[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
He
Lovecraft, Howard Phillips
Published:
1926
Categorie(s):
Fiction, Horror, Short Stories
Source:
http://en.wikisource.org
1
About Lovecraft:
Howard Phillips Lovecraft was an American author of fantasy, horror
and science fiction. He is notable for blending elements of science fiction
and horror; and for popularizing "cosmic horror": the notion that some
concepts, entities or experiences are barely comprehensible to human
minds, and those who delve into such risk their sanity. Lovecraft has be-
come a cult figure in the horror genre and is noted as creator of the
"Cthulhu Mythos," a series of loosely interconnected fictions featuring a
"pantheon" of nonhuman creatures, as well as the famed Necronomicon,
a grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore. His works typically had a
tone of "cosmic pessimism," regarding mankind as insignificant and
powerless in the universe. Lovecraft's readership was limited during his
life, and his works, particularly early in his career, have been criticized as
occasionally ponderous, and for their uneven quality. Nevertheless,
Lovecraft’s reputation has grown tremendously over the decades, and he
is now commonly regarded as one of the most important horror writers
of the 20th Century, exerting an influence that is widespread, though of-
ten indirect. Source: Wikipedia
Also available on Feedbooks for Lovecraft:
•
(1926)
•
(1931)
•
(1928)
•
(1934)
•
(1931)
•
(1936)
•
(1930)
•
(1927)
•
(1938)
•
(1932)
Copyright:
This work is available for countries where copyright is
.
Note:
This book is brought to you by Feedbooks
Strictly for personal use, do not use this file for commercial purposes.
2
I saw him on a sleepless night when I was walking desperately to save
my soul and my vision. My coming to New York had been a mistake; for
whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration in the teem-
ing labyrinths of ancient streets that twist endlessly from forgotten
courts and squares and waterfronts to courts and squares and water-
fronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean modern towers and pin-
nacles that rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found in-
stead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master,
paralyze, and annihilate me.
The disillusion had been gradual. Coming for the first time upon the
town, I had seen it in the sunset from a bridge, majestic above its waters,
its incredible peaks and pyramids rising flowerlike and delicate from
pools of violet mist to play with the flaming clouds and the first stars of
evening. Then it had lighted up window by window above the shimmer-
ing tides where lanterns nodded and glided and deep horns bayed weird
harmonies, and had itself become a starry firmament of dream, redolent
of faery music, and one with the marvels of Carcassonne and Samarcand
and El Dorado and all glorious and half-fabulous cities. Shortly after-
ward I was taken through those antique ways so dear to my fancy-nar-
row, curving alleys and passages where rows of red Georgian brick
blinked with small-paned dormers above pillared doorways that had
looked on gilded sedans and paneled coaches - and in the first flush of
realization of these long-wished things I thought I had indeed achieved
such treasures as would make me in time a poet.
But success and happiness were not to be. Garish daylight showed
only squalor and alienage and the noxious elephantiasis of climbing,
spreading stone where the moon had hinted of loveliness and elder ma-
gic; and the throngs of people that seethed through the flume-like streets
were squat, swarthy strangers with hardened faces and narrow eyes,
shrewd strangers without dreams and without kinship to the scenes
about them, who could never mean aught to a blue-eyed man of the old
folk, with the love of fair green lanes and white New England village
steeples in his heart.
So instead of the poems I had hoped for, there came only a shuddering
blackness and ineffable loneliness; and I saw at last a fearful truth which
no one had ever dared to breathe before - the unwhisperable secret of
secrets - the fact that this city of stone and stridor is not a sentient per-
petuation of Old New York as London is of Old London and Paris of Old
Paris, but that it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling body imperfectly em-
balmed and infested with queer animate things which have nothing to
3
do with it as it was in life. Upon making this discovery I ceased to sleep
comfortably; though something of resigned tranquillity came back as I
gradually formed the habit of keeping off the streets by day and ventur-
ing abroad only at night, when darkness calls forth what little of the past
still hovers wraith-like about, and old white doorways remember the
stalwart forms that once passed through them. With this mode of relief I
even wrote a few poems, and still refrained from going home to my
people lest I seem to crawl back ignobly in defeat.
