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;14 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 dæmoniac 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.15 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.
“. . . St. John, walking home after dark . . .” Weird Tales 3, no. 2 (February 1924) (artist: William F. Heitman)
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—.”16 Then he collapsed, an inert mass of mangled flesh.17
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 dæmoniac 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 Embankment18 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 death19 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 Belial20 . . . 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.
1. The story first appeared in Weird Tales 2 (February 1924), 50–52, 78; it was probably written, however, in September 1922.
2. Weird, fantastic. Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1961), many of whose works appeared alongside Lovecraft’s in Weird Tales and elsewhere, wrote a poem in 1912 entitled “The Eldritch Dark”:
Now as the twilight’s doubtful interval
Closes with night’s accomplished certainty,
A wizard wind goes crying eerily,
And on the wold misshapen shadows crawl,
Miming the trees, whose voices climb and fall,
Imploring, in Sabbatic ecstacy,
The sky where vapor-mounted phantoms flee
From the scythed moon impendent over all.
Twin veils of covering cloud and silence, thrown
Across the movement and the sound of things,
Make blank the night, till in the broken west
The moon’s ensanguined blade awhile is shown. . . .
The night grows whole again. . . . The shadows rest,
Gathered beneath a greater shadow’s wings.
3. The fin-de-siècle French poets Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud, whose emotional, intuitive structures and—especially in the case of Verlaine—classical form and musicality changed the course of nineteenth-century letters. The group is frequently also said to have included Paul Valéry.
4. English poets, painters, and critics of the late nineteenth century who styled themselves (at first secretly) the “Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood” and, largely rejecting the academic styles then prevalent, embraced the influence of late medieval and early Renaissance European art before the time of Raphael (1483–1520). Their works were characterized by noble subject matter and a luminous, bright palette achieved by the use of tempera paint. The most prominent member was Dante Gabriel Rossetti; others included William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens, and Thomas Woolner.
5. A late-nineteenth-century artistic movement that grew out of symbolism and included Baudelaire (who was viewed as leading the symbolist movement), Théophile Gautier, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and, in England, Oscar Wilde. Là-Bas (The Damned) (1891), a best-selling novel by Huysmans, which treated, among other subjects, Satanism, was seen as the Bible of the movement; the Huysmans novel À Rebours (Against Nature) (1884), still widely read today, features an antihero based both on Huysmans himself and on Robert de Montesquiou, the French dandy who also served as inspiration for Baron de Charlus in Marcel Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (1871–1922).
6. Grave-robbing certainly did not begin as “thrill-seeking”; rather, it was conducted for profit. See “Herbert West: Reanimator,” note 9, above.
7. Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828), who is considered the most important and influential Spanish artist of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and whose work made the transition from classical to modern. Toward the end of his life, isolated and lacking royal commissions, Goya conceived the Black Paintings, fourteen works in fresco done on the walls of his country house, which depicted dark supernatural themes. The drawings mentioned here might be sketches for those paintings.
Goya’s most famous work in the “Black Paintings” series, Saturn Devouring His Son (1819–23).
According to S. T. Joshi (in I Am Providence, 433), the original typescript described the skinbound portfolio as containing “the unknown and unnamable drawings of Clark Ashton Smith.”
8. The narrator is exaggerating here: The instruments could hardly be at fault, only the sounds that St. John and he made on them.
9. Such tales have a long history in many countries. Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902), hailed by many as the greatest mystery of the twentieth century, tells of the death of Hugo Baskerville, a man of ill repute who hunted a local girl for sport, by the ravages of a spectral hound. “Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!” (echoed in the opening sentence of this narration and below) is the most famous line of that famous story. Robert H. Waugh’s essay “The Hounds of Hell, the Hounds of Heaven, and the Hounds of Earth,” notes a number of similarities between the two tales, and there is no doubt that Lovecraft was very familiar with Doyle’s masterwork.
10. The Great Sphinx of Egypt has the body of a lion and the head of a Pharaoh; however, in Greek mythology, the sphinx had the body of a lion, the head and breasts of a woman, and the wings of an eagle. In Oedipus Tyrannus by Sophocles, the Sphinx who poses riddles to Oedipus is referred to as “dog-faced.”
11. Carved jade has been a part of Chinese culture for more than six thousand years.
12. Alhazred has been mentioned in a previous tale (see “The Nameless City,” note 7), but this is the first time that the Necronomicon has been referred to by name.
