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Beyond the Wall of Sleep
Lovecraft, Howard Phillips
Published:
1919
Categorie(s):
Fiction, Short Stories
Source:
Wikisource
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About Lovecraft:
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an American author of fantasy, horror
and science fiction. He is notable for blending elements of science fiction
and horror; and for popularizing "cosmic horror": the notion that some
concepts, entities or experiences are barely comprehensible to human
minds, and those who delve into such risk their sanity. Lovecraft has be-
come a cult figure in the horror genre and is noted as creator of the
"Cthulhu Mythos," a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a
"pantheon" of nonhuman creatures, as well as the famed Necronomicon,
a grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. His works typically had a
tone of "cosmic pessimism," regarding mankind as insignificant and
powerless in the universe. Lovecraft's readership was limited during his
life, and his works, particularly early in his career, have been criticized as
occasionally ponderous, and for their uneven quality. Nevertheless,
Lovecraft’s reputation has grown tremendously over the decades, and he
is now commonly regarded as one of the most important horror writers
of the 20th Century, exerting an influence that is widespread, though of-
ten indirect. Source: Wikipedia
Also available on Feedbooks for Lovecraft:
•
(1926)
•
(1931)
•
(1916)
•
(1928)
•
(1926)
•
(1934)
•
(1931)
•
(1927)
•
(1936)
•
(1930)
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I have often wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect
upon the occasionally titanic significance of dreams, and of the obscure
world to which they belong. Whilst the greater number of our nocturnal
visions are perhaps no more than faint and fantastic reflections of our
waking experiences - Freud to the contrary with his puerile symbolism -
there are still a certain remainder whose immundane and ethereal char-
acter permit of no ordinary interpretation, and whose vaguely exciting
and disquieting effect suggests possible minute glimpses into a sphere of
mental existence no less important than physical life, yet separated from
that life by an all but impassable barrier. From my experience I cannot
doubt but that man, when lost to terrestrial consciousness, is indeed so-
journing in another and uncorporeal life of far different nature from the
life we know, and of which only the slightest and most indistinct
memories linger after waking. From those blurred and fragmentary
memories we may infer much, yet prove little. We may guess that in
dreams life, matter, and vitality, as the earth knows such things, are not
necessarily constant; and that time and space do not exist as our waking
selves comprehend them. Sometimes I believe that this less material life
is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is it-
self the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.
It was from a youthful revery filled with speculations of this sort that I
arose one afternoon in the winter of 1900-01, when to the state psycho-
pathic institution in which I served as an interne was brought the man
whose case has ever since haunted me so unceasingly. His name, as giv-
en on the records, was Joe Slater, or Slaader, and his appearance was that
of the typical denizen of the Catskill Mountain region; one of those
strange, repellent scions of a primitive Colonial peasant stock whose isol-
ation for nearly three centuries in the hilly fastnesses of a little-traveled
countryside has caused them to sink to a kind of barbaric degeneracy,
rather than advance with their more fortunately placed brethren of the
thickly settled districts. Among these odd folk, who correspond exactly
to the decadent element of "white trash" in the South, law and morals are
non-existent; and their general mental status is probably below that of
any other section of native American people.
Joe Slater, who came to the institution in the vigilant custody of four
state policemen, and who was described as a highly dangerous character,
certainly presented no evidence of his perilous disposition when I first
beheld him. Though well above the middle stature, and of somewhat
brawny frame, he was given an absurd appearance of harmless stupidity
by the pale, sleepy blueness of his small watery eyes, the scantiness of
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his neglected and never-shaven growth of yellow beard, and the listless
drooping of his heavy nether lip. His age was unknown, since among his
kind neither family records nor permanent family ties exist; but from the
baldness of his head in front, and from the decayed condition of his
teeth, the head surgeon wrote him down as a man of about forty.
