Weird Tales/Volume 36/Issue 8/The Hound
The Hound
By Fritz Leiber
David Lashley huddled the skimpy blankets around him and dully watched the cold light of an early spring morning seep through the window and stiffen in his room. He could not recall the exact nature of the terror against which he had fought his way into wakefulness, except that it had been in some way gigantic and had brought back to him the fear-ridden helplessness of childhood. It had lurked near him all night, and finally it had crouched over him and thrust down toward his face.
The radiator whined dismally with the first push of steam from the basement, and he shivered in response. He thought that his shivering was an ironically humorous recognition of the fact that his room was never warm except when he was out of it. But there was more to it than that. The penetrating whine had touched something in his mind without being quite able to dislodge it and bring it into consciousness. The mounting rumble of city traffic, together with the hoarse panting of a locomotive in the railroad yards, mingled themselves with the nearer sound, intensifying its disturbing tug at hidden fears. For a few moments he lay inert, listening. There was an unpleasant stench, too, in the room, he noticed, but that was nothing to be surprised at. He had experienced before the strange olfactory illusions that are part of the aftermath of sinus trouble and flu. Then he heard his mother moving around laboriously in the kitchen, and that stung him into action.
"Have you caught another cold?” she asked, watching him anxiously as he hurriedly spooned in a boiled egg before its heat should be entirely lost in the chilly plate. "Are you sure?” she persisted. "I heard someone sniffling all night.”
"Perhaps father—” he began. She shook her head. "No, he’s all right. His side was giving him a lot of pain yesterday evening, but he slept quietly enough. That’s why I thought it must be you, David. I got up twice to see, but”—her voice became a little doleful—"I know you don’t like me to come poking into your room at all hours.”
"That’s not true!” He contradicted. She looked so frail and little and worn, standing there in front of the stove with one of father’s shapeless bathrobes hugged around her, so like a sick sparrow trying to appear chipper, that a futile irritation, and an indignation that he couldn’t help her more, welled up within him, choking his voice a little. “It’s that I don’t want you getting up all the time, and missing your sleep. You have enough to do taking care of father all day long. And I’ve told you a dozen times that you mustn’t make breakfast for me. You know the doctor says you need all the rest you can get.”
"Oh, I’m all right,” she answered quickly, "but I was sure you’d caught another cold. All night long I kept hearing it—a sniffling and a snuffling—”
For the city has spawned its own horde of horrors. Yes, the city has its own werewolves.
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"It’s late, I’ll have to rush,” he said.
She accompanied him to the door, so accustomed to his hastiness that she saw in it nothing unusual. Her wan voice followed him down the dark apartment stair: “I hope a rat hasn’t died in the walls. Did you notice the nasty smell?” And then he was out of the door and had lost himself and his memories in the early morning rush of the city. Tires singing on asphalt. Cold engines coughing, then starting with a roar. Heels clicking on the sidewalk, hurrying, trotting, converging on street car intersections and elevated stations. Low heels, high heels. Heels of stenographers bound downtown and of housewives hastening to their stints of war work. Shouts of newsboys and glimpses of headlines: "AIR BLITZ ON. . . . BATTLESHIP SUNK. . . . BLACKOUT EXPECTED HERE. . . . DRIVEN BACK.”
But sitting in the stuffy solemnity of the street car, it was impossible to keep from thinking of it any longer. Besides, the stale medicinal smell of the yellow woodwork immediately brought back the memory of that other smell. David Lashley clenched his hands in his overcoat pockets and asked himself how it was possible for a grown man to be so suddenly overwhelmed by a fear from childhood. Yet in the same instant he knew with terrible certainty that this was no childhood fear, this thing that had pursued him up the years, growing ever more vast and menacing, until, like the demon wolf Fenris at Ragnorak, its gaping jaws scraped heaven and earth, seeking to open wider. This thing that had dogged his footsteps, sometimes so far behind that he forgot its existence, but now so close that he could almost feel its cold sick breath on his neck. Werewolves? He had read up on such things at the library, fingering dusty books in uneasy fascination, but what he had read made them seem innocuous and without significance—dead superstitions—in comparison with this thing that was part and parcel of the great sprawling cities and chaotic peoples of the twentieth century, so much a part that he, David Lashley, winced at the endlessly varying howls and growls of traffic and industry—sounds at once animal and mechanical; shrank back with a start from the sight of headlights at night—those dazzling, unwinking eyes; trembled uncontrollably if he heard the scuffling of rats in an alley or caught sight in the evenings of the shadowy forms of lean mongrel dogs looking for food in vacant lots. "Sniffling and snuffling,” his mother had said. What better words would you want to describe the inquisitive, persistent pryings of the beast that had crouched outside the bedroom door all night in his dreams and then finally pushed through to plant its dirty paws on his chest. For a moment, he saw superimposed on the yellow ceiling and garish advertising placards of the street car, its malformed muzzle . . . the red eyes like thickly scummed molten metal . . . the jaws slavered with thick black oil. . . .
