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.
