Lovecraft, H P - Dreams In The Witch-House

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Dreams in the Witch-House

by H. P. Lovecraft

Written Jan-28 Feb 1932

Published July 1933 in Weird Tales, Vol. 22, No. 1, 86-111.

Whether the dreams brought on the fever or the fever brought on the dreams Walter

Gilman did not know. Behind everything crouched the brooding, festering horror of the

ancient town, and of the mouldy, unhallowed garret gable where he wrote and studied

and wrestled with flgures and formulae when he was not tossing on the meagre iron bed.

His ears were growing sensitive to a preternatural and intolerable degree, and he had long

ago stopped the cheap mantel clock whose ticking had come to seem like a thunder of

artillery. At night the subtle stirring of the black city outside, the sinister scurrying of rats

in the wormy partitions, and the creaking of hidden timbers in the centuried house, were

enough to give him a sense of strident pandemonium. The darkness always teemed with

unexplained sound - and yet he sometimes shook with fear lest the noises he heard should

subside and allow him to hear certain other fainter noises which he suspected were

lurking behind them.

He was in the changeless, legend-haunted city of Arkham, with its clustering gambrel

roofs that sway and sag over attics where witches hid from the King's men in the dark,

olden years of the Province. Nor was any spot in that city more steeped in macabre

memory than the gable room which harboured him - for it was this house and this room

which had likewise harboured old Keziah Mason, whose flight from Salem Gaol at the

last no one was ever able to explain. That was in 1692 - the gaoler had gone mad and

babbled of a small white-fanged furry thing which scuttled out of Keziah's cell, and not

even Cotton Mather could explain the curves and angles smeared on the grey stone walls

with some red, sticky fluid.

Possibly Gilman ought not to have studied so hard. Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum

physics are enough to stretch any brain, and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries

to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of

the Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be

wholly free from mental tension. Gilman came from Haverhill, but it was only after he

had entered college in Arkham that he began to connect his mathematics with the

fantastic legends of elder magic. Something in the air of the hoary town worked

obscurely on his imagination. The professors at Miskatonic had urged him to slacken up,

and had voluntarily cut down his course at several points. Moreover, they had stopped

him from consulting the dubious old books on forbidden secrets that were kept under lock

and key in a vault at the university library. But all these precautions came late in the day,

so that Gilman had some terrible hints from the dreaded Necronomicon of Abdul

Alhazred, the fragmentary Book of Eibon, and the suppressed Unaussprechlicken Kulten

of von Junzt to correlate with his abstract formulae on the properties of space and the

linkage of dimensions known and unknown.

Dreams in the Witch-House

He knew his room was in the old Witch-House - that, indeed, was why he had taken it.

There was much in the Essex County records about Keziah Mason's trial, and what she

had admitted under pressure to the Court of Oyer and Terminer had fascinated Gilman

beyond all reason. She had told Judge Hathorne of lines and curves that could be made to

point out directions leading through the walls of space to other spaces beyond, and had

implied that such lines and curves were frequently used at certain midnight meetings in

the dark valley of the white stone beyond Meadow Hill and on the unpeopled island in

the river. She had spoken also of the Black Man, of her oath, and of her new secret name

of Nahab. Then she had drawn those devices on the walls of her cell and vanished.

Gilman believed strange things about Keziah, and had felt a queer thrill on learning that

her dwelling was still standing after more than two hundred and thirty-five years. When

he heard the hushed Arkham whispers about Keziah's persistent presence in the old house

and the narrow streets, about the irregular human tooth-marks left on certain sleepers in

that and other houses, about the childish cries heard near May-Eve, and Hallowmass,

about the stench often noted in the old house's attic just after those dreaded seasons, and

about the small, furry, sharp-toothed thing which haunted the mouldering structure and

the town and nuzzled people curiously in the black hours before dawn, he resolved to live

in the place at any cost. A room was easy to secure, for the house was unpopular, hard to

rent, and long given over to cheap lodgings. Gilman could not have told what he expected

to find there, but he knew he wanted to be in the building where some circumstance had

more or less suddenly given a mediocre old woman of the Seventeenth Century an insight

into mathematical depths perhaps beyond the utmost modern delvings of Planck,

Heisenberg, Einstein, and de Sitter.

