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.
