The Horror Megapack

by H. P. Lovecraft

  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, embr
aced 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.

  THE DUKE OF DEMOLITION GOES TO HELL, by John Gregory Betancourt

  So this is hell, Big Jim Carnack, the self-proclaimed Duke of Demolition, thought to himself.

  He remembered dying. He remembered the sterile smell of the hospital, with so many doctors and nurses looming over him, so many fruit bowls and flower baskets and potted plants oh-so-tastefully arranged around the room.

  Reality had gotten a little weird at the end. He’d drifted through a painkiller haze as endless streams of relatives and business associates trooped through for one last look. They had no hope—he saw it in their eyes. They knew he was terminal. He knew he was terminal. Cancer was like that; it was just a matter of time.

  Don Esmond—his junior partner in the construction and demolition business for the last eight years, the kid he’d brought in straight from business school to handle the financial side when the company got too big—shoved his young, tanned, sickeningly healthy face close to Big Jim’s. “So this is it,” Esmond whispered with a rictus grin. “I get it all, old man. Hurry up and die, will you? My wife and kids are waiting in the car.”

  I don’t deserve this, Big Jim thought, but all the arguments had long ago leeched out of him. He merely closed his eyes. When he opened them again, Esmond was gone.

  That was the last thing he remembered.

  The next thing he knew, he was walking along a twilit street. Victorian mansions with huge front lawns and wrought-iron fences faced him from both sides, looking not run down, but new, like they must’ve been at their prime. The soft yellow glow of oil lamps spilled from their windows.

  “So this is hell,” Big Jim said again, this time aloud. He gave a low chuckle.

  His fate had a certain ironic quality. These were the houses he’d torn down his whole life, decaying relics of bygone days when coal had been cheap and ten-room houses the middle class standard—huge, drafty, inefficient monoliths to a lifestyle which no longer existed.

  He’d enjoyed destroying them. Was that his sin? He’d made a career in buying Victorian mansions. Abandoned by their owners, too run-down to renovate, they went cheaply at public auctions. His men moved in like a swarm of army ants, stripping everything salvageable. Big Jim had an eye for art: stained glass was a prize plum. Lead-glass fixtures, old tile, old brick, oak floorboards…it all ended up recycled into the new houses (“a touch of old-time class”) his company built on the foundations of the old. He squeezed every penny out of a mansion’s corpse before laying it in its grave.

  In the old days, before he started his construction company, it had been just demolition and salvage. He’d worked fifteen-hour days with non-union kids he hired at minimum wage. He’d operated the wrecking ball himself, and he’d enjoyed the work, enjoyed the slow, ponderous motion of the ball as it swung back, gathered speed, then slammed into a building with killer force. He’d raised demolition to an art form. Shattering walls without caving in roofs, loosening mortar without pulverizing bricks, knocking out windows one by one: it brought an almost sexual fulfillment, a sense of satisfaction like no other. Was that so terrible?

  He thought back to his wife, to his son and twin daughters. They’d seemed happy. He’d given them everything they wanted or needed…a nice home, a swimming pool, Catholic schools, two dogs and a cat, a car for each of them. Sure, they’d had fights and arguments, but what family didn’t? And when his son came to the hospital that last day, Big Jim could’ve sworn there were tears in his eyes. All past sins had been washed away, forgiven. They’d been friends.

  And his wife…Big Jim knew it had broken her heart to see him in the hospital, slipping farther away each day. But that hadn’t been his fault, had it? And his daughters, sobbing in the corner as he made lame jokes… If there’d been any other way…if suicide hadn’t been a sin…

  Perhaps it had been his business dealings that brought him to hell, Big Jim thought uneasily. He’d tried to run an honest company, but he’d paid his share of graft. The construction and demolition business floated on under-the-table cash. Even so, he’d never stabbed any partners in the back (literally or figuratively), never stolen, never cheated on his taxes—never done anything overtly illegal. All he’d done was tear down old houses and put up nice new ones. What had he done to end up in hell?

