                                From Beyond

By Howard Phillips Lovecraft in 1920, and first published in "The Fantasy
Fan" June 1934.

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
meta-physical researches were leading; when he had answered my awed and
almost frightened remonstrance's 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 sud-denly 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 cu-mulative 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 dif-ferently 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 Tilliinghaut 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 contin-ued 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 elec-trical machine, glowing with a sickly, sinister violet
luminos-ity. It was connected with a powerful chemical battery, but seemed
to be receiving no current; for I recalled that in 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, ontre 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 in-vited 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 held up in East Providence. Then from the farthermost regions of
remoteness, the sound softly glided into existence. It was infinitely
faint, subtly vibrant, and unmistakably musi-cal, but held a quality of
surpassing wildness which made its impact feel like a delicate torture of
my whole body. I felt sensations like those one feels when accidentally
scratching ground glass. Simultaneously there developed something like a
cold draught, which apparently swept past me from the direction of the
distant sound. As I waited breathlessly I perceived that both sound and
wind were increasing; the ef-fect being to give me an odd notion of myself
as tied to a pair of rails in the path of a gigantic approaching
locomotive. I began to speak to Tillinghast, and as I did so all the
unusual impressions abruptly vanished. I saw only the man, the glowing
machines, and the dim apartment. Tillinghast was grinning repulsively at
the revolver which I had almost unconsciously drawn, but from his
expression I was sure he had seen and heard as much as I, if not a great
deal more. I whispered what I had experienced and he bade me to re-main as
quiet and receptive as possible.

"Don't move," he cautioned, 'for in these rays we are able to be seen as
well as to see. I told you the servants left, but I didn't tell you how. It
was that thick-witted house-keeper - - she turned on the lights downstairs
after I had warned her not to, and the wires picked up sympathetic
vibrations. It must have been frightful -- I could hear the screams up here
in spite of all I was seeing and hearing from another direction, and later
it was rather awful to find those empty heaps of clothes around the house.
Mrs. Updike's clothes were close to the front hall switch that's how I know
she did it. It got them all. But go long as we don't move we're fairly
safe. Remember we're dealing with a hideous world in which we are
practically helpless. . . . Keep still!"

The combined shock of the revelation and of the abrupt command gave me a
kind of paralysis, and in my terror my mind again opened to the impressions
coming from what Til-linghast called "beyond." I was now in a vortex of
sound and motion, with confused pictures before my eyes. I saw the blurred
outlines of the room, but from some point in space there seemed to be
pouring a seething column of unrecognizable shapes or clouds, penetrating
the solid roof at a point ahead and to the right of me. Then I glimpsed the
temple - like effect again, but this time the pillars reached up into an
aerial ocean of light, which sent down one blinding beam along the path of
the cloudy column I had seen before. After that the scene was almost wholly
kaleidoscopic, and in the jumble of sights, sounds, and unidentified
sense-impressions I felt that I was about to dissolve or in some way lose
the solid form. One definite flash I shall always remember. I seemed for an
instant to behold a patch of strange night sky filled with shining,
revolving spheres, and as it receded I saw that the glowing suns formed a
constellation or galaxy of settled shape; this shape being the distorted
face of Crawford Tillinghast. At another time I felt the huge animate
things brushing past me and occasionally walking or drifting through my
supposedly solid body, and thought I saw TiIiiinghast look at them as
though his better trained senses could catch them visually. I recalled what
he had said of the pineal gland, and wondered what he saw with this
preternatural eye.

