Lovecraft, H P - Cool Air

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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.

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Lovecraft, H P - Cool Air

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