Shadows Out of Time

Toward a General Theory of Yithian PsychologyROBERT GUFFEY

“The possessing entity is as much a slave to negative psychic forces as he who is possessed.”

— Prof. Nathaniel Peaslee, 1929

Dear Dr. Peaslee,

Consider these pages the update you requested on the curious affair of Sean Willeford. For the record, it was the unexpected discovery of a lengthy article by your grandfather, Professor Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, published in several parts by the Journal of the American Psychological Society in 192829, that gave me the key to solving Sean’s problem. The title of the article in question was “Pnakotic Theory: A Research into Dream-work and Temporal Endurance.” I tried to tell my patient’s father, Howard Willeford, the most significant facts about your grandfather’s theory, but the man refused to listen. In order for you to understand exactly what occurred, it’s necessary to go into some detail about the exchange I had with the elder Willeford that strange afternoon.

“God damn it, lady, he’s not getting any better!” Willeford shouted, slamming his fist into his palm.

I admit I answered him somewhat stiffly. “Address me as Dr. Keil, please.”

Willeford stood in the lobby of my office and yelled at me in front of my secretary, a terminally optimistic young man just shy of twenty-two who was a devotee of New Age philosophy and an expert at ignoring all negativity within a twenty-mileradius. I, on the other hand, had been practicing psychotherapy for the past fifteen years; I wasn’t used to ignoring any negativity. Nor was I used to being chewed out by an obese old man with a red face and waving fists, I assure you.

I found it difficult to fault Mr. Willeford for his rage. His son had been under my care for over two years. To the untrained eye, Sean might have appeared to be sliding backwards into the “psychosis” that had almost destroyed him. My eye, however, as you well know, is far from untrained. Sean’s case was the most difficult I’d ever dealt with. I’d spent more time treating him than any other patient in my career. And yet all Willeford could see was his lifesavings draining into my pocketbook. I charged quite a bit for my services; it had to be that way. If Willeford had known the precise nature of what I had gone through trying to cure Sean, he would have been far more understanding. Unfortunately, I could not tell him the entire truth, not at that time.

I removed my glasses and cleaned them with a handkerchief. I said, “Mr. Willeford, that’s decidedly unfair.”

“Are you just gonna contradict everything I say?” he asked.

“I’m not contradicting you—”

He pointed at me accusingly. “You see?”

I sighed. “I’m agreeing with you, Mr. Willeford. You don’t appreciate my position. These things take time. I can’t just give him a pill, cross my fingers, and hope he gets better—”

“What about Prozac? I’ve heard good things about—”

“You’ve heard lies about it. That’s not going to help your son at all. It’s going to push him over the edge. Is that what you want?”

For the first time in the past ten minutes Willeford remained silent for more than a second. He mumbled, “No, of course not.”

“As I recall, the reason you chose me to treat your son was because I’m one of the few psychotherapists in all of Los Angeles — perhaps in all of the country — who uses natural methods to treat mental illness. If you want your son to be pumped full of Thorazine then send him to the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA. It would certainly be easier on you, but the effects on your son would be disastrous. It would take him back two years in his treatment. Maybe you don’t see a difference, but believe me Sean does. He’s told me so a hundred times.”

Willeford winced and shook his head. “How the hell would he know? He’s a God damn raving maniac!”

I just stared at him. I think my gaze was so powerful, he decided it was best to shut up again. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” I said.

Willeford threw his flabby arms in the air. “Listen, you only see him three times a week for a couple of hours. You don’t know what it’s like living with him twenty-four hours a day. He stands in the attic yelling at the ceiling, spouting gibberish.”

“Yes, I can see where that might be perceived as being somewhat peculiar—”

“It is peculiar, God damn it!”

I spread my hands out as if I were pressing against an invisible wall. “I know, I know. But as I’ve been trying to tell you for the past ten minutes — or has it been an hour already? — I believe we’re close to a breakthrough.”

Willeford threw his hands in the air and sighed.

I said, “Howard, listen. Have you ever heard me say those words before?” He glared at me. “Hm? Have you?”

“No.” He said this with some reluctance.

“Do you think I’m stringing you along, is that it? Just to squeeze more money out of you?”

He glanced down at the carpet again. “No.”

“Do you think I would say we were close to a breakthrough if we really weren’t?”

“No.”

A moment of uncomfortable silence followed. I gently grabbed Willeford’s hand and said, “Sean’s going to be okay. If I weren’t sure of that, I wouldn’t have spent so much time helping him. If I thought he was a lost cause I would have refused his case two years ago. But he’s not a lost cause, and if you just give me a few more sessions with him I’m certain I can prove that to you.”

