Hypnos

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
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.