Great weird-fiction author, second only to Poe.
Cool Air
H. P. LOVECRAFT
You ask me to explain why I am afraid of a draught of cool air; why I
shiver more than others upon entering a cold room, and seem nauseated
and repelled when the chill of evening creeps through the heat of a mild
autumn day. There are those who say I respond to cold as others do to a
bad odour, and I am the last to deny the impression. What I will do is
to relate the most horrible circumstance I ever encountered, and leave
it to you to judge whether or not this forms a suitable explanation of
my peculiarity.
It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with
darkness, silence, and solitude. I found it in the glare of
mid-afternoon, in the clangour of a metropolis, and in the teeming midst
of a shabby and commonplace rooming-house with a prosaic landlady and
two stalwart men by my side. In the spring of 1923 I had secured some
dreary and unprofitable magazine work in the city of New York, and being
unable to pay any substantial rent, began drifting from one cheap
boarding establishment to another in search of a room which might
combine the qualities of decent cleanliness, endurable furnishings and
very reasonable price. It soon developed that I had only a choice
between different evils, but after a time I came upon a house in West
Fourteenth Street which disgusted me much less than the others I had
sampled.
The place was a four-story mansion of brownstone, dating apparently from
the late forties, and fitted with woodwork and marble whose stained and
sullied splendour argued a descent from high levels of tasteful
opulence. In the rooms, large and lofty, and decorated with impossible
paper and ridiculously ornate stucco cornices, there lingered a
depressing mustiness and hint of obscure cookery; but the floors were
clean, the linen tolerably regular, and the hot water not too often cold
or turned off, so that I came to regard it as at least a bearable place
to hibernate until one might really live again. The landlady, a
slatternly, almost bearded Spanish woman named Herrero, did not annoy me
with gossip or with criticisms of the late-burning electric light in my
third floor front hall room; and my fellow lodgers were as quiet and
uncommunicative as one might desire, being mostly Spaniards a little
above the coarsest and crudest grade. Only the din of street-cars in the
thoroughfare below proved a serious annoyance.
I had been there about three weeks when the first odd incident occurred.
One evening at about eight I heard a spattering on the floor, and became
suddenly aware that I had been smelling the pungent odor of ammonia for
some time. Looking about, I saw that the ceiling was wet and dripping,
the stuff apparently proceeding from a corner on the side toward the
street. Anxious to stop the matter at its source, I hastened to the
basement to tell the landlady, and was assured by her that the trouble
would quickly be set right.
"Doctair Munoz," she cried as she rushed upstairs ahead of me, "he have
speel hees chemicals. He ees too seeck for doctair heemself--seecker and
seecker all the time--but he weel not have no othair for help. He ees
vairy queer in hees seeckness--all day he takes funneeh smelling baths,
and he cannot get excite or warm. All hees own housework he do--hees
leetle room are full of bottles and machines and he do not work as
doctair. But he was great once--my fathair in Barcelona have hear of
heem--and only joost now he feex a arm of the plumber that get hurt of
sudden. He nevair go out, only on roof, and my boy Esteban he breeng
heem hees food and laundry and mediceens and chemicals. My God, the
sal-ammoniac that man use for to keep heem cool!"
Mrs. Herrero disappeared up the staircase to the fourth floor, and I
returned to my room. The ammonia ceased to drip and as I cleaned up
what had spilled and opened the window for air, I heard the landlady's
heavy footsteps above me. Doctor Munoz I had never heard, save for
certain sounds as of some gasoline-driven mechanism, since his step was
soft and gentle. I wondered for a moment what the strange affliction of
this man might be and whether his obstinate refusal of outside aid were
not the result of a rather baseless eccentricity. There is, I reflected
tritely, an infinite deal of pathos in the state of an eminent person
who has come down in the world.
* * * * *
I might never have known Doctor Munoz had it not been for the heart
attack that suddenly seized me one forenoon as I sat writing in my room.
Physicians had told me of the danger of those spells, and I knew there
was no time to be lost. So, remembering what the landlady had said about
the invalid's help of the injured workman, I dragged myself upstairs and
knocked feebly at the door above mine. My knock was answered in good
English by a curious voice, some distance to the right, asking my name
and business; and these things being stated, there came an opening of
the door next to the one I had sought.
