Lovecraft, H P - The Shadow Out Of Time

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The Shadow Out of Time
The Shadow Out of Time
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written Nov 1934-Mar 1935
Published June 1936 in Astounding Stories, Vol. 17, No. 4, p. 110-54.
I
After twenty-two years of nightmare and terror, saved only by a desperate conviction of
the mythical source of certain impressions, I am unwilling to vouch for the truth of that
which I think I found in Western Australia on the night of 17-18 July 1935. There is
reason to hope that my experience was wholly or partly an hallucination - for which,
indeed, abundant causes existed. And yet, its realism was so hideous that I sometimes
find hope impossible.
If the thing did happen, then man must be prepared to accept notions of the cosmos, and
of his own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest mention is paralysing. He
must, too, be placed on guard against a specific, lurking peril which, though it will never
engulf the whole race, may impose monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain
venturesome members of it.
It is for this latter reason that I urge, with all the force of my being, final abandonment of
all the attempts at unearthing those fragments of unknown, primordial masonry which my
expedition set out to investigate.
Assuming that I was sane and awake, my experience on that night was such as has
befallen no man before. It was, moreover, a frightful confirmation of all I had sought to
dismiss as myth and dream. Mercifull there is no proof, for in my fright I lost the
awesome object which would - if real and brought out of that noxious abyss - have
formed irrefutable evidence.
When I came upon the horror I was alone - and I have up to now told no one about it. I
could not stop the others from digging in its direction, but chance and the shifting sand
have so far saved them from finding it. Now I must formulate some definite statement -
not only for the sake of my own mental balance, but to warn such others as may read it
seriously.
These pages - much in whose earlier parts will be familiar to close readers of the general
and scientific press - are written in the cabin of the ship that is bringing me home. I shall
give them to my son, Professor Wingate Peaslee of Miskatonic University - the only
member of my family who stuck to me after my queer amnesia of long ago, and the man
best informed on the inner facts of my case. Of all living persons, he is least likely to
ridicule what I shall tell of that fateful night.
The Shadow Out of Time
I did not enlighten him orally before sailing, because I think he had better have the
revelation in written form. Reading and re-reading at leisure will leave with him a more
convincing picture than my confused tongue could hope to convey.
He can do anything that he thinks best with this account - showing it, with suitable
comment, in any quarters where it will be likely to accomplish good. It is for the sake of
such readers as are unfamiliar with the earlier phases of my case that I am prefacing the
revelation itself with a fairly ample summary of its background.
My name is Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, and those who recall the newspaper tales of a
generation back - or the letters and articles in psychological journals six or seven years
ago - will know who and what I am. The press was filled with the details of my strange
amnesia in 1908-13, and much was made of the traditions of horror, madness, and
witchcraft which lurked behind the ancient Massachusetts town then and now forming
my place of residence. Yet I would have it known that there is nothing whatever of the
mad or sinister in my heredity and early life. This is a highly important fact in view of the
shadow which fell so suddenly upon me from outside sources.
It may be that centuries of dark brooding had given to crumbling, whisper-haunted
Arkham a peculiar vulnerability as regards such shadows - though even this seems
doubtful in the light of those other cases which I later came to study. But the chief point
is that my own ancestry and background are altogether normal. What came, came from
somewhere else - where I even now hesitate to assert in plain words.
I am the son of Jonathan and Hannah (Wingate) Peaslee, both of wholesome old
Haverhill stock. I was born and reared in Haverhill - at the old homestead in Boardman
Street near Golden Hill - and did not go to Arkham till I entered Miskatonic University as
instructor of political economy in 1895.
For thirteen years more my life ran smoothly and happily. I married Alice Keezar of
Haverhill in 1896, and my three children, Robert, Wingate and Hannah were born in
1898, 1900, and 1903, respectively. In 1898 I became an associate professor, and in 1902
a full professor. At no time had I the least interest in either occultism or abnormal
psychology.
