Collected Fiction Volume 1 (1905-1925): A Variorum Edition

by H. P. Lovecraft

  Handsome knights they were, astride roan horses and clad in shining armour with tabards of cloth-of-gold curiously emblazoned. So numerous were they, that Kuranes almost mistook them for an army, but their leader told him[44] they were sent in his honour; since it was he who had created Ooth-Nargai in his dreams, on which account he was now to be appointed its chief god for evermore. Then they gave Kuranes a horse and placed him at the head of the cavalcade, and all rode majestically through the downs of Surrey and onward toward the region where Kuranes and his ancestors were born. It was very strange, but as the riders went on they seemed to gallop back through Time; for whenever they passed through a village in the twilight they saw only such houses and villagers[45] as Chaucer or men before him might have seen, and sometimes they saw knights on horseback with small companies of retainers. When it grew dark they travelled more swiftly, till soon they were flying uncannily as if in the air. In the dim dawn they came upon the village which Kuranes had seen alive in his childhood, and asleep or dead in his dreams. It was alive now, and early villagers courtesied[46] as the horsemen clattered down the street and turned off into the lane that ends in the abyss of dream.[47] Kuranes had previously entered that abyss only at night, and wondered what it would look like by day; so he watched anxiously as the column approached its brink. Just as they galloped up the rising ground to the precipice a golden glare came somewhere out of the east[48] and hid all the landscape in its[49] effulgent draperies. The abyss was now[50] a seething chaos of roseate and cerulean splendour, and invisible[51] voices sang exultantly as the knightly entourage plunged over the edge and floated gracefully down past glittering clouds and silvery coruscations. Endlessly down the horsemen floated, their chargers pawing the aether as if galloping over golden sands; and then the luminous vapours spread apart to reveal a greater brightness, the brightness of the city Celephaïs,[52] and the seacoast[53] beyond, and the snowy peak overlooking the sea, and the gaily painted galleys that sail out of the harbour toward distant regions where the sea meets the sky.

  And Kuranes reigned thereafter over Ooth-Nargai and all the neighbouring[54] regions of dream, and held his court alternately in Celephaïs[55] and in the cloud-fashioned[56] Serannian. He reigns there still, and will reign happily for ever, though below the cliffs at Innsmouth the channel tides played mockingly with the body of a tramp who had stumbled through the half-deserted village at dawn; played mockingly, and cast it upon the rocks by ivy-covered Trevor Towers, where a notably fat and especially offensive millionaire brewer enjoys the purchased atmosphere of extinct nobility.

  Notes

  Editor’s Note: The story first appeared in the Rainbow (May 1922). A surviving T.Ms. must date after the Rainbow appearance, as it bears slight revisions from that text; it was not prepared by HPL, and may have been prepared by Donald Wandrei (although preparation of the T.Ms. is not mentioned in their correspondence). The T.Ms. bears the diaeresis over the i of the title. The T.Ms. was presumably followed (with many errors) by Marvel Tales (May 1934). It is unlikely that the divergences between the T.Ms. and the Marvel Tales text are the result of deliberate revisions by HPL, for that would imply that a new T.Ms. was prepared; and the nature of the divergences in virtually every instance suggests printing errors by Marvel Tales. The Marvel Tales text was used as the basis of the Arkham House editions. The posthumous Weird Tales appearance (June–July 1939) is not relevant to the tale’s textual history.

  Texts: A = Rainbow No. 2 (May 1922): 10–12; B = T.Ms. (JHL); C = Marvel Tales 1, No. 1 (May 1934): 26, 28–32; D = Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (Arkham House, 1965), 60–65. (All published appearances as “Celephais.”) Copy-text: B.

