A well-defined shock separates my final impression of the fading scene of light from my sudden and somewhat shamefaced awakening and straightening up in my chair as I saw the dying figure on the couch move hesitantly. Joe Slater was indeed awaking, though probably for the last time. As I looked more closely, I saw that in the sallow cheeks shone spots of colour which had never before been present. The lips, too, seemed unusual, being tightly compressed, as if by the force of a stronger character than had been Slater’s. The whole face finally began to grow tense, and the head turned restlessly with closed eyes.
I did not arouse the sleeping nurse, but readjusted the slightly disarranged head-bands of my telepathic “radio,” intent to catch any parting message the dreamer might have to deliver. All at once the head turned sharply in my direction and the eyes fell open, causing me to stare in blank amazement at what I beheld. The man who had been Joe Slater, the Catskill decadent, was now gazing at me with a pair of luminous, expanded eyes whose blue seemed subtly to have deepened. Neither mania nor degeneracy was visible in that gaze, and I felt beyond a doubt that I was viewing a face behind which lay an active mind of high order.
At this juncture my brain became aware of a steady external influence operating upon it. I closed my eyes to concentrate my thoughts more profoundly, and was rewarded by the positive knowledge that my long-sought mental message had come at last. Each transmitted idea formed rapidly in my mind, and though no actual language was employed, my habitual association of conception and expression was so great that I seemed to be receiving the message in ordinary English.
“Joe Slater is dead,” came the soul-petrifying voice or agency from beyond the wall of sleep. My opened eyes sought the couch of pain in curious horror, but the blue eyes were still calmly gazing, and the countenance was still intelligently animated. “He is better dead, for he was unfit to bear the active intellect of cosmic entity. His gross body could not undergo the needed adjustments between ethereal life and planet life. He was too much of an animal, too little a man; yet it is through his deficiency that you have come to discover me, for the cosmic and planet souls rightly should never meet. He has been my torment and diurnal prison for forty-two of your terrestrial years.
“I am an entity like that which you yourself become in the freedom of dreamless sleep. I am your brother of light, and have floated with you in the effulgent valleys. It is not permitted me to tell your waking earth-self of your real self, but we are all roamers of vast spaces and travellers in many ages. Next year I may be dwelling in the dark Egypt which you call ancient, or in the cruel empire of Tsan-Chan which is to come three thousand years hence. You and I have drifted to the worlds that reel about the red Arcturus, and dwelt in the bodies of the insect-philosophers that crawl proudly over the fourth moon of Jupiter.12 How little does the earth-self know life and its extent! How little, indeed, ought it to know for its own tranquility!
“Of the oppressor I cannot speak. You on earth have unwittingly felt its distant presence—you who without knowing idly gave to its blinking beacon the name of Algol, the Dæmon-Star.13 It is to meet and conquer the oppressor that I have vainly striven for æons, held back by bodily encumbrances. Tonight I go as a Nemesis bearing just and blazingly cataclysmic vengeance. Watch me in the sky close by the Dæmon-Star.
“I cannot speak longer, for the body of Joe Slater grows cold and rigid, and the coarse brains are ceasing to vibrate as I wish. You have been my friend in the cosmos; you have been my only friend on this planet—the only soul to sense and seek for me within the repellent form which lies on this couch. We shall meet again—perhaps in the shining mists of Orion’s Sword,14 perhaps on a bleak plateau in prehistoric Asia. Perhaps in unremembered dreams tonight; perhaps in some other form an æon hence, when the solar system shall have been swept away.”
At this point the thought-waves abruptly ceased, and the pale eyes of the dreamer—or can I say dead man?—commenced to glaze fishily. In a half-stupor I crossed over to the couch and felt of his wrist, but found it cold, stiff, and pulseless. The sallow cheeks paled again, and the thick lips fell open, disclosing the repulsively rotten fangs of the degenerate Joe Slater. I shivered, pulled a blanket over the hideous face, and awakened the nurse. Then I left the cell and went silently to my room. I had an insistent and unaccountable craving for a sleep whose dreams I should not remember.
