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object:1f.lovecraft - The Shadow out of Time
author class:H P Lovecraft
subject class:Fiction
genre class:Horror
class:chapter


I.
After twenty-two years of nightmare and terror, saved only by a
desperate conviction of the mythical source of certain impressions, I
am unwilling to vouch for the truth of that which I think I found in
Western Australia on the night of July 17–18, 1935. There is reason to
hope that my experience was wholly or partly an hallucination—for
which, indeed, abundant causes existed. And yet, its realism was so
hideous that I sometimes find hope impossible. If the thing did happen,
then man must be prepared to accept notions of the cosmos, and of his
own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest mention is
paralysing. He must, too, be placed on guard against a specific lurking
peril which, though it will never engulf the whole race, may impose
monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturesome members of
it. It is for this latter reason that I urge, with all the force of my
being, a final abandonment of all attempts at unearthing those
fragments of unknown, primordial masonry which my expedition set out to
investigate.
Assuming that I was sane and awake, my experience on that night was
such as has befallen no man before. It was, moreover, a frightful
confirmation of all I had sought to dismiss as myth and dream.
Mercifully there is no proof, for in my fright I lost the awesome
object which would—if real and brought out of that noxious abyss—have
formed irrefutable evidence. When I came upon the horror I was
alone—and I have up to now told no one about it. I could not stop the
others from digging in its direction, but chance and the shifting sand
have so far saved them from finding it. Now I must formulate some
definitive statement—not only for the sake of my own mental balance,
but to warn such others as may read it seriously.
These pages—much in whose earlier parts will be familiar to close
readers of the general and scientific press—are written in the cabin of
the ship that is bringing me home. I shall give them to my son, Prof.
Wingate Peaslee of Miskatonic University—the only member of my family
who stuck to me after my queer amnesia of long ago, and the man best
informed on the inner facts of my case. Of all living persons, he is
least likely to ridicule what I shall tell of that fateful night. I did
not enlighten him orally before sailing, because I think he had better
have the revelation in written form. Reading and re-reading at leisure
will leave with him a more convincing picture than my confused tongue
could hope to convey. He can do as he thinks best with this
account—shewing it, with suitable comment, to any quarters where it
will be likely to accomplish good. It is for the sake of such readers
as are unfamiliar with the earlier phases of my case that I am
prefacing the revelation itself with a fairly ample summary of its
background.
My name is Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, and those who recall the
newspaper tales of a generation back—or the letters and articles in
psychological journals six or seven years ago—will know who and what I
am. The press was filled with the details of my strange amnesia in
1908–13, and much was made of the traditions of horror, madness, and
witchcraft which lurk behind the ancient Massachusetts town then and
now forming my place of residence. Yet I would have it known that there
is nothing whatever of the mad or sinister in my heredity and early
life. This is a highly important fact in view of the shadow which fell
so suddenly upon me from outside sources. It may be that centuries of
dark brooding had given to crumbling, whisper-haunted Arkham a peculiar
vulnerability as regards such shadows—though even this seems doubtful
in the light of those other cases which I later came to study. But the
chief point is that my own ancestry and background are altogether
normal. What came, came from somewhere else—where, I even now hesitate
to assert in plain words.
I am the son of Jonathan and Hannah (Wingate) Peaslee, both of
wholesome old Haverhill stock. I was born and reared in Haverhill—at
the old homestead in Boardman Street near Golden Hill—and did not go to
Arkham till I entered Miskatonic University at the age of eighteen.
That was in 1889. After my graduation I studied economics at Harvard,
and came back to Miskatonic as Instructor of Political Economy in 1895.
For thirteen years more my life ran smoothly and happily. I married
Alice Keezar of Haverhill in 1896, and my three children, Robert K.,
Wingate, and Hannah, were born in 1898, 1900, and 1903, respectively.
In 1898 I became an associate professor, and in 1902 a full professor.
At no time had I the least interest in either occultism or abnormal
psychology.
It was on Thursday, May 14, 1908, that the queer amnesia came. The
thing was quite sudden, though later I realised that certain brief,
glimmering visions of several hours previous—chaotic visions which
disturbed me greatly because they were so unprecedented—must have
formed premonitory symptoms. My head was aching, and I had a singular
feeling—altogether new to me—that someone else was trying to get
possession of my thoughts.
The collapse occurred about 10:20 a.m., while I was conducting a class
in Political Economy VI—history and present tendencies of economics—for
juniors and a few sophomores. I began to see strange shapes before my
eyes, and to feel that I was in a grotesque room other than the
classroom. My thoughts and speech wandered from my subject, and the
students saw that something was gravely amiss. Then I slumped down,
unconscious in my chair, in a stupor from which no one could arouse me.
Nor did my rightful faculties again look out upon the daylight of our
normal world for five years, four months, and thirteen days.
It is, of course, from others that I have learned what followed. I
shewed no sign of consciousness for sixteen and a half hours, though
removed to my home at 27 Crane St. and given the best of medical
attention. At 3 a.m. May 15 my eyes opened and I began to speak, but
before long the doctors and my family were thoroughly frightened by the
trend of my expression and language. It was clear that I had no
remembrance of my identity or of my past, though for some reason I
seemed anxious to conceal this lack of knowledge. My eyes gazed
strangely at the persons around me, and the flexions of my facial
muscles were altogether unfamiliar.
Even my speech seemed awkward and foreign. I used my vocal organs
clumsily and gropingly, and my diction had a curiously stilted quality,
as if I had laboriously learned the English language from books. The
pronunciation was barbarously alien, whilst the idiom seemed to include
both scraps of curious archaism and expressions of a wholly
incomprehensible cast. Of the latter one in particular was very
potently—even terrifiedly—recalled by the youngest of the physicians
twenty years afterward. For at that late period such a phrase began to
have an actual currency—first in England and then in the United
States—and though of much complexity and indisputable newness, it
reproduced in every least particular the mystifying words of the
strange Arkham patient of 1908.
Physical strength returned at once, although I required an odd amount
of re-education in the use of my hands, legs, and bodily apparatus in
general. Because of this and other handicaps inherent in the mnemonic
lapse, I was for some time kept under strict medical care. When I saw
that my attempts to conceal the lapse had failed, I admitted it openly,
and became eager for information of all sorts. Indeed, it seemed to the
doctors that I had lost interest in my proper personality as soon as I
found the case of amnesia accepted as a natural thing. They noticed
that my chief efforts were to master certain points in history,
science, art, language, and folklore—some of them tremendously
abstruse, and some childishly simple—which remained, very oddly in many
cases, outside my consciousness.
At the same time they noticed that I had an inexplicable command of
many almost unknown sorts of knowledge—a command which I seemed to wish
to hide rather than display. I would inadvertently refer, with casual
assurance, to specific events in dim ages outside the range of accepted
history—passing off such references as a jest when I saw the surprise
they created. And I had a way of speaking of the future which two or
three times caused actual fright. These uncanny flashes soon ceased to
appear, though some observers laid their vanishment more to a certain
furtive caution on my part than to any waning of the strange knowledge
behind them. Indeed, I seemed anomalously avid to absorb the speech,
customs, and perspectives of the age around me; as if I were a studious
traveller from a far, foreign land.
As soon as permitted, I haunted the college library at all hours; and
shortly began to arrange for those odd travels, and special courses at
American and European universities, which evoked so much comment during
the next few years. I did not at any time suffer from a lack of learned
contacts, for my case had a mild celebrity among the psychologists of
the period. I was lectured upon as a typical example of secondary
personality—even though I seemed to puzzle the lecturers now and then
with some bizarre symptom or some queer trace of carefully veiled
mockery.
Of real friendliness, however, I encountered little. Something in my
aspect and speech seemed to excite vague fears and aversions in
everyone I met, as if I were a being infinitely removed from all that
is normal and healthful. This idea of a black, hidden horror connected
with incalculable gulfs of some sort of distance was oddly widespread
and persistent. My own family formed no exception. From the moment of
my strange waking my wife had regarded me with extreme horror and
loathing, vowing that I was some utter alien usurping the body of her
husband. In 1910 she obtained a legal divorce, nor would she ever
consent to see me even after my return to normalcy in 1913. These
feelings were shared by my elder son and my small daughter, neither of
whom I have ever seen since.
Only my second son Wingate seemed able to conquer the terror and
repulsion which my change aroused. He indeed felt that I was a
stranger, but though only eight years old held fast to a faith that my
proper self would return. When it did return he sought me out, and the
courts gave me his custody. In succeeding years he helped me with the
studies to which I was driven, and today at thirty-five he is a
professor of psychology at Miskatonic. But I do not wonder at the
horror I caused—for certainly, the mind, voice, and facial expression
of the being that awaked on May 15, 1908 were not those of Nathaniel
Wingate Peaslee.
I will not attempt to tell much of my life from 1908 to 1913, since
readers may glean all the outward essentials—as I largely had to
do—from files of old newspapers and scientific journals. I was given
charge of my funds, and spent them slowly and on the whole wisely, in
travel and in study at various centres of learning. My travels,
however, were singular in the extreme; involving long visits to remote
and desolate places. In 1909 I spent a month in the Himalayas, and in
1911 aroused much attention through a camel trip into the unknown
deserts of Arabia. What happened on those journeys I have never been
able to learn. During the summer of 1912 I chartered a ship and sailed
in the Arctic north of Spitzbergen, afterward shewing signs of
disappointment. Later in that year I spent weeks alone beyond the
limits of previous or subsequent exploration in the vast limestone
cavern systems of western Virginia—black labyrinths so complex that no
retracing of my steps could even be considered.
My sojourns at the universities were marked by abnormally rapid
assimilation, as if the secondary personality had an intelligence
enormously superior to my own. I have found, also, that my rate of
reading and solitary study was phenomenal. I could master every detail
of a book merely by glancing over it as fast as I could turn the
leaves; while my skill at interpreting complex figures in an instant
was veritably awesome. At times there appeared almost ugly reports of
my power to influence the thoughts and acts of others, though I seemed
to have taken care to minimise displays of this faculty.
Other ugly reports concerned my intimacy with leaders of occultist
groups, and scholars suspected of connexion with nameless bands of
abhorrent elder-world hierophants. These rumours, though never proved
at the time, were doubtless stimulated by the known tenor of some of my
reading—for the consultation of rare books at libraries cannot be
effected secretly. There is tangible proof—in the form of marginal
notes—that I went minutely through such things as the Comte d’Erlette’s
Cultes des Goules, Ludvig Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis, the
Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, the surviving fragments of the
puzzling Book of Eibon, and the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab
Abdul Alhazred. Then, too, it is undeniable that a fresh and evil wave
of underground cult activity set in about the time of my odd mutation.
In the summer of 1913 I began to display signs of ennui and flagging
interest, and to hint to various associates that a change might soon be
expected in me. I spoke of returning memories of my earlier life—though
most auditors judged me insincere, since all the recollections I gave
were casual, and such as might have been learned from my old private
papers. About the middle of August I returned to Arkham and reopened my
long-closed house in Crane St. Here I installed a mechanism of the most
curious aspect, constructed piecemeal by different makers of scientific
apparatus in Europe and America, and guarded carefully from the sight
of anyone intelligent enough to analyse it. Those who did see it—a
workman, a servant, and the new housekeeper—say that it was a queer
mixture of rods, wheels, and mirrors, though only about two feet tall,
one foot wide, and one foot thick. The central mirror was circular and
convex. All this is borne out by such makers of parts as can be
located.
On the evening of Friday, Sept. 26, I dismissed the housekeeper and the
maid till noon of the next day. Lights burned in the house till late,
and a lean, dark, curiously foreign-looking man called in an
automobile. It was about 1 a.m. that the lights were last seen. At 2:15
a.m. a policeman observed the place in darkness, but with the
stranger’s motor still at the curb. By four o’clock the motor was
certainly gone. It was at six that a hesitant, foreign voice on the
telephone asked Dr. Wilson to call at my house and bring me out of a
peculiar faint. This call—a long-distance one—was later traced to a
public booth in the North Station in Boston, but no sign of the lean
foreigner was ever unearthed.
When the doctor reached my house he found me unconscious in the
sitting-room—in an easy-chair with a table drawn up before it. On the
polished table-top were scratches shewing where some heavy object had
rested. The queer machine was gone, nor was anything afterward heard of
it. Undoubtedly the dark, lean foreigner had taken it away. In the
library grate were abundant ashes evidently left from the burning of
every remaining scrap of paper on which I had written since the advent
of the amnesia. Dr. Wilson found my breathing very peculiar, but after
an hypodermic injection it became more regular.
At 11:15 a.m., Sept. 27, I stirred vigorously, and my hitherto
mask-like face began to shew signs of expression. Dr. Wilson remarked
that the expression was not that of my secondary personality, but
seemed much like that of my normal self. About 11:30 I muttered some
very curious syllables—syllables which seemed unrelated to any human
speech. I appeared, too, to struggle against something. Then, just
after noon—the housekeeper and the maid having meanwhile returned—I
began to mutter in English.
“. . . of the orthodox economists of that period, Jevons typifies the
prevailing trend toward scientific correlation. His attempt to link the
commercial cycle of prosperity and depression with the physical cycle
of the solar spots forms perhaps the apex of . . .”
Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee had come back—a spirit in whose time-scale it
was still that Thursday morning in 1908, with the economics class
gazing up at the battered desk on the platform.
II.
My reabsorption into normal life was a painful and difficult process.
The loss of over five years creates more complications than can be
imagined, and in my case there were countless matters to be adjusted.
What I heard of my actions since 1908 astonished and disturbed me, but
I tried to view the matter as philosophically as I could. At last
regaining custody of my second son Wingate, I settled down with him in
the Crane Street house and endeavoured to resume teaching—my old
professorship having been kindly offered me by the college.
I began work with the February, 1914, term, and kept at it just a year.
By that time I realised how badly my experience had shaken me. Though
perfectly sane—I hoped—and with no flaw in my original personality, I
had not the nervous energy of the old days. Vague dreams and queer
ideas continually haunted me, and when the outbreak of the world war
turned my mind to history I found myself thinking of periods and events
in the oddest possible fashion. My conception of time—my ability to
distinguish between consecutiveness and simultaneousness—seemed subtly
disordered; so that I formed chimerical notions about living in one age
and casting one’s mind all over eternity for knowledge of past and
future ages.
The war gave me strange impressions of remembering some of its far-off
consequences—as if I knew how it was coming out and could look back
upon it in the light of future information. All such quasi-memories
were attended with much pain, and with a feeling that some artificial
psychological barrier was set against them. When I diffidently hinted
to others about my impressions I met with varied responses. Some
persons looked uncomfortably at me, but men in the mathematics
department spoke of new developments in those theories of
relativity—then discussed only in learned circles—which were later to
become so famous. Dr. Albert Einstein, they said, was rapidly reducing
time to the status of a mere dimension.
