The Hound By H. P. Lovecraft
In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare
whirring and flapping, and a faint distant baying as of some gigantic
hound.
It is not dream it is not, I fear,
even madness for too much has already happened to give me
these merciful doubts.
St John is a mangled corpse; I alone know why,
and such is my knowledge that I am about to blow out my brains
for fear I shall be mangled in the same way.
Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldrith phantasy
sweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to self-annihilation.
May heaven forgive the folly and morbidity which led us both
to so monstrous a fate! Wearied with the commonplaces of a
prosaic world; where even the joys of romance and adventure
soon grow stale, St John and I had followed enthusiastically
every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite
from our devastating ennui.
The enigmas of the symbolists and the ecstasies of the
pre-Raphaelites all were ours in their time, but each new mood was drained too soon,
of its diverting novelty and appeal.
Only the somber philosophy of the decadents could help us,
and this we found potent only by increasing gradually the
depth and diabolism of our penetrations.
Baudelaire and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills,
till finally there remained for us only the more direct
stimuli of unnatural personal experiences and adventures.
It was this frightful emotional need which led us eventually
to that detestable course which even in my present fear I
mention with shame and timidity - that hideous extremity of
human outrage, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing.
I cannot reveal the details of our shocking expeditions,
or catalogue even partly the worst of the trophies adorning
the nameless museum we prepared in the great stone house where
we jointly dwelt, alone and servantless.
Our museum was a blasphemous, unthinkable place,
where with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had
assembled an universe of terror and decay to excite our jaded
sensibilities.
It was a secret room, far, far, underground; where huge winged daemons carven of basalt
and onyx vomited from wide grinning mouths weird green and
orange light, and hidden pneumatic pipes ruffled into kaleidoscopic
dances of death the lines of red charnel things hand
in hand woven in voluminous black hangings.
Through these pipes came at will the odors our moods most
craved; sometimes the scent of pale funeral lilies;
sometimes the narcotic incense of imagined Eastern shrines of
the kingly dead, and sometimes how I shudder to recall it!
- the frightful, soul-upheaving stenches of the uncovered-grave.
Around the walls of this repellent chamber were cases of
antique mummies alternating with comely, lifelike bodies perfectly stuffed and cured
by the taxidermist's art,
and with headstones snatched from the oldest churchyards of
the world.
Niches here and there contained skulls of all shapes,
and heads preserved in various stages of dissolution.
There one might find the rotting, bald pates of famous noblemen,
and the fresh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children.
Statues and paintings there were, all of fiendish subjects and some executed
by St John and myself.
A locked portfolio, bound in tanned human skin,
held certain unknown and unnameable drawings which it was
rumored Goya had perpetrated but dared not acknowledge.
There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, and wood-wind,
on which St John and I sometimes produced dissonances of
exquisite morbidity and cacodaemoniacal ghastliness; whilst in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets
reposed the most incredible and unimaginable variety of
tomb-loot ever assembled by human madness and perversity.
It is of this loot in particular that I must not speak - thank
God I had the courage to destroy it long before I thought of
destroying myself! The predatory excursions on which we collected
our unmentionable treasures were always artistically
memorable events.
We were no vulgar ghouls, but worked only under certain conditions of
mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and
moonlight.
These pastimes were to us the most exquisite form of aesthetic
expression, and we gave their details a fastidious technical
care.
An inappropriate hour, a jarring lighting effect,
or a clumsy manipulation of the damp sod, would almost totally destroy for us that ecstatic
titillation which followed the exhumation of some ominous,
grinning secret of the earth.
Our quest for novel scenes and piquant conditions was feverish
and insatiate - St John was always the leader, and he it was who led the way at last to that
mocking, accursed spot which brought us our hideous
and inevitable doom.
By what malign fatality were we lured to that terrible Holland
churchyard? I think it was the dark rumor and legendry,
the tales of one buried for five centuries, who had himself been a ghoul in his time and
had stolen a potent thing from a mighty sepulchre.
I can recall the scene in these final moments the pale
autumnal moon over the graves, casting long horrible shadows;
the grotesque trees, drooping sullenly to meet the neglected grass
and the crumbling slabs;
the vast legions of strangely colossal bats that flew against
the moon; the antique ivied church pointing a huge spectral
finger at the livid sky;
the phosphorescent insects that danced like death-fires under
the yews in a distant corner; the odors of mould,
vegetation, and less explicable things that mingled feebly
with the night-wind from over far swamps and seas;
and, worst of all,
the faint deep-toned baying of some gigantic hound which we
could neither see nor definitely place.
As we heard this suggestion of baying we shuddered, remembering the tales of the peasantry;
for he whom we sought had centuries before been found in this
self same spot, torn and mangled by the claws and teeth of
some unspeakable beast.
