The Hound
By H. P. Lovecraft
I.
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.