The climax? What plain tale of science can boast of such a rhetorical effect? I have merely set down certain things appealing to me as facts, allowing you to construe them as you will. As I have already admitted, my superior, old Dr. Fenton, denies the reality of everything I have related. He vows that I was broken down with nervous strain, and badly in need of the long vacation on full pay which he so generously gave me. He assures me on his professional honour that Joe Slater was but a low-grade paranoiac, whose fantastic notions must have come from the crude hereditary folk-tales which circulate in even the most decadent of communities. All this he tells me—yet I cannot forget what I saw in the sky on the night after Slater died. Lest you think me a biassed witness, another’s pen must add this final testimony, which may perhaps supply the climax you expect. I will quote the following account of the star Nova Persei verbatim from the pages of that eminent astronomical authority, Prof. Garrett P. Serviss:15
“We shall meet again, perhaps in the shining mists of Orion’s Sword.” Weird Tales 31, no. 3 (March 1938) (artist: Virgil Finlay)
“On February 22, 1901, a marvellous new star was discovered by Dr. Anderson of Edinburgh, not very far from Algol. No star had been visible at that point before. Within twenty-four hours the stranger had become so bright that it outshone Capella. In a week or two it had visibly faded, and in the course of a few months it was hardly discernible with the naked eye.”
1. Written in the spring of 1919, it first appeared in Pine Cones (October 1919), an amateur journal edited by John Clinton Pryor. It also appeared in Weird Tales 31, no. 3 (March 1938), 331–38, where it included the following reading line: “What strange, splendid yet terrible experiences came to the poor mountaineer in the hours of sleep?—a story of a supernal being from Algol, the Demon-star.”
2. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, act 4, scene 1.
3. The narrator refers here to the sexual interpretations placed on many dreams by Freud. This phrase did not appear in the first publication of the story; it was added when the story was reprinted in Fantasy Fan in October 1934 and also appears in the Weird Tales reprint of March 1938.
4. “Immundane” does not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary but is found in various theological publications of the nineteenth century. Literally, it means something like “not of this world,” the opposite of mundane, and hence is paired here with “ethereal” as descriptive of the stuff of dreams.
5. An article in the Catskill Mountain News in 1913 recounted the tale of two locals who were fined for trapping and shooting a fox that had threatened local chickens. The paper concluded, “Owners of chickens would best take out hunting licenses at once for if a skunk, weasel, mink, fox or other fur-bearing animal gets into your chicken coop, he may carry your choicest bird to the line fence or the neighbor’s yard and sit there and eat it with impunity for it will cost you from $25 to $100 to touch a hair on his head. If it’s some poor white trash or a col’ed gent you may shoot or club or kill them but not the skunk.”
In a similar vein, a 1927 article about New York State troopers described the area as follows: “the Catskills and their outlying spurs, whose depths shelter a people as lawless and decadent as any in the southern highlands, and the Adirondacks, whose natives have held for years a hearty contempt for all man-made law.” Describing Polly Hollow, a Catskills village populated by a number of families named Slater (pronounced Slah-ter), the article points out that none of the residents can read or write and terms them “degenerate.”
However, the presence of “white trash” in rural New York appears to have been more myth than fact: According to 1910 census data, on
ly 1.6 percent of the native white rural population was illiterate (although this was four times the rate of illiteracy in the native white urban population), and school attendance among fifteen-to-twenty-year-olds was actually higher in the rural population (41.3 percent) than in the urban population (34 percent).
6. Historically, an alienist was a “mad-doctor” who treated mental disease—mental “alienation”—usually in an asylum. By 1919, when this story was written, alienists were no longer confined to asylums, and a survey of the early journals of the Alienists and Neurologists of America (founded in 1911) reveals that the self-image of the profession was changing from that of custodians of the insane to healers focused on insanity and mental and nervous diseases.
