The Color out of Space and Other Mystery Stories / «Цвет из иных миров» и другие мистические истории. Говард Филлипс Лавкрафт
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of the animal and realized that it must have come from a great distance and was tired. Suddenly the spell broke. My right hand threw the piece of limestone toward that point in the darkness from which the heavy breathing came. I must have missed because I heard the thing jump at a distance away, where it seemed to pause.
Then I threw my second stone, this time quite successfully because I listened with joy as the creature fell down and never moved again. Relieved, I leaned against the wall. Then I heard heavy breathing in gasps and realized that I had just wounded the creature. I had no wish to examine the thing. I did not come near the body, nor did I throw more stones at it. Instead, I ran at full speed in what was, as far as I could guess, the direction from which I had come. Suddenly, I heard a sound, and then regular sounds. This time there was no doubt. It was the guide. And then I shouted, yelled, screamed with joy as I saw the faint light of a torch. I ran to meet him, and before I knew it, I was on the ground at the feet of the guide, babbling, telling my terrible story, and at the same time thanking God and my savior. Some time later I became my normal self. The guide had noticed my absence when the group returned to the entrance of the cave and started checking all the by-passages, looking for me for about four hours.
By the time he had told me this, I, brave in his company, told him about the strange beast which I had wounded. It was only a short distance back in the darkness, and I suggested that we go and see what kind of creature my victim was. So we went deeper into the cave, to the scene of my terrible experience. Soon we found a white object on the floor – an object even whiter than the limestone itself. The monster appeared to be a large ape. Its hair was snow-white, mostly on the head, where it was so long that it fell over the shoulders. The face was turned away from us, as the creature lay almost face down. The limbs looked strange, which explained why the beast used sometimes all four, and sometimes two for its movement. There were long claws on the tips of its fingers or toes. The hands or feet were crooked, probably due to living in the cave for so long. There seemed to be no tail.
The breathing had now become very feeble, and the guide had taken out his gun to shoot the creature, when a sudden sound made by the beast made him drop the weapon. The sound was difficult to describe. It was not like the normal note of any known species, and I wondered if this was the result of living in complete silence for so long. The sound continued, and then, all of a sudden, a spasm of energy seemed to pass through the body of the beast. With a jerk, the white body rolled over and turned its face to us. For a moment, I was so shocked that I did not see anything else except the eyes. They were black, deep black. As I looked more closely, I saw that they were set in a face differently than those of the average ape. The nose was quite big too. As we looked at it, the thick lips opened, and several sounds came out, after which the thing relaxed in death.
The guide was trembling so violently that the torch light shook, casting weird shadows[20] on the walls around us. I did not move, but stood still, my horrified eyes fixed on the floor.
Eventually, fear left, and then there was only wonder and awe because the sounds made by that figure that lay dead on the limestone had told us the terrible truth. The creature I had killed, the strange beast of the cave was, or had once been, a man!
The music of Erich Zann
Many times I looked carefully at the maps of the city, but I could never find the Rue d’Auseil on them again. I looked at the modern maps and also at the old maps because I know that street names change. I have personally explored the place – every street, every lane, with any name, which could possibly be the street I knew as the Rue d’Auseil. But, sadly, I still haven’t found the house, the street, or even the district, where during the last months of my life as a student at the university, I heard the music of Erich Zann.
My memory might be broken, I have to say, because back then, during my stay in the Rue d’Auseil, my health – both physical and mental – was quite poor. I remember that I never invited any of my friends there. But the fact that I cannot find the place again is very strange and puzzling because it was within a short walk of the university. There also were certain specific landmarks which could hardly be forgotten by anyone who had been there. Yet I have never met a person who has seen the Rue d’Auseil.
The Rue d’Auseil went across a dark river bordered by warehouses. There was a bridge of dark stone, and it was always shadowy along that river as if the smoke of the factories shut out the sun. The river had an evil stench which I have never smelled anywhere else, and which may some day help me to find it. I am sure I will recognize it at once. Beyond the bridge there were narrow cobbled streets which went up quite steeply right before the Rue d’Auseil.
I have never seen another street as narrow and steep as the Rue d’Auseil. It was closed to all transport because in several places it consisted of steps and ended at the top in a wall. It was mostly cobbled, but sometimes there was just bare earth. The houses were tall, very old, and crazily leaning in all directions. Sometimes two houses on the opposite sides lent forward almost like an arch. There also were a few overhead bridges from house to house across the street.
The people who lived on that street impressed me very much. At first I thought it was because they were all silent and shy, but later I decided it was because they were all very old. I don’t know how I came to live on such a street, but I was not myself when I moved there. I had been living in many poor places because I never had much money until at last I found that ancient house in the Rue d’Auseil, kept by the paralytic Blandot. It was the third house from the top of the street and the tallest of them all.
My room was on the fifth floor – the only inhabited room there because the house was almost empty. On the night I arrived I heard strange music from the attic above, and the next day asked old Blandot about it. He told me it was an old German viol-player, a strange dumb[21] man who wrote his name as Erich Zann, and who played evenings in a cheap theatre orchestra. Blandot also added that Zann’s wish to play in the night after returning from the theatre was the reason he had chosen this isolated attic room whose single window was the only point on the street from which a person could look over the dead-end wall at the panorama beyond.
After that, I heard Zann every night. He kept me awake, but I was fascinated by the strangeness of his music. I knew little of this art myself, but I was sure that his music had no relation to music I had heard before. I thought he was a highly original composer, a genius. The longer I listened, the more I was fascinated. Then, one week later, I finally decided to meet with the old man.
One night, as Zann was returning from his work, I stopped him in the hallway and told him that I would like to know him and be with him while he played. He was a small, thin, bent person. He had shabby clothes and an ugly face, and his head was almost bald. At first, my words made him angry and frightened. But then my friendliness softened him, and he grudgingly showed to me to follow him up the dark and creaking attic stairs.
His room was on the west side of the attic. Its only curtained window was facing the high wall at the end of the street. The room was big in size, but mostly because it was almost empty. Of furniture there was only a narrow iron bed, a dirty washstand, a small table, a large bookcase, a music-rack, and three old chairs. Sheets of music were lying everywhere on the floor. The walls were bare, and dust and cobwebs made the place seem uninhabited. Clearly, Erich Zann’s world of beauty lay in some far cosmos of his imagination.
Showing me to sit down, the dumb man closed the door, locked it, and lighted a candle. He took his viol and sat in one of the chairs. He did not use the music-rack, but played from memory and enchanted me for more than an hour with tunes I had never heard before. It is impossible to describe them. But in them I didn’t hear any of the queer notes I had heard from my room below on other nights.
I had remembered those weird notes, and I had often hummed and whistled them to myself. So when the old man put down his bow, I asked him if he could play some of them. As I began saying that, the wrinkled face of the musician started showing the same strange mixture of anger and fright which I had noticed when I first met him. I was insistent and even tried to whistle a few of the tunes which I had listened to the night before. But in a moment, when the dumb musician recognized the notes I whistled, his face suddenly changed, and his
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