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


I saw him on a sleepless night when I was walking desperately to save
my soul and my vision. My coming to New York had been a mistake; for
whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming
labyrinths of ancient streets that twist endlessly from forgotten
courts and squares and waterfronts to courts and squares and
waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean modern towers and
pinnacles that rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found
instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to
master, paralyse, and annihilate me.
The disillusion had been gradual. Coming for the first time upon the
town, I had seen it in the sunset from a bridge, majestic above its
waters, its incredible peaks and pyramids rising flower-like and
delicate from pools of violet mist to play with the flaming golden
clouds and the first stars of evening. Then it had lighted up window by
window above the shimmering tides where lanterns nodded and glided and
deep horns bayed weird harmonies, and itself become a starry firmament
of dream, redolent of faery music, and one with the marvels of
Carcassonne and Samarcand and El Dorado and all glorious and
half-fabulous cities. Shortly afterward I was taken through those
antique ways so dear to my fancy—narrow, curving alleys and passages
where rows of red Georgian brick blinked with small-paned dormers above
pillared doorways that had looked on gilded sedans and panelled
coaches—and in the first flush of realisation of these long-wished
things I thought I had indeed achieved such treasures as would make me
in time a poet.
But success and happiness were not to be. Garish daylight shewed only
squalor and alienage and the noxious elephantiasis of climbing,
spreading stone where the moon had hinted of loveliness and elder
magic; and the throngs of people that seethed through the flume-like
streets were squat, swarthy strangers with hardened faces and narrow
eyes, shrewd strangers without dreams and without kinship to the scenes
about them, who could never mean aught to a blue-eyed man of the old
folk, with the love of fair green lanes and white New England village
steeples in his heart.
So instead of the poems I had hoped for, there came only a shuddering
blankness and ineffable loneliness; and I saw at last a fearful truth
which no one had ever dared to breathe before—the unwhisperable secret
of secrets—the fact that this city of stone and stridor is not a
sentient perpetuation of Old New York as London is of Old London and
Paris of Old Paris, but that it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling
body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate things which
have nothing to do with it as it was in life. Upon making this
discovery I ceased to sleep comfortably; though something of resigned
tranquillity came back as I gradually formed the habit of keeping off
the streets by day and venturing abroad only at night, when darkness
calls forth what little of the past still hovers wraith-like about, and
old white doorways remember the stalwart forms that once passed through
them. With this mode of relief I even wrote a few poems, and still
refrained from going home to my people lest I seem to crawl back
ignobly in defeat.
Then, on a sleepless night’s walk, I met the man. It was in a grotesque
hidden courtyard of the Greenwich section, for there in my ignorance I
had settled, having heard of the place as the natural home of poets and
artists. The archaic lanes and houses and unexpected bits of square and
court had indeed delighted me, and when I found the poets and artists
to be loud-voiced pretenders whose quaintness is tinsel and whose lives
are a denial of all that pure beauty which is poetry and art, I stayed
on for love of these venerable things. I fancied them as they were in
their prime, when Greenwich was a placid village not yet engulfed by
the town; and in the hours before dawn, when all the revellers had
slunk away, I used to wander alone among their cryptical windings and
brood upon the curious arcana which generations must have deposited
there. This kept my soul alive, and gave me a few of those dreams and
visions for which the poet far within me cried out.
The man came upon me at about two one cloudy August morning, as I was
threading a series of detached courtyards; now accessible only through
the unlighted hallways of intervening buildings, but once forming parts
of a continuous network of picturesque alleys. I had heard of them by
vague rumour, and realised that they could not be upon any map of
today; but the fact that they were forgotten only endeared them to me,
so that I had sought them with twice my usual eagerness. Now that I had
found them, my eagerness was again redoubled; for something in their
arrangement dimly hinted that they might be only a few of many such,
with dark, dumb counterparts wedged obscurely betwixt high blank walls
and deserted rear tenements, or lurking lamplessly behind archways,
unbetrayed by hordes of the foreign-speaking or guarded by furtive and
uncommunicative artists whose practices do not invite publicity or the
light of day.