But the dreams and disturbed feelings gained on me, so that I had to
drop my regular work in 1915. Certain of the impressions were taking an
annoying shape—giving me the persistent notion that my amnesia had
formed some unholy sort of exchange; that the secondary personality had
indeed been an intruding force from unknown regions, and that my own
personality had suffered displacement. Thus I was driven to vague and
frightful speculations concerning the whereabouts of my true self
during the years that another had held my body. The curious knowledge
and strange conduct of my body’s late tenant troubled me more and more
as I learned further details from persons, papers, and magazines.
Queernesses that had baffled others seemed to harmonise terribly with
some background of black knowledge which festered in the chasms of my
subconscious. I began to search feverishly for every scrap of
information bearing on the studies and travels of that other one during
the dark years.
Not all of my troubles were as semi-abstract as this. There were the
dreams—and these seemed to grow in vividness and concreteness. Knowing
how most would regard them, I seldom mentioned them to anyone but my
son or certain trusted psychologists, but eventually I commenced a
scientific study of other cases in order to see how typical or
non-typical such visions might be among amnesia victims. My results,
aided by psychologists, historians, anthropologists, and mental
specialists of wide experience, and by a study that included all
records of split personalities from the days of daemoniac-possession
legends to the medically realistic present, at first bothered me more
than they consoled me.
I soon found that my dreams had indeed no counterpart in the
overwhelming bulk of true amnesia cases. There remained, however, a
tiny residue of accounts which for years baffled and shocked me with
their parallelism to my own experience. Some of them were bits of
ancient folklore; others were case-histories in the annals of medicine;
one or two were anecdotes obscurely buried in standard histories. It
thus appeared that, while my special kind of affliction was
prodigiously rare, instances of it had occurred at long intervals ever
since the beginning of man’s annals. Some centuries might contain one,
two, or three cases; others none—or at least none whose record
survived.
The essence was always the same—a person of keen thoughtfulness seized
with a strange secondary life and leading for a greater or lesser
period an utterly alien existence typified at first by vocal and bodily
awkwardness, and later by a wholesale acquisition of scientific,
historic, artistic, and anthropological knowledge; an acquisition
carried on with feverish zest and with a wholly abnormal absorptive
power. Then a sudden return of the rightful consciousness,
intermittently plagued ever after with vague unplaceable dreams
suggesting fragments of some hideous memory elaborately blotted out.
And the close resemblance of those nightmares to my own—even in some of
the smallest particulars—left no doubt in my mind of their
significantly typical nature. One or two of the cases had an added ring
of faint, blasphemous familiarity, as if I had heard of them before
through some cosmic channel too morbid and frightful to contemplate. In
three instances there was specific mention of such an unknown machine
as had been in my house before the second change.
Another thing that cloudily worried me during my investigation was the
somewhat greater frequency of cases where a brief, elusive glimpse of
the typical nightmares was afforded to persons not visited with
well-defined amnesia. These persons were largely of mediocre mind or
less—some so primitive that they could scarcely be thought of as
vehicles for abnormal scholarship and preternatural mental
acquisitions. For a second they would be fired with alien force—then a
backward lapse and a thin, swift-fading memory of un-human horrors.
There had been at least three such cases during the past half
century—one only fifteen years before. Had something been groping
blindly through time from some unsuspected abyss in Nature? Were these
faint cases monstrous, sinister experiments of a kind and authorship
utterly beyond sane belief? Such were a few of the formless
speculations of my weaker hours—fancies abetted by myths which my
studies uncovered. For I could not doubt but that certain persistent
legends of immemorial antiquity, apparently unknown to the victims and
physicians connected with recent amnesia cases, formed a striking and
awesome elaboration of memory lapses such as mine.
Of the nature of the dreams and impressions which were growing so
clamorous I still almost fear to speak. They seemed to savour of
madness, and at times I believed I was indeed going mad. Was there a
special type of delusion afflicting those who had suffered lapses of
memory? Conceivably, the efforts of the subconscious mind to fill up a
perplexing blank with pseudo-memories might give rise to strange
imaginative vagaries. This, indeed (though an alternative folklore
theory finally seemed to me more plausible), was the belief of many of
the alienists who helped me in my search for parallel cases, and who
shared my puzzlement at the exact resemblances sometimes discovered.
They did not call the condition true insanity, but classed it rather
among neurotic disorders. My course in trying to track it down and
analyse it, instead of vainly seeking to dismiss or forget it, they
heartily endorsed as correct according to the best psychological
principles. I especially valued the advice of such physicians as had
studied me during my possession by the other personality.
My first disturbances were not visual at all, but concerned the more
abstract matters which I have mentioned. There was, too, a feeling of
profound and inexplicable horror concerning myself. I developed a queer
fear of seeing my own form, as if my eyes would find it something
utterly alien and inconceivably abhorrent. When I did glance down and
behold the familiar human shape in quiet grey or blue clothing I always
felt a curious relief, though in order to gain this relief I had to
conquer an infinite dread. I shunned mirrors as much as possible, and
was always shaved at the barber’s.
It was a long time before I correlated any of these disjointed feelings
with the fleeting visual impressions which began to develop. The first
such correlation had to do with the odd sensation of an external,
artificial restraint on my memory. I felt that the snatches of sight I
experienced had a profound and terrible meaning, and a frightful
connexion with myself, but that some purposeful influence held me from
grasping that meaning and that connexion. Then came that queerness
about the element of time, and with it desperate efforts to place the
fragmentary dream-glimpses in the chronological and spatial pattern.
The glimpses themselves were at first merely strange rather than
horrible. I would seem to be in an enormous vaulted chamber whose lofty
stone groinings were well-nigh lost in the shadows overhead. In
whatever time or place the scene might be, the principle of the arch
was known as fully and used as extensively as by the Romans. There were
colossal round windows and high arched doors, and pedestals or tables
each as tall as the height of an ordinary room. Vast shelves of dark
wood lined the walls, holding what seemed to be volumes of immense size
with strange hieroglyphs on their backs. The exposed stonework held
curious carvings, always in curvilinear mathematical designs, and there
were chiselled inscriptions in the same characters that the huge books
bore. The dark granite masonry was of a monstrous megalithic type, with
lines of convex-topped blocks fitting the concave-bottomed courses
which rested upon them. There were no chairs, but the tops of the vast
pedestals were littered with books, papers, and what seemed to be
writing materials—oddly figured jars of a purplish metal, and rods with
stained tips. Tall as the pedestals were, I seemed at times able to
view them from above. On some of them were great globes of luminous
crystal serving as lamps, and inexplicable machines formed of vitreous
tubes and metal rods. The windows were glazed, and latticed with
stout-looking bars. Though I dared not approach and peer out them, I
could see from where I was the waving tops of singular fern-like
growths. The floor was of massive octagonal flagstones, while rugs and
hangings were entirely lacking.
Later I had visions of sweeping through Cyclopean corridors of stone,
and up and down gigantic inclined planes of the same monstrous masonry.
There were no stairs anywhere, nor was any passageway less than thirty
feet wide. Some of the structures through which I floated must have
towered into the sky for thousands of feet. There were multiple levels
of black vaults below, and never-opened trap-doors, sealed down with
metal bands and holding dim suggestions of some special peril. I seemed
to be a prisoner, and horror hung broodingly over everything I saw. I
felt that the mocking curvilinear hieroglyphs on the walls would blast
my soul with their message were I not guarded by a merciful ignorance.
Still later my dreams included vistas from the great round windows, and
from the titanic flat roof, with its curious gardens, wide barren area,
and high, scalloped parapet of stone, to which the topmost of the
inclined planes led. There were almost endless leagues of giant
buildings, each in its garden, and ranged along paved roads fully two
hundred feet wide. They differed greatly in aspect, but few were less
than five hundred feet square or a thousand feet high. Many seemed so
limitless that they must have had a frontage of several thousand feet,
while some shot up to mountainous altitudes in the grey, steamy
heavens. They seemed to be mainly of stone or concrete, and most of
them embodied the oddly curvilinear type of masonry noticeable in the
building that held me. Roofs were flat and garden-covered, and tended
to have scalloped parapets. Sometimes there were terraces and higher
levels, and wide cleared spaces amidst the gardens. The great roads
held hints of motion, but in the earlier visions I could not resolve
this impression into details.
In certain places I beheld enormous dark cylindrical towers which
climbed far above any of the other structures. These appeared to be of
a totally unique nature, and shewed signs of prodigious age and
dilapidation. They were built of a bizarre type of square-cut basalt
masonry, and tapered slightly toward their rounded tops. Nowhere in any
of them could the least traces of windows or other apertures save huge
doors be found. I noticed also some lower buildings—all crumbling with
the weathering of aeons—which resembled these dark cylindrical towers
in basic architecture. Around all these aberrant piles of square-cut
masonry there hovered an inexplicable aura of menace and concentrated
fear, like that bred by the sealed trap-doors.
The omnipresent gardens were almost terrifying in their strangeness,
with bizarre and unfamiliar forms of vegetation nodding over broad
paths lined with curiously carven monoliths. Abnormally vast fern-like
growths predominated; some green, and some of a ghastly, fungoid
pallor. Among them rose great spectral things resembling calamites,
whose bamboo-like trunks towered to fabulous heights. Then there were
tufted forms like fabulous cycads, and grotesque dark-green shrubs and
trees of coniferous aspect. Flowers were small, colourless, and
unrecognisable, blooming in geometrical beds and at large among the
greenery. In a few of the terrace and roof-top gardens were larger and
more vivid blossoms of almost offensive contours and seeming to suggest
artificial breeding. Fungi of inconceivable size, outlines, and colours
speckled the scene in patterns bespeaking some unknown but
well-established horticultural tradition. In the larger gardens on the
ground there seemed to be some attempt to preserve the irregularities
of Nature, but on the roofs there was more selectiveness, and more
evidences of the topiary art.
The skies were almost always moist and cloudy, and sometimes I would
seem to witness tremendous rains. Once in a while, though, there would
be glimpses of the sun—which looked abnormally large—and of the moon,
whose markings held a touch of difference from the normal that I could
never quite fathom. When—very rarely—the night sky was clear to any
extent, I beheld constellations which were nearly beyond recognition.
Known outlines were sometimes approximated, but seldom duplicated; and
from the position of the few groups I could recognise, I felt I must be
in the earth’s southern hemisphere, near the Tropic of Capricorn. The
far horizon was always steamy and indistinct, but I could see that
great jungles of unknown tree-ferns, calamites, lepidodendra, and
sigillaria lay outside the city, their fantastic frondage waving
mockingly in the shifting vapours. Now and then there would be
suggestions of motion in the sky, but these my early visions never
resolved.
By the autumn of 1914 I began to have infrequent dreams of strange
floatings over the city and through the regions around it. I saw
interminable roads through forests of fearsome growths with mottled,
fluted, and banded trunks, and past other cities as strange as the one
which persistently haunted me. I saw monstrous constructions of black
or iridescent stone in glades and clearings where perpetual twilight
reigned, and traversed long causeways over swamps so dark that I could
tell but little of their moist, towering vegetation. Once I saw an area
of countless miles strown with age-blasted basaltic ruins whose
architecture had been like that of the few windowless, round-topped
towers in the haunting city. And once I saw the sea—a boundless steamy
expanse beyond the colossal stone piers of an enormous town of domes
and arches. Great shapeless suggestions of shadow moved over it, and
here and there its surface was vexed with anomalous spoutings.
III.
As I have said, it was not immediately that these wild visions began to
hold their terrifying quality. Certainly, many persons have dreamed
intrinsically stranger things—things compounded of unrelated scraps of
daily life, pictures, and reading, and arranged in fantastically novel
forms by the unchecked caprices of sleep. For some time I accepted the
visions as natural, even though I had never before been an extravagant
dreamer. Many of the vague anomalies, I argued, must have come from
trivial sources too numerous to track down; while others seemed to
reflect a common text-book knowledge of the plants and other conditions
of the primitive world of a hundred and fifty million years ago—the
world of the Permian or Triassic age. In the course of some months,
however, the element of terror did figure with accumulating force. This
was when the dreams began so unfailingly to have the aspect of
memories, and when my mind began to link them with my growing abstract
disturbances—the feeling of mnemonic restraint, the curious impressions
regarding time, the sense of a loathsome exchange with my secondary
personality of 1908–13, and, considerably later, the inexplicable
loathing of my own person.
As certain definite details began to enter the dreams, their horror
increased a thousandfold—until by October, 1915, I felt I must do
something. It was then that I began an intensive study of other cases
of amnesia and visions, feeling that I might thereby objectivise my
trouble and shake clear of its emotional grip. However, as before
mentioned, the result was at first almost exactly opposite. It
disturbed me vastly to find that my dreams had been so closely
duplicated; especially since some of the accounts were too early to
admit of any geological knowledge—and therefore of any idea of
primitive landscapes—on the subjects’ part. What is more, many of these
accounts supplied very horrible details and explanations in connexion
with the visions of great buildings and jungle gardens—and other
things. The actual sights and vague impressions were bad enough, but
what was hinted or asserted by some of the other dreamers savoured of
madness and blasphemy. Worst of all, my own pseudo-memory was aroused
to wilder dreams and hints of coming revelations. And yet most doctors
deemed my course, on the whole, an advisable one.
I studied psychology systematically, and under the prevailing stimulus
my son Wingate did the same—his studies leading eventually to his
present professorship. In 1917 and 1918 I took special courses at
Miskatonic. Meanwhile my examination of medical, historical, and
anthropological records became indefatigable; involving travels to
distant libraries, and finally including even a reading of the hideous
books of forbidden elder lore in which my secondary personality had
been so disturbingly interested. Some of the latter were the actual
copies I had consulted in my altered state, and I was greatly disturbed
by certain marginal notations and ostensible corrections of the hideous
text in a script and idiom which somehow seemed oddly un-human.
These markings were mostly in the respective languages of the various
books, all of which the writer seemed to know with equal though
obviously academic facility. One note appended to von Junzt’s
Unaussprechlichen Kulten, however, was alarmingly otherwise. It
consisted of certain curvilinear hieroglyphs in the same ink as that of
the German corrections, but following no recognised human pattern. And
these hieroglyphs were closely and unmistakably akin to the characters
constantly met with in my dreams—characters whose meaning I would
sometimes momentarily fancy I knew or was just on the brink of
recalling. To complete my black confusion, my librarians assured me
that, in view of previous examinations and records of consultation of
the volumes in question, all of these notations must have been made by
myself in my secondary state. This despite the fact that I was and
still am ignorant of three of the languages involved.
Piecing together the scattered records, ancient and modern,
anthropological and medical, I found a fairly consistent mixture of
myth and hallucination whose scope and wildness left me utterly dazed.
