Original subtitles

THE SHADOW OUT OF TIME

by George Moorse

based on a story by H.P. Lovecraft

I cannot guarantee that what I believe I found

on the night of July 17th to 18th, 1974

in Western Australia corresponds to the truth.

There is reasonable hope

that my experience was wholly or partly a hallucination.

Nevertheless, the memory of it is so horrifyingly realistic

that at times I lose all hope.

If it really happened to me, then humanity must prepare itself

to accept concepts of the cosmos whose mere mention is paralysing.

It must also be on guard against a lurking danger

that could bring unthinkable horrors to the entire planet.

For this reason, I urge with all my might

for the total abandonment of all attempts

to excavate these fragments of unknown primordial masonry.

It was a terrible confirmation of everything

I had tried to relegate to the realm of myth and dream.

Strictly speaking, there is no proof.

I, Nikolaus Wilfried Petersen, am the son of Johann and Anna Petersen,

both from Göttingen.

I was born and raised in Göttingen,

went to school and university there.

In 1951, I came to Munich as a professor of economics.

For five years, my life followed a normal course.

Never did I have the slightest interest in occultism or abnormal psychology.

It happened on Thursday, May 14th, 1957,

that a strange amnesia overtook me.

My head hurt.

I had the feeling that something foreign was trying

to take possession of my thoughts.

The collapse came at 10:20 a.m. while I was talking with some students.

My unconsciousness lasted 28 hours and 40 minutes.

On May 15th at 3:00 in the afternoon, I began to speak.

The doctor and my wife were deeply shocked

by my completely altered voice and the strange expression on my face.

It quickly became clear that I had no memory of my identity or past.

However, I seemed to be making an effort to hide this memory gap.

My speech was oddly clumsy and tentative.

My diction was strangely stylized,

as if I had learned the German language only from books.

It quickly became clear to me that the attempt

to cover up my memory loss was failing.

And I now openly admitted the amnesia.

I seemed to have lost interest in my old personality at the very moment.

I realised that the doctors had accepted my case of amnesia.

Over the years, I began to gather information of all kinds...

on history, natural sciences, language, art, and folklore.

Things every child knows I had to relearn.

At the same time,

I inexplicably mastered almost unexplored areas of knowledge.

I mentioned events from times beyond our history.

Whenever I was questioned about it,

I tried to dismiss it as intellectual playfulness.

I also had a way of speaking about the future,

that frightened those around me.

But soon I managed to adapt to the language and customs of the time.

Like a traveller from a distant, foreign land.

My thirst for knowledge seemed inexhaustible.

I met many academics,

as my case had gained some fame among the psychologists of the time.

But I rarely found friendship.

My outlook and my manner of speech

seemed to cause discomfort in everyone I met.

From the moment I awoke, my wife looked at me with fear and disgust.

She felt that something utterly foreign had taken possession of my body.

In 1958, she divorced me.

She never wanted to see me again.

The small fortune at my disposal,

I began to spend slowly and carefully,

travelling and studying at various centres of science.

My research journeys took me to far-off, remote places.

My academic stays at various universities

were marked by my abnormally rapid comprehension.

As if my second self possessed an intelligence

far superior to my own.

I seemed to have the power to influence the thoughts and actions of others.

But I tried to hide this ability.

There were rumours that I was in contact

with leaders of occult groups and secret sects.

In fact, I must have intensely studied occult literature,

as I later found marginal notes in my handwriting in many relevant works.

In the summer of 1962,

I began to show signs of boredom and waning interest.

I hinted that changes would soon occur.

I spoke of recurring memories from my previous life.

On the evening of the 26th of September,

I gave the housekeeper and the maids the evening off.

The lights in the house stayed on late into the night.

The doctor found me unconscious in the living room.

At 11:15 a.m. on the 27th of September,

I stirred violently.

My face began to show signs of expression.

Not those of my second personality, but of my normal self.

At 11:30, I uttered strange sounds.

It seemed as if I had to struggle against something.

Then I began to speak and continued the conversation.

I had started five years earlier with my students.

After five years, four months, and 13 days,

Nikolaus Wilfried Petersen had returned.

A mind, whose sense of time

was still fixed on that Thursday morning in 1957.

My reintegration into normal life was a painful and difficult process.

But I tried to look at the matter as philosophically as possible.

I began working at the university again

and managed to keep it up for a year.

During the last semester, Karin Schmidt became my assistant

and remained my companion through the difficult times to come.

Vague dreams and ideas constantly haunted me.

My sense of time, my ability to distinguish

between sequential and simultaneous events, was impaired.

I was obsessed with the feeling that my amnesia

had caused some kind of unholy exchange.

That my second self had, in reality,

been an intruder from the unknown and had displaced my own personality.

The question of where my true self might have resided during the years

in which another occupied my body became ever more tormenting.

Feverishly, I searched for information

about the studies and research travels of that "other"

during the lost five years.

I spoke of my research only with Karin Schmidt and a few trusted psychologists.

Over time, I began to concern myself with other cases of amnesia,

but only those with comparable experiences.