He spoke to me without invitation, noting my mood and glances as I
studied certain knockered doorways above iron-railed steps, the pallid
glow of traceried transoms feebly lighting my face. His own face was in
shadow, and he wore a wide-brimmed hat which somehow blended perfectly
with the out-of-date cloak he affected; but I was subtly disquieted
even before he addressed me. His form was very slight, thin almost to
cadaverousness; and his voice proved phenomenally soft and hollow,
though not particularly deep. He had, he said, noticed me several times
at my wanderings; and inferred that I resembled him in loving the
vestiges of former years. Would I not like the guidance of one long
practiced in these explorations, and possessed of local information
profoundly deeper than any which an obvious newcomer could possibly
have gained?
As he spoke, I caught a glimpse of his face in the yellow beam from a
solitary attic window. It was a noble, even a handsome, elderly
countenance; and bore the marks of a lineage and refinement unusual for
the age and place. Yet some quality about it disturbed me almost as
much as its features pleased me—perhaps it was too white, or too
expressionless, or too much out of keeping with the locality, to make
me feel easy or comfortable. Nevertheless I followed him; for in those
dreary days my quest for antique beauty and mystery was all that I had
to keep my soul alive, and I reckoned it a rare favour of Fate to fall
in with one whose kindred seekings seemed to have penetrated so much
farther than mine.
Something in the night constrained the cloaked man to silence, and for
a long hour he led me forward without needless words; making only the
briefest of comments concerning ancient names and dates and changes,
and directing my progress very largely by gestures as we squeezed
through interstices, tiptoed through corridors, clambered over brick
walls, and once crawled on hands and knees through a low, arched
passage of stone whose immense length and tortuous twistings effaced at
last every hint of geographical location I had managed to preserve. The
things we saw were very old and marvellous, or at least they seemed so
in the few straggling rays of light by which I viewed them, and I shall
never forget the tottering Ionic columns and fluted pilasters and
urn-headed iron fence-posts and flaring-lintelled windows and
decorative fanlights that appeared to grow quainter and stranger the
deeper we advanced into this inexhaustible maze of unknown antiquity.
We met no person, and as time passed the lighted windows became fewer
and fewer. The street-lights we first encountered had been of oil, and
of the ancient lozenge pattern. Later I noticed some with candles; and
at last, after traversing a horrible unlighted court where my guide had
to lead with his gloved hand through total blackness to a narrow wooden
gate in a high wall, we came upon a fragment of alley lit only by
lanterns in front of every seventh house—unbelievably colonial tin
lanterns with conical tops and holes punched in the sides. This alley
led steeply uphill—more steeply than I thought possible in this part of
New York—and the upper end was blocked squarely by the ivy-clad wall of
a private estate, beyond which I could see a pale cupola, and the tops
of trees waving against a vague lightness in the sky. In this wall was
a small, low-arched gate of nail-studded black oak, which the man
proceeded to unlock with a ponderous key. Leading me within, he steered
a course in utter blackness over what seemed to be a gravel path, and
finally up a flight of stone steps to the door of the house, which he
unlocked and opened for me.
We entered, and as we did so I grew faint from a reek of infinite
mustiness which welled out to meet us, and which must have been the
fruit of unwholesome centuries of decay. My host appeared not to notice
this, and in courtesy I kept silent as he piloted me up a curving
stairway, across a hall, and into a room whose door I heard him lock
behind us. Then I saw him pull the curtains of the three small-paned
windows that barely shewed themselves against the lightening sky; after
which he crossed to the mantel, struck flint and steel, lighted two
candles of a candelabrum of twelve sconces, and made a gesture
enjoining soft-toned speech.
In this feeble radiance I saw that we were in a spacious,
well-furnished, and panelled library dating from the first quarter of
the eighteenth century, with splendid doorway pediments, a delightful
Doric cornice, and a magnificently carved overmantel with
scroll-and-urn top. Above the crowded bookshelves at intervals along
the walls were well-wrought family portraits; all tarnished to an
enigmatical dimness, and bearing an unmistakable likeness to the man
who now motioned me to a chair beside the graceful Chippendale table.
