The Project Gutenberg eBook of Cool air
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Title: Cool air
Author: H. P. Lovecraft
Release date: March 16, 2024 [eBook #73177]
Language: English
Original publication: New York, NY: Weird Tales, 1939
Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COOL AIR ***
Cool Air
By H. P. LOVECRAFT
_A tale of dark science, and the ghastly
mystery that enveloped the Spanish doctor's
attempts at artificial refrigeration._
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Weird Tales September 1939.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
You ask me to explain why I am afraid of a draft 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 odor, 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
midafternoon, in the clangor 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 splendor 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 until 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 odor 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 God,
the sal-ammoniac that man use for to 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. Doctor 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 Doctor 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 surprized me in
this nest of squalor and seediness. A folding couch now filled its
diurnal rôle 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 obtrusively utilitarian devices. Doctor 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 fit and cut. A high-bred face
of masterful though not arrogant expression was adorned by a short
iron-gray 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 Celt-Iberian. 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 Doctor 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 draft 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 fifty-five or fifty-six degrees Fahrenheit--was
maintained by an absorption system of ammonia cooling, the gasoline
engine whose pumps I had often heard in my room below.
Relieved of my seizure in a marvelously 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 mediævalists, since he believed these cryptic
formulæ 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
Doctor Torres of Valencia, who had shared his earlier experiments
and nursed 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
Doctor 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 until his room smelled like the vault
of a sepulchered 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 until he could keep the temperature as low as
thirty-four or forty degrees, and finally even twenty-eight degrees;
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 odor;
but the smell in his room was worse, 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-demon even as that ancient enemy seized him. The
pretense 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 filed with injunctions that I transmit them after
his death to certain persons whom he named--for the most part lettered
East Indians, but including also 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 while 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. Doctor 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 neighboring all-night
garage we learned that nothing could be done until 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.
[Illustration: "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 five in the morning, the doctor retired to the bathroom,
commanding me to keep him supplied with all the ice I could obtain
at all-night drugstores 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 while 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 one-thirty that afternoon 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 odor 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 a 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
draft 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. Doctor 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_."
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COOL AIR ***
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