The Watchers Out of Time

by H. P. Lovecraft

  But I had seen enough to be convinced that the dark-clad brotherhood who walked the streets of Providence by night in the guise of Edgar Allan Poe had a purpose other than mine in doing so; theirs was no simple curiosity about the nocturnal characters, about fellow walkers of the night. Perhaps darkness was their natural element, even as daylight was that of the majority of their fellowmen; but that their motivation was sinister, I could not now doubt. Yet at the same time I was at a loss as to what course next to follow.

  I turned my steps at last toward the library, in the vague hope of grasping at something that might lead me to some clue by means of which I could approach an understanding of what I had seen.

  But there was nothing. Search as I might, I found no key, no hint, though I read widely through every conceivable reference—even to those on Poe in Providence on the shelves, and I left the library late in the day as baffled as I had entered.

  Perhaps it was inevitable that I would see Mr. Allan again that night. I had no way of knowing whether my visit to his home had been observed, despite the observer I thought I had glimpsed in an upper window in my flight, and I encountered him therefore in some trepidation. But this was evidently ill-founded, for when I greeted him on Benefit Street there was nothing in his manner or in his words to suggest any change in his attitude, such as I might have expected had he been aware of my intrusion. Yet I knew full well his capacity for being without expression—humor, disgust, even anger or irritation were alien to his features, which never changed from that introspective mask which was essentially that of Poe.

  “I trust you have recovered from our experiment, Mr. Phillips,” he said after exchanging the customary amenities.

  “Fully,” I answered, though it was not the truth. I added something about a sudden spell of dizziness to explain my bringing the experiment to its precipitate end.

  “It is but one of the worlds outside you saw, Mr. Phillips,” Mr. Allan went on. “There are many. As many as a hundred thousand. Life is not the unique property of Earth. Nor is life in the shape of human beings. Life takes many forms on other planets and far stars, forms that would seen bizarre to humans, as human life is bizarre to other life-forms.”

  For once, Mr. Allan was singularly communicative, and I had little to say. Clearly, whether or not I laid what I had seen to hallucination—even in the face of my discovery in my companion’s house—he himself believed implicity in what he said. He spoke of many worlds, as if he were familiar with them. On occasion he spoke almost with reverence of certain forms of life, particularly those with the astonishing adaptability of assuming the life-forms of other planets in their ceaseless quest for the conditions necessary to their existence.

  “The star I looked upon,” I broke in, “was dying.”

  “Yes,” he said simply.

  “You have seen it?”

  “I have seen it, Mr. Phillips.”

  I listened to him with relief. Since it was manifestly impossible to permit any man sight of the intimate life of outer space, what I had experienced was nothing more than the communicated hallucination of Mr. Allan and his brothers. Telepathic communication certainly, aided by a form of hypnosis I had not previously experienced. Yet I could not rid myself of the disquieting sense of evil that surrounded my nocturnal companion, nor of the uneasy feeling that the explanation which I had so eagerly accepted was unhappily glib.

  As soon as I decently could, thereafter, I made excuses to Mr. Allan and took my leave of him. I hastened directly to the Athenaeum in the hope of finding Rose Dexter there, but if she had been there, she had already gone. I went then to a public telephone in the building and telephoned her home.

  Rose answered, and I confess to an instantaneous feeling of gratification.

  “Have you seen Mr. Allan tonight?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she replied. “But only for a few moments. I was on my way to the library.”

  “So did I.”

  “He asked me to his home some evening to watch an experiment,” she went on.

  “Don’t go,” I said at once.

  There was a long moment of silence at the other end of the wire. Then, “Why not?” Unfortunately, I failed to acknowledge the edge of truculence in her voice.

  “It would be better not to go,” I said, with all the firmness I could muster.

  “Don’t you think, Mr. Phillips, I am the best judge of that?”

  I hastened to assure her that I had no wish to dictate her actions, but meant only to suggest that it might be dangerous to go.

  “Why?”

  “I can’t tell you over the telephone,” I answered, fully aware of how lame it sounded, and knowing even as I said it that perhaps I could not put into words at all the horrible suspicions which had begun to take shape in my mind, for they were so fantastic, so outré, that no one could be expected to believe in them.

  “I’ll think it over,” she said crisply.

  “I’ll try to explain when I see you,” I promised.

  She bade me good night and rang off with an intransigence that boded ill, and left me profoundly disturbed.

  V

  I come now to the final, apocalyptic events concerning Mr. Allan and the mystery surrounding the house on the forgotten knoll. I hesitate to set them down even now, for I recognize that the charge against me will only be broadened to include grave questions about my sanity. Yet I have no other course. Indeed, the entire future of humanity, the whole course of what we call civilization may be affected by what I do or do not write of this matter. For the culminating events followed rapidly and naturally upon my conversation with Rose Dexter, that unsatisfactory exchange over the telephone.

  After a restless, uneasy day at work, I concluded that I must make a tenable explanation to Rose. On the following evening, therefore, I went early to the library, where I was accustomed to meeting her, and took a place where I could watch the main entrance. There I waited for well over an hour before it occurred to me that she might not come to the library that night.

