by H. P. Lovecraft
Horrible beyond conception was the change which had taken place in my
best friend, Crawford Tillinghast. I had not seen him since that day,
two months and a half before, when he had told me toward what goal
his physical and metaphysical researches were leading; when he had
answered my awed and almost frightened remonstrances by driving me
from his laboratory and his house in a burst of fanatical rage, I had
known that he now remained mostly shut in the attic laboratory with
that accursed electrical machine, eating little and excluding even the
servants, but I had not thought that a brief period of ten weeks could
so alter and disfigure any human creature. It is not pleasant to see a
stout man suddenly grown thin, and it is even worse when the baggy skin
becomes yellowed or greyed, the eyes sunken, circled, and uncannily
glowing, the forehead veined and corrugated, and the hands tremulous
and twitching. And if added to this there be a repellant unkemptness;
a wild disorder of dress, a bushiness of dark hair white at the roots,
and an unchecked growth of white beard on a face once clean-shaven,
the cumulative effect is quite shocking. But such was the aspect of
Crawford Tillinghast on the night his half coherent message brought me
to his door after my weeks of exile; such was the spectre that trembled
as it admitted me, candle in hand, and glanced furtively over its
shoulder as if fearful of unseen things in the ancient, lonely house
set back from Benevolent Street.
That Crawford Tillinghast should ever have studied science and
philosophy was a mistake. These things should be left to the frigid and
impersonal investigator for they offer two equally tragic alternatives
to the man of feeling and action; despair, if he fail in his quest,
and terrors unutterable and unimaginable if he succeed. Tillinghast
had once been the prey of failure, solitary and melancholy; but now I
knew, with nauseating fears of my own, that he was the prey of success.
I had indeed warned him ten weeks before, when he burst forth with his
tale of what he felt himself about to discover. He had been flushed and
excited then, talking in a high and unnatural, though always pedantic,
voice.
"What do we know," he had said, "of the world and the universe about
us? Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our
notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only
as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their
absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the
boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings with a wider, stronger,
or different range of senses might not only see very differently the
things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy,
and life which lie close at hand yet can never be detected with the
senses we have. I have always believed that such strange, inaccessible
worlds exist at our very elbows, _and now I believe I have found a way
to break down the barriers_. I am not joking. Within twenty-four hours
that machine near the table will generate waves acting on unrecognized
sense-organs that exist in us as atrophied or rudimentary vestiges.
Those waves will open up to us many vistas unknown to man, and several
unknown to anything we consider organic life. We shall see that at
which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears
after midnight. We shall see these things, and other things which no
breathing creature has yet seen. We shall overleap time, space, and
dimensions, and without bodily motion peer to the bottom of creation."
When Tillinghast said these things I remonstrated, for I knew him well
enough to be frightened rather than amused; but he was a fanatic,
and drove me from the house. Now he was no less a fanatic, but his
desire to speak had conquered his resentment, and he had written me
imperatively in a hand I could scarcely recognize. As I entered the
abode of the friend so suddenly metamorphosed to a shivering gargoyle,
I became infected with the terror which seemed stalking in all the
shadows. The words and beliefs expressed ten weeks before seemed bodied
forth in the darkness beyond the small circle of candle light, and I
sickened at the hollow, altered voice of my host. I wished the servants
were about, and did not like it when he said they had all left three
days previously. It seemed strange that old Gregory, at least, should
desert his master without telling as tried a friend as I. It was he
who had given me all the information I had of Tillinghast after I was
repulsed in rage.
Yet I soon subordinated all my fears to my growing curiosity and
fascination. Just what Crawford Tillinghast now wished of me I could
only guess, but that he had some stupendous secret or discovery to
impart, I could not doubt. Before I had protested at his unnatural
pryings into the unthinkable; now that he had evidently succeeded to
some degree I almost shared his spirit, terrible though the cost of
victory appeared. Up through the dark emptiness of the house I followed
the bobbing candle in the hand of this shaking parody of man. The
electricity seemed to be turned off, and when I asked my guide he said
it was for a definite reason.
"It would be too much.... I would not dare," he continued to mutter.
I especially noted his new habit of muttering, for it was not like
him to talk to himself. We entered the laboratory in the attic, and I
observed that detestable electrical machine, glowing with a sickly,
sinister violet luminosity. It was connected with a powerful chemical
battery, but seemed to be receiving no current; for I recalled that in
its experimental stage it had sputtered and purred when in action. In
reply to my question Tillinghast mumbled that this permanent glow was
not electrical in any sense that I could understand.
He now seated me near the machine, so that it was on my right, and
turned a switch somewhere below the crowning cluster of glass bulbs.
