The Music OF Erich Zann

The Music OF Erich Zann
by H.P. Lovecraft

I have examined maps of the city with the greatest care, yet have never
again found the Rue d’Auseil. These maps have not been modem maps alone, for I
know that names change. I have, on the contrary, delved deeply into all the
antiquities of the place, and have personally explored every region, of whatever
name, which could possibly answer to the street I knew as the Rue d’Auseil. But
despite all I have done, it remains an humiliating fact that I cannot find the
house, the street, or even the locality, where, during the last months of my
impoverished life as a student of metaphysics at the university, I heard the
music of Erich Zann.
That my memory is broken, I do not wonder; for my health, physical and
mental, was gravely disturbed throughout the period of my residence in the Rue
d’Auseil, and I recall that I took none of my few acquaintances there. But that
I cannot find the place again is both singular and perplexing; for it was within
a half-hour’s walk of the university and was distinguished by peculiarities
which could hardly be forgotten by any one who had been there. I have never met
a person who has seen the Rue d’Auseil.
The Rue d’Auseil lay across a dark river bordered by precipitous brick
blear-windowed warehouses and spanned by a ponderous bridge of dark stone. It
was always shadowy along that river, as if the smoke of neighboring factories
shut out the sun perpetually. The river was also odorous with evil stenches
which I have never smelled elsewhere, and which may some day help me to find it,
since I should recognize them at once. Beyond the bridge were narrow cobbled
streets with rails; and then came the ascent, at first gradual, but incredibly
steep as the Rue d’Auseil was reached.
I have never seen another street as narrow and steep as the Rue d’Auseil. It
was almost a cliff, closed to all vehicles, consisting in several places of
ffights of steps, and ending at the top in a lofty ivied wall. Its paving was
irregular, sometimes stone slabs, sometimes cobblestones, and sometimes bare
earth with struggling greenish-grey vegetation. The houses were tall,
peaked-roofed, incredibly old, and crazily leaning backward, forward, and
sidewise. Occasionally an opposite pair, both leaning forward, almost met across
the street like an arch; and certainly they kept most of the light from the
ground below. There were a few overhead bridges from house to house across the
street.
The inhabitants of that street impressed me peculiarly; At first I thought
it was because they were all silent and reticent; but later decided it was
because they were all very old. I do not 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, always evicted for want of money; until at last I came upon that
tottering house in the Rue d’Auseil kept by the paralytic Blandot. It was the
third house from the top of the street, and by far the tallest of them all.
My rcom was on the fifth story; the only inhabited room there, since the
house was almost empty. On the night I arrived I heard strang music from the
peaked garret overhead, and the next day asked old Blandot about it. He told me
it was an old German viol-player, a strange dumb man who signed his name as
Erich Zann, and who played eve nings in a cheap theater orchestra; adding that
Zann’s desire to play in the night after his return from the theater was the
reason he had chosen this lofty and isolated garret room, whose single gable
window was the only point on the street from which one could look over the
terminating wall at the declivity and panorama beyond.
Thereafter I heard Zann every night, and although he kept me awake, I was
haunted by the weirdness of his music. Knowing little of the art myself, I was
yet certain that none of his harmonies had any relation to music I had heard
before; and concluded that he was a composer of highly original genius. The
longer I listened, the more I was fascinated, until after a week I resolved to
make the old man’s acquaintance.
One night as he was returning from his work, I intercepted Zann in the
hallway and told him that I would like to know him and be with him when he
played. He was a small, lean, bent person, with shabby clothes, blue eyes,
grotesque, satyrlike face, and nearly bald head; and at my first words seemed
both angered and frightened. My obvious friendliness, however, finally melted
him; and he grudgingly motioned to me to follow him up the dark, creaking and
rickety attic stairs. His room, one of only two in the steeply pitched garret,
was on the west side, toward the high wall that formed the upper end of the
street. Its size was very great, and seemed the greater because of its
extraordinary barrenness and neglect. Of furniture there was only a narrow iron
bedstead, a dingy wash-stand, a small table, a large bookcase, an iron
music-rack, and three old-fashioned chairs. Sheets of music were piled in
disorder about the floor. The walls were of bare boards, and had probably never
known plaster; whilst the abundance of dust and cobwebs made the place seem more
deserted than inhabited. Evidently Erich Zann’s world of beauty lay in some far
cosmos of the imagination.
