“Don’t move,” he cautioned, “for in these rays we are able to be seen as well as to see. I told you the servants left, but I didn’t tell you how. It was that thick-witted housekeeper—she turned on the lights downstairs after I had warned her not to, and the wires picked up sympathetic vibrations. It must have been frightful—I could hear the screams up here in spite of all I was seeing and hearing from another direction, and later it was rather awful to find those empty heaps of clothes around the house. Mrs. Updike’s clothes were close to the front hall switch—that’s how I know she did it. It got them all. But so long as we don’t move we’re fairly safe. Remember we’re dealing with a hideous world in which we are practically helpless.… Keep still!”
The combined shock of the revelation and of the abrupt command gave me a kind of paralysis, and in my terror my mind again opened to the impressions coming from what Tillinghast called “beyond.” I was now in a vortex of sound and motion, with confused pictures before my eyes. I saw the blurred outlines of the room, but from some point in space there seemed to be pouring a seething column of unrecognisable shapes or clouds, penetrating the solid roof at a point ahead and to the right of me. Then I glimpsed the temple-like effect again, but this time the pillars reached up into an aërial ocean of light, which sent down one blinding beam along the path of the cloudy column I had seen before. After that the scene was almost wholly kaleidoscopic, and in the jumble of sights, sounds, and unidentified sense-impressions I felt that I was about to dissolve or in some way lose the solid form. One definite flash I shall always remember. I seemed for an instant to behold a patch of strange night sky filled with shining, revolving spheres, and as it receded I saw that the glowing suns formed a constellation or galaxy of settled shape; this shape being the distorted face of Crawford Tillinghast. At another time I felt the huge animate things brushing past me and occasionally walking or drifting through my supposedly solid body, and thought I saw Tillinghast look at them as though his better trained senses could catch them visually. I recalled what he had said of the pineal gland, and wondered what he saw with this preternatural eye.
Suddenly I myself became possessed of a kind of augmented sight. Over and above the luminous and shadowy chaos arose a picture which, though vague, held the elements of consistency and permanence. It was indeed somewhat familiar, for the unusual part was superimposed upon the usual terrestrial scene much as a cinema view may be thrown upon the painted curtain of a theatre. I saw the attic laboratory, the electrical machine, and the unsightly form of Tillinghast opposite me; but of all the space unoccupied by familiar material objects not one particle was vacant. Indescribable shapes both alive and otherwise were mixed in disgusting disarray, and close to every known thing were whole worlds of alien, unknown entities. It likewise seemed that all the known things entered into the composition of other unknown things, and vice versa. Foremost among the living objects were great inky, jellyish monstrosities which flabbily quivered in harmony with the vibrations from the machine. They were present in loathsome profusion, and I saw to my horror that they overlapped; that they were semi-fluid and capable of passing through one another and through what we know as solids. These things were never still, but seemed ever floating about with some malignant purpose. Sometimes they appeared to devour one another, the attacker launching itself at its victim and instantaneously obliterating the latter from sight. Shudderingly I felt that I knew what had obliterated the unfortunate servants, and could not exclude the things from my mind as I strove to observe other properties of the newly visible world that lies unseen around us. But Tillinghast had been watching me, and was speaking.
“You see them? You see them? You see the things that float and flop about you and through you every moment of your life? You see the creatures that form what men call the pure air and the blue sky? Have I not succeeded in breaking down the barrier; have I not shewn you worlds that no other living men have seen?” I heard him scream through the horrible chaos, and looked at the wild face thrust so offensively close to mine. His eyes were pits of flame, and they glared at me with what I now saw was overwhelming hatred. The machine droned detestably.
