H.P. Lovecraft. The Hound
The Hound
by H. P. Lovecraft
Written Sep 1922
Published February 1924 in Weird Tales, Vol. 3, No. 2, p. 50-52, 78.
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.
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The Lovecraft Library wishes to extend its gratitude to Eulogio Garcia
Recalde for transcribing this text.