Rule of the Brains

by John Russell Fearn

  In another moment I had opened the door and passed into his study. The light was full on, and an open diary lay upon his desk with a smear of ink across it. Beyond, on the far side, another door was slightly ajar, with light streaming from it. I went toward it at a run and flung it open.

  I recognized the place at once as the doctor’s laboratory. Walmsley, a vaguely comical figure in his long dressing gown, came toward me with a hopeless look on his round face.

  “Thank God you’ve come, sir!” he breathed, clutching my sleeve. “I haven’t known what to do for the good doctor these last few days. He hasn’t been normal, sir. He’s looked at me with burning eyes and muttered things about ‘Veldoris’ and suchlike. Just now I heard him shout, and I came downstairs right away, to find him like that, sir. He’s—he’s dead!” The servant’s voice broke huskily.

  “Dead!” I exclaimed sharply and strode forward.

  I found the doctor sprawled at full-length on a long bench, with a single small pillow. One arm was dangling over the side, and on the floor beneath his limp hand was a blue bottle with the one word ‘Veldoris’ written across it. It required no expert to realize that he was quite dead, and his death had evidently been a struggle, for his face was set in the most horrified, distorted expression I have ever seen. Above him was his beam instrument, extinguished.

  I stood there in silence for a space, hardly knowing what to say or do. There were formalities to be gone through, of course. Then I found a letter, addressed to me propped against a chemical bottle. It contained a lot of things dear to me, which I do not wish to reproduce, but the gist of it was that he absolved everybody from blame in connection with his death, and I would find the full story in his diary.

  And that is all I have to tell for my own part. The remainder is Dr. Veldor’s own story, pieced from incoherencies in places, but mainly consistent. I give it to the world as coming from the hand of a man who met his death trying to devise a means of ending the terrors of sleep, who tried to probe a little too far into the unknowable—the words of Dr. Veldor, who has since become known in the scientific world as ‘the man who never slept’.

  * * * *

  NOVEMBER 18TH. I kept my word to Richard and set to work the same night to explore the unknown region beyond the living world. I am writing this two days after. I was fully aware as I set my beam machine to work of the dangerous nature of the phenomenon with which I was tampering, but dangerous or otherwise, nothing could be learned without trying. So, as on a previous occasion, I took a full dose of the overpowering, insidious Veldoris and lay on the table directly beneath those swirling lights.

  I am a man of pretty strong will, and I succeeded in eventually dissociating myself from bodily trammels. In some strange, indefinable way I knew I was no longer normally awake. My body was like lead. I could not fully comprehend what I was doing; yet I saw quite clearly that iridescent mist of hypnotic colours about me. In a manner, I suppose I was assimilated to a spiritualistic medium.

  Then suddenly it seemed to me as though the beam machine had gone out. I was no longer lying flat on my back; instead I was standing in some place that seemed vaguely familiar. A little back street, dimly lighted by lamps, and at the end of it a shining grey expanse that I knew was the Thames River. I looked down at myself. I was in ragged clothing, and shivering with cold.

  Quite suddenly I knew where I was. Almost twenty years ago I had stood in the same spot—a ragged, unwanted youth. It was when I had been turned out by my father and had been left to fight my own way in the world. But how in the name of wonder had I returned to this past point in time? While in my dream condition I could not understand, in any instance, how I reached the places I did.

  How crystal-clear everything was! None of the vagueness of a dream! I took a step forward to investigate, then somewhere a window slammed through the night. I returned to the mundane beneath my lights and sat up, still shivering. A close inspection of the laboratory revealed that the heater was not functioning properly and that the temperature was very low.

  Further, close to where I had been lying on the table, a test tube had slipped out of its rack onto the bench close to my ear. The resultant noise must have been slight, but loud enough to supply the sound of the slamming window.

  So, then, at my first effort I had discovered that dreams took one back into a past time to an event of outstanding mental clearness, and that most of the occurrences fitted in by some unexplained freak with occurrences in the present.

