The Squire is a fictional character from H. P. Lovecraft's 1926 short story "He". He is depicted as a wizard who "flouted the sanctity of things as great as space and time".
Description[]
The narrator of the story--as stand-in for Lovecraft himself--describes his first impression upon meeting a stranger in Greenwich Village who shared his fascination with Old New York:
| “ | It was a noble, even a handsome, elderly countenance; and bore the marks of a lineage and refinement unusual for the age and place. Yet some quality about it disturbed me almost as much as its features pleased me—perhaps it was too white, or too expressionless, or too much out of keeping with the locality, to make me feel easy or comfortable. | „ |
The stranger wears a costume not of the time the story is set, but typical of two centuries earlier:
| “ | [H]e wore a wide-brimmed hat which somehow blended perfectly with the out-of-date cloak he affected.... His form was very slight, thin almost to cadaverousness; and his voice proved phenomenally soft and hollow, though not particularly deep. | „ |
History[]
The stranger leads him to his home, a private estate incongruously located in the heart of Greenwich Village, where taking off his cloak he is "revealed in full mid-Georgian costume from queued hair and neck ruffles to knee-breeches, silk hose, and the buckled shoes I had not previously noticed." He tells the narrator the story of an ancestor who is plainly meant to be understood to be the stranger making a thinly veiled confession:
| “ | It hath been my good-fortune to retain the rural seat of my ancestors.... The squire who succeeded to it in 1768 studied sartain arts and made sartain discoveries, all connected with influences residing in this particular plot of ground... To—my ancestor...there appeared to reside some very remarkable qualities in the will of mankind; qualities having a little-suspected dominance not only over the acts of one’s self and of others, but over every variety of force and substance in Nature, and over many elements and dimensions deemed more univarsal than Nature herself. May I say that he flouted the sanctity of things as great as space and time, and that he put to strange uses the rites of sartain half-breed red Indians once encamped upon this hill? | „ |
These Native Americans for years had climbed over the wall of the estate to hold a ritual on the night of each full moon.
| “ | Then in ’68, the new squire catched them at their doings, and stood still at what he saw. Thereafter he bargained with them and exchanged the free access of his grounds for the exact inwardness of what they did; larning that their grandfathers got part of their custom from red ancestors and part from an old Dutchman in the time of the States-General. And pox on him, I’m afeared the squire must have sarved them monstrous bad rum—whether or not by intent—for a week after he larnt the secret he was the only man living that knew it. | „ |
The story's narrator is told that he is "the first outsider" to be told of this secret--and this only shared with him because he is "so hot after bygone things".
The stranger insists, though, that what he learned from the Native Americans he subsequently murdered is only part of his arcane knowledge:
| “ | But you must know, Sir, that what—the squire—got from those mongrel salvages was but a small part of the larning he came to have. He had not been at Oxford for nothing, nor talked to no account with an ancient chymist and astrologer in Paris. He was, in fine, made sensible that all the world is but the smoke of our intellects; past the bidding of the vulgar, but by the wise to be puffed out and drawn in like any cloud of prime Virginia tobacco. What we want, we may make about us; and what we don’t want, we may sweep away. | „ |
As the narrator learns of his host's depraved character, his perception of the Squire's appearance becomes more horrific:
| “ | The flash died, and an evil smile illumined the waxy face of the aged necromancer.... And as he nodded, and bared the black stumps of what had once been yellow fangs, I clutched at the curtains to prevent myself from falling. But he steadied me with that terrible, ice-cold claw, and once more made his insidious gesture. | „ |
The Squire shows the narrator visions of New York's past and future, the last causes him to scream--a sound that enrages the Squire and summons the spirits of the Native Americans whose magic he stole. In a panic, the wizard pulls curtains off a window that exposes him to the light of the full moon, which breaks the spell that has preserved his flesh from the effects of time:
| “ | It spread over the old man...and I saw him shrivel and blacken as he lurched near and strove to rend me with vulturine talons. Only his eyes stayed whole, and they glared with a propulsive, dilated incandescence which grew as the face around them charred and dwindled.... The black thing facing me had become only a head with eyes, impotently trying to wriggle across the sinking floor in my direction, and occasionally emitting feeble little spits of immortal malice. | „ |
The "head with eyes" is taken away by the collective spirit of the Indians, and the house collapses from the cumulative decay of centuries. The narrator concludes: "Of who or what that ancient creature was, I have no idea; but I repeat that the city is dead and full of unsuspected horrors."