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"The Thing on the Roof" is a short story by Robert E. Howard, first published in the February 1932 edition of Weird Tales.
Synopsis[]
A London scholar is contacted by Tussman, an academic enemy, who wants his help in finding an original copy of Von Junzt's Nameless Cults. This allows him to return to the Temple of the Toad in Honduras and return with a toad-shaped jewel. He failed to heed Von Junzt's warning, however, and met his doom in the form of a hoofprint from a vengeful god.
Characters[]
- Narrator: He lives in London and is the author of Evidences of Nahua Culture in Yucatan.
- Tussman: An academic who lives in Sussex, England, a rival of the narrator. Obsessed with finding the treasure of the Temple of the Toad.
- James Clement: A professor in Richmond, Virginia, who helps track down an original copy of Nameless Cults.
- Friedrich Von Junzt: Author of Nameless Cults. After "he spent the full forty-five years of his life prying into strange places and discovering secret and abysmal things," he was found mysteriously strangled to death in a barred and bolted room in 1840, six months after a trip to Mongolia.
- Justin Geoffrey: Poet, author of Out of the Old Land.
- Juan Gonzales: Spanish traveler who saw the Temple of the Toad in Honduras in 1793.
Behind the Mythos[]
Although the exact nature of the entity which kills Tussman at the climax of "The Thing on the Roof" is left intentionally vague - being described only as emitting a "hideous high-pitched tittering" and, presumably, possessing something akin to hooves - others have offered interpretations of what the entity may have been in the years since. Marvel, in their horror comic Chamber of Chills, suggested that it was the Toad God of Tussman's temple itself; in Ye Booke of Monstres II for the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game, J. Todd Kingrea instead stated that it was merely one of the temple's guardians, the Children of Tsathoggua.
Adaptations[]
A comic book adaptation was published in Chamber of Chills by Marvel Comics in 1972.