The Thing on the doorstep by HB Lovecraft,

Red by Mike Bennett

1

It is true that I've sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to show by this statement that I am not his murderer.

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.

Until then, I also saw nothing but madness in the wild tales I have acted on.

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 Asinath Darby, and even the Stollid Police are at their

wit's ends to account for that last terrible visit.

They have tried weakly to concoct a theory of a ghastly jest or warning by discharged servants,

yet they know in their hearts that the truth is something infinitely more terrible and incredible.

So I say that I have not murdered Edward Darby.

Rather, have I avenged him, and in so doing purge the earth of a horror whose survival

might have loosed untold terrors on all mankind. There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then some

evil soul breaks a passage through.

When that happens, the man who knows must strike before reckoning the consequences.

I have known Edward Pickman Darby all his life. Eight years, my junior, he was so precocious

that we had much in common from the time he was eight and I was 16.

He was the most phenomenal child scholar I have ever known, and at seven was writing verse

of a somber, fantastic, almost morbid cast, which astonished the tutors surrounding him.

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