The Watchers Out of Time

by H. P. Lovecraft

  “By all means!”

  “It may be perilous—to you as well as to him.”

  “I am not concerned about myself.”

  “But I assure you, it cannot be any more perilous to the boy than his present position. Even death for him is less perilous.”

  “You speak in riddles, Professor.”

  “Let it be better so, Mr. Williams. But come—we are at my residence. Pray come in.”

  We went into one of those ancient houses of which Professor Keane had spoken. I walked into the musty past, for the rooms were filled with books and all manner of antiquities. My host took me into what was evidently his sitting room, swept a chair clear of books, and invited me to wait while he busied himself on the second floor.

  He was not, however, gone very long—not even long enough for me to assimilate the curious atmosphere of the room in which I waited. When he came back he carried what I saw at once were objects of stone, roughly in the shape of five-pointed stars. He put five of them into my hands.

  “Tomorrow after school—if the Potter boy is there—you must contrive to touch him with one of these, and keep it fixed upon him,” said my host. “There are two other conditions. You must keep one of these at least on your person at all times, and you must keep all thought of the stone and what you are about to do out of your mind. These beings have a telepathic sense—an ability to read your thoughts.”

  Startled, I recalled Andrew’s charging me with having talked about them with Wilbur Dunlock.

  “Should I not know what these are?” I asked.

  “If you can abate your doubts for the time being,” my host answered with a grim smile. “These stones are among the thousands bearing the Sea of R’lyeh which closed the prisons of the Ancient Ones. They are the seals of the Elder Gods.”

  “Professor Keane, the age of superstition is past,” I protested.

  “Mr. Williams—the wonder of life and its mysteries is never past,” he retorted. “If the stone has no meaning, it has no power. If it has no power, it cannot affect young Potter. And it cannot protect you.”

  “From what?”

  “From the power behind the malignance you felt at the house in Witches’ Hollow,” he answered. “Or was this too superstition?” He smiled. “You need not answer. I know your answer. If something happens when you put the stone upon the boy, he cannot be allowed to go back home. You must bring him here to me. Are you agreed?”

  “Agreed,” I answered.

  That next day was interminable, not only because of the imminence of crisis, but because it was extremely difficult to keep my mind blank before the inquiring gaze of Andrew Potter. Moreover, I was conscious as never before of the wall of pulsing malignance at my back, emanating from the wild country there, a tangible menace hidden in a pocket of the dark hills. But the hours passed, however slowly, and just before dismissal I asked Andrew Potter to wait after the others had gone.

  And again he assented, with that casual air tantamount almost to insolence, so that I was compelled to ask myself whether he were worth “saving” as I thought of saving him in the depths of my mind.

  But I persevered. I had hidden the stone in my car, and, once the others were gone, I asked Andrew to step outside with me.

  At this point I felt both helpless and absurd. I, a college graduate, about to attempt what for me seemed inevitably the kind of mumbo-jumbo that belonged to the African wilderness. And for a few moments, as I walked stiffly from the school house toward the car I almost flagged, almost simply invited Andrew to get into the car to be driven home.

  But I did not. I reached the car with Andrew at my heels, reached in, seized a stone to slip into my own pocket, seized another, and turned with lightning rapidity to press the stone to Andrew’s forehead.

  Whatever I expected to happen, it was not what took place.

  For, at the touch of the stone, an expression of the utmost horror shone in Andrew Potter’s eyes; in a trice, this gave way to poignant anguish; a great cry of terror burst from his lips. He flung his arms wide, scattering his books, wheeled as far as he could with my hold upon him, shuddered, and would have fallen had I not caught him and lowered him, foaming at the mouth, to the ground. And then I was conscious of a great, cold wind which whirled about us and was gone, bending the grasses and the flowers, rippling the edge of the wood, and tearing away the leaves at the outer band of trees.