It was on Thursday, 14 May 1908, that the queer amnesia came. The thing was quite
sudden, though later I realized that certain brief, glimmering visions of several, hours
previous - chaotic visions which disturbed me greatly because they were so
unprecedented - must have formed premonitory symptoms. My head was aching, and I
had a singular feeling - altogether new to me - that some one else was trying to get
possession of my thoughts.
The collapse occurred about 10.20 A.M., while I was conducting a class in Political
Economy VI - history and present tendencies of economics - for juniors and a few
sophomores. I began to see strange shapes before my eyes, and to feel that I was in a
grotesque room other than the classroom.
The Shadow Out of Time
My thoughts and speech wandered from my subject, and the students saw that something
was gravely amiss. Then I slumped down, unconscious, in my chair, in a stupor from
which no one could arouse me. Nor did my rightful faculties again look out upon the
daylight of our normal world for five years, four months, and thirteen days.
It is, of course, from others that I have learned what followed. I showed no sign of
consciousness for sixteen and a half hours though removed to my home at 27 Crane
Street, and given the best of medical attention.
At 3 A.M. May my eyes opened and began to speak and my family were thoroughly
frightened by the trend of my expression and language. It was clear that I had no
remembrance of my identity and my past, though for some reason seemed anxious to
conceal his lack of knowledge. My eyes glazed strangely at the persons around me, and
the flections of my facial muscles were altogether unfamiliar.
Even my speech seemed awkward and foreign. I used my vocal organs clumsily and
gropingly, and my diction had a curiously stilted quality, as if I had laboriously learned
the English language from books. The pronunciation was barbarously alien, whilst the
idiom seemed to include both scraps of curious archaism and expressions of a wholly
incomprehensible cast.
Of the latter, one in particular was very potently - even terrifiedly - recalled by the
youngest of the physicians twenty years afterward. For at that late period such a phrase
began to have an actual currency - first in England and then in the United States - and
though of much complexity and indisputable newness, it reproduced in every least
particular the mystifying words of the strange Arkham patient of 1908.
Physical strength returned at once, although I required an odd amount of re-education in
the use of my hands, legs, and bodily apparatus in general. Because of this and other
handicaps inherent in the mnemonic lapse, I was for some time kept under strict medical
care.
When I saw that my attempts to conceal the lapse had failed, I admitted it openly, and
became eager for information of all sorts. Indeed, it seemed to the doctors that I lost
interest in my proper personality as soon as I found the case of amnesia accepted as a
natural thing.
They noticed that my chief efforts were to master certain points in history, science, art,
language, and folklore - some of them tremendously abstruse, and some childishly simple
- which remained, very oddly in many cases, outside my consciousness.
At the same time they noticed that I had an inexplicable command of many almost
unknown sorts of knowledge - a command which I seemed to wish to hide rather than
display. I would inadvertently refer, with casual assurance, to specific events in dim ages
outside of the range of accepted history - passing off such references as a jest when I saw
The Shadow Out of Time
the surprise they created. And I had a way of speaking of the future which two or three
times caused actual fright.
These uncanny flashes soon ceased to appear, though some observers laid their
vanishment more to a certain furtive caution on my part than to any waning of the strange
knowledge behind them. Indeed, I seemed anomalously avid to absorb the speech,
customs, and perspectives of the age around me; as if I were a studious traveller from a
far, foreign land.
As soon as permitted, I haunted the college library at all hours; and shortly began to
arrange for those odd travels, and special courses at American and European Universities,
which evoked so much comment during the next few years.
I did not at any time suffer from a lack of learned contacts, for my case had a mild
celebrity among the psychologists of the period. I was lectured upon as a typical example
of secondary personality - even though I seemed to puzzle the lecturers now and then
with some bizarre symptoms or some queer trace of carefully veiled mockery.