Before seating himself across the table from me, my host paused for a
moment as if in embarrassment; then, tardily removing his gloves,
wide-brimmed hat, and cloak, stood theatrically revealed in full
mid-Georgian costume from queued hair and neck ruffles to
knee-breeches, silk hose, and the buckled shoes I had not previously
noticed. Now slowly sinking into a lyre-back chair, he commenced to eye
me intently.
Without his hat he took on an aspect of extreme age which was scarcely
visible before, and I wondered if this unperceived mark of singular
longevity were not one of the sources of my original disquiet. When he
spoke at length, his soft, hollow, and carefully muffled voice not
infrequently quavered; and now and then I had great difficulty in
following him as I listened with a thrill of amazement and
half-disavowed alarm which grew each instant.
“You behold, Sir,” my host began, “a man of very eccentrical habits,
for whose costume no apology need be offered to one with your wit and
inclinations. Reflecting upon better times, I have not scrupled to
ascertain their ways and adopt their dress and manners; an indulgence
which offends none if practiced without ostentation. It hath been my
good-fortune to retain the rural seat of my ancestors, swallowed though
it was by two towns, first Greenwich, which built up hither after 1800,
then New-York, which joined on near 1830. There were many reasons for
the close keeping of this place in my family, and I have not been
remiss in discharging such obligations. The squire who succeeded to it
in 1768 studied sartain arts and made sartain discoveries, all
connected with influences residing in this particular plot of ground,
and eminently desarving of the strongest guarding. Some curious effects
of these arts and discoveries I now purpose to shew you, under the
strictest secrecy; and I believe I may rely on my judgment of men
enough to have no distrust of either your interest or your fidelity.”
He paused, but I could only nod my head. I have said that I was
alarmed, yet to my soul nothing was more deadly than the material
daylight world of New York, and whether this man were a harmless
eccentric or a wielder of dangerous arts I had no choice save to follow
him and slake my sense of wonder on whatever he might have to offer. So
I listened.
“To—my ancestor—” he softly continued, “there appeared to reside some
very remarkable qualities in the will of mankind; qualities having a
little-suspected dominance not only over the acts of one’s self and of
others, but over every variety of force and substance in Nature, and
over many elements and dimensions deemed more univarsal than Nature
herself. May I say that he flouted the sanctity of things as great as
space and time, and that he put to strange uses the rites of sartain
half-breed red Indians once encamped upon this hill? These Indians
shewed choler when the place was built, and were plaguy pestilent in
asking to visit the grounds at the full of the moon. For years they
stole over the wall each month when they could, and by stealth
performed sartain acts. Then, in ’68, the new squire catched them at
their doings, and stood still at what he saw. Thereafter he bargained
with them and exchanged the free access of his grounds for the exact
inwardness of what they did; larning that their grandfathers got part
of their custom from red ancestors and part from an old Dutchman in the
time of the States-General. And pox on him, I’m afeared the squire must
have sarved them monstrous bad rum—whether or not by intent—for a week
after he larnt the secret he was the only man living that knew it. You,
Sir, are the first outsider to be told there is a secret, and split me
if I’d have risked tampering that much with—the powers—had ye not been
so hot after bygone things.”
I shuddered as the man grew colloquial—and with familiar speech of
another day. He went on.
“But you must know, Sir, that what—the squire—got from those mongrel
salvages was but a small part of the larning he came to have. He had
not been at Oxford for nothing, nor talked to no account with an
ancient chymist and astrologer in Paris. He was, in fine, made sensible
that all the world is but the smoke of our intellects; past the bidding
of the vulgar, but by the wise to be puffed out and drawn in like any
cloud of prime Virginia tobacco. What we want, we may make about us;
and what we don’t want, we may sweep away. I won’t say that all this is
wholly true in body, but ’tis sufficient true to furnish a very pretty
spectacle now and then. You, I conceive, would be tickled by a better
sight of sartain other years than your fancy affords you; so be pleased
to hold back any fright at what I design to shew. Come to the window
and be quiet.”
