I couldn't help smiling as I read the letter and I cannot adequately express how pleased and grateful I am to hear from a sympathetic soul. I will not, of course, burden my long-distance friend with my personal issues but something to focus on, even for a few hours, is very much welcome. This is precisely the kind of spiritual and mental boost I needed just now.
I believe it is time to propose a collaboration with my friend across the ocean.
November 14th, 1886 -
I could not delay it any longer. I have had to take a job simply to keep myself housed and fed. It is a sad, menial position digging ditches for a paltry sum that is barely sufficient to provide the absolute essentials – but it is only temporary, I pray.
My consolation is the sheer, scientific joy I feel when designing, in my free time, an ether-based experiment that Layport and I can work on together from opposite sides of the Atlantic. Though it has not been my practice to engage in such, I feel that this is a rare opportunity to work with someone who so intimately understands what I wish to achieve and I find myself unaccountably desirous of working with my mysterious friend. Almost compelled. No matter – the distraction is something I need to keep myself going. If I cannot provide myself with adequate physical nourishment, I can certainly still nourish my intellect.
I hope to have the broad strokes planned out soon.
November 23rd, 1886 -
I have no idea how on Earth it is possible, but Layport has already responded to the letter I posted on the 15th. I don't believe there is any way it could have arrived in England so soon, much less a response be carried back to these shores. I should think by sheer coincidence he simply sent a second letter shortly after his last but he addresses specific points from my reply. It is a mystery I will make note of in my return dispatch.
However, far more important than postal oddities are the contents of Layport's letter. Not only has he agreed unreservedly to my proposed partnership and to the experiment, as well as made some suggestions regarding slight alterations of my designs (which I believe will enhance our results), but he has enclosed funds sufficient to purchase the equipment and materials I shall require!
Apparently, my friend is a man of means as well as one of scientific curiosity. I thank my lucky stars that he chose to reach out to me.
There is still some time in the day – I had best begin gathering the required components!
December 17th, 1886 -
The apparatus is complete and with a portion of Layport's funds, I have telegraphed him to determine a specific date and time for the commencement of our great undertaking.
December 19th, 1886 -
It is decided – December 31st at 11:30pm eastern standard time we will begin. Layport's telegraph read, "We will usher in a new era along with a new year."
I certainly hope so.
I will arrange the equipment on the hill just east of the Tesla Electric Light and Manufacturing building out of a sense of irony. I think Layport will approve.
December 31st, 1886 -
It is almost time. All is in readiness. I can scarcely contain myself.
January 1st, 1887 -
I do not know whether to consider last night a triumph or a dismal failure.
The equipment worked, but the result was nothing like what I had anticipated. I believe the difference lies with Layport's modifications to my original designs, though I saw nothing that caused any alarm upon reviewing them when first proposed nor now when I have seen their results.
The device was configured properly – of that I am sure. The machine's purpose was to add a sort of artificial ultraviolet light into the composition of the atmosphere and, the light being carried by the ether all around us, allow said substance to be observed. I believed Layport's addition to the machine would provide a more efficient generation of the UV rays, which he had stated, but it brought about something else, as well.
At the exact time we had agreed upon, 11:30 p.m., I activated the machine and began to observe. The expected sputtering began as the machine warmed up then quickly smoothed itself into a low hum as I pointed the ray-emitter towards Layport's position across the sea, some thirty-five hundred miles away. After another moment, the array began to dispense a sort of pale, unearthly-colored light of a shade that I cannot describe for I had never seen it before and I do not believe it exists in nature. I watched, fascinated, as the strange luminosity waxed and waned, pulsing as if alive and carving a tunnel through the darkness towards the horizon.
As I watched, my surroundings took on a quality of hazy unreality and I became intensely aware of the sounds of my own body – the beating of my heart, the rushing of the blood within my veins and the faint whistle of my lungs each time I drew breath. Added to this was the undertone of the device's hum as it took on a deeper note, which seemed to reverberate outward from the base of the machine into the earth and from there into the soles of my feet, where it traveled up my body and sent tendrils of unaccountable fear into the animal portion of my brain. Added to this were shadows that seemed, no matter which way I turned, ever to be just at the edge of my vision.
Finally, heart pounding and lungs gasping with a terror I could not explain, I shut the machine off and sank down into the snow, trembling slightly and wondering what could have caused me such reactions.
I knew it must now be close to midnight, though I was sure no more than twenty minutes at most had passed; when I checked my watch, however, I discovered it was nearly four a.m.!
This period of “lost time” frightened me even more than my other unexplained experiences and I quickly packed up the machine and hurried back to my lodgings.
I have spent the last several hours pondering these circumstances and composing a letter to Layport describing my experiences, much the same as I have here. I have asked, as well, for any insight concerning this and his modifications to my designs.
Now, though I am loathe to close my eyes and chance reliving the night's events in dreams, knowing how sharp such recollections will be, I suppose I should try to get some sleep. I must report to my employer shortly after noon and I am sure he will expect me to be grateful for the half-day's holiday.
