object:1f.lovecraft - The Music of Erich Zann
author class:H P Lovecraft
subject class:Fiction
genre class:Horror
class:chapter
I have examined maps of the city with the greatest care, yet have never
again found the Rue d’Auseil. These maps have not been modern maps
alone, for I know that names change. I have, on the contrary, delved
deeply into all the antiquities of the place; and have personally
explored every region, of whatever name, which could possibly answer to
the street I knew as the Rue d’Auseil. But despite all I have done it
remains an humiliating fact that I cannot find the house, the street,
or even the locality, where, during the last months of my impoverished
life as a student of metaphysics at the university, I heard the music
of Erich Zann.
That my memory is broken, I do not wonder; for my health, physical and
mental, was gravely disturbed throughout the period of my residence in
the Rue d’Auseil, and I recall that I took none of my few acquaintances
there. But that I cannot find the place again is both singular and
perplexing; for it was within a half-hour’s walk of the university and
was distinguished by peculiarities which could hardly be forgotten by
anyone who had been there. I have never met a person who has seen the
Rue d’Auseil.
The Rue d’Auseil lay across a dark river bordered by precipitous brick
blear-windowed warehouses and spanned by a ponderous bridge of dark
stone. It was always shadowy along that river, as if the smoke of
neighbouring factories shut out the sun perpetually. The river was also
odorous with evil stenches which I have never smelled elsewhere, and
which may some day help me to find it, since I should recognise them at
once. Beyond the bridge were narrow cobbled streets with rails; and
then came the ascent, at first gradual, but incredibly steep as the Rue
d’Auseil was reached.
I have never seen another street as narrow and steep as the Rue
d’Auseil. It was almost a cliff, closed to all vehicles, consisting in
several places of flights of steps, and ending at the top in a lofty
ivied wall. Its paving was irregular, sometimes stone slabs, sometimes
cobblestones, and sometimes bare earth with struggling greenish-grey
vegetation. The houses were tall, peaked-roofed, incredibly old, and
crazily leaning backward, forward, and sidewise. Occasionally an
opposite pair, both leaning forward, almost met across the street like
an arch; and certainly they kept most of the light from the ground
below. There were a few overhead bridges from house to house across the
street.
The inhabitants of that street impressed me peculiarly. At first I
thought it was because they were all silent and reticent; but later
decided it was because they were all very old. I do not know how I came
to live on such a street, but I was not myself when I moved there. I
had been living in many poor places, always evicted for want of money;
until at last I came upon that tottering house in the Rue d’Auseil,
kept by the paralytic Blandot. It was the third house from the top of
the street, and by far the tallest of them all.
My room was on the fifth story; the only inhabited room there, since
the house was almost empty. On the night I arrived I heard strange
music from the peaked garret overhead, and the next day asked old
Blandot about it. He told me it was an old German viol-player, a
strange dumb man who signed his name as Erich Zann, and who played
evenings in a cheap theatre orchestra; adding that Zann’s desire to
play in the night after his return from the theatre was the reason he
had chosen this lofty and isolated garret room, whose single gable
window was the only point on the street from which one could look over
the terminating wall at the declivity and panorama beyond.
Thereafter I heard Zann every night, and although he kept me awake, I
was haunted by the weirdness of his music. Knowing little of the art
myself, I was yet certain that none of his harmonies had any relation
to music I had heard before; and concluded that he was a composer of
highly original genius. The longer I listened, the more I was
fascinated, until after a week I resolved to make the old man’s
acquaintance.
One night, as he was returning from his work, I intercepted Zann in the
hallway and told him that I would like to know him and be with him when
he played. He was a small, lean, bent person, with shabby clothes, blue
eyes, grotesque, satyr-like face, and nearly bald head; and at my first
words seemed both angered and frightened. My obvious friendliness,
however, finally melted him; and he grudgingly motioned to me to follow
him up the dark, creaking, and rickety attic stairs. His room, one of
only two in the steeply pitched garret, was on the west side, toward
the high wall that formed the upper end of the street. Its size was
very great, and seemed the greater because of its extraordinary
bareness and neglect. Of furniture there was only a narrow iron
bedstead, a dingy washstand, a small table, a large bookcase, an iron
music-rack, and three old-fashioned chairs. Sheets of music were piled
in disorder about the floor. The walls were of bare boards, and had
probably never known plaster; whilst the abundance of dust and cobwebs
made the place seem more deserted than inhabited. Evidently Erich
Zann’s world of beauty lay in some far cosmos of the imagination.
