User:DoctorWho42/The Light from Beyond

"The Light from Beyond" is a short story by American author Clark Ashton Smith and was first published in the April 1933 of Wonder Stories.

Publication history
According to Emperor of Dreams: A Clark Ashton Smith Bibliography (1978) by Donald Sidney-Fryer, "The Light from Beyond" was first published in the April 1933 issue of Wonder Stories. It reappeared in the book Lost Worlds (1944).

Plot
Dorian Wiermoth, a painter, lives alone in a cabin. One night he sees strange lights wheel in the sky and his mind is flooded with music and edenic odours. He goes to where it may have occurred and stumbles across an unusual cairn which recedes like a treadmill when he approaches. When again his mind is filled with music and smells, he approaches the cairn but finds a flying ship with four creatures hovering nearby. He hovers with them and arrives in their world. On this world, they plant a tree. It grows strange fruit which the more sickly aliens eat. Wiermoth takes a bite and finds infinities open up to him. However, he separates from his infinite self and wakes up in the old world. Wiermoth also finds he has lost his artistic talent and believes it now belongs to his infinite self.

Reception
In the 1998 book Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years, E. F. Bleiler remarks "a very fine story."