H.P. Lovecraft. Hypnos
Hypnos
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written Mar 1922
Published May 1923 in The National Amateur, Vol. 45, No. 5, pages 1-3.
Apropos of sleep, that sinister adventure of all our nights, we may say
that men go to bed daily with an audacity that would be incomprehensible
if we did not know that it is the result of ignorance of the danger.
- Baudelaire
May the merciful gods, if indeed there be such, guard those hours when no
power of the will, or drug that the cunning of man devises, can keep me
from the chasm of sleep. Death is merciful, for there is no return
therefrom, but with him who has come back out of the nethermost chambers
of night, haggard and knowing, peace rests nevermore. Fool that I was to
plunge with such unsanctioned phrensy into mysteries no man was meant to
penetrate; fool or god that he was - my only friend, who led me and went
before me, and who in the end passed into terrors which may yet be mine!
We met, I recall, in a railway station, where he was the center of a crowd
of the vulgarly curious. He was unconscious, having fallen in a kind of
convulsion which imparted to his slight black-clad body a strange
rigidity. I think he was then approaching forty years of age, for there
were deep lines in the face, wan and hollow-cheeked, but oval and actually
beautiful; and touches of gray in the thick, waving hair and small full
beard which had once been of the deepest raven black. His brow was white
as the marble of Pentelicus, and of a height and breadth almost god-like.
I said to myself, with all the ardor of a sculptor, that this man was a
faun's statue out of antique Hellas, dug from a temple's ruins and brought
somehow to life in our stifling age only to feel the chill and pressure of
devastating years. And when he opened his immense, sunken, and wildly
luminous black eyes I knew he would be thenceforth my only friend - the
only friend of one who had never possessed a friend before - for I saw
that such eyes must have looked fully upon the grandeur and the terror of
realms beyond normal consciousness and reality; realms which I had
cherished in fancy, but vainly sought. So as I drove the crowd away I told
him he must come home with me and be my teacher and leader in unfathomed
mysteries, and he assented without speaking a word. Afterward I found that
his voice was music - the music of deep viols and of crystalline spheres.
We talked often in the night, and in the day, when I chiseled busts of him
and carved miniature heads in ivory to immortalize his different
expressions.
Of our studies it is impossible to speak, since they held so slight a
connection with anything of the world as living men conceive it. They were
of that vaster and more appalling universe of dim entity and consciousness
which lies deeper than matter, time, and space, and whose existence we
suspect only in certain forms of sleep - those rare dreams beyond dreams
which come never to common men, and but once or twice in the lifetime of
imaginative men. The cosmos of our waking knowledge, born from such an
universe as a bubble is born from the pipe of a jester, touches it only as
such a bubble may touch its sardonic source when sucked back by the
jester's whim. Men of learning suspect it little and ignore it mostly.
Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed. One man with
Oriental eyes has said that all time and space are relative, and men have
laughed. But even that man with Oriental eyes has done no more than
suspect. I had wished and tried to do more than suspect, and my friend had
tried and partly succeeded. Then we both tried together, and with exotic
drugs courted terrible and forbidden dreams in the tower studio chamber of
the old manor-house in hoary Kent.
Among the agonies of these after days is that chief of torments -
inarticulateness. What I learned and saw in those hours of impious
exploration can never be told - for want of symbols or suggestions in any
language. I say this because from first to last our discoveries partook
only of the nature of sensations; sensations correlated with no impression
which the nervous system of normal humanity is capable of receiving. They
were sensations, yet within them lay unbelievable elements of time and
space - things which at bottom possess no distinct and definite existence.
Human utterance can best convey the general character of our experiences
by calling them plungings or soarings; for in every period of revelation
some part of our minds broke boldly away from all that is real and
present, rushing aerially along shocking, unlighted, and fear-haunted
abysses, and occasionally tearing through certain well-marked and typical
obstacles describable only as viscous, uncouth clouds of vapors.
In these black and bodiless flights we were sometimes alone and sometimes
together. When we were together, my friend was always far ahead; I could
comprehend his presence despite the absence of form by a species of
pictorial memory whereby his face appeared to me, golden from a strange
light and frightful with its weird beauty, its anomalously youthful
cheeks, its burning eyes, its Olympian brow, and its shadowing hair and
growth of beard.