These cases could be traced,

scattered across the centuries, back to the beginnings of humanity.

In three cases there was mention of an unknown machine,

like the one that had stood in my house

shortly before my second transformation.

Had something from an abyss of nature blindly stumbled through time and space?

Were these cases monstrous experiments by unknown powers?

When the dreams and visions began, I believed I was going insane.

Was there perhaps a special form of self-deception

that affects amnesia victims?

Efforts by the subconscious to fill the void with pseudo-memories.

I seemed to be a prisoner, and fear brooded over everything that I saw.

At first, I tried to dismiss these dreams as something natural.

Images and things I had read,

arranged into fantastic new forms by the uncontrollable whims of sleep.

Some visions merely reflected standard textbook knowledge

of the primitive world from 150 million years ago.

But as the months went by, I found it harder and harder

to escape the feeling of fear.

Now the dreams had taken on the character of memories.

At this point, I deepened my study of other cases of amnesia in the hope

that by doing so I might distance myself from my own problems

and free myself from their emotional grip.

The exact opposite occurred.

In old books, I kept coming across descriptions of visions

that in detail matched my own.

Together with Karin, I studied medical,

historical, and anthropological records.

Karin discovered in my library a series of books unknown to me,

which my other self had apparently acquired.

They were works of forbidden teachings.

The pages were full of scribbled marginal notes.

One note in von Juntz's Nameless Cults

consisted of curvilinear hieroglyphs

that followed no recognisable, known human pattern.

They were the hieroglyphs I saw again and again in my dreams.

Signs whose meaning I sometimes thought I knew.

They were written in the same ink

as the German corrections in my own handwriting.

After we had compiled the various reports, old and modern,

anthropological and medical,

a consistent mixture of myth and hallucination emerged,

which shook our world-view.

Here, ancient myth and modern speculation converged.

Humanity is only one, and perhaps the last,

of the highly developed and dominant species

in the long history of this planet.

Things of unimaginable form had built towers into the sky

and wrested every secret from nature,

long before the amphibian ancestor of man

had crawled from the seething sea 300 million years ago.

Some had come down from the stars.

Some were as old as the cosmos itself.

Most legends spoke of a race

that had lived only 150 million years before the rise of humankind.

They alone had succeeded in conquering time.

They had learned everything ever known or ever to be known on Earth.

Their powerful consciousness projected itself

into the past and future across millions of years.

In their vast archives they hoarded volumes of texts and images,

storing the knowledge of the world, past and future.

The history and achievements of all species

that ever were or ever would be.

This race was called the Great Old Ones.

They had come from a dying planet in another galaxy.

The Great Old Ones could project their consciousness into the future.

In every era, they would select a specimen

of the highest life form and possess its body.

Thus, without attracting attention, they could study other epochs and life forms.

Meanwhile, the consciousness of the victim

was taken to the age of the Great Old Ones.

Only when all its knowledge had been stored in their archives

was it allowed to return to its own time.

Its memory of the stay with the Great Old Ones was erased from its mind.

Strange machines were used to send the consciousness of the Great Old Ones,

along with their stored knowledge, back.

In our time, tradition said,

nothing remained of the Great Old Ones but ruins.

Yet the Great Old Ones did not always succeed

in completely erasing memory from their victims' minds.

This fragmentary knowledge entered into legend

and was preserved by occult sects throughout the ages.

The Necronomicon and von Junzt's Nameless Cults

hint at the existence of such a sect.

When I had brought my research into a coherent form in the year 1967,

the fear seemed to fade from me.

I believed I had found a convincing explanation

for all the phenomena that had disturbed me.

During my amnesia, I had read the forbidden legends

and made contact with members of occult sects.

That alone had provided the material for my dreams.

As for the hieroglyphs, I had undoubtedly modelled them

on descriptions in ancient legends and woven them into my dreams.

The more I thought about it, the more convincing my own argument seemed.

A large number of psychologists shared this view.

If I saw strange things in my dreams,

they were merely echoes of myths I had absorbed during my second state.

I noted almost calmly that my visions became more frequent and more detailed.

I continued to record my dreams as psychological documents.

And then I saw the living things themselves.

In my dreams I always avoided looking down at myself.

But then, one night,

I could no longer resist the morbid temptation.

It took me weeks to get used to the visions of my monstrous dream-body.

I now physically moved among the other beings

and read terrible books from the shelves and wrote for hours with a quill,

held by the tentacles that hung from my head.

There were records of beings that had inhabited the Earth in a forgotten past,

and terrifying chronicles of intelligences with grotesque bodies

that would populate Earth millions of years after the death of the last human.

I read utterly forgotten chapters of human history.

I learned that the beings around me were the Great Old Ones

and that my consciousness had been abducted from the distant future.

The whole time, I seemed to be writing the history of my own era.

Yes, I was writing a book.

A book in which I poured out all my knowledge of our time.

There were others too, who wrote their books.

They had been abducted from all corners of time history and the solar system.

I awoke each morning in a fever.

Sometimes I desperately tried to verify information.

Traditionally accepted facts took on new and dubious aspects.

