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Title: He

Author: H. P. Lovecraft

Release Date: July 17, 2022 [eBook #68547]

Language: English

Produced by: Roger Frank

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HE ***





HE

By H. P. Lovecraft


[Illustration: “The old man clawed and spat at me through the moldy
air, and barked things in his throat as he swayed with the yellow
curtain he clutched.”]


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
teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twist endlessly from
forgotten courts and squares and waterfronts to courts and squares and
waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean modern towers and
pinnacles that rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found
instead 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 golden
clouds and the first stars of evening. Then it had lighted up window
by window above the shimmering 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 afterward I was taken through those
antique ways so dear to my fancy--narrow, 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
magic; and the throngs of people that seethed through the flumelike
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
blankness 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 perpetuation 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 embalmed and infested with queer animate things which
have nothing to 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 venturing abroad only at night, when darkness
calls forth what little of the past still hovers wraithlike 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 2 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 forming
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
archways, unbetrayed by hordes of the foreign-speaking or guarded by
furtive 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
perfectly with the out-of-date cloak he affected; but I was subtly
disquieted even before he addressed me. His form was very slight, thin
almost to cadaverousness; and his voice proved phenomenally soft and
hollow, though not particularly deep. He had, he said, noticed me
several 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 profoundly 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
countenance; 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 comfortable. 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
passage 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 fanlights that appeared to grow quainter and stranger the
deeper we advanced 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 me with his gloved hand through total blackness to a
narrow wooden 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 lanterns with conical tops and holes punched in the
sides. This alley led steeply uphill--more steeply than I had thought
possible in this part of New York--and the upper end was blocked
squarely by the ivy-clad wall of a private estate, beyond which I
could see a pale cupola, and the tops of trees waving against a vague
lightness in the sky. In this wall was a small, low-arched gate of
nail-studded black oak, which the man proceeded to unlock with a
ponderous key. Leading me within, he steered a course in utter
blackness over what seemed to be a gravel path, and finally up a
flight of stone steps to the door of the house, which he unlocked and
opened for me.

We entered, and as we did so I grew faint from a reek of infinite
mustiness which welled out to meet us, and which must have been the
fruit of unwholesome centuries of decay. My host appeared not to
notice this, and in courtesy I kept silent as he piloted me up a
curving stairway, across a hall, and into a room whose door I heard
him lock behind us. Then I saw him pull the curtains of the three
small-paned windows that barely showed themselves against the
lightening sky; after which he crossed to the mantel, struck flint and
steel, lighted two candles of a candelabrum of twelve sconces, and
made a gesture enjoining soft-toned speech.

In this feeble radiance I saw that we were in a spacious,
well-furnished and paneled library dating from the first quarter of
the Eighteenth Century, with splendid doorway pediments, a delightful
Doric cornice, and a magnificently carved overmantel with
scroll-and-urn top. Above the crowded bookshelves at intervals along
the walls were well-wrought family portraits; all tarnished to an
enigmatical dimness, and bearing an unmistakable likeness to the man
who now motioned me to a chair beside the graceful Chippendale table.
Before seating himself across the table from me, my host paused for a
moment as if in embarrassment; then, tardily removing his gloves,
wide-brimmed hat, and cloak, stood theatrically revealed in full
mid-Georgian costume from queued hair and neck ruffles to
knee-breeches, silk hose, and the buckled shoes I had not previously
noticed. Now slowly sinking into a lyre-back chair, he commenced to
eye me intently.

Without his hat he took on an aspect of extreme age which was scarcely
visible before, and I wondered if this unperceived mark of singular
longevity were not one of the sources of my original disquiet. When he
spoke at length, his soft, hollow, and carefully muffled voice not
infrequently quavered; and now and then I had great difficulty in
following him as I listened with a thrill of amazement and
half-disavowed alarm which grew each instant.

“You behold, Sir,” my host began, “a man of very eccentrical habits,
for whose costume no apology need be offered to one with your wit and
inclinations. Reflecting upon better times, I have not scrupled to
ascertain their ways and adopt their dress and manners; an indulgence
which offends none if practised without ostentation. It hath been my
good fortune to retain the rural seat of my ancestors, swallowed
though it was by two towns, first Greenwich, which built up hither
after 1800, then New York, which joined on near 1830. There were many
reasons for the close keeping of this place in my family, and I have
not been remiss in discharging such obligations. The squire who
succeeded to it in 1768 studied sartain arts and made sartain
discoveries, all connected with influences residing in this particular
plot of ground, and eminently desarving of the strongest guarding.
Some curious effects of these arts and discoveries I now purpose to
show you, under the strictest secrecy; and I believe I may rely on my
judgment of men enough to have no distrust of either your interest or
your fidelity.”

He paused, but I could only nod my head. I have said that I was
alarmed, yet to my soul nothing was more deadly than the material
daylight world of New York, and whether this man were a harmless
eccentric or a wielder of dangerous arts I had no choice save to
follow him and slake my sense of wonder on whatever he might have to
offer. So I listened.