Willeford had softened, but he was far from won over. “I’d like to sit in on today’s session.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Why?”

“It’s unethical. Sean needs his privacy. How can he relax and be open if you’re there breathing down his neck?”

Willeford’s lips had contracted into a tight, bloodless line. “I’ll sit right here in the lobby then.” He plopped down into a brown vinyl chair.

I tried not to reveal my frustration. I turned to my secretary and said, “Bobby, please make sure that Mr. Willeford is comfortable, won’t you?”

Bobby just grinned and saluted me with his index finger. “Yes, Dr. Keil, ma’am!” He was so sickeningly cheerful. Seriously, Dr. Peaslee, I’ve been thinking about raising his salary if only he would promise to frown once in a while.

I turned on one high heel and re-entered my office. I locked and bolted the door behind me; five bolts made of pure gold were attached to the oaken door, per your grandfather’s meticulous notes. I lit four black candles, one for each of the cardinal directions, along with incense and myrrh. I closed the shutters until the only source of light in the room was that of the consecrated candles. I pulled back the Persian rug in the middle of the room, revealing the pentagram underneath; I sprinkled sea salt inside the pentagram, black salt outside.

Your grandfather’s conclusions were correct, Dr. Peaslee. Certain ancient secret societies and primitive followers of witchcraft understood the essential principles of what we now know as hyperdimensional physics without comprehending the underlying causes. Almost all the tools and practices associated with witchcraft have a utilitarian purpose in the framework of advanced physics. It’s ironic that mystics and scientists have been at each other’s throats for so many centuries when, in fact, they’ve been pursuing the same truths all along.

Sean sat watching my “witchcraft” from the couch, his eyes as blank and lifeless as usual. He’d suffered so much in his brief eighteen years. Quite frankly, I was often surprised he was even alive, though I would never think of saying such a thing aloud. I tried to be as optimistic as possible when around him. A few months earlier he’d almost committed suicide just to prevent the thing from taking him over once and for all. Any negativity at all might push him over the brink again.

I asked Sean to remove his shirt. I used a smudge stick to paint a pentagram on his chest. I was surprised at how broad that chest had become during the past two years. He wasn’t a bad-looking kid. If not for the “accident” he might have been a track star or an Olympic runner. Sometimes, when I managed to push the thing out long enough to give the boy at least a few moments of respite, Sean’s eyes would brighten and I would catch a brief glimpse of the driven, intelligent young man who had so often been evicted from his own body.

I asked Sean to kneel on the floor within the exact center of the pentagram. He did so. Then I proceeded to light the black candles I had placed at each of the pentagram’s five points. Two years earlier I would have called myself a fool for engaging in such “mystical nonsense.” That was before Sean. Before I had discovered your grandfather’s dream-work research. Before I had seen what Sean could do. Or rather, what the thing inside him could do.

I chanted in Latin, an unbinding spell I had learned from a woman who called herself a witch (in another age, she might have been considered a physician on the same level as Paracelsus) who lived in a nearby mansion up in Sherman Oaks, of all places. This woman was quite wealthy and had spent years performing the everyday run-of-the-mill “mind control” spells for all the Hollywood types desperate for that one career-making role; she even had her own YouTube channel. Odd how the ancient wisdom can adapt itself to its surroundings, no matter how gauche or blasé.

The woman had been recommended to me by a former client whose fear of heights had been wiped away during a $75.00 fifteen-minute phone consultation. An obvious placebo effect, I had believed at the time. Yet, out of desperation, I had called her number anyway. I had never dealt with anything remotely resembling “magic” before, and yet somewhere in the back of my mind I believed the story Sean had told me: that it felt like something alien was trying to take over his consciousness. Something from outside. Something from the Great Gulf existing between the realms of dreaming and dreamless sleep.

“I built the machine on my own,” Sean had told me two years earlier. “I read about it in a William S. Burroughs book. I guess he got the idea from this artist named Brion Gysin. It’s called a Dreammachine. Basically, it’s just a light bulb connected to a turntable. The light bulb has to be covered with a cylinder with a bunch of holes poked in it. Then you switch the turntable on and let it spin. It creates a kind of strobe effect and puts you into a hypnotic trance. I just wanted to have some lucid dreams— bang chicks in my sleep, fly around like Superman and shit. I didn’t know it would leave my body open for…for this thing to crawl inside. I–I don’t know how much longer I can keep pushing it away and pushing it away!”

“And what do you think this ‘thing’ is, Sean?” This was still the “skeptical me” speaking.

