THE ROAD TO MADNESSTHE ROAD TO MADNESS: THE TRANSITION OF H. P. LOVECRAFT
by H. P. Lovecraft




Publication date: October 1996 in trade paperback
Compilation copyright  1996 by Arkham House Publishers, Inc. 

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Cool Air
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 teaming 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. 
"Doctair Muoz," she cried as she rushed upstairs ahead of me, "he have speel 
hees chemicals. He ees too seeck for doctair heemself--seecker and seecker all 
the time--but he weel not have no othair for help. He ees vairy queer in hees 
seeckness--all day he take funnee-smelling baths, and he cannot get excite or 
warm. All hees own housework he do--hees leetle room are full of bottles and 
machines, and he do not work as doctair. But he was great once--my fathair in 
Barcelona have hear of heem--and only joost now he feex a arm of the plumber 
that get hurt of sudden. He nevair go out, only on roof, and my boy Esteban he 
breeng heem hees food and laundry and mediceens and chemicals. My Gawd, the 
sal-ammoniac that man use for keep heem cool!" 
Mrs. Herrero disappeared up the staircase to the fourth floor, and I returned to 
my room. The ammonia ceased to drip, and as I cleaned up what had spilled and 
opened the window for air, I heard the landlady's heavy footsteps above me. Dr. 
Muoz I had never heard, save for certain sounds as of some gasoline-driven 
mechanism; since his step was soft and gentle. I wondered for a moment what the 
strange affliction of this man might be, and whether his obstinate refusal of 
outside aid were not the result of a rather baseless eccentricity. There is, I 
reflected tritely, an infinite deal of pathos in the state of an eminent person 
who has come down in the world. 
I might never have known Dr. Muoz had it not been for the heart attack that 
suddenly seized me one forenoon as I sat writing in my room. Physicians had told 
me of the danger of those spells, and I knew there was no time to be lost; so 
remembering what the landlady had said about the invalid's help of the injured 
workman, I dragged myself upstairs and knocked feebly at the door above mine. My 
knock was answered in good English by a curious voice some distance to the 
right, asking my name and business; and these things being stated, there came an 
opening of the door next to the one I had sought. 
A rush of cool air greeted me; and though the day was one of the hottest of late 
June, I shivered as I crossed the threshold into a large apartment whose rich 
and tasteful decoration surprised me in this nest of squalor and seediness. A 
folding couch now filled its diurnal role of sofa, and the mahogany furniture, 
sumptuous hangings, old paintings, and mellow bookshelves all bespoke a 
gentleman's study rather than a boarding-house bedroom. I now saw that the hall 
room above mine--the "leetle room" of bottles and machines which Mrs. Herrero 
had mentioned--was merely the laboratory of the doctor; and that his main living 
quarters lay in the spacious adjoining room whose convenient alcoves and large 
contiguous bathroom permitted him to hide all dressers and obtrusively 
utilitarian devices. Dr. Muoz, most certainly, was a man of birth, cultivation, 
and discrimination. 
The figure before me was short but exquisitely proportioned, and clad in 
somewhat formal dress of perfect cut and fit. A high-bred face of masterful 
though not arrogant expression was adorned by a short iron-grey full beard, and 
an old-fashioned pince-nez shielded the full, dark eyes and surmounted an 
aquiline nose which gave a Moorish touch to a physiognomy otherwise dominantly 
Celtiberian. Thick, well-trimmed hair that argued the punctual calls of a barber 
was parted gracefully above a high forehead; and the whole picture was one of 
striking intelligence and superior blood and breeding. 
Nevertheless, as I saw Dr. Muoz in that blast of cool air, I felt a repugnance 
which nothing in his aspect could justify. Only his lividly inclined complexion 
and coldness of touch could have afforded a physical basis for this feeling, and 
even these things should have been excusable considering the man's known 
invalidism. It might, too, have been the singular cold that alienated me; for 
such chilliness was abnormal on so hot a day, and the abnormal always excites 
aversion, distrust, and fear. 
But repugnance was soon forgotten in admiration, for the strange physician's 
extreme skill at once became manifest despite the ice-coldness and shakiness of 
his bloodless-looking hands. He clearly understood my needs at a glance, and 
ministered to them with a master's deftness; the while reassuring me in a finely 
modulated though oddly hollow and timbreless voice that he was the bitterest of 
sworn enemies to death, and had sunk his fortune and lost all his friends in a 
lifetime of bizarre experiment devoted to its bafflement and extirpation. 
Something of the benevolent fanatic seemed to reside in him, and he rambled on 
almost garrulously as he sounded my chest and mixed a suitable draught of drugs 
fetched from the smaller laboratory room. Evidently he found the society of a 
well-born man a rare novelty in this dingy environment, and was moved to 
unaccustomed speech as memories of better days surged over him. 