Only one thing consoled me—the fact that the myths were of such early
existence. What lost knowledge could have brought pictures of the
Palaeozoic or Mesozoic landscape into these primitive fables, I could
not even guess, but the pictures had been there. Thus, a basis existed
for the formation of a fixed type of delusion. Cases of amnesia no
doubt created the general myth-pattern—but afterward the fanciful
accretions of the myths must have reacted on amnesia sufferers and
coloured their pseudo-memories. I myself had read and heard all the
early tales during my memory lapse—my quest had amply proved that. Was
it not natural, then, for my subsequent dreams and emotional
impressions to become coloured and moulded by what my memory subtly
held over from my secondary state? A few of the myths had significant
connexions with other cloudy legends of the pre-human world, especially
those Hindoo tales involving stupefying gulfs of time and forming part
of the lore of modern theosophists.
Primal myth and modern delusion joined in their assumption that mankind
is only one—perhaps the least—of the highly evolved and dominant races
of this planet’s long and largely unknown career. Things of
inconceivable shape, they implied, had reared towers to the sky and
delved into every secret of Nature before the first amphibian forbear
of man had crawled out of the hot sea three hundred million years ago.
Some had come down from the stars; a few were as old as the cosmos
itself; others had arisen swiftly from terrene germs as far behind the
first germs of our life-cycle as those germs are behind ourselves.
Spans of thousands of millions of years, and linkages with other
galaxies and universes, were freely spoken of. Indeed, there was no
such thing as time in its humanly accepted sense.
But most of the tales and impressions concerned a relatively late race,
of a queer and intricate shape resembling no life-form known to
science, which had lived till only fifty million years before the
advent of man. This, they indicated, was the greatest race of all;
because it alone had conquered the secret of time. It had learned all
things that ever were known or ever would be known on the earth,
through the power of its keener minds to project themselves into the
past and future, even through gulfs of millions of years, and study the
lore of every age. From the accomplishments of this race arose all
legends of prophets, including those in human mythology.
In its vast libraries were volumes of texts and pictures holding the
whole of earth’s annals—histories and descriptions of every species
that had ever been or that ever would be, with full records of their
arts, their achievements, their languages, and their psychologies. With
this aeon-embracing knowledge, the Great Race chose from every era and
life-form such thoughts, arts, and processes as might suit its own
nature and situation. Knowledge of the past, secured through a kind of
mind-casting outside the recognised senses, was harder to glean than
knowledge of the future.
In the latter case the course was easier and more material. With
suitable mechanical aid a mind would project itself forward in time,
feeling its dim, extra-sensory way till it approached the desired
period. Then, after preliminary trials, it would seize on the best
discoverable representative of the highest of that period’s life-forms;
entering the organism’s brain and setting up therein its own vibrations
while the displaced mind would strike back to the period of the
displacer, remaining in the latter’s body till a reverse process was
set up. The projected mind, in the body of the organism of the future,
would then pose as a member of the race whose outward form it wore;
learning as quickly as possible all that could be learned of the chosen
age and its massed information and techniques.
Meanwhile the displaced mind, thrown back to the displacer’s age and
body, would be carefully guarded. It would be kept from harming the
body it occupied, and would be drained of all its knowledge by trained
questioners. Often it could be questioned in its own language, when
previous quests into the future had brought back records of that
language. If the mind came from a body whose language the Great Race
could not physically reproduce, clever machines would be made, on which
the alien speech could be played as on a musical instrument. The Great
Race’s members were immense rugose cones ten feet high, and with head
and other organs attached to foot-thick, distensible limbs spreading
from the apexes. They spoke by the clicking or scraping of huge paws or
claws attached to the end of two of their four limbs, and walked by the
expansion and contraction of a viscous layer attached to their vast
ten-foot bases.
When the captive mind’s amazement and resentment had worn off, and when
(assuming that it came from a body vastly different from the Great
Race’s) it had lost its horror at its unfamiliar temporary form, it was
permitted to study its new environment and experience a wonder and
wisdom approximating that of its displacer. With suitable precautions,
and in exchange for suitable services, it was allowed to rove all over
the habitable world in titan airships or on the huge boat-like
atomic-engined vehicles which traversed the great roads, and to delve
freely into the libraries containing the records of the planet’s past
and future. This reconciled many captive minds to their lot; since none
were other than keen, and to such minds the unveiling of hidden
mysteries of earth—closed chapters of inconceivable pasts and dizzying
vortices of future time which include the years ahead of their own
natural ages—forms always, despite the abysmal horrors often unveiled,
the supreme experience of life.
Now and then certain captives were permitted to meet other captive
minds seized from the future—to exchange thoughts with consciousnesses
living a hundred or a thousand or a million years before or after their
own ages. And all were urged to write copiously in their own languages
of themselves and their respective periods; such documents to be filed
in the great central archives.
It may be added that there was one sad special type of captive whose
privileges were far greater than those of the majority. These were the
dying permanent exiles, whose bodies in the future had been seized by
keen-minded members of the Great Race who, faced with death, sought to
escape mental extinction. Such melancholy exiles were not as common as
might be expected, since the longevity of the Great Race lessened its
love of life—especially among those superior minds capable of
projection. From cases of the permanent projection of elder minds arose
many of those lasting changes of personality noticed in later
history—including mankind’s.
As for the ordinary cases of exploration—when the displacing mind had
learned what it wished in the future, it would build an apparatus like
that which had started its flight and reverse the process of
projection. Once more it would be in its own body in its own age, while
the lately captive mind would return to that body of the future to
which it properly belonged. Only when one or the other of the bodies
had died during the exchange was this restoration impossible. In such
cases, of course, the exploring mind had—like those of the
death-escapers—to live out an alien-bodied life in the future; or else
the captive mind—like the dying permanent exiles—had to end its days in
the form and past age of the Great Race.
This fate was least horrible when the captive mind was also of the
Great Race—a not infrequent occurrence, since in all its periods that
race was intensely concerned with its own future. The number of dying
permanent exiles of the Great Race was very slight—largely because of
the tremendous penalties attached to displacements of future Great Race
minds by the moribund. Through projection, arrangements were made to
inflict these penalties on the offending minds in their new future
bodies—and sometimes forced re-exchanges were effected. Complex cases
of the displacement of exploring or already captive minds by minds in
various regions of the past had been known and carefully rectified. In
every age since the discovery of mind-projection, a minute but
well-recognised element of the population consisted of Great Race minds
from past ages, sojourning for a longer or shorter while.
When a captive mind of alien origin was returned to its own body in the
future, it was purged by an intricate mechanical hypnosis of all it had
learned in the Great Race’s age—this because of certain troublesome
consequences inherent in the general carrying forward of knowledge in
large quantities. The few existing instances of clear transmission had
caused, and would cause at known future times, great disasters. And it
was largely in consequence of two cases of the kind (said the old
myths) that mankind had learned what it had concerning the Great Race.
Of all things surviving physically and directly from that aeon-distant
world, there remained only certain ruins of great stones in far places
and under the sea, and parts of the text of the frightful Pnakotic
Manuscripts.
Thus the returning mind reached its own age with only the faintest and
most fragmentary visions of what it had undergone since its seizure.
All memories that could be eradicated were eradicated, so that in most
cases only a dream-shadowed blank stretched back to the time of the
first exchange. Some minds recalled more than others, and the chance
joining of memories had at rare times brought hints of the forbidden
past to future ages. There probably never was a time when groups or
cults did not secretly cherish certain of these hints. In the
Necronomicon the presence of such a cult among human beings was
suggested—a cult that sometimes gave aid to minds voyaging down the
aeons from the days of the Great Race.
And meanwhile the Great Race itself waxed well-nigh omniscient, and
turned to the task of setting up exchanges with the minds of other
planets, and of exploring their pasts and futures. It sought likewise
to fathom the past years and origin of that black, aeon-dead orb in far
space whence its own mental heritage had come—for the mind of the Great
Race was older than its bodily form. The beings of a dying elder world,
wise with the ultimate secrets, had looked ahead for a new world and
species wherein they might have long life; and had sent their minds en
masse into that future race best adapted to house them—the cone-shaped
things that peopled our earth a billion years ago. Thus the Great Race
came to be, while the myriad minds sent backward were left to die in
the horror of strange shapes. Later the race would again face death,
yet would live through another forward migration of its best minds into
the bodies of others who had a longer physical span ahead of them.
Such was the background of intertwined legend and hallucination. When,
around 1920, I had my researches in coherent shape, I felt a slight
lessening of the tension which their earlier stages had increased.
After all, and in spite of the fancies prompted by blind emotions, were
not most of my phenomena readily explainable? Any chance might have
turned my mind to dark studies during the amnesia—and then I read the
forbidden legends and met the members of ancient and ill-regarded
cults. That, plainly, supplied the material for the dreams and
disturbed feelings which came after the return of memory. As for the
marginal notes in dream-hieroglyphs and languages unknown to me, but
laid at my door by librarians—I might easily have picked up a
smattering of the tongues during my secondary state, while the
hieroglyphs were doubtless coined by my fancy from descriptions in old
legends, and afterward woven into my dreams. I tried to verify certain
points through conversation with known cult-leaders, but never
succeeded in establishing the right connexions.
At times the parallelism of so many cases in so many distant ages
continued to worry me as it had at first, but on the other hand I
reflected that the excitant folklore was undoubtedly more universal in
the past than in the present. Probably all the other victims whose
cases were like mine had had a long and familiar knowledge of the tales
I had learned only when in my secondary state. When these victims had
lost their memory, they had associated themselves with the creatures of
their household myths—the fabulous invaders supposed to displace men’s
minds—and had thus embarked upon quests for knowledge which they
thought they could take back to a fancied, non-human past. Then when
their memory returned, they reversed the associative process and
thought of themselves as the former captive minds instead of as the
displacers. Hence the dreams and pseudo-memories following the
conventional myth-pattern.
Despite the seeming cumbrousness of these explanations, they came
finally to supersede all others in my mind—largely because of the
greater weakness of any rival theory. And a substantial number of
eminent psychologists and anthropologists gradually agreed with me. The
more I reflected, the more convincing did my reasoning seem; till in
the end I had a really effective bulwark against the visions and
impressions which still assailed me. Suppose I did see strange things
at night? These were only what I had heard and read of. Suppose I did
have odd loathings and perspectives and pseudo-memories? These, too,
were only echoes of myths absorbed in my secondary state. Nothing that
I might dream, nothing that I might feel, could be of any actual
significance.
Fortified by this philosophy, I greatly improved in nervous
equilibrium, even though the visions (rather than the abstract
impressions) steadily became more frequent and more disturbingly
detailed. In 1922 I felt able to undertake regular work again, and put
my newly gained knowledge to practical use by accepting an
instructorship in psychology at the university. My old chair of
political economy had long been adequately filled—besides which,
methods of teaching economics had changed greatly since my heyday. My
son was at this time just entering on the post-graduate studies leading
to his present professorship, and we worked together a great deal.
IV.
I continued, however, to keep a careful record of the outré dreams
which crowded upon me so thickly and vividly. Such a record, I argued,
was of genuine value as a psychological document. The glimpses still
seemed damnably like memories, though I fought off this impression with
a goodly measure of success. In writing, I treated the phantasmata as
things seen; but at all other times I brushed them aside like any
gossamer illusions of the night. I had never mentioned such matters in
common conversation; though reports of them, filtering out as such
things will, had aroused sundry rumours regarding my mental health. It
is amusing to reflect that these rumours were confined wholly to
laymen, without a single champion among physicians or psychologists.
Of my visions after 1914 I will here mention only a few, since fuller
accounts and records are at the disposal of the serious student. It is
evident that with time the curious inhibitions somewhat waned, for the
scope of my visions vastly increased. They have never, though, become
other than disjointed fragments seemingly without clear motivation.
Within the dreams I seemed gradually to acquire a greater and greater
freedom of wandering. I floated through many strange buildings of
stone, going from one to the other along mammoth underground passages
which seemed to form the common avenues of transit. Sometimes I
encountered those gigantic sealed trap-doors in the lowest level,
around which such an aura of fear and forbiddenness clung. I saw
tremendous tessellated pools, and rooms of curious and inexplicable
utensils of myriad sorts. Then there were colossal caverns of intricate
machinery whose outlines and purpose were wholly strange to me, and
whose sound manifested itself only after many years of dreaming. I may
here remark that sight and sound are the only senses I have ever
exercised in the visionary world.
The real horror began in May, 1915, when I first saw the living things.
This was before my studies had taught me what, in view of the myths and
case histories, to expect. As mental barriers wore down, I beheld great
masses of thin vapour in various parts of the building and in the
streets below. These steadily grew more solid and distinct, till at
last I could trace their monstrous outlines with uncomfortable ease.
They seemed to be enormous iridescent cones, about ten feet high and
ten feet wide at the base, and made up of some ridgy, scaly,
semi-elastic matter. From their apexes projected four flexible,
cylindrical members, each a foot thick, and of a ridgy substance like
that of the cones themselves. These members were sometimes contracted
almost to nothing, and sometimes extended to any distance up to about
ten feet. Terminating two of them were enormous claws or nippers. At
the end of a third were four red, trumpet-like appendages. The fourth
terminated in an irregular yellowish globe some two feet in diameter
and having three great dark eyes ranged along its central
circumference. Surmounting this head were four slender grey stalks
bearing flower-like appendages, whilst from its nether side dangled
eight greenish antennae or tentacles. The great base of the central
cone was fringed with a rubbery, grey substance which moved the whole
entity through expansion and contraction.
Their actions, though harmless, horrified me even more than their
appearance—for it is not wholesome to watch monstrous objects doing
what one has known only human beings to do. These objects moved
intelligently around the great rooms, getting books from the shelves
and taking them to the great tables, or vice versa, and sometimes
writing diligently with a penlike rod gripped in the greenish
head-tentacles. The huge nippers were used in carrying books and in
conversation—speech consisting of a kind of clicking and scraping. The
objects had no clothing, but wore satchels or knapsacks suspended from
the top of the conical trunk. They commonly carried their head and its
supporting member at the level of the cone top, although it was
frequently raised or lowered. The other three great members tended to
rest downward on the sides of the cone, contracted to about five feet
each, when not in use. From their rate of reading, writing, and
operating their machines (those on the tables seemed somehow connected
with thought) I concluded that their intelligence was enormously
greater than man’s.
Afterward I saw them everywhere; swarming in all the great chambers and
corridors, tending monstrous machines in vaulted crypts, and racing
along the vast roads in gigantic boat-shaped cars. I ceased to be
afraid of them, for they seemed to form supremely natural parts of
their environment. Individual differences amongst them began to be
manifest, and a few appeared to be under some kind of restraint. These
latter, though shewing no physical variation, had a diversity of
gestures and habits which marked them off not only from the majority,
but very largely from one another. They wrote a great deal in what
seemed to my cloudy vision a vast variety of characters—never the
typical curvilinear hieroglyphs of the majority. A few, I fancied, used
our own familiar alphabet. Most of them worked much more slowly than
the general mass of the entities.
