The Music of Erich Zann - I Monster

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 anyone 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 neighbouring

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 recognise 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

flights 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 room was on the fifth story; the only inhabited room there, since the house

was almost empty. On the night I arrived I heard strange 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 evenings in a cheap theatre orchestra; adding that Zann’s

desire to play in the night after his return from the theatre 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,

satyr-like 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 bareness and neglect. Of furniture there was only a narrow iron

bedstead, a dingy washstand, 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 moth-eaten 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

satyr-like face lost the bored placidity it had possessed during the playing,

and seemed to shew 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 recognised 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 hill-top, 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 offence 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 laboured

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 another. 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 theatre 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 tiptoe 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 neighbouring

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 realise 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, delirious, and hysterical, yet kept to the last

the qualities of supreme genius which I knew this strange old man possessed.

I recognised the air—it was a wild Hungarian dance popular in the theatres,

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, unrecognisable 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 gleaming from

remembered streets, but only the blackness of space illimitable;

unimagined space alive with motion and music, and having no semblance to

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 daemon

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 of 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