The Horror From The Hills by Frank Belknap Long Jr.

Book Details

The Horror From the HiIls – A stone idol, brought to New York from China, unleashes the Great Old One Chaugnar Faugn upon the world. And Chaugnar Faugn is hungry.

The chapter “5. Little’s Dream” incorporates almost verbatim a dream H. P. Lovecraft related to Long in a letter.

The Horror From The Hills (1931)

1. The Coming of the Stone Beast
2. The Atrocity at the Museum

Part 2

3. An Archeological Digression
4. The Horror on the Hills
5. Little’s Dream
6. The Time-Space Machine
7. A Cure for Skepticism
8. What Happened in the Laboratory
9. The Horror Moves
10. Little’s Explanation

When Chaugnar Wakes (1932)

Frank Belknap Long, Jr. (1901–1994) was born in New York City on April 27, 1901. As a boy he was fascinated by natural history, and wrote that he dreamed of running “away from home and explore the great rain forests of the Amazon.” He developed his interest in the weird by reading the Oz books, Jules Verne, and H.G. Wells as well as Ambrose Bierce and Edgar Allan Poe.

In 1920, at the age of 19, Long began corresponding with H. P. Lovecraft. They became fast friends until Lovecraft’s death in 1937. Long wrote a number of early Cthulhu Mythos stories. These included The Hounds of Tindalos (the first Mythos story written by anyone other than Lovecraft), The Horror from the Hills (which introduced the elephantine Great Old One, Chaugnar Faugn to the Mythos), and The Space-Eaters (featuring a fictionalized Lovecraft as its main character).

The Horror From the Hills has 2 illustrations.

Files:

1. HorrorFromTheHills.epub

Excerpt: The Horror From The Hills

1. The Coming of the Stone Beast

IN A long, low-ceilinged room adorned with Egyptian, Græco-Roman, Minoan and Assyrian antiquities a thin, careless-seeming young man of twenty-six sat jubilantly humming. As nothing in his appearance or manner suggested the scholar—he wore gray tweeds of collegiate cut, gray spats, striped blue shirt and collar and a ridiculously brilliant cravat—the uninitiated were inclined to regard him as a mere supernumerary in his own office. Strangers entered unannounced and called him “young man” at least twenty times a week, and he was frequently asked to convey messages to a non-existent superior. No one suspected, no one dreamed until he enlightened them, that he was the lawful custodian of the objects about him; and even when he revealed his identity people surveyed him with distrust and were inclined to suspect that he was ironically pulling their legs.

Algernon Harris was the young man’s name and graduate degrees from Yale and Oxford set him distinctly apart from the undistinguished majority. But it is to his credit that he never paraded his erudition, nor succumbed to the impulse -almost irresistible in a young man with academic affiliations—to put a Ph.D. on the title page of his first book.

It was this book which had endeared him to the directors of the Manhattan Museum of Fine Arts and prompted their unanimous choice of him to succeed the late Halpin Chalmers as Curator of Archeology when the latter retired in the fall of 1929.

In less than six months young Harris had exhaustively familiarized himself with the duties and responsibilities of his office and was becoming the most successful curator that the museum had ever employed. So boyishly ebullient was he, so consumed with investigative zeal, that his field workers contracted his enthusiasm as though it were a kind of fever and sped from his presence to trust their scholarly and invaluable lives to slant-eyed ferocious Orientals, and gibbering hairy Indians, and entirely naked black men on the most detestable crustal sections of our planet.

And now they were coming back—for days now they had been coming back— occasionally with haggard faces, and once or twice, unfortunately, with something radically wrong with them. The Symons tragedy was a case in point. Symons was a Chang Dynasty specialist, and he had been obliged to leave his left eye and a piece of his nose in a Buddhist temple near a place called Fen Chow Fu, But when Algernon questioned him he could only mumble something about a small malignant face with corpsy eyes that had glared and glared at him out of a purple mist. And Francis Hogarth lost eighty pounds and a perfectly good right arm somewhere between Lake Rudolph and Naivasha in British East Africa.

