object:1f.lovecraft - The Hound
author class:H P Lovecraft
subject class:Fiction
genre class:Horror
class:chapter
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 eldritch 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 sombre philosophy of the
Decadents could hold 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 odours
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, life-like 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 unnamable drawings which it was rumoured 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, that 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 rumour 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 odours 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 selfsame spot, torn and mangled by the claws and teeth of some
unspeakable beast.
I remembered how we delved in this 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
odours, 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 on its
features was repellent in the extreme, savouring 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 recognised 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 that 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.
II.
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
frequent fumblings 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 alone—that same
curiously disturbed 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 strangely scented candles before it. We read much in Alhazred’s
Necronomicon about its properties, and about the relation of ghouls’
souls to the objects it symbolised; 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 that 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 realised, 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 dramatise 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 windswept 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 distant 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-litten 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 at least try any step
conceivably logical. What the hound was, and why it 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 neighbourhood. 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 above the usual clamour
of drunken voices a faint, deep, insistent note as of a gigantic hound.
So at last I stood again in that 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 close-packed
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 night-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 circles
closer and closer, I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is
my only refuge from the unnamed and unnamable.
Return to “The Hound”
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