My host now took my hand to draw me to one of the two windows on the
long side of the malodorous room, and at the first touch of his
ungloved fingers I turned cold. His flesh, though dry and firm, was of
the quality of ice; and I almost shrank away from his pulling. But
again I thought of the emptiness and horror of reality, and boldly
prepared to follow whithersoever I might be led. Once at the window,
the man drew apart the yellow silk curtains and directed my stare into
the blackness outside. For a moment I saw nothing save a myriad of tiny
dancing lights, far, far before me. Then, as if in response to an
insidious motion of my host’s hand, a flash of heat-lightning played
over the scene, and I looked out upon a sea of luxuriant
foliage—foliage unpolluted, and not the sea of roofs to be expected by
any normal mind. On my right the Hudson glittered wickedly, and in the
distance ahead I saw the unhealthy shimmer of a vast salt marsh
constellated with nervous fireflies. The flash died, and an evil smile
illumined the waxy face of the aged necromancer.
“That was before my time—before the new squire’s time. Pray let us try
again.”
I was faint, even fainter than the hateful modernity of that accursed
city had made me.
“Good God!” I whispered, “can you do that for any time?” And as he
nodded, and bared the black stumps of what had once been yellow fangs,
I clutched at the curtains to prevent myself from falling. But he
steadied me with that terrible, ice-cold claw, and once more made his
insidious gesture.
Again the lightning flashed—but this time upon a scene not wholly
strange. It was Greenwich, the Greenwich that used to be, with here and
there a roof or row of houses as we see it now, yet with lovely green
lanes and fields and bits of grassy common. The marsh still glittered
beyond, but in the farther distance I saw the steeples of what was then
all of New York; Trinity and St. Paul’s and the Brick Church dominating
their sisters, and a faint haze of wood smoke hovering over the whole.
I breathed hard, but not so much from the sight itself as from the
possibilities my imagination terrifiedly conjured up.
“Can you—dare you—go far?” I spoke with awe, and I think he shared it
for a second, but the evil grin returned.
“Far? What I have seen would blast ye to a mad statue of stone! Back,
back—forward, forward—look, ye puling lack-wit!”
And as he snarled the phrase under his breath he gestured anew;
bringing to the sky a flash more blinding than either which had come
before. For full three seconds I could glimpse that pandaemoniac sight,
and in those seconds I saw a vista which will ever afterward torment me
in dreams. I saw the heavens verminous with strange flying things, and
beneath them a hellish black city of giant stone terraces with impious
pyramids flung savagely to the moon, and devil-lights burning from
unnumbered windows. And swarming loathsomely on aërial galleries I saw
the yellow, squint-eyed people of that city, robed horribly in orange
and red, and dancing insanely to the pounding of fevered kettle-drums,
the clatter of obscene crotala, and the maniacal moaning of muted horns
whose ceaseless dirges rose and fell undulantly like the waves of an
unhallowed ocean of bitumen.
I saw this vista, I say, and heard as with the mind’s ear the
blasphemous domdaniel of cacophony which companioned it. It was the
shrieking fulfilment of all the horror which that corpse-city had ever
stirred in my soul, and forgetting every injunction to silence I
screamed and screamed and screamed as my nerves gave way and the walls
quivered about me.
Then, as the flash subsided, I saw that my host was trembling too; a
look of shocking fear half blotting from his face the serpent
distortion of rage which my screams had excited. He tottered, clutched
at the curtains as I had done before, and wriggled his head wildly,
like a hunted animal. God knows he had cause, for as the echoes of my
screaming died away there came another sound so hellishly suggestive
that only numbed emotion kept me sane and conscious. It was the steady,
stealthy creaking of the stairs beyond the locked door, as with the
ascent of a barefoot or skin-shod horde; and at last the cautious,
purposeful rattling of the brass latch that glowed in the feeble
candlelight. The old man clawed and spat at me through the mouldy air,
and barked things in his throat as he swayed with the yellow curtain he
clutched.
