From Beyond
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written 1920
Published June 1934 in The Fantasy Fan, 1, No. 10, 147-51, 160.
Horrible beyond conception was the change which had taken place in my best
friend, Crawford Tillinghast. I had not seen him since that day, two months and
a half before, when he told me toward what goal his physical and metaphysical
researches were leading; when he had answered my awed and almost frightened
remonstrances by driving me from his laboratory and his house in a burst of
fanatical rage. I had known that he now remained mostly shut in the attic
laboratory with that accursed electrical machine, eating little and excluding
even the servants, but I had not thought that a brief period of ten weeks could
so alter and disfigure any human creature. It is not pleasant to see a stout man
suddenly grown thin, and it is even worse when the baggy skin becomes yellowed
or grayed, the eyes sunken, circled, and uncannily glowing, the forehead veined
and corrugated, and the hands tremulous and twitching. And if added to this
there be a repellent unkemptness, a wild disorder of dress, a bushiness of dark
hair white at the roots, and an unchecked growth of white beard on a face once
clean-shaven, the cumulative effect is quite shocking. But such was the aspect
of Crawford Tilllinghast on the night his half coherent message brought me to
his door after my weeks of exile; such was the specter that trembled as it
admitted me, candle in hand, and glanced furtively over its shoulder as if
fearful of unseen things in the ancient, lonely house set back from Benevolent
Street.
That Crawford Tilinghast should ever have studied science and philosophy was a
mistake. These things should be left to the frigid and impersonal investigator
for they offer two equally tragic alternatives to the man of feeling and action;
despair, if he fail in his quest, and terrors unutterable and unimaginable if he
succeed. Tillinghast had once been the prey of failure, solitary and melancholy;
but now I knew, with nauseating fears of my own, that he was the prey of
success. I had indeed warned him ten weeks before, when he burst forth with his
tale of what he felt himself about to discover. He had been flushed and excited
then, talking in a high and unnatural, though always pedantic, voice.
"What do we know," he had said, "of the world and the universe about us? Our
means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding
objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them,
and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we
pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings with
wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see very
differently the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter,
energy, and life which lie close at hand yet can never be detected with the
senses we have. I have always believed that such strange, inaccessible worlds
exist at our very elbows, and now I believe I have found a way to break dawn the
barriers. I am not joking. Within twenty-four hours that machine near the table
will generate waves acting on unrecognized sense organs that exist in us as
atrophied or rudimentary vestiges. Those waves will open up to us many vistas
unknown to man and several unknown to anything we consider organic life. We
shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up
their ears after midnight. We shall see these things, and other things which no
breathing creature has yet seen. We shall overleap time, space, and dimensions,
and without bodily motion peer to the bottom of creation."
When Tillinghast said these things I remonstrated, for I knew him well enough to
be frightened rather than amused; but he was a fanatic, and drove me from the
house. Now he was no less a fanatic, but his desire to speak had conquered his
resentment, and he had written me imperatively in a hand I could scarcely
recognize. As I entered the abode of the friend so suddenly metamorphosed to a
shivering gargoyle, I became infected with the terror which seemed stalking in
all the shadows. The words and beliefs expressed ten weeks before seemed bodied
forth in the darkness beyond the small circle of candle light, and I sickened at
the hollow, altered voice of my host. I wished the servants were about, and did
not like it when he said they had all left three days previously. It seemed
strange that old Gregory, at least, should desert his master without telling as
tried a friend as I. It was he who had given me all the information I had of
Tillinghast after I was repulsed in rage.
Yet I soon subordinated all my fears to my growing curiosity and fascination.
Just what Crawford Tillinghast now wished of me I could only guess, but that he
had some stupendous secret or discovery to impart, I could not doubt. Before I
had protested at his unnatural pryings into the unthinkable; now that he had
evidently succeeded to some degree I almost shared his spirit, terrible though
the cost of victory appeared. Up through the dark emptiness of the house I
followed the bobbing candle in the hand of this shaking parody on man. The
electricity seemed to be turned off, and when I asked my guide he said it was
for a definite reason.
"It would he too much... I would not dare," he continued to mutter. I especially
noted his new habit of muttering, for it was not like him to talk to himself. We
entered the laboratory in the attic, and I observed that detestable electrical
machine, glowing with a sickly, sinister violet luminosity. It was connected
with a powerful chemical battery, but seemed to be receiving no current; for I
recalled that in its experimental stage it had sputtered and purred when in
action. In reply to my question Tillinghast mumbled that this permanent glow was
not electrical in any sense that I could understand.
He now seated me near the machine, so that it was on my right, and turned a
switch somewhere below the crowning cluster of glass bulbs. The usual sputtering
began, turned to a whine, and terminated in a drone so soft as to suggest a
return to silence. Meanwhile the luminosity increased, waned again, then assumed
a pale, outrè colour or blend of colours which I could neither place nor
describe. Tillinghast had been watching me, and noted my puzzled expression.
"Do you know what that is?" he whispered, "That is ultra-violet." He chuckled
oddly at my surprise. "You thought ultra-violet was invisible, and so it is -
but you can see that and many other invisible things now.
"Listen to me! The waves from that thing are waking a thousand sleeping senses
in us; senses which we inherit from aeons of evolution from the state of
detached electrons to the state of organic humanity. I have seen the truth, and
I intend to show it to you. Do you wonder how it will seem? I will tell you."
Here Trninghast seated himself directly opposite me, blowing out his candle and
staring hideously into my eyes. "Your existing sense-organs - ears first, I
think - will pick up many of the impressions, for they are closely connected
with the dormant organs. Then there will be others. You have heard of the pineal
gland? I laugh at the shallow endocrinologist, fellow-dupe and fellow-parvenu of
the Freudian. That gland is the great sense organ of organs - I have found out.
It is like sight in the end, and transmits visual pictures to the brain. If you
are normal, that is the way you ought to get most of it... I mean get most of
the evidence from beyond."
I looked about the immense attic room with the sloping south wall, dimly lit by
rays which the every day eye cannot see. The far corners were all shadows and
the whole place took on a hazy unreality which obscured its nature and invited
the imagination to symbolism and phantasm. During the interval that Tillinghast
was long silent I fancied myself in some vast incredible temple of long-dead
gods; some vague edifice of innumerable black stone columns reaching up from a
floor of damp slabs to a cloudy height beyond the range of my vision. The
picture was very vivid for a while, but gradually gave way to a more horrible
conception; that of utter, absolute solitude in infinite, sightless, soundless
space. There seemed to a void, and nothing more, and I felt a childish fear
which prompted me to draw from my hip pocket the revolver I carried after dark
since the night I was ...
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