Hound of Tindalos

The man on the Chinese rug was barking. Hoarse convulsive sounds, teeth bared, saliva at the corners of his mouth, and a slow hideous writhing in a circle around the bare boards. His friend got him by the shoulders and shook him, and Halpin Chalmers turned his head and snapped at his wrist. An hour earlier the two of them had been arguing pleasantly about Einstein.

Chalmers was an occult writer with a settled contempt for his own century. He preferred illuminated manuscripts to automobiles and leering stone gargoyles to radios and adding-machines, and his ebony bookcase held Plotinus beside Emanuel Moscopulus, Aquinas beside Frenicle de Bessy. Two candles burned at his elbow that evening and threw a sickly amber light across his long nose. On the desk, under the pamphlets on medieval sorcery, lay sheets of thin yellow paper covered in geometric designs and the mathematical formulae of a celebrated contemporary physicist.

He had a theory and five pellets of a drug called Liao to test it with. The drug had been used centuries earlier by Lao Tze, in Chalmers’ telling, and under its influence the philosopher had seen Tao. Tao was a great animal, recumbent and motionless, holding every world and every age inside its enormous body. Human beings see portions of that animal through a narrow slit, and they call the slit time. Chalmers intended to widen the slit.

None of this is ancient. It needs saying plainly, because the Hounds have been reprinted and gamed and quoted until they feel inherited. They were invented by Frank Belknap Long, twenty-seven years old, a protégé and lifelong friend of H. P. Lovecraft, and they arrived in the March 1929 issue of Weird Tales. Everything anyone knows about them comes out of that one story. Seventeen years later Long put its title on his first Arkham House collection, and it has been the thing he is remembered for ever since.

He swallowed the pellet at the exact moment the clock on the mantel stopped ticking, and took that for approval. His friend sat by the window with a fountain pen and wrote shorthand. What came first was ordinary human history running backwards at speed: migrations out of Atlantis and Lemuria, Achaeans streaming into the Greek islands, the ground shaking under the tread of the hastati, a cathedral going up stone by stone across months and years, a man burned on a cross head downward in the thyme-scented gardens of Nero. Then the people thinned out. Reptiles moved through the black water of dismal lakes and then they were gone too, and the forms below the surface simplified down to single cells, and after that there was nothing left but angles.

There is curved time and there is angular time, Chalmers said, and the beings that exist in angular time cannot enter curved time. He delivered it in the tone of a man reading a label.

Then the smell came into the room. Acrid, nauseous, strong enough that his friend crossed to the window and threw it open. Chalmers said they had scented him and were slowly turning toward him, and it was after that that he went down on the rug and began to bark.

He came back with whisky in him and his knuckles blue around the flask, and gave the only account of them that exists. No word in the language describes them. They are vaguely symbolised in the myth of the Fall, in the tree and the snake and the apple, and in an obscene shape occasionally found cut into ancient tablets. A deed was done in the beginning, before time, and the seeds of that deed move through angles, hungry and athirst. On a pale gray shore beyond time and space, in a light that was not light and a silence that shrieked, he saw them for one moment. All the evil in the universe was concentrated in their lean, hungry bodies. Or had they bodies. He could not be certain. But he heard them breathe, and for an instant he felt their breath on his face.

That is the entire physical description, and it has outlasted a century of more carefully rendered monsters. Long never draws them. What he supplies instead is residue: a bluish pus, tongues, and a smell that the neighbour across the hall had to hold his nose to walk past.

They are not evil, Chalmers insisted, not in any prosaic sense. In the spheres they move through there is no right or wrong, only the pure and the foul. The foul expresses itself through angles and the pure through curves. Man, the clean part of him, is descended from a curve, and Chalmers told his friend not to laugh, because he meant that literally.

The story never says what Tindalos is. Not a place, not a person, not a date. The word occurs twice in the whole text and both times it sits inside the phrase, and Long left it there without a gloss and never came back for it.

The defence was geometry and it cost twenty pounds. Plaster of Paris from a hardware store, a stepladder out of the hall, a pail of water. Chalmers mixed and the two men worked for three hours, filling the four corners of the walls, the intersections of floor and wall and of wall and ceiling, rounding off the sharp angles of the window seat. The furniture had already gone out. When they finished, the room was as close to the inside of a sphere as plaster could make it. The friend doing the mixing and the fetching is called Frank, which is also the author’s first name, and Long lets that sit on the page without comment.

The Partridgeville Gazette carried two items on 3 July 1928. At two in the morning an earth tremor had broken plate glass in Central Square, disorganised the electric and street railway systems, set the Partridgeville Glue Works alight and demolished the steeple of the First Baptist Church on Angell Hill, which the paper notes was designed by Christopher Wren in 1717 and then lets pass without further remark. The second item was longer.

At seven, a man named L. E. Hancock opened his door across the hall to take in his cat and the morning paper and smelled something so acrid he had to hold his nose to get past Chalmers’ door. The superintendent came with a pass key. When the door opened, Hancock’s heart went cold at what was on the floor, and the superintendent said nothing at all, walked to the open window, and stared at the building opposite for a full five minutes.

