lovecraft's townscape

''i have examined maps of the city with the greatest care, yet have never again found the rue d'auseil. ... but despite all i have done, it remains a 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 ... 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, ...

''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. ... 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. ... the houses were tall, peaked roofed, incredibly old, and crazily leaning backward, forward, and sidewise ... there were a few overhead bridges from house to house across the street ...

''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 ... 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 ...

''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 at intervals they assumed a symphonic quality which i could hardly conceive as produced by one player ... all these are terrible impressions that linger with me, ... 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 .''

h.p.lovecraft, the music of erich zann.

the music of stephen dickman.