The Shadow Out of Time | Page 2

had I the least interest in either occultism or abnormal
psychology.
It was on Thursday, 14 May 1908, that the queer amnesia came. The
thing was quite sudden, though later I realized that certain brief,
glimmering visions of several, hours previous--chaotic visions which
disturbed me greatly because they were so unprecedented--must have
formed premonitory symptoms. My head was aching, and I had a
singular feeling--altogether new to me--that some one else was trying
to get possession of my thoughts.
The collapse occurred about 10.20 A.M., while I was conducting a
class in Political Economy VI--history and present tendencies of
economics--for juniors and a few sophomores. I began to see strange
shapes before my eyes, and to feel that I was in a grotesque room other
than the classroom.
My thoughts and speech wandered from my subject, and the students
saw that something was gravely amiss. Then I slumped down,

unconscious, in my chair, in a stupor from which no one could arouse
me. Nor did my rightful faculties again look out upon the daylight of
our normal world for five years, four months, and thirteen days.
It is, of course, from others that I have learned what followed. I showed
no sign of consciousness for sixteen and a half hours though removed
to my home at 27 Crane Street, and given the best of medical attention.
At 3 A.M. May my eyes opened and began to speak and my family
were thoroughly frightened by the trend of my expression and language.
It was clear that I had no remembrance of my identity and my past,
though for some reason seemed anxious to conceal his lack of
knowledge. My eyes glazed strangely at the persons around me, and the
flections of my facial muscles were altogether unfamiliar.
Even my speech seemed awkward and foreign. I used my vocal organs
clumsily and gropingly, and my diction had a curiously stilted quality,
as if I had laboriously learned the English language from books. The
pronunciation was barbarously alien, whilst the idiom seemed to
include both scraps of curious archaism and expressions of a wholly
incomprehensible cast.
Of the latter, one in particular was very potently--even
terrifiedly--recalled by the youngest of the physicians twenty years
afterward. For at that late period such a phrase began to have an actual
currency--first in England and then in the United States--and though of
much complexity and indisputable newness, it reproduced in every
least particular the mystifying words of the strange Arkham patient of
1908.
Physical strength returned at once, although I required an odd amount
of re-education in the use of my hands, legs, and bodily apparatus in
general. Because of this and other handicaps inherent in the mnemonic
lapse, I was for some time kept under strict medical care.
When I saw that my attempts to conceal the lapse had failed, I admitted
it openly, and became eager for information of all sorts. Indeed, it
seemed to the doctors that I lost interest in my proper personality as

soon as I found the case of amnesia accepted as a natural thing.
They noticed that my chief efforts were to master certain points in
history, science, art, language, and folklore--some of them
tremendously abstruse, and some childishly simple--which remained,
very oddly in many cases, outside my consciousness.
At the same time they noticed that I had an inexplicable command of
many almost unknown sorts of knowledge--a command which I
seemed to wish to hide rather than display. I would inadvertently refer,
with casual assurance, to specific events in dim ages outside of the
range of accepted history--passing off such references as a jest when I
saw the surprise they created. And I had a way of speaking of the future
which two or three times caused actual fright.
These uncanny flashes soon ceased to appear, though some observers
laid their vanishment more to a certain furtive caution on my part than
to any waning of the strange knowledge behind them. Indeed, I seemed
anomalously avid to absorb the speech, customs, and perspectives of
the age around me; as if I were a studious traveller from a far, foreign
land.
As soon as permitted, I haunted the college library at all hours; and
shortly began to arrange for those odd travels, and special courses at
American and European Universities, which evoked so much comment
during the next few years.
I did not at any time suffer from a lack of learned contacts, for my case
had a mild celebrity among the psychologists of the period. I was
lectured upon as a typical example of secondary personality--even
though I seemed to puzzle the lecturers now and then with some bizarre
symptoms or some queer trace of carefully veiled mockery.
Of real friendliness, however, I encountered little. Something in my
aspect and