Of real friendliness, however, I encountered little. Something in my aspect and speech
seemed to excite vague fears and aversions in every one I met, as if I were a being
infinitely removed from all that is normal and healthful. This idea of a black, hidden
horror connected with incalculable gulfs of some sort of distance was oddly widespread
and persistent.
My own family formed no exception. From the moment of my strange waking my wife
had regarded me with extreme horror and loathing, vowing that I was some utter alien
usurping the body of her husband. In 1910 she obtained a legal divorce, nor would she
ever consent to see me even after my return to normality in 1913. These feelings were
shared by my elder son and my small daughter, neither of whom I have ever seen since.
Only my second son, Wingate, seemed able to conquer the terror and repulsion which my
change aroused. He indeed felt that I was a stranger, but though only eight years old held
fast to a faith that my proper self would return. When it did return he sought me out, and
the courts gave me his custody. In succeeding years he helped me with the studies to
which I was driven, and today, at thirty-five, he is a professor of psychology at
Miskatonic.
But I do not wonder at the horror caused - for certainly, the mind, voice, and facial
expression of the being that awakened on l5 May 1908, were not those of Nathaniel
Wingate Peastee.
I will not attempt to tell much of my life from 1908 to 1913, since readers may glean I the
outward essentials - as I largely had to do - from files of old newspapers and scientific
journals.
The Shadow Out of Time
I was given charge of my funds, and spent them slowly and on the whole wisely, in travel
and in study at various centres of learning. My travels, however, were singular in the
extreme, involving long visits to remote and desolate places.
In 1909 I spent a month in the Himalayas, and in 1911 roused much attention through a
camel trip into the unknown deserts of Arabia. What happened on those journeys I have
never been able to learn.
During the summer of l9l2 I chartered a ship and sailed in the Arctic, north of
Spitzbergen, afterward showing signs of disappointment.
Later in that year I spent weeks - alone beyond the limits of previous or subsequent
exploration in the vast limestone cavern systems of western Virginia - black labyrinths so
complex that no retracing of my steps could even be considered.
My sojourns at the universities were marked by abnormally rapid assimilation, as if the
secondary personality had an intelligence enormously superior to my own. I have found,
also, that my rate of reading and solitary study was phenomenal. I could master every
detail of a book merely by glancing over it as fast as I could turn the leaves; while my
skill at interpreting complex figures in an instant was veritably awesome.
At times there appeared almost ugly reports of my power to influence the thoughts and
acts of others, though I seemed to have taken care to minimize displays of this faculty.
Other ugly reports concerned my intimacy with leaders of occultist groups, and scholars
suspected of connection with nameless bands of abhorrent elder-world hierophants.
These rumours, though never proved at the time, were doubtless stimulated by the known
tenor of some of my reading - for the consulltation of rare books at libraries cannot be
effected secretly.
There is tangible proof - in the form of marginal notes - that I went minutely through
such things as the Comte d'Erlette's Cultes des Goules, Ludvig Prinn's De Vermis
Mysteriis, the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of von Junzt, the surviving fragments of the
puzzling Book of Eibon, and the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul
Alhazred. Then, too, it is undeniable that a fresh and evil wave of underground cult
activity set in about the time of my odd mutation.
In the summer of 1913 I began to display signs of ennui and flagging interest, and to hint
to various associates that a change might soon be expected in me. I spoke of returning
memories of my earlier life - though most auditors judged me insincere, since all the
recollections I gave were casual, and such as might have been learned from my old
private papers.
About the middle of August I returned to Arkham and re-opened my long-closed house in
Crane Street. Here I installed a mechanism of the most curious aspect, constructed
The Shadow Out of Time
piecemeal by different makers of scientific apparatus in Europe and America, and
guarded carefully from the sight of any one intelligent enough to analyse it.
Those who did see it - a workman, a servant, and the new housekeeper - say that it was a
queer mixture of rods, wheels, and mirros, though only about two feet tall, one foot wide,
and one foot thick. The central mirror was circular and convex. All this is borne out by
such makers of parts as can be located.