From the medical and court documents we learned all that could be
gathered of his case: this man, a vagabond, hunter and trapper, had al-
ways been strange in the eyes of his primitive associates. He had habitu-
ally slept at night beyond the ordinary time, and upon waking would of-
ten talk of unknown things in a manner so bizarre as to inspire fear even
in the hearts of an unimaginative populace. Not that his form of lan-
guage was at all unusual, for he never spoke save in the debased patois
of his environment; but the tone and tenor of his utterances were of such
mysterious wildness, that none might listen without apprehension. He
himself was generally as terrified and baffled as his auditors, and within
an hour after awakening would forget all that he had said, or at least all
that had caused him to say what he did; relapsing into a bovine, half-
amiable normality like that of the other hill-dwellers.
As Slater grew older, it appeared, his matutinal aberrations had gradu-
ally increased in frequency and violence; till about a month before his ar-
rival at the institution had occurred the shocking tragedy which caused
his arrest by the authorities. One day near noon, after a profound sleep
begun in a whiskey debauch at about five of the previous afternoon, the
man had roused himself most suddenly, with ululations so horrible and
unearthly that they brought several neighbors to his cabin - a filthy sty
where he dwelt with a family as indescribable as himself. Rushing out
into the snow, he had flung his arms aloft and commenced a series of
leaps directly upward in the air; the while shouting his determination to
reach some "big, big cabin with brightness in the roof and walls and floor
and the loud queer music far away". As two men of moderate size
sought to restrain him, he had struggled with maniacal force and fury,
screaming of his desire and need to find and kill a certain "thing that
shines and shakes and laughs". At length, after temporarily felling one of
his detainers with a sudden blow, he had flung himself upon the other in
a demoniac ecstasy of blood-thirstiness, shrieking fiendishly that he
would "jump high in the air and burn his way through anything that
stopped him".
Family and neighbors had now fled in a panic, and when the more
courageous of them returned, Slater was gone, leaving behind an
unrecognizable pulp-like thing that had been a living man but an hour
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before. None of the mountaineers had dared to pursue him, and it is
likely that they would have welcomed his death from the cold; but when
several mornings later they heard his screams from a distant ravine they
realized that he had somehow managed to survive, and that his removal
in one way or another would be necessary. Then had followed an armed
searching-party, whose purpose (whatever it may have been originally)
became that of a sheriff's posse after one of the seldom popular state
troopers had by accident observed, then questioned, and finally joined
the seekers.
On the third day Slater was found unconscious in the hollow of a tree,
and taken to the nearest jail, where alienists from Albany examined him
as soon as his senses returned. To them he told a simple story. He had,
he said, gone to sleep one afternoon about sundown after drinking much
liquor. He had awakened to find himself standing bloody-handed in the
snow before his cabin, the mangled corpse of his neighbor Peter Slader at
his feet. Horrified, he had taken to the woods in a vague effort to escape
from the scene of what must have been his crime. Beyond these things he
seemed to know nothing, nor could the expert questioning of his inter-
rogators bring out a single additional fact.
That night Slater slept quietly, and the next morning he awakened
with no singular feature save a certain alteration of expression. Doctor
Barnard, who had been watching the patient, thought he noticed in the
pale blue eyes a certain gleam of peculiar quality, and in the flaccid lips
an all but imperceptible tightening, as if of intelligent determination. But
when questioned, Slater relapsed into the habitual vacancy of the moun-
taineer, and only reiterated what he had said on the preceding day.
On the third morning occurred the first of the man's mental attacks.
After some show of uneasiness in sleep, he burst forth into a frenzy so
powerful that the combined efforts of four men were needed to bind him
in a straightjacket. The alienists listened with keen attention to his words,
since their curiosity had been aroused to a high pitch by the suggestive
yet mostly conflicting and incoherent stories of his family and neighbors.
Slater raved for upward of fifteen minutes, babbling in his backwoods
dialect of green edifices of light, oceans of space, strange music, and
shadowy mountains and valleys. But most of all did he dwell upon some
mysterious blazing entity that shook and laughed and mocked at him.
This vast, vague personality seemed to have done him a terrible wrong,
and to kill it in triumphant revenge was his paramount desire. In order
to reach it, he said, he would soar through abysses of emptiness, burning
every obstacle that stood in his way. Thus ran his discourse, until with
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