Motioning me to sit down, the dumb man closed the door, turned the
large wooden bolt, and lighted a candle to augment the one he had
brought with him. He now removed his viol from its moth-eaten covering,
and taking it, seated himself in the least uncomfortable of the chairs.
He did not employ the music-rack, but offering no choice and playing
from memory, enchanted me for over an hour with strains I had never
heard before; strains which must have been of his own devising. To
describe their exact nature is impossible for one unversed in music.
They were a kind of fugue, with recurrent passages of the most
captivating quality, but to me were notable for the absence of any of
the weird notes I had overheard from my room below on other occasions.
Those haunting notes I had remembered, and had often hummed and
whistled inaccurately to myself; so when the player at length laid down
his bow I asked him if he would render some of them. As I began my
request the wrinkled satyr-like face lost the bored placidity it had
possessed during the playing, and seemed to shew the same curious
mixture of anger and fright which I had noticed when first I accosted
the old man. For a moment I was inclined to use persuasion, regarding
rather lightly the whims of senility; and even tried to awaken my
host’s weirder mood by whistling a few of the strains to which I had
listened the night before. But I did not pursue this course for more
than a moment; for when the dumb musician recognised the whistled air
his face grew suddenly distorted with an expression wholly beyond
analysis, and his long, cold, bony right hand reached out to stop my
mouth and silence the crude imitation. As he did this he further
demonstrated his eccentricity by casting a startled glance toward the
lone curtained window, as if fearful of some intruder—a glance doubly
absurd, since the garret stood high and inaccessible above all the
adjacent roofs, this window being the only point on the steep street,
as the concierge had told me, from which one could see over the wall at
the summit.
The old man’s glance brought Blandot’s remark to my mind, and with a
certain capriciousness I felt a wish to look out over the wide and
dizzying panorama of moonlit roofs and city lights beyond the hill-top,
which of all the dwellers in the Rue d’Auseil only this crabbed
musician could see. I moved toward the window and would have drawn
aside the nondescript curtains, when with a frightened rage even
greater than before the dumb lodger was upon me again; this time
motioning with his head toward the door as he nervously strove to drag
me thither with both hands. Now thoroughly disgusted with my host, I
ordered him to release me, and told him I would go at once. His clutch
relaxed, and as he saw my disgust and offence his own anger seemed to
subside. He tightened his relaxing grip, but this time in a friendly
manner; forcing me into a chair, then with an appearance of wistfulness
crossing to the littered table, where he wrote many words with a pencil
in the laboured French of a foreigner.
The note which he finally handed me was an appeal for tolerance and
forgiveness. Zann said that he was old, lonely, and afflicted with
strange fears and nervous disorders connected with his music and with
other things. He had enjoyed my listening to his music, and wished I
would come again and not mind his eccentricities. But he could not play
to another his weird harmonies, and could not bear hearing them from
another; nor could he bear having anything in his room touched by
another. He had not known until our hallway conversation that I could
overhear his playing in my room, and now asked me if I would arrange
with Blandot to take a lower room where I could not hear him in the
night. He would, he wrote, defray the difference in rent.
As I sat deciphering the execrable French I felt more lenient toward
the old man. He was a victim of physical and nervous suffering, as was
I; and my metaphysical studies had taught me kindness. In the silence
there came a slight sound from the window—the shutter must have rattled
in the night-wind—and for some reason I started almost as violently as
did Erich Zann. So when I had finished reading I shook my host by the
hand, and departed as a friend. The next day Blandot gave me a more
expensive room on the third floor, between the apartments of an aged
money-lender and the room of a respectable upholsterer. There was no
one on the fourth floor.