“You think those floundering things wiped out the servants? Fool, they are harmless! But the servants are gone, aren’t they? You tried to stop me; you discouraged me when I needed every drop of encouragement I could get; you were afraid of the cosmic truth, you damned coward, but now I’ve got you! What swept up the servants? What made them scream so loud? … Don’t know, eh? You’ll know soon enough! Look at me—listen to what I say—do you suppose there are really any such things as time and magnitude? Do you fancy there are such things as form or matter? I tell you, I have struck depths that your little brain can’t picture! I have seen beyond the bounds of infinity and drawn down daemons from the stars.… I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness.… Space belongs to me, do you hear? Things are hunting me now—the things that devour and dissolve—but I know how to elude them. It is you they will get, as they got the servants. Stirring, dear sir? I told you it was dangerous to move. I have saved you so far by telling you to keep still—saved you to see more sights and to listen to me. If you had moved, they would have been at you long ago. Don’t worry, they won’t hurt you. They didn’t hurt the servants—it was seeing that made the poor devils scream so. My pets are not pretty, for they come out of places where aesthetic standards are—very different. Disintegration is quite painless, I assure you—but I want you to see them. I almost saw them, but I knew how to stop. You are not curious? I always knew you were no scientist! Trembling, eh? Trembling with anxiety to see the ultimate things I have discovered? Why don’t you move, then? Tired? Well, don’t worry, my friend, for they are coming.… Look! Look, curse you, look! … It’s just over your left shoulder.…”
What remains to be told is very brief, and may be familiar to you from the newspaper accounts. The police heard a shot in the old Tillinghast house and found us there—Tillinghast dead and me unconscious. They arrested me because the revolver was in my hand, but released me in three hours, after they found it was apoplexy which had finished Tillinghast and saw that my shot had been directed at the noxious machine which now lay hopelessly shattered on the laboratory floor. I did not tell very much of what I had seen, for I feared the coroner would be sceptical; but from the evasive outline I did give, the doctor told me that I had undoubtedly been hypnotised by the vindictive and homicidal madman.
I wish I could believe that doctor. It would help my shaky nerves if I could dismiss what I now have to think of the air and the sky about and above me. I never feel alone or comfortable, and a hideous sense of pursuit sometimes comes chillingly on me when I am weary. What prevents me from believing the doctor is this one simple fact— that the police never found the bodies of those servants whom they say Crawford Tillinghast murdered.
NOTES
(alphabetical by topic)
CAN’T FIND MY WAY HOME: written and performed by Steve Winwood, Almo Music, Blind Faith, ATCO SD 33-304, Atlantic Recording Corp., New York, 1969.
CORONERS’ INQUESTS INTO POLICE SHOOTINGS: Anyone unclear on how police shootings are currently rubber-stamped in America may want to read some non-fiction columns on the topic:
https://www.freedomsphoenix.com/Opinion/013442-2007-01-01-coroners-inquest-not-open-to-the-public.htm
http://www.vinsuprynowicz.com/?p=598&cpage=1
http://www.reviewjournal.com/vin-suprynowicz/inquest-closed-public-again
http://www.reviewjournal.com/vin-suprynowicz/its-fine-police-kill-people-so-long-theres-no-ill-will
http://www.vinsuprynowicz.com/?p=579
http://www.vinsuprynowicz.com/?p=562
http://www.vinsuprynowicz.com/?p=541
http://www.vinsuprynowicz.com/?p=609
http://www.reviewjournal.com/vin-suprynowicz/business-usual-las-vegas-police
http://www.vinsuprynowicz.com/?p=539
THE DOUGHERTY CASE (UNITED STAT
ES v. DOUGHERTY, 1972 — a draft protest case — UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA CIRCUIT, 473 F.2d 1113 (1972): Leventhal, Circuit Judge, wrote for the court: “There has evolved in the Anglo-American system an undoubted jury prerogative-in-fact, derived from its power to bring in a general verdict of not guilty in a criminal case, that is not reversible by the court. The power of the courts to punish jurors for corrupt or incorrect verdicts, which persisted after the medieval system of attaint by another jury became obsolete, was repudiated in 1670 when Bushell’s Case discharged the jurors who had acquitted William Penn of unlawful assembly. Juries in civil cases became subject to the control of ordering a new trial; no comparable control evolved for acquittals in criminal cases. The pages of history shine on instances of the jury’s exercise of its prerogative to disregard uncontradicted evidence and instructions of the judge. Most often commended are the 18th century acquittal of Peter Zenger of seditious libel, on the plea of Andrew Hamilton, and the 19th century acquittals in prosecutions under the fugitive slave law.…”
McKENNA, TERENCE (1946-2000): frequently quoted in the section headings of this book, was an inspired (and entertaining) visionary and champion of the advancement and enlightenment of both the individual and the species through the sacramental use of plant helpers. In fact, he speculated (not without some evidence) that the use of entheogens dates back to the time we “descended from the trees,” thus gave birth to all human religion, and by aiding visual acuity and the development of language may have played a substantial role in making us “human” as we now understand the term. He was (from all appearances; we were never privileged to meet him) a great guy. It is not our intention to belittle him, or to take a stance in the finally pointless debate (based on some of his own statements — he was endlessly voluble) that he served as any kind of government “agent.”
