Hypnos

by H. P. Lovecraft

Apropos of sleep, that sinister adventure of all our nights, we may say that mengo to bed daily with an audacity that would be incomprehensible if we did notknow that it is the result of ignorance of the danger.-BaudelaireMay the merciful gods, if indeed there be such, guard those hours when nopower of the will, or drug that the cunning of man devises, can keep me from thechasm of sleep. Death is merciful, for there is no return therefrom, but withhim who has come back out of the nethermost chambers of night, haggard andknowing, peace rests nevermore. Fool that I was to plunge with such unsanctionedphrensy into mysteries no man was meant to penetrate; fool or god that he was-myonly friend, who led me and went before me, and who in the end passed intoterrors which may yet be mine!We met, I recall, in a railway station, where he was the center of a crowdof the vulgarly curious. He was unconscious, having fallen in a kind ofconvulsion which imparted to his slight black-clad body a strange rigidity. Ithink he was then approaching forty years of age, for there were deep lines inthe face, wan and hollow-cheeked, but oval and actually beautiful; and touchesof gray in the thick, waving hair and small full beard which had once been ofthe deepest raven black. His brow was white as the marble of Pentelicus, and ofa height and breadth almost god-like.I said to myself, with all the ardor of a sculptor, that this man was afaun's statue out of antique Hellas, dug from a temple's ruins and broughtsomehow to life in our stifling age only to feel the chill and pressure ofdevastating years. And when he opened his immense, sunken, and wildly luminousblack eyes I knew he would be thence-forth my only friend-the only friend of onewho had never possessed a friend before-for I saw that such eyes must havelooked fully upon the grandeur and the terror of realms beyond normalconsciousness and reality; realms which I had cherished in fancy, but vainlysought. So as I drove the crowd away I told him he must come home with me and bemy teacher and leader in unfathomed mysteries, and he assented without speakinga word. Afterward I found that his voice was music-the music of deep viols andof crystalline spheres. We talked often in the night, and in the day, when Ichiseled busts of him and carved miniature heads in ivory to immortalize hisdifferent expressions.Of our studies it is impossible to speak, since they held so slight aconnection with anything of the world as living men conceive it. They were ofthat vaster and more appalling universe of dim entity and consciousness whichlies deeper than matter, time, and space, and whose existence we suspect only incertain forms of sleep- those rare dreams beyond dreams which come never tocommon men, and but once or twice in the lifetime of imaginative men. The cosmosof our waking knowledge, born from such an universe as a bubble is born from thepipe of a jester, touches it only as such a bubble may touch its sardonic sourcewhen sucked back by the jester's whim. Men of learning suspect it little andignore 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, andmen have laughed. But even that man with Oriental eyes has done no more thansuspect. I had wished and tried to do more than suspect, and my friend had triedand partly succeeded. Then we both tried together, and with exotic drugs courtedterrible and forbidden dreams in the tower studio chamber of the old manor-housein 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 explorationcan never be told-for want of symbols or suggestions in any language. I say thisbecause from first to last our discoveries partook only of the nature ofsensations; sensations correlated with no impression which the nervous system ofnormal humanity is capable of receiving. They were sensations, yet within themlay unbelievable elements of time and space-things which at bottom possess nodistinct and definite existence. Human utterance can best convey the generalcharacter of our experiences by calling them plungings or soarings; for in everyperiod of revelation some part of our minds broke boldly away from all that isreal and present, rushing aerially along shocking, unlighted, and fear-hauntedabysses, and occasionally tearing through certain well-marked and typicalobstacles describable only as viscous, uncouth clouds of vapors.In these black and bodiless flights we were sometimes alone and sometimestogether. When we were together, my friend was always far ahead; I couldcomprehend his presence despite the absence of form by a species of pictorialmemory whereby his face appeared to me, golden from a strange light andfrightful with its weird beauty, its anomalously youthful cheeks, its burningeyes, 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 themerest illusion. I know only that there must have been something very singularinvolved, since we came at length to marvel why we did not grow old. Ourdiscourse was unholy, and always hideously ambitious-no god or daemon could haveaspired to discoveries and conquest like those which we planned in whispers. Ishiver as I speak of them, and dare not be explicit; though I will say that myfriend once wrote on paper a wish which he dared not utter with his tongue, andwhich made me burn the paper and look affrightedly out of the window at thespangled night sky. I will hint-only hint- that he had designs which involvedthe rulership of the visible universe and more; designs whereby the earth andthe stars would move at his command, and the destinies of all living things behis. I affirm-I swear-that I had no share in these extreme aspirations. Anythingmy friend may have said or written to the contrary must be erroneous, for I amno man of strength to risk the unmentionable spheres by which alone one mightachieve success.There was a night when winds from unknown spaces whirled us irresistiblyinto limitless vacua beyond all thought and entity. Perceptions of the mostmaddeningly untransmissible sort thronged upon us; perceptions of infinity whichat the time convulsed us with joy, yet which are now partly lost to my memoryand partly incapable of presentation to others. Viscous obstacles were clawedthrough in rapid succession, and at length I felt that we had been borne torealms of greater remoteness than any we had previously known.My friend was vastly in advance as we plunged into this awesome ocean ofvirgin aether, and I could see the sinister exultation on his floating,luminous, too-youthful memory-face. Suddenly that face became dim and quicklydisappeared, and in a brief space I found myself projected against an obstaclewhich I could not penetrate. It was like the others, yet incalculably denser; asticky clammy mass, if such terms can be applied to analogous qualities in anon-material sphere.I had, I felt, been halted by a barrier which my friend and leader hadsuccessfully passed. Struggling anew, I came to the end of the drug-dream andopened my physical eyes to the tower studio in whose opposite corner reclinedthe pallid and still unconscious form of my fellow dreamer, weirdly haggard andwildly beautiful as the moon shed gold-green