Alienists have often found their way into fiction, especially as the public’s interest in psychology grew. Arthur Conan Doyle, a practicing physician himself, frequently wrote stories about the medical profession. In “A Medical Document,” written in 1894, three doctors are swapping experiences—“talking shop,” as one puts it. The alienist comments about a patient: “A disease of the body is bad enough, but this seems to be a disease of the soul. Is it not a shocking thing—a thing to drive a reasoning man into absolute Materialism—to think that you may have a fine, noble fellow with every divine instinct and that some little vascular change, the dropping, we will say, of a minute spicule of bone from the inner table of his skull on to the surface of his brain may have the effect of changing him to a filthy and pitiable creature with every low and debasing tendency? What a satire an asylum is upon the majesty of man, and no less upon the ethereal nature of the soul.” At the beginning of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), Marlow meets a doctor who questions Marlow’s motives for journeying to Africa, and Marlow immediately asks whether the doctor is an alienist. “Every doctor should be—a little,” is the answer.
The alienist as detective is also a popular trope—witness Nicholas Meyer’s The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1974), in which no less than Sigmund Freud joins forces with Sherlock Holmes, and Caleb Carr’s popular 1994 mystery The Alienist and its sequel, The Angel of Darkness (1997), set in late Victorian New York.
7. The “ether” (also spelled “æther”) was conceived by ancient scientists as a substance that filled the space between the planets and the stars, thought by later scientists to be necessary for the transmission of electromagnetic or gravitational waves; the term “luminiferous aether” came to be thought of as the medium through which light was transmitted. Einstein’s 1905 theory of special relativity demonstrated that the perceived effects long thought to require the existence of the ether could be explained without it. However, many scientists refused to let go of the notion and ignored or denied Einstein’s explanations. The Enyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.), for example, published in 1911, has a detailed explanation of the æther or ether by the physicist Sir Oliver Lodge (1851–1940). In 1929, cosmologist Sir James Hopwood Jeans wrote, “The ether has dropped out of science, not because scientists as a whole have formed a reasoned judgment that no such thing exists, but because they find they can describe all the phenomena of nature quite perfectly without it. It merely cumbers the picture, so they leave it out. If at some future time they find they need it, they will put it back again” (The Universe Around Us, 339). That time has not yet come.
8. In 1901, when these events occurred, little was known of electrical activity in the brain, or “brain waves” such as described here. In 1875, based on experiments with animals, electrophysiologist Richard Caton (1842–1926) reported to the British Medical Association that he had measured electrical changes in the brain, varying in location and direction but probably related to function. Others, including Adolf Beck (1863–1942) and Ernst Fleischl von Marxov (1846–1892), were among the first to demonstrate cortical localization with electophysiological methods. By 1890, Beck had discovered patterns of oscillation in animal brain activity. It was not until 1929, however, that Hans Berger (1873–1941) published his electroencephalograph work on humans, and serious study began. Radio waves (to which the narrator analogizes the “brain waves” he receives) were predicted as early as 1865 by mathematician James Clerk Maxwell and demonstrated in the laboratory by Heinrich Hertz in 1887.
9. Compare the views of Thomas Alva Edison, who, according to a 1920 interview with B. C. Forbes for American Magazine, “Edison Working on How to Communicate with the Next World,” said, “‘If our personality survives, then it is strictly logical and scientific to assume that it retains memory, intellect, and other faculties and knowledge that we acquire on earth. . . . I am inclined to believe that our personality hereafter will be able to affect matter. If this reasoning be correct, then, if we can evolve an instrument so delicate as to be affected, moved, or manipulated . . . by our personality as it survives in the next life, such an instrument, when made available, ought to record something.’” See also Edison’s interview with Austin C. Lescarboura in Scientific American Monthly for October 1920.
