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 somber
philosophy of the decadents could help us, and this we found potent only by
increasing gradually the depth and diablism 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 expedition, or catalogue even partly the worst of
the trophies adorning the nameless museum 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 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 line 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 flesh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children.
Statues and
painting 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, 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
circles closer and closer, I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is
my only refuge from the unnamed and unnameable.
No comments:
Post a Comment