Cool Air

by H.P. Lovecraft

You ask me to explain why I am afraid of cool air; why I shiver more than others when I enter a cold room, and seem ill when the evening chill wins against a warm autumn day. Some say I react to cold as others do to a bad smell and I agree. What I will do is tell you the most horrible thing I ever saw and let you decide if this explains my strange habit.

It is a mistake to imagine that horror is only linked to darkness, silence and being alone. I found it in the bright light of mid-afternoon, in the noise of a city and in a crowded and dirty guesthouse with two strong men by my side. In the spring of 1923, I had found some boring and unprofitable work on a magazine in New York. As I could not pay much rent, I began moving from one cheap room to another, trying to get cleanliness, enough furniture and a very reasonable price. But after a time I found a house which was better than the others.

The place was an old four-storey house which was once home to a rich and fashionable family. In the tall, large rooms, there was a depressing smell of food, but the floors were clean and the hot water not too often cold or turned off, and so it was good enough till I had money for something better. The landlady, a lazy, almost bearded Spanish woman named Herrero, did not annoy me with gossip, and the other tenants were as quiet as I could hope for. Only the noise of the traffic below was problematic.

I had been there about three weeks when the first odd incident happened. One evening at about eight I heard a crash on the floor and became aware of the strong smell of ammonia. Looking up, I saw that the ceiling was wet. I rushed downstairs to tell the landlady, who persuaded me she could quickly put the trouble right.

"Doctor Muñoz," she cried as she hurried upstairs ahead of me, "has dropped his chemicals. He's a very sick man and getting sicker all the time, but he won't have another doctor to help him. He's very odd and he treats his sickness in strange ways – all day he takes funny-smelling baths and he can't get excited or warm. He does all his own housework too. His little room is full of bottles and machines, but he doesn't practise as a doctor. However, he was very well-known once – my father in Barcelona has even heard of him. Only recently he fixed a workman's arm when he injured it very seriously and the man said afterwards he'd never felt so good. Dr. Muñoz doesn't go out, except onto the roof, and my boy, Esteban, brings him his food, laundry, medicines and chemicals. My God, the ammonia that man uses to keep himself cool!"

Mrs Herrero disappeared up the stairs to the fourth floor after her breathless description of my neighbour and I returned to my room. The ammonia stopped and as I cleaned up what had spilled and opened the window for air, I heard the landlady's heavy footsteps above me. I had never heard Dr. Muñoz, except for the sounds of some machine because his step was soft and gentle. I wondered for a moment what this man's strange illness might be and whether his obstinate refusal of outside help was only eccentricity. There's often great sadness when an eminent person has come down in the world.

I'd never have got to know Dr. Muñoz, if I had not had a heart attack as I sat writing in my room. Doctors had told me of the danger and I knew there was no time to lose. So, remembering what the landlady said about the sick doctor helping the injured workman, I pulled myself upstairs and knocked at the door above mine. My knock was answered by a curious voice asking my name and business. Then the door opened.

There was a rush of cool air and, though the day was one of the hottest of late June, I shivered as I walked into a large apartment with rich and tasteful decoration. I now saw that the hall room above mine – the 'little room' of bottles and machines which Mrs. Herrero had mentioned – was the doctor's laboratory and that his main living area was in a spacious room next to it with a large bathroom. Dr. Muñoz was, most certainly, a man with excellent taste.

The man before me was short but smartly clothed. He had a sensitive face with a short iron-grey beard, thick hair above a high forehead; and the whole picture was one of great intelligence.

Nevertheless, as I saw Dr. Muñoz in that cool air, I felt a horror which his appearance could not explain. Only his white complexion and coldness of touch could explain this, although they were natural in an invalid. It might have been the extreme cold that worried me because it was abnormal on a hot day and the abnormal always causes distrust and fear.

But my horror was soon forgotten. The strange doctor's great skill was immediately obvious, despite the icy coldness of his bloodless hands. He clearly understood my needs at once, all the while reassuring me that he was death's worst enemy and had spent most of his money and lost all his friends in a lifetime of experimenting against it. There was something fanatical in him, as his conversation made clear. Evidently, he did not get much opportunity to mix with intelligent and educated men in this environment.

His voice, if strange, was at least soothing and I did not even notice his breathing as he spoke. He tried to distract me from my heart attack by speaking about his theories and experiments. I remember him tactfully telling me that my weak heart was not a concern. Self-discipline was stronger than organic life, so that if a body was originally healthy, it could live on despite the most serious defects or even the failure of specific organs. He might, he jokingly said, one day teach me to live without any heart at all! He said he suffered from illnesses so complicated that he needed a very exact atmosphere which included constant cold. Any rise in temperature might kill him; and the coldness of his rooms – no more than ten degrees centigrade – was maintained by a system of ammonia cooling by the engine I had often heard in my own room.

Feeling much better in a marvellously short while after my heart attack, I left the place a keen supporter of the gifted doctor. I was almost cured of my disease. After that I paid him frequent calls, always in my coat, listening while he told me about his secret research and examining the unconventional ancient books on his shelves. I was touched by his account of the aged Dr. Torres of Valencia, who had shared his earlier experiments and nursed him through his great illness of eighteen years before, which caused his present disorders. The old and respected doctor saved his colleague and then, almost immediately, died himself. Perhaps the effort had been too great, as Dr. Muñoz made it whisperingly clear – though giving no details – that the treatments had been extraordinary, involving processes not welcomed by conservative doctors.

