hound from the pit
"st. john and i had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating 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 timidity--that hideous extremity of human outrage, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing. ...
"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 remember how we delved in the ghoul's grave with our spades, ... 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 it's long, firm teeth and it's 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 conventionalized figure of a crouching winged hound, or a sphinx with a semi-canine face, and was exquisitely carved in an antique oriental fashion from a small piece of green jade.
"the expression of it's features was repellent in the extreme, savouring 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 makers 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. ... 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. ... we read much in alhazred's necronomicon about it's properties, and about the relation of the ghost's soul to the object's it symbolized; and were disturbed by what we read. ... then terror came."
h.p.lovecraft, the hound.
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