But a few inexplicable and hence, from a scientific point of view, unfortunate occurrences were more than compensated for by the archeological treasures that the successful explorers brought back and figuratively dumped at Algernon’s feet. There were mirrors of Græco-Bactrian design and miniature tiger-dragons or tao-tiehs from Central China dating from at least 200 B. C, enormous diorite Sphinxes from the Valley of the Nile, “Geometric” vases from Mycenaean Crete, incised pottery from Messina and Syracuse, linens and spindles from the Swiss Lakes, sculptured lintels from Yucatan and Mexico, Mayan and Manabi monoliths ten feet tall, Paleolithic Venuses from the rock caverns of the Pyrenees, and even a series of rare bilingual tablets in Hamitic and Latin from the site of Carthage.

It is not surprizing that so splendid a garnering should have elated Algernon immoderately and impelled him to behave like a schoolboy. He addressed the attendants by their first names, slapped them boisterously upon their shoulders whenever they had occasion to approach him, and went roaming haphazardly about the building immersed in ecstatic reveries. So far indeed did he descend from his pedestal that even the directors were disturbed, and it is doubtful if anything short of the arrival of Clark Ulman could have jolted him out of it.

Ulman may have been aware of this, for he telephoned first to break the news mercifully. He had apparently heard of the success of the other expeditions and hated infernally to intrude his skeleton at the banquet. Algernon, as we have seen, was humming, and the jingling of a phone-bell at his elbow was the first intimation he had of Ulman’s return. Hastily detaching the receiver he pressed it against his ear and injected a staccato “What is it?” into the mouthpiece.

There ensued a silence. Then Ulman’s voice, disconcertingly shrill, smote unpleasantly upon his tympanum. “I’ve got the god, Algernon, and I’ll be over with it directly. I’ve three men helping me. It’s four feet high and as heavy as granite. Oh, it’s a strange, loathsome thing, Algernon. An unholy thing. I shall insist that you destroy it!”

“What’s that?” Algernon raised his voice incredulously.

“You may photograph it and study it, but you’ve got to destroy it. You’ll understand when you see what —what I have become!”

There came a hoarse sobbing, whilst Algernon struggled to comprehend what the other was driving at.

“It has wreaked its malice on me—on me—”

With a frown Algernon put up the receiver and began agitatedly to pace the room. “The elephant-god of Tsang!” he muttered to himself. “The horror Richardson drew before—before they impaled him. It’s unbelievable. Ulman has crossed the desert plateau on foot— he’s crossed above the graves of Steelbrath, Talman, McWilliams, Henley and Holmes. Richardson swore the cave was guarded night and day by leprous yellow abnormalities. I’m sure that’s the phrase he used—abnormalities without faces— fetid beast-men in thrall to some malign wizardry. He averred they moved in circles about the idol on their hands and knees, and participated in a rite so foul that he dared not describe it.

“His escape was a sheer miracle. He was a ‘stout fellow;’ it was merely because they couldn’t kill him that the priest was impressed. A man who can curse valiantly after three days of agonizing torture must of necessity be a great magician and wonder-worker. But it couldn’t have happened twice. Ulman could never have achieved such a break. He is too frail—a day on their cross would have finished him. They would never have released him and decked him out with flowers and worshipped him as a sort of subsidiary elephant-god. Richardson predicted that no other white man would ever get into the cave alive. And as for getting out-

“I can’t imagine how Ulman did it. If he encountered even a few of Richardson’s beast-men it isn’t surprizing he broke down on the phone. ‘Destroy the statue!’ Imagine! Sheer insanity, that. Ulman is evidently in a highly nervous and excitable state and we shall have to handle him with gloves.”

Excerpt From: Frank Belknap Long Jr. “The Horror From The Hills.”