I remember how we delved in the ghoul's grave with our spades,
and how we thrilled at the picture of ourselves, the grave,
the pale watching moon, the horrible shadows,
the grotesque trees, the titanic bats,
the antique church, the dancing death-fires,
the sickening odors, the gently moaning night-wind,
and the strange, half-heard directionless baying of whose objective
existence we could scarcely be sure.
Then we struck a substance harder than the damp mould,
and beheld a rotting oblong box crusted with mineral deposits
from the long undisturbed ground.
It was incredibly tough and thick, but so old that we finally pried it open and
feasted our eyes on what it held.
Much - amazingly much - was left of the object despite the
lapse of five hundred years.
The skeleton, though crushed in places by the jaws of the
thing that had killed it,
held together with surprising firmness, and we gloated over the clean white skull
and its long, firm teeth and its eyeless sockets that once
had glowed with a charnel fever like our own.
In the coffin lay an amulet of curious and exotic design,
which had apparently been worn around the sleeper's neck.
It was the oddly conventionalised figure of a crouching winged
hound, or sphinx with a semi-canine face,
and was exquisitely carved in antique Oriental fashion from a
small piece of green jade.
The expression of its features was repellent in the extreme,
savoring at once of death, bestiality and malevolence.
Around the base was an inscription in characters which neither
St John nor I could identify; and on the bottom,
like a maker's seal, was graven a grotesque and formidable skull.
Immediately upon beholding this amulet we knew that we must
possess it; that this treasure alone was our logical pelf
from the centuried grave.
Even had its outlines been unfamiliar we would have desired it,
but as we looked more closely we saw that it was not wholly
unfamiliar.
Alien it indeed was to all art and literature which sane and
balanced readers know, but we recognized it as the thing hinted of
in the forbidden Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred;
the ghastly soul-symbol of the corpse-eating cult of
inaccessible Leng, in Central Asia.
All too well did we trace the sinister lineaments described by
the old Arab daemonologist; lineaments,
he wrote, drawn from some obscure supernatural manifestation
of the souls of those who vexed and gnawed at the
dead.
Seizing the green jade object, we gave a last glance at the bleached and
cavern-eyed face of its owner and closed up the grave as we found
it.
As we hastened from the abhorrent spot, the stolen amulet in St John's pocket,
we thought we saw the bats descend in a body to the earth we
had so lately rifled, as if seeking for some cursed and unholy nourishment.
But the autumn moon shone weak and pale, and we could not be sure.
So, too,
as we sailed the next day away from Holland to our home,
we thought we heard the faint distant baying of some gigantic
hound in the background.
But the autumn wind moaned sad and wan, and we could not be sure.
Less than a week after our return to England, strange things began to happen.
We lived as recluses; devoid of friends,
alone, and without servants in a few rooms of an
ancient manor-house on a bleak and unfrequented moor;
so that our doors were seldom disturbed by the knock of the
visitor.
Now, however,
we were troubled by what seemed to be a frequent fumbling in
the night, not only around the doors but around the windows
also, upper as well as lower.
Once we fancied that a large, opaque body darkened the library window when
the moon was shining against it,
and another time we thought we heard a whirring or flapping
sound not far off.
On each occasion investigation revealed nothing, and we began to ascribe the occurrences to
imagination which still prolonged in our ears the faint far
baying we thought we had heard in the Holland churchyard.
The jade amulet now reposed in a niche in our museum,
and sometimes we burned a strangely scented candle before it.
We read much in Alhazred's Necronomicon about its properties,
and about the relation of ghosts' souls to the objects it
symbolized; and were disturbed by what we read.
Then terror came.
On the night of September 24, 19--,
I heard a knock at my chamber door.
Fancying it St John's, I bade the knocker enter,
but was answered only by a shrill laugh.
There was no one in the corridor.
When I aroused St John from his sleep, he professed entire ignorance of the event,
and became as worried as I.
It was the night that the faint, distant baying over the moor became to us
a certain and dreaded reality.
Four days later, whilst we were both in the hidden museum,
there came a low, cautious scratching at the single door which
led to the secret library staircase.
Our alarm was now divided, for,
besides our fear of the unknown, we had always entertained a dread that our
grisly collection might be discovered.
Extinguishing all lights, we proceeded to the door and threw it suddenly
open; whereupon we felt an unaccountable rush of
air, and heard,
as if receding far away, a queer combination of rustling,
tittering, and articulate chatter.
Whether we were mad, dreaming,
or in our senses, we did not try to determine.
We only realized, with the blackest of apprehensions,
that the apparently disembodied chatter was beyond a doubt in
the Dutch language.
After that we lived in growing horror and fascination.
Mostly we held to the theory that we were jointly going mad
from our life of unnatural excitements, but sometimes it pleased us more to dramatize
ourselves as the victims of some creeping and appalling doom.
Bizarre manifestations were now too frequent to count.