Wildly he looked around at his fellow-passengers, seeking to blot out that vision, but it seemed to have slipped down into all of them, infecting them, giving their features an ugly canine cast—the slack, receding jaw of an otherwise pretty blond, the narrow head and wide-set eyes of an unshaven mechanic returning from the night shift. He sought refuge then in the open newspaper of the man sitting beside him, studying it intently without regard for the impression of rudeness he was creating. But there was a wolf in the cartoon, and he quickly turned away to stare through the dusty pane at the stores sliding by. Gradually the sense of oppressive menace lifted a little. But the cartoon had established another contact in his brain—the memory of a cartoon from the First World War. What the wolf or hound in that earlier cartoon had represented—war, famine, or the ruthlessness of the enemy—he could not say, but it had haunted his dreams for weeks, crouched in corners, and waited for him at the head of the stairs. Later he had tried to explain to friends the horrors that may lie in the concrete symbolisms and personifications of a cartoon if interpreted naively by a child, but had been unable to get his idea across.
The conductor growled out the name of a downtown street, and once again he lost himself in the crowd, finding relief in the never-ceasing movement, the brushing of shoulders against his own.
But as the time-clock emitted its delayed musical bong! and he turned to stick his card in the rack, the girl at the desk looked up and remarked, "Aren’t you going to punch in for your dog, too?”
"My dog?”
"Well, it was there just a second ago. Came in right behind you, looking as if it owned you—I mean you owned it.” She giggled briefly through her nose. "One of Mrs. Montmorency’s mastiffs escaped from the chauffeur and wandering around the store, I presume.”
He continued to stare at her blankly. "A joke,” she explained patiently, and returned to her work.
"I’ve got to get a grip on myself,” he found himself muttering tritely as the elevator lowered him noiselessly to the basement.
"I’ve got to get a grip on myself,” he kept repeating as he hurried to the locker room, left his coat and lunch, gave his hair a quick careful brushing, hurried again through the still-empty aisles, and slipped in behind the socks-and-handkerchiefs counter. "It’s just nerves. I’m not crazy. But I got to get a grip on myself.”
"What do you mean, talking to yourself and not noticing anybody? Don’t you know that’s the first symptom of insanity?”
Gertrude Rees had stopped on her way over to neckties. Light brown hair, faultlessly waved after the fashion of department-store salesgirls, framed a serious, not-too-pretty face.
"Just jittery, I guess,” he murmured.
"Sorry.” What else could you say? Even to Gertrude?
"I guess all of us get that way sometimes these days, pal,” she answered. Her hand slipped across the counter to squeeze his for a moment. "Buck up.”
But even as he watched her walk away, his hands automatically arranging display boxes, the new question was furiously hammering in his brain. What else could you say? What words could you use to explain it? Above all, to whom could you tell it? A dozen names printed themselves in his mind and were as quickly discarded.
One remained. Tom Goodsell. Tom was a screwball with a lot of common sense. Liked to talk about queer things. He would tell Tom. Tonight, after the fire warden’s class.
Shoppers were already filtering down into the basement. "He wears size eleven, madam? Yes, we have some new patterns in. These are silk and lisle.” But their ever-increasing numbers gave him no sense of security. Crowding the aisles, they became shapes behind which something might hide. He was continually peering past them. A little child who wandered behind the counter and pushed at his knee, gave him a sudden fright.
Lunch came early for him. He arrived at the locker room in time to catch hold of Gertrude Rees as she retreated uncertainly from the dark doorway.
