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object:1f.lovecraft - The Strange High House in the Mist
author class:H P Lovecraft
subject class:Fiction
genre class:Horror
class:chapter


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 rumour of
old, strange secrets, and wonders that planets tell planets alone in
the night. When tales fly thick in the grottoes of tritons, and conches
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 the 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 grey
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 in 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 shews 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.
Nevertheless 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
therein 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 grey primeval roof,
peaked and shingled, whose eaves come nearly to the grey 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
cannot 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 grey 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 grey 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 vertically 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 briers 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 rumour 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 grey 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 grey as
the rock, and high peak standing bold against the milky white of the
seaward vapours. 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 but 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 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 a west window was a great black-bearded face whose eyes
shone phosphorescently 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 thick 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 marvellous 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
rumours 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
Poseidonis is still glimpsed at midnight by lost ships, who know 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 only the other gods
came to dance on the peak of Hatheg-Kla 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
peep-hole. 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 candlesticks. Frequently he would glance at
the door as if he expected someone, 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 through 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 grey and awful form of
primal Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss. And the conches of the tritons
gave weird blasts, and the nereids made strange sounds by striking on
the grotesque resonant shells of unknown lurkers in black sea-caves.
Then hoary Nodens reached forth a wizened hand and helped Olney and his
host into the vast shell, whereat the conches and the gongs set up a
wild and awesome clamour. 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 light-footed, 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 sky-perched 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 grey peaked roof, or amidst
inconceivable reaches of that sinister white mist, there lingered still
the lost spirit of him who was Thomas Olney.
And ever since that hour, through dull dragging years of greyness and
weariness, the philosopher has laboured 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 if 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
neighbours 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 fisherfolk. 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 lonely vertiginous
peak with the steep ancient house, that grey 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
conches in seaweed cities blow wild tunes learned from the Elder Ones,
then great eager vapours flock to heaven laden with lore; and
Kingsport, nestling uneasy on 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.
Return to “The Strange High House in the Mist”


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