  Once more I sought the telephone, intending to ask whether I might come over and explain my request of the previous night.

  But it was her sister-in-law, not Rose, who answered my ring.

  Rose had gone out. “A gentleman called for her.”

  “Did you know him?” I asked.

  “No, Mr. Phillips.”

  “Did you hear his name?”

  She had not heard it. She had, in fact, caught only a glimpse of him as Rose hurried out to meet him, but, in answer to my insistent probing, she admitted that Rose’s caller had had a moustache.

  Mr. Allan! I had no further need to inquire.

  For a few moments after I had hung up, I did not know what to do. Perhaps Rose and Mr. Allan were only walking the length of Benefit Street. But perhaps they had gone to that mysterious house. The very thought of it filled me with such apprehension that I lost my head.

  I rushed from the library and hurried home. It was ten o’clock when I reached the house on Angell Street. Fortunately, my mother had retired; so I was able to procure my father’s pistol without disturbing her. So armed, I hastened once more into night-held Providence and ran, block upon block, toward the shore of the Seekonk and the knoll upon which stood Mr. Allan’s strange house, unaware in my incautious haste of the spectacle I made for other night-walkers and uncaring, for perhaps Rose’s life was at stake—and beyond that, vaguely defined, loomed a far greater and hideous evil.

  When I reached the house into which Mr. Allan had disappeared I was taken aback by its solitude and unlit windows. Since I was winded, I hesitated to advance upon it, and waited for a minute or so to catch my breath and quiet my pulse. Then, keeping to the shadows, I moved silently up to the house, looking for any sliver of light.

  I crept from the front of the house around to the back. Not the slightest ray of light could be seen. But a low humming sound vibrated just inside the range of my hearing, like the hum of a power line responding to the weather. I crossed t
o the far side of the house—and there I saw the hint of light—not yellow light, as from a lamp inside, but a pale lavender radiance that seemed to glow faintly, ever so faintly, from the wall itself.

  I drew back, recalling only too sharply what I had seen in that house.

  But my role now could not be a passive one. I had to know whether Rose was in that darkened house—perhaps in that very room with the unknown machinery and the glass case with the monster in the violet radiance.

  I slipped back to the front of the house and mounted the steps to the front door.

  Once again, the door was not locked. It yielded to the pressure of my hands. Pausing only long enough to take my loaded weapon in hand, I pushed open the door and entered the vestibule. I stood for a moment to accustom my eyes to that darkness; standing there, I was even more aware of the humming sound I had heard—and of more—the same kind of chant which had put me into that hypnotic state in the course of which I had witnessed that disturbing vision purporting to be that of life in another world.

  I apprehended its meaning instantly, I thought. Rose must be with Mr. Allan and his brothers, undergoing a similar experience.

  Would that it had been no more!

  For when I pushed my way into that large room on the far side of the house, I saw that which will be forever indelibly imprinted on my mind. Lit by the radiance from the glass case, the room disclosed Mr. Allan and his identical brothers all prone upon the floor around the twin cases, making their chanting song. Beyond them, against the far wall, lay the discarded life-size likeness of Poe I had seen beneath that weird creature in the glass case bathed in violet radiance. But it was not Mr. Allan and his brothers that so profoundly shocked and repelled me—it was what I saw in the glass cases!

  For in the one that lit the room with its violently pulsating and agitated violet radiation lay Rose Dexter, fully clothed, and certainly under hypnosis—and on top of her lay, greatly elongated and with its tentacles flailing madly, the rugose cone-like figure I had last seen shrunken on the likeness of Poe. And in the connected case adjacent to it—I can hardly bear to set it down even now—lay, identical in every detail, a perfect duplicate of Rose!

  What happened next is confused in my memory. I know that I lost control, that I fired blindly at the glass cases, intending to shatter them. Certainly I struck one or both of them, for with the impact the radiance vanished, the room was plunged into utter darkness, cries of fear and alarm rose from Mr. Allan and his brothers, and, amid a succession of explosive sounds from the machinery, I rushed forward and picked up Rose Dexter.

  Somehow I gained the street with Rose.

  Looking back, I saw that flames were appearing at the windows of that accursed house, and then, without warning, the north wall of the house collapsed, and something—an object I could not identify—burst from the now burning house and vanished aloft. I fled, still carrying Rose.

  Regaining her senses, Rose was hysterical, but I succeeded in calming her, and at last she fell silent and would say nothing. And in silence I took her safely home, knowing how frightening her experience must have been, and resolved to say nothing until she had fully recovered.

  In the week that followed, I came to see clearly what was taking place in that house on the knoll. But the charge of arson—lodged against me in lieu of a far more serious one because of the pistol I abandoned in the burning house—has blinded the police to anything but the most mundane matters. I have tried to tell them, insisting that they see Rose Dexter when she is well enough to talk—and willing to do so. I cannot make them understand what I now understand only too well. Yet the facts are there, inescapably.