"Dog,” she gasped. "Huge one. Gave me an awful start. Talk about jitters! Wonder where he ever came from? Watch out. He looked nasty.”
But David, impelled by sudden recklessness born of fear and shock, was already inside and switching on the light.
"No dog in sight,” he told her. His face was whiter than hers.
"You’re crazy. It must be there.” Her face, gingerly poked through the doorway, lengthened in surprise. "But I tell you I— Oh, I guess it must have pushed out through the other door.”
He did not tell her that the other door was bolted.
"I suppose a customer brought it in,” she rattled on, nervously. "Some of them can’t seem to shop unless they’ve got a pair of Russian wolfhounds. Though that kind usually keeps out of the bargain basement. I suppose we ought to find it before we eat lunch. It looked dangerous—”
But he hardly heard her. He had just noticed that his locker was open, and his overcoat dragged down on the floor. The brown paper bag containing his lunch had been torn open, and the contents rummaged through, as if an animal had been nosing at it. As he stooped, he saw that there were greasy, black stains on the sandwiches, and a familiar stale stench rose to his nostrils.
That night he found Tom Goodsell in a nervously elated mood. The latter had been called up and would start for camp in a week. As they sipped coffee in the empty little restaurant, Tom poured out a flood of talk about old times. David would have been able to listen better, had not the uncertain shadowy shapes outside the window been continually distracting his attention. Eventually he found an opportunity to turn the conversation down the channels which absorbed his mind.
"The supernatural beings of a modern city?” Tom answered, seeming to find nothing out of the way in the question. "Sure, they’d be different from the ghosts of yesterday. Each culture creates its own demons. Look, the Middle Ages built cathedrals, and pretty soon there were little gray shapes gliding around at night to talk with the gargoyles. Same thing ought to happen to us, with our skyscrapers and factories.” He spoke eagerly, with all his old poetic flare, as if he’d just been meaning to discuss this very matter. He would talk about anything tonight. "I’ll tell you how it works out, Dave. We begin by denying all the old haunts and superstitions. Why shouldn’t we? They belong to the era of cottage and castle. They can’t take root in the new environment. Science goes materialistic, proving that there isn’t anything in the universe except tiny bundles of energy. As if, for that matter, a tiny bundle of energy mightn’t mean—anything.”
"But wait, that’s just the beginning. We go on inventing and discovering and organizing. We cover the earth with huge structures. We pile them together in great heaps that make old Rome and Alexandria and Babylon seem almost toy-towns by comparison. The new environment, you see, is forming.”
David stared at him with incredulous fascination, profoundly disturbed. This was not at all what he had expected or hoped for—this almost telepathic prying into his most hidden fears. He had wanted to talk about these things—yes—but in a skeptical reassuring way. Instead, Tom sounded almost serious—mocking, but serious. David started to speak, but Tom held up his finger for silence, aping the gesture of a schoolteacher.
"Meanwhile, what’s happening inside each one of us? I’ll tell you. All sorts of inhibited emotions are accumulating. Fear is accumulating. Horror is accumulating. A new kind of awe at the mysteries of the universe is accumulating. A pyschological environment is forming, along with the physical one. Wait, let me finish. Our culture becomes ripe for infection. From somewhere. It’s just like a bacteriologist’s culture—I didn’t intend the pun—when it gets to the right temperature and consistency for supporting a colony of germs. Similarly, our culture suddenly spawns a horde of demons. And, like germs, they have a peculiar affinity to our culture. They’re unique. They fit in. You wouldn’t find the same kind any other time or place.”
"How would we know when the infection had taken place? Say, you’re taking this pretty seriously, aren’t you? Well, so am I, maybe. Why, they’d haunt us, terrorize us, try to rule us. Our fears would be their fodder. A parasite-host relationship. Supernatural symbiosis. Some of us would notice them sooner than others—the sensitive ones. Some of us might see them without knowing what they were. Others might know about them without seeing them. Like me, eh?”
