The Shadow Out of Time & The Haunter of the Dark

When I was yet a youth, in those dim hinterlands of memory where the shadows of bygone Octobers still coil and whisper, I first enacted the eldritch rite of reading one tale of Howard Phillips Lovecraft for each night of that haunted month. Long did that custom lie dormant, like some buried thing beneath alien stars, until last October when I dared again to unseal the tomb of that tradition.

In earlier years, I confined myself to the Del Rey volumes, those civilized and curated relics fit for mortal libraries. Yet some deep and spectral prompting compelled me, in the most recent season of falling leaves, to plunge into The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft, an abyssal ledger of tales both known and unguessed. I discovered, to my mingled dread and delight, that the corpus was vaster than mortal arithmetic had led me to believe, filled with nameless narratives lurking beyond familiar catalogues. A single October proved insufficient to exhaust them, and so I marked the remainder for the following year, as one might schedule the exhumation of long-interred bones.

Thus we arrive at the present hour, when the final offerings awaited me: The Shadow Out of Time—that chronicle of mind-shattering temporal exile—and “The Haunter of the Dark”, wherein the abyss itself peers back with light-devouring eyes. Two tales, aye, lest one be banished to the limbo of next October, and so I vowed to complete the cycle upon Halloween itself, an alignment too perfect to resist.

The day was not void of earthly burdens. I rose before dawn to confront The Shadow Out of Time, then surrendered myself to the banal servitude of labor at my infernal machine (the laptop, that modern grimoire of blinking sigils). From morning until gloaming I toiled, unbroken. Only when the last task was laid to rest did I consume “The Haunter of the Dark”, and with a strange, almost blasphemous satisfaction, I marked the final checkbox in OmniFocus, as if the sanity one loses in Lovecraft’s cosmos might be offset by tidy digital lists.

Yet even as I completed one ritual, another demanded my presence: the sacred family procession of Halloween night. With but forty-five mortal minutes at my disposal, I anointed my flesh with the gray and livid tones of the walking dead, that I might roam beside my grandson beneath the lamplight. The disguise succeeded too well; for in the aftermath, the unholy pigments clung to my skin like the residue of some corpse-dream, and even now my face bears a texture reminiscent of a schoolroom eraser, an object both innocent and ghostly, worn down by unseen pressures. I suspect it may take several days before the last trace of the grave relinquishes its hold.

So ends not only Halloween, but the full circuit of my Lovecraftian pilgrimage. Shall I resume this eldritch devotion next year? The angles of time are uncertain. Perhaps another author of cosmic anxiety, one Thomas Ligotti, shall whisper to me from the void. We shall see what shapes form in the darkness.

For now, dear reader, I thank you for accompanying me on this strange itinerary of ink, madness, and tradition. May your dreams be haunted, in the gentlest possible way.

The Shadow Out of Time

Professor Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee of Miskatonic University recounts a span of years steeped in mystery and dread, stretching from 1908 to 1935. On the morning of May 14, 1908, as he lectured upon the dry certainties of economics, an unseen force seized his mind, casting him into a coma from which he awoke a stranger to his own flesh. His words, gestures, and desires were no longer his own. Those who had loved him recoiled in fear, for they sensed a presence not of this world. Only his youngest son, Wingate, clung to the fragile hope that the father he knew might one day return.

For five years the alien intelligence that ruled his body wandered across the earth in pursuit of ancient knowledge and secret places forbidden to men. Then, in September of 1913, Peaslee’s rightful self reawakened, bewildered and haunted by dreams of impossible cities beneath strange suns. He sought to dismiss these visions as madness, yet the shadow of truth grew darker as he uncovered chronicles of others who had suffered the same fate across the ages.

His memories, once recovered, revealed that his mind had been seized by the Great Race of Yith, beings of vast intellect who lived two hundred million years in the past. They had mastered the frightful art of casting their consciousness across time, exchanging minds with creatures of other epochs to gather the sum of all knowledge. Within their mighty stone cities, the captive minds of alien hosts were treated with courtesy, allowed to study, to write, to wander the echoing libraries of their inhuman masters. When the Yithians’ purpose was fulfilled, the minds were returned, purged of memory, so that the delicate threads of time might remain unbroken. Yet their dominion had not endured, for the Great Race fell to the ravening “flying polyps,” and their brightest intellects escaped into the future, to dwell within the forms of beetles that shall inherit the earth when mankind is dust.

In later years Peaslee received word of strange excavations in the Australian desert that mirrored the visions of his dreams. With Wingate beside him, he crossed that barren waste and beheld the blackened ruins of the Yithian city. Down into the labyrinth he descended, recognizing the titanic halls and shadowed passages of his long-lost captivity. The trapdoors that had once confined the polyps now yawned open, and in the depths he found a metal case that confirmed his every memory. Yet when a clamor of his own making echoed through those ancient corridors, a stirring answered from below. In terror he fled, abandoning the case and the proof it contained.

