THE TRANSVERSAL
I
It is with the last graspings of sanity and life that I transcribe my account here, for I have seen truths that the pitiful minds of mortal men were never meant to behold. Beside this pen and paper upon which I now write lies a revolver that I will use to end my existence, which is as meaningless as the universe we inhabit, once I am finished enunciating the terrible truth I've discovered beyond that wretched doorway of aether. I write this only to preserve the merciful ignorance of any a curious soul that would dare venture into that daemonic attic and transverse that cosmic doorway, and as such will leave it sealed in an envelope tacked upon the attic door until its discovery.
I will attempt to start at the beginning. My name is Haytch Lovell. I was born on the Twentieth of February in the year 1870 in the home of my parents, Elena and Jefferson Lovell in San Francisco, California, although as you are aware, time matters little now and has proven to be as malleable as a viscous jelly, as have many of the universal constants. My family was of well-bred and well-educated stock, and belonged to an ancient Massachusetts clan of liberalists. My father was a professor in the distant city of Boston before migrating to the frontier West with my mother in aftermath of the States War, where he resumed his life of academia and borne me unto the doomed world.
I was raised to be an upstanding man by them and followed in my father's footsteps of professorship, which I obtained only two years before the great cataclysms which started in the dreaded year of 1906. By that time, my mother had mercifully died of the white death several years before hand, and my heart-broken father took his own life as well by drowning himself in the San Francisco Bay. I speak of my lineage only to articulate that my transversal and subsequent revelations were not borne of an illness of the mind or putrid soul, but are indeed truths which no man should or shall experience without losing the very essence of his soul.
At the time of the cataclysms, I was living in the midst of San Francisco on Nob Hill and had professorship at San Francisco State University. I lived with my manservant and dearest friend, whose name and experiences I now pity, Bryson, an old servant of the Lovell clan who I knew since my distant youth. I can still remember clearly, even in the fogs of my current madness, the terrible April day when the earthquake hit, that terrible April day when the fate of the universe had not been determined, but merely reached the lonely corner of the stars which we as a species inhabit. I had been awake for but twenty minutes, preparing my class schedule for Wednesday's lecture when the walls of my Nob Hill home began to shake with the fury of a thousand angry gods beneath the earth. My loyal Bryson came running into my study and saw to our quick escape from my home, just before it completely collapsed along with half of the city.
Soon the infernos broke out across San Francisco, engulfing the city in flames and ensuring that the poor souls who had been spared by the quake would suffer the lickings of flames as well. Bryson and I worked all throughout that day to assist in the evacuations before we were forced to leave the city of my birth and heritage along with the rest of its pitiful migrants, but not before meeting up with a colleague of mine from the university, Dr. Elias B. Shepard of the astronomy department. The three of us travelled by train up to the capital Sacramento, along the way hearing queer whispers about yet greater cataclysms happening elsewhere throughout the country and the globe. It seemed the terrifying April quake in San Francisco was but the start of some great chain of terrible events, which recalled in my mind the mad ramblings of the minister of my boyhood church regarding the end times and Book of Revelations. I hate to pay that mad Methodist any credence now, but it certainly seems to most everyone, myself included, that we have reached the end.
Once arriving in Sacramento, Shepard, Bryson and I were flung into the mass of refugee camps that had been hastily constructed by the state government and military. Disturbingly, we had noticed that a minority of the refugees came not from the Bay Area which had just suffered the heralding quake, but from lands east of California in the sparsely populated silver country of Nevada. Of the Nevadans I spoke with, they too talked of a great cataclysm that had befallen them, of a great shaking and upheaval of the earth and great convulsions of fire and molten rock from the ground that had utterly destroyed Carson City and most of the small towns spread throughout the state. It became clear to most everyone in the camps that a great change was taking place, and that us Californians had suffered along with the rest of humanity. Our fears were confirmed throughout that wretched week in Sacramento. The newspapers that we could access spoke of great quakes and cataclysms befalling the Midwest and Southern states, in areas both metropolitan and rural. There had been reports of eldritch mountains suddenly appearing in the otherwise flat farmlands of Kansas and Nebraska, which were, according to the papers, communicated to them via telegraph by a hysterical army officer stationed in Omaha who had been assisting with the evacuations in the Midwest. There were even more sinister rumors of a monumental wave of water surging across the Atlantic and into the doomed shores of Europe, and that directly south of us the regions in the vicinity of great Los Angeles were being swallowed whole by the gaping maw of the Pacific. These grand tales were seemingly confirmed when in early May a wretchedly ragged group of refugees from the southern areas of the state made it into Sacramento, and rambled ceaselessly about Los Angeles sinking slowly and awesomely into the sea.
