The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories

  43 Cycad: “Subdivision of Gymnosperms [see n. 74] (Pinophyta); evergreen, perennial shrubs or trees with stems that are usually unbranched but thickened by some secondary growth” (CNH). Angiosperm: “Flowering plants; the major division of seed plants (Spermatophyta)” (CNH).

  44 Placoderm: “Class of primitive, heavily armoured, jawed fishes (Gnathostomata) known primarily from the Devonian” (CNH). Laby rinthodont: “Extinct subclass of primitive amphibians known from the Palaeozoic and Triassic” (CNH). Thecodont: “Primitive order of ar chosaurian reptiles with teeth set in sockets; probably ancestral to dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and crocodiles; known from the Upper Permian to the Upper Triassic” (CNH). Mososaur: An extinct Leipdosaurian marine reptile known from the Cretaceous; ancestor of various species of lizard. More commonly spelled mosasaur. Pterodactyl: A well-known extinct winged reptile of the suborder Pterodactyloidea, known from the Upper Jurassic to the Cretaceous. Archaeopteryx: “The oldest known fossil bird, having a long vertebrate tail” (OED). Fossil remains dating from the Late Jurassic have been found. Palaeothere: “Extinct family of horse-like mammals (Perissodactyla) known from the Eocene and Oligocene” (CNH). Xiphodon: “Extinct family of primitive artio dactyls [diverse order of mostly large herbivorous or omnivorous terrestrial mammals] known from the Eocene and Oligocene of Europe” (CNH). Dinocerase: “Extinct suborder of mainly North American ungulates [any large hoof-bearing, grazing animal] known from the late Palaeocene to Eocene” (CNH). Eohippus: The oldest known genus of the horse family. The term is now largely archaic and, when used, refers only to the North American specimens of the extinct genus Hyra cotherium. Oreodon: An extinct mammal of the artiodactyl order known from the Oligocene to Miocene periods in North America. Titanothere: An extinct rhinoceroslike ungulate mammal known from the Lower Eocene to the Middle Oligocene.

  45 Ventriculite: A type of sponge known from the Upper Cretaceous.

  46 For Einstein, see n. 129 to The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

  47 Archaeozoic: “Pertaining to the era of the earliest living beings on our planet” (OED). Now archaic.

  48 Radiata: Latinized plural noun form of the adjective “radiate,” referring to creatures (such as starfish) whose bodies are characterized by radial symmetry.

  49 Echinoderm: a phylum of marine animals including sea lilies, starfish, sea urchins, and sea cucumbers, all of which bear five-fold rotational symmetry.

  50 See n. 21 to “Pickman’s Model.”

  51 Albert N. Wilmarth, instructor of literature at Miskatonic University, is the narrator of “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1930).

  52 It is not entirely clear what is meant by this phrase. Cthulhu, the extraterrestrial entity trapped in his sunken city of R’lyeh in the Pacific, was created in “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926); he has a band of human wor shipers scattered across the earth who seek to bring about his resurrection. Here the term seems to refer to the entities (mentioned in the story as the Great Old Ones) who accompanied Cthulhu on his cosmic voyage through the depths of space to the earth, and who are presumably similar in shape to the octopoid Cthulhu. They are not, however, explicitly described in the tale; at one point it is said: “The carven idol was great Cthulhu, but none might say whether or not the others were precisely like him” (CC 154); later it is mentioned that they are not “composed altogether of flesh and blood” (CC 154).

  53 Cryptogam: “A lower plant, lacking conspicuous reproductive structures such as flowers or cones” (CNH). Pteridophyte: “Ferns; classified under the term Filicophyta [division of vascular plants which reproduce by spores produced in sporangia borne on the leaves, usually in clusters]” (CNH).

  54 Albert N. Wilmarth (see n. 51). “The Whisperer in Darkness” deals with creatures labeled the fungi from Yuggoth who have come from the planet Yuggoth (= Pluto) to the earth and besiege a lonely farmer in the Vermont wilderness.

  55 This term had also been used in several previous stories by HPL, but it appears to denote quite different entities. It first occurs in “The Strange High House in the Mist” (1926) and then in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, evidently referring to the gods of the dream-world.

