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| Weird Tales 1933.07 |
Opening Statement:
Whether the dreams brought on the fever or the fever brought on the dreams Walter Gilman did not know. Behind everything crouched the brooding, festering horror of the ancient town, and of the moldy, unhallowed garret gable where he wrote and studied and wrestled with figures and formulae when he was not tossing on the meagre iron bed. His ears were growing sensitive to a preternatural and intolerable degree, and he had long ago stopped the cheap mantel clock whose ticking had come to seem like a thunder of artillery. At night the subtle stirring of the black city outside, the sinister scurrying of rats in the wormy partitions, and the creaking of hidden timbers in the centuried house, were enough to give him a sense of strident pandemonium. The darkness always teemed with unexplained sound - and yet he sometimes shook with fear lest the noises he heard should subside and allow him to hear certain other fainter noises which he suspected were lurking behind them.What in Brown Jenkin's Name..?
While staying at a reputedly-haunted apartment, Walter Gilman finds himself dreaming about cross-dimensional travel, human sacrifice and human-faced rodents. He eventually realizes that some dreams are more realistic than others.Synopsis:
- In Arkham, Miskatonic student Walter Gilman stays at the Witch House, the former home of a legendary 17th C. witch named Keziah Mason and her human-rat familiar, “Brown Jenkin”. Two centuries prior, Keziah had vanished from her prison cell after speaking of inter-dimensional formulae, her oath to the “Black Man”, and her new name of “Nahab”. Gilman does research on connections between mathematics and the supernatural. He stays in Keziah’s old top floor garret room, which has non-geometric walls and roofing, hinting at unreachable closed-off spaces.
- While suffering fevers, Gilman dreams of strange dimensions populated by geometric objects and hostile, tentacled creatures, accompanied by loud weird noises. Gilman also dreams of nightly visits from Brown Jenkin and an old crone (Keziah), who try to entice him into meeting a third entity. Before entering his dreams, Gilman had spotted Keziah (“an unknown crone”) in the slums of Arkham. In his university classes, Gilman develops theories about crossing long distances by use of other-dimensional shortcuts (essentially wormholes or hyperspace).
- Gilman is also found to be sleepwalking to places unknown, unconsciously disappearing from his room for hours without a trace. Gilman hears strange noises behind his walls and dreams that the old crone wants him to meet Azathoth and Nyarlathotep, and to get a new name. Later, his attention is strangely drawn to a specific point in the night sky, and violet glows are noticed coming from his room by others.
- One night his dream journey takes him to a city on an alien planet. Carved images of wingless Elder Things (“At The Mountains of Madness”) can be seen, and he is soon approached by three Elder Things, Keziah and Brown Jenkin, after which he wakes up. The next night, he finds a carving of one of the Elder Things in his room, matching a piece that he’d broken off in his previous night’s dream. Gilman suspects that he had stolen it from some storage place while sleepwalking, and thus inspiring the “dream”.
- In that night’s dream, Keziah takes him to meet the hairless Black One (possibly Nyarlathotep), and urges him to write in a ledger. Later Gilman recalls hearing musical pipes, which he later rationalizes as being inspired by legends of Azathoth from the Necronomicon. He brings the Elder Thing carving to various professors, but can find no information about it, only that it is made of an unearthly substance.
- Despite moving to another room in the building and obtaining a roommate, Gilman has another horrible dream of the crone and the Black One, where they kidnap a child for sacrificial purposes. He wakes in his old room and reads a newspaper story describing the events of his dream. Gilman begins to suspect that his dreams are real journeys. (Insert eye-roll here). That night (the Witches Sabbath) he is drawn to a child-sacrifice chamber (actually the secret chamber above his room). He kills Keziah with his crucifix pendant, but fails to prevent Brown Jenkin from killing the child and collecting a bowl of blood (in the rooms below, he hears another housemate call on Shub-Niggurath). The next night, Gilman is attacked under the sheets and his heart is consumed by Brown Jenkin.
- Years later, the Witch House is demolished, and in the ruins are found the remains of the kidnapped child, an old crone, various books and notebooks stretching as far back as 200 years, Elder Thing statuettes, Gilman’s crucifix pendant, and a collection of children’s bones. They also find the remains of Brown Jenkin.
