C o o l A i r
by Howard Phillips Lovecraft
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 circumstances 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
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 'til 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 God, the salammoniac
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. 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 afternoon
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 obtrusively
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
fit and cut. 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 life-time 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 habitationsome fifty-five or
fifty-six 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 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 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 coordinated, 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 'til
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 'til 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 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. Munoz 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 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.
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
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 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 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_."
"Cool Air": copyright © 1928 by the Personal Arts Company
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