  56 Recall the name of the whaling ship accompanying Byrd’s expedition, the C. A. Larsen (n. 13).

  57 The Pnakotic Manuscripts are, chronologically, the first of HPL’s mythical books. They are first cited in “Polaris” (1918), a tale about the ancient arctic world of Lomar. Extensive use is made of them in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. The comment about their “pre-Pleistocene origin” refers to the possibility that they were composed before the earliest primitive human beings had evolved from hominids, about 2 million years ago.

  58 Tsathoggua is an invention of HPL’s friend Clark Ashton Smith (see n. 21 to “Pickman’s Model”); it first appeared in the story “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” (written in 1929; Weird Tales, November 1931). HPL made his first reference to the entity in “The Mound,” a tale ghostwritten for Zealia Bishop in 1929-30 but not published until 1940. Tsathoggua is cited again in “The Whisperer in Darkness” (1930).

  59 William Scoresby (1789-1857) undertook yearly voyages to Greenland between 1803 and 1822 and wrote many books of his travels, illustrated with his own drawings.

  60 Dyer and Danforth are at the very limit of breathability without external aid: human beings ordinarily require an oxygen supply above 25,000 feet.

  61 Machu Picchu is a city of the Incas fifty miles northwest of Cuzco, situated on a narrow ridge 2000 feet above the Vilcanota River. It was probably built sometime early in the second millennium C.E. (c. 1000-1400). It was rediscovered in 1911 by Hiram Bingham, an American explorer.

  62 Kish is an ancient Sumerian city near Babylon that flourished in the third millennium B.C.E. Oxford University and the Field Museum (Chicago) undertook a joint expedition to the site in 1923-29; several monographs detailing their excavations were subsequently published.

  63 The Giants’ Causeway is a geological formation on the northern coast of County Antrim, Northern Ireland. It consists of a lava flow that is at least 12 million years old, 700 feet long, and 40 feet wide. As the flat surface of the lava cooled, cracks formed an unusually regular pattern of hexagons; the downward extension of these cracks produced a forest of closely packed hexagonal columns 20 feet tall.

  64 The Garden of the Gods is a park northwest of Colorado Springs, consisting of red and white sandstone formations, some of which stand upright and are over 300 feet tall. The site is of late Paleozoic origin and was produced by erosion from wind and water.

  65 Presumably a reference to the Grand Canyon. HPL, having never gone west of New Orleans, did not know these sites in Colorado and Arizona at firsthand.

  66 “A name given to the Pamirs, the great region of mountains covering 30,000 square miles, devoid of trees and shrubs, and most of it in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Tadzhikistan” (Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable).

  67 The Mi-Go, Yeti, or Abominable Snowmen are a real folk myth in Nepal and Tibet. They are supposed to be huge human beings who dwell at the snow line in the Himalayas; their snowprints have purportedly been seen, but these are probably the prints of bears. The term Mi-Go is a Tibetan compound: mi, “man,” and go (or gyo), “swift,” or “Fast-moving manlike creature.” This mention, however, is a clear nod to “The Whisperer in Darkness,” where the stories of the fungi from Yuggoth in the Vermont hills are said to be analogous to the “belief of the Nepalese hill tribes in the dreaded Mi-Go or ‘Abominable Snow Men’ who lurk hideously amidst the ice and rock pinnacles of the Himalayan summits” (CC 206); later the fungi are explicitly identified with the Mi-Go (CC 216).

  68 For Tsathoggua, see n. 58. “Hyperborean” refers to the story cycle involving the ancient mythical northern continent of Hyperborea (at the North Pole) written by Clark Ashton Smith, of which “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” is a part.

  69 The Old Ones’ city corresponds approximately to the city described in A. Merritt’s “The People of the
Pit” (1917): “ ‘Straight beneath me was the—city. I looked down upon mile after mile of closely packed cylinders. They lay upon their sides in pyramids of three, of five—of dozens—piled upon each other. . . . they were topped by towers, by minarets, by flares, by fans, and twisted monstrosities.” The city is postulated as existing underground somewhere in the Yukon. See The Fox Woman and Other Stories (1949; rpt. New York: Avon, 1977), pp. 67-68.

