What the Light May Hide Part 2

Story by Holt Keystone

Illustrations by Samuel Mancier

This story and the illustrations were originally published in the July 1928 issue of Odd Stories Magazine. This version differs slightly, though not substantially in plot, from that which has appeared in subsequent publications. This is due to the infamous editorial liberties of Elijah Dayne Koco, founder and longtime editor of Odd Stories. He had a habit of “trimming the fat” on accepted submissions, often without the author’s blessing or knowledge. Though this regularly stung the pride of those who saw their altered works published in Odd Stories, most, including Keystone, begrudgingly admitted to the improved flow and pace achieved by Koco’s choices.

Be sure to read PART 1 before proceeding.

How, then, to begin? As mentioned before, it first happened in the early morning hours between midnight and the Witching Hour. I wasn’t yet dreaming, but fully in the hypnagogic state. Thoughts and events of the day swirled about my mind, their narrative threads adrift on winds of reverie. What remained of wakefulness latched onto an object of stability in the fluid scenery of my fancy. It was just a speck. The tiniest of stars twinkling in the firmament offer a more substantial view than this pinprick of sensory input. It was, in fact, so small and faint that its color was indeterminate. At least, that’s how I interpreted it, but the ensuing weeks cast a more disquieting shade upon that hue.

At the time, I took it for a simple aberration of thought or vision. Indeed, upon waking the next morning, I’d forgotten all about it, remembering it only when it reappeared the following night. Even then, it seemed, at worst, something to mention to my optometrist. And as it remained unseen when my eyes were open, I saw no cause for urgent concern.

The next several days saw no discernible change. But I now know it had been growing imperceptibly in size. Or, to be more exact, it had been getting closer. Either that or I, and that is to say, the whole world, was moving inexorably toward it. Both could be true, I fear.

Whatever the case, it wasn’t long before the thing filled enough of my vision to command my attention and insist upon a degree of lucidity till full dreaming overtook me. Soon after, it was as likely to wake me from my sleep as it was to stay with me until true dreaming pulled my consciousness beyond its reach. However, it was also about this time that, if my room was sufficiently dark, the vision would hold momentarily in my freshly awoken eyes.

I first assumed it was an effect of the intensity of my hypnagogia carrying over into my wakefulness. I didn’t, however, consider the phenomenon to be occurring on or within the physical apparatus of my eyes, something not unlike staring at the sun too long. Rather, I took it for an afterimage in whatever region of the brain controls vision or imagination.

This, too, proved an incorrect assumption. Within another week’s time, the thing had taken on size and clarity enough to be visible while I was yet awake but with eyes closed, even in a dimly lit room. And the morning after it appeared clearly to my waking eyes in similarly dim light, and persisted without diminishment, I immediately booked an appointment with my optometrist.

I won’t bore you with the finer details of that meeting. Suffice to say any physical cause was either ruled out, taken as too early in the malady’s development for clear diagnosis, or deemed beyond the domain of the optometric discipline. And once the stereoscopic nature of the phenomenon was ascertained, and in the absence of any discernible pressure or abnormal structure within either eye, a referral was made to my general practitioner.

That appointment occurred the following day, owing to my long-time physician clearing his schedule. However, it ended with no clearer an outcome than what my optometrist offered. There was talk of malignant growths on one or more portions of the brain, though a lack of other symptoms such as headache or impaired balance made this a weak candidate for causation. Likewise with the possibility of diabetes mellitus, for which I also showed no other symptoms.

At a loss for how to proceed, my doctor suggested I wait to see if the condition improved on its own. And so, finding myself at the end of this brief but thorough medical quest, and no closer to an answer than when I’d begun, wait I did. What else could I do, really?

As feared, the image grew and sharpened nightly until three things became undeniably certain. The first was that the image was not a mere amorphous blot, but some sort of animate entity. The second was that the thing was now as aware of me as I was of it. As for the third, well, that is the most crucial thing to understand. And like most crucial things, it will take a moment to explain.

My own understanding of this fact, and realization of its horrific portents, came the night of the hurricane. I’m sure you remember it. Many of the towns further inland from my fair, nigh-coastal city bear its ragged fingerprint, and those of the many fires and twisters it spawned. My three tenements fared well, all things considered, with only a few broken windows or missing awnings to mark the storm’s passing. Besides the downing of a handful of pines, my own home was spared even the mildest ire of that tempest. Through the better part of the evening and early morning, only the sound of threshing sheets of rain against window pane and blustering gusts moaning beneath the eves gave any sign of what raged outside my walls. I might even have been sung to sleep by such an alluring, if bold, susurration had the storm not knocked out the electricity.

