By Frank Belknap Long, Jr.
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Weird Tales March 1929.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
"I'm glad you came," said Chalmers. He was sitting by the window and
his face was very pale. Two tall candles guttered at his elbow and cast
a sickly amber light over his long nose and slightly receding chin.
Chalmers would have nothing modern about his apartment. He had the soul
of a mediæval ascetic, and he preferred illuminated manuscripts to
automobiles and leering stone gargoyles to radios and adding-machines.
As I crossed the room to the settee he had cleared for me I glanced at
his desk and was surprized to discover that he had been studying the
mathematical formulæ of a celebrated contemporary physicist, and that
he had covered many sheets of thin yellow paper with curious geometric
designs.
"Einstein and John Dee are strange bedfellows," I said as my gaze
wandered from his mathematical charts to the sixty or seventy quaint
books that comprised his strange little library. Plotinus and Emanuel
Moscopulus, St. Thomas Aquinas and Frenicle de Bessy stood elbow to
elbow in the somber ebony bookcase, and chairs, table and desk were
littered with pamphlets about mediæval sorcery and witchcraft and black
magic, and all of the valiant glamorous things that the modern world
has repudiated.
Chalmers smiled engagingly, and passed me a Russian cigarette on a
curiously carved tray. "We are just discovering now," he said, "that
the old alchemists and sorcerers were two-thirds _right_, and that your
modern biologist and materialist is nine-tenths _wrong_."
"You have always scoffed at modern science," I said, a little
impatiently.
"Only at scientific dogmatism," he replied. "I have always been a
rebel, a champion of originality and lost causes; that is why I have
chosen to repudiate the conclusions of contemporary biologists."
"And Einstein?" I asked.
"A priest of transcendental mathematics!" he murmured reverently. "A
profound mystic and explorer of the great _suspected_."
"Then you do not entirely despise science."
"Of course not," he affirmed. "I merely distrust the scientific
positivism of the past fifty years, the positivism of Haeckel and
Darwin and of Mr. Bertrand Russell. I believe that biology has failed
pitifully to explain the mystery of man's origin and destiny."
"Give them time," I retorted.
Chalmers' eyes glowed. "My friend," he murmured, "your pun is sublime.
Give them _time_. That is precisely what I would do. But your modern
biologist scoffs at time. He has the key but he refuses to use it. What
do we know of time, really? Einstein believes that it is relative, that
it can be interpreted in terms of space, of _curved_ space. But must we
stop there? When mathematics fails us can we not advance by--insight?"
"You are treading on dangerous ground," I replied. "That is a pit-fall
that your true investigator avoids. That is why modern science has
advanced so slowly. It accepts nothing that it can not demonstrate. But
you----"
"I would take hashish, opium, all manner of drugs. I would emulate the
sages of the East. And then perhaps I would apprehend----"
"What?"
"The fourth dimension."
"Theosophical rubbish!"
"Perhaps. But I believe that drugs expand human consciousness. William
James agreed with me. And I have discovered a new one."
"A new drug?"
"It was used centuries ago by Chinese alchemists, but it is virtually
unknown in the West. Its occult properties are amazing. With its aid
and the aid of my mathematical knowledge I believe that I can _go back
through time_."
"I do not understand."
"Time is merely our imperfect perception of a new dimension of space.
Time and motion are both illusions. Everything that has existed from
the beginning of the world _exists now_. Events that occurred centuries
ago on this planet continue to exist in another dimension of space.
Events that will occur centuries from now _exist already_. We can
not perceive their existence because we can not enter the dimension
of space that contains them. Human beings as we know them are merely
fractions, infinitesimally small fractions of one enormous whole. Every
human being is linked with _all_ the life that has preceded him on this
planet. All of his ancestors are parts of him. Only time separates him
from his forebears, and time is an illusion and does not exist."
"I think I understand," I murmured.
"It will be sufficient for my purpose if you can form a vague idea
of what I wish to achieve. I wish to strip from my eyes the veils of
illusion that time has thrown over them, and see the _beginning and the
end_."
