H.P. Lovecraft. The Shadow Out of Time
The Shadow Out of Time
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written Nov 1934-Mar 1935
Published June 1936 in Astounding Stories, Vol. 17, No. 4, p. 110-54.
I
After twenty-two years of nightmare and terror, saved only by a desperate
conviction of the mythical source of certain impressions, I am unwilling
to vouch for the truth of that which I think I found in Western Australia
on the night of 17-18 July 1935. There is reason to hope that my
experience was wholly or partly an hallucination - for which, indeed,
abundant causes existed. And yet, its realism was so hideous that I
sometimes find hope impossible.
If the thing did happen, then man must be prepared to accept notions of
the cosmos, and of his own place in the seething vortex of time, whose
merest mention is paralysing. He must, too, be placed on guard against a
specific, lurking peril which, though it will never engulf the whole race,
may impose monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturesome
members of it.
It is for this latter reason that I urge, with all the force of my being,
final abandonment of all the attempts at unearthing those fragments of
unknown, primordial masonry which my expedition set out to investigate.
Assuming that I was sane and awake, my experience on that night was such
as has befallen no man before. It was, moreover, a frightful confirmation
of all I had sought to dismiss as myth and dream. Mercifull there is no
proof, for in my fright I lost the awesome object which would - if real
and brought out of that noxious abyss - have formed irrefutable evidence.
When I came upon the horror I was alone - and I have up to now told no one
about it. I could not stop the others from digging in its direction, but
chance and the shifting sand have so far saved them from finding it. Now I
must formulate some definite statement - not only for the sake of my own
mental balance, but to warn such others as may read it seriously.
These pages - much in whose earlier parts will be familiar to close
readers of the general and scientific press - are written in the cabin of
the ship that is bringing me home. I shall give them to my son, Professor
Wingate Peaslee of Miskatonic University - the only member of my family
who stuck to me after my queer amnesia of long ago, and the man best
informed on the inner facts of my case. Of all living persons, he is least
likely to ridicule what I shall tell of that fateful night.
I did not enlighten him orally before sailing, because I think he had
better have the revelation in written form. Reading and re-reading at
leisure will leave with him a more convincing picture than my confused
tongue could hope to convey.
He can do anything that he thinks best with this account - showing it,
with suitable comment, in any quarters where it will be likely to
accomplish good. It is for the sake of such readers as are unfamiliar with
the earlier phases of my case that I am prefacing the revelation itself
with a fairly ample summary of its background.
My name is Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, and those who recall the newspaper
tales of a generation back - or the letters and articles in psychological
journals six or seven years ago - will know who and what I am. The press
was filled with the details of my strange amnesia in 1908-13, and much was
made of the traditions of horror, madness, and witchcraft which lurked
behind the ancient Massachusetts town then and now forming my place of
residence. Yet I would have it known that there is nothing whatever of the
mad or sinister in my heredity and early life. This is a highly important
fact in view of the shadow which fell so suddenly upon me from outside
sources.
It may be that centuries of dark brooding had given to crumbling,
whisper-haunted Arkham a peculiar vulnerability as regards such shadows -
though even this seems doubtful in the light of those other cases which I
later came to study. But the chief point is that my own ancestry and
background are altogether normal. What came, came from somewhere else -
where I even now hesitate to assert in plain words.
I am the son of Jonathan and Hannah (Wingate) Peaslee, both of wholesome
old Haverhill stock. I was born and reared in Haverhill - at the old
homestead in Boardman Street near Golden Hill - and did not go to Arkham
till I entered Miskatonic University as instructor of political economy in
1895.
For thirteen years more my life ran smoothly and happily. I married Alice
Keezar of Haverhill in 1896, and my three children, Robert, Wingate and
Hannah were born in 1898, 1900, and 1903, respectively. In 1898 I became
an associate professor, and in 1902 a full professor. At no time had I the
least interest in either occultism or abnormal psychology.
It was on Thursday, 14 May 1908, that the queer amnesia came. The thing
was quite sudden, though later I realized that certain brief, glimmering
visions of several, hours previous - chaotic visions which disturbed me
greatly because they were so unprecedented - must have formed premonitory
symptoms. My head was aching, and I had a singular feeling - altogether
new to me - that some one else was trying to get possession of my
thoughts.
The collapse occurred about 10.20 A.M., while I was conducting a class in
Political Economy VI - history and present tendencies of economics - for
juniors and a few sophomores. I began to see strange shapes before my
eyes, and to feel that I was in a grotesque room other than the classroom.