Motioning me to sit down, the dumb man closed the door, turned the large
wooden bolt, and lighted a candle to augment the one he had brought with him. He
now removed his viol from its motheaten covering, and taking it, seated himself
in the least uncomfortable of the chairs. He did not employ the music-rack, but,
offering no choice and playing from memory, enchanted me for over an hour with
strains I had never heard before; strains which must have been of his own
devising. To describe their exact nature is impossible for one unversed in
music. They were a kind of fugue, with recurrent passages of the most
captivating quality, but to me were notable for the absence of any of the weird
notes I had overheard from my room below on other occasions.
Those haunting notes I had remembered, and had often hummed and whistled
inaccurately to myself, so when the player at length laid down his bow I asked
him if he would render some of them. As I began my request the wrinkled
satyrlike face lost the bored placidity it had possessed during the playing, and
seemed to show the same curious mixture of anger and fright which I had noticed
when first I accosted the old man. For a moment I was inclined to use
persuasion, regarding rather lightly the whims of senility; and even tried to
awaken my host’s weirder mood by whistling a few of the strains to which I had
listened the night before. But I did not pursue this course for more than a
moment; for when the dumb musician recognized the whistled air his face grew
suddenly distorted with an expression wholly beyond analysis, and his long,
cold, bony right hand reached out to stop my mouth and silence the crude
imitation. As he did this he further demonstrated his eccentricity by casting a
startled glance toward the lone curtained window, as if fearful of some
intruder—a glance doubly absurd, since the garret stood high and inaccessible
above all the adjacent roofs, this window being the only point on the steep
street, as the concierge had told me, from which one could see over the wall at
the summit.
The old man’s glance brought Blandot’s remark to my mind, and with a certain
capriciousness I felt a wish to look out over the wide and dizzying panorama of
moonlit roofs and city lights beyond the hilltop, which of all the dwellers in
the Rue d’Auseil only this crabbed musician could see. I moved toward the window
and would have drawn aside the nondescript curtains, when with a frightened rage
even greater than before, the dumb lodger was upon me again; this time motioning
with his head toward the door as he nervously strove to drag me thither with
both hands. Now thoroughly disgusted with my host, I ordered him to release me,
and told him I would go at once. His clutch relaxed, and as he saw my disgust
and offense, his own anger seemed to subside. He tightened his relaxing grip,
but this time in a friendly manner, forcing me into a chair; then with an
appearance of wistfulness crossing to the littered table, where he wrote many
words with a pencil, in the labored French of a foreigner.
The note which he finally handed me was an appeal for tolerance and
forgiveness. Zann said that he was old, lonely, and afflicted with strange fears
and nervous disorders connected with his music and with other things. He had
enjoyed my listening to his music, and wished I would come again and not mind
his eccentricities. But he could not play to another his weird harmonies, and
could not bear hearing them from another; nor could he bear having anything in
his room touched by an-other. He had not known until our hallway conversation
that I could overhear his playing in my room, and now asked me if I would
arrange with Blandot to take a lower room where I could not hear him in the
night. He would, he wrote, defray the difference in rent.
As I sat deciphering the execrable French, I felt more lenient toward the
old man. He was a victim of physical and nervous suffering, as was I; and my
metaphysical studies had taught me kindness. In the silence there came a slight
sound from the window—the shutter must have rattled in the night wind, and for
some reason I started almost as violently as did Erich Zann. So when I had
finished reading, I shook my host by the hand, and departed as a friend.
The next day Blandot gave me a more expensive room on the third floor,
between the apartments of an aged money-lender and the room of a respectable
upholsterer. There was no one on the fourth floor.