His voice, if queer, was at least soothing; and I could not even perceive that 
he breathed as the fluent sentences rolled urbanely out. He sought to distract 
my mind from my own seizure by speaking of his theories and experiments; and I 
remember his tactfully consoling me about my weak heart by insisting that will 
and consciousness are stronger than organic life itself, so that if a bodily 
frame be but originally healthy and carefully preserved, it may through a 
scientific enhancement of these qualities retain a kind of nervous animation 
despite the most serious impairments, defects, or even absences in the battery 
of specific organs. He might, he half jestingly said, some day teach me to 
live--or at least to possess some kind of conscious existence--without any heart 
at all! For his part, he was afflicted with a complication of maladies requiring 
a very exact regimen which included constant cold. Any marked rise in 
temperature might, if prolonged, affect him fatally; and the frigidity of his 
habitation--some 55 or 56 degrees Fahrenheit--was maintained by an absorption 
system of ammonia cooling, the gasoline engine of whose pumps I had often heard 
in my own room below. 
Relieved of my seizure in a marvellously short while, I left the shivery place a 
disciple and devotee of the gifted recluse. After that I paid him frequent 
overcoated calls; listening while he told of secret researches and almost 
ghastly results, and trembling a bit when I examined the unconventional and 
astonishingly ancient volumes on his shelves. I was eventually, I may add, 
almost cured of my disease for all time by his skillful ministrations. It seems 
that he did not scorn the incantations of the mediaevalists, since he believed 
these cryptic formulae to contain rare psychological stimuli which might 
conceivably have singular effects on the substance of a nervous system from 
which organic pulsations had fled. I was touched by his account of the aged Dr. 
Torres of Valencia, who had shared his earlier experiments and nursed him 
through the great illness of eighteen years before, whence his present disorders 
proceeded. No sooner had the venerable practitioner saved his colleague than he 
himself succumbed to the grim enemy he had fought. Perhaps the strain had been 
too great; for Dr. Muoz made it whisperingly clear--though not in detail--that 
the methods of healing had been most extraordinary, involving scenes and 
processes not welcomed by elderly and conservative Galens. 
As the weeks passed, I observed with regret that my new friend was indeed slowly 
but unmistakably losing ground physically, as Mrs. Herrero had suggested. The 
livid aspect of his countenance was intensified, his voice became more hollow 
and indistinct, his muscular motions were less perfectly coordinated, and his 
mind and will displayed less resilience and initiative. Of this sad change he 
seemed by no means unaware, and little by little his expression and conversation 
both took on a gruesome irony which restored in me something of the subtle 
repulsion I had originally felt. 
He developed strange caprices, acquiring a fondness for exotic spices and 
Egyptian incense till his room smelled like a vault of a sepulchred Pharaoh in 
the Valley of Kings. At the same time his demands for cold air increased, and 
with my aid he amplified the ammonia piping of his room and modified the pumps 
and feed of his refrigerating machine till he could keep the temperature as low 
as 34 degrees or 40 degrees, and finally even 28 degrees; the bathroom and 
laboratory, of course, being less chilled, in order that water might not freeze, 
and that chemical processes might not be impeded. The tenant adjoining him 
complained of the icy air from around the connecting door, so I helped him fit 
heavy hangings to obviate the difficulty. A kind of growing horror, of outre and 
morbid cast, seemed to possess him. He talked of death incessantly, but laughed 
hollowly when such things as burial or funeral arrangements were gently 
suggested. 
All in all, he became a disconcerting and even gruesome companion; yet in my 
gratitude for his healing I could not well abandon him to the strangers around 
him, and was careful to dust his room and attend to his needs each day, muffled 
in a heavy ulster which I bought especially for the purpose. I likewise did much 
of his shopping, and gasped in bafflement at some of the chemicals he ordered 
from druggists and laboratory supply houses. 
An increasing and unexplained atmosphere of panic seemed to rise around his 
apartment. The whole house, as I have said, had a musty odour; but the smell in 
his room was worse--and in spite of all the spices and incense, and the pungent 
chemicals of the now incessant baths which he insisted on taking unaided. I 
perceived that it must be connected with his ailment, and shuddered when I 
reflected on what that ailment might be. Mrs. Herrero crossed herself when she 
looked at him, and gave him up unreservedly to me; not even letting her son 
Esteban continue to run errands for him. When I suggested other physicians, the 
sufferer would fly into as much of a rage as he seemed to dare to entertain. He 
evidently feared the physical effect of violent emotion, yet his will and 
driving force waxed rather than waned, and he refused to be confined to his bed. 
The lassitude of his earlier ill days gave place to a return of his fiery 
purpose, so that he seemed about to hurl defiance at the death-daemon even as 
that ancient enemy seized him. The pretence of eating, always curiously like a 
formality with him, he virtually abandoned; and mental power alone appeared to 
keep him from total collapse. 
He acquired a habit of writing long documents of some sort, which he carefully 
sealed and filled with injunctions that I transmit them after his death to 
certain persons whom he named--for the most part lettered East Indians, but 
including a once celebrated French physician now generally thought dead, and 
about whom the most inconceivable things had been whispered. As it happened, I 
burned all these papers undelivered and unopened. His aspect and voice became 
utterly frightful, and his presence almost unbearable. One September day an 
unexpected glimpse of him induced an epileptic fit in a man who had come to 
repair his electric desk lamp; a fit for which he prescribed effectively whilst 
keeping himself well out of sight. That man, oddly enough, had been through the 
terrors of the Great War without having incurred any fright so thorough. 
