The Dread Dimensions

THE DREAD DIMENSIONS

  By

  Tom Morris

  Copyright 2012, Tom Morris

  All places, characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  When we look back I suppose we all see things we regret having done, things that if only we had made other decisions, followed other paths, how different our lives and the lives of others would have been. When those decisions, often thoughtlessly made, without any regard to the consequences, lead to the hideous death of a friend and to ourselves being taken to the brink of insanity, then how much more painful it is, how much more we are consumed with guilt.

  It was some fifteen years ago that I came up to Leeds University to study and then to take up a junior lectureship in the Department of Chemistry. I had always had a fascination for this branch of science, dissolving scraps of metal in acids, precipitating strange coloured sludges from their solutions or growing multi-faceted crystals. The seeming transmutation of such substances seemed to offer an insight into a world of possibilities beyond the everyday experiences of my childhood. Not unnaturally such ideas were a little blunted by the hard graft of adsorbing and regurgitating a sufficient quantity of mundane knowledge imparted by lecturers who seemed to have no sense of wonder regarding the possibilities of their discipline. None the less I persevered and after I graduated an offer of research provided me with the opportunity to remain at University which had become the centre of my existence, for by now I had discovered the immense wealth of knowledge held within its libraries. I began to explore areas away from my primary discipline, firstly alchemy and then the more esoteric theories of the hermetic arts which lead me into a study of the occult. It was during this period that I first met Derek Davidson. As undergraduates we shared accommodation in the Headingley area, not too far from the sports ground where we used to go at weekends to watch Leeds Rhinos play Rugby League before sampling the pleasures of the nearby Royal Oak public house. Derek's world was mathematics at which he was by all accounts virtually a genius. He was totally immersed in his subject and destined to achieve world renown. In particular he relished cosmology and had already published several papers on aspects of the higher dimensions, Superstring theory and the Holographic Universe. Concepts which were far beyond me. None the less, for some strange reason we had struck up a strong accord and remained firm friends. A friendship that remained even in later years when Derek decided that he had had enough of the cosmopolitan atmosphere of North Leeds and decided on a complete change, renting a small cottage tucked way near a village not far from neighbouring Harrogate. We remained in close contact however, visiting each other every few weeks or so.

  It was then that the curious path of fate led me to circumstances which I now so bitterly regret. As I have said, my hobby and relaxation had led me into the study of the occult. It was not something in which I had any great belief, more a scientific curiosity as to whether there might be any physical evidence which might support the esoteric assertions of which I read. As a member of the academic staff I had free access to the restricted archives of the University Library which proved to have rich pickings of such material. It became obvious that a previous benefactor had also had a deep fascination with the subject and also a deep pocket with which to finance the acquisition of a large selection of rare books and manuscripts. It was thus that one day in delving through a hitherto unexplored cabinet I found to my great excitement copies of the Unaussprechlicken Kulten of Von Junzt and Comte d'Erlette's Cultes des Goules, publications rumoured at by other authors but which had long been considered spurious. I took these home with me and for days, whenever my time allowed, pored over them with a feverish concentration. As far as I could tell they gave every evidence of being genuine. Without evincing any great interest I sought the opinion of a colleague in the fine arts department and he assured me that the paper, binding and printing were as would be expected for documents of their provenance. Determined to see what other treasures might reside in that hoard I returned to make a further search. It was then, squeezed between some old, dusty copies of the journal of the Ordo Templi Orientis, I found that cursed document which was to be instrumental in the ruination of my own life and worse still in the horrific fate of my friend Derek. At first it appeared to be quite nondescript. A thin quarto manuscript, bound in a pale leather binder. The front was of a somewhat wrinkled appearance and as I looked more closely the ridges and blemishes seemed to give the appearance of a human face, with staring eyes and a mouth twisted in a macabre smile. Suppressing a shudder I opened the binder and with mounting sense of exultation realised what a treasure I had indeed unearthed. It was that legendary work of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, the fabled Necronomicon. I lost no time in hurrying back to my lodgings in order to examine it in more detail. It appeared to be a copy of the Black Letter edition published in Germany in the fifteenth century, but as I turned the worn pages I realised that interleaved with these were copies of the original Greek and Arabic texts. It could only have been the personal copy of its medieval translator. I had some little grasp of Latin but the Greek was more or less beyond me. None the less I could decipher enough to realise that this was no ordinary grimoire but seemed to set out instructions by which an adept could transcend our ordinary mundane reality and some how contact other realms. Beyond that I could not go. There were several phrases which seemed to be the key, but as written they seemed to be little other than gibberish. Try as I might I could make little of them. There matters rested until the following weekend when Derek made one of his frequent visits. We enjoyed an excellent meal at one of the local restaurants and returned home with a rather fine bottle of Costigliole d'Asti. Knowing that he had some fluency in Greek, an advantage of an education at a well known public school, I told him of my latest acquisition, produced the Necronomicon and asked if he could throw any light on the subject. At first he was somewhat derisory, having little interest in occult matters which he tended to dismiss as fanciful nonsense, and frequently poked gentle fun at me for what he thought was a rather peculiar obsession. As he continued to read through the text however his attitude changed, firstly to puzzlement and then to a marked degree of animation and excitement. Finally he sat back in his chair.

  "This is quite amazing," he said. "I believe that these phrases which have come through in the translation as chants are in fact a mnemonic device for visualising complex mathematical equations. See here, what has been written as grth f'nagl chnnl gremm 'slcght fhtagn ph'nglui h'nagl? In the Greek version the disposition of the characters used show a definite relationship to the way in which scalar indices can be used to set out matrices and tensors dealing with multi-dimensional space."

  Of course I laughed out loud. "OK," I said. "I should have expected you to have a joke at my expense, fair enough!" Then I realised from the expression on his face that he was quite serious.

  "No, No," he insisted, "this is not a joke, far from it indeed. You must know from your school days the notations of algebra, y = ax + b and so on. Higher mathematics used in describing space time are far more complicated but still use letters and symbols to stand as a shorthand for quite complex mathematical notations. A mathematician with sufficient understanding can look at these which would be quite meaningless to anyone else and see the complex mathematical operations which each one stands for. As I look at these phrases I can start to see the same sort of relationship. Don't you understand how incredible it is that some genius so long ago was able to anticipate mathematical thinking that we are only just exploring today? I've been working on a new approach to Riemann space curvature and the notations in these
phrases show a great similarity to the operators required to describe the vectors involved."

  What he was saying seemed to be farfetched in the extreme and I still suspected that this was some elaborate joke on his part, but he insisted that he was completely serious and continued to point out the arrangement of letters in the strange phrases throughout the pages. The matter ended there as I was rather tired. I was ready for sleep but Derek said he was too interested in his discovery and stayed downstairs until late at night, when I finally heard him come up and settle down in the guest bedroom. The next morning he begged me to let him have the book to take back with him so that he might study it at greater length. I was not really happy to let him have it but he insisted and after impressing on him that it was firstly of great value and secondly university property I agreed. As he left I somewhat hesitantly warned him that it had a particularly evil reputation but he shrugged away my concerns, promised to take great care