On the evening of Friday, 26 September, I dismissed the housekeeper and the maid until
noon of the next day. Lights burned in the house till late, and a lean, dark, curiously
foreign-looking man called in an automobile.
It was about one A.M. that the lights were last seen. At 2.15 A.M. a policeman observed
the place in darkness, but the strager's motor still at the curb. By 4 o'clock the motor was
certainly gone.
It was at 6 o'clock that a hesitant, foreign voice on the telephone asked Dr Wilson to call
at my house and bring me out of a peculiar faint. This call - a long-distance one - was
later traced to a public booth in the North Station in Boston, but no sign of the lean
foreigner was ever unearthed.
When the doctor reached my house he found me unconscious in the sitting room - in an
easy-chair with a table drawn up before it. On the polished top were scratches showing
where some heavy object had rested. The queer machine was gone, nor was anything
afterward heard of it. Undoubtedly the dark, lean foreigner had taken it away.
In the library grate were abundant ashes, evidently left from the burning of the every
remainmg scrap of paper on which I had written since the advent of the amnesia. Dr
Wilson found my breathing very peculiar, but after a hypodermic injection it became
more regular.
At 11.15 A.M., 27 September, I stirred vigorously, and my hitherto masklike face began
to show signs of expression. Dr Wilson remarked that the expression was not that of my
secondary personality, but seemed much like that of my normal self. About 11.30 I
muttered some very curious syllables - syllables which seemed unrelated to any human
speech. I appeared, too, to struggle against something. Then, just afternoon - the
housekeeper and the maid having meanwhile returned - I began to mutter in English.
"- of the orthodox economists of that period, Jevons typifies the prevailing trend toward
scientific correlation. His attempt to link the commercial cycle of prosperity and
depression with the physical cycle of the solar spots forms perhaps the apex of -"
Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee had come back - a spirit in whose time scale it was still
Thursday morning in 1908, with the economics class gazing up at the battered desk on
the platform.
The Shadow Out of Time
II
My reabsorption into normal life was a painful and difficult process. The loss of over five
years creates more complications than can be imagined, and in my case there were
countless matters to be adjusted.
What I heard of my actions since 1908 astonished and disturbed me, but I tried to view
the matter as philosophically as I could. At last, regaining custody of my second son,
Wingate, I settled down with him in the Crane Street house and endeavoured to resume
my teaching - my old professorship having been kindly offered me by the college.
I began work with the February, 1914, term, and kept at it just a year. By that time I
realized how badly my experience had shaken me. Though perfectly sane - I hoped - and
with no flaw in my original personality, I had not the nervous energy of the old days.
Vague dreams and queer ideas continually haunted me, and when the outbreak of the
World War turned my mind to history I found myself thinking of periods and events in
the oddest possible fashion.
My conception of time, my ability to distinguish between consecutiveness and
simultaneousness - seemed subtly disordered so that I formed chimerical notions about
living in one age and casting one's mind all over etenity for knowledge of past and future
ages.
The war gave me strange impressions of remembering some of its far-off consequences -
as if I knew how it was coming out and could look back upon it in the light of future
information. All such quasi-memories were attended with much pain, and with a feeling
that some artificial psychological barrier was set a against them.
When I diffidently hinted to others about my impressions I met with varied responses.
Some persons looked uncomfortably at me, but men in the mathematics department
spoke of new developments in those theories of relativity - then discussed only in learned
circles - which were later to become so famous. Dr. Albert Einstein, they said, was
rapidly reducing time to the status of a mere dimension.
But the dreams and disturbed feelings gained on me, so that I had to drop my regular
work in 1915. Certainly the impressions were taking an annoying shape - giving me the
persistent notion that my amnesia had formed some unholy sort of exchange; that the
secondary personality had indeed had had suffered displacement. been an in-
Thus I was driven to vague and fright speculations concerning the whereabouts of my
true self during the years that another had held my body. The curious knowledge and
strange conduct of my body's late tenant troubled me more and more as I learned further
details from persons, papers, and magazines.