Oh, what a time of headaches and bitterness this winter has been, and it is not yet but half over. If not for the diversion offered by this collaboration, I'd have gone mad.
Though, after last night, I am uncertain that I haven't.
January 1st, 1887 (cont.) -
No time to jot this down before I hurried off to dig ditches earlier but, now that the evening is mine, reflection and recording seems its best use.
As expected, when I lay down to rest after my last entry, the dreams I feared arrived no sooner than I had fallen into sleep. Rather than simply a retelling of the events I experienced in the night, however, my brain ran wild with a story spun from bits of memories and fantastic images for which I can imagine no source. Unlike the dreams of the previous months, however, I retain a great deal of what I experienced.
I found myself back on the hill, as in life, and standing before the machine, which hummed happily as though it had been running for some minutes. The apparatus was emitting purple rays as it was designed to – though I should not have been able to view them with the naked eye – rather than the obscure light I saw in reality, and the air shimmered around the beam as it raced out of sight. At first I thought this scintillating effect to be the ether that I have always known to surround us, and that the experiment was a success, but I realized after a moment that what I saw through that hazy streak in the sky was not simply the mundane features of a New Jersey hill on a cold winter's night, but something else entirely that I could not discern quite well enough to fix in my memory.
I was struck then with an insane thought: what if, rather than simply cutting a swath through the night, the beam was indeed cutting into the very fabric of reality itself and leaving behind in its wake a tear in whatever makes up the barrier between this world and the next?
As this idea sp
rang to life, so did my surroundings spring into quite-unexpected motion. Before my dream-self's eyes, the immediate area began to melt and run, as butter left near a stove’s flame, and pooled into a sticky, black mass at my feet that somehow did not flow down the hill as a terrestrial liquid would. From this arose, haltingly as if assembled by invisible hands unsure of their actions, a long, dark hallway lined with columns the color of the strange light I'd seen in the physical world and accompanied by the haziness the actual light had imbued to reality.
Before me, I saw that the hallway ran rail-straight along the path of my machine's rays and looking behind saw nothing but an apparently-infinite darkness, swirling vaguely and stretching away into unbroken nothingness. With no other option, I cautiously proceeded along the path presented me for some time without making any sort of forward progress, despite the movement of my limbs.
Chancing a glance behind me, I startled at the sight of an unknown companion who trailed me. He was black, though not a Negro, but rather a man composed entirely of an inky substance rivaling the depths of the stygian vortex behind the both of us, from which he must have come. Recovering from my momentary stun, and regaining my manners, I nodded in greeting and the fellow returned the gesture with an added, wide-mouthed grin showing blindingly-white teeth at utter contrast to the otherwise featureless expanse of his face.
Of the two of us he spoke first, asking if these were the results I had expected to obtain. Though his voice was cultured and pleasant, it chilled me to the bone for, without knowing how or why, it seemed to me to be the voice of my unseen friend, Ethan Layport – impossible though such a thing could be. Reminded by such lunacy that I was deeply ensconced in a dream-state, I shook my head and answered that more consideration was needed at this time. To this, the Black Man bowed slightly and said, "Of course, Mr. Tesla," and disappeared without another word, immediately after which I found myself awake.
Now, and since opening my eyes, I find appearing in my vision images of that unearthly man, that eerie hallway, and the light I should not have been able to see, as well as other things that caper maddeningly just out of my eyes' and mind's grasp.
Throughout the afternoon's work, thankfully mindless and leaving me to pursue my own thoughts, I reflected and analyzed. In my previous entry, I flippantly alluded to insanity but I know that not to be the case because what I am experiencing is strange, but not wholly new to me. The dreams, yes; the odd results of my experiment with Mr. Layport, yes; but the visions, of things I know to be real which seemingly cannot be, no.
As a child, I suffered from an affliction caused by the appearance of images, accompanied by powerful flashes of light, which marred my sight and interfered with my thoughts and actions. Most often, they were scenes of places I had never visited or seen in pictures, but knew to be entirely real. At times, I had trouble discerning what was actually before me and what was merely a likeness projected from my mind's eye. It caused me anxiety and mental discomfort and the fact that no doctor or alienist could offer an explanation simply worsened my state.
I could banish the images only by concentrating my thoughts and mental vision on something else entirely and straining to the utmost, but even then this great effort often only resulted in temporary relief. The scenes and sights would then creep back, blurred and indistinct but growing in concreteness, until I was once again under their affliction. I found that the only true surcease was to allow myself into these odd worlds, surrendering to their pull and making excursions beyond the small reality in which I lived and seeing ever more new locations in my phantom travels. On these "trips," I would sometimes meet people of uncommon dress and speech and we would share ideas and thoughts. Some of these I met repeatedly over the years and, strange as it seems, they became as dear to me as those in actual life. I told no one of these worlds I "visited," as I knew that it would be seen as a sign of serious mental defect, and simply hoped I would grow out of it, as many juvenile ailments seem to fade upon reaching the outskirts of adulthood. And, in fact, I was afflicted with my unique condition until I was about aged seventeen, when my body began to develop in earnest and my mind turned fully to invention.