Of the progress of time we kept no record, for time had become to us the
merest illusion. I know only that there must have been something very
singular involved, since we came at length to marvel why we did not grow
old. Our discourse was unholy, and always hideously ambitious - no god or
daemon could have aspired to discoveries and conquest like those which we
planned in whispers. I shiver as I speak of them, and dare not be
explicit; though I will say that my friend once wrote on paper a wish
which he dared not utter with his tongue, and which made me burn the paper
and look affrightedly out of the window at the spangled night sky. I will
hint - only hint - that he had designs which involved the rulership of the
visible universe and more; designs whereby the earth and the stars would
move at his command, and the destinies of all living things be his. I
affirm - I swear - that I had no share in these extreme aspirations.
Anything my friend may have said or written to the contrary must be
erroneous, for I am no man of strength to risk the unmentionable spheres
by which alone one might achieve success.
There was a night when winds from unknown spaces whirled us irresistibly
into limitless vacua beyond all thought and entity. Perceptions of the
most maddeningly untransmissible sort thronged upon us; perceptions of
infinity which at the time convulsed us with joy, yet which are now partly
lost to my memory and partly incapable of presentation to others. Viscous
obstacles were clawed through in rapid succession, and at length I felt
that we had been borne to realms of greater remoteness than any we had
previously known.
My friend was vastly in advance as we plunged into this awesome ocean of
virgin aether, and I could see the sinister exultation on his floating,
luminous, too-youthful memory-face. Suddenly that face became dim and
quickly disappeared, and in a brief space I found myself projected against
an obstacle which I could not penetrate. It was like the others, yet
incalculably denser; a sticky clammy mass, if such terms can be applied to
analogous qualities in a non-material sphere.
I had, I felt, been halted by a barrier which my friend and leader had
successfully passed. Struggling anew, I came to the end of the drug-dream
and opened my physical eyes to the tower studio in whose opposite corner
reclined the pallid and still unconscious form of my fellow dreamer,
weirdly haggard and wildly beautiful as the moon shed gold-green light on
his marble features.
Then, after a short interval, the form in the corner stirred; and may
pitying heaven keep from my sight and sound another thing like that which
took place before me. I cannot tell you how he shrieked, or what vistas of
unvisitable hells gleamed for a second in black eyes crazed with fright. I
can only say that I fainted, and did not stir till he himself recovered
and shook me in his phrensy for someone to keep away the horror and
desolation.
That was the end of our voluntary searchings in the caverns of dream.
Awed, shaken, and portentous, my friend who had been beyond the barrier
warned me that we must never venture within those realms again. What he
had seen, he dared not tell me; but he said from his wisdom that we must
sleep as little as possible, even if drugs were necessary to keep us
awake. That he was right, I soon learned from the unutterable fear which
engulfed me whenever consciousness lapsed.
After each short and inevitable sleep I seemed older, whilst my friend
aged with a rapidity almost shocking. It is hideous to see wrinkles form
and hair whiten almost before one's eyes. Our mode of life was now totally
altered. Heretofore a recluse so far as I know - his true name and origin
never having passed his lips - my friend now became frantic in his fear of
solitude. At night he would not be alone, nor would the company of a few
persons calm him. His sole relief was obtained in revelry of the most
general and boisterous sort; so that few assemblies of the young and gay
were unknown to us.
Our appearance and age seemed to excite in most cases a ridicule which I
keenly resented, but which my friend considered a lesser evil than
solitude. Especially was he afraid to be out of doors alone when the stars
were shining, and if forced to this condition he would often glance
furtively at the sky as if hunted by some monstrous thing therein. He did
not always glance at the same place in the sky - it seemed to be a
different place at different times. On spring evenings it would be low in
the northeast. In the summer it would be nearly overhead. In the autumn it
would be in the northwest. In winter it would be in the east, but mostly
if in the small hours of morning.
Midwinter evenings seemed least dreadful to him. Only after two years did
I connect this fear with anything in particular; but then I began to see
that he must be looking at a special spot on the celestial vault whose
position at different times corresponded to the direction of his glance -
a spot roughly marked by the constellation Corona Borealis.
We now had a studio in London, never separating, but never discussing the
days when we had sought to plumb the mysteries of the unreal world. We
were aged and weak from our drugs, dissipations, and nervous overstrain,
and the thinning hair and beard of my friend had become snow-white. Our
freedom from long sleep was surprising, for seldom did we succumb more
than an hour or two at a time to the shadow which had now grown so
frightful a menace.