A rush of cool air greeted me; and though the day was one of the hottest
of late June, I shivered as I crossed the threshold into a large
apartment whose rich and tasteful decoration surprised me in this nest
of squalor and seediness. A folding couch now filled its diurnal role of
sofa, and the mahogany furniture, sumptuous hangings, old paintings and
mellow bookshelves all bespoke a gentleman's study rather than a
boarding-house bedroom. I now saw that the hall room above mine--the
"leetle room" of bottles and machines which Mrs. Herrero had
mentioned--was merely the laboratory of the doctor, and that his main
living quarters lay in the spacious adjoining room whose convenient
alcoves and large contiguous bathroom permitted him to hide all dressers
and obtrusively utilitarian devices. Doctor Munoz, most certainly, was a
man of birth, cultivation, and discrimination.
The figure before me was short but exquisitely proportioned, and clad in
somewhat formal dress of perfect fit and cut. A high-bred face of
masterful though not arrogant expression was adorned by a short,
iron-grey beard, and an old-fashioned pince-nez shielded the full, dark
eyes and surmounted an acquiline nose which gave a Moorish touch to a
physiognomy otherwise dominantly Celt-Iberian. Thick, well-trimmed hair
that argued the punctual calls of a barber was parted gracefully above a
high forehead; and the whole picture was one of striking intelligence
and superior blood and breeding.
Nevertheless, as I saw Doctor Munoz in that blast of cool air, I felt a
repugnance which nothing in his aspect could justify. Only his lividly
inclined complexion and coldness of touch could have afforded a physical
basis for this feeling, and even these things should have been excusable
considering the man's known invalidism. It might, too, have been the
singular cold that alienated me; for such chilliness was abnormal on so
hot a day, and the abnormal always excites aversion, distrust and fear.
But repugnance was soon forgotten in admiration, for the strange
physician's extreme skill at once became manifest despite the
ice-coldness and shakiness of his bloodless-looking hands. He clearly
understood my needs at a glance, and ministered to them with a master's
deftness, the while reassuring me in a finely modulated though oddly
hollow and timbreless voice that he was the bitterest of sworn enemies
to death, and had sunk his fortune and lost all his friends in a
lifetime of bizarre experiment devoted to its bafflement and
extirpation. Something of the benevolent fanatic seemed to reside in
him, and he rambled on almost garrulously as he sounded my chest and
mixed a suitable draught of drugs fetched from the smaller laboratory
room. Evidently he found the society of a well-born man a rare novelty
in this dingy environment, and was moved to unaccustomed speech as
memories of better days surged over him.
His voice, if queer, was at least soothing, and I could not even
perceive that he breathed as the fluent sentences rolled urbanely out.
He sought to distract my mind from my own seizure by speaking of his
theories and experiments; and I remember his tactfully consoling me
about my weak heart by insisting that will and consciousness are
stronger than organic life itself so that if a bodily frame be but
originally healthy and carefully preserved, it may through a scientific
enhancement of these qualities retain a kind of nervous animation
despite the most serious impairments, defects, or even absences in the
battery of specific organs. He might, he half-jestingly said, some day
teach me to live--or at least to possess some kind of conscious
existence--without any heart at all!
For his part, he was afflicted with a complication of maladies requiring
a very exact regimen which included constant cold. Any marked rise in
temperature might, if prolonged, affect him fatally, and the frigidity
of his habitation--some fifty-five or fifty-six degrees Fahrenheit--was
maintained by an absorption system of ammonia cooling, the gasoline
engine whose pumps I had often heard in my room below.
* * * * *
Relieved of my seizure in a marvellously short while, I left the shivery
place a disciple and devotee of the gifted recluse. After that I paid
him frequently overcoated calls, listening while he told of secret
researches and almost ghastly results, and trembling a bit when I
examined the unconventional and astonishingly ancient volumes on his
shelves. I was eventually I may add, almost cured of my disease for all
time by his skilful ministrations. It seems that he did not scorn the
incantations of the mediaevalists, since he believed these cryptic
formulae to contain rare psychological stimuli which might conceivably
have singular effects on the substance of a nervous system from which
organic pulsations had fled.