  They say the charred flesh found in that house is not human, most of it. But could they have expected anything else? Seven men in the likeness of Edgar Allan Poe! Surely they must understand that whatever it was in that house came from another world, a dying world, and sought to invade and ultimately take over Earth by reproducing themselves in the shape of men! Surely they must know that it must have been only by coincidence that the model they first chose was a likeness of Poe, chosen because they had no knowledge that Poe did not represent the average among men? Surely they must know, as I came to know, that the rugose, tentacled cone in the violet radiance was the source of their material selves, that the machinery and the tubing—which they say was too much damaged by the fire to identify, as if they could have identified its functions even undamaged!—manufactured from the material simulating flesh supplied by the cone in the violet light, creatures in the shape of men from the likeness of Poe!

  “Mr. Allan” himself afforded me the key, though I did not know it at the time, when I asked him why mankind was the object of interplanetary scrutiny—“To make war on us? To invade us?”—and he replied: “A more highly developed form of life would hardly need to use such primitive methods.” Could anything more plainly set forth the explanation for the strange occupation of the house along the Seekonk? Of course, it is evident now that what “Mr. Allan” and his identical brothers afforded me in my own house was a glimpse of life on the planet of the cubes and rugose cones, which was their own.

  And surely, finally, most damning of all—it must be evident to any unbiased observer why they wanted Rose. They meant to reproduce their kind in the guise of men and women, so that they could mingle with us, undetected, unsuspected, and slowly, over decades—perhaps centuries, while their world died, take over, and prepare our Earth for those who would come after.

  God alone knows how many of them may be here, among us, even now!

  Later, I have been unable to see Rose until now, tonight, and I am hesitant to call for her. For something unutterably terrible has happened to me. I have fallen prey to horrible doubts. While it did not occur to me during that frightful experience in the shambles following my shots in that violet-lit room, I have now begun to wonder, and my concern has grown hour by hour until I find it now almost unbearable. How can I be sure that, in those frenzied minutes, I rescued the real Rose Dexter? If I did, surely she will reassure me tonight. If I did not—God knows what I may unwittingly have loosed upon Providence and the world!

  From The Providence Journal—July 17

  LOCAL GIRL SLAYS ATTACKER

  Rose Dexter, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Elisha Dexter of 127 Benevolent Street, last night fought off and killed a young man she charged with attacking her. Miss Dexter was apprehended in an hysterical condition as she fled down Benefit Street in the vicinity of the Cathedral of St. John, near the cemetery attached to which the attack took place.

  Her attacker was identified as an acquaintance, Arthur Phillips….

  THE HORROR FROM THE MIDDLE SPAN

  I

  The Bishop Manuscript was found by authorities investigating the disappearance of Ambrose Bishop. It was enclosed in a bottle evidently thrown wide into the woods at the rear of the burning house. It is still being held in the office of the sheriff in Arkham, Massachusetts.

  It was on my seventh day out of London that I reached the place in America to which my ancestors had come from England over two centuries before. It lay in the heart of wild, lonely country above Dunwich, Massachusetts, along the upper reaches of the Miskatonic River, and well away here even from the brier-bordered stone walls that line so much of the road away from the Aylesbury Pike—a country of great old trees, pressed darkly together, many brambles, and here and there—though rarely seen for the underbrush grown up about them—the ruins of a dwelling abandoned long ago. I might easily have missed the place, for the lane leading to the house—now totally concealed by trees and bushes—was long overgrown, but the remains of a stone pillar next to the road still bore the last four letters of Bishop, and thus I knew I had reached my goal, from which my great-uncle Septimus Bishop had vanished in his middle years almost two decades before. I fought my way up the lane, through brier and bramble, over fallen limbs of the trees that lined it, up the slope for half a mile.

  The house stood on the side of a hill—sq
uat, though it was of two storeys, and hybrid in construction, being partly of stone, and partly of wood that had once, long ago, been painted white, but had now lost all but traces of its original color and had long since reverted to its natural state. I observed its most unusual aspect at once—unlike the other houses I had espied along the road wholly or partly in ruins, it stood intact, stone upon stone, and not a window-pane broken, though the weather had had its way with the wood of its superstructure, particularly the circular cupola that crowned it, in which I could detect several apertures surrounded by what was clearly rotten wood.

  The door stood ajar, but the pillared verandah opening outward from it had protected the interior from the worst of the weather. Moreover, though dust lay thickly inside, it was quickly apparent that nothing had disturbed the interior—no vandal had laid hands upon so much as a stick of furniture, nor disturbed the still open book on the desk in the study, though mildew was everywhere, and the house smelled of damp and mustiness, which perhaps no amount of airing out would dissipate, and no intensiveness in cleaning would entirely eradicate.

  Nevertheless, I undertook to try, a decision that made necessary a return journey to Dunwich; so I made my way back to the main road—though that road was little more than a rutted lane—where I had left the car I had rented in New York, and drove back to Dunwich, a squalid hamlet crouched between the dark waters of the Miskatonic and the brooding mass of Round Mountain, which seemed eternally to shadow the village. There I went to the only general store the settlement offered, one that occupied an abandoned church and boasted the proprietorship of one Tobias Whateley.