The Terrible Old Man
Age is a precious thing, leaving us weak when we are young and old. Yet for an old man in Kingsport, strength and age are nothing, and some are curious why. I think; how awful it must be, not to be able to die.
"The Terrible Old Man" is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft, written on January 28, 1920, and first published in the Tryout, an amateur press publication, in July 1921. It's notable as the first story to make use of Lovecraft's imaginary New England setting, introducing the fictional town of Kingsport.
The story is of an old man who at one point was a sailor but he is now a feeble old man. He is an old man, whom some say is so old, no one can remember him when he was young. With no name except the “terrible old man” the old man keeps to himself and is left alone for the most of the time. No one pays a visit or calls upon the aged fellow, all except for devilish little boys who throw rocks at the man’s house, and curious folk who have seen the old man talking to bottles aligned on a shelf in his house. Inside the bottles, pieces of lead are suspended like a pendulum, and are all given strange names like Scar-Face, Long Tom, and Mate Ellis. He also was having conversation whit the named bottles. Sometimes more curious are the gold and silver Spanish coins that the old man buys food with, that are centuries old. In the story it’s mentioned that the old man was once believed to be a captain of an old Pirate ship in his old days.
Having heard of the old man’s feebleness and riches, a few robbers by the name of Angelo Ricci, Joe Czanek, and Manuel Silva, has decided to rob the man for his riches. The insiders fear him, so they wouldn’t rob him, but the outsiders doesn’t fear him so they take the chance.
Two of the robbers go into the house to force the old man to tell them where he keeps his money while the third of the man waits outside in the car for their getaway. The two men then go into the house and the third waits in the car. He hears strange noises from inside the house, but he waits anyway, and soon it’s not his friends who appear, but it is the terrible old man that appears rather than his friends. The story then cuts away from this chapter of the story and to the town, which talks of how they spend their next year talking of the three men who appeared as if cut to pieces.
You can say that he is the town boogeyman - if he isn’t desorbed, he doesn’t harm anyone. I have no desire to break into houses, like the three robbers did, but one of the things that does appeal to me, is the idea of seeing the inside of people’s homes, and see their secrets and learning things about them, that they may not want you to know. In the case of this short story, though the idea of learning someone’s secrets may be just a bit more trouble than it might otherwise seem.
I would very much like to talk about the episode, where Mr. Czanek watches and waits from the street, and constantly begins to hear screaming from the house and becomes impatient and begins to wonder what the two robbers are doing to the old feeble man. Then suddenly, the gate of the yard opens and there stands a horrible sight.
“For his colleagues were not there at all, but only the Terrible Old Man leaning quietly on his knotted cane and smiling hideously. Mr. Czanek had never before noticed the colour of that man’s eyes; now he saw that they were yellow.”
The Terrible Old Man has yellow eyes - he is a creature of the night. He is a supernatural phenomena, he is a werewolf. Werewolves were said in European cultural myths to bear telltale physical traits even in their human form. These included the meeting of both eyebrows at the bridge of the nose, curved fingernails, low-set ears and a pair of yellow eyes.
Although not too popular in H.P. Lovecraft tales, the Terrible Old Man is a recurring character. He re-appears in another tale entitled “The Strange High House in the Mist” and is more of a benevolent character. Lovecraft guiding aesthetic and philosophical principle was what he called "cosmicism" or "cosmic horror", the idea that life is incomprehensible to human minds and that the universe is fundamentally hostile interests of humanity. As such, expresses his stories a profound indifference to human beliefs and affairs - which we can say that this story lives well up to. He gets the reader thoroughly confused by taking a wonderful mix of supernatural phenomena.