H.P. Lovecraft. Cool Air
Cool Air
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written March 1926
Published March 1928 in Tales of Magic and Mystery, Vol. 1, No. 4, 29-34.
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 till
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 odour of ammonia for
some time. Looking about, I saw that the ceiling was wet and dripping; the
soaking 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 take funnee-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 Gawd, the sal-ammoniac that man
use for 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. Dr. 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 Dr. 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. Dr. 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 cut and fit. A high-bred face of
masterful though not arrogant expression was adorned by a short iron-grey
full beard, and an old-fashioned pince-nez shielded the full, dark eyes
and surmounted an aquiline nose which gave a Moorish touch to a
physiognomy otherwise dominantly Celtiberian. 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 Dr. 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 55 or 56 degrees Fahrenheit--was maintained by an
absorption system of ammonia cooling, the gasoline engine of whose pumps I
had often heard in my own 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
frequent 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
skillful 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 Dr. 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 Dr. 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 coordinated, 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 till his room smelled like a 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 till he could
keep the temperature as low as 34 degrees or 40 degrees, and finally even
28 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 outre 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--and 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-daemon 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 filled with injunctions that I transmit them after
his death to certain persons whom he named--for the most part lettered
East Indians, but including 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; a
fit for which he prescribed effectively whilst 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. Dr. 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 till 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
5 a.m. 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 whilst 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 1:30 p.m. 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 good theory, but couldn't keep up
indefinitely. There was a gradual deterioration I had not foreseen. Dr.
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 never would work again. It had to be done
my way--preservation--for you see I died that time eighteen years ago."
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