"And you think this new drug will help you?"
"I am sure that it will. And I want you to help me. I intend to take
the drug immediately. I can not wait. I must _see_." His eyes glittered
strangely. "I am going back, back through time."
He rose and strode to the mantel. When he faced me again he was holding
a small square box in the palm of his hand. "I have here five pellets
of the drug Liao. It was used by the Chinese philosopher Lao Tze, and
while under its influence he visioned Tao. Tao is the most mysterious
force in the world; it surrounds and pervades all things; it contains
the visible universe and everything that we call reality. He who
apprehends the mysteries of Tao sees clearly all that was and will be."
"Rubbish!" I retorted.
"Tao resembles a great animal, recumbent, motionless, containing in its
enormous body all the worlds of our universe, the past, the present and
the future. We see portions of this great monster through a slit, which
we call time. With the aid of this drug I shall enlarge the slit. I
shall behold the great figure of life, the great recumbent beast in its
entirety."
"And what do you wish me to do?"
"Watch, my friend. Watch and take notes. And if I go back too far you
must recall me to reality. You can recall me by shaking me violently.
If I appear to be suffering acute physical pain you must recall me at
once."
"Chalmers," I said, "I wish you wouldn't make this experiment. You
are taking dreadful risks. I don't believe that there is any fourth
dimension and I emphatically do not believe in Tao. And I don't approve
of your experimenting with unknown drugs."
"I know the properties of this drug," he replied. "I know precisely
how it affects the human animal and I know its dangers. The risk does
not reside in the drug itself. My only fear is that I may become
lost in time. You see, I shall assist the drug. Before I swallow
this pellet I shall give my undivided attention to the geometric and
algebraic symbols that I have traced on this paper." He raised the
mathematical chart that rested on his knee. "I shall prepare my mind
for an excursion into time. I shall _approach_ the fourth dimension
with my conscious mind before I take the drug which will enable me to
exercise occult powers of perception. Before I enter the dream world of
the Eastern mystics I shall acquire all of the mathematical help that
modern science can offer. This mathematical knowledge, this conscious
approach to an actual apprehension of the fourth dimension of time
will supplement the work of the drug. The drug will open up stupendous
new vistas--the mathematical preparation will enable me to grasp them
intellectually. I have often grasped the fourth dimension in dreams,
emotionally, intuitively, but I have never been able to recall, in
waking life, the occult splendors that were momentarily revealed to me.
"But with your aid, I believe that I can recall them. You will take
down everything that I say while I am under the influence of the drug.
No matter how strange or incoherent my speech may become you will omit
nothing. When I awake I may be able to supply the key to whatever is
mysterious or incredible. I am not sure that I shall succeed, but if I
_do_ succeed"--his eyes were strangely luminous--"_time will exist for
me no longer!_"
He sat down abruptly. "I shall make the experiment at once. Please
stand over there by the window and watch. Have you a fountain pen?"
I nodded gloomily and removed a pale green Waterman from my upper vest
pocket.
"And a pad, Frank?"
I groaned and produced a memorandum book. "I emphatically disapprove of
this experiment," I muttered. "You're taking a frightful risk."
"Don't be an asinine old woman!" he admonished. "Nothing that you can
say will induce me to stop now. I entreat you to remain silent while I
study these charts."
He raised the charts and studied them intently. I watched the clock on
the mantel as it ticked out the seconds, and a curious dread clutched
at my heart so that I choked.
Suddenly the clock stopped ticking, and exactly at that moment Chalmers
swallowed the drug.
* * * * *
I rose quickly and moved toward him, but his eyes implored me not to
interfere. "The clock has stopped," he murmured. "The forces that
control it approve of my experiment. _Time_ stopped, and I swallowed
the drug. I pray God that I shall not lose my way."
He closed his eyes and leaned back on the sofa. All of the blood had
left his face and he was breathing heavily. It was clear that the drug
was acting with extraordinary rapidity.
"It is beginning to get dark," he murmured. "Write that. It is
beginning to get dark and the familiar objects in the room are fading
out. I can discern them vaguely through my eyelids but they are fading
swiftly."