“To--my ancestor,” he softly continued, "there appeared to reside some
very remarkable qualities in the will of mankind; qualities having a
little-suspected dominance not only over the acts of one’s self and of
others, but over every variety of force and substance in Nature, and
over many elements and dimensions deemed more universal than Nature
herself. May I say that he flouted the sanctity of things as great as
space and time and that he put to strange uses the rites of sartain
half-breed red Indians once encamped upon this hill? These Indians
showed choler when the place was built, and were plaguey pestilent in
asking to visit the grounds at the full of the moon. For years they
stole over the wall each month when they could, and by stealth
performed sartain acts. Then, in ’68, the new squire catched them at
their doings, and stood still at what he saw. Thereafter he bargained
with them and exchanged the free access of his grounds for the exact
inwardness of what they did; larning that their grandfathers got part
of their custom from red ancestors and part from an old Dutchman in
the time of the States-General. And pox on him, I’m afeared the squire
must have sarved them monstrous bad rum--whether or not by intent--for
a week after he larnt the secret he was the only man living that knew
it. You, Sir, are the first outsider to be told there is a secret, and
split me if I’d have risked tampering that much with--the powers--had
ye not been so hot after bygone things.”

I shuddered as the man grew colloquial--and with the familiar speech
of another day. He went on.

“But you must know, Sir, that what--the squire--got from those mongrel
salvages was but a small part of the larning he came to have. He had
not been at Oxford for nothing, nor talked to no account with an
ancient chymist and astrologer in Paris. He was, in fine, made
sensible that all the world is but the smoke of our intellects; past
the bidding of the vulgar, but by the wise to be puffed out and drawn
in like any cloud of prime Virginia tobacco. What we want, we may make
about us; and what we don’t want, we may sweep away. I won’t say that
all this is wholly true in body, but ’tis sufficient true to furnish a
very pretty spectacle now and then. You, I conceive, would be tickled
by a better sight of sartain other years than your fancy affords you;
so be pleased to hold back any fright at what I design to show. Come
to the window and be quiet.”

                *       *       *       *       *

My host now took my hand to draw me to one of the two windows on the
long side of the malodorous room, and at the first touch of his
ungloved fingers I turned cold. His flesh, though dry and firm, was of
the quality of ice; and I almost shrank away from his pulling. But
again I thought of the emptiness and horror of reality, and boldly
prepared to follow whithersoever I might be led. Once at the window,
the man drew apart the yellow silk curtains and directed my stare into
the blackness outside. For a moment I saw nothing save a myriad of
tiny dancing lights, far, far before me. Then, as if in response to an
insidious motion of my host’s hand, a flash of heat-lightning played
over the scene, and I looked out upon a sea of luxuriant
foliage--foliage unpolluted, and not the sea of roofs to be expected
by any normal mind. On my right the Hudson glittered wickedly, and in
the distance ahead I saw the unhealthy shimmer of a vast salt marsh
constellated with nervous fireflies. The flash died, and an evil smile
illumined the waxy face of the aged necromancer.

“That was before my time--before the new squire’s time. Pray let us
try again.”

I was faint, even fainter than the hateful modernity of that accursed
city had made me.

“Good God!” I whispered; “can you do that for _any time_?” And as he
nodded, and bared the black stumps of what had once been yellow fangs,
I clutched at the curtains to prevent myself from falling. But he
steadied me with that terrible, ice-cold claw, and once more made his
insidious gesture.

Again the lightning flashed--but this time upon a scene not wholly
strange. It was Greenwich, the Greenwich that used to be, with here
and there a roof or row of houses as we see it now, yet with lovely
green lanes and fields and bits of grassy common. The marsh still
glittered beyond, but in the farther distance I saw the steeples of
what was then all of New York; Trinity and St. Paul’s and the Brick
Church dominating their sisters, and a faint haze of wood smoke
hovering over the whole. I breathed hard, but not so much from the
sight itself as from the possibilities my imagination terrifiedly
conjured up.

“Can you--dare you--go _far_?” I spoke with awe, and I think he shared
it for a second, but the evil grin returned.

“_Far?_ What I have seen would blast ye to a mad statue of stone!
Back, back--forward, _forward_--look, ye puling lack-wit!”

And as he snarled the phrase under his breath he gestured anew;
bringing to the sky a flash more blinding than either which had come
before. For full three seconds I could glimpse that pandemoniac sight,
and in those seconds I saw a vista which will ever afterward torment
me in dreams. I saw the heavens verminous with strange flying things,
and beneath them a hellish black city of giant stone terraces with
impious pyramids flung savagely to the moon, and devil-lights burning
from unnumbered windows. And swarming loathsomely on aerial galleries
I saw the yellow, squint-eyed people of that city, robed horribly in
orange and red, and dancing insanely to the pounding of fevered
kettle-drums, the clatter of obscene crotala, and the maniacal moaning
of muted horns whose ceaseless dirges rose and fell undulantly like
the waves of an unhallowed ocean of bitumen.

I saw this vista, I say, and heard as with the mind’s ear the
blasphemous domdaniel of cacophony which companioned it. It was the
shrieking fulfilment of all the horror which that corpse-city had ever
stirred in my soul, and forgetting every injunction to silence I
screamed and screamed and screamed as my nerves gave way and the walls
quivered about me.