All this time my own part in the dreams seemed to be that of a
disembodied consciousness with a range of vision wider than the normal;
floating freely about, yet confined to the ordinary avenues and speeds
of travel. Not until August, 1915, did any suggestions of bodily
existence begin to harass me. I say harass, because the first phase was
a purely abstract though infinitely terrible association of my
previously noted body-loathing with the scenes of my visions. For a
while my chief concern during dreams was to avoid looking down at
myself, and I recall how grateful I was for the total absence of large
mirrors in the strange rooms. I was mightily troubled by the fact that
I always saw the great tables—whose height could not be under ten
feet—from a level not below that of their surfaces.
And then the morbid temptation to look down at myself became greater
and greater, till one night I could not resist it. At first my downward
glance revealed nothing whatever. A moment later I perceived that this
was because my head lay at the end of a flexible neck of enormous
length. Retracting this neck and gazing down very sharply, I saw the
scaly, rugose, iridescent bulk of a vast cone ten feet tall and ten
feet wide at the base. That was when I waked half of Arkham with my
screaming as I plunged madly up from the abyss of sleep.
Only after weeks of hideous repetition did I grow half-reconciled to
these visions of myself in monstrous form. In the dreams I now moved
bodily among the other unknown entities, reading terrible books from
the endless shelves and writing for hours at the great tables with a
stylus managed by the green tentacles that hung down from my head.
Snatches of what I read and wrote would linger in my memory. There were
horrible annals of other worlds and other universes, and of stirrings
of formless life outside of all universes. There were records of
strange orders of beings which had peopled the world in forgotten
pasts, and frightful chronicles of grotesque-bodied intelligences which
would people it millions of years after the death of the last human
being. And I learned of chapters in human history whose existence no
scholar of today has ever suspected. Most of these writings were in the
language of the hieroglyphs; which I studied in a queer way with the
aid of droning machines, and which was evidently an agglutinative
speech with root systems utterly unlike any found in human languages.
Other volumes were in other unknown tongues learned in the same queer
way. A very few were in languages I knew. Extremely clever pictures,
both inserted in the records and forming separate collections, aided me
immensely. And all the time I seemed to be setting down a history of my
own age in English. On waking, I could recall only minute and
meaningless scraps of the unknown tongues which my dream-self had
mastered, though whole phrases of the history stayed with me.
I learned—even before my waking self had studied the parallel cases or
the old myths from which the dreams doubtless sprang—that the entities
around me were of the world’s greatest race, which had conquered time
and had sent exploring minds into every age. I knew, too, that I had
been snatched from my age while another used my body in that age, and
that a few of the other strange forms housed similarly captured minds.
I seemed to talk, in some odd language of claw-clickings, with exiled
intellects from every corner of the solar system.
There was a mind from the planet we know as Venus, which would live
incalculable epochs to come, and one from an outer moon of Jupiter six
million years in the past. Of earthly minds there were some from the
winged, star-headed, half-vegetable race of palaeogean Antarctica; one
from the reptile people of fabled Valusia; three from the furry
pre-human Hyperborean worshippers of Tsathoggua; one from the wholly
abominable Tcho-Tchos; two from the arachnid denizens of earth’s last
age; five from the hardy coleopterous species immediately following
mankind, to which the Great Race was some day to transfer its keenest
minds en masse in the face of horrible peril; and several from
different branches of humanity.
I talked with the mind of Yiang-Li, a philosopher from the cruel empire
of Tsan-Chan, which is to come in A.D. 5000; with that of a general of
the great-headed brown people who held South Africa in B.C. 50,000;
with that of a twelfth-century Florentine monk named Bartolomeo Corsi;
with that of a king of Lomar who had ruled that terrible polar land
100,000 years before the squat, yellow Inutos came from the west to
engulf it; with that of Nug-Soth, a magician of the dark conquerors of
A.D. 16,000; with that of a Roman named Titus Sempronius Blaesus, who
had been a quaestor in Sulla’s time; with that of Khephnes, an Egyptian
of the 14th Dynasty who told me the hideous secret of Nyarlathotep;
with that of a priest of Atlantis’ middle kingdom; with that of a
Suffolk gentleman of Cromwell’s day, James Woodville; with that of a
court astronomer of pre-Inca Peru; with that of the Australian
physicist Nevil Kingston-Brown, who will die in A.D. 2518; with that of
an archimage of vanished Yhe in the Pacific; with that of Theodotides,
a Graeco-Bactrian official of B.C. 200; with that of an aged Frenchman
of Louis XIII’s time named Pierre-Louis Montmagny; with that of
Crom-Ya, a Cimmerian chieftain of B.C. 15,000; and with so many others
that my brain cannot hold the shocking secrets and dizzying marvels I
learned from them.
I awaked each morning in a fever, sometimes frantically trying to
verify or discredit such information as fell within the range of modern
human knowledge. Traditional facts took on new and doubtful aspects,
and I marvelled at the dream-fancy which could invent such surprising
addenda to history and science. I shivered at the mysteries the past
may conceal, and trembled at the menaces the future may bring forth.
What was hinted in the speech of post-human entities of the fate of
mankind produced such an effect on me that I will not set it down here.
After man there would be the mighty beetle civilisation, the bodies of
whose members the cream of the Great Race would seize when the
monstrous doom overtook the elder world. Later, as the earth’s span
closed, the transferred minds would again migrate through time and
space—to another stopping-place in the bodies of the bulbous vegetable
entities of Mercury. But there would be races after them, clinging
pathetically to the cold planet and burrowing to its horror-filled
core, before the utter end.
Meanwhile, in my dreams, I wrote endlessly in that history of my own
age which I was preparing—half voluntarily and half through promises of
increased library and travel opportunities—for the Great Race’s central
archives. The archives were in a colossal subterranean structure near
the city’s centre, which I came to know well through frequent labours
and consultations. Meant to last as long as the race, and to withstand
the fiercest of earth’s convulsions, this titan repository surpassed
all other buildings in the massive, mountain-like firmness of its
construction.
The records, written or printed on great sheets of a curiously
tenacious cellulose fabric, were bound into books that opened from the
top, and were kept in individual cases of a strange, extremely light
rustless metal of greyish hue, decorated with mathematical designs and
bearing the title in the Great Race’s curvilinear hieroglyphs. These
cases were stored in tiers of rectangular vaults—like closed, locked
shelves—wrought of the same rustless metal and fastened by knobs with
intricate turnings. My own history was assigned a specific place in the
vaults of the lowest or vertebrate level—the section devoted to the
culture of mankind and of the furry and reptilian races immediately
preceding it in terrestrial dominance.
But none of the dreams ever gave me a full picture of daily life. All
were the merest misty, disconnected fragments, and it is certain that
these fragments were not unfolded in their rightful sequence. I have,
for example, a very imperfect idea of my own living arrangements in the
dream-world; though I seem to have possessed a great stone room of my
own. My restrictions as a prisoner gradually disappeared, so that some
of the visions included vivid travels over the mighty jungle roads,
sojourns in strange cities, and explorations of some of the vast dark
windowless ruins from which the Great Race shrank in curious fear.
There were also long sea-voyages in enormous, many-decked boats of
incredible swiftness, and trips over wild regions in closed,
projectile-like airships lifted and moved by electrical repulsion.
Beyond the wide, warm ocean were other cities of the Great Race, and on
one far continent I saw the crude villages of the black-snouted, winged
creatures who would evolve as a dominant stock after the Great Race had
sent its foremost minds into the future to escape the creeping horror.
Flatness and exuberant green life were always the keynote of the scene.
Hills were low and sparse, and usually displayed signs of volcanic
forces.
Of the animals I saw, I could write volumes. All were wild; for the
Great Race’s mechanised culture had long since done away with domestic
beasts, while food was wholly vegetable or synthetic. Clumsy reptiles
of great bulk floundered in steaming morasses, fluttered in the heavy
air, or spouted in the seas and lakes; and among these I fancied I
could vaguely recognise lesser, archaic prototypes of many
forms—dinosaurs, pterodactyls, ichthyosaurs, labyrinthodonts,
rhamphorhynci, plesiosaurs, and the like—made familiar through
palaeontology. Of birds or mammals there were none that I could
discern.
The ground and swamps were constantly alive with snakes, lizards, and
crocodiles, while insects buzzed incessantly amidst the lush
vegetation. And far out at sea unspied and unknown monsters spouted
mountainous columns of foam into the vaporous sky. Once I was taken
under the ocean in a gigantic submarine vessel with searchlights, and
glimpsed some living horrors of awesome magnitude. I saw also the ruins
of incredible sunken cities, and the wealth of crinoid, brachiopod,
coral, and ichthyic life which everywhere abounded.
Of the physiology, psychology, folkways, and detailed history of the
Great Race my visions preserved but little information, and many of the
scattered points I here set down were gleaned from my study of old
legends and other cases rather than from my own dreaming. For in time,
of course, my reading and research caught up with and passed the dreams
in many phases; so that certain dream-fragments were explained in
advance, and formed verifications of what I had learned. This
consolingly established my belief that similar reading and research,
accomplished by my secondary self, had formed the source of the whole
terrible fabric of pseudo-memories.
The period of my dreams, apparently, was one somewhat less than
150,000,000 years ago, when the Palaeozoic age was giving place to the
Mesozoic. The bodies occupied by the Great Race represented no
surviving—or even scientifically known—line of terrestrial evolution,
but were of a peculiar, closely homogeneous, and highly specialised
organic type inclining as much to the vegetable as to the animal state.
Cell-action was of an unique sort almost precluding fatigue, and wholly
eliminating the need of sleep. Nourishment, assimilated through the red
trumpet-like appendages on one of the great flexible limbs, was always
semi-fluid and in many aspects wholly unlike the food of existing
animals. The beings had but two of the senses which we recognise—sight
and hearing, the latter accomplished through the flower-like appendages
on the grey stalks above their heads—but of other and incomprehensible
senses (not, however, well utilisable by alien captive minds inhabiting
their bodies) they possessed many. Their three eyes were so situated as
to give them a range of vision wider than the normal. Their blood was a
sort of deep-greenish ichor of great thickness. They had no sex, but
reproduced through seeds or spores which clustered on their bases and
could be developed only under water. Great, shallow tanks were used for
the growth of their young—which were, however, reared only in small
numbers on account of the longevity of individuals; four or five
thousand years being the common life span.
Markedly defective individuals were quietly disposed of as soon as
their defects were noticed. Disease and the approach of death were, in
the absence of a sense of touch or of physical pain, recognised by
purely visual symptoms. The dead were incinerated with dignified
ceremonies. Once in a while, as before mentioned, a keen mind would
escape death by forward projection in time; but such cases were not
numerous. When one did occur, the exiled mind from the future was
treated with the utmost kindness till the dissolution of its unfamiliar
tenement.
The Great Race seemed to form a single loosely knit nation or league,
with major institutions in common, though there were four definite
divisions. The political and economic system of each unit was a sort of
fascistic socialism, with major resources rationally distributed, and
power delegated to a small governing board elected by the votes of all
able to pass certain educational and psychological tests. Family
organisation was not overstressed, though ties among persons of common
descent were recognised, and the young were generally reared by their
parents.
Resemblances to human attitudes and institutions were, of course, most
marked in those fields where on the one hand highly abstract elements
were concerned, or where on the other hand there was a dominance of the
basic, unspecialised urges common to all organic life. A few added
likenesses came through conscious adoption as the Great Race probed the
future and copied what it liked. Industry, highly mechanised, demanded
but little time from each citizen; and the abundant leisure was filled
with intellectual and aesthetic activities of various sorts. The
sciences were carried to an unbelievable height of development, and art
was a vital part of life, though at the period of my dreams it had
passed its crest and meridian. Technology was enormously stimulated
through the constant struggle to survive, and to keep in existence the
physical fabric of great cities, imposed by the prodigious geologic
upheavals of those primal days.
Crime was surprisingly scanty, and was dealt with through highly
efficient policing. Punishments ranged from privilege-deprivation and
imprisonment to death or major emotion-wrenching, and were never
administered without a careful study of the criminal’s motivations.
Warfare, largely civil for the last few millennia though sometimes
waged against reptilian and octopodic invaders, or against the winged,
star-headed Old Ones who centred in the Antarctic, was infrequent
though infinitely devastating. An enormous army, using camera-like
weapons which produced tremendous electrical effects, was kept on hand
for purposes seldom mentioned, but obviously connected with the
ceaseless fear of the dark, windowless elder ruins and of the great
sealed trap-doors in the lowest subterrene levels.
This fear of the basalt ruins and trap-doors was largely a matter of
unspoken suggestion—or, at most, of furtive quasi-whispers. Everything
specific which bore on it was significantly absent from such books as
were on the common shelves. It was the one subject lying altogether
under a taboo among the Great Race, and seemed to be connected alike
with horrible bygone struggles, and with that future peril which would
some day force the race to send its keener minds ahead en masse in
time. Imperfect and fragmentary as were the other things presented by
dreams and legends, this matter was still more bafflingly shrouded. The
vague old myths avoided it—or perhaps all allusions had for some reason
been excised. And in the dreams of myself and others, the hints were
peculiarly few. Members of the Great Race never intentionally referred
to the matter, and what could be gleaned came only from some of the
more sharply observant captive minds.
According to these scraps of information, the basis of the fear was a
horrible elder race of half-polypous, utterly alien entities which had
come through space from immeasurably distant universes and had
dominated the earth and three other solar planets about six hundred
million years ago. They were only partly material—as we understand
matter—and their type of consciousness and media of perception differed
wholly from those of terrestrial organisms. For example, their senses
did not include that of sight; their mental world being a strange,
non-visual pattern of impressions. They were, however, sufficiently
material to use implements of normal matter when in cosmic areas
containing it; and they required housing—albeit of a peculiar kind.
Though their senses could penetrate all material barriers, their
substance could not; and certain forms of electrical energy could
wholly destroy them. They had the power of aërial motion despite the
absence of wings or any other visible means of levitation. Their minds
were of such texture that no exchange with them could be effected by
the Great Race.
When these things had come to the earth they had built mighty basalt
cities of windowless towers, and had preyed horribly upon the beings
they found. Thus it was when the minds of the Great Race sped across
the void from that obscure trans-galactic world known in the disturbing
and debatable Eltdown Shards as Yith. The newcomers, with the
instruments they created, had found it easy to subdue the predatory
entities and drive them down to those caverns of inner earth which they
had already joined to their abodes and begun to inhabit. Then they had
sealed the entrances and left them to their fate, afterward occupying
most of their great cities and preserving certain important buildings
for reasons connected more with superstition than with indifference,
boldness, or scientific and historical zeal.
But as the aeons passed, there came vague, evil signs that the Elder
Things were growing strong and numerous in the inner world. There were
sporadic irruptions of a particularly hideous character in certain
small and remote cities of the Great Race, and in some of the deserted
elder cities which the Great Race had not peopled—places where the
paths to the gulfs below had not been properly sealed or guarded. After
that greater precautions were taken, and many of the paths were closed
for ever—though a few were left with sealed trap-doors for strategic
use in fighting the Elder Things if ever they broke forth in unexpected
places; fresh rifts caused by that selfsame geologic change which had
choked some of the paths and had slowly lessened the number of
outer-world structures and ruins surviving from the conquered entities.