  70 For HPL’s views on Atlantis, see n. 7 to “The Temple.” Lemuria is a continent once thought to have existed in the Indian Ocean; it was hypothesized by Ernst Haeckel to account for the presence of lemurs and other animals and plants in southern Africa and the Malay Peninsula. HPL, although philosophically influenced by Haeckel, learned of Lemuria primarily from W. Scott-Elliot’s The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria (1925), which is mentioned in “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926). Commorion and Uzuldaroum are cities in the land of Hyperborea invented by Clark Ashton Smith in “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros.” “Olathoë in the land of Lomar” is a reference to HPL’s own tale, “Polaris” (see n. 57).

  71 Valusia is a kingdom in prehistoric Europe invented by HPL’s friend Robert E. Howard (1906-1936). In Howard’s fiction Valusia is ruled by King Kull, and an entire series of tales are set in this realm. R’lyeh is the sunken city housing Cthulhu in “The Call of Cthulhu.” Ib is the primeval city that was destroyed by Sarnath in HPL’s “The Doom That Came to Sarnath” (1920). The Nameless City is a reference to HPL’s own story, “The Nameless City”: “It must have been thus before the first stones of Memphis were laid, and while the bricks of Babylon were yet unbaked. There is no legend so old as to give it a name, or to recall that it was ever alive . . .” (D 98).

  72 Petra is the Greek name (meaning simply “rock”) for an ancient city in the southern desert of modern-day Jordan, founded by the Edomites late in the second millennium B.C.E. It is probably to be identified with the biblical city of Sela. It was conquered by the Nabataeans around 312 B.C.E. and then by the Romans in 106 C.E. The Snake Tomb is a tomb, built by the Nabataeans, carved out of a mountain and surmounted by the figure of a coiled snake.

  73 Euclid was a mathematician who flourished around 300 B.C.E. in Greece and wrote the Stoicheia (Elements), a landmark work on the principles of geometry. HPL’s tales contain frequent references to “non-Euclidean” geometry, especially in architecture.

  74 Gymnosperm: now termed Pinophyta: “Ancient division of seed-bearing vascular plants extending from the Devonian to Recent” (CNH). Conifer: literally, “cone-bearer”; now classified under the term Pinatae: “The largest group of extant Gymnosperms; usually evergreen shrubs and trees” (CNH).

  75 Futurism was a short-lived artistic movement founded by the Italian poet Filippo Marinetti in 1909. It purported to address directly the phenomena of the modern world (especially machinery, speed, and violence) by attempting to depict movement rather than static still life. Although it had died out by around 1916, its principles were incorporated in part by the Dadaists and Vorticists. HPL satirized the movement in a poem, “Futurist Art” (1917).

  76 This idea of art as depicting the history of an alien species was first used by HPL in “The Nameless City”: “Rich, vivid, and daringly fantastic designs and pictures formed a continuous scheme of mural painting whose lines and colours were beyond description. . . . I thought I could trace roughly a wonderful epic of the nameless city; the tale of a mighty sea-coast metropolis that ruled the world before Africa rose out of the waves, and of its struggles as the sea shrank away, and the desert crept into the fertile valley that held it” (D 104-5).

  77 The period of the dinosaurs is thought to extend from roughly 200 to 65 million years ago (the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods). The first archaic mammals appeared roughly 190 million years ago.

  78 Minoan Crete refers to the pre-Greek civilization that had been established upon the island of Crete from c. 3000 to 1000 B.C.E. The name Minoan was coined by Sir Arthur Evans from Minos, the mythical king of Crete; the Minotaur (“the bull of Minos”) was a monster said to dwell in a labyrinth at the palace of Minos at Knossos. Bull-leaping and bull-baiting were common sports in Minoan culture.

  79 This passage is a reworking of a parallel one in “The Nameless City,” where an investigator similarly encounters depictions of anomalous nonhuman entities on the walls of an underground temple: “These creatures, I said to myself, were to the men of the nameless city what the she-wolf was to Rome, or some totem-beast is to a tribe of Indians” (D 105). The wolf had been an important symbol in Roman culture from the earliest times, as the Romans fostered the myth of their founders Remus and Romulus being nurtured by a she-wolf. The eagle was considered sacred to Jupiter; the figure of an eagle surmounted the standards of the Roman legions.

  80 “Flashlights” at this time referred primarily to the artificial light used in taking photographs at night or in dark rooms, but could also refer to the photographs so taken; it is this latter meaning that HPL uses here.