Queernesses that had baffled others seemed to harmonize terribly with some background
of black knowledge which festered in the chasms of my subconscious. I began to search
The Shadow Out of Time
feverishly for every scrap of information bearing on the studies and travels of that other
one during the dark years.
Not all of my troubles were as semi-abstract as this. There were the dreams - and these
seemed to grow in vividness and concreteness. Knowing how most would regard them, I
seldom mentioned them to anyone but my son or certain trusted psychologists, but
eventually I commenced a scientific study of other cases in order to see how typical or
nontypical such visions might be among amnesia victims.
My results, aided by psychologists, historians, anthropologists, and mental specialists of
wide experience, and by a study that included all records of split personalities from the
days of daemonic-possession legends to the medically realistic present, at first bothered
me more than they consoled me.
I soon found that my dreams had, indeed, no counterpart in the overwhelming bulk of
true amnesia cases. There remained, however, a tiny residue of accounts which for years
baffled and shocked me with their parallelism to my own experience. Some of them were
bits of ancient folklore; others were case histories in the annals of medicine; one or two
were anecdotes obscurely buried in standard histories.
It thus appeared that, while my special kind of affliction was prodigiously rare, instances
of it had occurred at long intervals ever since the beginnig of men's annals. Some
centuries might contain one, two, or three cases, others none - or at least none whose
record survived.
The essence was always the same - a person of keen thoughtfulness seized a strange
secondary life and leading for a greater or lesser period an utterly alien existence typified
at first by vocal and bodily awkwardness, an later by a wholesale acquisition of scientific,
historic, artistic, and anthropologic knowledge; an acquisition carried on with feverish
zest and with a wholly abnormal absorptive power. Then a sudden return of rightful
consciousness, intermittently plagued ever after with vague unplaceable dreams
suggesting fragments of some hideous memory elaborately blotted out.
And the close resemblance of those nightmares to my own - even in some of the smallest
particulars - left no doubt in my mind of their significantly typical nature. One or two of
the cases had an added ring of faint, blasphemous familiarity, as if I had heard of them
before through some cosmic channel too morbid and frightful to contemplate. In three
instances there was specific mention of such an unknown machine as had been in my
house before the second change.
Another thing that worried me during my investigation was the somewhat greater
frequency of cases where a brief, elusive glimpse of the typical nightmares was afforded
to persons not visited well-defined amnesia.
These persons were largely of mediocre mind or less - some so primitive that they could
scarcely be thought of as vehicles forabnormal scholarship and preternatural mental
The Shadow Out of Time
acquisitions. For a second they would be fired with alien force - then a backward lapse,
and a thin, swift-fading memory of unhuman horrors.
There had been at least three such cases during the past half century - one only fifteen
years before. Had something been groping blindly through time from some unsuspected
abyss in Nature? Were these faint cases monstrous, sinister experiments of a kind and
authorship uttely beyond same belief?
Such were a few of the forless speculations of my weaker hours - fancies abetted by
myths which my studies uncovered. For I could not doubt but that certain persistent
legends of immemorial antiquity, apparently unknown to the victims and physicians
connected with recent amnesia cases, formed a striking and awesome elaboration of
memory lapses such as mine.
Of the nature of the dreams and impressions which were growing so clamorous I still
almost fear to speak. They seemed to savor of madness, and at times I believed I was
indeed going mad. Was there a special type of delusion afflicting those who had suffered
lapses of memory? Conceivably, the efforts of the subconscious mind to fill up a
perplexing blank with pseudo-memories might give rise to strange imaginative vagaries.
This indeed - though an alternative folklore theory finally seemed to me more plausible -
was the belief of many of the alienists who helped me in my search for parallel cases, and
who shared my puzzlement at the exact resemblances sometimes discovered.