I was touched by his account of the aged Doctor Torres of Valencia, who
had shared his earlier experiments and nursed him through the great
illness of eighteen years before, whence his present disorders
proceeded. No sooner had the venerable practitioner saved his colleague
than he himself succumbed to the grim enemy he had fought. Perhaps the
strain had been too great; for Doctor Munoz made it whisperingly
clear--though not in detail--that the methods of healing had been most
extraordinary, involving scenes and processes not welcomed by elderly
and conservative Galens.
As the weeks passed, I observed with regret that my new friend was
indeed slowly but unmistakably losing ground physically, as Mrs. Herrero
had suggested. The livid aspect of his countenance was intensified, his
voice became more hollow and indistinct, his muscular motions were less
perfectly co-ordinated, and his mind and will displayed less resilience
and initiative. Of this sad change he seemed by no means unaware, and
little by little his expression and conversation both took on a gruesome
irony which restored in me something of the subtle repulsion I had
originally felt.
He developed strange caprices, acquiring a fondness for exotic spices
and Egyptian incense until his room smelled like the vault of a
sepulchred Pharaoh in the Valley of Kings. At the same time, his demands
for cold air increased, and with my aid he amplified the ammonia piping
of his room and modified the pumps and feed of his refrigerating machine
until he could keep the temperature as low as thirty-four or forty
degrees, and finally even twenty-eight degrees; the bathroom and
laboratory, of course, being less chilled, in order that water might not
freeze and that chemical processes might not be impeded. The tenant
adjoining him complained of the icy air from around the connecting door;
so I helped him fit heavy hangings to obviate the difficulty.
A kind of growing horror, of outré and morbid cast, seemed to possess
him. He talked of death incessantly, but laughed hollowly when such
things as burial or funeral arrangements were gently suggested. All in
all, he became a disconcerting and even gruesome companion; yet in my
gratitude for his healing I could not well abandon him to the strangers
around him, and was careful to dust his room and attend to his needs
each day, muffled in a heavy ulster which I bought especially for the
purpose. I likewise did much of his shopping, and gasped in bafflement
at some of the chemicals he ordered from druggists and laboratory supply
houses.
An increasing and unexplained atmosphere of panic seemed to rise around
his apartment. The whole house, as I have said had a musty odour, but
the smell in his room was worse, in spite of all the spices and incense
and the pungent chemicals of the now incessant baths which he insisted
on taking unaided. I perceived that it must be connected with his
ailment, and shuddered when I reflected on what that ailment might be.
Mrs. Herrero crossed herself when she looked at him, and gave him up
unreservedly to me, not even letting her son Esteban continue to run
errands for him.
When I suggested other physicians, the sufferer would fly into as much
of a rage as he seemed to dare to entertain. He evidently feared the
physical effect of violent emotion, yet his will and driving force waxed
rather than waned, and he refused to be confined to his bed. The
lassitude of his earlier ill days gave place to a return of his fiery
purpose, so that he seemed about to hurl defiance at the death demon
even as that ancient enemy seized him. The pretence of eating, always
curiously like a formality with him, he virtually abandoned, and mental
power alone appeared to keep him from total collapse.
He acquired a habit of writing long documents of some sort, which he
carefully sealed and filed with injunctions that I transmit them after
his death to certain persons whom he named--for the most part lettered
East Indians, but including also a once celebrated French physician now
generally thought dead, and about whom the most inconceivable things had
been whispered. As it happened, I burned all these papers undelivered
and unopened. His aspect and voice became utterly frightful, and his
presence almost unbearable. One September day an unexpected glimpse of
him induced an epileptic fit in a man who had come to repair his
electric desk lamp, and for whom he prescribed effectively while keeping
himself well out of sight. That man, oddly enough, had been through the
terrors of the Great War without having incurred any fright so thorough.
* * * * *
Then, in the middle of October, the horror of horrors came with
stupefying suddenness. One night about eleven the pump of the
refrigerating machine broke down, so that within three hours the process
of ammonia cooling became impossible. Doctor Munoz summoned me by
thumping on the floor, and I worked desperately to repair the injury
while my host cursed in a tone whose lifeless, rattling hollowness
surpassed description. My amateur efforts, however, proved of no use,
and when I had brought in a mechanic from a neighbouring all-night
garage we learned that nothing could be done until morning, when a new
piston would have to be obtained. The moribund hermit's rage and fear,
swelling to grotesque proportions, seemed likely to shatter what
remained of his failing physique; and once a spasm caused him to clap
his hands to his eyes and rush into the bathroom. He groped his way out
with face tightly bandaged, and I never saw his eyes again.
