For reasons unknown, the outsider once more drags his bulky frame earthward. Arriving exhausted in the superterranean realm, he finds himself standing, badly, in neither darkness nor daylight, but some morbid transitional phase between the two. A senile sun throbs with deadly dimness, and every living thing on the face of the land has been choked by desolation and by an equivocal gloom which has perhaps already lasted millennia, if not longer. The outsider, a thing of the dead, has managed to outlive all those others whom, either from madness or mere loss of memory, he would willingly seek out to escape a personal void that seems to have existed prior to astronomy.
This possibility is now, of course, as defunct as the planet itself. With all biology in tatters, the outsider will never again hear the consoling gasps of those who shunned him and in whose eyes and hearts he achieved a certain tangible identity, however loathsome. Without the others he simply cannot go on being himself—The Outsider—for there is no longer anyone to be outside of. In no time at all he is overwhelmed by this atrocious paradox of fate.
In the midst of this revelation, a feeling begins to well up in the outsider, an incalculable sorrow deep inside. From the center of his being (which now is the center of all being that remains in existence) he summons a suicidal outburst of pain whose force shatters his rotting shape into innumerable fragments. Catastrophically enough, this antic, designed to conclude universal genocide, gives off such energy that the distant sun is revived by a transfusion of warmth and light.
And each fragment of the outsider cast far across the earth now absorbs the warmth and catches the light, reflecting the future life and festivals of a resurrected race of beings: ones who will remain forever ignorant of their origins but for whom the sight of a surface of cold, unyielding glass will always hold profound and unexplainable terrors.
The Blasphemous Enlightenment of Professor Francis Wayland Thurston of Boston, Providence, and the Human Race
In the late 1920s Professor Thurston is putting a few final touches to a manuscript he intends no other person ever to lay eyes on, so that no one else will have to suffer unnecessarily in the way he has this past year or so. When it’s all done with, he just sits in silence for a few moments in the library of his Boston home (summer sunlight wandering over the oak walls), and then he breaks down and weeps like a lost soul for the better part of the day, letting up later that evening.
Professor Thurston is the nephew of George Gammell Angell, also a professor (at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island), whose archaeological and anthropological unearthings led him, and after his death led his nephew, to some disturbing conclusions concerning the nature and fate of human life, with implications universal even in their least astounding aspects.
The two professors discovered, positively, that throughout the world there exist savage cults which practice strange rites: degenerate Eskimos in the Arctic, degenerate Caucasians in New England seaport towns, and degenerate Indians and mulattoes in the Louisiana swamps not far from Tulane University, New Orleans. They also discovered that the primary aim of these cults is to await and welcome the return of ante-prehistoric monstrosities which will unseat the human race, overrun the earth, and generally have their way with our world.
These beings are as detestably inhuman as humanly imaginable, though no more so. From the common individual’s viewpoint their nature is one of supreme evil and insanity, notwithstanding that the creatures themselves are indifferent to, if not totally unaware of, such mundane categories of value.
From the beginning of time they have held a certain attraction for persons interested in pursuing an existence of utter chaos and mayhem; that is, one of complete liberation at all conceivable levels.
After learning the designs these beings have on our planet, Professor Thurston just assumes he will be murdered to keep him quiet on the subject, as his uncle and others have been. (And to think that at one point in his investigation he was planning to publish his findings in the journal of the American Archaeological Society!) All he can do now is wait.
For some reason, however, the followers of the Great Old Ones (as the extraterrestrial entities are referred to) never follow through, and Professor Thurston appears to escape assassination, at least for an indefinite period of time. But this is of little comfort, because knowing what he knows, Professor Thurston is the most miserable being on earth. He grieves for his lost dream of life, and even the skies of spring and flowers of summer are a horror to his eyes. It goes without saying that he now finds even the simplest daily task a joyless requisite for survival, and no more.