This created quite a sensation of panick amongst us refugees, and riots soon broke out across the city. Men, women, and children clamored and fought with each other over control of various resources that were whisked away from market shelves, general goods stores, and even the carts of unfortunate farmers and merchants who were beaten into submission. The military nominally declared control of Sacramento and tried to quell the riots, but my party and I often saw young recruits deserting their stations and joining in the fray, alarmingly equipped with firearms, knives, and other instruments of destruction. I am ashamed to admit that my party and I joined in this insanity too, for the instinct of survival is a strong and ugly one.
Eventually we decided we must leave Sacramento, which was being consumed by riots and chaos. We conspired with several of our fellow refugees to leave the city in a small caravan of horses, wagons, and all the supplies we could muster through preservation and yes, looting.
We left the doomed city on the Twentieth of May, near one month after the earthquake in San Francisco, for refuge the various towns and forests in the foothills region of the Sierra Nevada range. Shepard spoke of a summer home his family maintained betwixt the regions of Sutter's Mill and Cassidy Hill, and we decided the three of us would venture with the caravan until reaching the Auburn region and heading for Shepard's summer home ourselves.
We travelled for three long days with the caravan, our progress being beset by various fires that had broken out in the forested regions in which we travelled. Members of our party also seemed by to be succumbing to a strange flu-like illness the likes of which nobody, not even our party's medical doctor Peabody, had seen before. We came to the conclusion this too was a form of the cataclysms currently sweeping mankind. Of the twenty-eight of us that set out from Sacramento on the twentieth, only thirteen remained by the time we finally reached the Auburn region on the Twenty-Third. The town was strangely abandoned, but we discovered numerous corpses that had evidently died of the flu-like illness throughout the houses and shops of that city. Thus we surmised its residents had fled the city to escape the illness. We carefully avoided the remains of the dead to prevent ourselves from being infected.
On the Twenty-Fourth Shepard, Bryson, and I separated from our party and started our trek towards Shepard's summer home. Our journey was only a day longer than the one from Sacramento to Auburn, but was beset by great tragedy and peril nonetheless. The wildlife had become abnormally aggressive and neurotic, no doubt another manifestation of the global cataclysms, and we had to stop at an abandoned trading outpost near Sutter's Mill to outfit ourselves with firearms and other hunting gear to keep the mad beasts at bay. We discovered other effects of the great change as well. We noticed the rapid decay of various plant life and human structures, and noticed our hair was rapidly becoming grey with premature age. Disturbingly though, the lines of our middle-aged faces were fading, and it seemed we were simultaneously becoming older and younger, as had other objects and organisms in our seemingly decaying world. Shepard, ever a scientist of the natural world, theorized that we were suffering some form of universal decay, a degradation of the forces, such as time, matter, and energy, that hold our reality intact. This would indeed explain the global cataclysms, strange diseases, and queer shifts in time and matter that we had been experiencing. He told us this eldritch hypothesis around our camp's fire the day before our arrival at his cabin.
Poor Shepard would not live to see it though. Later that night, I awoke from my slumber by the fading embers of the fire to the distant mad laughter of Shepard, who I spotted some yards away in a clearing gazing through his telescope that he insistently brought with him all the way from San Francisco. The moonlight, which was queerly tinged with a crimson color, shone on his face expressions of pure insanity and hopelessness. I approached poor Shepard apprehensively, both fearing and pitying that brilliant mind turned irrevocably mad, and found myself shivering mostly not at Shepard's loss of sanity but at what caused his loss of sanity. I tapped him nervously on his twitching shoulder and inquired stupidly as to his obvious condition. He quickly wheeled around to me, taking his right eye out of the telescope but still reeling with maniacal laughter. Even after my shocking revelation, the tone of his words still haunt me:
"The stars, Lovell, they are going out. One by one by one!"