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Basil Copper

The Great White Space

For Howard Phillips Lovecraft and August Derleth

Openers of the Way

One

1

There are those — and they have been many — who were inclined to dismiss my theories as the ramblings of a man in fever. Certainly, the circumstances surrounding the Great Northern Expedition were such as to drive a sensitive person into mindless idiocy. The shifting lights in the sky which preceded the Coming in the spring of 1932 passed generally unnoticed by the world’s press, but the disappearance of so distinguished a field worker as Professor Clark Ashton Scarsdale into the blank void of those vast, unknowable spaces, could hardly fail to arouse comment.

And I, the solitary survivor of the penetration made by the small group of five, have seen enough, God knows, to make the strongest man unhinged. And so I must live on, my story unbelieved, and scorned, until such time as the truth emerges. The world may indeed fear if that period should ever come.

Meanwhile I continue the only man on earth who knows why and how poor Scarsdale went into the Great White Space, never to be seen again by mortal men. But what gibbering, formless things he may now dwell with apart from the world — it is this and other knowledge, long pent within my overheated brain, which makes me start at shadows; or awake fearfully at the night wind’s insidious tapping at my bedroom blinds.

It is the wind itself which makes me abhor the winter in these latitudes; keening from off the world’s dreariest places it seems to freeze the very heart.

Robson, my old friend, and the one most inclined to place some small faith in my theories, has truly described me as ‘a man without a shadow’. He meant only that my emaciated form and spectral aspect were hardly substantial enough to imprint their own image on the ground; to me the phrase suggests awful things and in particular that dreadful day in which the Great White Space first came within the knowledge of living men.

In setting down these sketchy notes before the events which they describe have irrevocably burned themselves into insanity within my mind, I do not expect to be believed. At best they will confirm the prejudiced in their bigotry; at worst, if discovered untimely, they will undoubtedly lead to my speedy committal to some secluded asylum where I shall assuredly end my days. That these are numbered I have no doubt; yet even the relief of oblivion is denied me for may I not, beyond the wall of the thin veil that men call life, meet those Others who gyrate and ponderously undulate far out in the utmost reaches of space?

And to be brought face to face with the thing that once was Scarsdale, is a fear too frightful to be contemplated; an eternity in such company and the terror of other beings which are such blasphemies that even I dare not hint at, makes me cling to such poor life as I have. I can still sleep occasionally without dreaming, thank God; this at least is something. And the notes, if they serve the small purpose of warning one sensitive person of the dangers overshadowing the earth, may yet spell great goodness for mankind.