H.P. Lovecraft. The Strange High House in the Mist
The Strange High House in the Mist
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written 9 Nov 1926
Published October 1931 in Weird Tales, Vol. 18, No. 3, p. 394-400
In the morning, mist comes up from the sea by the cliffs beyond Kingsport.
White and feathery it comes from the deep to its brothers the clouds, full
of dreams of dank pastures and caves of leviathan. And later, in still
summer rains on the steep roofs of poets, the clouds scatter bits of those
dreams, that men shall not live without rumor of old strange secrets, and
wonders that planets tell planets alone in the night. When tales fly thick
in the grottoes of tritons, and conchs in seaweed cities blow wild tunes
learned from the Elder Ones, then great eager mists flock to heaven laden
with lore, and oceanward eyes on tile rocks see only a mystic whiteness,
as if the cliff's rim were the rim of all earth, and the solemn bells of
buoys tolled free in the aether of faery.
Now north of archaic Kingsport the crags climb lofty and curious, terrace
on terrace, till the northernmost hangs in the sky like a gray frozen
wind-cloud. Alone it is, a bleak point jutting in limitless space, for
there the coast turns sharp where the great Miskatonic pours out of the
plains past Arkham, bringing woodland legends and little quaint memories
of New England's hills. The sea-folk of Kingsport look up at that cliff as
other sea-folk look up at the pole-star, and time the night's watches by
the way it hides or shows the Great Bear, Cassiopeia and the Dragon. Among
them it is one with the firmament, and truly, it is hidden from them when
the mist hides the stars or the sun.
Some of the cliffs they love, as that whose grotesque profile they call
Father Neptune, or that whose pillared steps they term "The Causeway"; but
this one they fear because it is so near the sky. The Portuguese sailors
coming in from a voyage cross themselves when they first see it, and the
old Yankees believe it would be a much graver matter than death to climb
it, if indeed that were possible. Neverthcless there is an ancient house
on that cliff, and at evening men see lights in the small-paned windows.
The ancient house has always been there, and people say One dwells within
who talks with the morning mists that come up from the deep, and perhaps
sees singular things oceanward at those times when the cliff's rim becomes
the rim of all earth, and solemn buoys toll free in the white aether of
faery. This they tell from hearsay, for that forbidding crag is always
unvisited, and natives dislike to train telescopes on it. Summer boarders
have indeed scanned it with jaunty binoculars, but have never seen more
than the gray primeval roof, peaked and shingled, whose eaves come nearly
to the gray foundations, and the dim yellow light of the little windows
peeping out from under those eaves in the dusk. These summer people do not
believe that the same One has lived in the ancient house for hundreds of
years, but can not prove their heresy to any real Kingsporter. Even the
Terrible Old Man who talks to leaden pendulums in bottles, buys groceries
with centuried Spanish gold, and keeps stone idols in the yard of his
antediluvian cottage in Water Street can only say these things were the
same when his grandfather was a boy, and that must have been inconceivable
ages ago, when Belcher or Shirley or Pownall or Bernard was Governor of
His Majesty's Province of the Massachusetts-Bay.
Then one summer there came a philosopher into Kingsport. His name was
Thomas Olney, and he taught ponderous things in a college by Narragansett
Bay. With stout wife and romping children he came, and his eyes were weary
with seeing the same things for many years, and thinking the same
well-disciplined thoughts. He looked at the mists from the diadem of
Father Neptune, and tried to walk into their white world of mystery along
the titan steps of The Causeway. Morning after morning he would lie on the
cliffs and look over the world's rim at the cryptical aether beyond,
listening to spectral bells and the wild cries of what might have been
gulls. Then, when the mist would lift and the sea stand out prosy with the
smoke of steamers, he would sigh and descend to the town, where he loved
to thread the narrow olden lanes up and down hill, and study the crazy
tottering gables and odd-pillared doorways which had sheltered so many
generations of sturdy sea-folk. And he even talked with the Terrible Old
Man, who was not fond of strangers, and was invited into his fearsomely
archaic cottage where low ceilings and wormy panelling hear the echoes of
disquieting soliloquies in the dark small hours.
Of course it was inevitable that Olney should mark the gray unvisited
cottage in the sky, on that sinister northward crag which is one with the
mists and the firmament. Always over Kingsport it hung, and always its
mystery sounded in whispers through
Kingsport's crooked alleys. The Terrible Old Man wheezed a tale that his
father had told him, of lightning that shot one night up from that peaked
cottage to the clouds of higher heaven; and Granny Orne, whose tiny
gambrel-roofed abode in Ship Street is all covered with moss and ivy,
croaked over something her grandmother had heard at second-hand, about
shapes that flapped out of the eastern mists straight into the narrow
single door of that unreachable place - for the door is set close to the
edge of the crag toward the ocean, and glimpsed only from ships at sea.
