Whether
the dreams brought on the fever or the fever brought on the dreams Walter
Gilman did not know. Behind everything crouched the brooding, festering
horror of the ancient town, and of the mouldy, unhallowed garret gable
where he wrote and studied and wrestled with flgures and formulae when
he was not tossing on the meagre iron bed. His ears were growing sensitive
to a preternatural and intolerable degree, and he had long ago stopped
the cheap mantel clock whose ticking had come to seem like a thunder of
artillery. At night the subtle stirring of the black city outside, the
sinister scurrying of rats in the wormy partitions, and the creaking of
hidden timbers in the centuried house, were enough to give him a sense
of strident pandemonium. The darkness always teemed with unexplained sound
- and yet he sometimes shook with fear lest the noises he heard should
subside and allow him to hear certain other fainter noises which he suspected
were lurking behind them.
He was in the changeless, legend-haunted city of Arkham,
with its clustering gambrel roofs that sway and sag over attics where witches
hid from the King's men in the dark, olden years of the Province. Nor was
any spot in that city more steeped in macabre memory than the gable room
which harboured him - for it was this house and this room which had likewise
harboured old Keziah Mason, whose flight from Salem Gaol at the last no
one was ever able to explain. That was in 1692 - the gaoler had gone mad
and babbled of a small white-fanged furry thing which scuttled out of Keziah's
cell, and not even Cotton Mather could explain the curves and angles smeared
on the grey stone walls with some red, sticky fluid.
Possibly Gilman ought not to have studied so hard. Non-Euclidean
calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain, and when
one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of
multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales
and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be
wholly free from mental tension. Gilman came from Haverhill, but it was
only after he had entered college in Arkham that he began to connect his
mathematics with the fantastic legends of elder magic. Something in the
air of the hoary town worked obscurely on his imagination. The professors
at Miskatonic had urged him to slacken up, and had voluntarily cut down
his course at several points. Moreover, they had stopped him from consulting
the dubious old books on forbidden secrets that were kept under lock and
key in a vault at the university library. But all these precautions came
late in the day, so that Gilman had some terrible hints from the dreaded
Necronomicon
of Abdul Alhazred, the fragmentary Book of Eibon, and the suppressed
Unaussprechlicken
Kulten of von Junzt to correlate with his abstract formulae on the
properties of space and the linkage of dimensions known and unknown.
He knew his room was in the old Witch-House - that, indeed,
was why he had taken it. There was much in the Essex County records about
Keziah Mason's trial, and what she had admitted under pressure to the Court
of Oyer and Terminer had fascinated Gilman beyond all reason. She had told
Judge Hathorne of lines and curves that could be made to point out directions
leading through the walls of space to other spaces beyond, and had implied
that such lines and curves were frequently used at certain midnight meetings
in the dark valley of the white stone beyond Meadow Hill and on the unpeopled
island in the river. She had spoken also of the Black Man, of her oath,
and of her new secret name of Nahab. Then she had drawn those devices on
the walls of her cell and vanished.
Gilman believed strange things about Keziah, and had felt
a queer thrill on learning that her dwelling was still standing after more
than two hundred and thirty-five years. When he heard the hushed Arkham
whispers about Keziah's persistent presence in the old house and the narrow
streets, about the irregular human tooth-marks left on certain sleepers
in that and other houses, about the childish cries heard near May-Eve,
and Hallowmass, about the stench often noted in the old house's attic just
after those dreaded seasons, and about the small, furry, sharp-toothed
thing which haunted the mouldering structure and the town and nuzzled people
curiously in the black hours before dawn, he resolved to live in the place
at any cost. A room was easy to secure, for the house was unpopular, hard
to rent, and long given over to cheap lodgings. Gilman could not have told
what he expected to find there, but he knew he wanted to be in the building
where some circumstance had more or less suddenly given a mediocre old
woman of the Seventeenth Century an insight into mathematical depths perhaps
beyond the utmost modern delvings of Planck, Heisenberg, Einstein, and
de Sitter.
He studied the timber and plaster walls for traces of
cryptic designs at every accessible spot where the paper had peeled, and
within a week managed to get the eastern attic room where Keziah was held
to have practised her spells. It had been vacant from the first - for no
one had ever been willing to stay there long - but the Polish landlord
had grown wary about renting it. Yet nothing whatever happened to Gilman
till about the time of the fever. No ghostly Keziah flitted through the
sombre halls and chambers, no small furry thing crept into his dismal eyrie
to nuzzle him, and no record of the witch's incantations rewarded his constant
search. Sometimes he would take walks through shadowy tangles of unpaved
musty-smelling lanes where eldritch brown houses of unknown age leaned
and tottered and leered mockingly through narrow, small-paned windows.
