Hypnos by H.P. Lovecraft
Hypnos by H.P. Lovecraft Written Mar 1922
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.