H.P. Lovecraft. Dreams in the Witch-House
Dreams in the Witch-House
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written Jan-28 Feb 1932
Published July 1933 in Weird Tales, Vol. 22, No. 1, 86-111.
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.
As April advanced, Gilman's fever-sharpened ears were disturbed by the
whining prayers of a superstitious loom-fixer named Joe Mazurewicz who had
a room on the ground floor. Mazurewicz had told long, rambling stories
about the ghost of old Keziah and the furry sharp-fanged, nuzzling thing,
and had said he was so badly haunted at times that only his silver
crucifix - given him for the purpose by Father Iwanicki of St. Stanislaus'
Church - could bring him relief. Now he was praying because the Witches'
Sabbath was drawing near. May Eve was Walpurgis Night, when hell's
blackest evil roamed the earth and all the slaves of Satan gathered for
nameless rites and deeds. It was always a very bad lime in Arkham, even
though the fine folks up in Miskatonic Avenue and High and Saltonstall
Streets pretended to know nothing about it. There would be bad doings, and
a child or two would probably be missing. Joe knew about such things, for
his grandmother in the old country had heard tales from her grandmother.
It was wise to pray and count one's beads at this season. For three months
Keziah and Brown Jenkin had not been near Joe's room, nor near Paul
Choynski's room, nor anywhere else - and it meant no good when they held
off like that. They must be up to something.
Gilman dropped in at the doctor's office on the sixteenth of the month,
and was surprised to find his temperature was not as high as he had
feared. The physician questioned him sharply, and advised him to see a
nerve specialist. On reflection, he was glad he had not consulted the
still more inquisitive college doctor. Old Waldron, who had curtailed his
activities before, would have made him take a rest - an impossible thing
now that he was so close to great results in his equations. He was
certainly near the boundary between the known universe and the fourth
dimension, and who could say how much farther he might go?
But even as these thoughts came to him he wondered at the source of his
strange confidence. Did all of this perilous sense of immininence come
from the formulae on the sheets he covered day by day? The soft, stealthy,
imaginary footsteps in the sealed loft above were unnerving. And now, too,
there was a growing feeling that somebody was constantly persuading him to
do something terrible which he could not do. How about the somnambulism?
Where did he go sometimes in the night? And what was that faint suggestion
of sound which once in a while seemed to trickle through the confusion of
identifiable sounds even in broad daylight and full wakefulness? Its
rhythm did not correspond to anything on earth, unless perhaps to the
cadence of one or two unmentionable Sabbat-chants, and sometimes he feared
it corresponded to certain attributes of the vague shrieking or roaring in
those wholly alien abysses of dream.
The dreams were meanwhile getting to be atrocious. In the lighter
preliminary phase the evil old woman was now of fiendish distinctness, and
Gilman knew she was the one who had frightened him in the slums. Her bent
back, long nose, and shrivelled chin were unmistakable, and her shapeless
brown garments were like those he remembered. The expression on her face
was one of hideous malevolence and exultation, and when he awaked he could
recall a croaking voice that persuaded and threatened. He must meet the
Black Man and go with them all to the throne of Azathoth at the centre of
ultimate chaos. That was what she said. He must sign the book of Azathoth
in his own blood and take a new secret name now that his independent
delvings had gone so far. What kept him from going with her and Brown
Jenkin and the other to the throne of Chaos where the thin flutes pipe
mindlessly was the fact that he had seen the name "Azathoth" in the
Necronomicon, and knew it stood for a primal evil too horrible for
description.
The old woman always appeared out of thin air near the corner where the
downward slant met the inward slant. She seemed to crystallize at a point
closer to the ceiling than to the floor, and every night she was a little
nearer and more distinct before the dream shifted. Brown Jenkin, too was
always a little nearer at the last, and its yellowish-white fangs
glistened shockingly in that unearthly violet phosphorescence. Its shrill
loathsome tittering struck more and more into Gilman's head, and he could
remember in the morning how it had pronounced the words "Azathoth" and
"Nyarlathotep".
In the deeper dreams everything was likewise more distinct, and Gilman
felt that the twilight abysses around him were those of the fourth
dimension. Those organic entities whose motions seemed least flagrantly
irrelevant and unmotivated were probably projections of life-forms from
our own planet, including human beings. What the others were in their own
dimensional sphere or spheres he dared not try to think. Two of the less
irrelevantly moving things - a rather large congeries of iridescent,
prolately spheroidal bubbles and a very much smaller polyhedron of unknown
colours and rapidly shifting surface angles - seemed to take notice of him
and follow him about or float ahead as he changed position among the titan
prisms, labyrinths, cube-and-plane clusters and quasi-buildings; and all
the while the vague shrieking and roaring waxed louder and louder, as if
approaching some monstrous climax of utterly unendurable intensity.
During the night of 19-20 April the new development occurred. Gilman was
half involuntarily moving about in the twilight abysses with the
bubble-mass and the small polyhedron floating ahead when he noticed the