The Shadow Out of Time | Page 5

true self during the years that another had held my
body. The curious knowledge and strange conduct of my body's late
tenant troubled me more and more as I learned further details from
persons, papers, and magazines.
Queernesses that had baffled others seemed to harmonize terribly with
some background of black knowledge which festered in the chasms of
my subconscious. I began to search feverishly for every scrap of
information bearing on the studies and travels of that other one during
the dark years.

Not all of my troubles were as semi-abstract as this. There were the
dreams--and these seemed to grow in vividness and concreteness.
Knowing how most would regard them, I seldom mentioned them to
anyone but my son or certain trusted psychologists, but eventually I
commenced a scientific study of other cases in order to see how typical
or nontypical such visions might be among amnesia victims.
My results, aided by psychologists, historians, anthropologists, and
mental specialists of wide experience, and by a study that included all
records of split personalities from the days of daemonic-possession
legends to the medically realistic present, at first bothered me more
than they consoled me.
I soon found that my dreams had, indeed, no counterpart in the
overwhelming bulk of true amnesia cases. There remained, however, a
tiny residue of accounts which for years baffled and shocked me with
their parallelism to my own experience. Some of them were bits of
ancient folklore; others were case histories in the annals of medicine;
one or two were anecdotes obscurely buried in standard histories.
It thus appeared that, while my special kind of affliction was
prodigiously rare, instances of it had occurred at long intervals ever
since the beginnig of men's annals. Some centuries might contain one,
two, or three cases, others none--or at least none whose record
survived.
The essence was always the same--a person of keen thoughtfulness
seized a strange secondary life and leading for a greater or lesser period
an utterly alien existence typified at first by vocal and bodily
awkwardness, an later by a wholesale acquisition of scientific, historic,
artistic, and anthropologic knowledge; an acquisition carried on with
feverish zest and with a wholly abnormal absorptive power. Then a
sudden return of rightful consciousness, intermittently plagued ever
after with vague unplaceable dreams suggesting fragments of some
hideous memory elaborately blotted out.
And the close resemblance of those nightmares to my own--even in
some of the smallest particulars--left no doubt in my mind of their

significantly typical nature. One or two of the cases had an added ring
of faint, blasphemous familiarity, as if I had heard of them before
through some cosmic channel too morbid and frightful to contemplate.
In three instances there was specific mention of such an unknown
machine as had been in my house before the second change.
Another thing that worried me during my investigation was the
somewhat greater frequency of cases where a brief, elusive glimpse of
the typical nightmares was afforded to persons not visited well-defined
amnesia.
These persons were largely of mediocre mind or less--some so
primitive that they could scarcely be thought of as vehicles for
abnormal scholarship and preternatural mental acquisitions. For a
second they would be fired with alien force--then a backward lapse,
and a thin, swift-fading memory of unhuman horrors.
There had been at least three such cases during the past half
century--one only fifteen years before. Had something been groping
blindly through time from some unsuspected abyss in Nature? Were
these faint cases monstrous, sinister experiments of a kind and
authorship uttely beyond same belief?
Such were a few of the forless speculations of my weaker
hours--fancies abetted by myths which my studies uncovered. For I
could not doubt but that certain persistent legends of immemorial
antiquity, apparently unknown to the victims and physicians connected
with recent amnesia cases, formed a striking and awesome elaboration
of memory lapses such as mine.
Of the nature of the dreams and impressions which were growing so
clamorous I still almost fear to speak. They seemed to savor of
madness, and at times I believed I was indeed going mad. Was there a
special type of delusion afflicting those who had suffered lapses of
memory? Conceivably, the efforts of the subconscious mind to fill up a
perplexing blank with pseudo-memories might give rise to strange
imaginative vagaries.

This indeed--though an alternative folklore theory finally seemed to me
more plausible--was the belief of many of the alienists who helped me
in my search for parallel cases, and who shared my puzzlement at the
exact resemblances sometimes discovered.
They did not call the condition true insanity, but classed it rather
among neurotic disorders. My course in trying to track down and
analyze it, instead of vaintly seeking to dismiss or forget it, they
heartily endorsed as