Ambrose Dexter

Doctor Ambrose Dexter is a character who is first mentioned in the the 1936 H. P. Lovecraft short story "The Haunter of the Dark", but plays a more developed role in Robert Bloch's 1950 sequel, "The Shadow From the Steeple".
==History==
Dexter is unnamed when he first appears toward the beginning of Lovecraft's story, which concerns the death of the writer Robert Blake after he encounters an artifact called the Shining Trapezohedron in the deserted Starry Wisdom Church in Providence: A "reputable physician with a taste for odd folklore" is said to have been "moved to fanatical extremes" when he "threw into the bay the curiously angled stone and its strangely adorned metal box found in the old church steeple." This doctor is said to be among those "inclined to take much of Blake’s diary at its face value." 
Toward the end of the story, Lovecraft names "superstitious Dr. Dexter, who threw the curious box and angled stone...into the deepest channel of Narragansett Bay."
When Bloch wrote a sequel--continuing a sort of literary game, as the Lovecraft story was itself a sequel to Bloch's "The Shambler from the Stars"--he expanded this brief mention into a full-fledged character. Giving the doctor the first name of Ambrose and a house on Benefit Street, he describes the physician as "Providence-born, a lifelong resident, forty years of age [in 1935], unmarried, a general practitioner, [and] member of several medical societies". Bloch wrote that Dexter "had left town immediately following his dramatic theft and disposal of the 'Shining Trapezohedron'."
The protagonist of the story, a friend of the late Robert Blake named Edmund Fiske, searches for Dexter for several years before finding a reference in an astrophysics journal to Dexter "delivering an address on 'Practical Applications in Military Technology'" at Princeton University in 1945. In 1948 he is listed among "investigators in the field of nuclear physics" in a national newsmagazine. News accounts in 1949 connect him to research on the H-bomb.
When Fiske finally catches up with Dexter, who returns to the house on Benefit Street in 1950, he finds him "a tall, thin, immaculately dressed man who may have been fifty but who scarcely looked thirty-five; a man whose wholly natural grace and elegance of movement concealed the sole incongruity of his aspect--a very deep suntan."
Dexter admits to Fiske that after Blake's death, he went to to the Starry Wisdom Church and removed the stone as well as the sect's collection of forbidden books--including De Vermis Mysteriis, the Liber Ivonis and the Necronomicon itself. Subsequently, he says, "during the past decade or more, I have been working on problems relative to atomic energy and nuclear fission"--including an unnamed project he took part in with Albert Einstein.
Fiske then accuses Dexter of having been possessed by a supernatural entity, the Haunter of the Dark, who was released when the Trapezohedron was cast into the darkness at the bottom of the bay. Furthermore, he identifies the Haunter as an avatar of the dark deity Nyarlathotep:
es:Doctor Ambrose Dexter
Category:Humans
Category:Avatars of Nyarlathotep
Category:Characters Originating From Lovecraft Circle Works