My thoughts and speech wandered from my subject, and the students saw that
something was gravely amiss. Then I slumped down, unconscious, in my
chair, in a stupor from which no one could arouse me. Nor did my rightful
faculties again look out upon the daylight of our normal world for five
years, four months, and thirteen days.
It is, of course, from others that I have learned what followed. I showed
no sign of consciousness for sixteen and a half hours though removed to my
home at 27 Crane Street, and given the best of medical attention.
At 3 A.M. May my eyes opened and began to speak and my family were
thoroughly frightened by the trend of my expression and language. It was
clear that I had no remembrance of my identity and my past, though for
some reason seemed anxious to conceal his lack of knowledge. My eyes
glazed strangely at the persons around me, and the flections of my facial
muscles were altogether unfamiliar.
Even my speech seemed awkward and foreign. I used my vocal organs clumsily
and gropingly, and my diction had a curiously stilted quality, as if I had
laboriously learned the English language from books. The pronunciation was
barbarously alien, whilst the idiom seemed to include both scraps of
curious archaism and expressions of a wholly incomprehensible cast.
Of the latter, one in particular was very potently - even terrifiedly -
recalled by the youngest of the physicians twenty years afterward. For at
that late period such a phrase began to have an actual currency - first in
England and then in the United States - and though of much complexity and
indisputable newness, it reproduced in every least particular the
mystifying words of the strange Arkham patient of 1908.
Physical strength returned at once, although I required an odd amount of
re-education in the use of my hands, legs, and bodily apparatus in
general. Because of this and other handicaps inherent in the mnemonic
lapse, I was for some time kept under strict medical care.
When I saw that my attempts to conceal the lapse had failed, I admitted it
openly, and became eager for information of all sorts. Indeed, it seemed
to the doctors that I lost interest in my proper personality as soon as I
found the case of amnesia accepted as a natural thing.
They noticed that my chief efforts were to master certain points in
history, science, art, language, and folklore - some of them tremendously
abstruse, and some childishly simple - which remained, very oddly in many
cases, outside my consciousness.
At the same time they noticed that I had an inexplicable command of many
almost unknown sorts of knowledge - a command which I seemed to wish to
hide rather than display. I would inadvertently refer, with casual
assurance, to specific events in dim ages outside of the range of accepted
history - passing off such references as a jest when I saw the surprise
they created. And I had a way of speaking of the future which two or three
times caused actual fright.
These uncanny flashes soon ceased to appear, though some observers laid
their vanishment more to a certain furtive caution on my part than to any
waning of the strange knowledge behind them. Indeed, I seemed anomalously
avid to absorb the speech, customs, and perspectives of the age around me;
as if I were a studious traveller from a far, foreign land.
As soon as permitted, I haunted the college library at all hours; and
shortly began to arrange for those odd travels, and special courses at
American and European Universities, which evoked so much comment during
the next few years.
I did not at any time suffer from a lack of learned contacts, for my case
had a mild celebrity among the psychologists of the period. I was lectured
upon as a typical example of secondary personality - even though I seemed
to puzzle the lecturers now and then with some bizarre symptoms or some
queer trace of carefully veiled mockery.
Of real friendliness, however, I encountered little. Something in my
aspect and speech seemed to excite vague fears and aversions in every one
I met, as if I were a being infinitely removed from all that is normal and
healthful. This idea of a black, hidden horror connected with incalculable
gulfs of some sort of distance was oddly widespread and persistent.
My own family formed no exception. From the moment of my strange waking my
wife had regarded me with extreme horror and loathing, vowing that I was
some utter alien usurping the body of her husband. In 1910 she obtained a
legal divorce, nor would she ever consent to see me even after my return
to normality in 1913. These feelings were shared by my elder son and my
small daughter, neither of whom I have ever seen since.
Only my second son, Wingate, seemed able to conquer the terror and
repulsion which my change aroused. He indeed felt that I was a stranger,
but though only eight years old held fast to a faith that my proper self
would return. When it did return he sought me out, and the courts gave me
his custody. In succeeding years he helped me with the studies to which I
was driven, and today, at thirty-five, he is a professor of psychology at
Miskatonic.
But I do not wonder at the horror caused - for certainly, the mind, voice,
and facial expression of the being that awakened on l5 May 1908, were not
those of Nathaniel Wingate Peastee.
