The Fantasy Fan, Volume 1, Number 10, June 1934: The Fan's Own Magazine — John Shaqi
The Fantasy Fan, Volume 1, Number 10, June 1934: The Fan's Own MagazineVarious
History
The Fantasy Fan, Volume 1, Number 10, June 1934: The Fan's Own Magazine
Various
Fan magazines; Fantasy fiction -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Fantasy fiction -- Periodicals
"Listen to me! The waves from that thing are waking a thousand sleeping
senses in us; senses which we inherit from aeons of evolution from the
state of detached electrons to the state of organic humanity. I have
seen _truth_, and I intend to show it to you. Do you wonder how it
will seem? I will tell you." Here Tillinghast seated himself directly
opposite me, blowing out his candle and staring hideously into my eyes.
"Your existing sense-organs--ears first, I think--will pick up many
of the impressions, for they are closely connected with the dormant
organs. Then there will be others. You have heard of the pineal gland?
I laugh at the shallow endocrinologist, fellow-dupe and fellow-parvenu
of the Freudian. That gland is the great sense organ of organs--_I have
found out_. It is like sight in the end, and transmits visual pictures
to the brain. If you are normal, that is the way you ought to get most
of it.... I mean get most of the evidence _from beyond_."
I looked about the immense attic room with the sloping south wall,
dimly lit by rays which the every-day eye cannot see. The far corners
were all shadows, and the whole place took on a hazy unreality which
obscured its nature and invited the imagination to symbolism and
phantasm. During the interval that Tillinghast was silent I fancied
myself in some vast and incredible temple of long-dead gods; some
vague edifice of innumerable black stone columns reaching up from a
floor of damp slabs to a cloudy height beyond the range of my vision.
The picture was very vivid for a while, but gradually gave way to a
more horrible conception; that of utter, absolute solitude in infinite,
sightless, soundless space. There seemed to be a void, and nothing
more, and I felt a childish fear which prompted me to draw from my
hip pocket the revolver I always carried after dark since the night I
was held up in East Providence. Then, from the farthermost regions of
remoteness, the _sound_ softly glided into existence. It was infinitely
faint, subtly vibrant, and unmistakably musical, but held a quality
of surpassing wildness which made its impact feel like a delicate
torture of my whole body. I felt sensations like those one feels when
accidentally scratching ground glass. Simultaneously there developed
something like a cold draught, which apparently swept past me from the
direction of the distant sound. As I waited breathlessly I perceived
that both sound and wind were increasing; the effect being to give me
an odd notion of myself as tied to a pair of rails in the path of a
gigantic approaching locomotive. I began to speak to Tillinghast, and
as I did so all the unusual impressions abruptly vanished. I saw only
the man, the glowing machine, and the dim apartment. Tillinghast was
grinning repulsively at the revolver which I had almost unconsciously
drawn, but from his expression I was sure he had seen and heard as much
as I, if not a great deal more. I whispered what I had experienced and
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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