  I remembered, when I came to ponder, that at that point twenty years ago, a window had slammed, and I had been cold. Funny, then, that a falling test tube and a faulty radiator should produce the coinciding external results twenty years later. I thought of ‘mechanized’ and ‘induced’ dreams, and decided that the brain after all is responsive during dreams to external things. (Or so Dr. Veldor believed at this períod. R. F.)

  But that coincidence of events, and my travel backward in time, deeply impressed me. I decided to probe further.

  NOVEMBER 19TH. I thought when I discovered Veldoris that I had done mankind a service—that I would be able to pass on to mankind a panacea for all the ills of sleep, and make mankind a thriving and industrious race. Now I have decided otherwise. It is not such joy after all to be deprived of sleep—never for a moment to feel relaxation, never to desire to slumber. This accursed Veldoris! It is deadly in its attraction.

  I have tried to overcome its temptation, but it is too strong for me. I cannot do without it. I want sleep, and I want Veldoris. I cannot have both, so I take the latter. I have just returned from a walk about London—a sleeping city. Almost everybody asleep save me. Everybody on earth can sleep save me! I have a growing horror of this wakefulness. I have decided to postpone my next effort until tomorrow night.

  NOVEMBER 20TH. After my usual process of self-hypnosis I ultimately found myself standing on a bare and windy plain, with a grey sky that had a flush akin to twilight above me. There was no moon, no stars. I looked down at myself but failed to recognize my form. It was a peculiarly squat affair, with very short, amazingly thick legs, round powerful body, and tremendous hands and arms. An investigative fingering of my face revealed a growth of thick hair. Where was I? What was I? I did not know. The present situation did not seem to fit in with anything I remembered. Even my body was different, and as before I could not, while undergoing the experience, remember anything outside it.

  I went forward a few paces, then a remarkable thing happened. I found myself viewing two places simultaneously. Superimposed upon the barren, cheerless plain was Piccadilly Circus. It was daylight, and the seething flood of traffic was at its height. I stood looking upon it all, like an uncomprehending animal—stood looking at the plain, and London. I felt suspended between heaven and earth. Buses and people passed through me, yet I did not feel anything. What had taken place this time? I still had that repulsive body.

  There was only one explanation. I was in the fourth dimension—or some dimension or other.

  (Be it understood that Dr. Veldor wrote his notes after his return, in the light of normal intelligence. In his form as a brute man he could neither have understood London nor a fourth dimension. R. F.)

  By some unexplained paradox of time and space it was night where I was standing, yet daylight in the normal world. Imagine my amazement, when upon a hoarding, I saw a placard, which read: “Three More Days to See the Cattle Exhibition”, and gave the date when the exhibition ended. Although I did not comprehend it then—although I could not even read then and have only my latent memory to describe it by—I know now that I was viewing a time ten years ahead of the present, and Heaven alone knows how many years in advance of the time when I stood on the barren plain....

  So the dream state did not necessarily take one into the past. Here was a future occurrence; which by some complexity of time relation to the mundane world I was permitted to view.

  Then suddenly, out of the grey darkness of the mysterious plain on which I stood,
there swept a black, shapeless thing that bore down upon me like an express train. I tried to move, but somehow felt powerless. My limbs refused to act. A blank and freezing terror was in my vitals. It did not hit me; it absorbed me!

  I have a remembrance of struggling with a sudden return of muscular movement, of grappling desperately with that shapeless, abominable creation of an unknown dimension, of feeling it expand and contract beneath my clutch. Then I fell off the experimental table in my laboratory, to find the lights still above me. I was perspiring freely, and my heart was beating furiously from the recollection of that frightful thing.

  Again I have traced certain fundamental truths in my experiences. The creature I had struggled with was one of those awful things that occasionally come into a normal nightmare. The dreaded, impalpable something that expands and contracts and suffocates, until one awakes in a sweating, paralyzed terror. I have proved this seeming figment of imagination to be real! It does exist, in a dimension that I, too, had occupied at some point in my existence—at a point, which, perhaps all of us have at one time inhabited.