It was not long before I found that Zann’s eagerness for my company was not
as great as it had seemed while he was persuading me to move down from the fifth
story. He did not ask me to call on him, and when I did call he appeared uneasy
and played listlessly. This was always at night—in the day he slept and would
admit no one. My liking for him did not grow, though the attic room and the
weird music seemed to hold an odd fascination for me. I had a curious desire to
look out of that window, over the wall and down the unseen slope at the
glittering roofs and spires which must lie outspread there. Once I went up to
the garret during theater hours, when Zann was away, but the door was locked.
What I did succeed in doing was to overhear the nocturnal playing of the
dumb old man. At first I would tip-toe up to my old fifth floor, then I grew
bold enough to climb the last creaking staircase to the peaked garret. There in
the narrow hall, outside the bolted door with the covered keyhole, I often heard
sounds which filled me with an indefinable dread—the dread of vague wonder and
brooding mystery. It was not that the sounds were hideous, for they were not;
but that they held vibrations suggesting nothing on this globe of earth, and
that at certain intervals they assumed a symphonic quality which I could hardly
conceive as produced by one player. Certainly, Erich Zann was a genius of wild
power. As the weeks passed, the playing grew wilder, whilst the old musician
acquired an increasing haggardness and furtiveness pitiful to behold. He now
refused to admit me at any time, and shunned me whenever we met on the stairs.
Then one night as I listened at the door, I heard the shrieking viol swell
into a chaotic babel of sound; a pandemonium which would have led me to doubt my
own shaking sanity had there not come from behind that barred portal a piteous
proof that the horror was real—the awful, inarticulate cry which only a mute can
utter, and which rises only in moments of the most terrible fear or anguish. I
knocked repeatedly at the door, but received no response. Afterward I waited in
the black hallway, shivering with cold and fear, till I heard the poor
musician’s feeble effort to rise from the floor by the aid of a chair. Believing
him just conscious after a fainting fit, I renewed my rapping, at the same time
calling out my name reassuringly. I heard Zann stumble to the window and close
both shutter and sash, then stumble to the door, which he falteringly unfastened
to admit me. This time his delight at having me present was real; for his
distorted face gleamed with relief while he clutched at my coat as a child
clutches at its mother’s skirts.
Shaking pathetically, the old man forced me into a chair whilst he sank into
another, beside which his viol and bow lay carelessly on the floor. He sat for
some time inactive, nodding oddly, but having a paradoxical suggestion of
intense and frightened listening. Subsequently he seemed to be satisfied, and
crossing to a chair by the table wrote a brief note, handed it to me, and
returned to the table, where he began to write rapidly and incessantly. The note
implored me in the name of mercy, and for the sake of my own curiosity, to wait
where I was while he prepared a full account in German of all the marvels and
terrors which beset him. I waited, and the dumb man’s pencil flew.
It was perhaps an hour later, while I still waited and while the old
musician’s feverishly written sheets still continued to pile up, that I saw Zann
start as from the hint of a horrible shock. Unmistakably he was looking at the
curtained window and listening shudderingly. Then I half fancied I heard a sound
myself; though it was not a horrible sound, but rather an exquisitely low and
infinitely distant musical note, suggesting a player in one of the neighboring
houses, or in some abode beyond the lofty wall over which I had never been able
to look. Upon Zann the effect was terrible, for, dropping his pencil, suddenly
he rose, seized his viol, and commenced to rend the night with the wildest
playing I had ever heard from his bow save when listening at the barred door.
It would be useless to describe the playing of Erich Zann on that dreadful
night. It was more horrible than anything I had ever overheard, because I could
now see the expression of his face, and could realize that this time the motive
was stark fear. He was trying to make a noise; to ward something off or drown
something out—what, I could not imagine, awesome though I felt it must be. The
playing grew fantastic, dehnous, and hysterical, yet kept to the last the
qualities of supreme genius which I knew this strange old man possessed. I
recognized the air—it was a wild Hungarian dance popular in the theaters, and I
reflected for a moment that this was the first time I had ever heard Zann play
the work of another composer.
