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 eldrith 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 diabolism 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 expeditions,

or catalogue 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 an universe of terror and decay to excite our jaded

sensibilities.

It was 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 lines 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 fresh and radiantly golden heads of new-buried children.

Statues and paintings 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, and 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.