  Driven by my own terror, I lifted Andrew Potter into the car, laid the stone on his chest, and drove as fast as I could into Arkham, seven miles away. Professor Keane was waiting, no whit surprised at my coming. And he had expected that I would bring Andrew Potter, for he had made a bed ready for him, and together we put him into it, after which Keane administered a sedative.

  Then he turned to me. “Now then, there’s no time to be lost. They’ll come to look for him—the girl probably first. We must get back to the school house at once.”

  But now the full meaning and horror of what had happened to Andrew Potter had dawned upon me, and I was so shaken that it was necessary for Keane to push me from the room and half drag me out of the house. And again, as I set down these words so long after the terrible events of that night, I find myself trembling with that apprehension and fear which seize hold of a man who comes for the first time face to face with the vast unknown and knows how puny and meaningless he is against that cosmic immensity. I knew in that moment that what I had read in that forbidden book at the Miskatonic Library was not a farrago of superstition, but the key to a hitherto unsuspected revelation perhaps far, far older than mankind in the universe. I did not dare to think of what Wizard Potter had called down from the sky.

  I hardly heard Professor Keane’s words as he urged me to discard my emotional reaction and think of what had happened in scientific, more clinical fashion. After all, I had now accomplished my objective—Andrew Potter was saved. But to insure it, he must be made free of the others, who would surely follow him and find him. I thought only of what waiting horror that quartet of country people from Michigan had walked into when they came to take up possession of the solitary farm in Witches’ Hollow.

  I drove blindly back to school. There, at Professor Keane’s behest, I put on the lights and sat with the door open to the warm night, while he concealed himself behind the building to wait upon their coming. I had to steel myself in order to blank out my mind and take up that vigil.

  On the edge of night, the girl came…

  And after she had undergone the same experience as her brother, and lay beside the desk, the star-shaped stone on her breast, their father showed up in the doorway. All was darkness now, and he carried a gun. He had no need to ask what had happened; he knew. He stood wordless, pointed to his daughter and the stone on her breast, and raised his gun. His inference was plain—if I did not remove the stone, he meant to shoot. Evidently this was the contingency the professor expected, for he came upon Potter from the rear and touched him with the stone.

  Afterward we waited for two hours—in vain, for Mrs. Potter.

  “She isn’t coming,” said Professor Keane at last. “She harbors the seat of its intelligence—I had thought it would be the man. Very well—we have no choice—we must go to Witches’ Hollow. These two can be left here.”

  We drove through the darkness, making no attempt at secrecy, for the professor said the “thing” in the house in the Hollow “knew” we were coming but could not reach us past the talisman of the stone. We went through that close pressing forest, down the narrow lane where the queer undergrowth seemed to reach out toward us in the glow of the headlights, into the Potter yard.

  The house stood dark save for a wan glow of lamplight in one room.

  Professor Keane leaped from the car with his little bag of star-shaped stones, and went around sealing the house—with a stone at each of the two doors, and one at each of the windows, through one of which we could see the woman sitting at the kitchen table—stolid, watchful, aware, no longer dissembling, looking unlike that
tittering woman I had seen in this house not long ago, but rather like some great sentient beast at bay.

  When he had finished, my companion went around to the front, and, by means of brush collected from the yard and piled against the door, set fire to the house, heedless of my protests.

  Then he went back to the window to watch the woman, explaining that only fire could destroy the elemental force, but that he hoped, still, to save Mrs. Potter. “Perhaps you’d better not watch, Williams.”

  I did not heed him. Would that I had—and so spared myself the dreams that invade my sleep even yet! I stood at the window behind him and watched what went on in that room—for the smell of smoke was now permeating the house. Mrs. Potter—or what animated her gross body—started up, went awkwardly to the back door, retreated, to the window, retreated from it, and came back to the center of the room, between the table and the wood stove, not yet fired against the coming cold. There she fell to the floor, heaving and writhing.