The usual sputtering began, turned to a whine, and terminated in
a drone so soft as to suggest a return to silence. Meanwhile the
luminosity increased, waned again, then assumed a pale, outre colour or
blend of colours which I could neither place nor describe. Tillinghast
had been watching me, and noted my puzzled expression.
"Do you know what that is?" he whispered, "_that is ultra-violet_." He
chuckled oddly at my surprise. "You thought ultra-violet was invisible,
and so it is--but you can see that and many other invisible things
_now_.
"Listen to me! The waves from that thing are waking a thousand sleeping
senses in us; senses which we inherit from aeons of evolution from the
state of detached electrons to the state of organic humanity. I have
seen _truth_, and I intend to show it to you. Do you wonder how it
will seem? I will tell you." Here Tillinghast seated himself directly
opposite me, blowing out his candle and staring hideously into my eyes.
"Your existing sense-organs--ears first, I think--will pick up many
of the impressions, for they are closely connected with the dormant
organs. Then there will be others. You have heard of the pineal gland?
I laugh at the shallow endocrinologist, fellow-dupe and fellow-parvenu
of the Freudian. That gland is the great sense organ of organs--_I have
found out_. It is like sight in the end, and transmits visual pictures
to the brain. If you are normal, that is the way you ought to get most
of it.... I mean get most of the evidence _from beyond_."
I looked about the immense attic room with the sloping south wall,
dimly lit by rays which the every-day eye cannot see. The far corners
were all shadows, and the whole place took on a hazy unreality which
obscured its nature and invited the imagination to symbolism and
phantasm. During the interval that Tillinghast was silent I fancied
myself in some vast and incredible temple of long-dead gods; some
vague edifice of innumerable black stone columns reaching up from a
floor of damp slabs to a cloudy height beyond the range of my vision.
The picture was very vivid for a while, but gradually gave way to a
more horrible conception; that of utter, absolute solitude in infinite,
sightless, soundless space. There seemed to be a void, and nothing
more, and I felt a childish fear which prompted me to draw from my
hip pocket the revolver I always carried after dark since the night I
was held up in East Providence. Then, from the farthermost regions of
remoteness, the _sound_ softly glided into existence. It was infinitely
faint, subtly vibrant, and unmistakably musical, but held a quality
of surpassing wildness which made its impact feel like a delicate
torture of my whole body. I felt sensations like those one feels when
accidentally scratching ground glass. Simultaneously there developed
something like a cold draught, which apparently swept past me from the
direction of the distant sound. As I waited breathlessly I perceived
that both sound and wind were increasing; the effect being to give me
an odd notion of myself as tied to a pair of rails in the path of a
gigantic approaching locomotive. I began to speak to Tillinghast, and
as I did so all the unusual impressions abruptly vanished. I saw only
the man, the glowing machine, and the dim apartment. Tillinghast was
grinning repulsively at the revolver which I had almost unconsciously
drawn, but from his expression I was sure he had seen and heard as much
as I, if not a great deal more. I whispered what I had experienced and
he bade me remain as quiet and receptive as possible.
"Don't move," he cautioned, "for in these rays _we are able to be seen
as well as to see_. I told you the servants left, but I didn't tell you
_how_. It was that thick-witted housekeeper--she turned on the lights
downstairs after I had warned her not to, and the wires picked up
sympathetic vibrations. It must have been frightful--I could hear the
screams up here in spite of all I was seeing and hearing from another
direction, and later it was rather awful to find those empty heaps of
clothes around the house. Mrs. Updike's clothes were close to the front
hall switch--that's how I know she did it. It got them all. But so
long as we don't move we're fairly safe. Remember we're dealing with a
hideous world in which we are practically helpless.... _Keep still!_"
The combined shock of the revelation and of the abrupt command gave
me a kind of paralysis, and in my terror my mind again opened to the
impressions coming from what Tillinghast called "_beyond_." I was now
in a vortex of sound and motion, with confused pictures before my eyes.
I saw the blurred outlines of the room, but from some point in space
there seemed to be pouring a seething column of unrecognizable shapes
or clouds, penetrating the solid roof at a point ahead and to the right
of me. Then I glimpsed the temple-like effect again, but this time the
pillars reached up into an aerial ocean of light, which sent down one
blinding beam along the path of the cloudy column I had seen before.
After that the scene was almost wholly kaleidoscopic, and in the jumble
of sights, sounds, and unidentified sense-impressions I felt that I was
about to dissolve or in some way lose the solid form. One definite
flash I shall always remember. I seemed for an instant to behold a
patch of strange night sky filled with shining, revolving spheres,
and as it receded I saw that the glowing suns formed a constellation
or galaxy of settled shape; this shape being the distorted face of
Crawford Tillinghast. At another time I felt huge animate things
brushing past me and occasionally _walking or drifting through my
supposedly solid body_, and thought I saw Tillinghast look at them as
though his better trained senses could catch them visually. I recalled
what he had said of the pineal gland, and wondered what he saw with
this preternatural eye.