“I have no idea. God, I don’t even sleep anymore. I feel like I’m awake twenty-four hours a day even though I know I’m not. Sometimes it wears me down. Finally, it just pulls me out. And I’m over there, in this huge room with no ceiling except stars. With that cone-shaped thing talking at me, through me, its tentacles waving and somehow touching me. Inside my mind. Inside my soul. I get so cold inside…just…just thinking about its touch…”

Oh, yes, I was very skeptical. That is, until the creature spoke to me one day.

It spoke to me though Sean’s mouth, told me things about myself and the universe and the dream-work of your grandfather that poor Sean could never know. It told me how the earth was formed, the number of stars in the Milky Way, what really killed the dinosaurs, how Rome fell, the name of the ancient lost planet to which Mars had been a mere satellite, the origins of the human species in the grottoes deep beneath the Antarctic where the shoggoths once slithered in obeisance to the Old Ones before the great rebellion, the time before the shoggoths slaughtered their masters, then turned around and created slaves of their own — hairless apes meant to be nothing more than mindless drones…

And it told me about my seventh birthday, the one I spent alone in the dark beneath the stairs while I listened to the soft, pulpy sounds of my mother’s face being beaten into a wall. I never saw the attacker. He was never charged or even arrested. In my infantile mind he was something beyond the physical, a being I could never truly visualize, a being I kept stored away in a tiny room in the back of my head. It took all of my willpower to keep that door closed. Sometimes I wondered if I’d become a psychiatrist merely to deal with the overwhelming pain locked inside that tiny room.

The creature, who identified itself as a member of the Great Race of Yith, could not tell me what the murderer looked like. It could see nothing beyond the dark beneath the stairs, the dark inside my own mind. This told me its knowledge was limited. It wasn’t omniscient. It was just very, very old.

I finished lighting the candles, then completed the protection spell. “Are you ready, Sean?” I asked.

The boy could only nod.

I deferred to the tools of a science far older than the limited systems of knowledge I had studied at University. I removed the Tarot cards from my desk drawer. I laid them out on the carpet just outside the circle. Sometimes the proper combination would trigger the being’s presence. If that didn’t work, I would have to try the evocation. But such spells drained a great deal of energy from me. I hoped to avoid it if at all possible.

I took a deep breath and drew the first card.

The Eight of Cups. Upside down.

Sean didn’t move. He seemed paralyzed, like a living statue.

Then the Knight of Pentacles.

Sean closed his eyes, began to rock back and forth. The left side of his face twitched ever so slightly.

Nine of Pentacles. Upside down.

Sean doubled over, clawing at his stomach. He appeared to be having an epileptic fit. The faint scent of ozone filled the air, like the smell of a coming electrical storm.

Six of cups.

Sean moaned as if feeling the mounting pressure of a coming orgasm. The hair on my arms stood on end. The sound of clicking filled the room, a thousand grasshoppers rupturing a quiet country night.

Five of Pentacles.

Sean whispered, “Please no, please go away.” Despite being a naïve young man, his will was very strong. He’d managed to push the thing away many times in the past. This time, however, I hoped he didn’t succeed.

I remember thinking, Don’t you dare listen to him. Let’s get this damn thing over with. Now.

The final card. The nineteenth of the Major Arcana. Le Soleil. The Sun.

Sean cocked his head back and opened his mouth wide as if in the throes of ecstasy. His fingers dug into the ground so violently the carpet tore away like tinfoil. He stared at me with black misty eyes. And he spoke. That voice, that familiar voice, the sound of insects scurrying over a corpse-strewn battlefield…

Hello again, Miss Keil.

Each syllable was slightly out of synch with the other; though they overlapped one another, at the same time there seemed to be long gaps between them. I didn’t understand the paradox, accepted it and moved on.

I said, “Let’s cut the bullshit, shall we? I’d like to make you an offer.”

Sean pressed his fingertips together to form a steeple. He cocked his head to the right and smirked. He moved his torso from side to side as if trying to manipulate limbs that weren’t there. I am intrigued, he said. Continue.

I tried to calm down. If only I could stop sweating. But that voice! It was so God damn cold.

I cleared my throat and said, “During our previous conversations you’ve…indicated that your…your possession of the boy was completely arbitrary. Isn’t that correct?”

Sean nodded, then sniffed the air. Interesting. Your sweat glands are swelling considerably. I presume you are uncomfortable?

“Well…yes, you could say that. It’s not every day I talk to…something like you.” Sean said nothing. Now I felt stupid. I thought, Is this even happening outside my own mind? “You…you’ve also said you’re tormenting Sean like this to learn more about our time period. You’re a historian, in a sense?”