“The full moon—damn ye—ye . . . ye yelping dog—ye called ’em, and
they’ve come for me! Moccasined feet—dead men—Gad sink ye, ye red
devils, but I poisoned no rum o’ yours—han’t I kept your pox-rotted
magic safe?—ye swilled yourselves sick, curse ye, and ye must needs
blame the squire—let go, you! Unhand that latch—I’ve naught for ye
here—”
At this point three slow and very deliberate raps shook the panels of
the door, and a white foam gathered at the mouth of the frantic
magician. His fright, turning to steely despair, left room for a
resurgence of his rage against me; and he staggered a step toward the
table on whose edge I was steadying myself. The curtains, still
clutched in his right hand as his left clawed out at me, grew taut and
finally crashed down from their lofty fastenings; admitting to the room
a flood of that full moonlight which the brightening of the sky had
presaged. In those greenish beams the candles paled, and a new
semblance of decay spread over the musk-reeking room with its wormy
panelling, sagging floor, battered mantel, rickety furniture, and
ragged draperies. It spread over the old man, too, whether from the
same source or because of his fear and vehemence, and I saw him shrivel
and blacken as he lurched near and strove to rend me with vulturine
talons. Only his eyes stayed whole, and they glared with a propulsive,
dilated incandescence which grew as the face around them charred and
dwindled.
The rapping was now repeated with greater insistence, and this time
bore a hint of metal. The black thing facing me had become only a head
with eyes, impotently trying to wriggle across the sinking floor in my
direction, and occasionally emitting feeble little spits of immortal
malice. Now swift and splintering blows assailed the sickly panels, and
I saw the gleam of a tomahawk as it cleft the rending wood. I did not
move, for I could not; but watched dazedly as the door fell in pieces
to admit a colossal, shapeless influx of inky substance starred with
shining, malevolent eyes. It poured thickly, like a flood of oil
bursting a rotten bulkhead, overturned a chair as it spread, and
finally flowed under the table and across the room to where the
blackened head with the eyes still glared at me. Around that head it
closed, totally swallowing it up, and in another moment it had begun to
recede; bearing away its invisible burden without touching me, and
flowing again out of that black doorway and down the unseen stairs,
which creaked as before, though in reverse order.
Then the floor gave way at last, and I slid gaspingly down into the
nighted chamber below, choking with cobwebs and half swooning with
terror. The green moon, shining through broken windows, shewed me the
hall door half open; and as I rose from the plaster-strown floor and
twisted myself free from the sagged ceilings, I saw sweep past it an
awful torrent of blackness, with scores of baleful eyes glowing in it.
It was seeking the door to the cellar, and when it found it, it
vanished therein. I now felt the floor of this lower room giving as
that of the upper chamber had done, and once a crashing above had been
followed by the fall past the west window of something which must have
been the cupola. Now liberated for the instant from the wreckage, I
rushed through the hall to the front door; and finding myself unable to
open it, seized a chair and broke a window, climbing frenziedly out
upon the unkempt lawn where moonlight danced over yard-high grass and
weeds. The wall was high, and all the gates were locked; but moving a
pile of boxes in a corner I managed to gain the top and cling to the
great stone urn set there.
About me in my exhaustion I could see only strange walls and windows
and old gambrel roofs. The steep street of my approach was nowhere
visible, and the little I did see succumbed rapidly to a mist that
rolled in from the river despite the glaring moonlight. Suddenly the
urn to which I clung began to tremble, as if sharing my own lethal
dizziness; and in another instant my body was plunging downward to I
knew not what fate.
The man who found me said that I must have crawled a long way despite
my broken bones, for a trail of blood stretched off as far as he dared
look. The gathering rain soon effaced this link with the scene of my
ordeal, and reports could state no more than that I had appeared from a
place unknown, at the entrance of a little black court off Perry
Street.
I never sought to return to those tenebrous labyrinths, nor would I
direct any sane man thither if I could. Of who or what that ancient
creature was, I have no idea; but I repeat that the city is dead and
full of unsuspected horrors. Whither he has gone, I do not know; but I
have gone home to the pure New England lanes up which fragrant
sea-winds sweep at evening.
Return to “He”


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