Horrible beyond conception was the change which
had taken place in my best friend, Crawford Tillinghast. I had not seen
him since that day, two months and a half before, when he 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. 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 grayed,
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, a wild disorder of dress, a bushiness
of dark hair white at the roots, and an unchecked growth of white beard
on a face once clean-shaven, the cumulative effect is quite shocking. But
such was the aspect of Crawford Tilllinghast on the night his half coherent
message brought me to his door after my weeks of exile; such was the specter
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.
That Crawford Tilinghast should ever have studied science and philosophy
was a mistake. These things should be left to the frigid and impersonal
investigator for they offer two equally tragic alternatives to the man
of feeling and action; despair, 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.
"What do we know," 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 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 dawn the barriers. I am not
joking. Within twenty-four hours that machine near the table will generate
waves acting on unrecognized 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 recognize. 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.
Yet I soon subordinated all my fears to my growing curiosity and
fascination. Just what Crawford Tillinghast 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.
"It would he too much... I would not dare," 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 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, outrè 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 is ultra-violet."
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
the truth, and I intend to show it to you. Do you wonder how it
will seem? I will tell you." Here Trninghast seated himself directly opposite
me, blowing out his candle and staring hideously into my eyes. "Your existing
sense-organs - 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. That gland is the great
sense organ of organs - I have found out. 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
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 long silent I fancied myself in some
vast 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 space. There seemed
to a void, and nothing more, and I felt a childish fear which prompted
me to draw from my hip pocket the revolver I carried after dark since the
night I was held up in East Providence. 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 machines, 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 and he bade me to remain as quiet and receptive as possible.
"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 house-keeper - 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 "beyond." 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 unrecognizable shapes or clouds, penetrating the solid
roof at a point ahead and to the right of me. Then I glimpsed the temple
- like effect again, but this time the pillars reached up into an aerial
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 the 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 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. It was indeed somewhat
familiar, for the unusual part was superimposed upon the usual terrestrial
scene much as a cinema view may be thrown upon the painted curtain of a
theater. I saw the attic laboratory, the electrical machine, and the unsightly
form of Tillinghast opposite me; but of all the space unoccupied by familiar
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 inky, jellyfish 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 thing 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.
"You see them? You see them? You see the things that float and flop
about you and through you every moment of your life? You see the creatures
that form what men call the pure air and the blue sky? Have I not succeeded
in breaking down the barrier; have I not shown you worlds that no other
living men have seen?" I heard his scream through the horrible chaos, and
looked at the wild face thrust so offensively close to mine. His eyes were
pits of flame, and they glared at me with what I now saw was overwhelming
hatred. The machine droned detestably.
"You think those floundering things wiped out the servants? Fool,
they are harmless! But the servants are gone, aren't they? You tried to
stop me; you discouraged me when I needed every drop of encouragement I
could get; you were afraid of the cosmic truth, you damned coward, but
now I've got you! What swept up the servants? What made them scream so
loud?... Don't know, eh! You'll know soon enough. Look at me - listen to
what I say - do you suppose there are really any such things as time and
magnitude? Do you fancy there are such things as form or matter? I tell
you, I have struck depths that your little brain can't picture. I have
seen beyond the bounds of infinity and drawn down daemons from the stars...
I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death
and madness... Space belongs to me, do you hear? Things are hunting me
now - the things that devour and dissolve - but I know how to elude them.
It is you they will get, as they got the servants... Stirring, dear sir?
I told you it was dangerous to move, I have saved you so far by telling
you to keep still - saved you to see more sights and to listen to me. If
you had moved, they would have been at you long ago. Don't worry, they
won't hurt you. They didn't hurt the servants - it was the seeing
that made the poor devils scream so. My pets are not pretty, for they come
out of places where aesthetic standards are - very different. Disintegration
is quite painless, I assure you -- but I want you to see them. I
almost saw them, but I knew how to stop. You are curious? I always knew
you were no scientist. Trembling, eh. Trembling with anxiety to see the
ultimate things I have discovered. Why don't you move, then? Tired? Well,
don't worry, my friend, for they are coming... Look, look, curse
you, look... it's just over your left shoulder..."
What remains to be told is very brief, and may be familiar to you
from the newspaper accounts. The police heard a shot in the old Tillinghast
house and found us there - Tillinghast dead and me unconscious. They arrested
me because the revolver was in my hand, but released me in three hours,
after they found it was apoplexy which had finished Tillinghast and saw
that my shot had been directed at the noxious machine which now lay hopelessly
shattered on the laboratory floor. I did not tell very much of what I had
seen, for I feared the coroner would be skeptical; but from the evasive
outline I did give, the doctor told me that I had undoubtedly been hypnotized
by the vindictive and homicidal madman.
I wish I could believe that doctor. It would help my shaky nerves
if I could dismiss what I now have to think of the air and the sky about
and above me. I never feel alone or comfortable, and a hideous sense of
pursuit sometimes comes chillingly on me when I am weary. What prevents
me from believing the doctor is one simple fact - that the police never
found the bodies of those servants whom they say Crawford Tillinghast murdered.
