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 meta-physical
researches were leading; when he had answered my awed and almost frightened
remonstrance's 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
sud-denly 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 cu-mulative 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
dif-ferently 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 on unrecognized sense organs that exist in us as
atrophied or rudimentary vestiges. Those waves will open up to us many vistas
unknown to man and several unknown to anything we consider organic life. We
shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up
their ears after midnight. We shall see these things, and other things which no
breathing creature has yet seen. We shall overleap time, space, and dimensions,
and without bodily motion peer to the bottom of creation."
When Tilliinghaut 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.