He studied the timber and plaster walls for traces of cryptic designs at every accessible

spot where the paper had peeled, and within a week managed to get the eastern attic room

where Keziah was held to have practised her spells. It had been vacant from the first - for

no one had ever been willing to stay there long - but the Polish landlord had grown wary

about renting it. Yet nothing whatever happened to Gilman till about the time of the

fever. No ghostly Keziah flitted through the sombre halls and chambers, no small furry

thing crept into his dismal eyrie to nuzzle him, and no record of the witch's incantations

rewarded his constant search. Sometimes he would take walks through shadowy tangles

of unpaved musty-smelling lanes where eldritch brown houses of unknown age leaned

and tottered and leered mockingly through narrow, small-paned windows. Here he knew

strange things had happened once, and there was a faint suggestion behind the surface

that everything of that monstrous past might not - at least in the darkest, narrowest, and

most intricately crooked alleys - have utterly perished. He also rowed out twice to the ill-

regarded island in the river, and made a sketch of the singular angles described by the

moss-grown rows of grey standing stones whose origin was so obscure and immemorial.

Gilman's room was of good size but queerly irregular shape; the north wall slating

perceptibly inward from the outer to the inner end, while the low ceiling slanted gently

downward in the same direction. Aside from an obvious rat-hole and the signs of other

stopped-up ones, there was no access - nor any appearance of a former avenue of access -

to the space which must have existed between the slanting wall and the straight outer wall

Dreams in the Witch-House

on the house's north side, though a view from the exterior showed where a window had

heen boarded up at a very remote date. The loft above the ceiling - which must have had

a slanting floor - was likewise inaccessible. When Gilman climbed up a ladder to the cob-

webbed level loft above the rest of the attic he found vestiges of a bygone aperture tightly

and heavily covered with ancient planking and secured by the stout wooden pegs

common in Colonial carpentry. No amount of persuasion, however, could induce the

stolid landlord to let him investigate either of these two closed spaces.

As time wore along, his absorption in the irregular wall and ceiling of his room increased;

for he began to read into the odd angles a mathematical significance which seemed to

offer vague clues regarding their pnrpose. Old Keziah, he reflected, might have had

excellent reasons for living in a room with peculiar angles; for was it not through certain

angles that she claimed to have gone outside the boundaries of the world of space we

know? His interest gradually veered away from the unplumbed voids beyond the slanting

surfaces, since it now appeared that the purpose of those surfaces concerned the side he

was on.

The touch of brain-fever and the dreams began early in February. For some time,

apparently, the curious angles of Gilman's room had been having a strange, almost

hypnotic effect on him; and as the bleak winter advanced he had found himself staring

more and more intently at the corner where the down-slanting ceiling met the inward-

slanting wall. About this period his inability to concentrate on his formal studies worried

him considerably, his apprehensions about the mid-year examinations being very acute.

But the exaggerated sense of bearing was scarcely less annoying. Life had become an

insistent and almost unendurable cacophony, and there was that constant, terrifying

impression of other sounds - perhaps from regions beyond life - trembling on the very

brink of audibility. So far as concrete noises went, the rats in the ancient partitions were

the worst. Sometimes their scratching seemed not only furtive but deliberate. When it

came from beyond the slanting north wall it was mixed with a sort of dry rattling; and

when it came from the century-closed loft above the slanting ceiling Gilman always

braced himself as if expecting some horror which only bided its time before descending

to engulf him utterly.

The dreams were wholly beyond the pale of sanity, and Gilman fell that they must be a

result, jointly, of his studies in mathematics and in folklore. He had been thinking too

much about the vague regions which his formulae told him must lie beyond the three

dimensions we know, and about the possibility that old Keziah Mason - guided by some

influence past all conjecture - had actually found the gate to those regions. The yellowed

country records containing her testimony and that of her accusers were so damnably

suggestive of things beyond human experience - and the descriptions of the darting little

furry object which served as her familiar were so painfully realistic despite their

incredible details.

That object - no larger than a good-sized rat and quaintly called by the townspeople

"Brown Jenkins - seemed to have been the fruit of a remarkable case of sympathetic herd-

delusion, for in 1692 no less than eleven persons had testified to glimpsing it. There were

Dreams in the Witch-House

recent rumours, too, with a baffling and disconcerting amount of agreement. Witnesses

said it had long hair and the shape of a rat, but that its sharp-toothed, bearded face was

evilly human while its paws were like tiny human hands. It took messages betwixt old

Keziah and the devil, and was nursed on the witch's blood, which it sucked like a

vampire. Its voice was a kind of loathsome titter, and it could speak all languages. Of all

the bizarre monstrosities in Gilman's dreams, nothing filled him with greater panic and

nausea than this blasphemous and diminutive hybrid, whose image flitted across his

vision in a form a thousandfold more hateful than anything his waking mind had deduced

from the ancient records and the modern whispers.