Then, as the flash subsided, I saw that my host was trembling too; a
look of shocking fear half-blotting from his face the serpent
distortion of rage which my screams had excited. He tottered, clutched
at the curtains as I had done before, and wriggled his head wildly,
like a hunted animal. God knows he had cause, for as the echoes of my
screaming died away there came another sound so hellishly suggestive
that only numbed emotion kept me sane and conscious. It was the
steady, stealthy creaking of the stairs beyond the locked door, as
with the ascent of a barefoot or skin-shod horde; and at last the
cautious, purposeful rattling of the brass latch that glowed in the
feeble candlelight. The old man clawed and spat at me through the
moldy air, and barked things in his throat as he swayed with the
yellow curtain he clutched.

“The full moon--damn ye--ye . . . ye yelping dog--ye called ’em, and
they’ve come for me! Moccasined feet--dead men--Gad sink ye, ye red
devils, but I poisoned no rum o’ yours--han’t I kept your pox-rotted
magic safe?--ye swilled yourselves sick, curse ye, and ye must needs
blame the squire--let go, you! Unhand that latch--I’ve naught for ye
here----”

At this point three slow and very deliberate raps shook the panels of
the door, and a white foam gathered at the mouth of the frantic
magician. His fright, turning to steely despair, left room for a
resurgence of his rage against me; and he staggered a step toward the
table on whose edge I was steadying myself. The curtains, still
clutched in his right hand as his left clawed out at me, grew taut and
finally crashed down from their lofty fastenings; admitting to the
room a flood of that full moonlight which the brightening of the sky
had presaged. In those greenish beams the candles paled, and a new
semblance of decay spread over the musk-reeking room with its wormy
paneling, sagging floor, battered mantel, rickety furniture, and
ragged draperies. It spread over the old man, too, whether from the
same source or because of his fear and vehemence, and I saw him
shrivel and blacken as he lurched near and strove to rend me with
vulturine talons. Only his eyes stayed whole, and they glared with a
propulsive, dilated incandescence which grew as the face around them
charred and dwindled.

The rapping was now repeated with greater insistence, and this time
bore a hint of metal. The black thing facing me had become only a head
with eyes, impotently trying to wriggle across the sinking floor in my
direction, and occasionally emitting feeble little spits of immortal
malice. Now swift and splintering blows assailed the sickly panels,
and I saw the gleam of a tomahawk as it cleft the rending wood. I did
not move, for I could not; but watched dazedly as the door fell in
pieces to admit a colossal, shapeless influx of inky substance starred
with shining, malevolent eyes. It poured thickly, like a flood of oil
bursting a rotten bulkhead, overturned a chair as it spread, and
finally flowed under the table and across the room to where the
blackened head with the eyes still glared at me. Around that head it
closed, totally swallowing it up, and in another moment it had begun
to recede; bearing away its invisible burden without touching me, and
flowing again out of that black doorway and down the unseen stairs,
which creaked as before, though in reverse order.

Then the floor gave way at last, and I slid gaspingly down into the
nighted chamber below, choking with cobwebs and half-swooning with
terror. The green moon, shining through broken windows, showed me the
hall door half open; and as I rose from the plaster-strewn floor and
twisted myself free from the sagged ceiling, I saw sweep past it an
awful torrent of blackness, with scores of baleful eyes glowing in it.
It was seeking the door to the cellar, and when it found it, it
vanished therein. I now felt the floor of this lower room giving as
that of the upper chamber had done, and once a crashing above had been
followed by the fall past the west window of something which must have
been the cupola. Now liberated for the instant from the wreckage, I
rushed through the hall to the front door; and finding myself unable
to open it, seized a chair and broke a window, climbing frenziedly out
upon the unkempt lawn where moonlight danced over yard-high grass and
weeds. The wall was high, and all the gates were locked; but moving a
pile of boxes in a corner I managed to gain the top and cling to the
great stone urn set there.

About me in my exhaustion I could see only strange walls and windows
and old gambrel roofs. The steep street of my approach was nowhere
visible, and the little I did see succumbed rapidly to a mist that
rolled in from the river despite the glaring moonlight. Suddenly the
urn to which I clung began to tremble, as if sharing my own lethal
dizziness; and in another instant my body was plunging downward to I
knew not what fate.

The man who found me said that I must have crawled a long way despite
my broken bones, for a trail of blood stretched off as far as he dared
look. The gathering rain soon effaced this link with the scene of my
ordeal, and reports could state no more than that I had appeared from
a place unknown, at the entrance of a little black court off Perry
Street.

I never sought to return to those tenebrous labyrinths, nor would I
direct any sane man thither if I could. Of who or what that ancient
creature was, I have no idea; but I repeat that the city is dead and
full of unsuspected horrors. Whither _he_ has gone, I do not know; but
I have gone home to the pure New England lanes up which fragrant
sea-winds sweep at evening.

[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the September 1926 issue
of Weird Tales Magazine.]

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