When dawn came, the desert had swallowed the ruins. No trace of the city or the horrors beneath remained. Peaslee returned home, burdened by the final, ineffable truth, for within the lost case had rested a book written entirely in his own hand—a relic not of his past, but of another age, and another body, beneath the monstrous sun of a forgotten world.

S. T. Joshi has observed that the spectral beauty of the 1933 film Berkeley Square awakened in Lovecraft a strange recognition of self, shaping the conception of “The Shadow Out of Time”. The author beheld the picture four times, entranced by its vision of a man whose spirit drifts backward to mingle with that of an ancestor long dead. To Lovecraft, it seemed “the most weirdly perfect embodiment of my own moods and pseudo-memories,” a work that spoke to his lifelong sense of existing out of time, as though his true consciousness belonged to an earlier century. Yet the film’s handling of temporal exchange left him dissatisfied, and in his novella he sought to perfect what the cinema had only dimly perceived.

Other influences whispered through his imagination: H. B. Drake’s The Shadowy Thing, Henri Beraud’s Lazarus, and Walter de la Mare’s The Return, each touching upon the dread mystery of mind and body undone. Critics would later call the tale his summit of achievement. Lin Carter saw in it a grandeur of time and cosmos unmatched in his other works, while Martin Andersson named it his magnum opus, the true measure of Lovecraft’s cosmic vision. Yet the author himself regarded the story with cold detachment, sending the single manuscript to August Derleth without retaining a copy, as though weary of his own creation.

In later years, new voices would awaken its reputation. Cinescape placed it among the finest works of speculative art, and Publishers Weekly hailed its return to print. Scholars Edward Guimont and Horace A. Smith have discerned within it, and within At the Mountains of Madness, the birth of that haunting archetype of science fiction: the vast, incomprehensible structure whose very silence proclaims the smallness of man before the infinite.

“The Haunter of the Dark”

In the city of Providence, beneath the brooding shadow of Federal Hill, there stood a church long abandoned to dust and dread. Robert Blake, a young writer steeped in occult studies, felt an unwholesome fascination for that decaying edifice, once the lair of the accursed Church of Starry Wisdom. The foreign folk of the hill whispered of monstrous rites and a presence older than mankind, yet their warnings only deepened his curiosity.

Within the darkened nave, Blake discovered the mouldering skeleton of the lost reporter Edwin Lillibridge, and upon a pedestal of alien workmanship, a strange crystal of unearthly sheen known as the Shining Trapezohedron. The stone pulsed with an inner life, its depths shifting like a window into the gulfs between the stars. In touching it, Blake awakened that which no mortal should stir, and fled into the night, haunted by the sense that eyes beyond time had turned upon him.

The horror imprisoned in the church could stir only in darkness, restrained by the ceaseless lights of the city. Yet when thunder rolled and the storm broke, the power faltered and prayers rose from terrified throats. Blake, in his high room, pleaded for the light to endure, but the lamps flickered and went out. What came then was not of this earth. When dawn returned, he was found lifeless before his window, his face twisted in unspeakable fear, and his dying words spoke of black wings and the burning eye that sees all worlds. Later, a trembling doctor cast the blighted stone into the waters of Narragansett Bay, though none can say if the thing it summoned sleeps once more or waits beneath the depths for the turning of the next dark age.

Lovecraft conceived “The Haunter of the Dark” in response to Robert Bloch’s “The Shambler from the Stars”, in which a writer much like Lovecraft perishes by forces he cannot name. With grim mirth, Lovecraft answered by crafting the fate of Robert Harrison Blake, a figure molded in Bloch’s likeness, whose curiosity drew him into the shadows of an ancient church. Years later, Bloch would close their dark correspondence with “The Shadow from the Steeple”, binding the three tales in a cycle of mutual dread.

Some threads of the story reach back to Hanns Heinz Ewers’ “The Spider”, a tale of unseen horror and mounting fascination that Lovecraft had studied with care. In Blake’s final writings, he invokes the specter of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”, for like that haunted trinity of brother, sister, and house, Blake, the church, and the spectral Haunter seem bound by a single, corrupted soul. Scholars have read the climax as the moment when the avatar of Nyarlathotep merges with Blake’s mind and is struck by lightning, annihilating both mortal and immortal essence in a single flash of blasphemous light.

Fritz Leiber called it among Lovecraft’s finest and final creations, and R. S. Hadji placed it among the most terrifying works ever to issue from a human pen, for in it one feels the last tremor of a mind gazing too long into the gulf that lies beyond the stars.