THE BOOK

My memories are very confused. There is even much doubt as to where they begin;
for at times I feel appalling vistas of years stretching behind me, while at
other times it seems as if the present moment were an isolated point in a grey,
formless infinity. I am not even certain how I am communicating this message.
While I know I am speaking, I have a vague impression that some strange and
perhaps terrible mediation will be needed to bear what I say to the points where
I wish to be heard. My identity, too, is bewilderingly cloudy. I seem to have
suffered a great shock--perhaps from some utterly monstrous outgrowth of my
cycles of unique, incredible experience.

These cycles of experience, of course, all stem from that worm-riddled book. I
remember when I found it--in a dimly lighted place near the black, oily river
where the mists always swirl. That place was very old, and the ceiling-high
shelves full of rotting volumes reached back endlessly through windowless inner
rooms and alcoves. There were, besides, great formless heaps of books on the
floor and in crude bins; and it was in one of these heaps that I found the
thing. I never learned its title, for the early pages were missing; but it fell
open toward the end and gave me a glimpse of something which sent my senses
reeling.

There was a formula--a sort of list of things to say and do--which I recognized
as something black and forbidden; something which I had read of before in
furtive paragraphs of mixed abhorrence and fascination penned by those strange
ancient delvers into the universe's guarded secrets whose decaying texts I loved
to absorb. It was a key--a guide--to certain gateways and transitions of which
mystics have dreamed and whispered since the race was young, and which lead to
freedoms and discoveries beyond the three dimensions and realms of life and
matter that we know. Not for centuries had any man recalled its vital substance
or known where to find it, but this book was very old indeed. No printing-press,
but the hand of some half--crazed monk, had traced these ominous Latin phrases
in uncials of awesome antiquity.

I remember how the old man leered and tittered, and made a curious sign with his
hand when I bore it away. He had refused to take pay for it, and only long
afterwards did I guess why. As I hurried home through those narrow, winding,
mist-cloaked waterfront streets I had a frightful impression of being stealthily
followed by softly padding feet. The centuried, tottering houses on both sides
seemed alive with a fresh and morbid malignity--as if some hitherto closed
channel of evil understanding had abruptly been opened. I felt that those walls
and over-hanging gables of mildewed brick and fungoid plaster and timber--with
eyelike, diamond-paned windows that leered--could hardly desist from advancing
and crushing me yet I had read only the least fragment of that blasphemous rune
before closing the book and bringing it away.

I remember how I read the book at last--white-faced, and locked in the attic
room that I had long devoted to strange searchings. The great house was very
still, for I had not gone up till after midnight. I think I had a family
then--though the details are very uncertain--and I know there were many
servants. Just what the year was I cannot say; for since then I have known many
ages and dimensions, and have had all my notions of time dissolved and
refashioned. It was by the light of candles that I read--I recall the relentless
dripping of the wax--and there were chimes that came every now and then from
distant belfries. I seemed to keep track of those chimes with a peculiar
intentness, as if I feared to hear some very remote, intruding note among them.

Then came the first scratching and fumbling at the dormer window that looked out
high above the other roofs of the city. It came as I droned aloud the ninth
verse of that primal lay, and I knew amidst my shudders what it meant. For he
who passes the gateways always wins a shadow, and never again can he be alone. I
had evoked--and the book was indeed all I had suspected. That night I passed the
gateway to a vortex of twisted time and vision, and when morning found me in the
attic room I saw in the walls and shelves and fittings that which I had never
seen before.

Nor could I ever after see the world as I had known it. Mixed with the present
scene was always a little of the past and a little of the future, and every
once-familiar object loomed alien in the new perspective brought by my widened
sight. From then on I walked in a fantastic dream of unknown and half-known
shapes; and with each new gateway crossed, the less plainly could I recognise
the things of the narrow sphere to which I had so long been bound. What I saw
about me, none else saw; and I grew doubly silent and aloof lest I be thought
mad. Dogs had a fear of me, for they felt the outside shadow which never left my
side. But still I read more--in hidden, forgotten books and scrolls to which my
new vision led me--and pushed through fresh gateways of space and being and
life-patterns toward the core of the unknown cosmos.

I remember the night I made the five concentric circles of fire on the floor,
and stood in the innermost one chanting that monstrous litany the messenger from
Tartary had brought. The walls melted away, and I was swept by a black wind
through gulfs of fathomless grey with the needle-like pinnacles of unknown
mountains miles below me. After a while there was utter blackness, and then the
light of myriad stars forming strange, alien constellations. Finally I saw a
green-litten plain far below me, and discerned on it the twisted towers of a
city built in no fashion I had ever known or read or dreamed of. As I floated
closer to that city I saw a great square building of stone in an open space, and
felt a hideous fear clutching at me. I screamed and struggled, and after a
blankness was again in my attic room sprawled flat over the five phosphorescent
circles on the floor. In that night's wandering there was no more of strangeness
than in many a former night's wandering; but there was more of terror because I
knew I was closer to those outside gulfs and worlds than I had ever been before.
Thereafter I was more cautious with my incantations, for I had no wish to be cut
off from my body and from the earth in unknown abysses whence I could never
return...