The Evil Clergyman

A dream account published as fiction

The piece originates in a dream recounted in a letter to Bernard Austin Dwyer. The Archive dates it to October 1933; the precise correspondence context should not be flattened into a claim that Lovecraft completed and submitted a conventional short story at that time.

It first appeared posthumously in the April 1939 Weird Tales, volume 33, number 4, on pages 135–137, under the title The Wicked Clergyman. The Evil Clergyman is the title used by the Archive and this encyclopedia.

The dreamlike gaps in motivation and mechanism belong to the surviving account. No complete history of the society, device or cleric is supplied.

Sources: H. P. Lovecraft Archive — fiction in composition order, The Evil Clergyman — publication data, Joshi and Schultz — The Evil Clergyman, encyclopedia entry

The attic and the warning

A bearded man brings the narrator to an old attic and warns him against remaining after dark or disturbing a small object on a table. A society has taken responsibility for the former occupant's affairs, and the guide says that the man's burial place is unknown.

The narrator cannot later recover the location clearly. He believes it is a small seaport in the Old World and specifically excludes London. The text does not name the town.

The room combines ordinary theological and classical books with works associated with magic. The only practical exit is a steep stair opening through the floor, a detail that becomes essential during the encounter.

Sources: The Evil Clergyman — original text

Two unfamiliar instruments

The object on the table resembles a matchbox in size or appearance. Fascinated by it, the narrator takes out another device from his pocket that resembles an electric light but emits violet particles or rays.

He distinguishes this instrument from the ordinary flashlight he also carries. The source therefore does not simply describe someone shining a common torch onto a haunted box.

The violet emission makes the object's glassy center glow, and a pale form begins to appear. The narrator seems to know how to proceed without explaining where that knowledge or the instrument came from, a discontinuity consistent with the account's dream origin.

Sources: The Evil Clergyman — original text

The silent clerical scene

An Anglican clergyman appears in the room. He is a dark-haired, clean-shaven man with a high forehead, spectacles and an expression the narrator reads as concealed malice.

The cleric burns magical books. Other clergy, including a bishop, arrive and seem to communicate a serious judgment. Their exchange is visible but inaudible; the narrator infers hostility and fear from gestures rather than overhearing an accusation.

When the first cleric reaches toward the small device, the visitors withdraw. The account never identifies their decision in legal or ecclesiastical terms. Calling the scene a documented trial for a specific crime would supply information absent from the narrative.

Sources: The Evil Clergyman — original text

The interrupted death and the fall

Alone again, the clergyman prepares to hang himself. The narrator moves to intervene. On noticing him, the cleric abandons the preparations and approaches with an expression of triumph.

The narrator uses the violet instrument defensively. The cleric recoils, moves backward toward the stair opening and falls through it. When the narrator reaches the opening, no injured body lies below.

The distinction is important: the hanging is prepared but not completed in the witnessed sequence. It is the cleric, not the observing narrator, who falls through the opening.

Sources: The Evil Clergyman — original text

Recognition by the arriving crowd

Ordinary sound and spatial appearance return as people climb toward the attic with lights. They react to the narrator as though they recognize someone who has returned. Most flee.

The original guide remains. He understands the change and says that a previous victim reacted by taking his own life. He urges the narrator to stay calm, leave the town and consider beginning again in America.

His explanation makes a distinction between appearance and personality. The process has not advanced far enough to destroy the narrator's mind, and the guide warns that further experimentation will worsen matters rather than reverse them.

Sources: The Evil Clergyman — original text

The mirror and the surviving self

The mirror shows the narrator with the clergyman's face, clothing and spectacles. He expects to retain that outward form for the rest of his life.

The story does not show a complete exchange in which the cleric now walks elsewhere in the narrator's former body. It establishes the visitor's altered appearance while leaving the wider mechanism obscure.

The result is socially catastrophic even though consciousness remains continuous. Other people recognize a feared figure, while the person experiencing that recognition still thinks of himself as the visitor who entered the room.

This makes the work useful beside stories of possession and bodily displacement, provided their different outcomes remain distinct. The clergyman's society is not named as a Cthulhu cult, and the small device is not identified with another familiar Mythos artifact.

Sources: The Evil Clergyman — original text