They did not call the condition true insanity, but classed it rather among neurotic
disorders. My course in trying to track down and analyze it, instead of vaintly seeking to
dismiss or forget it, they heartily endorsed as correct according to the best psychological
principles. I especially valued the advice of such physicians as had studied me during my
possession by the other personality.
My first disturbances were not visual at all, but concerned the more abstract matters
which I have mentioned. There was, too, a feeling of profound and inexplicable horror
concerning myself. I developed a queer fear of seeing my own form, as if my eyes would
find it something utterly alien and inconceivably abhorrent.
When I did glance down and behold the familiar human shape in quiet grey or blue
clothing, I always felt a curious relief, though in order to gain this relief I had to conquer
an infinite dread. I shunned mirrors as much as possible, and was always shaved at the
barber's.
It was a long time before I correlated any of these disappointed feelings with the fleeting,
visual impressions which began to develop. The first such correlation had to do with the
odd sensation of an external, artificial restraint on my memory.
I felt that the snatches of sight I experienced had a profound and terrible meaning, and a
frightful connexion with myself, but that some purposeful influence held me from
The Shadow Out of Time
grasping that meaning and that connexion. Then came that queerness about the element
of time, and with it desperate efforts to place the fragmentary dream-glimpses in the
chronological and spatial pattern.
The glimpses themselves were at first merely strange rather than horrible. I would seem
to be in an enormous vaulted chamber whose lofty stone aroinings were well-nigh lost in
the shadows overhead. In whatever time or place the scene might be, the principle of the
arch was known as fully and used as extensively as by the Romans.
There were colossal, round windows and high, arched doors, and pedestals or tables each
as tall as the height of an ordinary room. Vast shelves of dark wood lined the walls,
holding what seemed to be volumes of immense size with strange hieroglyphs on their
backs.
The exposed stonework held curious carvings, always in curvilinear mathematical
designs, and there were chiselled inscriptions in the same characters that the huge books
bore. The dark granite masonry was of a monstrous megathic type, with lines of convex-
topped blocks fitting the concave-bottomed courses which rested upon them.
There were no chairs, but the tops of the vast pedestals were littered with books, papers,
and what seemed to be writing materials - oddly figured jars of a purplish metal, and rods
with stained tips. Tall as the pedestals were, I seemed at times able to view them from
above. On some of them were great globes of luminous crystal serving as lamps, and
inexplicable machines formed of vitreous tubes and metal rods.
The windows were glazed, and latticed with stout-looking bars. Though I dared not
approach and peer out them, I could see from where I was he waving tops of singular
fern-like growths. The floor was of massive octagonal flagstones, while rugs and
hangings were entirely lacking.
Later I had visions of sweeping through Cyclopean corridors of stone, and up and down
gigantic inclined planes of the same monstrous masonry. There were no stairs anywhere,
nor was any passageway less than thirty feet wide. Some of the structures through which
I floated must have towered in the sky for thousands of feet.
There were multiple levels of black vaults below, and never-opened trapdoors, sealed
down with metal bands and holding dim suggestions of some special peril.
I seemed to be a prisoner, and horror hung broodingly over everything I saw. I felt that
the mocking curvilinear hieroglyphs on the walls would blast my soul with their message
were I not guarded by a merciful ignorance.
Still later my dreams included vistas from the great round windows, and from the titanic
flat roof, with its curious gardens, wide barren area, and high, scalloped parapet of stone,
to which the topmost of the inclined planes led.
摘要：

TheShadowOutofTimeTheShadowOutofTimebyH.P.LovecraftWrittenNov1934-Mar1935PublishedJune1936inAstoundingStories,Vol.17,No.4,p.110-54.IAftertwenty-twoyearsofnightmareandterror,savedonlybyadesperateconvictionofthemythicalsourceofcertainimpressions,IamunwillingtovouchforthetruthofthatwhichIthinkIfoundinW...

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