Chalmers lay on his back in the middle of the empty room, naked, his chest and arms covered with a bluish pus. His head had been severed and lay on his chest. There was no blood anywhere. The plaster had cracked and fallen away in patches, and someone had gathered the fragments and grouped them on the bare floor around him to make a perfect triangle.

Charred yellow sheets lay beside the body. On one he had written that he was waiting and watching and did not believe they could reach him, but that he must beware of the Doels, who might help them break through, and that the satyrs would help, and could advance through the scarlet circles, and that the Greeks had known a way of preventing that, and it was a great pity so much had been forgotten. He explains none of it. On the most badly burned sheet: the plaster is falling, an earthquake perhaps, it is growing dark, I will recite the Einstein formula, they are breaking through, smoke is pouring from the corners of the wall, their tongues, and then a syllable that runs off the edge of the page.

The blue slime went to the Partridgeville Chemical Laboratories, and James Morton, chemist and bacteriologist, wrote back to Detective Sergeant Douglas in a state of visible professional distress. The fluid resembled living protoplasm but it contained no enzymes, and enzymes are what make a cell fall apart once it dies. Protoplasm without them should possess enduring vitality. He wrote down the word immortality, and then asked the detective whether he understood what that opened up.

Two years later Lovecraft reached across and took them. In The Whisperer in Darkness a man is handed, in a single rush, the black truth behind the immemorial allegory of Tao, the nature of the Doels, and the essence, though not the source, of the Hounds of Tindalos. Lovecraft borrowed the whole kit out of Long’s story, and he borrowed the withholding along with it. The source stays out of reach in his hands exactly as it did in Long’s, and that single sentence is why the Hounds escaped one pulp magazine and went feral across everything that came after.

Everything they can do follows from where they live. Years are not a distance to a thing that travels by angle, so a mind that has fled screaming down quintillions of years arrives home with them already behind it. They come through any corner, any crevice, any junction of two straight lines, which in an ordinary room means very nearly everywhere. They do not tire and they do not age, and the chemist’s report suggests why: whatever they are made of has no working mechanism for dying.

What they cannot do is enter a curve. That is the one gap and it is a real one, since the plaster holds from that afternoon until two the following morning while the Hounds circle a world built almost entirely out of corners. They also appear to need the scent first. They are hunters rather than sentries, and they took no interest in Chalmers until he came far enough back to be noticed. The defence is sound. It only depends on a rented room above a jewellery store holding its shape through an earthquake, and on hardware store plaster not shrinking, not cracking, not falling away from a single seam.

The story closes with a paragraph from a book of Chalmers’ own, published after his death. He wonders in it whether some life runs parallel to ours without the elements that destroy ours, and then abandons the speculation for something worse. In his room at night, he writes, he has talked with the Doels. And in dreams he has seen their maker, standing on the dim shore beyond time and matter, moving through strange curves and outrageous angles. Some day, he writes, he intends to travel in time and meet it face to face.

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 every other earthly form live in its curves. Once a Hound has taken the scent of a mind that has travelled too far back into the past, it follows that person across any span of years and cannot be shaken off. It hungers for whatever in a human being is clean, which is the one thing it can never possess.

Who created the Hounds of Tindalos?

The American writer Frank Belknap Long invented them for his short story “The Hounds of Tindalos,” published in Weird Tales in March 1929. They are a literary creation rather than inherited folklore, though they are often mistaken for ancient myth. H. P. Lovecraft, a close friend of Long’s, referred to them in “The Whisperer in Darkness” two years later, which carried them into the wider body of shared Mythos fiction.

What does a Hound of Tindalos look like?

Nobody in Long’s story ever gets a proper look at one. The only description given is that all the evil in the universe was concentrated in their lean, hungry bodies, followed immediately by doubt as to whether they had bodies at all. What the story does supply is indirect: an acrid smell, breath felt on the face, tongues, and a residue of bluish pus that a chemist finds to be living protoplasm without enzymes, and therefore incapable of decay.

What is Tindalos?

Long never says. The word appears twice in the story, both times inside the phrase “the Hounds of Tindalos,” and it is never explained as a place, a person, or a time, either in that story or afterwards. The withholding became part of the appeal, and Lovecraft repeated it deliberately when he borrowed the creatures, telling his reader the essence of the Hounds but not their source.

How do you escape a Hound of Tindalos?

In Long’s story the only defence is geometry. Because the Hounds can enter only through angles, the occultist Halpin Chalmers strips his room of furniture and plasters over every corner, crevice and intersection until the space resembles the inside of a sphere. It holds for about half a day, until an earthquake cracks the plaster at two in the morning and the Hounds come through.

Related Entries

Cthulhu, Azathoth, Nyarlathotep, Hastur, Shoggoth, King in Yellow, Slender Man, Shadow People, Hellhound, Black Shuck, Cŵn Annwn, Cerberus, Garmr, Wild Hunt