After months of boredom and a personal devastation far worse than any worldwide apocalypse could possibly be, he decides to return to his old job at the university. Not that he believes any longer in the hollow conclusions of his once beloved anthropology, but at least it would give him a way to occupy himself, to lose himself. Still, he continues to be profoundly despondent, and his looks degenerate beyond polite comment.
“What’s wrong, Professor Thurston?” a student asks him one day after class. The professor glances up at the girl. After only the briefest gaze into her eyes he can see that she really cares. “Amazing,” he thinks. Of course there is no way he could tell her what is really wrong, but they do talk for a while and later take a walk across the campus on a clear autumn afternoon. They begin to see each other secretly off campus, and with graduation day behind them they finally get married, their ceremony solemn and discreet.
The couple honeymoons at a picturesque little town on the seacoast of Massachusetts. To all appearances, several sublime days pass without one ripple of grief. One day, as he and his bride watch the sun descend into a perfectly unwrinkled ocean, Professor Thurston almost manages to rationalize into nonexistence his dreadful knowledge. After all, he tells himself, there still exists precious human feeling and human beauty (e.g., the quaint little town) created by human hands. These things have been perennially threatened by disorder and oblivion. Anyway, all of it was bound to end somehow, at some time. What difference did it make when the world was lost, or to whom?
But Professor Thurston cannot sustain these consoling thoughts for long. All during their honeymoon he snaps pictures of his smiling wife. He loves her dearly, but her innocence is tearing him apart. How long can he conceal the terrible things he knows about the world? Even after he takes a picture, this wonderful girl just keeps smiling at him! How long can he live with this new pain?
The problem continues to obsess him (to the future detriment, he fears, of his marriage). Then, on the last night of the honeymoon, everything is resolved.
He awakens in darkness from a strange dream he cannot recall. Outside the window of the bedroom it sounds as though the whole town is in an ambivalent uproar—hysterical voices blending festival and catastrophe. And there are weirdly colored lights quivering upon the bedroom wall. Professor Thurston’s wife is also awake, and she says to her husband: “The new masters have come in the night to their chosen city. Have you dreamed of them?” There passes a moment of silence. Then, at last, Professor Thurston answers his wife with the long, abandoned howl of a madman or a beast, for he too has dreamed the new dream and, without his conscious knowledge or consent, has embraced the new world.
And now nothing can hurt him as he has been so cruelly hurt in the past. Nothing will ever again cause him that pain he suffered so long, an intolerable anguish from which he could never have found release in any other way.
The Premature Death of H. P. Lovecraft, Oldest Man in New England
H. P. Lovecraft, the last great writer of supernatural horror tales, has just died of stomach cancer at the age of forty-six in a Providence, Rhode Island, hospital. He died alone and with no particular expression on his face. Upon the nightstand next to his bed are a few books and many handwritten pages in which Lovecraft recorded the sensations of his dying. (These notes are later lost, to the dismay of scholars.)
Two nurses come to look in on the gentleman in the private room and a
re the first to discover that he has, not unexpectedly, passed away. They have already seen death many times in their nursing careers, though they’re still quite young, and neither is alarmed. They know nothing can be done for the dead man. One of them says: “Open a window, it’s stuffy in here.” “Sure is,” replies the other. A crisp mid-March breeze freshens the room.
“Well, there’s no more that can be done for him,” comments the first nurse. Then she asks: “Do you remember if he had a wife or anybody that visited him?” The other nurse shakes her head negatively, then adds: “Are you kidding! He’s not exactly the husband type. I mean, just take a look at that face.”
The first nurse nods positively. She makes a humorous remark about the deceased and then both nurses leave the room smiling.
But apparently neither of them noticed the fantastic and frightening thing which occurred right before their eyes: H.P. Lovecraft, for only the shortest-lived moment, had ever so faintly smiled back at them.
Thomas Ligotti, The Agonizing Resurrection of Victor Frankenstein and Other Gothic Tales
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