Our lonely house was seemingly alive with the presence of some
malign being whose nature we could not guess, and every night that daemoniac baying rolled
over the wind-swept moor,
always louder and louder.
On October 29 we found in the soft earth underneath the
library window a series of footprints utterly impossible to
describe.
They were as baffling as the hordes of great bats which
haunted the old manor-house in unprecedented and increasing
numbers.
The horror reached a culmination on November 18,
when St John, walking home after dark from the dismal railway
station, was seized by some frightful carnivorous thing
and torn to ribbons.
His screams had reached the house, and I had hastened to the terrible scene in
time to hear a whir of wings and see a vague black cloudy
thing silhouetted against the rising moon.
My friend was dying when I spoke to him, and he could not answer coherently.
All he could do was to whisper, "The amulet that damned thing"
Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh.
I buried him the next midnight in one of our neglected gardens,
and mumbled over his body one of the devilish rituals he had
loved in life.
And as I pronounced the last daemoniac sentence I heard afar
on the moor the faint baying of some gigantic hound.
The moon was up, but I dared not look at it.
And when I saw on the dim-lighted moor a wide-nebulous shadow
sweeping from mound to mound, I shut my eyes and threw myself face down
upon the ground.
When I arose, trembling,
I know not how much later, I staggered into the house and made shocking
obeisances before the enshrined amulet of green jade.
Being now afraid to live alone in the ancient house on the moor,
I departed on the following day for London, taking with me the amulet after destroying
by fire and burial the rest of the impious collection in the
museum.
But after three nights I heard the baying again,
and before a week was over felt strange eyes upon me whenever
it was dark.
One evening as I strolled on Victoria Embankment for some
needed air, I saw a black shape obscure one of the reflections
of the lamps in the water.
A wind, stronger than the night-wind,
rushed by, and I knew that what had befallen St John
must soon befall me.
The next day I carefully wrapped the green jade amulet and
sailed for Holland.
What mercy I might gain by returning the thing to its silent,
sleeping owner I knew not; but I felt that I must try any step conceivably
logical.
What the hound was, and why it had pursued me,
were questions still vague; but I had first heard the baying in that ancient
churchyard, and every subsequent event including St John's
dying whisper had served to connect the curse with the stealing
of the amulet.
Accordingly I sank into the nethermost abysses of despair when,
at an inn in Rotterdam, I discovered that thieves had despoiled me
of this sole means of salvation.
The baying was loud that evening, and in the morning I read of a nameless deed
in the vilest quarter of the city.
The rabble were in terror, for upon an evil tenement had fallen a red
death beyond the foulest previous crime of the neighborhood.
In a squalid thieves' den an entire family had been torn to
shreds by an unknown thing which left no trace, and those around had heard all night a faint,
deep, insistent note as of a gigantic hound.
So at last I stood again in the unwholesome churchyard where a
pale winter moon cast hideous shadows and leafless trees
drooped sullenly to meet the withered, frosty grass and cracking slabs,
and the ivied church pointed a jeering finger at the
unfriendly sky, and the night-wind howled maniacally from
over frozen swamps and frigid seas.
The baying was very faint now, and it ceased altogether as I approached the
ancient grave I had once violated,
and frightened away an abnormally large horde of bats which
had been hovering curiously around it.
I know not why I went thither unless to pray, or gibber out insane pleas and apologies to
the calm white thing that lay within;
but, whatever my reason,
I attacked the half frozen sod with a desperation partly mine
and partly that of a dominating will outside myself.
Excavation was much easier than I expected, though at one point I encountered a queer
interruption; when a lean vulture darted down out of the
cold sky and pecked frantically at the grave-earth until I killed
him with a blow of my spade.
Finally I reached the rotting oblong box and removed the damp
nitrous cover.
This is the last rational act I ever performed.
For crouched within that centuried coffin, embraced by a closepacked nightmare retinue
of huge, sinewy,
sleeping bats, was the bony thing my friend and I had robbed;
not clean and placid as we had seen it then, but covered with caked blood and shreds of
alien flesh and hair, and leering sentiently at me with phosphorescent
sockets and sharp ensanguined fangs yawning twistedly
in mockery of my inevitable doom.
And when it gave from those grinning jaws a deep,
sardonic bay as of some gigantic hound, and I saw that it held in its gory filthy
claw the lost and fateful amulet of green jade,
I merely screamed and ran away idiotically, my screams soon dissolving into peals of hysterical
laughter.
Madness rides the star-wind...
claws and teeth sharpened on centuries of corpses...
dripping death astride a bacchanale of bats from nigh-black
ruins of buried temples of Belial...
Now, as the baying of that dead fleshless monstrosity
grows louder and louder,
and the stealthy whirring and flapping of those accursed
web-wings closer and closer, I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion
which is my only refuge from the unnamed and unnameable.