  The room filled slowly with smoke, hazing about the yellow lamp, making the room indistinct—but not indistinct enough to conceal completely what went on in the course of that terrible struggle on the floor, where Mrs. Potter threshed about as if in mortal convulsion and slowly, half visibly, something other took shape—an incredible amorphous mass, only half glimpsed in the smoke, tentacled, shimmering, with a cold intelligence and a physical coldness that I could feel through the window. The thing rose like a cloud above the now motionless body of Mrs. Potter, and then fell upon the stove and drained into it like vapor!

  “The stove!” cried Professor Keane, and fell back.

  Above us, out of the chimney, came a spreading blackness, like smoke, gathering itself briefly there. Then it hurtled like a lightning bolt aloft, into the stars, in the direction of the Hyades, back to that place from which old Wizard Potter had called it into himself, away from where it had lain in wait for the Potters to come from Upper Michigan and afford it a new host on the face of earth.

  We managed to get Mrs. Potter out of the house, much shrunken now, but alive.

  On the remainder of that night’s events there is no need to dwell—how the professor waited until fire had consumed the house to collect his store of star-shaped stones, of the reuniting of the Potter family—freed from the curse of Witches’ Hollow and determined never to return to that haunted valley—of Andrew, who, when we came to waken him, was talking in his sleep of “great winds that fought and tore” and a “place by the Lake of Hali where they live in glory forever.”

  What it was that old Wizard Potter had called down from the stars, I lacked the courage to ask, but I knew that it touched upon secrets better left unknown to the races of men, secrets I would never have become aware of had I not chanced to take District School Number Seven, and had among my pupils the strange boy who was Andrew Potter.

  THE SHADOW IN THE ATTIC

  I

  My Great-uncle Uriah Garrison was not a man to cross—a dark-faced, shaggy-browed man with wild black hair and a face that haunted my childhood dreams. I knew him only in those early years. My father crossed him, and he died—strangely, smothered in his bed a hundred miles from Arkham, where my great-uncle lived. My Aunt Sophia condemned him, and she died—tripped on a stair by nothing visible. How many others might there have been? Who knows? Who could do more than whisper fearfully of what dark powers were at Uriah Garrison’s command?

  And of how much of what was said of him was superstitious gossip, baseless, and malicious, none could say. We never saw him again after my father’s death, my mother hating her uncle then and until the day she died, though she never forgot him. Nor did I, either him or his gambrel-roofed house on Aylesbury Street, in that part of Arkham south of the Miskatonic River, not far from Hangman’s Hill and its wooded graveyard. Indeed, Hangman’s Brook flowed through his grounds, wooded, too, like the cemetery on the hill; I never forgot the shadowed house where he lived alone and had someone in—by night—to keep his house for him—the high-ceilinged rooms, the shunned attic which no one entered by day and into which no one was permitted, ever, to go with a lamp or light of any kind, the small-paned windows that looked out upon the bushes and trees, the fan-lit doors; it was the kind of house that could not fail to lay its dark magic upon an impressionable young mind, and it did upon mine, filling me with brooding fancies and, sometimes, terrifying dreams, from which I started awake and fled to my mother’s side, and one memorable night lost my way and came upon my great-uncle’s housekeeper, with her strange emotionless, expressionless face—she stared at me and I at her, as across unfathomable gulfs of space, before I turned and sped away, spurred by new fear imposed upon those engendered in dreams.

  I did not miss going there. There was no love lost between us, and there was little communication, though there were occasions on which I was moved to send Uriah Garrison a short greeting—the old man’s birthday, or Christmas—to which he never responded, which was as well.

  It was, therefore, all the more surprising to me that I should have inherited his property and a small competence at his death, with no more annoying a provision but that I inhabit the house for the summer months of the first year after his death; he had known, clearly, that my teaching obligations would not permit occupancy throughout the year.

  It was not much to ask. I had no intention of keeping the property. Arkham had even in those years begun to grow outward along the Aylesbury Pike, and the city which had once been so detached from my great-uncle’s home, was now pressing close upon it, and the property would be a desirable acquistion for someone. Arkham held no particular attraction for me, though I was fascinated by the legends that haunted it, by its clustering gambrel roofs, and the architectural ornamentation of two centuries ago. This fascination did not run deep, and Arkham as a permanent home did not appeal to me. But before I could sell Uriah Garrison’s house, it was necessary to occupy it in accordance with the terms of his will.