I shook my pen to make the ink come and wrote rapidly in shorthand as
he continued to dictate.
"I am leaving the room. The walls are vanishing and I can no longer see
any of the familiar objects. Your face, though, is still visible to me.
I hope that you are writing. I think that I am about to make a great
leap--a leap through space. Or perhaps it is through time that I shall
make the leap. I can not tell. Everything is dark, indistinct."
He sat for a while silent, with his head sunk upon his breast. Then
suddenly he stiffened and his eyelids fluttered open. "God in heaven!"
he cried. "I _see_!"
He was straining forward in his chair, staring at the opposite wall.
But I knew that he was looking beyond the wall and that the objects in
the room no longer existed for him. "Chalmers," I cried, "Chalmers,
shall I wake you?"
"Do not!" he shrieked. "I see _everything_. All of the billions of
lives that preceded me on this planet are before me at this moment. I
see men of all ages, all races, all colors. They are fighting, killing,
building, dancing, singing. They are sitting about rude fires on lonely
gray deserts, and flying through the air in monoplanes. They are riding
the seas in bark canoes and enormous steamships; they are painting
bison and mammoths on the walls of dismal caves and covering huge
canvases with queer futuristic designs. I watch the migrations from
Atlantis. I watch the migrations from Lemuria. I see the elder races--a
strange horde of black dwarfs overwhelming Asia and the Neandertalers
with lowered heads and bent knees ranging obscenely across Europe.
I watch the Achæans streaming into the Greek islands, and the crude
beginnings of Hellenic culture. I am in Athens and Pericles is young. I
am standing on the soil of Italy. I assist in the rape of the Sabines;
I march with the Imperial Legions. I tremble with awe and wonder as
the enormous standards go by and the ground shakes with the tread of
the victorious _hastati_. A thousand naked slaves grovel before me as
I pass in a litter of gold and ivory drawn by night-black oxen from
Thebes, and the flower-girls scream '_Ave Cæsar_' as I nod and smile.
I am myself a slave on a Moorish galley. I watch the erection of a
great cathedral. Stone by stone it rises, and through months and years
I stand and watch each stone as it falls into place. I am burned on a
cross head downward in the thyme-scented gardens of Nero, and I watch
with amusement and scorn the torturers at work in the chambers of the
Inquisition.
"I walk in the holiest sanctuaries; I enter the temples of Venus. I
kneel in adoration before the Magna Mater, and I throw coins on the
bare knees of the sacred courtezans who sit with veiled faces in the
groves of Babylon. I creep into an Elizabethan theater and with the
stinking rabble about me I applaud _The Merchant of Venice_. I walk
with Dante through the narrow streets of Florence. I meet the young
Beatrice and the hem of her garment brushes my sandals as I stare
enraptured. I am a priest of Isis, and my magic astounds the nations.
Simon Magus kneels before me, imploring my assistance, and Pharaoh
trembles when I approach. In India I talk with the Masters and run
screaming from their presence, for their revelations are as salt on
wounds that bleed.
"I perceive everything _simultaneously_. I perceive everything from all
sides; I am a part of all the teeming billions about me. I exist in all
men and all men exist in me. I perceive the whole of human history in a
single instant, the past and the present.
"By simply _straining_ I can see farther and farther back. Now I
am going back through strange curves and angles. Angles and curves
multiply about me. I perceive great segments of time through _curves_.
There is _curved time_, and _angular time_. The beings that exist in
angular time can not enter curved time. It is very strange.
"I am going back and back. Man has disappeared from the earth. Gigantic
reptiles crouch beneath enormous palms and swim through the loathly
black waters of dismal lakes. Now the reptiles have disappeared. No
animals remain upon the land, but beneath the waters, plainly visible
to me, dark forms move slowly over the rotting vegetation.
"The forms are becoming simpler and simpler. Now they are single cells.
All about me there are angles--strange angles that have no counterparts
on the earth. I am desperately afraid.
"There is an abyss of being which man has never fathomed."
