object:1f.lovecraft - The Book
author class:H P Lovecraft
subject class:Fiction
genre class:Horror
class:chapter
My memories are very confused. There is even much doubt as to where
they begin; for at times I feel appalling vistas of years stretching
behind me, while at other times it seems as if the present moment were
an isolated point in a grey, formless infinity. I am not even certain
how I am communicating this message. While I know I am speaking, I have
a vague impression that some strange and perhaps terrible mediation
will be needed to bear what I say to the points where I wish to be
heard. My identity, too, is bewilderingly cloudy. I seem to have
suffered a great shock—perhaps from some utterly monstrous outgrowth of
my cycles of unique, incredible experience.
These cycles of experience, of course, all stem from that worm-riddled
book. I remember when I found it—in a dimly lighted place near the
black, oily river where the mists always swirl. That place was very
old, and the ceiling-high shelves full of rotting volumes reached back
endlessly through windowless inner rooms and alcoves. There were,
besides, great formless heaps of books on the floor and in crude bins;
and it was in one of these heaps that I found the thing. I never
learned its title, for the early pages were missing; but it fell open
toward the end and gave me a glimpse of something which sent my senses
reeling.
There was a formula—a sort of list of things to say and do—which I
recognised as something black and forbidden; something which I had read
of before in furtive paragraphs of mixed abhorrence and fascination
penned by those strange ancient delvers into the universe’s guarded
secrets whose decaying texts I loved to absorb. It was a key—a guide—to
certain gateways and transitions of which mystics have dreamed and
whispered since the race was young, and which lead to freedoms and
discoveries beyond the three dimensions and realms of life and matter
that we know. Not for centuries had any man recalled its vital
substance or known where to find it, but this book was very old indeed.
No printing-press, but the hand of some half-crazed monk, had traced
these ominous Latin phrases in uncials of awesome antiquity.
I remember how the old man leered and tittered, and made a curious sign
with his hand when I bore it away. He had refused to take pay for it,
and only long afterward did I guess why. As I hurried home through
those narrow, winding, mist-choked waterfront streets I had a frightful
impression of being stealthily followed by softly padding feet. The
centuried, tottering houses on both sides seemed alive with a fresh and
morbid malignity—as if some hitherto closed channel of evil
understanding had abruptly been opened. I felt that those walls and
overhanging gables of mildewed brick and fungous plaster and
timber—with fishy, eye-like, diamond-paned windows that leered—could
hardly desist from advancing and crushing me . . . yet I had read only
the least fragment of that blasphemous rune before closing the book and
bringing it away.
I remember how I read the book at last—white-faced, and locked in the
attic room that I had long devoted to strange searchings. The great
house was very still, for I had not gone up till after midnight. I
think I had a family then—though the details are very uncertain—and I
know there were many servants. Just what the year was, I cannot say;
for since then I have known many ages and dimensions, and have had all
my notions of time dissolved and refashioned. It was by the light of
candles that I read—I recall the relentless dripping of the wax—and
there were chimes that came every now and then from distant belfries. I
seemed to keep track of those chimes with a peculiar intentness, as if
I feared to hear some very remote, intruding note among them.
Then came the first scratching and fumbling at the dormer window that
looked out high above the other roofs of the city. It came as I droned
aloud the ninth verse of that primal lay, and I knew amidst my shudders
what it meant. For he who passes the gateways always wins a shadow, and
never again can he be alone. I had evoked—and the book was indeed all I
had suspected. That night I passed the gateway to a vortex of twisted
time and vision, and when morning found me in the attic room I saw in
the walls and shelves and fittings that which I had never seen before.
Nor could I ever after see the world as I had known it. Mixed with the
present scene was always a little of the past and a little of the
future, and every once-familiar object loomed alien in the new
perspective brought by my widened sight. From then on I walked in a
fantastic dream of unknown and half-known shapes; and with each new
gateway crossed, the less plainly could I recognise the things of the
narrow sphere to which I had so long been bound. What I saw about me
none else saw; and I grew doubly silent and aloof lest I be thought
mad. Dogs had a fear of me, for they felt the outside shadow which
never left my side. But still I read more—in hidden, forgotten books
and scrolls to which my new vision led me—and pushed through fresh
gateways of space and being and life-patterns toward the core of the
unknown cosmos.
I remember the night I made the five concentric circles of fire on the
floor, and stood in the innermost one chanting that monstrous litany
the messenger from Tartary had brought. The walls melted away, and I
was swept by a black wind through gulfs of fathomless grey with the
needle-like pinnacles of unknown mountains miles below me. After a
while there was utter blackness, and then the light of myriad stars
forming strange, alien constellations. Finally I saw a green-litten
plain far below me, and discerned on it the twisted towers of a city
built in no fashion I had ever known or read of or dreamed of. As I
floated closer to that city I saw a great square building of stone in
an open space, and felt a hideous fear clutching at me. I screamed and
struggled, and after a blankness was again in my attic room, sprawled
flat over the five phosphorescent circles on the floor. In that night’s
wandering there was no more of strangeness than in many a former
night’s wandering; but there was more of terror because I knew I was
closer to those outside gulfs and worlds than I had ever been before.
Thereafter I was more cautious with my incantations, for I had no wish
to be cut off from my body and from the earth in unknown abysses whence
I could never return.
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