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“Secret Cave, or John Lees Adventure, The.”
Juvenile story (525 words); written c. 1898–99. First published in SR;corrected text in Juvenilia: 1897–1905(1985) and MW
Mrs. Lee instructs her ten-year-old son John and two-year-old daughter Alice to be “good children” while both parents are “going off for the day”; but immediately upon their departure John and Alice go down to the cellar and begin “to rummage among the rubbish.” When Alice leans against a wall and it suddenly gives way behind her, a passage is discovered. John and Alice enter the passage, coming successively upon a large empty box; a small, very heavy box that is not opened; and a boat with oars. The passage comes to an abrupt end; John pulls away “the obstacle” and finds a torrent of water rushing in. John is a good swimmer, but little Alice is not, and she drowns. John manages to struggle into the boat, clinging to the body of his sister and the small box. Suddenly he realizes that “he could shut off the water”; he does so, although how he does it—and why he did not think of it earlier—is never explained. Finally he reaches the cellar. Later it is discovered that the box contains a solid gold chunk worth $10,000—“enough to pay for any thing but the death of his sister.” “Shadow out of Time, The.”
Novelette (25,600 words); written November 10, 1934 to February 22, 1935. First published in Astounding Stories(June 1936); first collected in O;reprinted in DH;corrected and annotated text (based on recently discovered AMS): Hippocampus Press, 2001.
Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, a professor of political economy at Miskatonic University, experiences a sudden nervous breakdown on May 14, 1908, while teaching a class. Awaking in the hospital after a collapse, he appears to have suffered amnesia so severe that it has affected even his vocal and motor faculties. Gradually he relearns the use of his body and, indeed, develops tremendous mental capacity, seemingly far beyond that of a normal human being. His wife, sensing that something is gravely wrong, refuses to have anything to do with him and later obtains a divorce; only one of his three children, Wingate, continues to associate with him. Peaslee spends the next five years conducting prodigious research at various libraries around the world and also undertakes expeditions to various mysterious realms. Finally, on September 27, 1913, he suddenly snaps back into his old life: when he awakes after a spell of unconsciousness, he believes he is still teaching the economics course in 1908.
Peaslee is now plagued with dreams of increasing strangeness. He dreams that his mind has been placed in the body of an entity shaped like a ten-foot-high rugose cone, while that entity’s mind occupies his own body. These creatures are called the Great Race “because [they] alone had conquered the secret of time”: they have perfected a technique of mind-exchange with almost any other life-form throughout the universe and at any point in time—past, present, or future. The Great Race had established a colony on this planet in Australia 150,000,000 years ago. Their minds had previously occupied the bodies of another race but had left them because of some impending cataclysm; later they would migrate to other bodies after the cone-shaped beings were destroyed. They had compiled a voluminous library consisting of the accounts of all the other captive minds throughout the universe. Peaslee writes an account of his time for the Great Race’s archives.
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Peaslee believes that his dreams of the Great Race are merely the product of his esoteric study during his amnesia; but then an Australian explorer, having read some of Peaslee’s articles on his dreams in a psychological journal, writes to him to let him know that some archeological remains very similar to the ones he has described as the city of the Great Race have been recently discovered. Peaslee accompanies the explorer, Robert B.F.Mackenzie, on an expedition to the Great Sandy Desert and is stunned to find that his dreams may have a real source. One night he leaves the camp to conduct a solitary exploration. He winds through the now underground corridors of the Great Race’s city, increasingly unnerved at the familiarity of the sites he is traversing. He knows that the only way to discern whether his dreams are only dreams or some monstrous reality is to find the account he dreamed he had written for the archives of the Great Race. After a laborious descent he comes to the place and does indeed find his own record. Reflecting afterward, he writes: “No eye had seen, no hand had touched that book since the advent of man to this planet. And yet, when I flashed my torch upon it in that frightful megalithic abyss, I saw that the queerly pigmented letters on the brittle, aeon-browned cellulose pages were not indeed any nameless hieroglyphs of earth’s youth. They were, instead, the letters of our familiar alphabet, spelling out the words of the English language in my own handwriting.”
The basic mind-exchange scenario of the tale derives from at least three sources. First is H.B.Drake’s The Shadowy Thing(1928; first published in England in 1925 as The Remedy), which also influenced “The Thing on the Doorstep.” Second, there is Henri Béraud’s obscure novel Lazarus(1925), which HPL owned and which he read in 1928 (HPL to August Derleth, [February 1928]; ms., SHSW). The novel presents a man, Jean Mourin, who remains in a hospital for sixteen years (for the period 1906– 22) while suffering a long amnesia. During this time he develops a personality (named Gervais by the hospital staff) very different from that of his usual self. Every now and then this alternate personality returns; once Mourin thinks he sees Gervais when he looks in the mirror, and later he thinks Gervais is stalking him. Mourin even undertakes a study of split personalities, as Peaslee does, in an attempt to come to grips with the situation.
The third dominant influence is the film Berkeley Square(1933), which enraptured HPL by its portrayal of a man whose mind somehow drifts back into the body of his ancestor in the eighteenth century. This source in particular may have been critical, for it seems to have supplied HPL with suggestions on how he might embody his long-held belief (expressed in “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction”) that “ Conflict with timeseems to me the most potent and fruitful theme in all human expression.” HPL first saw Berkeley Squarein November 1933. Initially he was much taken with the fidelity with which the eighteenth-century atmosphere was captured; but on seeing the film again, he began to detect some flaws in conception. Berkeley Squareis based on a play of that title by John L.Balderston (1929). It tells the story of Peter Standish, a man in the early twentieth century who is so fascinated with the eighteenth century—and in particular his own ancestor and namesake—that he somehow transports himself literally into the past and into the body of his ancestor. HPL detected two problems with the execution of the idea: (1) Where was the mind or personality of the eighteenth-century Peter Standish when the twentieth-century Peter was occupying his body? (2) How could the
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eighteenth-century Peter’s diary, written in part while the twentieth-century Peter was occupying his body, not take cognizance of the fact ( SL4.362–64)? In his story HPL seems to have striven to obviate these difficulties.
Other, smaller features in “The Shadow out of Time” may also have literary sources. Peaslee’s alienation from his family may echo Walter de la Mare’s novel The Return(1910), in which again an eighteenth-century personality seems to fasten itself upon the body of a twentieth-century individual, causing his wife to cease all relations with him. Leonard Cline’s The Dark Chamber(1927), in which a man attempts to recapture his entire past, is perhaps the source for the vast archives of the Great Race. Cline’s protagonist, Richard Pride, keeps an immense warehouse full of documents about his own life, and toward the end of the novel the narrator frantically traverses this warehouse before finding Pride killed by his own dog.