Gilman's dreams consisted largely in plunges through limitless abysses of inexplicably

coloured twilight and baffingly disordered sound; abysses whose material and

gravitational properties, and whose relation to his own entity, he could not even begin to

explain. He did not walk or climb, fly or swim, crawl or wriggle; yet always experienced

a mode of motion partly voluntary and partly involuntary. Of his own condition he could

not well judge, for sight of his arms, legs, and torso seemed always cut off by some odd

disarrangement of perspective; but he felt that his physical organization and faculties

were somehow marvellously transmuted and obliquely projected - though not without a

certain grotesque relationship to his normal proportions and properties.

The abysses were by no means vacant, being crowded with indescribably angled masses

of alien-hued substance, some of which appeared to be organic while others seemed

inorganic. A few of the organic objects tended to awake vague memories in the back of

his mind, though he could form no conscious idea of what they mockingly resembled or

suggested. In the later dreams he began to distinguish separate categories into which the

organic objects appeared to be divided, and which seemed to involve in each case a

radically different species of conduct-pattern and basic motivation. Of these categories

one seemed to him to include objects slightly less illogical and irrelevant in their motions

than the members of the other categories.

All the objects - organic and inorganic alike - were totally beyond description or even

comprehension. Gilman sometimes compared the inorganic matter to prisms, labyrinths,

clusters of cubes and planes, and Cyclopean buildings; and the organic things struck him

variously as groups of bubbles, octopi, centipedes, living Hindoo idols, and intricate

arabesques roused into a kind of ophidian animation. Everything he saw was unspeakably

menacing and horrible; and whenever one of the organic entities appeared by its motions

to be noticing him, he felt a stark, hideous fright which generally jolted him awake. Of

how the organic entities moved, he could tell no more than of how he moved himself. In

time he observed a further mystery - the tendency of certain entities to appear suddenly

out of empty space, or to disappear totally with equal suddenness. The shrieking, roaring

confusion of sound which permeated the abysses was past all analysis as to pitch, timbre

or rhythm; but seemed to be synchronous with vague visual changes in all the indefinite

objects, organic and inorganic alike. Gilman had a constant sense of dread that it might

rise to some unbearable degree of intensity during one or another of its obscure,

relentlessly inevitable fluctuations.

Dreams in the Witch-House

But it was not in these vortices of complete alienage that he saw Brown Jenkin. That

shocking little horror was reserved for certain lighter, sharper dreams which assailed him

just before he dropped into the fullest depths of sleep. He would be lying in the dark

fighting to keep awake when a faint lambent glow would seem to shimmer around the

centuried room, showing in a violet mist the convergence of angled planes which had

seized his brain so insidiously. The horror would appear to pop out of the rat-hole in the

corner and patter toward him over the sagging, wide-planked floor with evil expectancy

in its tiny, bearded human face; but mercifully, this dream always melted away before the

object got close enough to nuzzle him. It had hellishly long, sharp, canine teeth; Gilman

tried to stop up the rat-hole every day, but each night the real tenants of the partitions

would gnaw away the obstruction, whatever it might be. Once he had the landlord nail a

tin over it, but the next night the rats gnawed a fresh hole, in making which they pushed

or dragged out into the room a curious little fragment of bone.

Gilman did not report his fever to the doctor, for he knew he could not pass the

examinations if ordered to the college infirmary when every moment was needed for

cramming. As it was, he failed in Calculus D and Advanced General Psychology, though

not without hope of making up lost ground before the end of the term.

It was in March when the fresh element entered his lighter preliminary dreaming, and the

nightmare shape of Brown Jenkin began to be companioned by the nebulous blur which

grew more and more to resemble a bent old woman. This addition disturbed him more

than he could account for, but finally he decided that it was like an ancient crone whom

he had twice actually encountered in the dark tangle of lanes near the abandoned

wharves. On those occasions the evil, sardonic, and seemingly unmotivated stare of the

beldame had set him almost shivering - especially the first time when an overgrown rat

darting across the shadowed mouth of a neighbouring alley had made him think

irrationally of Brown Jenkin. Now, he reflected, those nervous fears were being mirrored

in his disordered dreams. That the influence of the old house was unwholesome he could

not deny, but traces of his early morbid interest still held him there. He argued that the

fever alone was responsible for his nightly fantasies, and that when the touch abated he

would be free from the monstrous visions. Those visions, however, were of absorbing

vividness and convincingness, and whenever he awaked he retained a vague sense of

having undergone much more than he remembered. He was hideously sure that in

unrecalled dreams he had talked with both Brown Jenkin and the old woman, and that

they had been urging him to go somewhere with them and to meet a third being of greater

potency.