  I have lived as a squat, peculiar man of little brain, with all the fears of a primitive man or ape. Long have I known that the ‘falling dream’ is merely a recollection, from apelike days, handed down, when one fell from a tree to destruction—the stark memory of which still lies in our innermost selves to startle us out of sleep. But I have discovered something new! More and more do I realize that dreams are not imaginative creations, but actual occurrences impressed upon the mind, handed down through the process of evolution, by procreation and heredity, across the gulf of endless time from body to body. It is a sobering thought.

  As to the superimposition of a future time in London, I can only explain it as being an ‘overlap’ of the three-dimensional world, related by some paradox of higher mathematics in that moment of unknown past when I was in another dimension and inconceivably far back in the scale of evolution. One fact has become very manifest to me: It is that dream experiences cannot be governed to any particular point. Another point is that time, in the subconscious state, is merely a myth. It is haphazard and indeterminable.

  NOVEMBER 21ST. I have made a remarkable discovery. Today I have been working out my data on this subject, and I have discovered why it is that external conditions affect and coincide with subconscious dream states. There is a realm of what I will call force that exists between the conscious and subconscious states. Always, at the time of a dream, that dream occurs in relation to that force, which is related not indirectly to time, which latter cannot be altered. Everything, according to the laws of this force, duplicates itself in some form or other, and links the mentality of the dreamer with the occurrences he is dreaming about.

  Hence the coinciding moment of the slamming window and the cold. By predetermined calculation this force in relation to time had brought about the seeming coincidence, which really, as I see it now, was mathematical immutability. The process of time had ordained these sounds, as inseparable from the subconscious mind, and nothing could, or ever will, alter it. My experience coinciding with the sounds was also predetermined. More than ever I realize that time is not only as we compute it with our material senses, but is an endless something that also controls those other and stranger experiences of which I have written. Nothing is done without the dictates of time and force; hence, then, even an ‘induced’ dream, where sounds are provided to coincide with the sleeper’s dreams, is only a dictate of time and force. I appreciate clearly, also, that coincidence is becoming a useless quantity. There is no such thing as coincidence. Perhaps you will ask what force is, then? To which I answer, nobody knows what force is—nowhere on earth will you find the explanation of what force is—only what it does.

  Again, then, I shall venture into this unknown realm. Each time I learn something. My only worry is the increasing demand of this devilish Veldoris. If only it were not so potent, so irresistible!

  (LATER). This time I have had an astounding experience, which proves beyond all doubt that dreams are indeed purely the ‘leftovers’ of some former state of existence or consciousness. Following the hypnotic trance, I came to myself in a drawing room of extremely old-fashioned design. Men with long hair and bows upon it were about me. One was chafing my wrists and looking very soulfully into my eyes. The others were solicitous and attentive. An old-fashioned candelabra stood at the chenille-draped mantelshelf. But—I was a woman! I had no male conceptions whatever. All my emotions were those of a woman. I knew that I very much loved this dark-eyed youth who was chafing my wrists.

  “You fainted, Adeline,” he said in a soft, gentle voice. “Do you feel better? You must take care with that weak heart of yours, you know.”

  I got to my feet unsteadily and looked down at the neat, buckled shoe on my small foot. Again, I say, I had no conception then of being anything different from Adeline Laysen, a very-much-sought-after young beauty of the Victorian era. I had no conception pf my own self—or at least the self of my own time. Actually, I was living then in what was myself.

  I spent an evening playing the piano in that very old-fashioned drawing room, then I complained once again of feeling unwell. The lights, the candles, were swirling round. Somebody caught at me as I fell, and I have a distinct remembrance of hearing somebody shout: “Good Heavens, Marnot, she’s dead!”