I had never considered my childhood condition anything more than a quirk of my admittedly-unusual brain, but now I wonder... The events of the night, the grotesque dream world and my old "travels" have too much in common for me to consider mere coincidence.
Have I somehow been lead in the direction I now face? I have always taken great pride in my ability to identify cause and effect relationships but, like the shadows that pestered my vision last night, it seems just beyond my grasp.
January 2nd, 1887 -
The letter I composed yesterday to Layport has been misplaced. Not at all like me, though I am half of the opinion that it's for the best. What would he think of me if I were to send him such a mad epistle? I've instead used a bit more of the money he loaned me to send a short telegram asking after the results of his side of our experiment.
More worrying than my lapse in memory are the visions that seem determined to plague me. Unpleasant dreams, regardless of intensity, are troubling enough, but intrusions upon my waking thoughts can only compound my already-distasteful situation.
These intrusions, however, are nothing so severe as what I experienced in youth; rather they are akin to the motions at the edge of my sight when I was on the hill and again in the dream world I visit nightly. If I concentrate greatly, I can force these images to subside but when the opposite is true – when I consciously relax my body and perceptions – it seems that the air around me becomes filled with flickering wisps of living flame. This is not flame as is familiar, however, but rather dark and dancing tongues in shades of black from ink to a very deep Navy blue, not unlike the night sky when starless, but far less placid.
I find this much-disturbing as my old tricks of eliminating such experiences have only the barest effect and when I attempted to enter this vision, as my younger self was able to do, it resulted not in transport to a fantastic world but merely expansion and animation of the strange field. Within seconds of my focusing on it, sparks of scintillating green light, seeming somehow unwholesome, advanced towards me and left in their wake a system of parallel lines and closed spaces at right angles to one another; the combined effect of this seemed in some fashion to be an entryway to a far-off door I could not see. It was reminiscent of the hallway from my New Year's dream, but more abstract and yet, I sense, more truthful. When I ceased deliberate focus, the image slowly began to fade; rather than disappear, however, it transformed into a scene of the town, but all in shades of an inert and quite unpleasant gray. After a time it, too, faded but I simply don't know what to make of any of this.
Since that first attempt, I have been afraid to try again and have delayed normal evening habits by writing this, fearing what new and terrible shape my dreamscapes may now take. I foresee a night of cold compresses and fitful sleeplessness ahead of me.
January 8th, 1887 -
The one positive about my working days are the ample time in which I have to think. My employment offers no intellectual stimulation – though I suspect the exercise does me good – but nor does it prohibit my mental wanderings. Oh, and I have wandered a great deal these last few days.
Surprisingly, I have had no trouble sleeping, despite my predictions. I am, however, visited each night in my dreams by the murky man and each time he asks, "Is this what you sought, Mr. Tesla?" or "Is the data what you expected, sir?" Always he questions me with that incongruous smile beaming from his blank face and in a voice that my subconscious insists is the silent Ethan Layport, from whom I have still not heard either by letter or telegram. My response is ever consistent: that I have not yet determined what it is I am seeing, much less what it means. He indulges me with what I am coming to feel is an unctuous and condescending manner, though never becoming cross or otherwise aggressive in any way. After receiving my nightly answer, he disappears into the ether, as it were, leaving behind only t
he monotonous whine that in the world of solid reality came from the experimental machine's moving parts, but in this dream realm seems both sinister and almost organic, as if there were some sort of intelligence behind it.
Which steers me back to course and brings me, I think, full circle to the ether.
As I have described, I believe ether is entirely featureless and has no true substance. If it has no true substance, therefore, it would not be bound by any of the familiar rules or laws that govern this world. Might it in fact, if my conjecture has any merit, not even be bound to this world?
As Layport surmises the ether to be the pure stuff of which space is composed and in which all heavenly bodies are suspended, might the ether be not merely around everything but, indeed, suffuse everything – including worlds and realities other than our own?
New Year's Eve, on that frigid hill, I described what I saw as seeming unreal and indistinct. In my dream following that event, the sights and sounds I experienced were both more outré as well as somehow more concrete than what I saw with my waking eyes. What if that is, indeed, so? What if the device was not causing me to see things imagined but rather unseen things to be revealed?
Take for a moment as a given that my assumptions about the ether are correct, that it bridges some sort of gap between our world and perhaps many more, and that the device did as intended, imparting a measurable quality to the unknown substance and thus changing its properties into something new. By adding at least one characteristic to the ether, I may have changed all others and upset some sort of cosmic scheme, resulting in a sundering of what must surely be a carefully-balanced and ordered system and thus breaking down barriers mankind was never meant to even know existed.
The Altar in the Hills and Other Weird Tales Page 9