"What was that? I didn’t catch your remark. Oh, about werewolves. Well, that’s a pretty special question, but tonight I’d take a crack at anything. Yes, I think there’d be werewolves among our demons, but they wouldn’t be much like the old ones. No nice clean fur, white teeth and shining eyes. Oh, no. Instead you’d get some nasty hound that wouldn’t surprise you if you saw it nosing at a garbage pail or crawling out from under a truck. Frighten and terrorize you, yes. But surprise, no. It would fit into the environment. Look as if it belonged in a city, and smell the same. Because of the twisted emotions that would be its food, your emotions and mine. A matter of diet.”
Tom Goodsell chuckled loudly, and lit another cigarette. But David only stared down at the scarred counter. What good would it do now to tell Tom Goodsell that his wild speculations were well on the way to becoming sober truth. Probably Tom would immediately scoff and be skeptical, but that wouldn’t get around the fact that he had already agreed—agreed in partial jest perhaps, but still agreed. And Tom himself confirmed this, when, in a more serious, friendlier voice, he said:
"Oh, I know I’ve talked a lot of rot tonight, but still, you know, the way things are, there’s something to it. At least, I can’t express my feelings any other way.”
They shook hands at the corner, and David rode the surging street car home through a city whose every bolt and stone seemed subtly infected, whose every noise carried shuddering overtones. His mother was waiting up for him, and after he had wearily argued with her about getting more rest and seen her off to bed, he lay sleepless himself, all through the night, like a child in a strange house, listening to each tiny noise and watching intently each changing shape taken by the shadows.
That night nothing shouldered through the door or pressed its muzzle against the window pane.
Yet he found that it cost him an effort to go down to the department store next morning, so conscious was he of the thing’s presence in the faces and forms, the structures and machines around him. It was as if he were forcing himself into the heart of a monster. Detestation of the city grew within him. As yesterday the crowded aisles seemed only hiding places, and he avoided the locker room. Gertrude Rees remarked sympathetically on his fatigued look, and he took the opportunity to invite her out that evening. There seemed something normal and wholesome and familiar, something untainted about her, and his whole being demanded those qualities. Of course, he told himself, while they sat watching the movie, she wasn’t very close to him. None of the girls had been close to him—a not-very-competent young man tied down to the task of supporting parents whose little reserve of money had long ago dribbled away. He had dated them for awhile, talked to them, told them his beliefs and ambitions, and then one by one they had drifted off to marry other men. But that did not change the fact that he needed the wholesomeness Gertrude could give him.
And as they walked home through the chilly night, he found himself talking of inconsequential things and laughing at his own jokes. Then, as they turned to one another in the shadowy vestibule and she lifted her lips, he sensed her features altering queerly, lengthening. "A funny sort of light here,” he thought as he took her in his arms. But the thin strip of fur on her collar grew matted and oily under his touch, her fingers grew hard and sharp against his back, he felt her teeth pushing out against her lips, and then a sharp, prickling sensation as of icy needles.
Blindly he pushed away from her, then saw—and the sight stopped him dead—that she had not changed at all, or that whatever change had been was now gone.
"What’s the matter, dear?” he heard her ask startledly. "What’s happened? What’s that you’re mumbling? Changed, you say? What’s changed? Infected with it? What do you mean? For heaven’s sake, don’t talk that way. You’ve done it to me, you say? Done what?” He felt her hand on his arm, a soft hand now. "No, you’re not crazy. Don’t think of such things. But you’re neurotic, and a little batty. For heaven’s sake, pull yourself together.”
“I don’t know what happened to me,” he managed to say, in his right voice again. Then, because he had to say somethingmore: "My nerves all jumped, like someone had snapped them.”
He expected her to be angry, but she seemed only puzzledly sympathetic, as if she liked him but had become afraid of him, as if she sensed something wrong in him beyond her powers of understanding or repair.
"Do take care of yourself," she said doubtfully. "We’re all a little crazy now and then, I guess. My nerves get like wires too. Good night.”
He watched her disappear up the stair. Then he turned and ran into the night.
At home his mother was waiting up again, sitting close to the hall radiator to catch its dying warmth, the inevitable shapeless bathrobe wrapped about her. Because of a new thought that had come to the forefront of his brain, he avoided her embrace and, after a few brief words, hurried off toward his room. But she followed him down the hall.
