Cool Air
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written March 1926
Published March 1928 in Tales of Magic and Mystery, Vol. 1, No. 4, 29-34.
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
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 mid-afternoon, 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 till 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 Gawd, the
sal-ammoniac that man use for 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 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 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 cut and fit. 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
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 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 ...
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