Hypnos
By H. P. lovecraft
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
frensy 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
demon 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
vacum 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 frensy 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.
