’s Model’: Lovecraft’s Model of Terror,” Lovecraft Studies Nos. 22/23 (Fall 1990): 15-21.

  K. Setiya, “Aesthetics and the Artist in ‘Pickman’s Model’ ” (one of “Two Notes on Lovecraft”), Lovecraft Studies No. 26 (Spring 1992): 15-16.

  1 An appropriate name for a Bostonian, as it is one of the oldest and most distinguished families in the city. The family originated with John Eliot (1604-1690), who came to Massachusetts in 1636. Among its more prominent members are Charles W. Eliot (1834-1926), longtime president of Harvard, and the poet T. S. Eliot (1888-1965).

  2 Park Street, in downtown Boston, is the hub of numerous subway lines that intersect the city.

  3 The Boston Art Club at Dartmouth and Newbury Streets was organized in 1855.

  4 HPL chose the name Pickman as a typical name from Salem history, and it is indeed that. The Samuel Pickman house (1664) at 20 Liberty Street is Salem’s oldest surviving bu
ilding. HPL wrote late in life: “About the name ‘Pickman’—no, I don’t know any bearer of it, but it is especially common in Salem, which as you know is the vague prototype of my ‘Arkham’ ” (SL 5.384).

  5 The North End, the region of Boston facing Boston Harbor and the Charles River, is the oldest part of the city; it was the focus of city life in colonial times. In HPL’s day parts of it—especially around the waterfront—had declined to a slum, largely inhabited by Italian immigrants.

  6 The passage is reminiscent of the theoretical portions of HPL’s treatise “Supernatural Horror in Literature” (1927), which he had begun in late 1925: “The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. . . . The one test of the really weird is simply this—whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim” (D 368-69).

  7 Henry Fuseli (Heinrich Füssli, 1741-1825) was a Swiss-born painter who resided in England. He is also mentioned in “The Colour Out of Space” (1927; CC 196) and “Medusa’s Coil” (1930; HM 175).

  8 Gustave Doré (1832-1883), French painter and illustrator. HPL saw his illustrations to Paradise Lost (1866), The Divine Comedy (1861-68), and Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1876) as a boy; they had much to do with his early interest in the weird. Sidney H. Sime (1867-1941), British artist and illustrator, gained great fame for illustrating many of the early works of Lord Dunsany. Anthony Angarola (1893-1929) was an American book illustrator. HPL may have seen his illustrations to Ben Hecht’s The Kingdom of Evil (1924). Cf. “The Call of Cthulhu”: “On this [island] now leaped and twisted a more indescribable horde of human abnormality than any but a Sime or an Angarola could paint” (CC 152).