The irruptions of the Elder Things must have been shocking beyond all
description, since they had permanently coloured the psychology of the
Great Race. Such was the fixed mood of horror that the very aspect of
the creatures was left unmentioned—at no time was I able to gain a
clear hint of what they looked like. There were veiled suggestions of a
monstrous plasticity, and of temporary lapses of visibility, while
other fragmentary whispers referred to their control and military use
of great winds. Singular whistling noises, and colossal footprints made
up of five circular toe-marks, seemed also to be associated with them.
It was evident that the coming doom so desperately feared by the Great
Race—the doom that was one day to send millions of keen minds across
the chasm of time to strange bodies in the safer future—had to do with
a final successful irruption of the Elder Beings. Mental projections
down the ages had clearly foretold such a horror, and the Great Race
had resolved that none who could escape should face it. That the foray
would be a matter of vengeance, rather than an attempt to reoccupy the
outer world, they knew from the planet’s later history—for their
projections shewed the coming and going of subsequent races untroubled
by the monstrous entities. Perhaps these entities had come to prefer
earth’s inner abysses to the variable, storm-ravaged surface, since
light meant nothing to them. Perhaps, too, they were slowly weakening
with the aeons. Indeed, it was known that they would be quite dead in
the time of the post-human beetle race which the fleeing minds would
tenant. Meanwhile the Great Race maintained its cautious vigilance,
with potent weapons ceaselessly ready despite the horrified banishing
of the subject from common speech and visible records. And always the
shadow of nameless fear hung about the sealed trap-doors and the dark,
windowless elder towers.
V.
That is the world of which my dreams brought me dim, scattered echoes
every night. I cannot hope to give any true idea of the horror and
dread contained in such echoes, for it was upon a wholly intangible
quality—the sharp sense of pseudo-memory—that such feelings mainly
depended. As I have said, my studies gradually gave me a defence
against these feelings, in the form of rational psychological
explanations; and this saving influence was augmented by the subtle
touch of accustomedness which comes with the passage of time. Yet in
spite of everything the vague, creeping terror would return momentarily
now and then. It did not, however, engulf me as it had before; and
after 1922 I lived a very normal life of work and recreation.
In the course of years I began to feel that my experience—together with
the kindred cases and the related folklore—ought to be definitely
summarised and published for the benefit of serious students; hence I
prepared a series of articles briefly covering the whole ground and
illustrated with crude sketches of some of the shapes, scenes,
decorative motifs, and hieroglyphs remembered from the dreams. These
appeared at various times during 1928 and 1929 in the Journal of the
American Psychological Society, but did not attract much attention.
Meanwhile I continued to record my dreams with the minutest care, even
though the growing stack of reports attained troublesomely vast
proportions.
On July 10, 1934, there was forwarded to me by the Psychological
Society the letter which opened the culminating and most horrible phase
of the whole mad ordeal. It was postmarked Pilbarra, Western Australia,
and bore the signature of one whom I found, upon inquiry, to be a
mining engineer of considerable prominence. Enclosed were some very
curious snapshots. I will reproduce the text in its entirety, and no
reader can fail to understand how tremendous an effect it and the
photographs had upon me.
I was, for a time, almost stunned and incredulous; for although I had
often thought that some basis of fact must underlie certain phases of
the legends which had coloured my dreams, I was none the less
unprepared for anything like a tangible survival from a lost world
remote beyond all imagination. Most devastating of all were the
photographs—for here, in cold, incontrovertible realism, there stood
out against a background of sand certain worn-down, water-ridged,
storm-weathered blocks of stone whose slightly convex tops and slightly
concave bottoms told their own story. And when I studied them with a
magnifying glass I could see all too plainly, amidst the batterings and
pittings, the traces of those vast curvilinear designs and occasional
hieroglyphs whose significance had become so hideous to me. But here is
the letter, which speaks for itself:
49, Dampier Str.,
Pilbarra, W. Australia,
18 May, 1934.
Prof. N. W. Peaslee,
c/o Am. Psychological Society,
30, E. 41st Str.,
N. Y. City, U.S.A.
My dear Sir:—
A recent conversation with Dr. E. M. Boyle of Perth, and some papers
with your articles which he has just sent me, make it advisable for
me to tell you about certain things I have seen in the Great Sandy
Desert east of our gold field here. It would seem, in view of the
peculiar legends about old cities with huge stonework and strange
designs and hieroglyphs which you describe, that I have come upon
something very important.
The blackfellows have always been full of talk about “great stones
with marks on them”, and seem to have a terrible fear of such
things. They connect them in some way with their common racial
legends about Buddai, the gigantic old man who lies asleep for ages
underground with his head on his arm, and who will some day awake
and eat up the world. There are some very old and half-forgotten
tales of enormous underground huts of great stones, where passages
lead down and down, and where horrible things have happened. The
blackfellows claim that once some warriors, fleeing in battle, went
down into one and never came back, but that frightful winds began to
blow from the place soon after they went down. However, there
usually isn’t much in what these natives say.
But what I have to tell is more than this. Two years ago, when I was
prospecting about 500 miles east in the desert, I came on a lot of
queer pieces of dressed stone perhaps 3 × 2 × 2 feet in size, and
weathered and pitted to the very limit. At first I couldn’t find any
of the marks the blackfellows told about, but when I looked close
enough I could make out some deeply carved lines in spite of the
weathering. They were peculiar curves, just like what the blacks had
tried to describe. I imagine there must have been 30 or 40 blocks,
some nearly buried in the sand, and all within a circle perhaps a
quarter of a mile’s diameter.
When I saw some, I looked around closely for more, and made a
careful reckoning of the place with my instruments. I also took
pictures of 10 or 12 of the most typical blocks, and will enclose
the prints for you to see. I turned my information and pictures over
to the government at Perth, but they have done nothing with them.
Then I met Dr. Boyle, who had read your articles in the Journal of
the American Psychological Society, and in time happened to mention
the stones. He was enormously interested, and became quite excited
when I shewed him my snapshots, saying that the stones and markings
were just like those of the masonry you had dreamed about and seen
described in legends. He meant to write you, but was delayed.
Meanwhile he sent me most of the magazines with your articles, and I
saw at once from your drawings and descriptions that my stones are
certainly the kind you mean. You can appreciate this from the
enclosed prints. Later on you will hear directly from Dr. Boyle.
Now I can understand how important all this will be to you. Without
question we are faced with the remains of an unknown civilisation
older than any dreamed of before, and forming a basis for your
legends. As a mining engineer, I have some knowledge of geology, and
can tell you that these blocks are so ancient they frighten me. They
are mostly sandstone and granite, though one is almost certainly
made of a queer sort of cement or concrete. They bear evidence of
water action, as if this part of the world had been submerged and
come up again after long ages—all since these blocks were made and
used. It is a matter of hundreds of thousands of years—or heaven
knows how much more. I don’t like to think about it.
In view of your previous diligent work in tracking down the legends
and everything connected with them, I cannot doubt but that you will
want to lead an expedition to the desert and make some
archaeological excavations. Both Dr. Boyle and I are prepared to
coöperate in such work if you—or organisations known to you—can
furnish the funds. I can get together a dozen miners for the heavy
digging—the blacks would be of no use, for I’ve found that they have
an almost maniacal fear of this particular spot. Boyle and I are
saying nothing to others, for you very obviously ought to have
precedence in any discoveries or credit.
The place can be reached from Pilbarra in about 4 days by motor
tractor—which we’d need for our apparatus. It is somewhat west and
south of Warburton’s path of 1873, and 100 miles southeast of Joanna
Spring. We could float things up the De Grey River instead of
starting from Pilbarra—but all that can be talked over later.
Roughly, the stones lie at a point about 22° 3′ 14″ South Latitude,
125° 0′ 39″ East Longitude. The climate is tropical, and the desert
conditions are trying. Any expedition had better be made in
winter—June or July or August. I shall welcome further
correspondence upon this subject, and am keenly eager to assist in
any plan you may devise. After studying your articles I am deeply
impressed with the profound significance of the whole matter. Dr.
Boyle will write later. When rapid communication is needed, a cable
to Perth can be relayed by wireless.
Hoping profoundly for an early message,
Believe me,
Most faithfully yours,
Robert B. F. Mackenzie.
Of the immediate aftermath of this letter, much can be learned from the
press. My good fortune in securing the backing of Miskatonic University
was great, and both Mr. Mackenzie and Dr. Boyle proved invaluable in
arranging matters at the Australian end. We were not too specific with
the public about our objects, since the whole matter would have lent
itself unpleasantly to sensational and jocose treatment by the cheaper
newspapers. As a result, printed reports were sparing; but enough
appeared to tell of our quest for reported Australian ruins and to
chronicle our various preparatory steps.
Professors William Dyer of the college’s geology department (leader of
the Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition of 1930–31), Ferdinand C. Ashley of
the department of ancient history, and Tyler M. Freeborn of the
department of anthropology—together with my son Wingate—accompanied me.
My correspondent Mackenzie came to Arkham early in 1935 and assisted in
our final preparations. He proved to be a tremendously competent and
affable man of about fifty, admirably well-read, and deeply familiar
with all the conditions of Australian travel. He had tractors waiting
at Pilbarra, and we chartered a tramp steamer of sufficiently light
draught to get up the river to that point. We were prepared to excavate
in the most careful and scientific fashion, sifting every particle of
sand, and disturbing nothing which might seem to be in or near its
original situation.
Sailing from Boston aboard the wheezy Lexington on March 28, 1935, we
had a leisurely trip across the Atlantic and Mediterranean, through the
Suez Canal, down the Red Sea, and across the Indian Ocean to our goal.
I need not tell how the sight of the low, sandy West Australian coast
depressed me, and how I detested the crude mining town and dreary gold
fields where the tractors were given their last loads. Dr. Boyle, who
met us, proved to be elderly, pleasant, and intelligent—and his
knowledge of psychology led him into many long discussions with my son
and me.
Discomfort and expectancy were oddly mingled in most of us when at
length our party of eighteen rattled forth over the arid leagues of
sand and rock. On Friday, May 31st, we forded a branch of the De Grey
and entered the realm of utter desolation. A certain positive terror
grew on me as we advanced to this actual site of the elder world behind
the legends—a terror of course abetted by the fact that my disturbing
dreams and pseudo-memories still beset me with unabated force.
It was on Monday, June 3, that we saw the first of the half-buried
blocks. I cannot describe the emotions with which I actually touched—in
objective reality—a fragment of Cyclopean masonry in every respect like
the blocks in the walls of my dream-buildings. There was a distinct
trace of carving—and my hands trembled as I recognised part of a
curvilinear decorative scheme made hellish to me through years of
tormenting nightmare and baffling research.
A month of digging brought a total of some 1250 blocks in varying
stages of wear and disintegration. Most of these were carven megaliths
with curved tops and bottoms. A minority were smaller, flatter,
plain-surfaced, and square or octagonally cut—like those of the floors
and pavements in my dreams—while a few were singularly massive and
curved or slanted in such a manner as to suggest use in vaulting or
groining, or as parts of arches or round window casings. The deeper—and
the farther north and east—we dug, the more blocks we found; though we
still failed to discover any trace of arrangement among them. Professor
Dyer was appalled at the measureless age of the fragments, and Freeborn
found traces of symbols which fitted darkly into certain Papuan and
Polynesian legends of infinite antiquity. The condition and scattering
of the blocks told mutely of vertiginous cycles of time and geologic
upheavals of cosmic savagery.
We had an aëroplane with us, and my son Wingate would often go up to
different heights and scan the sand-and-rock waste for signs of dim,
large-scale outlines—either differences of level or trails of scattered
blocks. His results were virtually negative; for whenever he would one
day think he had glimpsed some significant trend, he would on his next
trip find the impression replaced by another equally insubstantial—a
result of the shifting, wind-blown sand. One or two of these ephemeral
suggestions, though, affected me queerly and disagreeably. They seemed,
after a fashion, to dovetail horribly with something which I had
dreamed or read, but which I could no longer remember. There was a
terrible pseudo-familiarity about them—which somehow made me look
furtively and apprehensively over the abominable, sterile terrain
toward the north and northeast.
Around the first week in July I developed an unaccountable set of mixed
emotions about that general northeasterly region. There was horror, and
there was curiosity—but more than that, there was a persistent and
perplexing illusion of memory. I tried all sorts of psychological
expedients to get these notions out of my head, but met with no
success. Sleeplessness also gained upon me, but I almost welcomed this
because of the resultant shortening of my dream-periods. I acquired the
habit of taking long, lone walks in the desert late at night—usually to
the north or northeast, whither the sum of my strange new impulses
seemed subtly to pull me.
Sometimes, on these walks, I would stumble over nearly buried fragments
of the ancient masonry. Though there were fewer visible blocks here
than where we had started, I felt sure that there must be a vast
abundance beneath the surface. The ground was less level than at our
camp, and the prevailing high winds now and then piled the sand into
fantastic temporary hillocks—exposing some traces of the elder stones
while it covered other traces. I was queerly anxious to have the
excavations extend to this territory, yet at the same time dreaded what
might be revealed. Obviously, I was getting into a rather bad state—all
the worse because I could not account for it.
An indication of my poor nervous health can be gained from my response
to an odd discovery which I made on one of my nocturnal rambles. It was
on the evening of July 11th, when a gibbous moon flooded the mysterious
hillocks with a curious pallor. Wandering somewhat beyond my usual
limits, I came upon a great stone which seemed to differ markedly from
any we had yet encountered. It was almost wholly covered, but I stooped
and cleared away the sand with my hands, later studying the object
carefully and supplementing the moonlight with my electric torch.
Unlike the other very large rocks, this one was perfectly square-cut,
with no convex or concave surface. It seemed, too, to be of a dark
basaltic substance wholly dissimilar to the granite and sandstone and
occasional concrete of the now familiar fragments.
Suddenly I rose, turned, and ran for the camp at top speed. It was a
wholly unconscious and irrational flight, and only when I was close to
my tent did I fully realise why I had run. Then it came to me. The
queer dark stone was something which I had dreamed and read about, and
which was linked with the uttermost horrors of the aeon-old legendry.
It was one of the blocks of that basaltic elder masonry which the
fabled Great Race held in such fear—the tall, windowless ruins left by
those brooding, half-material, alien Things that festered in earth’s
nether abysses and against whose wind-like, invisible forces the
trap-doors were sealed and the sleepless sentinels posted.
I remained awake all that night, but by dawn realised how silly I had
been to let the shadow of a myth upset me. Instead of being frightened,
I should have had a discoverer’s enthusiasm. The next forenoon I told
the others about my find, and Dyer, Freeborn, Boyle, my son, and I set
out to view the anomalous block. Failure, however, confronted us. I had
formed no clear idea of the stone’s location, and a late wind had
wholly altered the hillocks of shifting sand.