"You’re not looking at all well, David,” she told him anxiously, whispering because father might be asleep. "Are you sure you’re not getting flu again? Don’t you think you should see the doctor tomorrow?” Then she went on quickly to another subject, using that nervously apologetic tone with which he was so familiar. “I shouldn’t bother you with it, David, but you must really be more careful of the bedclothes. You’d laid something greasy on the coverlet and there were big black stains on it when I went in this morning.”
He was pushing open the bedroom door when she spoke, but her words halted his hand for an instant. It was only what might be expected. And how could you avoid the thing by going one place rather than another?
"And one thing more,” she added, as he switched on the lights. "Will you try to get some cardboard tomorrow to black out the windows? They’re out of it at the stores around here and the radio says we should be ready.”
"Yes, I will. Good night, mother.”
"Oh, and something else,” she persisted, lingering uneasily just beyond the door. "That really must be a dead rat in the walls. The smell keeps coming in waves. I spoke to the real estate agent, but he hasn’t done anything about it. I wish you’d speak to him again.”
"Yes. Good night, mother.”
He waited until he heard her door softly close.
Then he went over to the dresser to examine his lips in the mirror, lifting aside the lampshade to get a brighter light. On the lower lip were two tiny white spots. Each felt distinctly numb to the touch, as if it were frozen. That much confirmed, he lit a cigarette and slumped down on the bed to try to think as clearly as he could about something to which science and everyday ideas could not be applied.
Question one (and he realized with an ironic twinge that it sounded melodramatic enough for a dime-novel): Was Gertrude Rees what might be called for want of a better term, a werewolf? Answer: Almost certainly not, in any ordinary sense of the word. What had momentarily come to her had almost certainly been something he had communicated to her. It had happened because of his presence. And either his own shock had interrupted the transformation or else Gertrude Rees had not proved a suitable vehicle of incarnation for the thing.
Question Two: Might he not communicate the thing to some other person? Answer: Yes. For a moment his thinking paused, as there swept before his mind’s eye kaleidoscope visions of the faces which might, without warning, begin to change in his presence: His mother, his father, Tom Goodsell, the prim-mouthed real estate agent, a customer at the store, a panhandler whom he would chance to meet in the street on a rainy night.
Question Three: Was there any escape from the thing? Answer: No. And yet—there was one bare possibility. Escape from the city. The city had bred the thing; might it not be chained to the city? It hardly seemed to be a reasonable possibility; how could a supernatural entity be tied down to one locality? And yet—He stepped quickly to the window and, after a moment’s hesitation, jerked it up. Sounds which had been temporarily blotted out by his thinking now poured past him in quadrupled volume, mixing together discordantly like instruments tuning up for some titanic symphony—the racking surge of street car and elevated, the coughing of a locomotive in the yards, the hum of tires on asphalt and the growl of engines, the mumbling of radio voices, the faint mournful note of distant horns. But now they were no longer separate sounds. They all issued from one cavernous throat—a single moan, infinitely penetrating, infinitely menacing. He slammed down the window and put his hands to his ears. He switched out the light and threw himself on the bed, burying his head in the pillows. Still the sound came through. And it was then he realized that ultimately, whether he wanted to or not, the thing would drive him from the city. The moment would come when the sound would begin to penetrate too deeply, to reverberate too unendurably in his ears.
The sight of so many faces, trembling on the brink of an almost unimaginable change, would become too much for him. And he would leave whatever he was doing and go away.
That moment came a little after four o’clock next afternoon. He could not say what sensation it was that, adding its pressure to the rest, drove him to take the step. Perhaps it was a heaving movement in the rack of dresses two counters away; perhaps it was the snoutlike appearance momentarily taken by a crumpled piece of cloth. Whatever it was, he slipped out from behind the counter without a word, leaving a customer to mutter indignantly, and walked up the stair and out into the street, moving almost like a sleepwalker yet constantly edging from side to side to avoid any direct contact with the crowd engulfing him. Once in the street, he took the first car that came by, never noting its number, and found himself an empty place in the corner of the front platform.
With ominous slowness at first, then with increasing rapidity, the heart of the city was left behind. A great gloomy bridge spanning an oily river was passed over, and the frowning cliffs of the buildings grew lower. Warehouses gave way to factories, factories to apartment buildings, apartment buildings to dwellings which were at first small and dirty white, then large and mansion-like but very much decayed, then new and monotonous in their uniformity. Peoples of different economic status and racial affiliations filed into and emptied from the street car as the different strata of the city were passed through. Finally the vacant lots began to come, at first one by one, then in increasing numbers, until the houses were spaced out two or three to a block.
