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 thence-forth 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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