Speaker 1: The Hound by H. P. Lovecraft. In my tortured ears,
there sounds unceasingly a nightmare, wearing 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. Sinjin
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 fantasy
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 adventures soon grow stale. Sinjin and I had followed
enthusiastically every esthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from
our devastating on we. The enigmas of the symbolists and
the ecstasies of the pre Raphaelite 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 decadence could hold us, and this we found
potent only by increasing gradually the depth and diabolism of
our penetrations. Beaudelaire and Heismans 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 mentioned 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 catalog 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 a universe
of terror and decay to excite our jaded sensibilities. It
was a secret room, far far underground, where huge winged
demons 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 are 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 appeaving
stenches of the uncovered grave. Round 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 can 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 newly buried children, statues and paintings.
There were all of fiendish subjects, and some executed by
Sinjin 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 woodwind on which Sinjoin
and I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodmoniacal ghastliness,
Whilst in a multitude of inlaid ebony cabinets reposed the
most incredible and unimaginable variety of tomblut ever assembled by
human madness and perversity. It is of this slute, in particular,
that I must not speak. Thank God, I had the
courage to destroy it long before I thought of destroying
myself off. 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 esthetic 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 it was he 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 rumor and legendary the
tales of one buried for fire centuries, who had himself
been a ghoul in his time, and had stolen a
potent thing from a mighty sepulcher. 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 ewes in a distant corner,
the odors of mold 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 the suggestion of baying,
we shuddered, remembering the tails of the peasantry, for he
whom we sought had sentries before been found in this
self same 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 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 mold,
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 had once 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 conventionalized 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 savoring at once of death, bestiality, and malevolence.
Around the base was an inscription in characters which neither
Stingin nor I could identify, And on the bottom, like
a maker's seal, was grave in a grotesque and formidable skull.
Immediately upon beholding this amulet, we knew that we must
possess it, that this treasure alone was our logical palf
from the sentried 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 ahasred, the ghastly soul symbol of the corpse eating
colt of inaccessible Lange in Central Asia. All too well
did we trace the sinister lineaments described by the old
Arab demonologist, lineaments he wrote drawn from some obscure supernatural
manifestation of the souls of those who vexed and gnawed
the dead. Seizing the green jade object, we gave a
last glance at the bleached and cavernized face of its owner,
and closed up the grave as we found it. As
we hastened from that abhorrent spot, the stolen amulet in
StJohn'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 bang 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 more 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 bang 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 al Hazard's and Necronomicon
about its properties and about the relation of Ghul's souls
to the objects symbolized, and were disturbed by what we read.
Then terror came. On the night of September twenty fourth, nineteen.
I heard a knock at my chamber door. Fancying its Sinjohns,
I bade the knocker enter, but was answered only by
a shrill laugh. There was no one in the corridor.
When I aroused Sinjhn 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 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 victim 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 demoniac baying rolled over, the wind swept more, always
louder and louder. On October twenty ninth, 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 giant bats which haunted the old manor House
an unprecedented and increasing numbers. The horror reached a culmination
on November eighteenth, when Sinjohn, 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 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 demoniac 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 in the dim litton more 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 obeiences 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 sin John must soon befall me 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 questioned still vague, But I had first
heard the baying in that ancient churchyard, and every subsequent event,
including sin 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, above the usual
clamor 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 hither unless to pray or gibber out insane
please 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. 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 sentried 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 and
sanguine 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 sentries of corpses dripping death, astride a bacchanal
of bats from night black ruins, of buried temples of Bolile. 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 end of the hound,