Then came one January of fog and rain, when money ran low and drugs were
hard to buy. My statues and ivory heads were all sold, and I had no means
to purchase new materials, or energy to fashion them even had I possessed
them. We suffered terribly, and on a certain night my friend sank into a
deep-breathing sleep from which I could not awaken him. I can recall the
scene now - the desolate, pitch-black garret studio under the eaves with
the rain beating down; the ticking of our lone clock; the fancied ticking
of our watches as they rested on the dressing-table; the creaking of some
swaying shutter in a remote part of the house; certain distant city noises
muffled by fog and space; and, worst of all, the deep, steady, sinister
breathing of my friend on the couch - a rhythmical breathing which seemed
to measure moments of supernal fear and agony for his spirit as it
wandered in spheres forbidden, unimagined, and hideously remote.
The tension of my vigil became oppressive, and a wild train of trivial
impressions and associations thronged through my almost unhinged mind. I
heard a clock strike somewhere - not ours, for that was not a striking
clock - and my morbid fancy found in this a new starting-point for idle
wanderings. Clocks - time - space - infinity - and then my fancy reverted
to the locale as I reflected that even now, beyond the roof and the fog
and the rain and the atmosphere, Corona Borealis was rising in the
northeast. Corona Borealis, which my friend had appeared to dread, and
whose scintillant semicircle of stars must even now be glowing unseen
through the measureless abysses of aether. All at once my feverishly
sensitive ears seemed to detect a new and wholly distinct component in the
soft medley of drug-magnified sounds - a low and damnably insistent whine
from very far away; droning, clamoring, mocking, calling, from the
northeast.
But it was not that distant whine which robbed me of my faculties and set
upon my soul such a seal of fright as may never in life be removed; not
that which drew the shrieks and excited the convulsions which caused
lodgers and police to break down the door. It was not what I heard, but
what I saw; for in that dark, locked, shuttered, and curtained room there
appeared from the black northeast corner a shaft of horrible red-gold
light - a shaft which bore with it no glow to disperse the darkness, but
which streamed only upon the recumbent head of the troubled sleeper,
bringing out in hideous duplication the luminous and strangely youthful
memory-face as I had known it in dreams of abysmal space and unshackled
time, when my friend had pushed behind the barrier to those secret,
innermost and forbidden caverns of nightmare.
And as I looked, I beheld the head rise, the black, liquid, and
deep-sunken eyes open in terror, and the thin, shadowed lips part as if
for a scream too frightful to be uttered. There dwelt in that ghastly and
flexible face, as it shone bodiless, luminous, and rejuvenated in the
blackness, more of stark, teeming, brain-shattering fear than all the rest
of heaven and earth has ever revealed to me.
No word was spoken amidst the distant sound that grew nearer and nearer,
but as I followed the memory-face's mad stare along that cursed shaft of
light to its source, the source whence also the whining came, I, too, saw
for an instant what it saw, and fell with ringing ears in that fit of
shrieking epilepsy which brought the lodgers and the police. Never could I
tell, try as I might, what it actually was that I saw; nor could the still
face tell, for although it must have seen more than I did, it will never
speak again. But always I shall guard against the mocking and insatiate
Hypnos, lord of sleep, against the night sky, and against the mad
ambitions of knowledge and philosophy.
Just what happened is unknown, for not only was my own mind unseated by
the strange and hideous thing, but others were tainted with a
forgetfulness which can mean nothing if not madness. They have said, I
know not for what reason, that I never had a friend; but that art,
philosophy, and insanity had filled all my tragic life. The lodgers and
police on that night soothed me, and the doctor administered something to
quiet me, nor did anyone see what a nightmare event had taken place. My
stricken friend moved them to no pity, but what they found on the couch in
the studio made them give me a praise which sickened me, and now a fame
which I spurn in despair as I sit for hours, bald, gray-bearded,
shriveled, palsied, drug-crazed, and broken, adoring and praying to the
object they found.
For they deny that I sold the last of my statuary, and point with ecstasy
at the thing which the shining shaft of light left cold, petrified, and
unvocal. It is all that remains of my friend; the friend who led me on to
madness and wreckage; a godlike head of such marble as only old Hellas
could yield, young with the youth that is outside time, and with beauteous
bearded face, curved, smiling lips, Olympian brow, and dense locks waving
and poppy-crowned. They say that that haunting memory-face is modeled from
my own, as it was at twenty-five; but upon the marble base is carven a
single name in the letters of Attica - HYPNOS.
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