At length, being avid for new strange things and held back by neither the
Kingsporter's fear nor the summer boarder's usual indolence, Olney made a
very terrible resolve. Despite a conservative training - or because of it,
for humdrum lives breed wistful longings of the unknown - he swore a great
oath to scale that avoided northern cliff and visit the abnormally antique
gray cottage in the sky. Very plausibly his saner self argued that the
place must be tenanted by people who reached it from inland along the
easier ridge beside the Miskatonic's estuary. Probably they traded in
Arkham, knowing how little Kingsport liked their habitation or perhaps
being unable to climb down the cliff on the Kingsport side. Olney walked
out along the lesser cliffs to where the great crag leaped insolently up
to consort with celestial things, and became very sure that no human feet
could mount it or descend it on that beetling southern slope. East and
north it rose thousands of feet perpendicular from the water so only the
western side, inland and toward Arkham, remained.
One early morning in August Olney set out to find a path to the
inaccessible pinnacle. He worked northwest along pleasant back roads, past
Hooper's Pond and the old brick powder-house to where the pastures slope
up to the ridge above the Miskatonic and give a lovely vista of Arkham's
white Georgian steeples across leagues of river and meadow. Here he found
a shady road to Arkham, but no trail at all in the seaward direction he
wished. Woods and fields crowded up to the high bank of the river's mouth,
and bore not a sign of man's presence; not even a stone wall or a straying
cow, but only the tall grass and giant trees and tangles of briars that
the first Indian might have seen. As he climbed slowly east, higher and
higher above the estuary on his left and nearer and nearer the sea, he
found the way growing in difficulty till he wondered how ever the dwellers
in that disliked place managed to reach the world outside, and whether
they came often to market in Arkham.
Then the trees thinned, and far below him on his right he saw the hills
and antique roofs and spires of Kingsport. Even Central Hill was a dwarf
from this height, and he could just make out the ancient graveyard by the
Congregational Hospital beneath which rumor said some terrible caves or
burrows lurked. Ahead lay sparse grass and scrub blueberry bushes, and
beyond them the naked rock of the crag and the thin peak of the dreaded
gray cottage. Now the ridge narrowed, and Olney grew dizzy at his loneness
in the sky, south of him the frightful precipice above Kingsport, north of
him the vertical drop of nearly a mile to the river's mouth. Suddenly a
great chasm opened before him, ten feet deep, so that he had to let
himself down by his hands and drop to a slanting floor, and then crawl
perilously up a natural defile in the opposite wall. So this was the way
the folk of the uncanny house journeyed betwixt earth and sky!
When he climbed out of the chasm a morning mist was gathering, but he
clearly saw the lofty and unhallowed cottage ahead; walls as gray as the
rock, and high peak standing bold against the milky white of the seaward
vapors. And he perceived that there was no door on this landward end, but
only a couple of small lattice windows with dingy bull's-eye panes leaded
in seventeenth century fashion. All around him was cloud and chaos, and he
could see nothing below the whiteness of illimitable space. He was alone
in the sky with this queer and very disturbing house; and when he sidled
around to the front and saw that the wall stood flush with the cliff's
edge, so that the single narrow door was not to be reached save from the
empty aether, he felt a distinct terror that altitude could not wholly
explain. And it was very odd that shingles so worm-eaten could survive, or
bricks so crumbled still form a standing chimney.
As the mist thickened, Olney crept around to the windows on the north and
west and south sides, trying them but finding them all locked. He was
vaguely glad they were locked, because the more he saw of that house the
less he wished to get in. Then a sound halted him. He heard a lock rattle
and a bolt shoot, and a long creaking follow as if a heavy door were
slowly and cautiously opened. This was on the oceanward side that he could
not see, where the narrow portal opened on blank space thousands of feet
in the misty sky above the waves.
Then there was heavy, deliberate tramping in the cottage, and Olney heard
the windows opening, first on the north side opposite him, and then on the
west just around the corner. Next would come the south windows, under the
great low eaves on the side where he stood; and it must be said that he
was more than uncomfortable as he thought of the detestable house on one
side and the vacancy of upper air on the other. When a fumbling came in
the nearer casements he crept around to the west again, flattening himself
against the wall beside the now opened windows. It was plain that the
owner had come home; but he had not come from the land, nor from any
balloon or airship that could be imagined. Steps sounded again, and Olney
edged round to the north; but before he could find a haven a voice called
softly, and he knew he must confront his host.
