H.P. Podcraft.com. Cool and by HP Lovecraft.

You asked me to explain why I'm afraid of a draft of cool air, why I shiver more than others upon entering a cold room, and seemed nauseated and repelled, when the chill of evening creeps through the heat of and to a bad odor 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 clanger of a metropolis,

and in the teeming midst of a shabby and commonplace roominghouse

with a prosaic landlady, and two stoleal what 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,

in durable 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 14th 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 40s and fitted with

woodwork and marble who 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 a 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 slatently almost bearded Spanish

woman named Herrera, 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 dane of streetcars in the thoroughfare below proved a serious annoyance.

I had been there about three weeks when the first odd incident occurred.

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