H.P. Lovecraft. From Beyond
From Beyond
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written 1920
Published June 1934 in The Fantasy Fan, 1, No. 10, 147-51, 160.
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, outre 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.
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The Lovecraft Library wishes to extend its gratitude to Eulogio Garcia
Recalde for transcribing this text.