Chapter1
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 17-18 July 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, final abandonment of all the 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 definite 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,
Professor 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 anything that he thinks best with this account—showing
it, with suitable comment, in 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 lurked 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 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, 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, 14 May 1908, that the queer amnesia came. The
thing was quite sudden, though later I realized 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 some one 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
showed no sign of consciousness for sixteen and a half hours though
removed to my home at 27 Crane Street, and given the best of medical
attention.
At 3 A.M. 15 May my eyes opened and I began to speak, but before
long the doctor 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 and my past, though for some reason I seemed anxious to
conceal this lack of knowledge. My eyes glazed strangely at the persons
around me, and the flections 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 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 of 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
symptoms 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
every one 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 normality 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 caused—for certainly, the mind,
voice, and facial expression of the being that awakened on 15 May 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 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 roused 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 showing 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 minimize displays of this faculty.
Other ugly reports concerned my intimacy with leaders of
occultist groups, and scholars suspected of connection 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 re-opened my
long-closed house in Crane Street. 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 any one 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, 26 September, I dismissed the
housekeeper and the maid until 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 one A.M. that the lights were last seen. At 2.15
A.M. a policeman observed the place in darkness, but the stranger's
motor still at the curb. By 4 o'clock the motor was certainly gone.
It was at 6 o'clock 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 top were scratches showing 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 the 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 a hypodermic injection it became more regular.
At 11.15 A.M., 27 September, I stirred vigorously, and my
hitherto masklike face began to show 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 Thursday morning in 1908, with the economics class
gazing up at the battered desk on the platform.
Chapter 2
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 my 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 realized 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. Certainly 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 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 harmonize 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
nontypical 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 daemonic-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 men'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 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 anthropologic knowledge; an acquisition carried
on with feverish zest and with a wholly abnormal absorptive power. Then a
sudden return of 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 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 unhuman 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 savor 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 down and
analyze 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 disappointed
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 in 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 200 feet wide. They
differed greatly in aspect, but few were less than 500 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 unrecognizable, blooming in geometrical beds and at large among the greenery.
In a few of the terrace and roof-top gardens were larger and more
blossoms of most 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 recognize, 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 tone 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 strewn 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.
Chapter 3
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, and 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 savored 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 unhuman.
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 recognized 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 Hindu 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 300 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 to
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 recognized 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.
It would enter the organism's brain and set 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 boatlike 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 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 this 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 beings 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.
Chapter 4
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
rumors regarding my mental health. It is amusing to reflect that these
rumors 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 tremendously 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, trumpetlike 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 had known only human beings to do. These objects moved
intelligently about the great rooms, getting books from the shelves and
taking them to the great tables, or vice versa, and sometimes writing
diligently with a peculiar 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 at 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.
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 5,000 A.D.; with that of a
general of the greatheaded brown people who held South Africa in 50,000
B.C.; 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 one hundred thousand years before the squat, yellow Inutos came
from the west to engulf it.
I talked with the mind of Nug-Soth, a magician of the dark
conquerors of 16,000 A.D.; 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 2,518 A.D.; with that
of an archimage of vanished Yhe in the Pacific; with that of
Theodotides, a Greco-Bactrian official of 200 B.C.; with that of an aged
Frenchman of Louis XIII's time named Pierre-Louis Montagny; with that
of Crom-Ya, a Cimmerian chieftain of 15,000 B.C.; 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 center, which I came to know well through frequent
labors 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,
plesiosaurs, and the like-made familiar through palaeontology. Of birds
or mammals there were none that I could discover.
The ground and swamps were constantly alive with snakes, lizards,
and crocodiles while insects buzzed incessantly among 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 pseudomemories.
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 as 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. Of other and incomprehensible
senses—not, however, well utilizable 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 quickly 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 scant, 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 or octopodic invaders, or against the
winged, star-headed Old Ones who centered 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 subterranean 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 600 million
years ago. They were only partly material—as we understand matter—and
their type of consciousness and media of perception differed widely 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 forever—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.
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.
Chapter 5
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 St.,
Pilbarra, W. Australia,
May 18, 1934.
Prof. N. W Peaslee,
c/o Am. Psychological Society,
30 E. 41st St.,
New York 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. There were peculiar curves,
just like what the blackfellows had tried to describe. I imagine there
must have been thirty or forty blocks, some nearly buried in the sand,
and all within a circle perhaps a quarter of a mile in 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 ten or twelve 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 about 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 the 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
civilization 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 those
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
cooperate in such work if you—or organizations known to you—can furnish
the funds.
I can get together a dozen miners for the heavy digging—the
blackfellows 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 four 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.
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,
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.
Professor 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 sufficiently small 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 3rd, 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 I had dreamed or read, but which I could no
longer remember. There was a terrible 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 low 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 the 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 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.
Chapter 6
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 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 Professor 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 Professor 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 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 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 on July 20th, 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 upon 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, mnemonic urge toward the northeast, I
plodded on beneath the evil, burning moon. Here and there I saw, half
shrouded by 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 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 seen so
far, 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 realized that there was some utterly
unprecedented quality about those stones. Not only was the mere number
of them quite without parallel, but something in the sandworn 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 those 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
center 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 darkness.
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 strewn 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 at 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 locked 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
searchlight 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
dreamed 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 realized with hideous
and instinctive certainty. What in heaven'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 old in the millions of years since the time of
my dreams? Of the subterrene mazes which had underlain the city and
linked all the 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,
the 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 realized 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.
Chapter 7
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
daemonic 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 daemonic 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 posthuman 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 ages-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
stone, 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 wiggled over the mound of debris—my torch,
switched continuously on, thrust deeply in 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 marvelous 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 beneath 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 subclasses 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 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.
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 recollection, 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.
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 of the deafening clatter of toppling
objects. It was only when I was nearly across the space that I realized
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.
Chapter 8
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 tiptoed 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 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 temporized 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
collected 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 collapsed. Clenching my teeth,
however, I kept silent. 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 about 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 repass through the 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 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 blackfellows,
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. 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 shows 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
pandaemoniae 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 phantasmagoria
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 vapor 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-vistial 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 delirious dream left off and true memory 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 desert.
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 I 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 that 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 lair amidst the 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 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.
Also see:
About the Author
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an American writer of weird, science, fantasy, and horror fiction. He is best known for his creation of the Cthulhu Mythos.
Born in Providence, Rhode Island, Lovecraft spent most of his life in New England. Wikipedia
Born: August 20, 1890, Providence, RI
Died: March 15, 1937, Providence, RI
Full Name: Howard Phillips Lovecraft
Spouse: Sonia Greene (m. 1924–1937)
Buy H. P. Lovecraft Books at Amazon
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.jpg "Howard Phillips Lovecraft")
.jpg "THE SHADOW OUT OF TIME by H. P. LOVECRAFT")