Here he knew strange things had happened once, and there was a faint suggestion
behind the surface that everything of that monstrous past might not - at
least in the darkest, narrowest, and most intricately crooked alleys -
have utterly perished. He also rowed out twice to the ill-regarded island
in the river, and made a sketch of the singular angles described by the
moss-grown rows of grey standing stones whose origin was so obscure and
immemorial.
Gilman's room was of good size but queerly irregular shape;
the north wall slating perceptibly inward from the outer to the inner end,
while the low ceiling slanted gently downward in the same direction. Aside
from an obvious rat-hole and the signs of other stopped-up ones, there
was no access - nor any appearance of a former avenue of access - to the
space which must have existed between the slanting wall and the straight
outer wall on the house's north side, though a view from the exterior showed
where a window had heen boarded up at a very remote date. The loft above
the ceiling - which must have had a slanting floor - was likewise inaccessible.
When Gilman climbed up a ladder to the cob-webbed level loft above the
rest of the attic he found vestiges of a bygone aperture tightly and heavily
covered with ancient planking and secured by the stout wooden pegs common
in Colonial carpentry. No amount of persuasion, however, could induce the
stolid landlord to let him investigate either of these two closed spaces.
As time wore along, his absorption in the irregular wall
and ceiling of his room increased; for he began to read into the odd angles
a mathematical significance which seemed to offer vague clues regarding
their pnrpose. Old Keziah, he reflected, might have had excellent reasons
for living in a room with peculiar angles; for was it not through certain
angles that she claimed to have gone outside the boundaries of the world
of space we know? His interest gradually veered away from the unplumbed
voids beyond the slanting surfaces, since it now appeared that the purpose
of those surfaces concerned the side he was on.
The touch of brain-fever and the dreams began early in
February. For some time, apparently, the curious angles of Gilman's room
had been having a strange, almost hypnotic effect on him; and as the bleak
winter advanced he had found himself staring more and more intently at
the corner where the down-slanting ceiling met the inward-slanting wall.
About this period his inability to concentrate on his formal studies worried
him considerably, his apprehensions about the mid-year examinations being
very acute. But the exaggerated sense of bearing was scarcely less annoying.
Life had become an insistent and almost unendurable cacophony, and there
was that constant, terrifying impression of other sounds - perhaps from
regions beyond life - trembling on the very brink of audibility. So far
as concrete noises went, the rats in the ancient partitions were the worst.
Sometimes their scratching seemed not only furtive but deliberate. When
it came from beyond the slanting north wall it was mixed with a sort of
dry rattling; and when it came from the century-closed loft above the slanting
ceiling Gilman always braced himself as if expecting some horror which
only bided its time before descending to engulf him utterly.
The dreams were wholly beyond the pale of sanity, and
Gilman fell that they must be a result, jointly, of his studies in mathematics
and in folklore. He had been thinking too much about the vague regions
which his formulae told him must lie beyond the three dimensions we know,
and about the possibility that old Keziah Mason - guided by some influence
past all conjecture - had actually found the gate to those regions. The
yellowed country records containing her testimony and that of her accusers
were so damnably suggestive of things beyond human experience - and the
descriptions of the darting little furry object which served as her familiar
were so painfully realistic despite their incredible details.
That object - no larger than a good-sized rat and quaintly
called by the townspeople "Brown Jenkins - seemed to have been the fruit
of a remarkable case of sympathetic herd-delusion, for in 1692 no less
than eleven persons had testified to glimpsing it. There were recent rumours,
too, with a baffling and disconcerting amount of agreement. Witnesses said
it had long hair and the shape of a rat, but that its sharp-toothed, bearded
face was evilly human while its paws were like tiny human hands. It took
messages betwixt old Keziah and the devil, and was nursed on the witch's
blood, which it sucked like a vampire. Its voice was a kind of loathsome
titter, and it could speak all languages. Of all the bizarre monstrosities
in Gilman's dreams, nothing filled him with greater panic and nausea than
this blasphemous and diminutive hybrid, whose image flitted across his
vision in a form a thousandfold more hateful than anything his waking mind
had deduced from the ancient records and the modern whispers.
