The Hounds of Tindalos and Other Stories by Frank Belknap Long Jr.

Book Details

The Hounds of Tindalos and Other Stories – five stories of horror from Frank Belknap Long, Jr. including two classic contributions to the Cthulhu Mythos.

The Red Fetish (1930) – Weird adventures among savage head-hunters— a red-headed man runs afoul of cannibals

The Were-Snake (1925) – Arthur Fights With the Goddess Ishtar in Her Subterranean Retreat
A novelette of three chapters

The Space-Eaters (1928) – A tremendous menace closed in upon the earth from outside the solar system— a powerful story of uncanny horror
A novelette of three chapters

The Hounds of Tindalos (1929) – A tale of unutterable horror— of a pursuit by loathsome entities through the ages and through the dimensions
A novelette of five chapters

The Black Druid (1930) – A short tale that compresses a world of cosmic horror in its few pages

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 HPL as its main character).

The Space Eaters was adapted as episode 63 of the television series Monsters, starring Richard Clarke, Mart Hulswit and Richard M. Hughes. It first aired January 6, 1991.

The Hounds of Tindalos has been used or referenced by many later Mythos writers, including Ramsey Campbell, Lin Carter, Brian Lumley and Peter Cannon. Additionally it has inspired several metal songs such as the Metallica song “All Nightmare Long” from their album Death Magnetic.

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Excerpt: The Hounds of Tindalos

1

“I’M GLAD you came,” said Chalmers. He was sitting by the window and his face was very pale. Two tall candles guttered at his elbow and cast a sickly amber light over his long nose and slightly receding chin. Chalmers would have nothing modern about his apartment. He had the soul of a mediæval ascetic, and he preferred illuminated manuscripts to automobiles and leering stone gargoyles to radios and adding-machines.

As I crossed the room to the settee he had cleared for me I glanced at his desk and was surprised to discover that he had been studying the mathematical formulæ of a celebrated contemporary physicist, and that he had covered many sheets of thin yellow paper with curious geometric designs.

“Einstein and John Dee are strange bedfellows,” I said as my gaze wandered from his mathematical charts to the sixty or seventy quaint books that comprised his strange little library. Plotinus and Emanuel Moscopulus, St. Thomas Aquinas and Frenicle de Bessy stood elbow to elbow in the somber ebony bookcase, and chairs, table and desk were littered with pamphlets about mediæval sorcery and witchcraft and black magic, and all of the valiant glamorous things that the modern world has repudiated.

Chalmers smiled engagingly, and passed me a Russian cigarette on a curiously carved tray. “We are just discovering now,” he said, “that the old alchemists and sorcerers were two-thirds right, and that your modern biologist and materialist is nine-tenths wrong.”

“You have always scoffed at modern science,” I said, a little impatiently.

“Only at scientific dogmatism,” he replied. “I have always been a rebel, a champion of originality and lost causes; that is why I have chosen to repudiate the conclusions of contemporary biologists.”

“And Einstein?” I asked.

“A priest of transcendental mathematics!” he murmured reverently. “A profound mystic and explorer of the great suspected.”

“Then you do not entirely despise science.”

“Of course not,” he affirmed. “I merely distrust the scientific positivism of the past fifty years, the positivism of Haeckel and Darwin and of Mr. Bertrand Russell. I believe that biology has failed pitifully to explain the mystery of man’s origin and destiny.”

“Give them time,” I retorted.

Chalmers’ eyes glowed. “My friend,” he murmured, “your pun is sublime. Give them time. That is precisely what I would do. But your modern biologist scoffs at time. He has the key but he refuses to use it. What do we know of time, really? Einstein believes that it is relative, that it can be interpreted in terms of space, of curved space. But must we stop there? When mathematics fails us can we not advance by—insight?”

“You are treading on dangerous ground,” I replied. “That is a pit fall that your line investigator avoids. That is why modern science has advanced so slowly. It accepts nothing that it can not demonstrate. But you—”

“I would take hashish, opium, all manner of drugs. I would emulate the sages of the East. And then perhaps I would apprehend—”

“What?”