As the weeks passed, I noticed with sadness that my new friend was slowly but unmistakably becoming more and more ill, as Mrs. Herrero had suggested. His complexion became paler, his conversation harder to follow, his movements were less coordinated, and his mind showed less initiative. He was certainly aware of this sad change and, little by little, he became unhappier.

He developed strange habits such as a liking for exotic spices. At the same time, his need for cold air increased and, with my help, he added new ammonia pipes to his room till he could keep the temperature as low as zero degrees and, finally, even minus two or three; the bathroom and laboratory, of course, were not so cold or the water would have frozen. The tenant in the next room to his complained of the icy air from around the door, so I helped him to put up heavy curtains. A kind of growing horror seemed to control him. He talked of death constantly, but laughed when people gently suggested he should make funeral arrangements.

All in all, although he became an uncomfortable companion, I could not leave him to the strangers around him and was careful to clean his room each day, clothed in a heavy coat which I bought especially for his room. I also did much of his shopping and was shocked at some of the chemicals he ordered from laboratories.

An increasing and unexplained panic seemed to grow around his apartment. The whole house, as I have said, had a stale smell but in his room it was worse — in spite of all the spices and the strong chemicals in the baths which he insisted on taking all the time and without any help. I noticed that the smell must be connected with his illness and was worried when I thought about what that might be.

Mrs. Herrero left him to me, not even letting her son Esteban run errands for him anymore. When I suggested other doctors, the sufferer would be furious. He was evidently afraid of the physical effect of violent emotion, but he refused to stay in his bed. His self-discipline was like iron, so that he seemed to laugh at that ancient enemy, death, which was pulling at him. In the end, he almost stopped eating and only mental power seemed to keep him from death.

He got into the habit of writing long documents, which he carefully asked me to give after his death to certain people – including a famous French doctor, who was generally thought dead. As it happened, I burnt all these papers unopened. His appearance and voice were becoming frightening.

Then, in the middle of October, the horror of horrors came with astonishing suddenness. One night about eleven, the refrigerating machine broke down so that within three hours the process of ammonia cooling became impossible. Dr. Muñoz called me by banging on the floor and I tried to repair the machine while my host swore. My amateur efforts, however, were useless and when I had brought in a mechanic from a neighbouring all-night garage, we learnt that nothing could be done till morning, when a new piece of equipment could be bought.

The coolness of the apartment was now falling and at about 5 a.m. the doctor went to the bathroom, telling me to keep him supplied with all the ice I could get at all-night shops and cafés. As I returned from my trips and put the ice in front of the closed bathroom door, I could hear a thick voice weakly calling out 'More, more!' At last, a warm day began and the shops opened one by one. I asked Esteban to help with fetching ice while I got the spare part, or to buy the part while I continued with the ice, but he absolutely refused.

Finally I hired a poor man I met on the corner to keep the patient supplied with ice from a little shop and tried to find a part for the pump and the workmen to install it. The search seemed like it would never end and I got almost as angry as the doctor when I saw the hours passing in a breathless, foodless rush from place to place by subway, car and train. About midday, I found a suitable shop far away and at about 1:30, I arrived at my guest house with the necessary parts and two intelligent mechanics. I had done all I could and hoped I was in time.

Black terror, however, arrived before me. The house was in chaos. Terrible things were happening and tenants looked frightened as they caught the smell from beneath the doctor's closed door. The poor man I had hired, it seems, had run away screaming and mad-eyed not long after his second delivery of ice. He could not, of course, have locked the door behind him, yet it was now locked from the inside. There was no sound.

Briefly consulting Mrs. Herrero and the workmen despite my fear, I advised them to break down the door, but the landlady found a way to turn the key from the outside with some wire. We had previously opened the doors of all the other rooms on that hall and thrown open all the windows. With our noses protected by handkerchiefs, we now entered the doctor's room, warm with the sun of early afternoon.

A dark, wet trail led from the open bathroom door to the hall and from there to the desk, where a little pool of liquid had gathered. Something was written there in pencil in awful, blind handwriting on a piece of paper. Then the trail led to the sofa and ended.

What was, or had been, on the sofa I cannot and dare not say here. But this is what I found on the paper before I burnt it; what I saw as the landlady and two mechanics rushed frantically from that hellish place to tell their incoherent stories at the nearest police station. The words seemed incredible in that yellow sunlight, with the noise of cars and trucks coming from the crowded street, yet I believed them then. Whether I believe them now, I honestly do not know. There are things it is better not to guess, and all that I can say is that I hate the smell of ammonia, and grow ill at unusually cool air.

"The end," ran that writing, "is here."

"No more ice – the man looked and ran away. Warmer every minute, and the tissues can't last. I imagine you know – what I said about self-discipline and the nerves and the body after the organs stopped working. It was a good theory but couldn't keep going forever. There was a gradual decline I had not expected. Dr. Torres knew what he had to do when he followed the instructions in my letter to him and nursed me back. But the organs never would work again. It had to be done my way – preservation – because, you see, I died that time eighteen years ago."