One afternoon there was a discussion of possible freakish curvatures in space, and of theoretical points of approach or even contact between our part of the cosmos and various other regions as distant as the farthest stars or the transgalactic gulfs themselves - or even as fabulously remote as the tentatively conceivable cosmic units beyond the whole Einsteinian space-time continuum. Gilman's handling of this theme filled everyone with admiration, even though some of his hypothetical illustrations caused an increase in the always plentiful gossip about his nervous and solitary eccentricity. What made the students shake their heads was his sober theory that a man might - given mathematical knowledge admittedly beyond all likelihood of human acquirement - step deliberately from the earth to any other celestial body which might lie at one of an infinity of specific points in the cosmic pattern.
Such a step, he said, would require only two stages; first, a passage out of the three-dimensional sphere we know, and second, a passage back to the three-dimensional sphere at another point, perhaps one of infinite remoteness. That this could be accomplished without loss of life was in many cases conceivable. Any being from any part of three-dimensional space could probably survive in the fourth dimension; and its survival of the second stage would depend upon what alien part of three-dimensional space it might select for its re-entry. Denizens of some planets might be able to live on certain others - even planets belonging to other galaxies, or to similar dimensional phases of other space-time continua - though of course there must be vast numbers of mutually uninhabitable even though mathematically juxtaposed bodies or zones of space.
It was also possible that the inhabitants of a given dimensional realm could survive entry to many unknown and incomprehensible realms of additional or indefinitely multiplied dimensions - be they within or outside the given space-time continuum - and that the converse would be likewise true. This was a matter for speculation, though one could be fairly certain that the type of mutation involved in a passage from any given dimensional plane to the next higher one would not be destructive of biological integrity as we understand it.
* * * * *
The passage through the vague abysses would be frightful, for the Walpurgis-rhythm would be vibrating, and at last he would have to hear that hitherto-veiled cosmic pulsing which he so mortally dreaded. Even now he could detect a low, monstrous shaking whose tempo he suspected all too well. At Sabbat-time it always mounted and reached through to the worlds to summon the initiate to nameless rites. Half the chants of the Sabbat were patterned on this faintly overheard pulsing which no earthly ear could endure in its unveiled spatial fullness. Gilman wondered, too, whether he could trust his instincts to take him back to the right part of space. How could he be sure he would not land on that green-litten hillside of a far planet, on the tessellated terrace above the city of tentacled monsters somewhere beyond the galaxy or in the spiral black vortices of that ultimate void of Chaos where reigns the mindless demon-sultan Azathoth?
* * * * *
Then, long after both he and Gilman had retired, the atrocious shrieking began. Elwood jumped up, turned on the lights and rushed over to his guest's couch. The occupant was emitting sounds of veritably inhuman nature, as if racked by some torment beyond description. He was writhing under the bedclothes, and a great stain was beginning to appear on the blankets.
Elwood scarcely dared to touch him, but gradually the screaming and writhing subsided. By this time Dombrowski, Choynski, Desrochers, Mazurewicz, and the top-floor lodger were all crowding into the doorway, and the landlord had sent his wife back to telephone for Doctor Malkowaki. Everybody shrieked when a large rat-like form suddenly jumped out from beneath the ensanguined bedclothes and scuttled across the floor to a fresh, open hole close by. When the doctor arrived and began to pull down those frightful covers Walter Gilman was dead.
It would be barbarous to do more than suggest what had killed Gilman. There had been virtually a tunnel through his body - something had eaten his heart out.From Dr. Armitage's Notes:
- Mentions REH/Derleth’s Von Junzt (“The Children of the Night) and Smith’s “Book of Eibon” (“The Door To Saturn”, WT 1932.01, expanded in “Ubbo-Sathla” WT 1933.07, writ 1932.02)
- The "Black One": Nyarlathotep?
The Horrible Conclusion:
The bones of the tiny paws, it is rumored, imply prehensile characteristics more typical of a diminutive monkey than of a rat, while the small skull with its savage yellow fangs is of the utmost anomalousness, appearing from certain angles like a miniature, monstrously degraded parody of a human skull. The workmen crossed themselves in fright when they came upon this blasphemy, but later burned candles of gratitude in St. Stanislaus' Church because of the shrill, ghostly tittering they felt they would never hear again.Read it here.
Follow'd by "The Thing on the Doorstep".
