Hound of Tindalos (the Hounds of Tindalos)

Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Literary Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: The Hounds inhabit the angles of time rather than its curves, they are lean and immortal and unfathomably old, and they can travel any distance through the ages once they have taken a scent.
Role in Mythos: They are the punishment attached to forbidden knowledge, the thing that notices a human mind when it strays too far back into the deep past.
Relation to Humans: They hunger for whatever in a human being is clean and uncorrupted, which is the one thing they can never possess. A person who has been scented cannot outrun them, cannot hide in another century, and can only try to live inside a shape that has no corners.

Twenty pounds of plaster of Paris, mixed in a pail, troweled into the corners of an empty room. The man doing the work had sold off his own furniture a fortnight earlier and now stood on a borrowed stepladder, filling the joins where the walls met the ceiling, smoothing the intersections of floor and wall, rounding the sharp angles of the window seat until the whole room began to resemble the inside of a sphere. He worked for three hours. He believed a right angle was a door, and he believed that something on the far side of it had already caught his scent.

Halpin Chalmers was an occult writer with a taste for illuminated manuscripts and a contempt for adding machines. His shelves held Plotinus and Aquinas, and on his desk, the week it all went wrong, lay sheets of thin yellow paper covered in geometric designs and the mathematical formulae of a celebrated contemporary physicist. He had decided that time was only a slit through which human beings glimpse a vast recumbent animal containing every age at once, and that the slit could be widened. He had five pellets of a Chinese drug called Liao to widen it with.

The Hounds of Tindalos are what came through.

They are not old. This needs saying plainly, because they wear the costume of something ancient and they have been reprinted, gamed, filmed, and quoted until they feel like folklore. They were invented by Frank Belknap Long, a young writer in H. P. Lovecraft’s circle, and they first appeared in the March 1929 issue of Weird Tales. Lovecraft liked them enough to take them into his own fiction two years later, in a passage where a man is told the essence, though not the source, of the Hounds of Tindalos. That single borrowing is why they escaped Long’s story and went feral across the whole Mythos. Everything anyone knows about them still comes out of eleven pages of pulp magazine.

In the story, Chalmers takes the drug with his friend Frank sitting by the window with a fountain pen, taking dictation. The clock on the mantel stops at the moment he swallows it. What follows is a fall backwards through everything: migrations and cathedrals and Roman standards, then men gone, then reptiles moving through black water, then forms simplifying down to single cells, and then no life at all. Only angles. Chalmers describes them in a voice that is coming apart. There is curved time and there is angular time, and the beings that exist in angular time cannot enter curved time. Beyond life there are things that move slowly through outrageous angles, and they have no bodies.

Then the room fills with a smell, acrid and nauseous, and Chalmers says that they have scented him.

Nobody in the story ever sees one properly. Long gives a glimpse on a pale gray shore beyond time and space, in a light that was not light and a silence that shrieked, and then withdraws it. Lean, hungry bodies, or perhaps not bodies. Breath felt for an instant on the face. Later, tongues. That is the whole inventory, and it is the reason the Hounds have outlived far more elaborately described monsters. The horror is entirely load bearing. What they leave behind is more concrete: a bluish pus or ichor, and an odor so strong that a neighbor across the hall had to hold his nose to walk past the door.

Chalmers is not evil in any way the Hounds recognize, and they are not evil in any way he does. He works this out too late. In the spheres they move through there is no right and wrong, only the pure and the foul, and the foul expresses itself through angles while the pure expresses itself through curves. Humanity, he insists, is descended from a curve. He means it literally. That is why they want us and why we cannot bargain.

The plaster held for a night. At two in the morning an earth tremor rolled through the financial district of Partridgeville, breaking plate glass in Central Square and knocking the steeple off the First Baptist Church. It also cracked the plaster in a rented room above a jewelry store. The last thing Chalmers wrote, on a sheet of yellow paper that was later found charred beside him, was that the plaster was falling and it was growing dark and smoke was pouring from the corners of the wall. Then that they were breaking through. Then their tongues, and a scream that runs off the edge of the page.

He was found at nine the next morning, naked, his head severed and set upon his chest, his arms and chest smeared with blue ichor. There was no blood anywhere in the room. Fragments of fallen plaster had been gathered up and arranged around him on the bare floor to form a perfect triangle.

The chemist who analyzed the blue slime wrote back to the police in a state of professional panic. The fluid resembled living protoplasm, he said, but it entirely lacked enzymes, the substances that make a cell decay once it dies. Protoplasm without enzymes should possess enduring vitality. He used the word immortality, and then asked the detective sergeant whether he understood what that meant.

What the Hounds can do follows from what they are. Because they occupy the angles of time, distance in years is nothing to them, and a mind that has fled screaming down quintillions of years arrives home with them already on the trail. They do not tire, they do not age, and they cannot be killed by anything that lives inside a curve. They can reach through any corner, any crevice, any junction of two straight lines, which in an ordinary building means very nearly everywhere.

What they cannot do is come through a curve. That is the single gap in them, and it is a real one, since Chalmers survives a full day and night inside his sphere of plaster while the Hounds circle a world made almost entirely of corners. They also appear to need the scent first. They are hunters, not patrollers, and they took no interest in the man until he came far enough back to be noticed. The defense is sound. It is only that it depends on a rented room in a small American city holding its shape through an earthquake, and on twenty pounds of hardware store plaster not shrinking, not cracking, not falling away from a single seam. A triangle can be made from the pieces afterward.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Hound of Tindalos?

A Hound of Tindalos is a lean, immortal predatory being that lives in the angles of time, while humans and all earthly life live in its curves. Once a Hound has caught the scent of a human mind that has traveled too far back into the past, it pursues that person across any span of years and cannot be shaken off. Nothing in the original story gives it a clear physical form, only a hungry body that may not be a body, a foul smell, breath, tongues, and a residue of blue ichor.

Where do the Hounds of Tindalos come from?

They were invented by the American writer Frank Belknap Long for his short story “The Hounds of Tindalos,” published in Weird Tales in March 1929. They are literary creations rather than traditional folklore, though they are frequently mistaken for ancient myth. H. P. Lovecraft, a friend of Long’s, referred to them in “The Whisperer in Darkness” in 1931, which pulled them into the wider Cthulhu Mythos where they have circulated ever since.

How do you escape a Hound of Tindalos?

In Long’s story the only defense is geometry. Because the Hounds can only enter through angles, the occultist Halpin Chalmers strips his room of furniture and plasters over every corner, crevice, and intersection so that the space resembles the inside of a sphere. It works until an earthquake cracks the plaster, at which point the Hounds break through and kill him.

What happens to Halpin Chalmers in the story?

Chalmers takes an ancient Chinese drug called Liao in order to see backwards through time, travels too far, and is scented by the Hounds. After a night sealed inside a plastered, curve-shaped room, he is found dead, decapitated, covered in a blue ichor with no blood in the room, and surrounded by fallen plaster fragments arranged into a triangle. A chemist later reports that the blue substance is living protoplasm that lacks the enzymes which cause cells to decay, meaning it should be immortal.