Then, in the middle of October, the horror of horrors came with stupefying 
suddenness. One night about eleven the pump of the refrigerating machine broke 
down, so that within three hours the process of ammonia cooling became 
impossible. Dr. Muoz summoned me by thumping on the floor, and I worked 
desperately to repair the injury while my host cursed in a tone whose lifeless, 
rattling hollowness surpassed description. My amateur efforts, however, proved 
of no use; and when I had brought in a mechanic from a neighbouring all-night 
garage, we learned that nothing could be done till morning, when a new piston 
would have to be obtained. The moribund hermit's rage and fear, swelling to 
grotesque proportions, seemed likely to shatter what remained of his failing 
physique, and once a spasm caused him to clap his hands to his eyes and rush 
into the bathroom. He groped his way out with face tightly bandaged, and I never 
saw his eyes again. 
The frigidity of the apartment was now sensibly diminishing, and at about 5 a.m. 
the doctor retired to the bathroom, commanding me to keep him supplied with all 
the ice I could obtain at all-night drug stores and cafeterias. As I would 
return from my sometimes discouraging trips and lay my spoils before the closed 
bathroom door, I could hear a restless splashing within, and a thick voice 
croaking out the order for "More--more!" At length a warm day broke, and the 
shops opened one by one. I asked Esteban either to help with the ice-fetching 
whilst I obtained the pump piston, or to order the piston while I continued with 
the ice; but instructed by his mother, he absolutely refused. 
Finally I hired a seedy-looking loafer whom I encountered on the corner of 
Eighth Avenue to keep the patient supplied with ice from a little shop where I 
introduced him, and applied myself diligently to the task of finding a pump 
piston and engaging workmen competent to install it. The task seemed 
interminable, and I raged almost as violently as the hermit when I saw the hours 
slipping by in a breathless, foodless round of vain telephoning, and a hectic 
quest from place to place, hither and thither by subway and surface car. About 
noon I encountered a suitable supply house far downtown, and at approximately 
1:30 p.m. arrived at my boarding-place with the necessary paraphernalia and two 
sturdy and intelligent mechanics. I had done all I could, and hoped I was in 
time. 
Black terror, however, had preceded me. The house was in utter turmoil, and 
above the chatter of awed voices I heard a man praying in a deep basso. Fiendish 
things were in the air, and lodgers told over the beads of their rosaries as 
they caught the odour from beneath the doctor's closed door. The lounger I had 
hired, it seems, had fled screaming and mad-eyed not long after his second 
delivery of ice; perhaps as a result of excessive curiosity. He could not, of 
course, have locked the door behind him; yet it was now fastened, presumably 
from the inside. There was no sound within save a nameless sort of slow, thick 
dripping. 
Briefly consulting with Mrs. Herrero and the workmen despite a fear that gnawed 
my inmost soul, I advised the breaking down of the door; but the landlady found 
a way to turn the key from the outside with some wire device. We had previously 
opened the doors of all the other rooms on that hall, and flung all the windows 
to the very top. Now, noses protected by handkerchiefs, we tremblingly invaded 
the accursed south room which blazed with the warm sun of early afternoon. 
A kind of dark, slimy trail led from the open bathroom door to the hall door, 
and thence to the desk, where a terrible little pool had accumulated. Something 
was scrawled there in pencil in an awful, blind hand on a piece of paper 
hideously smeared as though by the very claws that traced the hurried last 
words. Then the trail led to the couch and ended unutterably. 
What was, or had been, on the couch I cannot and dare not say here. But this is 
what I shiveringly puzzled out on the stickily smeared paper before I drew a 
match and burned it to a crisp; what I puzzled out in terror as the landlady and 
two mechanics rushed frantically from that hellish place to babble their 
incoherent stories at the nearest police station. The nauseous words seemed 
well-nigh incredible in that yellow sunlight, with the clatter of cars and motor 
trucks ascending clamorously from crowded Fourteenth Street, yet I confess that 
I believed them then. Whether I believe them now I honestly do not know. There 
are things about which it is better not to speculate, and all that I can say is 
that I hate the smell of ammonia, and grow faint at a draught of unusually cool 
air. 
"The end," ran that noisome scrawl, "is here. No more ice--the man looked and 
ran away. Warmer every minute, and the tissues can't last. I fancy you 
know--what I said about the will and the nerves and the preserved body after the 
organs ceased to work. It was good theory, but couldn't keep up indefinitely. 
There was a gradual deterioration I had not foreseen. Dr. Torres knew, but the 
shock killed him. He couldn't stand what he had to do--he had to get me in a 
strange, dark place when he minded my letter and nursed me back. And the organs 
never would work again. It had to be done my way--preservation--for you see I 
died that time eighteen years ago." 


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