It was not long before I found that Zann’s eagerness for my company was
not as great as it had seemed while he was persuading me to move down
from the fifth story. He did not ask me to call on him, and when I did
call he appeared uneasy and played listlessly. This was always at
night—in the day he slept and would admit no one. My liking for him did
not grow, though the attic room and the weird music seemed to hold an
odd fascination for me. I had a curious desire to look out of that
window, over the wall and down the unseen slope at the glittering roofs
and spires which must lie outspread there. Once I went up to the garret
during theatre hours, when Zann was away, but the door was locked.
What I did succeed in doing was to overhear the nocturnal playing of
the dumb old man. At first I would tiptoe up to my old fifth floor,
then I grew bold enough to climb the last creaking staircase to the
peaked garret. There in the narrow hall, outside the bolted door with
the covered keyhole, I often heard sounds which filled me with an
indefinable dread—the dread of vague wonder and brooding mystery. It
was not that the sounds were hideous, for they were not; but that they
held vibrations suggesting nothing on this globe of earth, and that at
certain intervals they assumed a symphonic quality which I could hardly
conceive as produced by one player. Certainly, Erich Zann was a genius
of wild power. As the weeks passed, the playing grew wilder, whilst the
old musician acquired an increasing haggardness and furtiveness pitiful
to behold. He now refused to admit me at any time, and shunned me
whenever we met on the stairs.
Then one night as I listened at the door I heard the shrieking viol
swell into a chaotic babel of sound; a pandemonium which would have led
me to doubt my own shaking sanity had there not come from behind that
barred portal a piteous proof that the horror was real—the awful,
inarticulate cry which only a mute can utter, and which rises only in
moments of the most terrible fear or anguish. I knocked repeatedly at
the door, but received no response. Afterward I waited in the black
hallway, shivering with cold and fear, till I heard the poor musician’s
feeble effort to rise from the floor by the aid of a chair. Believing
him just conscious after a fainting fit, I renewed my rapping, at the
same time calling out my name reassuringly. I heard Zann stumble to the
window and close both shutter and sash, then stumble to the door, which
he falteringly unfastened to admit me. This time his delight at having
me present was real; for his distorted face gleamed with relief while
he clutched at my coat as a child clutches at its mother’s skirts.
Shaking pathetically, the old man forced me into a chair whilst he sank
into another, beside which his viol and bow lay carelessly on the
floor. He sat for some time inactive, nodding oddly, but having a
paradoxical suggestion of intense and frightened listening.
Subsequently he seemed to be satisfied, and crossing to a chair by the
table wrote a brief note, handed it to me, and returned to the table,
where he began to write rapidly and incessantly. The note implored me
in the name of mercy, and for the sake of my own curiosity, to wait
where I was while he prepared a full account in German of all the
marvels and terrors which beset him. I waited, and the dumb man’s
pencil flew.
It was perhaps an hour later, while I still waited and while the old
musician’s feverishly written sheets still continued to pile up, that I
saw Zann start as from the hint of a horrible shock. Unmistakably he
was looking at the curtained window and listening shudderingly. Then I
half fancied I heard a sound myself; though it was not a horrible
sound, but rather an exquisitely low and infinitely distant musical
note, suggesting a player in one of the neighbouring houses, or in some
abode beyond the lofty wall over which I had never been able to look.
Upon Zann the effect was terrible, for dropping his pencil suddenly he
rose, seized his viol, and commenced to rend the night with the wildest
playing I had ever heard from his bow save when listening at the barred
door.
It would be useless to describe the playing of Erich Zann on that
dreadful night. It was more horrible than anything I had ever
overheard, because I could now see the expression of his face, and
could realise that this time the motive was stark fear. He was trying
to make a noise; to ward something off or drown something out—what, I
could not imagine, awesome though I felt it must be. The playing grew
fantastic, delirious, and hysterical, yet kept to the last the
qualities of supreme genius which I knew this strange old man
possessed. I recognised the air—it was a wild Hungarian dance popular
in the theatres, and I reflected for a moment that this was the first
time I had ever heard Zann play the work of another composer.