Stuck out of the west window was a great black-bearded face whose eyes
were phosphorescent with the imprint of unheard-of sights. But the voice
was gentle, and of a quaint olden kind, so that Olney did not shudder when
a brown hand reached out to help him over the sill and into that low room
of black oak wainscots and carved Tudor furnishings. The man was clad in
very ancient garments, and had about him an unplaceable nimbus of sea-lore
and dreams of tall galleons. Olney does not recall many of the wonders he
told, or even who he was; but says that he was strange and kindly, and
filled with the magic of unfathomed voids of time and space. The small
room seemed green with a dim aqueous light, and Olney saw that the far
windows to the east were not open, but shut against the misty aether with
dull panes like the bottoms of old bottles.
That bearded host seemed young, yet looked out of eyes steeped in the
elder mysteries; and from the tales of marvelous ancient things he
related, it must be guessed that the village folk were right in saying he
had communed with the mists of the sea and the clouds of the sky ever
since there was any village to watch his taciturn dwelling from the plain
below. And the day wore on, and still Olney listened to rumors of old
times and far places, and heard how the kings of Atlantis fought with the
slippery blasphemies that wriggled out of rifts in ocean's floor, and how
the pillared and weedy temple of Poseidon is still glimpsed at midnight by
lost ships, who knew by its sight that they are lost. Years of the Titans
were recalled, but the host grew timid when he spoke of the dim first age
of chaos before the gods or even the Elder Ones were born, and when the
other gods came to dance on the peak of Hatheg-Kia in the stony desert
near Ulthar, beyond the River Skai.
It was at this point that there came a knocking on the door; that ancient
door of nail-studded oak beyond which lay only the abyss of white cloud.
Olney started in fright, but the bearded man motioned him to be still, and
tiptoed to the door to look out through a very small peephole. What he saw
he did not like, so pressed his fingers to his lips and tiptoed around to
shut and lock all the windows before returning to the ancient settle
beside his guest. Then Olney saw lingering against the translucent squares
of each of the little dim windows in succession a queer black outline as
the caller moved inquisitively about before leaving; and he was glad his
host had not answered the knocking. For there are strange objects in the
great abyss, and the seeker of dreams must take care not to stir up or
meet the wrong ones.
Then the shadows began to gather; first little furtive ones under the
table, and then bolder ones in the dark panelled corners. And the bearded
man made enigmatical gestures of prayer, and lit tall candles in curiously
wrought brass candle-sticks. Frequently he would glance at the door as if
he expected some one, and at length his glance seemed answered by a
singular rapping which must have followed some very ancient and secret
code. This time he did not even glance tbrough the peep-hole, but swung
the great oak bar and shot the bolt, unlatching the heavy door and
flinging it wide to the stars and the mist.
And then to the sound of obscure harmonies there floated into that room
from the deep all the dreams and memories of earth's sunken Mighty Ones.
And golden flames played about weedy locks, so that Olney was dazzled as
he did them homage. Trident-bearing Neptune was there, and sportive
tritons and fantastic nereids, and upon dolphins' backs was balanced a
vast crenulate shell wherein rode the gay and awful form of primal Nodens,
Lord of the Great Abyss. And the conchs of the tritons gave weird blasts,
and the nereids made strange sounds by striking on the grotesque resonant
shells of unknown lurkers in black seacaves. Then hoary Nodens reached
forth a wizened hand and helped Olney and his host into the vast shell,
whereat the conchs and the gongs set up a wild and awesome clamor. And out
into the limitless aether reeled that fabulous train, the noise of whose
shouting was lost in the echoes of thunder.
All night in Kingsport they watched that lofty cliff when the storm and
the mists gave them glimpses of it, and when toward the small hours the
little dim windows went dark they whispered of dread and disaster. And
Olney's children and stout wife prayed to the bland proper god of
Baptists, and hoped that the traveller would borrow an umbrella and
rubbers unless the rain stopped by morning. Then dawn swam dripping and
mist-wreathed out of the sea, and the buoys tolled solemn in vortices of
white aether. And at noon elfin horns rang over the ocean as Olney, dry
and lightfooted, climbed down from the cliffs to antique Kingsport with
the look of far places in his eyes. He could not recall what he had
dreamed in the skyperched hut of that still nameless hermit, or say how he
had crept down that crag untraversed by other feet. Nor could he talk of
these matters at all save with the Terrible Old Man, who afterward mumbled
queer things in his long white beard; vowing that the man who came down
from that crag was not wholly the man who went up, and that somewhere
under that gray peaked roof, or amidst inconceivable reaches of that
sinister white mist, there lingered still the lost spirit of him who was
Thomas Obey.