VI.
I come now to the crucial and most difficult part of my narrative—all
the more difficult because I cannot be quite certain of its reality. At
times I feel uncomfortably sure that I was not dreaming or deluded; and
it is this feeling—in view of the stupendous implications which the
objective truth of my experience would raise—which impels me to make
this record. My son—a trained psychologist with the fullest and most
sympathetic knowledge of my whole case—shall be the primary judge of
what I have to tell.
First let me outline the externals of the matter, as those at the camp
know them. On the night of July 17–18, after a windy day, I retired
early but could not sleep. Rising shortly before eleven, and afflicted
as usual with that strange feeling regarding the northeastward terrain,
I set out on one of my typical nocturnal walks; seeing and greeting
only one person—an Australian miner named Tupper—as I left our
precincts. The moon, slightly past full, shone from a clear sky and
drenched the ancient sands with a white, leprous radiance which seemed
to me somehow infinitely evil. There was no longer any wind, nor did
any return for nearly five hours, as amply attested by Tupper and
others who did not sleep through the night. The Australian last saw me
walking rapidly across the pallid, secret-guarding hillocks toward the
northeast.
About 3:30 a.m. a violent wind blew up, waking everyone in camp and
felling three of the tents. The sky was unclouded, and the desert still
blazed with that leprous moonlight. As the party saw to the tents my
absence was noted, but in view of my previous walks this circumstance
gave no one alarm. And yet as many as three men—all Australians—seemed
to feel something sinister in the air. Mackenzie explained to Prof.
Freeborn that this was a fear picked up from blackfellow folklore—the
natives having woven a curious fabric of malignant myth about the high
winds which at long intervals sweep across the sands under a clear sky.
Such winds, it is whispered, blow out of the great stone huts under the
ground where terrible things have happened—and are never felt except
near places where the big marked stones are scattered. Close to four
the gale subsided as suddenly as it had begun, leaving the sand hills
in new and unfamiliar shapes.
It was just past five, with the bloated, fungoid moon sinking in the
west, when I staggered into camp—hatless, tattered, features scratched
and ensanguined, and without my electric torch. Most of the men had
returned to bed, but Prof. Dyer was smoking a pipe in front of his
tent. Seeing my winded and almost frenzied state, he called Dr. Boyle,
and the two of them got me on my cot and made me comfortable. My son,
roused by the stir, soon joined them, and they all tried to force me to
lie still and attempt sleep.
But there was no sleep for me. My psychological state was very
extraordinary—different from anything I had previously suffered. After
a time I insisted upon talking—nervously and elaborately explaining my
condition. I told them I had become fatigued, and had lain down in the
sand for a nap. There had, I said, been dreams even more frightful than
usual—and when I was awaked by the sudden high wind my overwrought
nerves had snapped. I had fled in panic, frequently falling over
half-buried stones and thus gaining my tattered and bedraggled aspect.
I must have slept long—hence the hours of my absence.
Of anything strange either seen or experienced I hinted absolutely
nothing—exercising the greatest self-control in that respect. But I
spoke of a change of mind regarding the whole work of the expedition,
and earnestly urged a halt in all digging toward the northeast. My
reasoning was patently weak—for I mentioned a dearth of blocks, a wish
not to offend the superstitious miners, a possible shortage of funds
from the college, and other things either untrue or irrelevant.
Naturally, no one paid the least attention to my new wishes—not even my
son, whose concern for my health was very obvious.
The next day I was up and around the camp, but took no part in the
excavations. Seeing that I could not stop the work, I decided to return
home as soon as possible for the sake of my nerves, and made my son
promise to fly me in the plane to Perth—a thousand miles to the
southwest—as soon as he had surveyed the region I wished let alone. If,
I reflected, the thing I had seen was still visible, I might decide to
attempt a specific warning even at the cost of ridicule. It was just
conceivable that the miners who knew the local folklore might back me
up. Humouring me, my son made the survey that very afternoon; flying
over all the terrain my walk could possibly have covered. Yet nothing
of what I had found remained in sight. It was the case of the anomalous
basalt block all over again—the shifting sand had wiped out every
trace. For an instant I half regretted having lost a certain awesome
object in my stark fright—but now I know that the loss was merciful. I
can still believe my whole experience an illusion—especially if, as I
devoutly hope, that hellish abyss is never found.
Wingate took me to Perth July 20, though declining to abandon the
expedition and return home. He stayed with me until the 25th, when the
steamer for Liverpool sailed. Now, in the cabin of the Empress, I am
pondering long and frantically on the entire matter, and have decided
that my son at least must be informed. It shall rest with him whether
to diffuse the matter more widely. In order to meet any eventuality I
have prepared this summary of my background—as already known in a
scattered way to others—and will now tell as briefly as possible what
seemed to happen during my absence from the camp that hideous night.
Nerves on edge, and whipped into a kind of perverse eagerness by that
inexplicable, dread-mingled, pseudo-mnemonic urge toward the northeast,
I plodded on beneath the evil, burning moon. Here and there I saw,
half-shrouded by the sand, those primal Cyclopean blocks left from
nameless and forgotten aeons. The incalculable age and brooding horror
of this monstrous waste began to oppress me as never before, and I
could not keep from thinking of my maddening dreams, of the frightful
legends which lay behind them, and of the present fears of natives and
miners concerning the desert and its carven stones.
And yet I plodded on as if to some eldritch rendezvous—more and more
assailed by bewildering fancies, compulsions, and pseudo-memories. I
thought of some of the possible contours of the lines of stones as seen
by my son from the air, and wondered why they seemed at once so ominous
and so familiar. Something was fumbling and rattling at the latch of my
recollection, while another unknown force sought to keep the portal
barred.
The night was windless, and the pallid sand curved upward and downward
like frozen waves of the sea. I had no goal, but somehow ploughed along
as if with fate-bound assurance. My dreams welled up into the waking
world, so that each sand-embedded megalith seemed part of endless rooms
and corridors of pre-human masonry, carved and hieroglyphed with
symbols that I knew too well from years of custom as a captive mind of
the Great Race. At moments I fancied I saw those omniscient conical
horrors moving about at their accustomed tasks, and I feared to look
down lest I find myself one with them in aspect. Yet all the while I
saw the sand-covered blocks as well as the rooms and corridors; the
evil, burning moon as well as the lamps of luminous crystal; the
endless desert as well as the waving ferns and cycads beyond the
windows. I was awake and dreaming at the same time.
I do not know how long or how far—or indeed, in just what direction—I
had walked when I first spied the heap of blocks bared by the day’s
wind. It was the largest group in one place that I had so far seen, and
so sharply did it impress me that the visions of fabulous aeons faded
suddenly away. Again there were only the desert and the evil moon and
the shards of an unguessed past. I drew close and paused, and cast the
added light of my electric torch over the tumbled pile. A hillock had
blown away, leaving a low, irregularly round mass of megaliths and
smaller fragments some forty feet across and from two to eight feet
high.
From the very outset I realised that there was some utterly
unprecedented quality about these stones. Not only was the mere number
of them quite without parallel, but something in the sand-worn traces
of design arrested me as I scanned them under the mingled beams of the
moon and my torch. Not that any one differed essentially from the
earlier specimens we had found. It was something subtler than that. The
impression did not come when I looked at one block alone, but only when
I ran my eye over several almost simultaneously. Then, at last, the
truth dawned upon me. The curvilinear patterns on many of these blocks
were closely related—parts of one vast decorative conception. For the
first time in this aeon-shaken waste I had come upon a mass of masonry
in its old position—tumbled and fragmentary, it is true, but none the
less existing in a very definite sense.
Mounting at a low place, I clambered laboriously over the heap; here
and there clearing away the sand with my fingers, and constantly
striving to interpret varieties of size, shape, and style, and
relationships of design. After a while I could vaguely guess at the
nature of the bygone structure, and at the designs which had once
stretched over the vast surfaces of the primal masonry. The perfect
identity of the whole with some of my dream-glimpses appalled and
unnerved me. This was once a Cyclopean corridor thirty feet tall, paved
with octagonal blocks and solidly vaulted overhead. There would have
been rooms opening off on the right, and at the farther end one of
those strange inclined planes would have wound down to still lower
depths.
I started violently as these conceptions occurred to me, for there was
more in them than the blocks themselves had supplied. How did I know
that this level should have been far underground? How did I know that
the plane leading upward should have been behind me? How did I know
that the long subterrene passage to the Square of Pillars ought to lie
on the left one level above me? How did I know that the room of
machines, and the rightward-leading tunnel to the central archives,
ought to lie two levels below? How did I know that there would be one
of those horrible, metal-banded trap-doors at the very bottom, four
levels down? Bewildered by this intrusion from the dream-world, I found
myself shaking and bathed in a cold perspiration.
Then, as a last, intolerable touch, I felt that faint, insidious stream
of cool air trickling upward from a depressed place near the centre of
the huge heap. Instantly, as once before, my visions faded, and I saw
again only the evil moonlight, the brooding desert, and the spreading
tumulus of palaeogean masonry. Something real and tangible, yet fraught
with infinite suggestions of nighted mystery, now confronted me. For
that stream of air could argue but one thing—a hidden gulf of great
size beneath the disordered blocks on the surface.
My first thought was of the sinister blackfellow legends of vast
underground huts among the megaliths where horrors happen and great
winds are born. Then thoughts of my own dreams came back, and I felt
dim pseudo-memories tugging at my mind. What manner of place lay below
me? What primal, inconceivable source of age-old myth-cycles and
haunting nightmares might I be on the brink of uncovering? It was only
for a moment that I hesitated, for more than curiosity and scientific
zeal was driving me on and working against my growing fear.
I seemed to move almost automatically, as if in the clutch of some
compelling fate. Pocketing my torch, and struggling with a strength
that I had not thought I possessed, I wrenched aside first one titan
fragment of stone and then another, till there welled up a strong
draught whose dampness contrasted oddly with the desert’s dry air. A
black rift began to yawn, and at length—when I had pushed away every
fragment small enough to budge—the leprous moonlight blazed on an
aperture of ample width to admit me.
I drew out my torch and cast a brilliant beam into the opening. Below
me was a chaos of tumbled masonry, sloping roughly down toward the
north at an angle of about forty-five degrees, and evidently the result
of some bygone collapse from above. Between its surface and the ground
level was a gulf of impenetrable blackness at whose upper edge were
signs of gigantic, stress-heaved vaulting. At this point, it appeared,
the desert’s sands lay directly upon a floor of some titan structure of
earth’s youth—how preserved through aeons of geologic convulsion I
could not then and cannot now even attempt to guess.
In retrospect, the barest idea of a sudden, lone descent into such a
doubtful abyss—and at a time when one’s whereabouts were unknown to any
living soul—seems like the utter apex of insanity. Perhaps it was—yet
that night I embarked without hesitancy upon such a descent. Again
there was manifest that lure and driving of fatality which had all
along seemed to direct my course. With torch flashing intermittently to
save the battery, I commenced a mad scramble down the sinister,
Cyclopean incline below the opening—sometimes facing forward as I found
good hand and foot holds, and at other times turning to face the heap
of megaliths as I clung and fumbled more precariously. In two
directions beside me, distant walls of carven, crumbling masonry loomed
dimly under the direct beams of my torch. Ahead, however, was only
unbroken blackness.
I kept no track of time during my downward scramble. So seething with
baffling hints and images was my mind, that all objective matters
seemed withdrawn into incalculable distances. Physical sensation was
dead, and even fear remained as a wraith-like, inactive gargoyle
leering impotently at me. Eventually I reached a level floor strown
with fallen blocks, shapeless fragments of stone, and sand and detritus
of every kind. On either side—perhaps thirty feet apart—rose massive
walls culminating in huge groinings. That they were carved I could just
discern, but the nature of the carvings was beyond my perception. What
held me the most was the vaulting overhead. The beam from my torch
could not reach the roof, but the lower parts of the monstrous arches
stood out distinctly. And so perfect was their identity with what I had
seen in countless dreams of the elder world, that I trembled actively
for the first time.
Behind and high above, a faint luminous blur told of the distant
moonlit world outside. Some vague shred of caution warned me that I
should not let it out of my sight, lest I have no guide for my return.
I now advanced toward the wall on my left, where the traces of carving
were plainest. The littered floor was nearly as hard to traverse as the
downward heap had been, but I managed to pick my difficult way. At one
place I heaved aside some blocks and kicked away the detritus to see
what the pavement was like, and shuddered at the utter, fateful
familiarity of the great octagonal stones whose buckled surface still
held roughly together.
Reaching a convenient distance from the wall, I cast the torchlight
slowly and carefully over its worn remnants of carving. Some bygone
influx of water seemed to have acted on the sandstone surface, while
there were curious incrustations which I could not explain. In places
the masonry was very loose and distorted, and I wondered how many aeons
more this primal, hidden edifice could keep its remaining traces of
form amidst earth’s heavings.
But it was the carvings themselves that excited me most. Despite their
time-crumbled state, they were relatively easy to trace at close range;
and the complete, intimate familiarity of every detail almost stunned
my imagination. That the major attributes of this hoary masonry should
be familiar, was not beyond normal credibility. Powerfully impressing
the weavers of certain myths, they had become embodied in a stream of
cryptic lore which, somehow coming to my notice during the amnesic
period, had evoked vivid images in my subconscious mind. But how could
I explain the exact and minute fashion in which each line and spiral of
these strange designs tallied with what I had dreamt for more than a
score of years? What obscure, forgotten iconography could have
reproduced each subtle shading and nuance which so persistently,
exactly, and unvaryingly besieged my sleeping vision night after night?
For this was no chance or remote resemblance. Definitely and
absolutely, the millennially ancient, aeon-hidden corridor in which I
stood was the original of something I knew in sleep as intimately as I
knew my own house in Crane Street, Arkham. True, my dreams shewed the
place in its undecayed prime; but the identity was no less real on that
account. I was wholly and horribly oriented. The particular structure I
was in was known to me. Known, too, was its place in that terrible
elder city of dreams. That I could visit unerringly any point in that
structure or in that city which had escaped the changes and
devastations of uncounted ages, I realised with hideous and instinctive
certainty. What in God’s name could all this mean? How had I come to
know what I knew? And what awful reality could lie behind those antique
tales of the beings who had dwelt in this labyrinth of primordial
stone?
Words can convey only fractionally the welter of dread and bewilderment
which ate at my spirit. I knew this place. I knew what lay before me,
and what had lain overhead before the myriad towering stories had
fallen to dust and debris and the desert. No need now, I thought with a
shudder, to keep that faint blur of moonlight in view. I was torn
betwixt a longing to flee and a feverish mixture of burning curiosity
and driving fatality. What had happened to this monstrous megalopolis
of eld in the millions of years since the time of my dreams? Of the
subterrene mazes which had underlain the city and linked all its titan
towers, how much had still survived the writhings of earth’s crust?