A conspiracy of stormcloud and moonless night saw every chamber and passage of my manor drowned in utter darkness.

I was sitting in my favorite chair at my favorite desk, poring over ledgers and contracts, when the electric lamps winked out. I was all alone in the black, and my wide eyes finally beheld the Traveler in its full loathsomeness. It was at that moment the color of the thing was revealed to be not simply indeterminate, but indeterminable by the human eye. Whatever the quality of that hue, it lies beyond the spectrum, whether the visible range or among those regions Newton deemed as “light unfit for vision”.

No! The color of the Traveler is born wholly of a light unfit for human comprehension!

And yet, I could see it. Though it was still too far off to make out its every facet and detail, I could tell it was shambling in my direction, and with undivided purpose. Match and candle, lighter and lamp, all were far from my hand, and only a stumbling, rushing search in the dark would have remedied their absence. So, I could only sit there, helplessly paralyzed and mesmerized by this vision of the Traveler as it crept ever nearer.

I don’t know how long I sat and watched as it dragged itself through void and silence on its way to me. I only remember the resurrection of the electric lights stirring me from a slumber into which I had no memory of falling.

Things were different after that. Escalated. I found that, once sleep took me, there was no longer any shutting of my inner sight upon the thing. Even my true dreams were now plagued by it.

However, I noticed something else, as well. We’ve come to it now, that third and most crucial of the facts I wish to impart to you. And it is this: despite that extended span of movement the Traveler displayed while the electricity was out, despite the significant distance it had crossed, when next I witnessed it, I discovered it had not moved any perceptible distance between that sleep and my last.

The same was true of my next sleep, and the next after that. I can’t say for certain if it was true before that, but my every intuition screams that it must have been so. And there is no great mystery to how I had missed this detail up till then; when these strange windows of dream first brought that other world to my rapt attention, and for some time after, the thing had been so far removed from me that judging the distances it traveled, or the speed by which it did so, was impossible. This holds true for my inability to notice a cessation of the Traveler’s movement during those merciful times I couldn’t see it.

Why this vile monstrosity should only move when observed isn’t something I can know. But I have thought on this every waking moment since this revelation came to my mind. Perhaps, the explanation is as simple as there being some astral or æthereal link joining our two worlds, but one that is weakened or even sundered in the presence of light. Sadly, I don’t think that’s the truth, or, at least, the whole truth. Were I to hazard a guess, I’d say that the thing’s as blind to us as we are to it when the lights in our world are of sufficient brightness. And this makes me ponder the nature of light in that other world. Is it too much to believe that light is to that creature’s eyes what darkness is to our own? And, having spied me, it now knows where in the darkness (or, that is to say, in the light) to search for my form. Its eyes, if we may call them that, have slowly adjusted to the dazzling glow our reality casts like shadow upon its alien ground.

My eyes, too, have adjusted, though inversely, until I am now constantly aware of this previously unknown darkness, so that even the grey shade of a passing midday cloud can reveal it to me. It is a dark of deeper hue than that found in any terrestrial night or subterranean gulf. It surrounds us like the waters of a sea unseen and unfelt. But behemoths and leviathans, vast of girth and appetite, inhabit those depths, and they may, at any moment, reach up to drag us downward, to gnaw us to bones in a lightless oblivion.

Whatever the case, these and other foul ideas soon eclipsed all other considerations, to the extent that I began neglecting the day’s business and all social obligations. Consumed with thoughts of the Traveler, I began to view sleep and dreams, even simple drowsiness, as evils that would, at best, permit, and, at worst, abet our species’ collective demise. So, psychosis and hallucinations be damned, I began fighting sleep in earnest!

My tenacious industriousness helped, but only so much. Strong, black coffee, long my morning beverage of choice, quickly became ineffective. Understandably, my physician’s refusal to prescribe me any strong stimulants only forced me to seek out less innocuous, but equally potent, alternatives among the seedier parts of the city. But soon enough, avoiding sleep wasn’t enough to rid me of the vision. Any space with sufficiently subdued light brought it to my open eyes, and I took to employing, at all hours of the day, lamps and candles as augmentation to the electric lights still burning hotly throughout my home. I also began spending more of the daylit hours out of doors, seeking out the brightest spots the city had to offer and suffering sunburn for my troubles. By then, the image had swelled and refined so that even the shade of densely foliated trees at high noon revealed the horrid thing.