“The fourth dimension.”

“Theosophical rubbish!”

“Perhaps. But I believe that drugs expand human consciousness. William James agreed with me. And I have discovered a new one.”

“A new drug?”

“It was used centuries ago by Chinese alchemists, but it is virtually unknown in the West. Its occult properties are amazing. With its aid and the aid of my mathematical knowledge I believe that I can go back through time.”

“I do not understand.”

“Time is merely our imperfect perception of a new dimension of space. Time and motion are both illusions. Everything that has existed from the beginning of the world exists now. Events that occurred centuries ago on this planet continue to exist in another dimension of space. Events that will occur centuries from now exist already. We can not perceive their existence because we can not enter the dimension of space that contains them. Human beings as we know them are merely fractions, infinitesimally small fractions of one enormous whole. Every human being is linked with all the life that has preceded him on this planet. All of his ancestors are parts of him. Only time separates him from his forebears, and time is an illusion and does not exist.”

“I think I understand,” I murmured.

“It will be sufficient for my purpose if you can form a vague idea of what I wish to achieve. I wish to strip from my eyes the veils of illusion that time has thrown over them, and see the beginning and the end.”

“And you think this new drug will help you?”

“I am sure that it will. And I want you to help me. I intend to take the drug immediately. I can not wait. I must see.” His eyes glittered strangely. “I am going back, back through time.”

He rose and strode to the mantel. When he faced me again he was holding a small square box in the palm of his hand. “I have here five pellets of the drug Liao. It was used by the Chinese philosopher Lao Tze, and while under its influence he visioned Tao. Tao is the most mysterious force in the world; it surrounds and pervades all things; it contains the visible universe and everything that we call reality. He who apprehends the mysteries of Tao sees clearly all that was and will be.”

“Rubbish!” I retorted.

“Tao resembles a great animal, recumbent, motionless, containing in its enormous body all the worlds of our universe, the past, the present and the future. We see portions of this great monster through a slit, which we call time. With the aid of this drug I shall enlarge the slit. I shall behold the great figure of life, the great recumbent beast in its entirety.”

“And what do you wish me to do?”

“Watch, my friend. Watch and take notes. And if I go back too far you must recall me to reality. You can recall me by shaking me violently. If I appear to be suffering acute physical pain you must recall me at once.”

“Chalmers,” I said, “I wish you wouldn’t make this experiment. You are taking dreadful risks. I don’t believe that there is any fourth dimension and I emphatically do not believe in Tao. And I don’t approve of your experimenting with unknown drugs.”

“I know the properties of this drug,” he replied. “I know precisely how it affects the human animal and I know its dangers. The risk does not reside in the drug itself. My only fear is that I may become lost in time. You see, I shall assist the drug. Before I swallow this pellet I shall give my undivided attention to the geometric and algebraic symbols that I have traced on this paper.” He raised the mathematical chart that rested on his knee. “I shall prepare my mind for an excursion into time. I shall approach the fourth dimension with my conscious mind before I take the drug which will enable me to exercise occult powers of perception. Before I enter the dream world of the Eastern mystics I shall acquire all of the mathematical help that modern science can offer. This mathematical knowledge, this conscious approach to an actual apprehension of the fourth dimension of time will supplement the work of the drug. The drug will open up stupendous new vistas—the mathematical preparation will enable me to grasp them intellectually. I have often grasped the fourth dimension in dreams, emotionally, intuitively, but I have never been able to recall, in waking life, the occult splendors that were momentarily revealed to me.

“But with your aid, I believe that I can recall them. You will take down everything that I say while I am under the influence of the drug. No matter how strange or incoherent my speech may become you will omit nothing. When I awake I may be able to supply the key to whatever is mysterious or incredible. I am not sure that I shall succeed, but if I do succeed”—his eyes were strangely luminous—“time will exist for me no longer!”

Excerpt From: Frank Belknap Long, Jr. “The Hounds of Tindalos and Other Stories.”