I will not attempt to tell much of my life from 1908 to 1913, since
readers may glean I the outward essentials - as I largely had to do - from
files of old newspapers and scientific journals.
I was given charge of my funds, and spent them slowly and on the whole
wisely, in travel and in study at various centres of learning. My travels,
however, were singular in the extreme, involving long visits to remote and
desolate places.
In 1909 I spent a month in the Himalayas, and in 1911 roused much
attention through a camel trip into the unknown deserts of Arabia. What
happened on those journeys I have never been able to learn.
During the summer of l9l2 I chartered a ship and sailed in the Arctic,
north of Spitzbergen, afterward showing signs of disappointment.
Later in that year I spent weeks - alone beyond the limits of previous or
subsequent exploration in the vast limestone cavern systems of western
Virginia - black labyrinths so complex that no retracing of my steps could
even be considered.
My sojourns at the universities were marked by abnormally rapid
assimilation, as if the secondary personality had an intelligence
enormously superior to my own. I have found, also, that my rate of reading
and solitary study was phenomenal. I could master every detail of a book
merely by glancing over it as fast as I could turn the leaves; while my
skill at interpreting complex figures in an instant was veritably awesome.
At times there appeared almost ugly reports of my power to influence the
thoughts and acts of others, though I seemed to have taken care to
minimize displays of this faculty.
Other ugly reports concerned my intimacy with leaders of occultist groups,
and scholars suspected of connection with nameless bands of abhorrent
elder-world hierophants. These rumours, though never proved at the time,
were doubtless stimulated by the known tenor of some of my reading - for
the consulltation of rare books at libraries cannot be effected secretly.
There is tangible proof - in the form of marginal notes - that I went
minutely through such things as the Comte d'Erlette's Cultes des Goules,
Ludvig Prinn's De Vermis Mysteriis, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von
Junzt, the surviving fragments of the puzzling Book of Eibon, and the
dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. Then, too, it is
undeniable that a fresh and evil wave of underground cult activity set in
about the time of my odd mutation.
In the summer of 1913 I began to display signs of ennui and flagging
interest, and to hint to various associates that a change might soon be
expected in me. I spoke of returning memories of my earlier life - though
most auditors judged me insincere, since all the recollections I gave were
casual, and such as might have been learned from my old private papers.
About the middle of August I returned to Arkham and re-opened my
long-closed house in Crane Street. Here I installed a mechanism of the
most curious aspect, constructed piecemeal by different makers of
scientific apparatus in Europe and America, and guarded carefully from the
sight of any one intelligent enough to analyse it.
Those who did see it - a workman, a servant, and the new housekeeper - say
that it was a queer mixture of rods, wheels, and mirros, though only about
two feet tall, one foot wide, and one foot thick. The central mirror was
circular and convex. All this is borne out by such makers of parts as can
be located.
On the evening of Friday, 26 September, I dismissed the housekeeper and
the maid until noon of the next day. Lights burned in the house till late,
and a lean, dark, curiously foreign-looking man called in an automobile.
It was about one A.M. that the lights were last seen. At 2.15 A.M. a
policeman observed the place in darkness, but the strager's motor still at
the curb. By 4 o'clock the motor was certainly gone.
It was at 6 o'clock that a hesitant, foreign voice on the telephone asked
Dr Wilson to call at my house and bring me out of a peculiar faint. This
call - a long-distance one - was later traced to a public booth in the
North Station in Boston, but no sign of the lean foreigner was ever
unearthed.
When the doctor reached my house he found me unconscious in the sitting
room - in an easy-chair with a table drawn up before it. On the polished
top were scratches showing where some heavy object had rested. The queer
machine was gone, nor was anything afterward heard of it. Undoubtedly the
dark, lean foreigner had taken it away.
In the library grate were abundant ashes, evidently left from the burning
of the every remainmg scrap of paper on which I had written since the
advent of the amnesia. Dr Wilson found my breathing very peculiar, but
after a hypodermic injection it became more regular.
At 11.15 A.M., 27 September, I stirred vigorously, and my hitherto
masklike face began to show signs of expression. Dr Wilson remarked that
the expression was not that of my secondary personality, but seemed much
like that of my normal self. About 11.30 I muttered some very curious
syllables - syllables which seemed unrelated to any human speech. I
appeared, too, to struggle against something. Then, just afternoon - the
housekeeper and the maid having meanwhile returned - I began to mutter in
English.