  In June of 1928, over my mother’s protests and in spite of her dark hints that Uriah Garrison had been peculiarly cursed and abhorred, I took up my residence in the house on Aylesbury Street. It required little effort to do so, for the house had been left furnished since my great-uncle’s death in March of that year, and someone, clearly, had kept it clean, as I saw on my arrival from Brattleboro. My great-uncle’s housekeeper had evidently been instructed to continue her duties at least until my occupancy.

  But my great-uncle’s lawyer—an ancient fellow who still affected high collars and solemn black attire—knew nothing of any arrangements Uriah Garrison had made, when I called upon him to investigate the provisions of the will. “I’ve never been in the house, Mr. Duncan,” he said. “If he made arrangements to have it kept clean, there must have been another key. I sent you the one I had, as you know. There is no other, to my knowledge.”

  As for the provisions of my great-uncle’s will—these were barrenly simple. I was merely to occupy the house through the months of June, July, and August, or for ninety days following my coming, if my teaching obligations made it impossible to take up occupancy on the first of June. There were no other conditions whatsoever, not even the ban on the attic room I had expected to see set down.

  “You may find the neighbors a trifle unfriendly at first,” Mr. Saltonstall went on. “Your great-uncle was a man of odd habits, and he rebuffed the neighbors. I suppose he resented their moving into the neighborhood, and they for their part took umbrage at his independence and made much of the fact that, because he took walks into the cemetery on Hangman’s Hill, he seemed to prefer the company of the dead to that of the living.”

  As to what the old man had been like in his last years, about which I asked,—“He was a lusty, vigorous old fellow, very tough, actually,” answered Mr. Saltonstall, “but, as so often happens, when his decline came, it came fast—he was dead in just one week. Senility, the doctor said.”

  “His mind?” I asked.

  Mr. Saltonstall smiled frostily. “Well, now, Mr. Dunc
an, you must know there was always some question about your uncle’s mind. He had some very strange ideas which were, in a real sense, archaic. This witchcraft exploration, for one thing—he spent a good deal of money investigating the Salem trials. But you’ll find his library intact—and filled with books on the subject. Other than this obsessive interest in one subject, he was a coldly rational man—that describes him best. Unfriendly, and holding himself aloof.”

  So Great-uncle Uriah Garrison had not changed in the years that had intervened between my childhood and my late twenties. And the house had not changed, either. It still had that air of watchful waiting—like someone huddled together against the weather, waiting for a stagecoach—nothing more recent, certainly, for the house was two hundred years old, and, though well kept up, it had never been invaded by electricity and its plumbing was archaic. Apart from its appointments, and some aspects of its finishing lumber, the house had no value—only the property on which it stood had considerable monetary worth in view of the expansion of Arkham along the Aylesbury Pike.

  The furniture was in cherry and mahogany and black walnut, and I more than half suspected that if Rhoda—my fiancée, saw it, she would want to keep it for our own house when we built one—and, what with the money the sale of the property and the furniture might realize, we should be able to build that house, leaving my salary as an English Department assistant and hers as an instructor in philology and archaeology to keep it up.

  Three months’ time was not long to do without electricty, and I could endure the ancient plumbing for those weeks, but I decided forthwith that I could not do without a telephone; so I drove into Arkham and ordered a telephone installed without delay. While I was in the business section, I stopped in at the telegraph office on Church Street and sent wires to both my mother and Rhoda, assuring them of my arrival and inviting Rhoda, at her leisure, to drive around and inspect my newly acquired property. I stopped long enough, too, for a good meal at one of the restaurants, bought a few necessary provisions for breakfast—however little inclined I might be toward building a fire in the old iron range in the kitchen—and went back fortified against hunger for the remainder of that day.