He nodded again. In a sense.

“Then why did it have to be Sean?”

Because he opened himself up to me. He was a willing vessel, nothing more.

“But he had no idea what he was doing.”

That is not our concern. The boy is actually quite fortunate. My intention was to inhabit his body for a greater length of time. But his mind…though primitive…is unusually strong.

I leaned forward, staring into his night-filled eyes. “Take me instead. Let Sean go. I’ll record all the information you need on that…backwater planet of yours.” Sean uttered a word I couldn’t understand, presumably the name of the planet. I said, “I’m afraid I can never pronounce that damn thing.”

Sean laughed. You still do not understand. It is your planet, about four hundred million years ago. We are not bound to any one particular time. The bodies we inhabit in the past are native to your world, but are wholly unlike the species that happens to reign during this era. Your era. He stroked his neck as if fascinated by its texture. Why would you do this for the boy?

“Because I’d rather feel the pain than him.”

Masochism? An emotion unique to your species. An underrated delicacy, I might add. He sighed. Very well, I will do as you request. Your body or the boy’s…it makes very little difference to me.

I suddenly realized I had been holding my breath. “Thank you.”

No need to thank me, my dear lady. Do what you must to release me.

I blew out the candles one by one. In darkness, I reached out and ran my fingertip through the barrier of sea salt. The break was barely half an inch, but that was enough. Possession was immediate.

At first I felt nothing at all. Then: a piercing headache in the exact center of my brain. Something squirmed and kicked like a fetus swimming around inside my skull. I felt myself being pushed out of my body. No, I thought. It’s not supposed to happen this way.

For a moment two minds merged into one. I wasn’t sure if I was human or a strange mixture of plant and insect. I felt the phantom presence of claw-tipped tentacles on either side of my cone-shaped body and four slender stalks on my globular head from which sprouted writhing, flower-like appendages. I watched through a trio of eyes as Sean collapsed onto his back. “Sean!” I yelled, but the name didn’t sound quite right. It didn’t sound English. It didn’t even sound human. It was merely a dissonant series of whistles, like a madman playing a dozen flutes at once.

Then Sean and the room and the Earth itself rippled and melted away. I found myself standing in the midst of a vast vaulted chamber without a ceiling. Or rather, the chamber was so huge the ceiling couldn’t be seen. Above my head hovered a gray mist through which a sea of lights winked intermittently. They could have been artificial lights or distant stars. An onyx obelisk as tall as a three-story building stood upon a granite pedestal with strange symbols carved upon its uneven surface. The obelisk was featureless except for a massive sigil inscribed just below the pointed top. The sigil consisted of thin squiggles in the vague shape of a bee with its wings outspread.

On the far side of the chamber a circular window latticed with iron bars looked out upon an overgrown garden bathed in spectral moonlight. Cyclopean fernlike growths of a sickly, fungoid pallor swayed in the low breeze like nightmarish claws waving at me in a mocking fashion. All the windows and doors resembled Roman arches and were blocked by stout-looking bars. I knew those bars were meant to keep me in. Massive bookshelves filled with ancient tomes lined the basalt walls. Scattered papers and open books lay strewn on a series of pedestals that seemed to be beckoning to me, waiting for me to begin my work.

“No,” I said aloud, but the only sound that emerged was an angry, whistling wind. “No!” I screamed and the wind grew louder and angrier.

I closed my three eyes, willed myself to calm down. Silently, I recited the words my “witch” acquaintance had taught me and waited. I saw eight bizarre sigils composed of flame burning in the blackness around me. Each sigil represented a different concept. I cannot reproduce these sigils (though I have tried many times, I assure you), but I can replicate on the page their exact positions in the air as they danced and twirled and fell inside the darkness behind my eyes:

breeze

moonlight

obelisk

arches

bars

ripple

melt

vanish

Abruptly, the cavernous chamber drifted away. I now stood in a featureless gray void filled with fleeting images of my past…and what appeared to be a simulacrum of myself. Dr. Margaret Keil looked very surprised as she looked at me and said, How did you—?

If possible, I would have grinned. Instead I said, “I presume you’re uncomfortable?” then wrapped my tentacles around the doctor’s throat. My own throat.

The doctor fell to her knees; she grasped hold of the tentacles and tried to pry them loose, but this was impossible.

You know you cannot kill me in here, the doctor said. You will kill yourself too.

“I’m not going to do it.”

