The Terrible Old Man
H. P. Lovecraft
January 28, 1920
It was the design of Angelo Ricci and Joe
Czanek and Manuel Silva to call on the
Terrible
Old Man. This old man dwells all
alone in a very ancient
house on Water Street
near the sea, and is reputed to be both exceedingly
rich and exceedingly feeble; which forms a situation very
attractive to men of the profession of Messrs. Ricci, Czanek, and Silva, for that profession was nothing less dignified than
robbery.
The inhabitants of Kingsport say and think many things
about the Terrible
Old Man which generally keep him safe from the
attention of gentlemen like Mr. Ricci and his colleagues,
despite the almost certain fact that he hides a fortune of indefinite magnitude
somewhere about his musty and venerable
abode. He is, in truth, a very strange
person, believed to have been a captain of East India
clipper ships in his day; so old that no one can remember when he was
young, and so taciturn that few know his real name. Among the
gnarled trees in the front yard of his
aged and neglected place he maintains a strange
collection of large stones, oddly grouped and painted so that they
resemble the idols in some obscure
Eastern temple. This collection frightens away most of
the small boys who love to taunt the Terrible Old
Man about his long
white hair and beard, or to break the small paned windows of his
dwelling with wicked missiles; but
there are other things which frighten the older and more curious
folk who sometimes steal up to the house to peer in
through the dusty panes. These folk say that on a table in a bare
room on the ground floor are many peculiar bottles, in each a
small piece of lead suspended pendulum-wise from a string. And they say
that the Terrible
Old Man talks to these bottles, addressing them by such names
as Jack, Scar-Face, Long Tom, Spanish Joe, Peters, and Mate Ellis, and that whenever he
speaks to a bottle the little lead pendulum within makes certain definite
vibrations as if in answer.