Suddenly I myself became possessed of a kind of augmented sight. Over
and above the luminous and shadowy chaos arose a picture which, though
vague, held the elements of consistency and permanence. It was indeed
somewhat familiar, for the unusual part was superimposed upon the usual
terrestrial scene much as a cinema view may be thrown upon the painted
curtain of a theater. I saw the attic laboratory, the electrical
machine, and the unsightly form of Tillinghast opposite me; but of all
the space unoccupied by familiar objects not one particle was vacant.
Indescribable shapes both alive and otherwise were mixed in disgusting
disarray, and close to every known thing were whole worlds of alien,
unknown entities. It likewise seemed that all the known things entered
into the composition of other unknown things, and vice versa. Foremost
among the living objects were inky, jellyish monstrosities which
flabbily quivered in harmony with the vibrations from the machine.
They were present in loathsome profusion, and I saw to my horror that
they _over-lapped_; that they were semi fluid and capable of passing
through one another and through what we know as solids. These things
were never still, but seemed ever floating about with some malignant
purpose. Sometimes they appeared to devour one another, the attacker
launching itself at its victim and instantaneously obliterating the
latter from sight. Shudderingly I felt that I knew what had obliterated
the unfortunate servants, and could not exclude the things from my mind
as I strove to observe other properties of the newly visible world that
lies unseen around us. But Tillinghast had been watching me, and was
speaking.
"You see them? You see them? You see the things that float and flop
about you and through you every moment of your life? You see the
creatures that form what men call the pure air and the blue sky? Have I
not succeeded in breaking down the barrier; have I not shown you worlds
that no other living men have seen?" I heard his scream through the
horrible chaos, and looked at the wild face thrust so offensively close
to mine. His eyes were pits of flame, and they glared at me with what I
now saw was overwhelming hatred. The machine droned detestably.
"You think those floundering things wiped out the servants? Fool, they
are harmless! But the servants _are_ gone, aren't they? You tried to
stop me; you discouraged me when I needed every drop of encouragement I
could get; you were afraid of the cosmic truth, you damned coward, but
now I've got you! What swept up the servants? What made them scream so
loud?... Don't know, eh! You'll know soon enough. Look at me--listen to
what I say--do you suppose there are really any such things as time
and magnitude. Do you fancy there are such things as form or matter. I
tell you, I have struck depths that your little brain can't picture.
I have seen beyond the bounds of infinity and drawn down demons from
the stars.... I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to
world to sow death and madness.... Space belongs to me, do you hear?
Things are hunting me now--the things that devour and dissolve--but
I know how to elude them. It is you they will get, as they got the
servants.... Stirring, dear sir? I told you it was dangerous to move,
I have saved you so far by telling you to keep still--saved you to see
more sights and to listen to me. If you had moved, they would have been
at you long ago. Don't worry, they won't _hurt_ you. They didn't hurt
the servants--it was the _seeing_ that made the poor devils scream so.
My pets are not pretty, for they come out of places where aesthetic
standards are--_very different_. Disintegration is quite painless, I
assure you--_but I want you to see them_. I almost saw them, but I knew
how to stop. You are not curious? I always knew you were no scientist.
Trembling, eh. Trembling with anxiety to see the ultimate things I have
discovered. Why don't you move, then? Tired? Well, don't worry, my
friend, _for they are coming_.... Look, look, curse you, look ... it's
just over your left shoulder...."
What remains to be told is very brief, and may be familiar to you from
the newspaper accounts. The police heard a shot in the old Tillinghast
house and found us there--Tillinghast dead and me unconscious. They
arrested me because the revolver was in my hand, but released me in
three hours, after they found that it was apoplexy which had finished
Tillinghast and saw that my shot had been directed at the noxious
machine which now lay hopelessly shattered on the laboratory floor. I
did not tell very much of what I had seen, for I feared the coroner
would be skeptical; but from the evasive outline I did give, the doctor
told me that I had undoubtedly been hypnotised by the vindictive and
homicidal madman.
I wish I could believe that doctor. It would help my shaky nerves if
I could dismiss what I now have to think of the air and the sky about
and above me. I never feel alone or comfortable, and a hideous sense
of pursuit sometimes comes chillingly on me when I am weary. What
prevents me from believing the doctor is this one simple fact--that the
police never found the bodies of those servants whom they say Crawford
Tillinghast murdered.
* * * * *