However, lest our citing of his frequent brilliant insights should be taken as an embrace of everything he ever said or thought, Mr. McKenna came out of the anti-war movement in California in the 1960s, and (while there’s no sin in that) like many from that background who failed to later discover and embrace Ayn Rand, Isabel Paterson, Henry Hazlitt, Friedrich Hayek, or Ludwig von Mises, he continued to carry with him the unexamined baggage of a casual anti-capitalism. Of the three major known forms of economic organization — feudalism, capitalism, and communism — capitalism (though it may remain the “unrealized ideal,” and can certainly be corrupted via subsidies and protectionism into “crony capitalism”) is the only system that honors, embraces, and encourages truly free exchange, with minimal interference by the enervating hand of the kleptocrat state. It thus tends to facilitate through free exchange the creation of wealth and prosperity, where its known alternatives create poverty, tyranny, starvation, and systematic murder.
Mr. McKenna was also sometimes capable of elitism — only smart guys like I and thou should be trusted with these drugs — and of special pleading, urging the authorities to look at legalizing his favorite entheogens, the mushroom, DMT and the ayahuasca tryptamines, even if they continued to show no such tolerance for “other psychedelics.” But this merely encourages a strategy of “divide and conquer” among the prohibitionists. In fact, it’s both more principled and more effective, in the long run, to simply insist government has no proper authority to regulate or “control” the possession or use of any plant, drug, or medicine, since to do so is to attempt to control what goes on inside an individual’s mind — the ultimate tyranny.
MICROWAVES: The risks & dangers are dealt with in a fairly light tone in this book, as seemed appropriate for the genre (whatever the genre to which this book may eventually be assigned.) But those risks & dangers are real enough. See Paul Brodeur’s “The Zapping of America,” full listing in the bibliography.
THE MOYLAN CASE, 417 F.2d 1002 — UNITED STATE V. MARY MOYLAN, PHILIP BERRIGAN, ET AL., 1969 (a Vietnam War protest case) Sobeloff, Circuit Judge, writing for a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, actually upheld the convictions, finding there was no requirement that the trial judge inform the jury of their power to ignore the law, or allow defense counsel to do so, nonetheless noting: “We recognize, as appellants urge, the undisputed power of the jury to acquit, even if its verdict is contrary to the law as given by the judge and contrary to the evidence. This is a power that must exist as long as we adhere to the general verdict in criminal cases, for the courts cannot search the minds of the jurors to find the basis upon which they judge. If the jury feels that the law under which the defendant is accused is unjust, or that exigent circumstances justified the actions of the accused, or for any reason which appeals to their logic or passion, the jury has the power to acquit, and the courts must abide by that decision.… Concededly, this power of the jury is not always contrary to the interests of justice. For example, freedom of the press was immeasurably strengthened by the jury’s acquittal of John Peter Zenger of seditious libel, a violation of which, under the law as it then existed and the facts, he was clearly guilty. In that case Andrew Hamilton was allowed to urge the jury, in the face of the judge’s charge, ‘to see with their own eyes, to hear with their own ears, and to make use of their consciences and understanding in judging of the lives, liberties, or estates of their fellow subjects.’”