  What if it’s not hell? he wondered suddenly. What if it’s all been a dream—my dying, everything? He stopped and held up his hands. They’d been yellow-gray and liverspotted with age in the hospital. He’d been sixty-three, after all, not young anymore. But these hands…he turned them over and over in the dim light. These hands looked young, healthy, like the hands he’d had in school.

  Reincarnation? he wondered. Amnesia?

  Shadows flickered in the windows of the Victorian opposite him. Had a person moved inside, or was it a trick of the light? Big Jim hesitated. He knew he couldn’t spend the rest of eternity wandering aimlessly. Better to check out the house than stand in the street and guess.

  Having a plan made him feel better. He opened the Victorian’s gate, strode up the brick walkway, then climbed the porch steps one by one. Stumbling on the top step, he almost fell—a loose board had caught his foot, he realized.

  Be careful, he chided himself. He was used to Victorians; he knew how treacherous they became when they were old and decaying. Several of his workmen had fallen through rotted-out floors, or had walls unexpectedly cave in on them.

  He knocked, paused a minute, knocked again. No answer came. When he tested the knob, though, it turned easily.

  He pushed the door open with his fingertips. A needlelike pain jabbed his index finger, and he jerked his hand back with a startled cry. “Ahhh…” he muttered. Damn splinter. He pulled it out with his teeth, spat it away, then stumped in.

  The place was deserted: not a stick of furniture anywhere. Varnished oak floorboards creaked underfoot. A cold draft touched his cheek. The place felt like nobody had been inside in years, even though a flame flickered in the old-fashioned oil lamp hanging from the ceiling.

  Big Jim shivered. It was cold in here.

  Crossing to the huge, cast-iron radiator, he reached out cautiously. He didn’t feel any radiating heat. When he bent to check the valve, though, it burned his hand. He leaped back, cursing out loud this time, nursing burned fingers.

  Another draft touched him. The house seemed to exhale, like it was alive. Alive?

  Big Jim backed toward the door as dust began to sift down from the ceiling. The place seemed to exude hatred, he thought, as though it wanted to collapse on top of him, as though it wanted to kill him.

  He ran for the door, made it through, didn’t stop for the porch steps but leaped over them. On the brick walkway he came to a sudden stop.

  A wrecking machine now sat directly in front of him. It hadn’t been there when he entered the house, nor had he heard it drive up. It must be a trick of some kind, he thought

  He circled the machine cautiously. Its huge stabilizing feet had been lowered and locked into place, sprea
d out in a huge X to brace against movements of the wrecking ball. The ball itself, a five-hundred-pound steel slug at the end of a chain, hung from a forty-foot-tall steel tower.

  The door to the operator’s cab had “Carnack Demolition” stencilled across it. Big Jim climbed onto the tractor tread, then the stepping rung. The cab door opened easily. He slid into the padded bucket seat, the smells of plastic and new rubber surrounding him.

  A manila folder lay across the controls. He flicked on the cab’s light, opened the folder, and began to read.

  JAMES HOUSE (1884-1973)

  December 8, 1884. Leaking roof ruined 473-book library.

  January 14, 1885. Child broke leg on steps.

  January 19, 1885. Clogged flue filled house with smoke.

  February 2, 1885. Ceiling fixture fell, injuring woman.

  March 17, 1885. Maid slipped on wet kitchen floor.

  March 24, 1885—

  * * * *

  It was a list of the house’s sins, Big Jim Carnack realized. He leafed through page after page of petty annoyances. Broken pipes, leaking gas valves, rotting wood, lots of burns and splinters and minor injuries for the people who lived there. The house had even killed: an old woman fell down the second-floor steps and broke her neck in 1904. It killed again in 1951, a teenage girl who slipped in the bathtub and hit her head on the sink.

  As Big Jim skimmed the entries, he got a sense of the house’s true nature. It wanted to hurt people, he realized, to make their lives as miserable as it could. He thought of the stumble he’d taken on the front steps, of the splinter the door had given him, of the burn he’d received from the radiator—even when it wasn’t radiating heat.

  The pettiness irked him. The house needed to be punished, he thought, and he was just the man to do it.

  He turned the key in the wrecking machine’s ignition. The engine purred to life. He changed gears; the steel ball began to swing back.