Louder and louder, wilder and wilder, mounted the shrieking and whining of
that desperate viol. The player was dripping with an uncanny perspiration and
twisted like a monkey, always looking frantically at the curtained window. In
his frenzied strains I could almost see shadowy satyrs and bacchanals dancing
and whirling insanely through seething abysses of clouds and smoke and
lightning. And then I thought I heard a shriller, steadier note that was not
from the viol; a calm, deliberate, purposeful, mocking note from far away in the
West.
At this juncture the shutter began to rattle in a howling night wind which
had sprung up outside as if in answer to the mad playing within. Zann’s
screaming viol now outdid itself emitting sounds I had never thought a viol
could emit. The shutter rattled more loudly, unfastened, and commenced slamming
against the window. Then the glass broke shiveringly under the persistent
impacts, and the chill wind rushed in, making the candles sputter and rustling
the sheets of paper on the table where Zann had begun to write out his horrible
secret. I looked at Zann, and saw that he was past conscious observation. His
blue eyes were bulging, glassy and sightless, and the frantic playing had become
a blind, mechanical, unrecognizable orgy that no pen could even suggest.
A sudden gust, stronger than the others, caught up the manuscript and bore
it toward the window. I followed the flying sheets in desperation, but they were
gone before I reached the demolished panes. Then I remembered my old wish to
gaze from this window, the only window in the Rue d’Auseil from which one might
see the slope beyond the wall, and the city outspread beneath. It was very dark,
but the city’s lights always burned, and I expected to see them there amidst the
rain and wind. Yet when I looked from that highest of all gable windows, looked
while the candles sputtered and the insane viol howled with the night-wind, I
saw no city spread below, and no friendly lights gleamed from remembered
streets, but only the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space alive
with motion and music, and having no semblance of anything on earth. And as I
stood there looking in terror, the wind blew out both the candles in that
ancient peaked garret, leaving me in savage and impenetrable darkness with chaos
and pandemonium before me, and the demon madness of that night-baying viol
behind me.
I staggered back in the dark, without the means of striking a light,
crashing against the table, overturning a chair, and finally groping my way to
the place where the blackness screamed with shocking music. To save myself and
Erich Zann I could at least try, whatever the powers opposed to me. Once I
thought some chill thing brushed me, and I screamed, but my scream could not be
heard above that hideous viol. Suddenly out of the blackness the madly sawing
bow struck me, and I knew I was close to the player. I felt ahead, touched the
back of Zann’s chair, and then found and shook his shoulder in an effort to
bring him to his senses.
He did not respond, and still the viol shrieked on without slackening. I
moved my hand to his head, whose mechanical nodding I was able to stop, and
shouted in his ear that we must both flee from the unknown things of the night.
But he neither answered me nor abated the frenzy of his unutterable music, while
all through the garret strange currents of wind seemed to dance in the darkness
and babel. When my hand touched his ear I shuddered, though I knew not why—knew
not why till I felt the still face; the ice-cold, stiffened, unbreathing face
whose glassy eyes bulged uselessly into the void. And then, by some miracle,
finding the door and the large wooden bolt, I plunged wildly away from that
glassy-eyed thing in the dark, and from the ghoulish howling of that accursed
viol whose fury increased even as I plunged.
Leaping, floating, flying down those endless stairs through the dark house;
racing mindlessly out into the narrow, steep, and ancient street of steps and
tottering houses; clattering down steps and over cobbles to the lower streets
and the putrid canyon-walled river; panting across the great dark bridge to the
broader, healthier streets and boulevards we know; all these are terrible
impressions that linger with me. And I recall that there was no wind, and that
the moon was out, and that all the lights of the city twinkled.
Despite my most careful searches and investigations, I have never since been
able to find the Rue d’Auseil. But I am not wholly sorry; either for this or for
the loss in undreamable abysses of the closely-written sheets which alone could
have explained the music of Erich Zann.