"End of the line,” sang out the conductor, and without hesitation David swung down from the platform and walked on in the same direction that the street car had been going. He did not hurry. He did not lag. He moved as an automaton that had been wound up and set going, and will not stop until it runs down.
The sun was setting smokily red in the west. He could not see it because of a tree-fringed rise ahead, but its last rays winked at him from the window panes of little houses blocks off to right and left, as if flaming lights had been lit inside. As he moved they flashed on and off like signals. Two blocks further on the sidewalk ended, and he walked down the center of a muddy lane. After passing a final house, the lane also came to an end, giving way to a narrow dirt path between high weeds. The path led up the rise and through the fringe of trees. Emerging on the other side, he slowed his pace and finally stopped, so bewilderingly fantastic was the scene spread out before him. The sun had set, but high cloud-banks reflected its light, giving a spectral glow to the landscape.
Immediately before him stretched the equivalent of two or three empty blocks, but beyond that began a strange realm that seemed to have been plucked from another climate and another geological system and set down here outside the city. There were strange trees and shrubs, but, most striking of all, great uneven blocks of reddish stone which rose from the earth at unequal intervals and culminated in a massive central eminence fifty or sixty feet high.
And as he gazed, the light drained from the landscape, as if a cloak had been flipped over the earth, and in the sudden twilight there rose from somewhere in the region ahead a faint howling, mournful and sinister, but in no way allied to the other howling that had haunted him day and night. Once again he moved forward, but now he moved impulsively toward the source of the new sound.
A small gate in a high wire fence pushed open, giving him access to the realm of rocks. He found himself following a gravel path between thick shrubs and trees. At first it seemed quite dark, in contrast to the open land behind him. And with every step he took, the hollow howling grew closer. He felt as though he were walking through a dream world. Finally the path turned abruptly around a shoulder of rock, and he found himself at the sound’s source.
A ditch of rough stone about eight feet wide and of a similar depth separated him from a space overgrown with short, brownish vegetation and closely surrounded on the other three sides by precipitous rocky walls in which the dark mouths of two or three caves showed. In the center of the open space were gathered a half dozen white-furred canine figures, their muzzles pointing toward the sky, giving voice to the mournful cry that had drawn him here.
It was only when he felt the low iron fence against his knees and made out the neat little sign reading, artic wolves, that he realized where he must be—in the famous zoological gardens which he had heard about but never visited, where the animals were kept in as nearly natural conditions as was feasible. Looking around, he noted the outlines of two or three low inconspicuous buildings, and some distance away he could see the form of a uniformed guard silhouetted against a patch of sky. Evidently he had come in after hours, and through an auxiliary gate that probably should have been locked.
Swinging around again, he stared with casual curiosity at the wolves. The turn of events had the effect of making him feel stupid and bewildered, and for a long time he pondered dully as to why he should find these animals unalarming and even attractive.
Perhaps it was because they were so much a part of the wild, so little of the city. That great brute there, for example, the biggest of the lot, who had come forward to the edge of the ditch to stare back at him. He seemed an incarnation of primitive strength. His fur so creamy white—well, perhaps not so white; it seemed darker than he had thought at first, streaked with black—or was that due to the fading light? But at least his eyes were clear and clean, shining faintly like jewels in the gathering dark. But no, they weren’t clean; their reddish gleam was thickening, scumming over, until they looked more like two tiny peep-holes in the walls of hell. And why hadn’t he noticed before that the creature was obviously malformed? And why should the other wolves draw away from it and snarl as if afraid?
Then the brute licked its black tongue across, its greasy jowls, and from its throat came a faint familiar growl that had in it nothing of the wild, and David Lashley knew that before him crouched the monster of his dreams, finally made flesh and blood.
With a choked scream he turned and fled blindly down the gravel path that led between thick shrubs to the little gate, fled in panic across empty blocks, stumbling in the uneven ground and twice falling. When he reached the fringe of trees he looked back, to see a low, lurching form emerge from the gate. Even at this distance he could tell that the eyes were those of no animal.