  1. seacoast] sea-coast A, B; sea-/coast C

  2. was also] also was A

  3. and] and to C, D

  4. of ] of the C, D

  5. shewed] showed C, D

  6. others] other C

  7. myth,] myth C, D

  8. shew] show C, D

  9. alone.] alone_ C [type failed to print]

  10. heroes] hereos A

  11. caparisoned] caparison C

  12. was] had been C, D

  13. were either] om. C, D

  14. away] om. C, D

  15. Kuranes] Knranes C

  16. Celephaïs,] Celephais, A, C, D

  17. Ooth-Nargai] Oooth-Nargai A

  18. Hills,] Hills D

  19. aroused] arroused C

  20. Celephaïs.] Celephais. A, C, D

  21. minarets] minerets C

  22. Valley] valley C, D

  23. Celephaïs.] Celephais. A, C, D

  24. lest] less C

  25. spices] spice C, D

  26. realise] realize A, D

  27. oarsmen,] oarmen, C, D

  28. marvellous] marvelous A

  29. Celephaïs] Celephais A, C, D

  30. Ooth-Nargai,] Ooth-Nargai C, D

  31. leaders;] leaders, C, D

  32. grey] gray C, D

  33. Celephaïs] Celephais A, C, D

  34. that] this C, D

  35. river-bank] river bank A, B, C, D

  36. shewing] showing C, D

  37. lying] laying C

  38. Celephaïs] Celephais A, C, D

  39. on] in C, D

  40. Celephaïs,] Celephais, C, D

  41. fulfilment] fulfillment D

  42. Celephaïs] Celephais A, C, D

  43. for ever.] forever. D

  44. their leader told him] om. C, D

  45. villagers] villages A

  46. courtesied] curtsied D

  47. dream.] dreams. C, D

  48. east] west C, D

  49. its] om. C, D

  50. now] om. C, D

  51. invisible] invisable C

  52. Celephaïs,] Celephais, A, C, D

  53. seacoast] sea coast A, B, C, D

  54. neighbouring] neighboring D

  55. Celephaïs] Celephais A, C, D

  56. cloud-fashioned] cloud fashioned C, D

  From Beyond

  Horrible beyond conception was the change which had taken place in my best friend, Crawford Tillinghast.[1] I had not seen him since that day, two months and a half before, when he had[2] 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.[3] 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 repellent unkemptness;[4] a wild disorder of dress, a bushiness of dark hair white at the roots, and an unchecked growth of pure[5] 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[6] message brought me to his door after my weeks of exile; such[7] 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.[8]

  That Crawford Tillinghast should ever have studied science and philosophy was a mistake. These things should be left to the frigid and impersonal investigator,[9] for they offer two equally tragic alternatives to the man of feeling and action; despair[10] 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.[11]

  “What do we know,” [12] 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 unrecognised[13] 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 recognise.[14] 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.[15]

  Yet I soon subordinated all my fears to my growing curiosity and fascination. Just what Crawford Tillinghast[16] 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 on man. The electricity seemed to be turned off, and when I asked my guide he said it was for a definite reason.[17]

  “It would be too much. . . . I would not dare,”[18] 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,[19] 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, outré[20] 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 [21] is ultra-violet.”[22] 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[23] truth, and I intend to shew[24] 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[25]—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.[26] That gland is the great sense-organ[27] of organs—I have found out.[28] 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[29] 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[30] 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[31] 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.[32] 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,[33] 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,[34] and he bade me[35] remain as quiet and receptive as possible.[36]

  “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[37]—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[38] “beyond”.[39] 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 unrecognisable[40] shapes or clouds, penetrating the solid roof at a point ahead and to the right of me. Then I glimpsed the temple-lik
e effect again, but this time the pillars reached up into an aërial[41] 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[42] 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[43] 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.[44] It was indeed somewhat familiar, for the unusual part was superimposed upon the usual terrestrial[45] scene much as a cinema view may be thrown upon the painted curtain of a theatre.[46] I saw the attic laboratory, the electrical[47] machine, and the unsightly form of Tillinghast opposite me; but of all the space unoccupied by familiar material[48] 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 great[49] 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 overlapped; 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.