Shoggoths

Shoggoths are shape-changing beings in Edward Pickman Derby’s account of an underground cultic ordeal, where they turn the journey’s occult lore into a reported encounter. Their significance lies both in what Derby says he saw and in what remains unverified: Daniel Upton receives the story through Derby’s fragmented testimony, and the later events echo its sounds and imagery without conclusively identifying another creature.

Appearance in Derby’s Account

After stumbling out of the woods near Chesuncook, Derby told Daniel Upton that he had been taken to a pit beneath a place of ritual. His disjointed recollection described a vast descent, a figure rising at an altar, and a crowd gathered there; amid these details, he said he saw a Shoggoth change shape. The account places the creature within an experience Derby understood as a forced return to a place where Asenath Waite had gone with his body.

Derby’s report also associates the ordeal with Ephraim Waite. A hooded figure at the ritual used a name Derby identified as Ephraim’s secret name within the cult. The episode binds the Shoggoth to a larger occult setting in Derby’s telling, but does not explain the creature’s origin, purpose, or relationship to the ritual participants.

A Wider, Uncertain World

Before the journey to Chesuncook, Derby had spoken to Upton about meetings in remote places, ruins in the Maine woods, stairways descending into hidden depths, and angles that opened passage through invisible barriers into other regions of space and time. He described these claims as connected to exchanges of personality that enabled travel into remote and forbidden places. The Shoggoth encounter gives this scattered lore a concrete, frightening instance, while leaving the larger account at the boundary between reported experience and what Upton can establish.

Derby also displayed objects that he said came from outside and that Asenath knew how to obtain. Their unfamiliar colors, textures, and irregular surfaces seemed to Upton to resist ordinary explanations. The story does not say that these objects were made by Shoggoths or that the creature brought them; their place beside Derby’s disclosures instead suggests a world whose materials and routes exceed his listener’s understanding.

Recurrence and Uncertainty

At Christmas, Derby abruptly became terrified while visiting Upton. He cried out about his mind being pulled from beyond, invoked the pit and the Shoggoths, and spoke of a flame beyond body and life, somewhere in the earth. The episode recalls the earlier ordeal, but it does not establish whether a Shoggoth is physically present or whether Derby is reliving, anticipating, or interpreting an unseen force.

The story later repeats a bubbling sound first heard during a telephone call traced to the Crowninshield House. A dwarfed visitor at Upton’s door makes a similar sound, but the narrative never identifies that messenger as a Shoggoth. The remains later found among Edward Pickman Derby’s clothes are identified as Asenath Waite’s; that discovery deepens the story’s bodily and personal confusion without confirming any direct connection to the creature. Shoggoths remain most clearly defined by Derby’s account: beings capable of changing shape, encountered in a place he feared being sent to again, and known to the reader through testimony rather than direct observation.

Narrative Role

The Shoggoth’s brief appearance concentrates the story’s uncertainty about bodies, identity, and the limits of ordinary space. Derby’s claim that it changes shape belongs to an experience in which he says he was displaced into a location reached through another person’s body. Yet Upton’s account supplies no independent view of the creature, and later parallels—the repeated bubbling sound and the strange visitor—remain suggestive rather than conclusive. This separation between vivid testimony and incomplete verification allows the Shoggoth to function as an anchor for the story’s cosmic dread without reducing its mysteries to a fully explained monster.