It was dark in the trees, and dark in the lane beyond. Ahead the street lamps glowed, and there were lights in houses. A pang of helpless terror gripped him when he saw there was no street car waiting, until he realized—and the realization was like the onset of insanity—that nothing whatever in the city promised him refuge. This—everything that lay ahead—was the thing’s hunting ground. It was driving him in toward its lair for the kill.
Then he ran, ran with the hopeless terror of a victim in the arena of a rabbit loosed before greyhounds, ran until his sides were walls of pain and his gasping throat seemed aflame, and then still ran. Over mud, dirt, and brick, and then onto the endless sidewalks. Past the neat suburban dwellings which in their uniformity seemed like monoliths lining some avenue of doom. The streets were almost empty, and those few people he passed stared at him as at a madman.
Brighter lights came into view, a corner with two or three stores. There he paused to look back. For a moment he saw nothing. Then it emerged from the shadows a block behind him, loping unevenly with long strides that carried it forward with a rush, its matted fur shining oilily under a street lamp. With a croaking sob he turned and ran on.
The thing’s howling seemed suddenly to increase a thousandfold, becoming a pulsating wail, a screaming ululation that seemed to blanket the whole city with sound. And as that demonaic screeching continued, the lights in the houses began to go out one by one. Then the streetlights vanished in a rush, and an approaching street car was blotted out, and he knew that the sound did not come altogether or directly from the thing. This was the long-predicted blackout.
He ran on with arms outstretched, feeling rather than seeing intersections as he approached them, misjudging his step at curbs, tripping and falling flat, picking himself up to stagger on half-stunned. His diaphragm contracted to a knot of pain that tied itself tighter and tighter. Breath rasped like a file in his throat. There seemed no light in the whole world, for the clouds had gathered thicker and thicker ever since sunset. No light, except those twin points of dirty red in the blackness behind.
A solid edge of darkness struck him down, inflicting pain on his shoulder and side. He scrambled up. Then a second solid obstacle in his path smashed him full in the face and chest. This time he did not rise. Dazed, tortured by exhaustion, motionless, he waited its approach.
First a padding of footsteps, with the faint scraping of claws on cement. Then a sniffling and a snuffling. Then a sickening stench. Then a glimpse again, of red eyes. And then the thing was upon him, its weight pinning him down, its jaws thrusting at his throat. Instinctively his hand went up, and his forearm was clamped by teeth whose icy sharpness stung through the layers of cloth, while a foul oily fluid splattered on his face.
At that moment light flooded upon them, and he was aware of a malformed muzzle retreating into the blackness, and of weight lifted from him. Then silence and cessation of movement. Nothing, nothing at all—except the light flooding down. As consciousness and sanity teetered in his brain, his eyes found the source of light, a glaring white disk only a few feet away. A flashlight, but nothing visible in the blackness behind it. For what seemed an eternity, there was no change in the situation—himself supine and exposed upon the ground in the unwavering circle of light.
Then a voice from the darkness, the voice of a man paralyzed by horror and supernatural fear. "God, God, God,” over and over again. Each word dragged out with prodigious effort.
An unfamiliar sensation stirred in David, a feeling almost of security and relief though he could never have told why.
"You—saw it then?” he heard issue from his own dry throat. "The hound? The—wolf?”
"Wolf? Hound?” The voice from behind the flashlight was hideously shaken. "It was nothing like that. God, I never believed in such things. But now—” Then the voice spoke out with awful certainty and conviction. "It was— It was something from the factories of hell.” Then it broke, became earthly once more. "Good grief, a man, we must get you inside.”
Then consciousness drained away.
But as it came back to him in the house to which he had been taken, he still felt that same almost tranquil sensation he had experienced when listening to the man’s words. With an effort he raised his arm, shaking his head when they tried to restrain him, and by the flickering candlelight he looked at the marks of the thing—hugh, deep pocks which had indented the flesh of his forearm for as much as half an inch without breaking the skin, each white and cold and numb to the touch. Yes, it was all true, he told himself, true beyond the possibility of disproof. But now he was no longer the only one who knew, the only one who feared, the only potential victim. There was danger, terrible danger, incredible danger, a danger big enough to shatter reality. But it was danger shared.