The Boundry

Perhaps it is the time of year, I don't really know. What I do know is that it is the 27th day of October, 1937, at 7:30 in the evening and that this is the appointed time of the expiration of my tender grasp on sanity and that my previously ill-conceived perceptions of reality are about to be changed forever.

Let me explain. In the course of my ordinary life, I had lost contact with the lurid tales of Mr H. P. Lovecraft, although not with some of the feelings and perceptions he describes so well. It was in the early 1930's that I first became aquainted with Mr Lovecraft's fiction. I spent several weekends visiting in New Hampshire, in those days, reading the ghastly tales by the fire with a friend whose apartments overlooked a dark and overgrown stand of trees in a park located in the center of the capital city.

At night, looking down from his window on the dead limbs below, we saw them silhouetted in the harsh yellow glow of newly installed electirc lighting (that these days surrounds so many urban landscapes), we both had the sense that something sinister lurked in the stark, unnatural shadows that were cast under the eves of that tangled woodlot, though we could see no movement within. Indeed, all we could really make out was a static pattern of artificial light and intense, almost primeval darkness that seemed to effortlessly devour the man-made illumination, as if it were falling into a bottomless abyss from which there was no escape, all the while being mocked it for it's foolish insolence.

Later, in the mid 1930's, I moved from the city to the rural area surrounding Arkham Massachusetts, partly in an effort to escape from the spreading artificial sphere of light that was quickly replacing night's blanket of natural darkness in most urban settings. I found comfort in the pastoral scene and like the most of my reticent and taciturn New England nieghbors, was content to live in blissful ignorance and largely ignored any suggestion of the dark or the sinister and if asked would have denied the existence of the supernatural altogether. But at times, when my dog would bark relentlessly at the dark, late at night, I would turn on the backyard electric lights, open the door and point out to the foolish animal that nothing was there, at least within the limits of my vision, and I would laugh, if a bit uneasily, when she would snarl, as if to sayin her native accent "That's what you think, bub."

And when, during drives along the winding Miskatonic River, particularly on those fall nights when a thick fog came down out of the hills, flowing sinuously through the vallies and climbing around and over the silhouetted shoulder of Black Mountain and beyond, I would see strange patterns and shapes illuminated by my dim, electric headlamps, appearing and disappearing in the roiling mists, or in the isolated islands of illumination, created by the lights from the windows of widely scattered farmhouses, it would seem as if the churning fog contianed armies of half seen creatures that would lay siege to the solitary homesteads, battering noiselessly against their walls and windows - and in the light of a full, or nearly full moon, monsterous shapes were revealed to cover the whole of the land.

I originally explained these patterns and shapes as attempts by the organizing mind to make sense out of the chaos of the swirling mass of water dropplets in the air and even attributed the almost organic quality they sometimes would appear to have, as growing out of my post-traumatic memories from the anatomy lab, or those painful hours spent in the pathology lab, looking at slide after slide of diseased and disordered organs and tissues during my brief stint as a medical student before abandoning that carreer to which I was, by temperment and imagination so ill suited, for the life of a bohemian artist.

It was not until recently, when an article in the local newspaper revealed that Mr Lovecraft had visited our area, and that some of his writings had been penned while he was actually staying nearby that I understood the implications of his stories. Indeed, now that it had been brought to my attention I realized that the surrounding dark hills appeared in the Whisperer. I immediately returned to his writings and began to devour them anew, wondering all the while if those shapes I saw illuminated in the thick valley fogs were a reflection, not of my fertile imagination, but rather of things that existed in these same hills, but that of old, before the age of the electric light, we never saw, or perhaps chose not to see, save when they were illuminated by the combination of mist and moon, and were glimpsed out of the corner of our uneasy eyes.

I apologized to my dog for my insensitivity, and began to take her barking more seriously, and in our walks though the woods began to notice that she saw a different landscape than I, sniffing intently where I saw nothing, running frantically after invisible beasts or digging in what I had thought were just random places.

It was in the early part of October of this year, while experimenting with some new art materials that strange images began to appear in my paintings. They reminded me of those recurrent shapes that appeared in the mist, and of some of the many larval stages interposed between egg and insectile organism. I felt intrigued by what was emerging, almost compelled (you can ask my dog about that) to keep creating or perhaps more accurately, revealing them, sometimes late into the night, or even into the early morning.

It was while I was preoccupied with these shapes that I reread 'The Whisperer in The Darkness' and realized that perhaps these shapes were not just the products of my overactive imagination.

Artists play, and in our play are always amazed when new styles, images or themes emerge. "Why now" we often ask, "From where did it come", and "Where will it go - and will it take me along". In this case it is finally become clear to me. It is the 27th day of October, 1937, at 7:30 in the evening , the dog shivers by my feet, though the fire is burning high. I see fog rolling in over the shoulder of Black Mountian, down into the valley and pressing up to my very window, and I know now it comes from Beyond. All the lights in the house are on - and I know that my time is running out.