Gilman's dreams consisted largely in plunges through limitless
abysses of inexplicably coloured twilight and baffingly disordered sound;
abysses whose material and gravitational properties, and whose relation
to his own entity, he could not even begin to explain. He did not walk
or climb, fly or swim, crawl or wriggle; yet always experienced a mode
of motion partly voluntary and partly involuntary. Of his own condition
he could not well judge, for sight of his arms, legs, and torso seemed
always cut off by some odd disarrangement of perspective; but he felt that
his physical organization and faculties were somehow marvellously transmuted
and obliquely projected - though not without a certain grotesque relationship
to his normal proportions and properties.
The abysses were by no means vacant, being crowded with
indescribably angled masses of alien-hued substance, some of which appeared
to be organic while others seemed inorganic. A few of the organic objects
tended to awake vague memories in the back of his mind, though he could
form no conscious idea of what they mockingly resembled or suggested. In
the later dreams he began to distinguish separate categories into which
the organic objects appeared to be divided, and which seemed to involve
in each case a radically different species of conduct-pattern and basic
motivation. Of these categories one seemed to him to include objects slightly
less illogical and irrelevant in their motions than the members of the
other categories.
All the objects - organic and inorganic alike - were totally
beyond description or even comprehension. Gilman sometimes compared the
inorganic matter to prisms, labyrinths, clusters of cubes and planes, and
Cyclopean buildings; and the organic things struck him variously as groups
of bubbles, octopi, centipedes, living Hindoo idols, and intricate arabesques
roused into a kind of ophidian animation. Everything he saw was unspeakably
menacing and horrible; and whenever one of the organic entities appeared
by its motions to be noticing him, he felt a stark, hideous fright which
generally jolted him awake. Of how the organic entities moved, he could
tell no more than of how he moved himself. In time he observed a further
mystery - the tendency of certain entities to appear suddenly out of empty
space, or to disappear totally with equal suddenness. The shrieking, roaring
confusion of sound which permeated the abysses was past all analysis as
to pitch, timbre or rhythm; but seemed to be synchronous with vague visual
changes in all the indefinite objects, organic and inorganic alike. Gilman
had a constant sense of dread that it might rise to some unbearable degree
of intensity during one or another of its obscure, relentlessly inevitable
fluctuations.
But it was not in these vortices of complete alienage
that he saw Brown Jenkin. That shocking little horror was reserved for
certain lighter, sharper dreams which assailed him just before he dropped
into the fullest depths of sleep. He would be lying in the dark fighting
to keep awake when a faint lambent glow would seem to shimmer around the
centuried room, showing in a violet mist the convergence of angled planes
which had seized his brain so insidiously. The horror would appear to pop
out of the rat-hole in the corner and patter toward him over the sagging,
wide-planked floor with evil expectancy in its tiny, bearded human face;
but mercifully, this dream always melted away before the object got close
enough to nuzzle him. It had hellishly long, sharp, canine teeth; Gilman
tried to stop up the rat-hole every day, but each night the real tenants
of the partitions would gnaw away the obstruction, whatever it might be.
Once he had the landlord nail a tin over it, but the next night the rats
gnawed a fresh hole, in making which they pushed or dragged out into the
room a curious little fragment of bone.
Gilman did not report his fever to the doctor, for he
knew he could not pass the examinations if ordered to the college infirmary
when every moment was needed for cramming. As it was, he failed in Calculus
D and Advanced General Psychology, though not without hope of making up
lost ground before the end of the term.
It was in March when the fresh element entered his lighter
preliminary dreaming, and the nightmare shape of Brown Jenkin began to
be companioned by the nebulous blur which grew more and more to resemble
a bent old woman. This addition disturbed him more than he could account
for, but finally he decided that it was like an ancient crone whom he had
twice actually encountered in the dark tangle of lanes near the abandoned
wharves. On those occasions the evil, sardonic, and seemingly unmotivated
stare of the beldame had set him almost shivering - especially the first
time when an overgrown rat darting across the shadowed mouth of a neighbouring
alley had made him think irrationally of Brown Jenkin. Now, he reflected,
those nervous fears were being mirrored in his disordered dreams. That
the influence of the old house was unwholesome he could not deny, but traces
of his early morbid interest still held him there. He argued that the fever
alone was responsible for his nightly fantasies, and that when the touch
abated he would be free from the monstrous visions. Those visions, however,
were of absorbing vividness and convincingness, and whenever he awaked
he retained a vague sense of having undergone much more than he remembered.