  81 The luminiferous (“light-bearing”) ether was a conception of nineteenth-century science, derived ultimately from Aristotle. Believing that light could not travel through a vacuum, physicists thought that an ether—what Ernst Haeckel termed “an extremely attenuated medium, filling the whole of space outside of ponderable matter”—was required to allow the particles (as they were then conceived) of light to travel through space. See Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe, trans. Joseph McCabe (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1900), pp. 225-28. Einstein’s theory of relativity was the deathblow to the ether, and it soon dropped out of physics; but in 1936 HPL heard a lecture by Prof. Dayton C. Miller who continued to deny Einstein and assert the existence of the ether (see SL 5.255). The idea of the Old Ones flying through the ether on wings strikes us as ridiculous, but HPL used the same idea for the fungi from Yuggoth in “The Whisperer in Darkness” (see CC 234); this is what HPL here refers to as “curious hill folklore . . . told me by an antiquarian colleague” (i.e., Albert N. Wilmarth).

  82 A common attribute of HPL’s extraterrestrial species. Cf. “The Whisperer in Darkness” on the fungi from Yuggoth: “Their brain-capacity exceeds that of any other surviving life-form” (CC 234). Cf. also “The Shadow out of Time” on the Great Race: “their intelligence was enormously greater than man’s” (DH 393).

  83 This single sentence points to a central concern in HPL’s later political philosophy: the psychological and cultural effects of mechanized industrialism upon human beings. In 1929 he wrote: “Mechanical invention has, for better or for worse, permanently altered mankind’s relationship to his setting & to the forces of nature generally; & has just as inevitably begun to produce a new type of organisation among his own numbers as a result of changed modes of housing, transportation, manufacture, agriculture, commerce, & economic adjustment” (SL 2.280-81). In speaking of the Old Ones’ abandonment of mechanization, HPL echoes what he had said of the alien species in “The Mound” (1929-30): “Many of the old mechanical devices were still in use, though others had been abandoned when it was seen that they failed to give pleasure . . . Industry, being found fundamentally futile except for the supplying of basic needs and the gratification of inescapable yearnings, had become very simple. Physical comfort was ensured by an urban mechanisation of standardised and easily maintained pattern . . .” (HM 134).

  84 Shoggoths were first cited in “Night-Gaunts,” sonnet XX of Fungi from Yuggoth: “And down the nether pits to that foul lake / Where the puffed shoggoths splash in doubtful sleep” (AT 72). Nearly simultaneously they appear (without being named) in “The Mound”: “. . . when the men of K’n-yan went down into N’kai’s black abyss with their great atom-power searchlights they found living things—living things that oozed along stone channels and worshipped onyx and basalt images of Tsathoggua. But they were not toads like Tsathoggua himself. Far worse—they were amorphous lumps of viscous black slime that took temporary shapes for various purposes” (HM 141).

  85 C
f. the Great Race in “The Shadow out of Time”: “They had no sex, but reproduced through seeds or spores which clustered on their bases and could be developed only under water” (DH 399).

  86 Cf. the Great Race in “The Shadow out of Time”: “Family organisation was not overstressed, though ties among persons of common descent were recognised, and the young were generally reared by their parents” (DH 399).

  87 This sentence suggests that HPL himself had converted to a moderate, non-Marxist socialism by this time. In July 1931, speaking of the effects of “technological unemployment” (whereby machines have permanently replaced human beings in many occupations), HPL states that the artificial shortening of working hours for all individuals is the only bulwark against a revolt of the unemployed. “If the existing social order is to last, more money must be distributed in some way or other, regardless of normal principles of profit. Socialistic measures like those already in force in England—old age pensions & unemployment insurance—the so-called ‘dole’—will be as necessary as fire-engines at a fire” (SL 3.386-87).

  88 This theory of the moon’s origin was commonly held in HPL’s day, although ironically it was the continental drift theory, which HPL here also embraces (see n. 89), that cast doubt on it, since continental drift renders the Pacific Ocean an ephemeral feature in geological time. The theory is now, however, regarded as highly unlikely, at least in the form expressed here. Currently it is believed that, around 4 billion years ago, a glancing blow from some planetary body about the size of Mars caused a large cloud of fragments to be ejected from the earth, which eventually coalesced into the moon.