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The Strange High House in the Mist
Lovecraft, Howard Phillips
Published:
1931
Categorie(s):
Fiction, Short Stories
Source:
http://en.wikisource.org
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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:
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(1926)
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(1931)
•
(1928)
•
(1934)
•
(1931)
•
(1936)
•
(1930)
•
(1927)
•
(1938)
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(1932)
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In the morning, mist comes up from the sea by the cliffs beyond Kings-
port. White and feathery it comes from the deep to its brothers the
clouds, full of dreams of dank pastures and caves of leviathan. And later,
in still summer rains on the steep roofs of poets, the clouds scatter bits of
those dreams, that men shall not live without rumor of old strange
secrets, and wonders that planets tell planets alone in the night. When
tales fly thick in the grottoes of tritons, and conchs in seaweed cities
blow wild tunes learned from the Elder Ones, then great eager mists
flock to heaven laden with lore, and oceanward eyes on tile rocks see
only a mystic whiteness, as if the cliff's rim were the rim of all earth, and
the solemn bells of buoys tolled free in the aether of faery.
Now north of archaic Kingsport the crags climb lofty and curious, ter-
race on terrace, till the northernmost hangs in the sky like a gray frozen
wind-cloud. Alone it is, a bleak point jutting in limitless space, for there
the coast turns sharp where the great Miskatonic pours out of the plains
past Arkham, bringing woodland legends and little quaint memories of
New England's hills. The sea-folk of Kingsport look up at that cliff as
other sea-folk look up at the pole-star, and time the night's watches by
the way it hides or shows the Great Bear, Cassiopeia and the Dragon.
Among them it is one with the firmament, and truly, it is hidden from
them when the mist hides the stars or the sun.
Some of the cliffs they love, as that whose grotesque profile they call
Father Neptune, or that whose pillared steps they term "The Causeway";
but this one they fear because it is so near the sky. The Portuguese sailors
coming in from a voyage cross themselves when they first see it, and the
old Yankees believe it would be a much graver matter than death to
climb it, if indeed that were possible. Nevertheless there is an ancient
house on that cliff, and at evening men see lights in the small-paned
windows.
The ancient house has always been there, and people say One dwells
within who talks with the morning mists that come up from the deep,
and perhaps sees singular things oceanward at those times when the
cliff's rim becomes the rim of all earth, and solemn buoys toll free in the
white aether of faery. This they tell from hearsay, for that forbidding
crag is always unvisited, and natives dislike to train telescopes on it.
Summer boarders have indeed scanned it with jaunty binoculars, but
have never seen more than the gray primeval roof, peaked and shingled,
whose eaves come nearly to the gray foundations, and the dim yellow
light of the little windows peeping out from under those eaves in the
dusk. These summer people do not believe that the same One has lived
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in the ancient house for hundreds of years, but can not prove their
heresy to any real Kingsporter. Even the Terrible Old Man who talks to
leaden pendulums in bottles, buys groceries with centuried Spanish
gold, and keeps stone idols in the yard of his antediluvian cottage in
Water Street can only say these things were the same when his grand-
father was a boy, and that must have been inconceivable ages ago, when
Belcher or Shirley or Pownall or Bernard was Governor of His Majesty's
Province of the Massachusetts-Bay.
Then one summer there came a philosopher into Kingsport. His name
was Thomas Olney, and he taught ponderous things in a college by Nar-
ragansett Bay. With stout wife and romping children he came, and his
eyes were weary with seeing the same things for many years, and think-
ing the same well-disciplined thoughts. He looked at the mists from the
diadem of Father Neptune, and tried to walk into their white world of
mystery along the titan steps of The Causeway. Morning after morning
he would lie on the cliffs and look over the world's rim at the cryptical
aether beyond, listening to spectral bells and the wild cries of what
might have been gulls. Then, when the mist would lift and the sea stand
out prosy with the smoke of steamers, he would sigh and descend to the
town, where he loved to thread the narrow olden lanes up and down
hill, and study the crazy tottering gables and odd-pillared doorways
which had sheltered so many generations of sturdy sea-folk. And he
even talked with the Terrible Old Man, who was not fond of strangers,
and was invited into his fearsomely archaic cottage where low ceilings
and wormy panelling hear the echoes of disquieting soliloquies in the
dark small hours.
Of course it was inevitable that Olney should mark the gray unvisited
cottage in the sky, on that sinister northward crag which is one with the
mists and the firmament. Always over Kingsport it hung, and always its
mystery sounded in whispers through Kingsport's crooked alleys. The
Terrible Old Man wheezed a tale that his father had told him, of light-
ning that shot one night up from that peaked cottage to the clouds of
higher heaven; and Granny Orne, whose tiny gambrel-roofed abode in
Ship Street is all covered with moss and ivy, croaked over something her
grandmother had heard at second-hand, about shapes that flapped out
of the eastern mists straight into the narrow single door of that unreach-
able place - for the door is set close to the edge of the crag toward the
ocean, and glimpsed only from ships at sea.
At length, being avid for new strange things and held back by neither
the Kingsporter's fear nor the summer boarder's usual indolence, Olney
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made a very terrible resolve. Despite a conservative training - or because
of it, for humdrum lives breed wistful longings of the unknown - he
swore a great oath to scale that avoided northern cliff and visit the ab-
normally antique gray cottage in the sky. Very plausibly his saner self ar-
gued that the place must be tenanted by people who reached it from in-
land along the easier ridge beside the Miskatonic's estuary. Probably
they traded in Arkham, knowing how little Kingsport liked their habita-
tion or perhaps being unable to climb down the cliff on the Kingsport
side. Olney walked out along the lesser cliffs to where the great crag
leaped insolently up to consort with celestial things, and became very
sure that no human feet could mount it or descend it on that beetling
southern slope. East and north it rose thousands of feet perpendicular
from the water so only the western side, inland and toward Arkham,
remained.
One early morning in August Olney set out to find a path to the inac-
cessible pinnacle. He worked northwest along pleasant back roads, past
Hooper's Pond and the old brick powder-house to where the pastures
slope up to the ridge above the Miskatonic and give a lovely vista of
Arkham's white Georgian steeples across leagues of river and meadow.
Here he found a shady road to Arkham, but no trail at all in the seaward
direction he wished. Woods and fields crowded up to the high bank of
the river's mouth, and bore not a sign of man's presence; not even a stone
wall or a straying cow, but only the tall grass and giant trees and tangles
of briars that the first Indian might have seen. As he climbed slowly east,
higher and higher above the estuary on his left and nearer and nearer the
sea, he found the way growing in difficulty till he wondered how ever
the dwellers in that disliked place managed to reach the world outside,
and whether they came often to market in Arkham.
Then the trees thinned, and far below him on his right he saw the hills
and antique roofs and spires of Kingsport. Even Central Hill was a dwarf
from this height, and he could just make out the ancient graveyard by
the Congregational Hospital beneath which rumor said some terrible
caves or burrows lurked. Ahead lay sparse grass and scrub blueberry
bushes, and beyond them the naked rock of the crag and the thin peak of
the dreaded gray cottage. Now the ridge narrowed, and Olney grew
dizzy at his loneness in the sky, south of him the frightful precipice
above Kingsport, north of him the vertical drop of nearly a mile to the
river's mouth. Suddenly a great chasm opened before him, ten feet deep,
so that he had to let himself down by his hands and drop to a slanting
floor, and then crawl perilously up a natural defile in the opposite wall.
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