  So I came back again. Try as I would, I could not connect the haphazard events that occurred. But then, if that force of which I have written had predetermined everything, the events would occur in relation to the order of the force, not time. I might have the later events before the earlier ones—it all depended on the force relationship to my consciousness.

  Looking back over my notes, I have found a case where a woman has dreamed of being a drunken man, several times running, yet has never known such a person in real life, and has no idea what it is to be intoxicated. Sufficient evidence surely that I am right in my opinion that dreams are but phases of life from other lives. Sometimes sweet and lovely; at others terrible and bizarre.

  I do not feel too happy tonight. Somehow I have a feeling that I am dabbling in things too deep for me—that I am violating some almighty law, which will sooner or later rise up and destroy me. Veldoris is still maintaining its grip upon me, but, strangely enough, I find now that I cannot sleep even when I make effort of will enough to keep away from Veldoris for a space. What is the matter with me? I have just looked in the mirror and I see that my face is old and weary. There are deep furrows round my mouth. It is the face of a drug addict.

  NOVEMBER 22ND. If I could only sleep! I am indeed paying the penalty for my fool curiosity. Either with Veldoris or without it, I cannot sleep, so I may as well have Veldoris and spare myself the effort of will power to keep away from it.

  (Here was a gap, presumably of some hours, for the writing is resumed in a less steady hand. R. F.)

  I cannot understand what has happened to me! Just now I went off into a hypnotic trance without Veldoris! The stuff is mastering me! I never know now when I shall be overcome. It happens without coloured lights—without Veldoris—without any exertion on my part. I am becoming perpetually suspended between two worlds—between that mystery subconscious region and the mundane. Poor Walmsley! I think he is rather frightened of me—and well he might be! I am frightened of myself!

  My dream experience this time was not pleasant. I merged into a world of utter blackness—black, that is, from a human standpoint. Yet I seemed to be possessed of some curious optical faculty. I saw heat and infra-red rays, and looked through rubber windows as though they were of glass. I read strange wording by the glow of a red-hot iron, and everything about me seemed as bright as day.

  What strange dimension had I got into this time? Obviously a dimension where the eyesight was different to ours, where one could see heat and look through a solid. And through it all there lingered, somewhere forgotten yet most desired, a desire for sleep! If only I could sleep! My Heaven, why did I ever try such a fool ex
periment? Why did I ever attempt to delve into the unknown?

  I vanished abruptly from my world of heat into a dimension of utter incredibility. A world where oblongs and cubes were mounted end on end and subdivided into long, incomprehensible shapes vanishing in an inky sky, in which were set strange and brilliant stars. I have no idea what dimension or world it was. It faded almost instantly, and I awoke where I am now—sitting at my desk with my diary before me. I am becoming alarmed, yet some unknown power impels me on.

  NOVEMBER 23RD. I have not long to live—not long to write down these words. Three times today I have fallen into that hypnotic state between worlds. Veldoris is all I crave; it has become my soul—my being. Yet I crave sleep still more. I must rest! My brain feels as though it will burst, so constant is the strain and stress being placed upon it. It is more than flesh and blood can stand.

  I hope I am not a coward—but this is too much. You will find me dead, Richard, and, I hope, asleep in the gulf beyond. You will find a bottle near me which will have ‘Veldoris’ written upon it. You will find the formula for Veldoris in my safe. Pledge me your solemn oath that you will destroy that formula the first thing you do. Try to stop vivid dreams by the aid of what few notes I have given you, but never try to stop sleep. Nature never intended that life should go on perpetually without a rest.

  Tonight I have again dropped into that dream world and have had a deadly experience. I have seen a world of flame. I have been forced toward a canyon of flame by barbs with my hands tied behind me. I had a recognizable human form. But, Richard, you were the one who sent me to my doom—or I thought you did. I have seen you upon a throne of some strange, glittering metal, watching my progress toward a furnace, a cleft of flame and death. And you watched with a merciless smile on your face.