Then, on a sleepless night's walk, I met the man. It was in a grotesque
hidden courtyard of the Greenwich section, for there in my ignorance I
had settled, having heard of the place as the natural home of poets and
artists. The archaic lanes and houses and unexpected bits of square and
court had indeed delighted me, and when I found the poets and artists to
be loud-voiced pretenders whose quaintness is tinsel and whose lives are
a denial of all that pure beauty which is poetry and art, I stayed on for
love of these venerable things. I fancied them as they were in their prime,
when Greenwich was a placid village not yet engulfed by the town; and
in the hours before dawn, when all the revellers had slunk away, I used
to wander alone among their cryptical windings and brood upon the
curious arcana which generations must have deposited there. This kept
my soul alive, and gave me a few of those dreams and visions for which
the poet far within me cried out.
The man came upon me at about two one cloudy August morning, as I
was threading a series of detached courtyards; now accessible only
through the unlighted hallways of intervening buildings, but once form-
ing parts of a continuous network of picturesque alleys. I had heard of
them by vague rumor, and realized that they could not be upon any map
of today; but the fact that they were forgotten only endeared them to me,
so that I had sought them with twice my usual eagerness. Now that I had
found them, my eagerness was again redoubled; for something in their
arrangement dimly hinted that they might be only a few of many such,
with dark, dumb counterparts wedged obscurely betwixt high blank
walls and deserted rear tenements, or lurking lamplessly behind arch-
ways unbetrayed by hordes of the foreign-speaking or guarded by furt-
ive and uncommunicative artists whose practises do not invite publicity
or the light of day.
He spoke to me without invitation, noting my mood and glances as I
studied certain knockered doorways above iron-railed steps, the pallid
glow of traceried transoms feebly lighting my face. His own face was in
shadow, and he wore a wide-brimmed hat which somehow blended
4
perfectly with the out-of-date cloak he affected; but I was subtly dis-
quieted even before he addressed me. His form was very slight; thin al-
most to cadaverousness; and his voice proved phenomenally soft and
hollow, though not particularly deep. He had, he said, noticed me sever-
al times at my wanderings; and inferred that I resembled him in loving
the vestiges of former years. Would I not like the guidance of one long
practised in these explorations, and possessed of local information pro-
foundly deeper than any which an obvious newcomer could possibly
have gained?
As he spoke, I caught a glimpse of his face in the yellow beam from a
solitary attic window. It was a noble, even a handsome elderly counten-
ance; and bore the marks of a lineage and refinement unusual for the age
and place. Yet some quality about it disturbed me almost as much as its
features pleased me - perhaps it was too white, or too expressionless, or
too much out of keeping with the locality, to make me feel easy or com-
fortable. Nevertheless I followed him; for in those dreary days my quest
for antique beauty and mystery was all that I had to keep my soul alive,
and I reckoned it a rare favor of Fate to fall in with one whose kindred
seekings seemed to have penetrated so much farther than mine.
Something in the night constrained the cloaked man to silence and for
a long hour he led me forward without needless words; making only the
briefest of comments concerning ancient names and dates and changes,
and directing my progress very largely by gestures as we squeezed
through interstices, tiptoed through corridors clambered over brick
walls, and once crawled on hands and knees through a low, arched pas-
sage of stone whose immense length and tortuous twistings effaced at
last every hint of geographical location I had managed to preserve. The
things we saw were very old and marvelous, or at least they seemed so
in the few straggling rays of light by which I viewed them, and I shall
never forget the tottering Ionic columns and fluted pilasters and urn-
headed iron fenceposts and flaring-linteled windows and decorative fan-
lights that appeared to grow quainter and stranger the deeper we ad-
vanced into this inexhaustible maze of unknown antiquity.
We met no person, and as time passed the lighted windows became
fewer and fewer. The streetlights we first encountered had been of oil,
and of the ancient lozenge pattern. Later I noticed some with candles;
and at last, after traversing a horrible unlighted court where my guide
had to lead with his gloved hand through total blackness to a narrow
wooded gate in a high wall, we came upon a fragment of alley lit only by
lanterns in front of every seventh house - unbelievably Colonial tin
5
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]