Suddenly I myself became possessed of a kind of augmented sight. Over and
above the luminous and shadowy chaos arose a picture which, though vague,
held the elements of consist-ency and permanence. It was indeed somewhat
familiar, for the unusual part was superimposed upon the usual terrestrial
scene much as a cinema view may be thrown upon the painted curtain of a
theater. I saw the attic laboratory, the electrical machine, and the
unsightly form of Tillinghast op-posite me; but of all the space unoccupied
by familiar objects not one particle was vacant. Indescribable shapes both
alive and otherwise were mixed in disgusting disarray, and close to every
known thing were whole worlds of alien, unknown entities. It likewise
seemed that all the known things entered into the composition of other
unknown things and vice versa. Foremost among the living objects were inky,
jellyfish mon-strosities which flabbily quivered in harmony with the
vibra-tions from the machine. They were present in loathsome profusion, and
I saw to my horror that they overlapped; that they were semi - fluid and
capable of passing through one an-other and through what we know as solids.
These things were never still, but seemed ever floating about with some
malignant purpose. Sometimes they appeared to devour one another, the
attacker launching itself at its victim and instan-taneously obliterating
the latter from sight. Shudderingly I felt that I knew what had obliterated
the unfortunate serv-ants, and could not exclude the thing from my mind as
I strove to observe other properties of the newly visible world that lies
unseen around us. But Tillinghast had been watching me and was speaking.

"You see them? You see them? You see the things that float and flop about
you and through you every moment of your life? You see the creatures that
form what men call the pure air and the blue sky? Have I not succeeded in
breaking down the barrier; have I not shown you worlds that no other living
men have seen?" I heard his scream through the hor-rible chaos, and looked
at the wild face thrust so offensively close to mine. His eyes were pits of
flame, and they glared at me with what I now saw was overwhelming hatred.
The machine droned detestably.

"You think those floundering things wiped Out the servants? Fool, they are
harmless! But the servants are gone, aren't they? You tried to stop me; you
discouraged me when I needed every drop of encouragement I could get; you
were afraid of the cosmic truth, you damned coward, but now I've got you!
What swept up the servants? What made them scream so loud? . . . Don't
know, ehl You'll know soon enough. Look at me -- listen to what I say - -
do you suppose there are really any such things as time and magnitude? Do
you fancy there are such things as form or matter? I tell you, I have
struck depths that your little brain can't picture. I have seen beyond the
bounds of infinity and drawn down daemons from the stars . . . I have
harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and
madness. . . . Space belongs to me, do you hear? Things are hunting me now
- - the things that devour and dissolve - - but I know how to elude them.
It is you they will get, as they got the servants. . . . Stirring. dear
sir? I told you it was dangerous to move, I have saved you so far by
telling you to keep still - - saved you to see more sights and to listen to
me. If you had moved, they would have been at you long ago. Don't worry,
they won't hurt you. They didn't hurt the servants - - it was the seeing
that made the poor devils scream so. My pets are not pretty, for they come
out of places where aes-thetic standards are very different. Disintegration
is quite painless, I assure you - - but I want you to see them. I almost
saw them, but I knew how to stop. You are curious? I always knew you were
no scientist Trembling, eh. Trembling with anxiety to see the ultimate
things I have discovered. Why don't you move, then? Tired? Well, don't
worry, my friend, for they are coming . . . Look, look, curse you, look . .
. it's just over your left shoulder. . . . "

What remains to be told is very brief, and may be familiar to you from the
newspaper accounts. The police heard a shot in the old Tillinghast house
and found us there - - Tillinghast dead and me unconscious They arrested me
because the revolver was in my hand, but released me in three hours, after
they found it was apoplexy which had finished Tillinghast and saw that my
shot had been directed at the noxious machine which now lay hopelessly
shattered on the laboratory floor. I did not tell very much of what I had
seen, for I feared the coroner would be skeptical; but from the evasive
outline I did give, the doctor told me that I had undoubtedly been
hypnotized by the vindictive and homicidal madman.

I wish I could believe that doctor. It would help my shaky nerves if I
could dismiss what I now have to think of the air and the sky about and
above me. I never feel alone or comfortable, and a hideous sense of pursuit
sometimes comes chillingly on me when I am weary. What prevents me from
never' g the doctor is this simple fact - - that the police never found the
bodies of those servants whom they say Crawford Tillinghast murdered.