And ever since that hour, through dull dragging years of grayness and
weariness, the philosopher has labored and eaten and slept and done
uncomplaining the suitable deeds of a citizen. Not any more does he long
for the magic of farther hills, or sigh for secrets that peer like green
reefs from a bottomless sea. The sameness of his days no longer gives him
sorrow and well-disciplined thoughts have grown enough for his
imagination. His good wife waxes stouter and his children older and
prosier and more useful, and he never fails to smile correctly with pride
when the occasion calls for it. In his glance there is not any restless
light, and all he ever listens for solemn bells or far elfin horns it is
only at night when old dreams are wandering. He has never seen Kingsport
again, for his family disliked the funny old houses and complained that
the drains were impossibly bad. They have a trim bungalow now at Bristol
Highlands, where no tall crags tower, and the neighbors are urban and
modern.
But in Kingsport strange tales are abroad, and even the Terrible Old Man
admits a thing untold by his grandfather. For now, when the wind sweeps
boisterous out of the north past the high ancient house that is one with
the firmament, there is broken at last that ominous, brooding silence ever
before the bane of Kingsport's maritime cotters. And old folk tell of
pleasing voices heard singing there, and of laughter that swells with joys
beyond earth's joys; and say that at evening the little low windows are
brighter than formerly. They say, too, that the fierce aurora comes
oftener to that spot, shining blue in the north with visions of frozen
worlds while the crag and the cottage hang black and fantastic against
wild coruscations. And the mists of the dawn are thicker, and sailors are
not quite so sure that all the muffled seaward ringing is that of the
solemn buoys.
Worst of all, though, is the shrivelling of old fears in the hearts of
Kingsport's young men, who grow prone to listen at night to the north
wind's faint distant sounds. They swear no harm or pain can inhabit that
high peaked cottage, for in the new voices gladness beats, and with them
the tinkle of laughter and music. What tales the sea-mists may bring to
that haunted and northernmost pinnacle they do not know, but they long to
extract some hint of the wonders that knock at the cliff-yawning door when
clouds are thickest. And patriarchs dread lest some day one by one they
seek out that inaccessible peak in the sky, and learn what centuried
secrets hide beneath the steep shingled roof which is part of the rocks
and the stars and the ancient fears of Kingsport. That those venturesome
youths will come back they do not doubt, but they think a light may be
gone from their eyes, and a will from their hearts. And they do not wish
quaint Kingsport with its climbing lanes and archaic gables to drag
listless down the years while voice by voice the laughing chorus grows
stronger and wilder in that unknown and terrible eyrie where mists and the
dreams of mists stop to rest on their way from the sea to the skies.
They do not wish the souls of their young men to leave the pleasant
hearths and gambrel-roofed taverns of old Kingsport, nor do they wish the
laughter and song in that high rocky place to grow louder. For as the
voice which has come has brought fresh mists from the sea and from the
north fresh lights, so do they say that still other voices will bring more
mists and more lights, till perhaps the olden gods (whose existence they
hint only in whispers for fear the Congregational parson shall hear} may
come out of the deep and from unknown Kadath in the cold waste and make
their dwelling on that evilly appropriate crag so close to the gentle
hills and valleys of quiet, simple fisher folk. This they do not wish, for
to plain people things not of earth are unwelcome; and besides, the
Terrible Old Man often recalls what Olney said about a knock that the lone
dweller feared, and a shape seen black and inquisitive against the mist
through those queer translucent windows of leaded bull's-eyes.
All these things, however, the Elder Ones only may decide; and meanwhile
the morning mist still comes up by that lovely vertiginous peak with the
steep ancient house, that gray, low-eaved house where none is seen but
where evening brings furtive lights while the north wind tells of strange
revels. white and feathery it comes from the deep to its brothers the
clouds, full of dreams of dank pastures and caves of leviathan. And when
tales fly thick in the grottoes of tritons, and conchs in seaweed cities
blow wild tunes learned from the Elder Ones, then great eager vapors flock
to heaven laden with lore; and Kingsport, nestling uneasy in its lesser
cliffs below that awesome hanging sentinel of rock, sees oceanward only a
mystic whiteness, as if the cliff's rim were the rim of all earth, and the
solemn bells of the buoys tolled free in the aether of faery.