10. According to vol. 58 (1911) of the American Druggist and Pharmaceutical Record, a “semi-monthly illustrated journal of practical pharmacy,” popular products of the sort included Young’s Kidney and Nerve Powder and Adamson’s Head Ache and Nerve Powder. Tonics, “cures,” and “plasters” were also sold to treat nerves: Spiegel’s Blood and Nerve Tonic; Adironda (Wheeler’s Heart and Nerve) Cure; Brod’s Stomach, Nerve and Asthma Plaster. Other proprietary (that is, nonprescription) products included “nerve invigorators,” “nerve foods,” and nerve beans, nerve seeds, and nerve gum. Merck’s 1899 Manual of the Materia Medica lists over twenty-five drugs to be prescribed by physicians for “nervous affections,” including arsenic and cocaine!
11. An architectural term of several meanings—here, probably, ornamental moldings around the exterior of an arch.
12. Jupiter has sixty-one moons. Four were discovered by Galileo in 1610; a fifth moon was discovered in 1892, and several others were found over the next few decades. The bulk were not discovered until the twenty-first century. In 1901, if the speaker were up on his astronomy (as Lovecraft undoubtedly was), the “fourth” moon, in terms of distance from the planet, was actually Ganymede. The speaker was probably not conversant with the latest discoveries, however, and meant the four Gallilean moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, and Callisto was the fourth most distant of those moons from the planet’s surface.
The idea that life exists beyond Earth was first suggested in ancient literature. The Jewish Talmud speaks of 18,000 worlds, and the Qu’ran and Hindu mythology assume that life exists on other worlds. In the late nineteenth century, after the observations by Schiaparelli in 1878 of canali on the surface of the planet Mars, intense speculation began regarding life there, including French astronomer Camille Flammarion’s 1892 book Le planète Mars and the subsequent writings of American astronomer Percival Lowell: Mars (1895); Mars and Its Canals (1906); and Mars as the Abode of Life (1908). Life on other worlds was also a popular topic of fiction, including such early works as Across the Zodiac (1880) by Percy Greg; Journey to Mars (1894) by Gustavus W. Pope, an adventure story that may have influenced Edgar Rice Burroughs’s later books; and of course The War of the Worlds (1898) by H. G. Wells. Lovecraft may also have read Edison’s Conquest of Mars (1898) by Garrett P. Serviss (see note 15, below). In this “Edisonade” (a popular genre of fictional adventures of inventor Thomas A. Edison, and a precursor to the “Tom Swift” stories that first appeared in 1910), and essentially a sequel to Wells’s popular book, Earthmen respond to an attack from Mars with a successful genocide of the Martian race.
13. Beta Persei, a bright star in the constellation of Perseus. It is a binary star and its brightness varies markedly. Richard H. Allen, in his invaluable 1899 work Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning, writes: “Algol, the Demon, the Demon Star, and the Blinking Demon, from the Arabians’ Ra’s al Ghul, the Demon’s Head, is said to have been thus called from its rapid and wonderful variations; but I find no evidence of this, and that peo
ple probably took the title from Ptolemy. Al Ghul literally signifies a Mischief-maker, and the name still appears in the Ghoul of the Arabian Nights and of our day. Its name derives from ras al-ghul, Arabic for head of the ghoul. . . . Astrologers of course said that it was the most unfortunate, violent, and dangerous star in the heavens, and it certainly has been one of the best observed, as the most noteworthy variable in the northern sky.” Ra’s al Ghul is a nemesis of Batman and head of the Demon, an international crime cartel, in the DC Comics Universe.
14. The middle “star” of the three forming the “sword” depending from the belt of the constellation Orion is the Orion Nebula.
15. Serviss (1851–1929) was an astronomer, a popularizer of astronomy, and an early science fiction writer. The quotation is from his Astronomy with the Naked Eye (1908). Of course, if the nova was first visible in 1901, it did not occur in 1901; Algol is approximately 93 light-years from Earth, and so the nova would have occurred in 1808. Perhaps the thought-transmission from the “brother of light” also traveled at the speed of light (rather than instantaneously), making it appear contemporary although it was actually almost a century old. This does not explain, however, how the “brother” was able to tell that, ninety-three years in the future, Slater would die.
The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft Page 11