I stared. Chalmers had risen to his feet and he was gesticulating
helplessly with his arms. "I am passing through _unearthly_ angles; I
am approaching--oh, the burning horror of it!"
"Chalmers!" I cried. "Do you wish me to interfere?"
He brought his right hand quickly before his face, as though to shut
out a vision unspeakable. "Not yet!" he cried; "I will go on. I will
see--what--lies--beyond----"
A cold sweat streamed from his forehead and his shoulders jerked
spasmodically. "Beyond life there are"--his face grew ashen with
terror--"_things_ that I can not distinguish. They move slowly through
angles. They have no bodies, and they move slowly through outrageous
angles."
It was then that I became aware of the odor in the room. It was a
pungent, indescribable odor, so nauseous that I could scarcely endure
it. I stepped quickly to the window and threw it open. When I returned
to Chalmers and looked into his eyes I nearly fainted.
"I think they have scented me!" he shrieked. "They are slowly turning
toward me."
He was trembling horribly. For a moment he clawed at the air with his
hands. Then his legs gave way beneath him and he fell forward on his
face, slobbering and moaning.
I watched him in silence as he dragged himself across the floor. He
was no longer a man. His teeth were bared and saliva dripped from the
corners of his mouth.
"Chalmers," I cried. "Chalmers, stop it! Stop it, do you hear?"
As if in reply to my appeal he commenced to utter hoarse convulsive
sounds which resembled nothing so much as the barking of a dog, and
began a sort of hideous writhing in a circle about the room. I bent and
seized him by the shoulders. Violently, desperately, I shook him. He
turned his head and snapped at my wrist. I was sick with horror, but
I dared not release him for fear that he would destroy himself in a
paroxysm of rage.
"Chalmers," I muttered, "you must stop that. There is nothing in this
room that can harm you. Do you understand?"
I continued to shake and admonish him, and gradually the madness died
out of his face. Shivering convulsively, he crumpled into a grotesque
heap on the Chinese rug.
* * * * *
I carried him to the sofa and deposited him upon it. His features were
twisted in pain, and I knew that he was still struggling dumbly to
escape from abominable memories.
"Whisky," he muttered. "You'll find a flask in the cabinet by the
window--upper left-hand drawer."
When I handed him the flask his fingers tightened about it until the
knuckles showed blue. "They nearly got me," he gasped. He drained the
stimulant in immoderate gulps, and gradually the color crept back into
his face.
"That drug was the very devil!" I murmured.
"It wasn't the drug," he moaned.
His eyes no longer glared insanely, but he still wore the look of a
lost soul.
"They scented me in time," he moaned. "I went too far."
"What were _they_ like?" I said, to humor him.
He leaned forward and gripped my arm. He was shivering horribly. "No
word in our language can describe them!" He spoke in a hoarse whisper.
"They are symbolized vaguely in the myth of the Fall, and in an obscene
form which is occasionally found engraven on ancient tablets. The
Greeks had a name for them, which veiled their essential foulness. The
tree, the snake and the apple--these are the vague symbols of a most
awful mystery."
His voice had risen to a scream. "Frank, Frank, a terrible and
unspeakable _deed_ was done in the beginning. Before time, the _deed_,
and from the deed----"
He had risen and was hysterically pacing the room. "The seeds of the
deed move through angles in dim recesses of time. They are hungry and
athirst!"
"Chalmers," I pleaded to quiet him. "We are living in the third decade
of the Twentieth Century."
"They are lean and athirst!" he shrieked. "_The Hounds of Tindalos!_"
"Chalmers, shall I phone for a physician?"
"A physician can not help me now. They are horrors of the soul, and
yet"--he hid his face in his hands and groaned--"they are real, Frank.
I saw them for a ghastly moment. For a moment I stood on the _other
side_. I stood on the pale gray shores beyond time and space. In an
awful light that was not light, in a silence that shrieked, I saw
_them_.
