The Uncanny Reader (21 page)

You will have guessed there were no children, what an intrusion children would have been in such a life!

One rather wondered … it is always the important things one mustn't touch on, isn't it? The things that matter most, that fill our souls, our minds, even our eyes … I'm always amazed at our eternal reticences … well, there were no children and I am queer in my views on marriage without children, it is a tricky business this mating … one knows too much … you've got to be jolly careful the people you marry to each other or, well, sometimes I've felt nauseated.

Anyhow, here were two carrying it off beautifully—all grossness purged away, they would tell you, the souls in perfect communion—all lovely and delicate, serving Art—beauty, nature, God. Yes, but why didn't she give the poor devil a corner to himself?

I don't believe he was alone for five minutes of the day or night—she used to speak of ‘
our
bedroom' and carry up flowers and fountain pens and biscuits, for the table beside
their
bed … ugh! I became uneasy at meeting his glance, I don't know why.

Then … I was coming in from the garden the fourth evening she was playing as usual, in a white gown that didn't suit her, and he was seated on his pure coloured chair with a Danish book of poetry.

As I entered the room I was assailed by a smell, so creeping, so foetid I could hardly forbear an exclamation—yet this was so obviously bad manners that I was silent.

I thought of course of drains or even dead birds in the chimney and that the discomfortable thing would be marked and removed. But neither of them noticed it and it died away presently.

Still, though it hung round us the whole evening now faint, now stronger … always indescribably awful.

It was not in my own room, yet I woke up in the night drenched with it, sick and shuddering with the horror of it … potent as a live thing it filled the lovely chamber. Lord! what a smell … I was retching as I staggered out to shut the window.

But it was in the house for the closed window made no difference … I passed a night of torment … by the morning it was gone.

I won't bore you with my next day's work, which was to trace that smell.

Quite fruitless.

The garden, the drains, the kitchens, all furtively examined were in perfect order.

How could one suspect anything else in such a house?

Yet with evening … that loathsome terror again.

It so saturated the rooms that everything seemed tainted with it, like a fog dirties and dims, so this smell blighted and smeared every lovely thing in the place.

And there were lovely things, I'd envied some of them really.

But it was all spoilt for me now—even when the ghastly odour wasn't there everything reminded me of it … I was in a state of perpetual nausea.

Naturally I resolved to clear out.

But it couldn't be done at less than a couple of days' notice, for I had come for a fortnight.

I mentioned the smell, actually dared to Jennifer (I shall always think of her as that, never as ‘Mrs Halston,' I know) and she was so distantly sweet about it that I felt I had been very impertinent.

‘Of course there is nothing,' she said kindly. ‘Cedric is so particular about—perfumes—sensitive people are, are they not? Perhaps you have fancies? Cedric used to … that is where I was able to … help him.'

Again the little thrill on the last two words: ‘help him!' poor brute. Yes she has helped him all right … but where to.

I could do nothing but agree.

Jennifer gazed at me and I could see she meant to be very soothing.

‘I banished everything ugly out of Cedric's life … Someday you will meet a woman who will do that for you—' then, with that natural brightness she used to mask her sacred emotions, ‘Will you come and look at the rose bushes? I
think
I have got some teeny weeny buds for you to see—'

Yes, she had and must needs pick me one and give it me gravely … as a symbol of something or other, I'm sure. But it was no good; her ‘teeny weeny' buds
stank
, my God, Lorimer, that is the only word for it stank to Heaven.

That day it was awful, the smell I mean. I took two long walks to get rid of it, the countryside was sweet and clean enough … the abomination was in the house, clinging to everything.

After dinner I asked them if they meant to live this life always, asked it bluntly, I suppose.

‘Dear friend,' said Jennifer, ‘you don't quite understand, does he, Cedric? This is … just home … ours…'

‘Home?' I was worse than blunt, but the smell was torturing me. ‘What have you got in it?'

They both looked at me.

‘Each other, haven't we, Cedric?' Her smile was transcendent.

‘Oh, yes,' I echoed, ‘you've got each other—one can see that—feel it—sm—'

I stopped; what was I going to say?—what was slipping out?

I bit my tongue; but now I knew and it rather frightened me.

I cleared … I remember she said: ‘And the Epic,' but I just cleared out into the garden like a lunatic and walked as I was into Hertford to the hotel where they knew me.

Do you see it, Lorimer? It was all dead, love, ambition, kindness, the souls themselves, shut in, stagnant, he sold for money, his comforts, she sold for her satisfied lusts, each exacting the price … each
hating
the other—no children, nothing let in, nothing going on—putrid, rotten … each caged and caught by the other—and, Lorimer,
stinking themselves to Hell
.

 

THE MUSIC OF ERICH ZANN

H. P. Lovecraft

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 neighboring 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 recognize 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 barrenness 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 recognized 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 hilltop, 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 offense, 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 labored 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.