light on his marble features.Then, after a short interval, the form in the corner stirred; and maypitying heaven keep from my sight and sound another thing like that which tookplace before me. I cannot tell you how he shrieked, or what vistas ofunvisitable hells gleamed for a second in black eyes crazed with fright. I canonly say that I fainted, and did not stir till he himself recovered and shook mein 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 thatwe must never venture within those realms again. What he had seen, he dared nottell 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 learnedfrom the unutterable fear which engulfed me whenever consciousness lapsed.After each short and inevitable sleep I seemed older, whilst my friend agedwith a rapidity almost shocking. It is hideous to see wrinkles form and hairwhiten 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 havingpassed his lips-my friend now became frantic in his fear of solitude. At nighthe would not be alone, nor would the company of a few persons calm him. His solerelief was obtained in revelry of the most general and boisterous sort; so thatfew assemblies of the young and gay were unknown to us.Our appearance and age seemed to excite in most cases a ridicule which Ikeenly 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 ifhunted by some monstrous thing therein. He did not always glance at the sameplace in the sky-it seemed to be a different place at different times. On springevenings it would be low in the northeast. In the summer it would be nearlyoverhead. In the autumn it would be in the northwest. In winter it would be inthe east, but mostly if in the small hours of morning.Midwinter evenings seemed least dreadful to him. Only after two years did Iconnect this fear with anything in particular; but then I began to see that hemust be looking at a special spot on the celestial vault whose position atdifferent times corresponded to the direction of his glance-a spot roughlymarked by the constellation Corona Borealis.We now had a studio in London, never separating, but never discussing thedays when we had sought to plumb the mysteries of the unreal world. We were agedand weak from our drugs, dissipations, and nervous overstrain, and the thinninghair and beard of my friend had become snow-white. Our freedom from long sleepwas surprising, for seldom did we succumb more than an hour or two at a time tothe shadow which had now grown so frightful a menace.Then came one January of fog and rain, when money ran low and drugs werehard to buy. My statues and ivory heads were all sold, and I had no means topurchase new materials, or energy to fashion them even had I possessed them. Wesuffered terribly, and on a certain night my friend sank into a deep-breathingsleep from which I could not awaken him. I can recall the scene now-thedesolate, 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 restedon the dressing-table; the creaking of some swaying shutter in a remote part ofthe house; certain distant city noises muffled by fog and space; and, worst ofall, the deep, steady, sinister breathing of my friend on the couch-a rhythmicalbreathing which seemed to measure moments of supernal fear and agony for hisspirit as it wandered in spheres forbidden, unimagined, and hideously remote.The tension of my vigil became oppressive, and a wild train of trivialimpressions and associations thronged through my almost unhinged mind. I heard aclock strike somewhere-not ours, for that was not a striking clock-and my morbidfancy found in this a new starting-point for idle wanderings.Clocks-time-space-infinity- and then my fancy reverted to the locale as Ireflected that even now, beyond the roof and the fog and the rain and theatmosphere, Corona Borealis was rising in the northeast. Corona Borealis, whichmy friend had appeared to dread, and whose scintillant semicircle of stars musteven now be glowing unseen through the measureless abysses of aether. All atonce my feverishly sensitive ears seemed to detect a new and wholly distinctcomponent in the soft medley of drug-magnified sounds-a low and damnablyinsistent whine from very far away; droning, clamoring, mocking, calling, fromthe northeast.But it was not that distant whine which robbed me of my faculties and setupon my soul such a seal of fright as may never in life be removed; not thatwhich drew the shrieks and excited the convulsions which caused lodgers andpolice to break down the door. It was not what I heard, but what I saw; for inthat dark, locked, shuttered, and curtained room there appeared from the blacknortheast corner a shaft of horrible red-gold light-a shaft which bore with itno glow to disperse the darkness, but which streamed only upon the recumbenthead of the troubled sleeper, bringing out in hideous duplication the luminousand strangely youthful memory-face as I had known it in dreams of abysmal spaceand unshackled time, when my friend had pushed behind the barrier to thosesecret, innermost and forbidden caverns of nightmare.And as I looked, I beheld the head rise, the black, liquid, and deep-sunkeneyes open in terror, and the thin, shadowed lips part as if for a scream toofrightful to be uttered. There dwelt in that ghastly and flexible face, as itshone bodiless, luminous, and rejuvenated in the blackness, more of stark,teeming, brain-shattering fear than all the rest of heaven and earth has everrevealed to me.No word was spoken amidst the distant sound that grew nearer and nearer, butas I followed the memory-face's mad stare along that cursed shaft of light toits source, the source whence also the whining came, I, too, saw for an instantwhat it saw, and fell with ringing ears in that fit of shrieking epilepsy whichbrought the lodgers and the police. Never could I tell, try as I might, what itactually was that I saw; nor could the still face tell, for although it musthave seen more than I did, it will never speak again. But always I shall guardagainst 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 thestrange and hideous thing, but others were tainted with a forgetfulness whichcan 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 allmy tragic life. The lodgers and police on that night soothed me, and the doctoradministered something to quiet me, nor did anyone see what a nightmare eventhad taken place. My stricken friend moved them to no pity, but what they foundon the couch in the studio made them give me a praise which sickened me, and nowa 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 objectthey found.For they deny that I sold the last of my statuary, and point with ecstasy atthe thing which the shining shaft of light left cold, petrified, and unvocal. Itis all that remains of my friend; the friend who led me on to madness andwreckage; a godlike head of such marble as only old Hellas could yield, youngwith the youth that is outside time, and with beauteous bearded face, curved,smiling lips, Olympian brow, and dense locks waving and poppy-crowned. They saythat 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 ofAttica-HYPNOS.

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