The Music of Erich Zann

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