collector's neurosis

''st.john and i followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devestating ennui. 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 timiditly--that hideous extremity of human outrage, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing.

''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. 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.

''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!

''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 there for five centuries, who had himself been a ghoul in his time and had stolen a potent thing from a mighty sepulchre.

''i remember how we delved in the ghoul's grave with our spades, ... then we struck a substance harder that the damp mould, and beheld a rotting oblong box crusted with mineral deposits from the long undisturbed ground. ... 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 surprizing 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 sleepers neck. it was the oddly conventionalized 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 repellant in the extreme, savoring at once of death, bestiality, and malevolance. around the base was an inscription in characters which neither st. john nor i could identify; and on the bottom, like a makers seal was graven a grotesque and formidable skull.

''immediatly upon beholding this amulet we knew that we must posess it; that this treasure alone was our logical pelf from the centuried grave ... 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 inaccessable leng, in central asia, ...

''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 ghost's souls to the objects it symbolized; and were disturbed by what we read,. ... then the terror came ...''

h.p.lovecraft, the hound.