"They are lean and athirst! The HOUNDS OF TINDALOS!"
From the March 1929 issue of WEIRD TALES, this is a short horror tale by Frank Belknap Long that has serious weaknesses in its writing but still somehow has always haunted me. It's much more effective than it should be somehow; for some reason, I can visualize the title critters and their approach all too vividly.
We follow the experiments of a journalist named Halpin Chalmers, who is trying to project his consciousness back through time. He uses a combination of Einstein-related knowledge, Pink Floyd's WISH YOU WERE HERE and a Chinese drug called Liao "I believe that drugs expand human consciousness," he says. (Woo-hoo! Hendrix is on stage next!), and darned if it doesn't work. While the narrator guards his body and takes notes, Chalmers goes drifting back through history in a mystic vision that reads like an epic movie montage, further and further back, until he goes back to a forbidden period before time itself....
Here his presence is detected and he is pursued back to the 20th century by hateful beings who move through angles and not curves, whose ancient evil is told in parable in myths and legends but who still live and ache to kill. ("They are lean and athirst! The Hounds of Tindalos! All the evil of the universe was concentrated in their lean, hungry bodies.") This is oddly disturbing. The business about evil forces being able to come in through angles and not curves is creepily like the delusions of schizophrenics who think voices are talking through the cracks in the sidewalk.
Well, if you've read a lot of classic horror tales, you probably won't give Chalmers much chance of getting out of this mess healthy and chipper. Since the Hounds move through angles and not curves, the hysterical author fills in the interior of his room with plaster of Paris so the walls and floor and ceiling all meet in curves. He gets rid of his furniture and in general tries to surround himself with an enviroment without sharp angles. Safe! That is until a minor earthquake cracks the plaster loose...
The mangled naked body has been decapitated (in fact the head is sitting on the chest), and is covered with a bluish pus and the room reeks of a vile stench. I might suspect foul play, to be honest but the police are described as blaming his death on poisoning by some obscure chemical (seriously).
The ending of the story is weakened by a tacked-on coroner's report that the blue ichor lacks enzymes and a being with such fluid would therefore be immortal (huh?) and a further except from Chalmer's writings which repeat what we've already been told.
The story throughout suffers from vague, repititious gibberish about time and space; the dialogue is weak and clunky ("Theosophical rubbish!"). What really hurts, though, is that even when the horrifying brutes are coming in through the angles, Chalmers doggedly* keeps writing in his notebook: "They are breaking through! Smoke is pouring from the corners of the walls! Their tongues --- ahhhhh ---" Heh heh. I'm sorry. This reminded me so irresistably of that scene from MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL with the cave wall inscription that ends "Arrrghh" that I almost fell off my chair. You're being ripped apart by demonic beasts and you're still determined to write the word "ahhhh" as if you were talking into a tape recorder. Okay, way dumb.
And yet, somehow, this story lives in my imagination. The idea of these ancient beings existing in a misty place at the very beginning of time, chasing murderously after an intruder as soon as they sniff him, inevitably finding an angle to enter through, is unsettling. I picture the Hounds of Tindalos as exaggerated Great Danes standing upright on their hind legs, steam coming off them, with long curved fingers and malicious grins... eek. Come to think of it, there are a lot of angles all around me right now....
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*sorry.