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object:1f.lovecraft - Cool Air
author class:H P Lovecraft
subject class:Fiction
genre class:Horror
class:chapter


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 Muñoz,” 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. Muñoz 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. Muñoz 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 obtrusive utilitarian devices. Dr. Muñoz, 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. Muñoz 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 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
Dr. Torres of Valencia, who had shared his earlier experiments with 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. Muñoz 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 coördinated, 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 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 till he could keep the temperature as low as 34° or 40° and
finally even 28°; 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—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. Muñoz 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—artificial preservation—for you see I
died that time eighteen years ago.”
Return to “Cool Air”


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1f.lovecraft - Cool Air
select ::: Being, God, injunctions, media, place, powers, subjects,
favorite ::: cwsa, everyday, grade, mcw, memcards (table), project, project 0001, Savitri, the Temple of Sages, three js, whiteboard,
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