Cool Air by HP Lovecraft

Red by Mike Bannett.

You ask me to explain why I am afraid of a draft 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 odor, and I am the last to deny the impression.

What I will do is to relate the most horrible circumstance I have 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 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, 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,

and durable furnishings and a 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, 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, they 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.

...