The frigidity of the apartment was now sensibly diminishing, and at
about five in the morning the Doctor retired to the bathroom, commanding
me to keep him supplied with all the ice I could obtain at all-night
drug stores and cafeterias. As I would return from my sometimes
discouraging trips and lay my spoils before the closed bathroom door, I
could hear a restless splashing within and a thick voice croaking out
the order for "More--more!" At length a warm day broke, and the shops
opened one by one. I asked Esteban either to help with the ice-fetching
while I obtained the pump piston or to order the piston while I
continued with the ice; but, instructed by his mother, he absolutely
refused. Finally I hired a seedy-looking loafer whom I encountered on
the corner of Eighth Avenue to keep the patient supplied with ice from a
little shop where I introduced him, and applied myself diligently to the
task of finding a pump piston and engaging workmen competent to install
it.
The task seemed interminable, and I raged almost as violently as the
hermit when I saw the hours slipping by in a breathless, foodless round
of vain telephoning and a hectic quest from place to place, hither and
thither by subway and surface car. About noon I encountered a suitable
supply house far downtown, and at approximately one-thirty that
afternoon arrived at my boarding-place with the necessary paraphernalia
and two sturdy and intelligent mechanics. I had done all I could, and
hoped I was in time.
Black terror, however, had preceded me. The house was in utter turmoil,
and above the chatter of awed voices I heard a man praying in a deep
basso. Fiendish things were in the air, and lodgers told over the beads
of their rosaries as they caught the odour from beneath the Doctor's
closed door. The lounger I had hired, it seems, had fled screaming and
mad-eyed not long after his second delivery of ice: perhaps as a result
of excessive curiosity. He could not, of course, have locked the door
behind him, yet it was now fastened, presumably from the inside. There
was no sound within save a nameless sort of slow thick dripping.
Briefly consulting with Mrs. Herrero and the workmen, despite a fear
that gnawed my inmost soul, I advised the breaking down of the door; but
the landlady found a way to turn the key from the outside with some wire
device. We had previously opened the doors of all the other rooms on
that hall and flung all the windows to the very top. Now, noses
protected by handkerchiefs, we tremblingly invaded the accursed south
room, which blazed with the warm sun of early afternoon.
A kind of dark, slimy trail led from the open bathroom door to the hall
door, and thence to the desk, where a terrible little pool had
accumulated. Something was scrawled there in pencil in an awful, blind
hand on a piece of paper hideously smeared as though by the very claws
that traced the hurried last words. Then the trail led to the couch and
ended unutterably.
What was, or had been, on the couch I cannot and dare not say here. But
this is what I shiveringly puzzled out on the stickily smeared paper
before I drew a match and burned it to a crisp; what I puzzled out in
terror as the landlady and two mechanics rushed frantically from that
hellish place to babble their incoherent stories at the nearest police
station. The nauseous words seemed well-nigh incredible in that yellow
sunlight, with the clatter of cars and motor trucks ascending
clamorously from crowded Fourteenth Street, yet I confess that I
believed them then. Whether I believe them now I honestly do not know.
There are things about which it is better not to speculate, and all that
I can say is that I hate the smell of ammonia and grow faint at a
draught of unusually cool air.
"The end," ran that noisome scrawl, "is here. No more ice--the man
looked and ran away. Warmer every minute, and the tissues can't last. I
fancy you know--what I said about the will and the nerves and the
preserved body after the organs ceased to work. It was a good theory,
but couldn't keep up indefinitely. There was a gradual deterioration I
had not foreseen. Doctor Torres knew, but the shock killed him. He
couldn't stand what he had to do; he had to get me in a strange, dark
place, when he minded my letter and nursed me back. And the organs
would never work again. It had to be done my way--artificial
preservation--for you see I died that time eighteen years ago."
* * * * *
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cool_Air