Behind the doctor — in this immaterial plane composed of nothing more than memories — a door appeared out of nowhere. It was thin, rectangular, and covered in peeling white paint. It looked exactly like the door to the tiny closet beneath the stairway.

The one little Maggie escaped into on her seventh birthday.

The door swung open as if propelled by an invisible force. It hadn’t been opened in over thirty-six years. A foul, musty odor emerged from the blackness. I pushed the doctor into the blackness, and the door shut behind us.

The room was much bigger than it appeared on the outside. I could not tell where the walls began, but it seemed as if we were surrounded by a vastness not dissimilar to the cyclopean chamber I had just escaped.

Something laughed at us. Something human. A man?

I withdrew my newly acquired tentacles and backed away from the doctor. Where are we? the doctor said, and for the first time I heard fear in its ancient voice.

I felt the fear as well. I had been feeling it for most of my life.

The man stepped out of the darkness. He was smiling. He had long sandy-blond hair that was thinning on top, a tangled beard, and bloodshot eyes. He was amped up, maybe on some form of speed? I was surprised at how small he was, only 5’5. He wore a ripped white t-shirt, baggy blue jeans, and a pair of combat boots. His shirt and pants were spattered in blood. My mother’s blood.

He cackled, blurting out gibberish half-remembered from an old Christian hymn, and revealed the bloody hunting knife he had been holding behind his back. He motioned with his fingers as if beckoning the doctor forward.

The doctor didn’t move. What are you? the Yithian asked the blood-drenched man. In all their exhaustive studies, had the “Great Race” never encountered anything as irrational as this?

The cackling man didn’t respond, not vocally. He swung his blade, puncturing the doctor through the soft spot in her throat. Blood gushed. The doctor fell to her knees. Gurgling sounds, not unlike the demonic piping that emerged now from my antennae, erupted from the new hole in the doctor’s flesh. The doctor grabbed her own neck, as if trying to keep the red sap inside. The man giggled and the blade swung again, down into the base of her neck, severing her spinal cord. The doctor fell into a pool of her own blood.

Then the man turned toward me. He looked down at me, as if I was very small. He said, “Now just close your eyes and enjoy it, little girl.”

Little? Girl? I thought, Can’t he see me for what I really am?

I was Dr. Margaret Keil, but I was also something more.

The mad piping and the whistling wind drowned out the man’s final screams, followed by the battering down of that pitiful, insignificant closet door…

I awoke facedown on the floor of my office. The sound of metal pounding on wood filled my head. I groaned as I pushed myself up. My blouse hung off my body in tatters. My skirt was much the same, stained in fresh blood. The office was a mess. My desk was on its back, the couch toppled over on its side, the window smashed and devoid of glass. Pieces of paper and random trash lay scattered across the filthy carpet, which was covered in a rubbery gray substance that had the scent of musty fungus. In the midst of this chaos Sean lay prostrate in the center of the pentagram. The smaller pentagram on his bare chest had smeared, dripping messy red tendrils down his torso as if it were an unfinished scrap of graffiti spray painted by a group of amateur taggers. I couldn’t tell if he was breathing.

I crawled toward him, ignoring the pounding at the door. I cradled his head in my lap. “Sean? Can you hear me?”

The boy’s eyes fluttered open. “Where am I?”

I laughed as tears trickled down my cheeks. “It doesn’t matter. It’s over now.”

The door to my office burst inward. In the doorway stood two police officers with their guns drawn. Behind them I could see Mr. Willeford staring at me with an expression of mounting horror.

“What the hell’s been happening in here?” he asked.

I cleared my throat and put on a decidedly professional air. “Mr. Willeford,” I said, “I’m happy to announce we’ve accomplished a major breakthrough far sooner than previously anticipated. I’ll be waiving the fee on this one. No need to thank me. By the way, any of you gentlemen can feel free to help us to our feet when you’re ready.”

I tried to appear calm, but somewhere in the depths of my mind was the sound of a madman choking on his own blood in a room too small to die in…and far too small to live in. I can still hear it sometimes, even to this day, despite the fact that many weeks have passed since that fateful afternoon.

I must admit, Dr. Peaslee, it’s not always an unpleasant sound.

Of course, I plan to translate these experiences into a far more organized and objective report, one I hope to present to your esteemed colleagues at your exclusive conference next year.

As always, I appreciate your support in these matters. Needless to say, Sean does as well.

It will no doubt be…interesting…to hear the reaction of our peers when I present my findings to them next fall.

At long last, perhaps your grandfather’s name can be restored to the exalted heights it so richly deserves after all these decades of shameful neglect.

Yours Sincerely,

Dr. Margaret Keil, Ph.D.