"All the evil in the universe was concentrated in their lean, hungry
bodies. Or had they bodies? I saw them only for a moment; I can not
be certain. _But I heard them breathe._ Indescribably for a moment
I felt their breath upon my face. They turned toward me and I fled
screaming. In a single moment I fled screaming through time. I fled
down quintillions of years.
"But they scented me. Men awake in them cosmic hungers. We have
escaped, momentarily, from the foulness that rings them round. They
thirst for that in us which is clean, which emerged from the deed
without stain. There is a part of us which did not partake in the
deed, and that they hate. But do not imagine that they are literally,
prosaically evil. They are beyond good and evil as we know it. They are
that which in the beginning fell away from cleanliness. Through the
deed they became bodies of death, receptacles of all foulness. But they
are not evil in our sense because in the spheres through which they
move there is no thought, no morals, no right or wrong as we understand
it. There is merely the pure and the foul. The foul expresses itself
through angles; the pure through curves. Man, the pure part of him, is
descended from a curve. Do not laugh. I mean that literally."
I rose and searched for my hat. "I'm dreadfully sorry for you,
Chalmers," I said, as I walked toward the door. "But I don't intend to
stay and listen to such gibberish. I'll send my physician to see you.
He's an elderly, kindly chap and he won't be offended if you tell him
to go to the devil. But I hope you'll respect his advice. A week's rest
in a good sanitarium should benefit you immeasurably."
I heard him laughing as I descended the stairs, but his laughter was so
utterly mirthless that it moved me to tears.
2
When Chalmers phoned the following morning my first impulse was to hang
up the receiver immediately. His request was so unusual and his voice
was so wildly hysterical that I feared any further association with him
would result in the impairment of my own sanity. But I could not doubt
the genuineness of his misery, and when he broke down completely and I
heard him sobbing over the wire I decided to comply with his request.
"Very well," I said. "I will come over immediately and bring the
plaster."
En route to Chalmers' home I stopped at a hardware store and purchased
twenty pounds of plaster of Paris. When I entered my friend's room he
was crouching by the window watching the opposite wall out of eyes that
were feverish with fright. When he saw me he rose and seized the parcel
containing the plaster with an avidity that amazed and horrified me.
He had extruded all of the furniture and the room presented a desolate
appearance.
"It is just conceivable that we can thwart them!" he exclaimed. "But we
must work rapidly. Frank, there is a stepladder in the hall. Bring it
here immediately. And then fetch a pail of water."
"What for?" I murmured.
He turned sharply and there was a flush on his face. "To mix the
plaster, you fool!" he cried. "To mix the plaster that will save our
bodies and souls from a contamination unmentionable. To mix the
plaster that will save the world from--Frank, _they must be kept out_!"
"Who?" I murmured.
"The Hounds of Tindalos!" he muttered. "They can only reach us through
angles. We must eliminate all angles from this room. I shall plaster
up all of the corners, all of the crevices. We must make this room
resemble the interior of a sphere."
I knew that it would have been useless to argue with him. I fetched the
stepladder, Chalmers mixed the plaster, and for three hours we labored.
We filled in the four corners of the wall and the intersections of
the floor and wall and the wall and ceiling, and we rounded the sharp
angles of the window-seat.
"I shall remain in this room until they return in time," he affirmed
when our task was completed. "When they discover that the scent leads
through curves they will return. They will return ravenous and snarling
and unsatisfied to the foulness that was in the beginning, before time,
beyond space."
He nodded graciously and lit a cigarette. "It was good of you to help,"
he said.
"Will you not see a physician, Chalmers?" I pleaded.
"Perhaps--tomorrow," he murmured. "But now I must watch and wait."
"Wait for what?" I urged.
Chalmers smiled wanly. "I know that you think me insane," he said. "You
have a shrewd but prosaic mind, and you can not conceive of an entity
that does not depend for its existence on force and matter. But did
it ever occur to you, my friend, that force and matter are merely the
barriers to perception imposed by time and space? When one knows, as I
do, that time and space are identical and that they are both deceptive
because they are merely imperfect manifestations of a higher reality,
one no longer seeks in the visible world for an explanation of the
mystery and terror of being."