Hypnos | Page 3

sort; so that few assemblies of the young and gay were unknown to us.
Our appearance and age seemed to excite in most cases a ridicule which I keenly resented,
but which my friend considered a lesser evil than solitude. Especially was he afraid to be
out of doors alone when the stars were shining, and if forced to this condition he would
often glance furtively at the sky as if hunted by some monstrous thing therein. He did not
always glance at the same place in the sky- it seemed to be a different place at different
times. On spring evenings it would be low in the northeast. In the summer it would be
nearly overhead. In the autumn it would be in the northwest. In winter it would be in the
east, but mostly if in the small hours of morning.

Midwinter evenings seemed least dreadful to him. Only after two years did I connect this
fear with anything in particular; but then I began to see that he must be looking at a
special spot on the celestial vault whose position at different times corresponded to the
direction of his glance- a spot roughly marked by the constellation Corona Borealis.
We now had a studio in London, never separating, but never discussing the days when we
had sought to plumb the mysteries of the unreal world. We were aged and weak from our
drugs, dissipations, and nervous overstrain, and the thinning hair and beard of my friend
had become snow-white. Our freedom from long sleep was surprising, for seldom did we
succumb more than an hour or two at a time to the shadow which had now grown so
frightful a menace.
Then came one January of fog and rain, when money ran low and drugs were hard to buy.
My statues and ivory heads were all sold, and I had no means to purchase new materials,
or energy to fashion them even had I possessed them. We suffered terribly, and on a
certain night my friend sank into a deep-breathing sleep from which I could not awaken
him. I can recall the scene now- the desolate, pitch-black garret studio under the eaves
with the rain beating down; the ticking of our lone clock; the fancied ticking of our
watches as they rested on the dressing-table; the creaking of some swaying shutter in a
remote part of the house; certain distant city noises muffled by fog and space; and, worst
of all, the deep, steady, sinister breathing of my friend on the couch- a rhythmical
breathing which seemed to measure moments of supernal fear and agony for his spirit as
it wandered in spheres forbidden, unimagined, and hideously remote.
The tension of my vigil became oppressive, and a wild train of trivial impressions and
associations thronged through my almost unhinged mind. I heard a clock strike
somewhere- not ours, for that was not a striking clock- and my morbid fancy found in
this a new starting-point for idle wanderings. Clocks- time- space- infinity- and then my
fancy reverted to the locale as I reflected that even now, beyond the roof and the fog and
the rain and the atmosphere, Corona Borealis was rising in the northeast. Corona Borealis,
which my friend had appeared to dread, and whose scintillant semicircle of stars must
even now be glowing unseen through the measureless abysses of aether. All at once my
feverishly sensitive ears seemed to detect a new and wholly distinct component in the soft
medley of drug-magnified sounds- a low and damnably insistent whine from very far
away; droning, clamoring, mocking, calling, from the northeast.
But it was not that distant whine which robbed me of my faculties and set upon my soul
such a seal of fright as may never in life be removed; not that which drew the shrieks and
excited the convulsions which caused lodgers and police to break down the door. It was
not what I heard, but what I saw; for in that dark, locked, shuttered, and curtained room
there appeared from the black northeast corner a shaft of horrible red-gold light- a shaft
which bore with it no glow to disperse the darkness, but which streamed only upon the
recumbent head of the troubled sleeper, bringing out in hideous duplication the luminous
and strangely youthful memory-face as I had known it in dreams of abysmal space and
unshackled time, when my friend had pushed behind the barrier to those secret, innermost
and forbidden caverns of nightmare.

And as I looked, I beheld the head rise, the black, liquid, and deep-sunken eyes open in
terror, and the thin, shadowed lips part as if for a scream too frightful to be uttered. There
dwelt in that ghastly and flexible face, as it shone bodiless, luminous, and rejuvenated