Had I come upon a whole buried world of unholy archaism? Could I still
find the house of the writing-master, and the tower where S’gg’ha, a
captive mind from the star-headed vegetable carnivores of Antarctica,
had chiselled certain pictures on the blank spaces of the walls? Would
the passage at the second level down, to the hall of the alien minds,
be still unchoked and traversable? In that hall the captive mind of an
incredible entity—a half-plastic denizen of the hollow interior of an
unknown trans-Plutonian planet eighteen million years in the future—had
kept a certain thing which it had modelled from clay.
I shut my eyes and put my hand to my head in a vain, pitiful effort to
drive these insane dream-fragments from my consciousness. Then, for the
first time, I felt acutely the coolness, motion, and dampness of the
surrounding air. Shuddering, I realised that a vast chain of aeon-dead
black gulfs must indeed be yawning somewhere beyond and below me. I
thought of the frightful chambers and corridors and inclines as I
recalled them from my dreams. Would the way to the central archives
still be open? Again that driving fatality tugged insistently at my
brain as I recalled the awesome records that once lay cased in those
rectangular vaults of rustless metal.
There, said the dreams and legends, had reposed the whole history, past
and future, of the cosmic space-time continuum—written by captive minds
from every orb and every age in the solar system. Madness, of
course—but had I not now stumbled into a nighted world as mad as I? I
thought of the locked metal shelves, and of the curious knob-twistings
needed to open each one. My own came vividly into my consciousness. How
often had I gone through that intricate routine of varied turns and
pressures in the terrestrial vertebrate section on the lowest level!
Every detail was fresh and familiar. If there were such a vault as I
had dreamed of, I could open it in a moment. It was then that madness
took me utterly. An instant later, and I was leaping and stumbling over
the rocky debris toward the well-remembered incline to the depths
below.
VII.
From that point forward my impressions are scarcely to be relied
on—indeed, I still possess a final, desperate hope that they all form
parts of some daemoniac dream—or illusion born of delirium. A fever
raged in my brain, and everything came to me through a kind of
haze—sometimes only intermittently. The rays of my torch shot feebly
into the engulfing blackness, bringing phantasmal flashes of hideously
familiar walls and carvings, all blighted with the decay of ages. In
one place a tremendous mass of vaulting had fallen, so that I had to
clamber over a mighty mound of stones reaching almost to the ragged,
grotesquely stalactited roof. It was all the ultimate apex of
nightmare, made worse by the blasphemous tug of pseudo-memory. One
thing only was unfamiliar, and that was my own size in relation to the
monstrous masonry. I felt oppressed by a sense of unwonted smallness,
as if the sight of these towering walls from a mere human body was
something wholly new and abnormal. Again and again I looked nervously
down at myself, vaguely disturbed by the human form I possessed.
Onward through the blackness of the abyss I leaped, plunged, and
staggered—often falling and bruising myself, and once nearly shattering
my torch. Every stone and corner of that daemoniac gulf was known to
me, and at many points I stopped to cast beams of light through choked
and crumbling yet familiar archways. Some rooms had totally collapsed;
others were bare or debris-filled. In a few I saw masses of metal—some
fairly intact, some broken, and some crushed or battered—which I
recognised as the colossal pedestals or tables of my dreams. What they
could in truth have been, I dared not guess.
I found the downward incline and began its descent—though after a time
halted by a gaping, ragged chasm whose narrowest point could not be
much less than four feet across. Here the stonework had fallen through,
revealing incalculable inky depths beneath. I knew there were two more
cellar levels in this titan edifice, and trembled with fresh panic as I
recalled the metal-clamped trap-door on the lowest one. There could be
no guards now—for what had lurked beneath had long since done its
hideous work and sunk into its long decline. By the time of the
post-human beetle race it would be quite dead. And yet, as I thought of
the native legends, I trembled anew.
It cost me a terrible effort to vault that yawning chasm, since the
littered floor prevented a running start—but madness drove me on. I
chose a place close to the left-hand wall—where the rift was least wide
and the landing-spot reasonably clear of dangerous debris—and after one
frantic moment reached the other side in safety. At last gaining the
lower level, I stumbled on past the archway of the room of machines,
within which were fantastic ruins of metal half-buried beneath fallen
vaulting. Everything was where I knew it would be, and I climbed
confidently over the heaps which barred the entrance of a vast
transverse corridor. This, I realised, would take me under the city to
the central archives.
Endless ages seemed to unroll as I stumbled, leaped, and crawled along
that debris-cluttered corridor. Now and then I could make out carvings
on the age-stained walls—some familiar, others seemingly added since
the period of my dreams. Since this was a subterrene house-connecting
highway, there were no archways save when the route led through the
lower levels of various buildings. At some of these intersections I
turned aside long enough to look down well-remembered corridors and
into well-remembered rooms. Twice only did I find any radical changes
from what I had dreamed of—and in one of these cases I could trace the
sealed-up outlines of the archway I remembered.
I shook violently, and felt a curious surge of retarding weakness, as I
steered a hurried and reluctant course through the crypt of one of
those great windowless ruined towers whose alien basalt masonry bespoke
a whispered and horrible origin. This primal vault was round and fully
two hundred feet across, with nothing carved upon the dark-hued
stonework. The floor was here free from anything save dust and sand,
and I could see the apertures leading upward and downward. There were
no stairs or inclines—indeed, my dreams had pictured those elder towers
as wholly untouched by the fabulous Great Race. Those who had built
them had not needed stairs or inclines. In the dreams, the downward
aperture had been tightly sealed and nervously guarded. Now it lay
open—black and yawning, and giving forth a current of cool, damp air.
Of what limitless caverns of eternal night might brood below, I would
not permit myself to think.
Later, clawing my way along a badly heaped section of the corridor, I
reached a place where the roof had wholly caved in. The debris rose
like a mountain, and I climbed up over it, passing through a vast empty
space where my torchlight could reveal neither walls nor vaulting.
This, I reflected, must be the cellar of the house of the
metal-purveyors, fronting on the third square not far from the
archives. What had happened to it I could not conjecture.
I found the corridor again beyond the mountain of detritus and stones,
but after a short distance encountered a wholly choked place where the
fallen vaulting almost touched the perilously sagging ceiling. How I
managed to wrench and tear aside enough blocks to afford a passage, and
how I dared disturb the tightly packed fragments when the least shift
of equilibrium might have brought down all the tons of superincumbent
masonry to crush me to nothingness, I do not know. It was sheer madness
that impelled and guided me—if, indeed, my whole underground adventure
was not—as I hope—a hellish delusion or phase of dreaming. But I did
make—or dream that I made—a passage that I could squirm through. As I
wriggled over the mound of debris—my torch, switched continuously on,
thrust deeply within my mouth—I felt myself torn by the fantastic
stalactites of the jagged floor above me.
I was now close to the great underground archival structure which
seemed to form my goal. Sliding and clambering down the farther side of
the barrier, and picking my way along the remaining stretch of corridor
with hand-held, intermittently flashing torch, I came at last to a low,
circular crypt with arches—still in a marvellous state of
preservation—opening off on every side. The walls, or such parts of
them as lay within reach of my torchlight, were densely hieroglyphed
and chiselled with typical curvilinear symbols—some added since the
period of my dreams.
This, I realised, was my fated destination, and I turned at once
through a familiar archway on my left. That I could find a clear
passage up and down the incline to all the surviving levels, I had
oddly little doubt. This vast, earth-protected pile, housing the annals
of all the solar system, had been built with supernal skill and
strength to last as long as that system itself. Blocks of stupendous
size, poised with mathematical genius and bound with cements of
incredible toughness, had combined to form a mass as firm as the
planet’s rocky core. Here, after ages more prodigious than I could
sanely grasp, its buried bulk stood in all its essential contours; the
vast, dust-drifted floors scarce sprinkled with the litter elsewhere so
dominant.
The relatively easy walking from this point onward went curiously to my
head. All the frantic eagerness hitherto frustrated by obstacles now
took itself out in a kind of febrile speed, and I literally raced along
the low-roofed, monstrously well-remembered aisles beyond the archway.
I was past being astonished by the familiarity of what I saw. On every
hand the great hieroglyphed metal shelf-doors loomed monstrously; some
yet in place, others sprung open, and still others bent and buckled
under bygone geological stresses not quite strong enough to shatter the
titan masonry. Here and there a dust-covered heap below a gaping empty
shelf seemed to indicate where cases had been shaken down by
earth-tremors. On occasional pillars were great symbols or letters
proclaiming classes and sub-classes of volumes.
Once I paused before an open vault where I saw some of the accustomed
metal cases still in position amidst the omnipresent gritty dust.
Reaching up, I dislodged one of the thinner specimens with some
difficulty, and rested it on the floor for inspection. It was titled in
the prevailing curvilinear hieroglyphs, though something in the
arrangement of the characters seemed subtly unusual. The odd mechanism
of the hooked fastener was perfectly well known to me, and I snapped up
the still rustless and workable lid and drew out the book within. The
latter, as expected, was some twenty by fifteen inches in area, and two
inches thick; the thin metal covers opening at the top. Its tough
cellulose pages seemed unaffected by the myriad cycles of time they had
lived through, and I studied the queerly pigmented, brush-drawn letters
of the text—symbols utterly unlike either the usual curved hieroglyphs
or any alphabet known to human scholarship—with a haunting,
half-aroused memory. It came to me that this was the language used by a
captive mind I had known slightly in my dreams—a mind from a large
asteroid on which had survived much of the archaic life and lore of the
primal planet whereof it formed a fragment. At the same time I recalled
that this level of the archives was devoted to volumes dealing with the
non-terrestrial planets.
As I ceased poring over this incredible document I saw that the light
of my torch was beginning to fail, hence quickly inserted the extra
battery I always had with me. Then, armed with the stronger radiance, I
resumed my feverish racing through unending tangles of aisles and
corridors—recognising now and then some familiar shelf, and vaguely
annoyed by the acoustic conditions which made my footfalls echo
incongruously in these catacombs of aeon-long death and silence. The
very prints of my shoes behind me in the millennially untrodden dust
made me shudder. Never before, if my mad dreams held anything of truth,
had human feet pressed upon those immemorial pavements. Of the
particular goal of my insane racing, my conscious mind held no hint.
There was, however, some force of evil potency pulling at my dazed will
and buried recollections, so that I vaguely felt I was not running at
random.
I came to a downward incline and followed it to profounder depths.
Floors flashed by me as I raced, but I did not pause to explore them.
In my whirling brain there had begun to beat a certain rhythm which set
my right hand twitching in unison. I wanted to unlock something, and
felt that I knew all the intricate twists and pressures needed to do
it. It would be like a modern safe with a combination lock. Dream or
not, I had once known and still knew. How any dream—or scrap of
unconsciously absorbed legend—could have taught me a detail so minute,
so intricate, and so complex, I did not attempt to explain to myself. I
was beyond all coherent thought. For was not this whole experience—this
shocking familiarity with a set of unknown ruins, and this monstrously
exact identity of everything before me with what only dreams and scraps
of myth could have suggested—a horror beyond all reason? Probably it
was my basic conviction then—as it is now during my saner moments—that
I was not awake at all, and that the entire buried city was a fragment
of febrile hallucination.
Eventually I reached the lowest level and struck off to the right of
the incline. For some shadowy reason I tried to soften my steps, even
though I lost speed thereby. There was a space I was afraid to cross on
this last, deeply buried floor, and as I drew near it I recalled what
thing in that space I feared. It was merely one of the metal-barred and
closely guarded trap-doors. There would be no guards now, and on that
account I trembled and tiptoed as I had done in passing through that
black basalt vault where a similar trap-door had yawned. I felt a
current of cool, damp air, as I had felt there, and wished that my
course led in another direction. Why I had to take the particular
course I was taking, I did not know.
When I came to the space I saw that the trap-door yawned widely open.
Ahead the shelves began again, and I glimpsed on the floor before one
of them a heap very thinly covered with dust, where a number of cases
had recently fallen. At the same moment a fresh wave of panic clutched
me, though for some time I could not discover why. Heaps of fallen
cases were not uncommon, for all through the aeons this lightless
labyrinth had been racked by the heavings of earth and had echoed at
intervals to the deafening clatter of toppling objects. It was only
when I was nearly across the space that I realised why I shook so
violently.
Not the heap, but something about the dust of the level floor was
troubling me. In the light of my torch it seemed as if that dust were
not as even as it ought to be—there were places where it looked
thinner, as if it had been disturbed not many months before. I could
not be sure, for even the apparently thinner places were dusty enough;
yet a certain suspicion of regularity in the fancied unevenness was
highly disquieting. When I brought the torchlight close to one of the
queer places I did not like what I saw—for the illusion of regularity
became very great. It was as if there were regular lines of composite
impressions—impressions that went in threes, each slightly over a foot
square, and consisting of five nearly circular three-inch prints, one
in advance of the other four.
These possible lines of foot-square impressions appeared to lead in two
directions, as if something had gone somewhere and returned. They were
of course very faint, and may have been illusions or accidents; but
there was an element of dim, fumbling terror about the way I thought
they ran. For at one end of them was the heap of cases which must have
clattered down not long before, while at the other end was the ominous
trap-door with the cool, damp wind, yawning unguarded down to abysses
past imagination.
VIII.
That my strange sense of compulsion was deep and overwhelming is shewn
by its conquest of my fear. No rational motive could have drawn me on
after that hideous suspicion of prints and the creeping dream-memories
it excited. Yet my right hand, even as it shook with fright, still
twitched rhythmically in its eagerness to turn a lock it hoped to find.
Before I knew it I was past the heap of lately fallen cases and running
on tiptoe through aisles of utterly unbroken dust toward a point which
I seemed to know morbidly, horribly well. My mind was asking itself
questions whose origin and relevancy I was only beginning to guess.
Would the shelf be reachable by a human body? Could my human hand
master all the aeon-remembered motions of the lock? Would the lock be
undamaged and workable? And what would I do—what dare I do—with what
(as I now commenced to realise) I both hoped and feared to find? Would
it prove the awesome, brain-shattering truth of something past normal
conception, or shew only that I was dreaming?
The next I knew I had ceased my tiptoe racing and was standing still,
staring at a row of maddeningly familiar hieroglyphed shelves. They
were in a state of almost perfect preservation, and only three of the
doors in this vicinity had sprung open. My feelings toward these
shelves cannot be described—so utter and insistent was the sense of old
acquaintance. I was looking high up, at a row near the top and wholly
out of my reach, and wondering how I could climb to best advantage. An
open door four rows from the bottom would help, and the locks of the
closed doors formed possible holds for hands and feet. I would grip the
torch between my teeth as I had in other places where both hands were
needed. Above all, I must make no noise. How to get down what I wished
to remove would be difficult, but I could probably hook its movable
fastener in my coat collar and carry it like a knapsack. Again I
wondered whether the lock would be undamaged. That I could repeat each
familiar motion I had not the least doubt. But I hoped the thing would
not scrape or creak—and that my hand could work it properly.
