The One

The One is a fictional character created by H. P. Lovecraft in the short story "The Strange High House in the Mist". He is a mysterious hermit who has dealings with mysterious supernatural forces.
The One lives in the titular Strange High House, an "abnormally antique grey cottage in the sky" atop a crag overlooking Kingsport. He is never seen or heard from by anyone in the town, but "people say One dwells therein who talks with the morning mists that come up from the deep, and perhaps sees singular things oceanward at those times when the cliff’s rim becomes the rim of all earth." The universal Kingsport opinion is that "the same One has lived in the ancient house for hundreds of years"--at least since the time "when Belcher or Shirley or Pownall or Bernard was Governor of His Majesty’s Province of the Massachusetts-Bay", that is, between 1730 and 1769.Wikipedia, "List of colonial governors of Massachusetts" They maintain that "he had communed with the mists of the sea and the clouds of the sky ever since there was any village to watch his taciturn dwelling from the plain below."
He is visited for the first time by Thomas Olney, a Rhode Island philosophy professor who dares to scale the precipice and is invited inside. He is greeted by 
The One tells Olney "tales of marvellous ancient things...rumours of old times and far places": about "Kings of Atlantis" who battled "slippery blasphemies that wriggled out of rifts in ocean's floor"; about the "pillared and weedy temple of Poseidonis" and about the "Years of the Titans"; about the "other gods" who danced on Hatheg-Kla "in the stony desert near Ulthar, beyond the river Skai". 
The One bids Olney to be silent when an unwanted visitor comes to the door that opens onto a sheer drop. But he welcomes a visit from "all the dreams and memories of earth’s sunken Mighty Ones": "Trident-bearing Neptune", "sportive tritons and fantastic nereids", and "the grey and awful form of primal Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss".
Olney returns to Kingsport, but leaves part of himself in the house with the One forever after: "old folk tell of pleasing voices heard singing there, and of laughter that swells with joys beyond earth’s joys; and say that at evening the little low windows are brighter than formerly,"
==References==
Category:Characters Originating From Lovecraft Circle Works
Category:Humans