He was hideously sure that in unrecalled dreams he had talked with both
Brown Jenkin and the old woman, and that they had been urging him to go
somewhere with them and to meet a third being of greater potency.
Toward the end of March he began to pick up in his mathematics,
though the other stndies bothered him increasingly. He was getting an intuitive
knack for solving Riemannian equations, and astonished Professor Upham
by his comprehension of fourth-dimensional and other problems which had
floored all the rest of the class. One afternoon there was a discussion
of possible freakish curvatures in space, and of theoretical points of
approach or even contact between our part of the cosmos and various other
regions as distant as the farthest stars or the transgalactic gulfs themselves
- or even as fabulously remote as the tentatively conceivable cosmic units
beyond the whole Einsteinian space-time continuum. Gilman's handling of
this theme filled everyone with admiration, even though some of his hypothetical
illustrations caused an increase in the always plentiful gossip about his
nervous and solitary eccentricity. What made the students shake their heads
was his sober theory that a man might - given mathematical knowledge admittedly
beyond all likelihood of human acquirement - step deliberately from the
earth to any other celestial body which might lie at one of an infinity
of specifc points in the cosmic pattern.
Such a step, he said, would require only two stages; first,
a passage out of the three-dimensional sphere we know, and second, a passage
back to the three-dimensional sphere at another point, perhaps one of infinite
remoteness. That this could be accomplished without loss of life was in
many cases conceivable. Any being from any part of three-dimensional space
could probably survive in the fourth dimension; and its survival of the
second stage would depend upon what alien part of three-dimensional space
it might select for its re-entry. Denizens of some planets might be able
to live on certain others - even planets belonging to other galaxies, or
to similar dimensional phases of other space-time continua - though of
course there must be vast numbers of mutually uninhabitable even though
mathematically juxtaposed bodies or zones of space.
It was also possible that the inhabitants of a given dimensional
realm could survive entry to many unknown and incomprehensible realms of
additional or indefinitely multiplied dimensions - be they within or outside
the given space-time continuum - and that the converse would be likewise
true. This was a matter for speculation, though one could be fairly certain
that the type of mutation involved in a passage from any given dimensional
plane to the next higher one would not be destructive of biological integrity
as we understand it. Gilman could not be very clear about his reasons for
this last assumption, but his haziness here was more than overbalanced
by his clearness on other complex points. Professor Upham especially liked
his demonstration of the kinship of higher mathematics to certain phases
of magical lore transmitted down the ages from an ineffable antiquity -
human or pre-human - whose knowledge of the cosmos and its laws was greater
than ours.
Around 1 April Gilman worried cosiderably because his
slow fever did not abate. He was also troubled by what some of his fellow
lodgers said about his sleep-walking. It seened that he was often absent
from his bed and that the creaking of his floor at certain hours of the
night was remarked by the man in the room below. This fellow also spoke
of hearing the tread of shod feet in the night; but Gilman was sure he
must have been mistaken in this, since shoes as well as other apparel were
always precisely in place in the morning. One could develop all sorts of
aural delusions in this morbid old house - for did not Gilman himself,
even in daylight, now feel certain that noises other than rat-scratching
came from the black voids beyond the slanting wall and above the slanting
ceiling? His pathologically sensitive ears began to listen for faint footfalls
in the immemorially sealed loft overhead, and sometimes the illusion of
such things was agonizingly realistic.
However, he knew that he had actually become a somnambulist;
for twice at night his room had been found vacant, though with all his
clothing in place. Of this he had been assured by Frank Elwood, the one
fellow-student whose poverty forced him to room in this squalid and unpopular
house. Elwood had been studying in the small hours and had come up for
help on a differential equation, only to find Gilman absent. It had been
rather presumptuous of him to open the unlocked door after knocking had
failed to rouse a response, but he had needed the help very badly and thought
that his host would not mind a gentle prodding awake. On neither occasion,
though, had Gilman been there; and when told of the matter he wondered
where he could have been wandering, barefoot and with only his night clothes
on. He resolved to investigate the matter if reports of his sleep-walking
continued, and thought of sprinkling flour on the floor of the corridor
to see where his footsteps might lead. The door was the only conceivable
egress, for there was no possible foothold outside the narrow window.
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