"- of the orthodox economists of that period, Jevons typifies the
prevailing trend toward scientific correlation. His attempt to link the
commercial cycle of prosperity and depression with the physical cycle of
the solar spots forms perhaps the apex of -"
Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee had come back - a spirit in whose time scale it
was still Thursday morning in 1908, with the economics class gazing up at
the battered desk on the platform.
II
My reabsorption into normal life was a painful and difficult process. The
loss of over five years creates more complications than can be imagined,
and in my case there were countless matters to be adjusted.
What I heard of my actions since 1908 astonished and disturbed me, but I
tried to view the matter as philosophically as I could. At last, regaining
custody of my second son, Wingate, I settled down with him in the Crane
Street house and endeavoured to resume my teaching - my old professorship
having been kindly offered me by the college.
I began work with the February, 1914, term, and kept at it just a year. By
that time I realized how badly my experience had shaken me. Though
perfectly sane - I hoped - and with no flaw in my original personality, I
had not the nervous energy of the old days. Vague dreams and queer ideas
continually haunted me, and when the outbreak of the World War turned my
mind to history I found myself thinking of periods and events in the
oddest possible fashion.
My conception of time, my ability to distinguish between consecutiveness
and simultaneousness - seemed subtly disordered so that I formed
chimerical notions about living in one age and casting one's mind all over
etenity for knowledge of past and future ages.
The war gave me strange impressions of remembering some of its far-off
consequences - as if I knew how it was coming out and could look back upon
it in the light of future information. All such quasi-memories were
attended with much pain, and with a feeling that some artificial
psychological barrier was set a against them.
When I diffidently hinted to others about my impressions I met with varied
responses. Some persons looked uncomfortably at me, but men in the
mathematics department spoke of new developments in those theories of
relativity - then discussed only in learned circles - which were later to
become so famous. Dr. Albert Einstein, they said, was rapidly reducing
time to the status of a mere dimension.
But the dreams and disturbed feelings gained on me, so that I had to drop
my regular work in 1915. Certainly the impressions were taking an annoying
shape - giving me the persistent notion that my amnesia had formed some
unholy sort of exchange; that the secondary personality had indeed had had
suffered displacement. been an in-
Thus I was driven to vague and fright speculations concerning the
whereabouts of my true self during the years that another had held my
body. The curious knowledge and strange conduct of my body's late tenant
troubled me more and more as I learned further details from persons,
papers, and magazines.
Queernesses that had baffled others seemed to harmonize terribly with some
background of black knowledge which festered in the chasms of my
subconscious. I began to search feverishly for every scrap of information
bearing on the studies and travels of that other one during the dark
years.
Not all of my troubles were as semi-abstract as this. There were the
dreams - and these seemed to grow in vividness and concreteness. Knowing
how most would regard them, I seldom mentioned them to anyone but my son
or certain trusted psychologists, but eventually I commenced a scientific
study of other cases in order to see how typical or nontypical such
visions might be among amnesia victims.
My results, aided by psychologists, historians, anthropologists, and
mental specialists of wide experience, and by a study that included all
records of split personalities from the days of daemonic-possession
legends to the medically realistic present, at first bothered me more than
they consoled me.
I soon found that my dreams had, indeed, no counterpart in the
overwhelming bulk of true amnesia cases. There remained, however, a tiny
residue of accounts which for years baffled and shocked me with their
parallelism to my own experience. Some of them were bits of ancient
folklore; others were case histories in the annals of medicine; one or two
were anecdotes obscurely buried in standard histories.
It thus appeared that, while my special kind of affliction was
prodigiously rare, instances of it had occurred at long intervals ever
since the beginnig of men's annals. Some centuries might contain one, two,
or three cases, others none - or at least none whose record survived.
The essence was always the same - a person of keen thoughtfulness seized a
strange secondary life and leading for a greater or lesser period an
utterly alien existence typified at first by vocal and bodily awkwardness,
an later by a wholesale acquisition of scientific, historic, artistic, and
anthropologic knowledge; an acquisition carried on with feverish zest and
with a wholly abnormal absorptive power. Then a sudden return of rightful
consciousness, intermittently plagued ever after with vague unplaceable
dreams suggesting fragments of some hideous memory elaborately blotted
out.
And the close resemblance of those nightmares to my own - even in some of
the smallest particulars - left no doubt in my mind of their significantly