Toward the end of March he began to pick up in his mathematics, though the other

stndies bothered him increasingly. He was getting an intuitive knack for solving

Riemannian equations, and astonished Professor Upham by his comprehension of fourth-

dimensional and other problems which had floored all the rest of the class. One afternoon

there was a discussion of possible freakish curvatures in space, and of theoretical points

of approach or even contact between our part of the cosmos and various other regions as

distant as the farthest stars or the transgalactic gulfs themselves - or even as fabulously

remote as the tentatively conceivable cosmic units beyond the whole Einsteinian space-

Dreams in the Witch-House

time continuum. Gilman's handling of this theme filled everyone with admiration, even

though some of his hypothetical illustrations caused an increase in the always plentiful

gossip about his nervous and solitary eccentricity. What made the students shake their

heads was his sober theory that a man might - given mathematical knowledge admittedly

beyond all likelihood of human acquirement - step deliberately from the earth to any

other celestial body which might lie at one of an infinity of specifc points in the cosmic

pattern.

Such a step, he said, would require only two stages; first, a passage out of the three-

dimensional sphere we know, and second, a passage back to the three-dimensional sphere

at another point, perhaps one of infinite remoteness. That this could be accomplished

without loss of life was in many cases conceivable. Any being from any part of three-

dimensional space could probably survive in the fourth dimension; and its survival of the

second stage would depend upon what alien part of three-dimensional space it might

select for its re-entry. Denizens of some planets might be able to live on certain others -

even planets belonging to other galaxies, or to similar dimensional phases of other space-

time continua - though of course there must be vast numbers of mutually uninhabitable

even though mathematically juxtaposed bodies or zones of space.

It was also possible that the inhabitants of a given dimensional realm could survive entry

to many unknown and incomprehensible realms of additional or indefinitely multiplied

dimensions - be they within or outside the given space-time continuum - and that the

converse would be likewise true. This was a matter for speculation, though one could be

fairly certain that the type of mutation involved in a passage from any given dimensional

plane to the next higher one would not be destructive of biological integrity as we

understand it. Gilman could not be very clear about his reasons for this last assumption,

but his haziness here was more than overbalanced by his clearness on other complex

points. Professor Upham especially liked his demonstration of the kinship of higher

mathematics to certain phases of magical lore transmitted down the ages from an

ineffable antiquity - human or pre-human - whose knowledge of the cosmos and its laws

was greater than ours.

Around 1 April Gilman worried cosiderably because his slow fever did not abate. He was

also troubled by what some of his fellow lodgers said about his sleep-walking. It seened

that he was often absent from his bed and that the creaking of his floor at certain hours of

the night was remarked by the man in the room below. This fellow also spoke of hearing

the tread of shod feet in the night; but Gilman was sure he must have been mistaken in

this, since shoes as well as other apparel were always precisely in place in the morning.

One could develop all sorts of aural delusions in this morbid old house - for did not

Gilman himself, even in daylight, now feel certain that noises other than rat-scratching

came from the black voids beyond the slanting wall and above the slanting ceiling? His

pathologically sensitive ears began to listen for faint footfalls in the immemorially sealed

loft overhead, and sometimes the illusion of such things was agonizingly realistic.

However, he knew that he had actually become a somnambulist; for twice at night his

room had been found vacant, though with all his clothing in place. Of this he had been

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摘要：

DreamsintheWitch-HouseDreamsintheWitch-HousebyH.P.LovecraftWrittenJan-28Feb1932PublishedJuly1933inWeirdTales,Vol.22,No.1,86-111.WhetherthedreamsbroughtonthefeverorthefeverbroughtonthedreamsWalterGilmandidnotknow.Behindeverythingcrouchedthebrooding,festeringhorroroftheancienttown,andofthemouldy,unhal...

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Lovecraft, H P - Dreams In The Witch-House

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