To S. L.
“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 centre 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 grey 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 godlike. I said to myself, with all the ardour 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 chiselled busts of him and carved miniature heads
in ivory to immortalise his different expressions.
Of our studies it is impossible to speak, since they held so slight a connexion
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 aërially
along shocking, unlighted, and fear-haunted abysses, and occasionally
tearing through
certain well-marked and typical obstacles describable only as viscous, uncouth clouds or vapours.
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 conquests 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 warfare in 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 the 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 the 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 local 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, clamouring, 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 and 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, grey-bearded, shrivelled, 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 modelled from my own, as it was at twenty-five, but
upon the marble base is carven a single name in the letters of Attica—
’ΥΠΝΟΣ.
