An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

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.