Lovecraft wrote an outline for a history of the book, only published after his death, set forth in Appendix 3, below. In 1937, in a letter to Harry O. Fischer, he revealed that the name came to him in a dream (late February 1937, Selected Letters, V, 418), and he understood the translation to be “An Image (or Picture) of the Law of the Dead.” However, there is great controversy over the correct translation of the Greek. Alexandre Bouchard and Louis-Pierre Smith Lacroix examine the competing theories in some detail in “Necronomicon: A Note” and offer four versions, for which they claim equal merit: Eaters of the Dead, Chants of the Dead, Book of the Districts/Habitations Hiding/Enclosing the Dead, and Law of the Dead. There is also controversy over the contents of the book. Here, as in other tales (for example, in “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” here, above), it seems to be a demonology, a scholarly work studying various supernatural entities, and indeed here, Alhazred is described as a demonologist. Elsewhere, it seems to be a grimoire, a book providing spells and incantations to be used to summon those entities. See, for example, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (here, below). In “History of the Necronomicon,” Alhazred is described as worshipping the entities, not studying them.
13. Leng, like other lands mentioned in Lovecraft’s work, is “inaccessible” and hence unknown. It is mentioned again in “The Whisperer in Darkness” and At the Mountains of Madness, where it is described as bordering the region known as the Cold Wastes. The name had its origin in Tibetan legend and is described in H. A. Jäschke’s A Tibetan-English Dictionary (1881) as “one of the four imaginary parts of the earth, as taught by the geographers of Tibet” (80). See Marco Frenschkowski’s “The Secret of Leng” for a further discussion.
14. Again, the narrator rings the same chimes as Conan Doyle; The Hound of the Baskervilles takes place almost wholly in Dartmoor. “Avoid the moor in those hours of darkness when the powers of evil are exalted.”
15. See note 9, above.
16. Cf. Ambrose Bierce’s 1893 story “The Damned Thing,” about an object of a color outside the spectrum of human vision and, by extension, things that humans cannot expect to understand. Lovecraft owned several collections of Bierce’s works, one including this tale.
17. So, who killed St. John? The same being as the skeleton in the grave? A winged hound in England? The ambiguities of the tale are explored, complete with a table with sixteen different alternatives, in “Who Killed St. John?” by Peter F. Jeffery.
18. A walkway along the north bank of the Thames, built in 1865.
The Thames Embankment, late nineteenth century, showing a reproduction of the Sphinx statue which “guards” Cleopatra’s Needle.
19. A phrase perhaps borrowed from Edgar Allan Poe’s 1845 story “The Masque of the Red Death,” in which death is inexorably brought about by plague.
20. Generally a synonym for Satan. Belial is referred to in 2 Corinthians 6:15 (King James Version): “And what concord hath Christ with Belial? or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel?”
The Festival1
Kingsport is also the locale of “The Terrible Old Man,” but there it was mere backdrop. In “The Festival,” the town reflects Lovecraft’s fascination with places such as Marblehead and Salem, Massachusetts, and their evocations of antiquity. The religion described in this tale long predates the founding of those towns and indeed predates Christianity. In that way, the story revisits the true horror of “Dagon”—the narrator’s discovery that there are things still present on this planet that began before human history.
Weird Tales 5, no. 1 (January 1925) (artist: Andrew Brosnatch)
Efficiunt Dæmones, ut quæ non sunt, sic tamen quasi sint, conspicienda hominibus exhibeant.
—LACTANTIUS2
I was far from home, and the spell of the eastern sea was upon me. In the twilight I heard it pounding on the rocks, and I knew it lay just over the hill where the twisting willows writhed against the clearing sky and the first stars of evening. And because my fathers had called me to the old town beyond, I pushed on through the shallow, new-fallen snow along the road that soared lonely up to where Aldebaran3 twinkled among the trees; on toward the very ancient town I had never seen but often dreamed of.
It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind.4 It was the Yuletide, and I had come at last to the ancient sea town where my people had dwelt and kept festival in the elder time when festival was forbidden; where also they had commanded their sons to keep festival once every century, that the memory of primal secrets might not be forgotten. Mine were an old people, and were old even when this land was settled three hundred years before. And they were strange, because they had come as dark furtive folk from opiate southern gardens of orchids,5 and spoken another tongue before they learnt the tongue of the blue-eyed fishers.6 And now they were scattered, and shared only the rituals of mysteries that none living could understand. I was the only one who came back that night to the old fishing town as legend bade, for only the poor and the lonely remember.
The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft Page 22
