From Beyond

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
 From Beyond

on unrecognized sense organs that exist in us as atrophied or rudimentary vestiges. Those

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.
 From Beyond

"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 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 musical, 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 effect 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 remain 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
 From Beyond

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 so 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
Tillinghast 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 Tillinghast 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
consistency 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 opposite 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 monstrosities which flabbily quivered in harmony with the
vibrations 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
another 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 instantaneously obliterating the
latter from sight. Shudderingly I felt that I knew what had obliterated the unfortunate
servants, 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.
 From Beyond

"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 horrible 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, eh! 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 aesthetic 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 believing the doctor is one simple fact - that the police
never found the bodies of those servants whom they say Crawford Tillinghast murdered.
 From Beyond

The Lovecraft Library wishes to extend its gratitude to Eulogio García Recalde for transcribing this text.
This text has been converted into PDF by Agha Yasir

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