I remembered how we delved in this[22] 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,[23] the gently moaning night-wind, and the strange, half-heard,[24] directionless baying,[25] of whose objective existence we could scarcely be sure.[26] 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[27] 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[28] its features was repellent in the extreme, savouring[29] 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[30] it as the thing hinted of in the forbidden “Necronomicon”[31] 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[32] 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.[33] 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.[34]
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.[35] Now, however, we were troubled by what seemed to be frequent fumblings[36] 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[37] 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[38] before it. We read much in Alhazred’s “Necronomicon”[39] about its properties, and about the relation of ghouls’[40] souls to the objects it symbolised;[41] and were disturbed by what we read.[42] 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[43] night that the faint, distant baying over the moor became to us a certain and dreaded reality.[44] 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[45] 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[46] a queer combination of rustling,[47] tittering, and articulate chatter. Whether we were mad, dreaming, or in our senses, we did not try to determine. We only realised,[48] 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[49] 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[50] 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[51] 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.[52] 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—.”[53] 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[54] 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[55] trembling, I know not how much later, I staggered into the house and made shocking obeisances[56] 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[57] 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[58] try any step conceivably logical. What the hound was, and why it[59] 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 t
hat 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.[60] 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[61] of drunken voices[62] a faint, deep, insistent note as of a gigantic hound.
So at last I stood again in that[63] 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[64] 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,[65] 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[66] of bats from night-black ruins of buried temples of Belial. . . . Now, as the baying of that dead,[67] fleshless monstrosity grows louder and louder, and the stealthy whirring and flapping of those accursed[68] web-wings circles closer and closer, I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is my only refuge from the unnamed and unnamable.[69]
Notes
Editor’s Note: The surviving T.Ms. is one of HPL’s single-spaced T.Mss. sent to Weird Tales in mid-1923. He must have subsequently made slight revisions, as the Weird Tales text (February 1924) appears to bear a few deliberate alterations by HPL; but the majority of the divergences between the single-spaced T.Ms. and the Weird Tales text are probably the result of alterations in accordance with the magazine’s “house style.” The Arkham House editions follow the Weird Tales text; the 1965 edition makes numerous additional errors. The second Weird Tales appearance (September 1929) is not relevant to the textual history of the tale.
Texts: A = T.Ms. (JHL); B = Weird Tales 3, No. 2 (February 1924): 50–52, 78; C = Beyond the Wall of Sleep (Arkham House, 1943), 45–49; D = Dagon and Other Macabre Tales (Arkham House, 1965), 152–59. Copy-text: A (with a few readings from B).
1. faint,] faint D
2. of] if B
3. doubts.] doubts. ¶ B, C, D
4. self-annihilation.] annihilation. A
5. world,] world; D
6. soon] soon, C, D
7. appeal.] appeal. ¶ B, C, D
8. hold] help D
9. far] far, C, D
10. odours] odors B, C, D
11. funereal lilies,] funeral lilies; D
12. incense] incence D
13. children.] children. ¶ B, C, D
14. unnamable] unnameable D
15. rumoured] rumored B, C, D
16. held . . . acknowledge.] held the unknown and unnamable drawings of Clark Ashton Smith. A [revised in pencil by HPL]
17. myself! ] myself. A
18. that] om. B, C, D
19. rumour] rumor B, C, D
20. odours] odors B, C, D
21. and] and, B, C, D
22. this] the D
23. odours,] odors, B, C, D
24. half-heard,] half-heard D
25. baying,] baying D
26. sure.] sure. ¶ B, C, D
27. conventionalised] conventionalized D
28. on] of D
29. savouring] savoring B, C, D
30. recognised] recognized B, C, D
31. “Necronomicon”] Necronomicon D
32. that] the D
33. sure.] sure. ¶ B, C, D
34. II.] om. C, D
35. visitor.] visitor. ¶ B, C, D
36. frequent fumblings] a frequent fumbling D
37. alone . . . imagination] om. D
38. strangely . . . candles] a strangely . . . candle D
39. “Necronomicon”] Necronomicon D
40. ghouls’] ghosts’ C, D
41. symbolised;] symbolized; B, C, D
42. read.] read. ¶ B, C, D
43. that] the D
44. reality.] reality. ¶ B, C, D
45. for] for, B, C, D
46. heard . . . away] heard, . . . away, B, C, D
47. rustling,] rusting, D
48. realised,] realized, B, C, D
49. dramatise] dramatize B, C, D
50. windswept] wind-swept A, B, C, D
51. distant] dismal B, C, D
52. moon.] moon. ¶ B, C, D
53. thing—.”] thing—”. A; thing—.” ¶ B, C, D
54. dim-litten] dim-lighted B, C, D
55. arose] arose, B, C, D
56. obeisances] obeisance D
57. wind . . . night-wind] wind, . . . night-wind, B, C, D
58. at least] om. C, D
59. it] it had B, C, D
60. neighbourhood.] neighborhood. B, C, D
61. clamour] clamor B; om. C, D [see below]
62. above . . . voices] om. C, D
63. that] the B, C, D
64. close-packed] closepacked B, C, D
65. gory,] gory C, D
66. Bacchanale] bacchanale A, B, C, D
67. dead,] dead C, D
68. accursed] accused B
69. unnamable.] unnameable. D
The Lurking Fear
I. The Shadow on the Chimney
There was thunder in the air on the night I went to the deserted mansion atop Tempest Mountain to find the lurking fear. I was not alone, for foolhardiness was not then mixed with that love of the grotesque and the terrible which has made my[1] career a series of quests for strange horrors in literature and in life. With me were two faithful and muscular men for whom I had sent when the time came; men long associated with me in my ghastly explorations because of their peculiar fitness.
We had started quietly from the village because of the reporters who still lingered about after the eldritch panic of a month before—the nightmare creeping death. Later, I thought, they might aid me; but I did not want them then. Would to God I had let them share the search, that I might not have had to bear the secret alone so long; to bear it alone for fear the world would call me mad or go mad itself at the daemon[2] implications of the thing. Now that I am telling it anyway, lest the brooding make me a maniac, I wish I had never concealed it. For I, and I only, know what manner of fear lurked on that spectral and desolate mountain.
In a small motor-car we covered the miles of primeval forest and hill until the wooded ascent checked it. The country bore an aspect more than usually sinister as we viewed it by night and without the accustomed[3] crowds of investigators, so that we were often temp
ted to use the acetylene headlight[4] despite the attention it might attract. It was not a wholesome landscape after dark, and I believe I would have noticed its morbidity even had I been ignorant of the terror that stalked there. Of wild creatures there were none—they are wise when death leers close. The ancient lightning-scarred trees seemed unnaturally large and twisted, and the other vegetation unnaturally thick and feverish, while curious mounds and hummocks in the weedy, fulgurite-pitted earth reminded me of snakes and dead men’s skulls swelled to gigantic proportions.
Fear had lurked on Tempest Mountain for more than a century. This I learned at once from newspaper accounts of the catastrophe which first brought the region to the world’s notice. The place is a remote, lonely elevation in that part of the Catskills where Dutch civilisation[5] once feebly and transiently penetrated, leaving behind as it receded only a few ruined mansions and a degenerate squatter population inhabiting pitiful hamlets on isolated slopes. Normal beings seldom visited the locality till the state police were formed, and even now only infrequent troopers patrol it. The fear, however, is an old tradition throughout the neighbouring[6] villages;[7] since it is a prime topic in the simple discourse of the poor mongrels who sometimes leave their valleys to trade hand-woven[8] baskets for such primitive necessities as they cannot[9] shoot, raise, or make.
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