歌手:I Monster
专辑:《A Dollop of HP》

I have examined maps of the city with the greatest care
Yet have never again found the Rue d’Auseil.
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
But that I cannot find the place again
Is both singular and perplexing

I have never met a person who has seen the Rue d’Auseil
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
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 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 they 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

I 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
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

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

I would climb the last creaking staircase
To the peaked garret
And there 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
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

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
Suddenly he rose
Seized his viol
And commenced to rend the night with the wildest playing I had ever heard

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
Thne the shrieking and whining of that desperate
Grew fantastic, delirious, and hysterical
Louder and louder, wilder and wilder
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.
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

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
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

And 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
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