POLICE SHOOTINGS: Anyone who finds the details of Sgt. Phil Robichaux’s deadly shooting of Providence business owner Leroy Johnson in the doorway of his own home hard to believe may want to review the shooting of John Geer, standing with arms raised in the doorway of his own home, by police in Fairfax County, Virginia in August of 2013.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/john-b-geer-had-hands-up-when-shot-by-fairfax-police-documents-show/2015/01/30/6ef0142c-a8ef-11e4-a06b-9df2002b86a0_story.html
http://www.policestateusa.com/2013/john-geer-shot-by-police/
http://www.vinsuprynowicz.com/?p=2484
POLICE TATTOOS: Anyone who finds my description of Police Sgt. Phil Robichaux’s tattoo in Chapter Six unlikely is referred to my syndicated newspaper column of Dec. 4, 2011 on a curiously similar subject, at
http://www.vinsuprynowicz.com/?p=928, or
http://www.reviewjournal.com/vin-suprynowicz/what-does-officers-tattoo-really-mean.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
— Strongly recommended.
The Archaic Revival / Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History, Terence McKenna, HarperOne 1991 (paperback)
Empire of the Air / The Men Who Made Radio, Tom Lewis, HarperCollins 1991: Edwin Howard Armstrong, who invented the regenerative circuit (1914), the super-regenerative circuit (1922), the superheterodyne receiver (1918), and Frequency Modulation, making possible radio and television as we know them. Also the hustler Lee de Forest, and David Sarnoff, who claimed FM was worthless, then proceeded to put an FM receiver in every television he built (which is why TV sound is static-free), never paying Armstrong for any of them. Armstrong’s widow won all the patent infringement suits.
I Am Providence / The Life and Times of H.P. Lovecraft: Volumes 1 and 2, S.T. Joshi, Hippocampus Press, New York, 2010 (hardcover), 2013 (paperback.) Volume 1 carries the reader through 1924; Volume 2 picking up at the beginning of 1925. Although “From Beyond” was written in 1920, the second volume is in many ways the more useful and revealing.
The Invisible Landscape / Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching, Dennis J. McKenna and Terence K. McKenna, Seabury Press, New York, 1975
PIHKAL (Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved) / A Chemical Love Story, Alexander & Ann Shulgin, Transform Press, Berkeley, Calif., 1991. (See TIHKAL.)
Psychoactive Sacramentals / Essays on Entheogens and Religion, edited by Thomas B. Roberts, The Council on Spiritual Practices, 2001. At Luke 17:21, of course, we are advised that “The kingdom of God is within you.” One would think that should have narrowed the search quite a bit. Taking up the path from there, the essays
in this book — by Dan Merkur, Albert Hofmann, and Ann and Sasha Shulgin, for starters — are crucial. Editor Roberts has penned on the title page of our copy: “Children of a future age, / Reading this indignant page, / Know that in a former time / A path to God was thought a crime,” which he credits “After Wm. Blake.” And the tryptamine Munchkins cry “Now do you see? Now do you see?”
The Second Sin, Thomas Szasz, Anchor Press 1973. Dr. Szasz asserts the “second sin” is speaking clearly, that (in contrast) control is gained by those who first define disfavored behaviors with the metaphor “mental illness,” implying their attempts to suppress such phenomena are scientific, therapeutic, and beneficial. If you talk to God, he notes, “that’s prayer. If God talks to you, that’s schizophrenia.”
Sperm Wars: The Science of Sex, Robin Baker, Basic Books 1996: “The Evolutionary Logic of Love and Lust.”
The Tempter / A novel about a great invention — by the man who invented the science of cybernetics, Norbert Weiner, Random House 1959: Weiner’s thinly disguised account of the temptation of scientist Michael Pupin by AT&T to file for a patent on a method of adding loading coils to correct distortion in long-distance telegraph and particularly telephone lines — an invention already published by self-taught English electrical engineer Oliver Heaviside (who developed the operational calculus and invented the coaxial cable) and thus in the public domain.
The Miskatonic Manuscript (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens Book 2) Page 31