Louder and louder, wilder and wilder, mounted the shrieking and whining
of that desperate viol. The player was dripping with an uncanny
perspiration and twisted like a monkey, always looking frantically at
the curtained window. In his frenzied strains I could almost see
shadowy satyrs and Bacchanals dancing and whirling insanely through
seething abysses of clouds and smoke and lightning. And then I thought
I heard a shriller, steadier note that was not from the viol; a calm,
deliberate, purposeful, mocking note from far away in the west.
At this juncture the shutter began to rattle in a howling night-wind
which had sprung up outside as if in answer to the mad playing within.
Zann’s screaming viol now outdid itself, emitting sounds I had never
thought a viol could emit. The shutter rattled more loudly, unfastened,
and commenced slamming against the window. Then the glass broke
shiveringly under the persistent impacts, and the chill wind rushed in,
making the candles sputter and rustling the sheets of paper on the
table where Zann had begun to write out his horrible secret. I looked
at Zann, and saw that he was past conscious observation. His blue eyes
were bulging, glassy, and sightless, and the frantic playing had become
a blind, mechanical, unrecognisable orgy that no pen could even
suggest.
A sudden gust, stronger than the others, caught up the manuscript and
bore it toward the window. I followed the flying sheets in desperation,
but they were gone before I reached the demolished panes. Then I
remembered my old wish to gaze from this window, the only window in the
Rue d’Auseil from which one might see the slope beyond the wall, and
the city outspread beneath. It was very dark, but the city’s lights
always burned, and I expected to see them there amidst the rain and
wind. Yet when I looked from that highest of all gable windows, looked
while the candles sputtered and the insane viol howled with the
night-wind, I saw no city spread below, and no friendly lights gleaming
from remembered streets, but only the blackness of space illimitable;
unimagined space alive with motion and music, and having no semblance
to anything on earth. And as I stood there looking in terror, the wind
blew out both the candles in that ancient peaked garret, leaving me in
savage and impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium before me,
and the daemon madness of that night-baying viol behind me.
I staggered back in the dark, without the means of striking a light,
crashing against the table, overturning a chair, and finally groping my
way to the place where the blackness screamed with shocking music. To
save myself and Erich Zann I could at least try, whatever the powers
opposed to me. Once I thought some chill thing brushed me, and I
screamed, but my scream could not be heard above that hideous viol.
Suddenly out of the blackness the madly sawing bow struck me, and I
knew I was close to the player. I felt ahead, touched the back of
Zann’s chair, and then found and shook his shoulder in an effort to
bring him to his senses.
He did not respond, and still the viol shrieked on without slackening.
I moved my hand to his head, whose mechanical nodding I was able to
stop, and shouted in his ear that we must both flee from the unknown
things of the night. But he neither answered me nor abated the frenzy
of his unutterable music, while all through the garret strange currents
of wind seemed to dance in the darkness and babel. When my hand touched
his ear I shuddered, though I knew not why—knew not why till I felt of
the still face; the ice-cold, stiffened, unbreathing face whose glassy
eyes bulged uselessly into the void. And then, by some miracle finding
the door and the large wooden bolt, I plunged wildly away from that
glassy-eyed thing in the dark, and from the ghoulish howling of that
accursed viol whose fury increased even as I plunged.
Leaping, floating, flying down those endless stairs through the dark
house; racing mindlessly out into the narrow, steep, and ancient street
of steps and tottering houses; clattering down steps and over cobbles
to the lower streets and the putrid canyon-walled river; panting across
the great dark bridge to the broader, healthier streets and boulevards
we know; all these are terrible impressions that linger with me. And I
recall that there was no wind, and that the moon was out, and that all
the lights of the city twinkled.
Despite my most careful searches and investigations, I have never since
been able to find the Rue d’Auseil. But I am not wholly sorry; either
for this or for the loss in undreamable abysses of the closely written
sheets which alone could have explained the music of Erich Zann.
Return to “The Music of Erich Zann”
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