Even as I thought these things I had taken the torch in my mouth and
begun to climb. The projecting locks were poor supports; but as I had
expected, the opened shelf helped greatly. I used both the difficultly
swinging door and the edge of the aperture itself in my ascent, and
managed to avoid any loud creaking. Balanced on the upper edge of the
door, and leaning far to my right, I could just reach the lock I
sought. My fingers, half-numb from climbing, were very clumsy at first;
but I soon saw that they were anatomically adequate. And the
memory-rhythm was strong in them. Out of unknown gulfs of time the
intricate secret motions had somehow reached my brain correctly in
every detail—for after less than five minutes of trying there came a
click whose familiarity was all the more startling because I had not
consciously anticipated it. In another instant the metal door was
slowly swinging open with only the faintest grating sound.
Dazedly I looked over the row of greyish case-ends thus exposed, and
felt a tremendous surge of some wholly inexplicable emotion. Just
within reach of my right hand was a case whose curving hieroglyphs made
me shake with a pang infinitely more complex than one of mere fright.
Still shaking, I managed to dislodge it amidst a shower of gritty
flakes, and ease it over toward myself without any violent noise. Like
the other case I had handled, it was slightly more than twenty by
fifteen inches in size, with curved mathematical designs in low relief.
In thickness it just exceeded three inches. Crudely wedging it between
myself and the surface I was climbing, I fumbled with the fastener and
finally got the hook free. Lifting the cover, I shifted the heavy
object to my back, and let the hook catch hold of my collar. Hands now
free, I awkwardly clambered down to the dusty floor, and prepared to
inspect my prize.
Kneeling in the gritty dust, I swung the case around and rested it in
front of me. My hands shook, and I dreaded to draw out the book within
almost as much as I longed—and felt compelled—to do so. It had very
gradually become clear to me what I ought to find, and this realisation
nearly paralysed my faculties. If the thing were there—and if I were
not dreaming—the implications would be quite beyond the power of the
human spirit to bear. What tormented me most was my momentary inability
to feel that my surroundings were a dream. The sense of reality was
hideous—and again becomes so as I recall the scene.
At length I tremblingly pulled the book from its container and stared
fascinatedly at the well-known hieroglyphs on the cover. It seemed to
be in prime condition, and the curvilinear letters of the title held me
in almost as hypnotised a state as if I could read them. Indeed, I
cannot swear that I did not actually read them in some transient and
terrible access of abnormal memory. I do not know how long it was
before I dared to lift that thin metal cover. I temporised and made
excuses to myself. I took the torch from my mouth and shut it off to
save the battery. Then, in the dark, I screwed up my courage—finally
lifting the cover without turning on the light. Last of all I did
indeed flash the torch upon the exposed page—steeling myself in advance
to suppress any sound no matter what I should find.
I looked for an instant, then almost collapsed. Clenching my teeth,
however, I kept silence. I sank wholly to the floor and put a hand to
my forehead amidst the engulfing blackness. What I dreaded and expected
was there. Either I was dreaming, or time and space had become a
mockery. I must be dreaming—but I would test the horror by carrying
this thing back and shewing it to my son if it were indeed a reality.
My head swam frightfully, even though there were no visible objects in
the unbroken gloom to swirl around me. Ideas and images of the starkest
terror—excited by vistas which my glimpse had opened up—began to throng
in upon me and cloud my senses.
I thought of those possible prints in the dust, and trembled at the
sound of my own breathing as I did so. Once again I flashed on the
light and looked at the page as a serpent’s victim may look at his
destroyer’s eyes and fangs. Then, with clumsy fingers in the dark, I
closed the book, put it in its container, and snapped the lid and the
curious hooked fastener. This was what I must carry back to the outer
world if it truly existed—if the whole abyss truly existed—if I, and
the world itself, truly existed.
Just when I tottered to my feet and commenced my return I cannot be
certain. It comes to me oddly—as a measure of my sense of separation
from the normal world—that I did not even once look at my watch during
those hideous hours underground. Torch in hand, and with the ominous
case under one arm, I eventually found myself tiptoeing in a kind of
silent panic past the draught-giving abyss and those lurking
suggestions of prints. I lessened my precautions as I climbed up the
endless inclines, but could not shake off a shadow of apprehension
which I had not felt on the downward journey.
I dreaded having to re-pass through that black basalt crypt that was
older than the city itself, where cold draughts welled up from
unguarded depths. I thought of that which the Great Race had feared,
and of what might still be lurking—be it ever so weak and dying—down
there. I thought of those possible five-circle prints and of what my
dreams had told me of such prints—and of strange winds and whistling
noises associated with them. And I thought of the tales of the modern
blacks, wherein the horror of great winds and nameless subterrene ruins
was dwelt upon.
I knew from a carven wall symbol the right floor to enter, and came at
last—after passing that other book I had examined—to the great circular
space with the branching archways. On my right, and at once
recognisable, was the arch through which I had arrived. This I now
entered, conscious that the rest of my course would be harder because
of the tumbled state of the masonry outside the archive building. My
new metal-cased burden weighed upon me, and I found it harder and
harder to be quiet as I stumbled among debris and fragments of every
sort.
Then I came to the ceiling-high mound of debris through which I had
wrenched a scanty passage. My dread at wriggling through again was
infinite; for my first passage had made some noise, and I now—after
seeing those possible prints—dreaded sound above all things. The case,
too, doubled the problem of traversing the narrow crevice. But I
clambered up the barrier as best I could, and pushed the case through
the aperture ahead of me. Then, torch in mouth, I scrambled through
myself—my back torn as before by stalactites. As I tried to grasp the
case again, it fell some distance ahead of me down the slope of the
debris, making a disturbing clatter and arousing echoes which sent me
into a cold perspiration. I lunged for it at once, and regained it
without further noise—but a moment afterward the slipping of blocks
under my feet raised a sudden and unprecedented din.
The din was my undoing. For, falsely or not, I thought I heard it
answered in a terrible way from spaces far behind me. I thought I heard
a shrill, whistling sound, like nothing else on earth, and beyond any
adequate verbal description. It may have been only my imagination. If
so, what followed has a grim irony—since, save for the panic of this
thing, the second thing might never have happened.
As it was, my frenzy was absolute and unrelieved. Taking my torch in my
hand and clutching feebly at the case, I leaped and bounded wildly
ahead with no idea in my brain beyond a mad desire to race out of these
nightmare ruins to the waking world of desert and moonlight which lay
so far above. I hardly knew it when I reached the mountain of debris
which towered into the vast blackness beyond the caved-in roof, and
bruised and cut myself repeatedly in scrambling up its steep slope of
jagged blocks and fragments. Then came the great disaster. Just as I
blindly crossed the summit, unprepared for the sudden dip ahead, my
feet slipped utterly and I found myself involved in a mangling
avalanche of sliding masonry whose cannon-loud uproar split the black
cavern air in a deafening series of earth-shaking reverberations.
I have no recollection of emerging from this chaos, but a momentary
fragment of consciousness shews me as plunging and tripping and
scrambling along the corridor amidst the clangour—case and torch still
with me. Then, just as I approached that primal basalt crypt I had so
dreaded, utter madness came. For as the echoes of the avalanche died
down, there became audible a repetition of that frightful, alien
whistling I thought I had heard before. This time there was no doubt
about it—and what was worse, it came from a point not behind but ahead
of me.
Probably I shrieked aloud then. I have a dim picture of myself as
flying through the hellish basalt vault of the Elder Things, and
hearing that damnable alien sound piping up from the open, unguarded
door of limitless nether blacknesses. There was a wind, too—not merely
a cool, damp draught, but a violent, purposeful blast belching savagely
and frigidly from that abominable gulf whence the obscene whistling
came.
There are memories of leaping and lurching over obstacles of every
sort, with that torrent of wind and shrieking sound growing moment by
moment, and seeming to curl and twist purposefully around me as it
struck out wickedly from the spaces behind and beneath. Though in my
rear, that wind had the odd effect of hindering instead of aiding my
progress; as if it acted like a noose or lasso thrown around me.
Heedless of the noise I made, I clattered over a great barrier of
blocks and was again in the structure that led to the surface. I recall
glimpsing the archway to the room of machines and almost crying out as
I saw the incline leading down to where one of those blasphemous
trap-doors must be yawning two levels below. But instead of crying out
I muttered over and over to myself that this was all a dream from which
I must soon awake. Perhaps I was in camp—perhaps I was at home in
Arkham. As these hopes bolstered up my sanity I began to mount the
incline to the higher level.
I knew, of course, that I had the four-foot cleft to re-cross, yet was
too racked by other fears to realise the full horror until I came
almost upon it. On my descent, the leap across had been easy—but could
I clear the gap as readily when going uphill, and hampered by fright,
exhaustion, the weight of the metal case, and the anomalous backward
tug of that daemon wind? I thought of these things at the last moment,
and thought also of the nameless entities which might be lurking in the
black abysses below the chasm.
My wavering torch was growing feeble, but I could tell by some obscure
memory when I neared the cleft. The chill blasts of wind and the
nauseous whistling shrieks behind me were for the moment like a
merciful opiate, dulling my imagination to the horror of the yawning
gulf ahead. And then I became aware of the added blasts and whistling
in front of me—tides of abomination surging up through the cleft itself
from depths unimagined and unimaginable.
Now, indeed, the essence of pure nightmare was upon me. Sanity
departed—and ignoring everything except the animal impulse of flight, I
merely struggled and plunged upward over the incline’s debris as if no
gulf had existed. Then I saw the chasm’s edge, leaped frenziedly with
every ounce of strength I possessed, and was instantly engulfed in a
pandaemoniac vortex of loathsome sound and utter, materially tangible
blackness.
This is the end of my experience, so far as I can recall. Any further
impressions belong wholly to the domain of phantasmagoric delirium.
Dream, madness, and memory merged wildly together in a series of
fantastic, fragmentary delusions which can have no relation to anything
real. There was a hideous fall through incalculable leagues of viscous,
sentient darkness, and a babel of noises utterly alien to all that we
know of the earth and its organic life. Dormant, rudimentary senses
seemed to start into vitality within me, telling of pits and voids
peopled by floating horrors and leading to sunless crags and oceans and
teeming cities of windowless basalt towers upon which no light ever
shone.
Secrets of the primal planet and its immemorial aeons flashed through
my brain without the aid of sight or sound, and there were known to me
things which not even the wildest of my former dreams had ever
suggested. And all the while cold fingers of damp vapour clutched and
picked at me, and that eldritch, damnable whistling shrieked fiendishly
above all the alternations of babel and silence in the whirlpools of
darkness around.
Afterward there were visions of the Cyclopean city of my dreams—not in
ruins, but just as I had dreamed of it. I was in my conical, non-human
body again, and mingled with crowds of the Great Race and the captive
minds who carried books up and down the lofty corridors and vast
inclines. Then, superimposed upon these pictures, were frightful
momentary flashes of a non-visual consciousness involving desperate
struggles, a writhing free from clutching tentacles of whistling wind,
an insane, bat-like flight through half-solid air, a feverish burrowing
through the cyclone-whipped dark, and a wild stumbling and scrambling
over fallen masonry.
Once there was a curious, intrusive flash of half-sight—a faint,
diffuse suspicion of bluish radiance far overhead. Then there came a
dream of wind-pursued climbing and crawling—of wriggling into a blaze
of sardonic moonlight through a jumble of debris which slid and
collapsed after me amidst a morbid hurricane. It was the evil,
monotonous beating of that maddening moonlight which at last told me of
the return of what I had once known as the objective, waking world.
I was clawing prone through the sands of the Australian desert, and
around me shrieked such a tumult of wind as I had never before known on
our planet’s surface. My clothing was in rags, and my whole body was a
mass of bruises and scratches. Full consciousness returned very slowly,
and at no time could I tell just where true memory left off and
delirious dream began. There had seemed to be a mound of titan blocks,
an abyss beneath it, a monstrous revelation from the past, and a
nightmare horror at the end—but how much of this was real? My
flashlight was gone, and likewise any metal case I may have discovered.
Had there been such a case—or any abyss—or any mound? Raising my head,
I looked behind me, and saw only the sterile, undulant sands of the
waste.
The daemon wind died down, and the bloated, fungoid moon sank
reddeningly in the west. I lurched to my feet and began to stagger
southwestward toward the camp. What in truth had happened to me? Had I
merely collapsed in the desert and dragged a dream-racked body over
miles of sand and buried blocks? If not, how could I bear to live any
longer? For in this new doubt all my faith in the myth-born unreality
of my visions dissolved once more into the hellish older doubting. If
that abyss was real, then the Great Race was real—and its blasphemous
reachings and seizures in the cosmos-wide vortex of time were no myths
or nightmares, but a terrible, soul-shattering actuality.
Had I, in full hideous fact, been drawn back to a pre-human world of a
hundred and fifty million years ago in those dark, baffling days of the
amnesia? Had my present body been the vehicle of a frightful alien
consciousness from palaeogean gulfs of time? Had I, as the captive mind
of those shambling horrors, indeed known that accursed city of stone in
its primordial heyday, and wriggled down those familiar corridors in
the loathsome shape of my captor? Were those tormenting dreams of more
than twenty years the offspring of stark, monstrous memories? Had I
once veritably talked with minds from reachless corners of time and
space, learned the universe’s secrets past and to come, and written the
annals of my own world for the metal cases of those titan archives? And
were those others—those shocking Elder Things of the mad winds and
daemon pipings—in truth a lingering, lurking menace, waiting and slowly
weakening in black abysses while varied shapes of life drag out their
multimillennial courses on the planet’s age-racked surface?
I do not know. If that abyss and what it held were real, there is no
hope. Then, all too truly, there lies upon this world of man a mocking
and incredible shadow out of time. But mercifully, there is no proof
that these things are other than fresh phases of my myth-born dreams. I
did not bring back the metal case that would have been a proof, and so
far those subterrene corridors have not been found. If the laws of the
universe are kind, they will never be found. But I must tell my son
what I saw or thought I saw, and let him use his judgment as a
psychologist in gauging the reality of my experience, and communicating
this account to others.
I have said that the awful truth behind my tortured years of dreaming
hinges absolutely upon the actuality of what I thought I saw in those
Cyclopean buried ruins. It has been hard for me literally to set down
the crucial revelation, though no reader can have failed to guess it.
Of course it lay in that book within the metal case—the case which I
pried out of its forgotten lair amidst the undisturbed dust of a
million centuries. No eye had seen, no hand had touched that book since
the advent of man to this planet. And yet, when I flashed my torch upon
it in that frightful megalithic abyss, I saw that the queerly pigmented
letters on the brittle, aeon-browned cellulose pages were not indeed
any nameless hieroglyphs of earth’s youth. They were, instead, the
letters of our familiar alphabet, spelling out the words of the English
language in my own handwriting.
Return to “The Shadow out of Time”


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