And horrid it is! How many limbs it possesses, I can’t say. The larger of them writhe and twist about each other, making telling one from the other quite impossible. The smaller seem to wink in and out of existence, or waver like mist buffeted by a relentless gale. Each limb appears supple as a rudely awakened viper, yet firm and multitudinously jointed as any insect stalking subterranean deeps.

I count it a blessing that whatever will or uncanny physics transmit the image have not also transmitted its sound. I fear hearing such a noise, if only for an instant, would strip away what little of my sanity remains.

Shall I speak now of the eyes? The maw? The countenance of the Traveler? Throbbing, multifaceted nodules of hexagons and octagons rise amorphously upon what constitutes its head. I first took their color to be the black of moonless midnight. I know now they have no color. They only reflect the gulf of infinite space that, when I am dually inhabiting both our world and that of the Traveler, must lie behind my body. Behind the entire world. Within those chitinous eyes, stars of equally strange huelessness sparkle and flare, and palely illuminated planets of matter unknown to science orbit them along tracks suggesting intention rather than mere gravity.

I can’t say if the thing has one mouth or many. If one, then it’s capable of expressive articulations no earthly organism could hope to mimic. If many mouths, then the rims of those gaping, circular hellholes are imperceptible when shut. They seem a field of wounds opening and closing within the flesh of its face. And they’re ringed by teeth ebon as the dark mirrored in the Traveler’s eyes, and prehensile like its limbs. One is left to wonder what unholy sustenance could require such convolutions and appendages with which to feed upon it.

Taken together, these abominations constitute a face, though not one to approximate any lifeform I know. Alien though it is, it exudes profound intelligence and ruthless calculation. This became apparent the instant it caught sight of me. In that moment of mutual recognition, I knew it regarded me with no minor emotion, though with an expression I couldn’t decipher. I only know it was neither pleasant nor amiable.

That look alone was enough for me to comprehend the grave danger the Traveler poses to us all. But it was nothing when compared to the hunger I read in its monstrous visage. My God, what ravenousness emanated from that face! It set me immediately upon the path that led me here!

Believing, at first, that I was the sole object of that hunger, I rose from bed and staggered to my gun cabinet. The oiled barrel of my Remington was resting upon my tongue, my finger already squeezing the trigger when, upon closing my eyelids, the weight of revelation truly hit me. Though in a parlor harshly lit by an overabundance of flame both gaseous and electric, I saw the Traveler projected clearly upon the inner surface of my lids. And the horror that I might not be alone in seeing the thing, or in being seen by it—or, most terrible of all, in hastening its arrival with each involuntary glimpse of its nebulous mass (No! With every blink of my weary eyelids!)—well, it should come as no surprise that I immediately returned the pistol to the cabinet, and began considering other courses of action.

Naturally, my mind quickly drifted toward my tenants, whose welfare I’ve always sought to promote.

To Be Continued…in PART 3 – Available on Jan 23rd

About the Author

Holt Archambaud Keystone was born in the fall of 1901 on a plantation manor in the Appalachian foothills of Georgia’s legend-haunted Red Wolf River Valley. After convalescing from injuries sustained as a soldier in WWI, he limped his way across Europe, the Middle East, and much of Asia, all while honing his skills as a writer. Though true fame and critical praise only came posthumously, Keystone was hailed by his contemporaries for his prose and poetry, particularly in the genres of weird fiction, dark fantasy, and “sword and sorcery”.

The darkly irreverent cosmic nihilism he displayed in much of his work saw him affectionately referred to as The Gentleman Blasphemer by none other than Samuel “Skipper” Clemens. In his controversial biography of Keystone, author Lymon W. Lyon described the man as “what might have happened had Lovecraft grown up in the Jim Crow South, traveled the world by foot, and bothered actually getting to know the various races and cultures the Old Man from Providence feared and despised.”

Due to the eerily prescient nature of some of his work, Keystone also earned the moniker of Great Prophet of the South. This and other aspects of his life led to rumors of psychic abilities or even divination via the same dark forces about which he wrote. This reputation has only grown since his untimely death and purported cannibalism at the hands of his murderously insane mother in 1930.