I shuddered at the thought of the secrets that the past might be hiding

and trembled at the threat that the future might still bring.

And what post-human beings hinted about humanity's fate

is too terrible to speak of.

Meanwhile, in my dreams,

I kept writing endlessly this story of my own era,

which I was preparing for the central archive of the Great Old Ones.

The archive was housed in an underground structure.

It was meant to outlast the Great Old Ones themselves.

I came to know it well, because I often worked there and consulted books.

The books were stored in metal containers.

My own history book was assigned a place on the lowest level.

In my dreams I found myself in an era about 150 million years ago.

The Great Old Ones seemed to be a highly developed organic species,

related to both plants and animals.

They seemed to form a single loosely connected nation or league,

sharing major institutions.

The most important resources were rationally distributed.

Power was delegated to a small governing group,

elected by all who had passed certain educational and psychological tests.

An army was kept on constant alert.

For reasons that were never spoken of.

But which were obviously connected to the constant fear

of the great sealed trapdoors in the underground corridors.

This fear concerned a terrible older race

of gelatinous, completely alien beings.

They dwelled in mighty basalt structures of windowless towers.

It was like this when the Great Old Ones

rushed to our planet through time and space.

For the Great Old Ones it was easy

to subjugate the cruel beings and drive them down into the caves of the Earth.

After that, the Great Old Ones sealed the caves

and left the beings to their fate.

But as time passed, signs increased

that the beings were growing stronger and more numerous inside the Earth.

At their first escape attempt,

they destroyed one of the cities of the Great Old Ones.

Stronger precautions were then ordered,

and most of the gates leading into the Earth's interior were sealed forever.

The Great Old Ones were afraid.

One day, the older beings would break out for good.

All the research of the Great Old Ones

on past and future times served only one purpose...

to find a safe refuge for their endangered race.

And always the shadow of nameless fear hung over the sealed trapdoors

and the dark, windowless towers of the older beings.

In the years 1971 and 1972,

in the Journal of the German Psychological Society,

a series of articles appeared

in which I summarized my experiences and conclusions.

In July of 1973,

a letter from the Psychological Society was forwarded to me,

which began the most terrifying phase of my life.

The letter had the postmark of Pilbara, Western Australia,

and bore the signature of a man

who, as I found out through inquiries,

was a mining engineer of considerable prominence.

Enclosed were some strange photographs.

The engineer, a certain Mr. McKenzie, wrote

that he had discovered some monoliths

and evidently very old ruins in the desert,

near the gold mines his company was working.

He wrote that the Australian aboriginals

associated these ruins with some of their legends.

They spoke of large, dark caves within the earth and of icy winds

that drove away anyone who dared approach the ruins.

McKenzie regarded the stories of the aboriginals as superstitious fantasies,

but the huge stones they spoke of...

they existed.

And they bore a remarkable resemblance to the monoliths

I had seen in my dreams and described

for the Journal of the German Psychological Society.

McKenzie proposed that I accompany him to visit the still unexplored ruins.

They were not far from the gold mines

and I could count on any assistance from him

that I needed for my research.

Once we overcame the initial shock,

we began to make plans and decisions.

Then we got to work.

We contacted the Archaeological Department of the University of Munich.

We had decided that I would fly ahead alone,

and Karin would follow in about three weeks.

She still had important work to complete at the university.

On July 1st, 1974, we said our goodbyes at Munich Airport.

McKenzie picked me up from the airport in Sydney.

An exceptionally competent and personable young man.

July 11th.

I can't describe the feelings that gripped me

when I actually touched one of those stone blocks

that I knew from my dreams.

A faint trace of engraved markings was still preserved.

My hands trembled as I recognised part of the curved hieroglyphs

that had made years of my life hell in tormenting nightmares.

July 12th.

I have inspected a total of 1,250 stones.

McKenzie, a good geologist and somewhat of an archaeologist as well,

is startled by the immeasurable age of the fragments.

Toward the north-west, there are many more blocks.

I will inspect them tomorrow.

July 13th.

Everything seems terribly familiar.

I feel horror and curiosity.

But more than all of that, this persistent illusion of memory.

Now I also suffer from insomnia.

Strange impulses pull me toward the north-west.

July 15th.

As I wandered by moonlight, a stone caught my attention

that seemed different from the others I had seen before.

It appeared to be distinct.

My flight was impulsive and irrational.

And only when I returned to camp

did I realise what I had fled from.

The dark stone was something I had dreamed of and read about.

It had appeared again and again

with apocalyptic prophecies from prehistoric legends.

July 17th.

I cannot sleep.

Again the strange feeling pulling me toward the north-west.

How is it that I can find my way so well in these corridors?

How do I know the path downward?

I know this city, the way it once was.

What happened to it since that time?

Is the way to the central archive still open?

The shelves.

My book.

The trapdoors!

They are open!

The book!

Where is the book?

On July 17th, 1974, Prof. N.W. Petersen,

who was in Australia for archaeological research,

disappeared without a trace.

THE SHADOW OUT OF TIME

by George Moorse

based on a story by H.P. Lovecraft