Black Hounds of Death (28 page)

Weird Tales, August 1937

I swam below the surface of a lake

And found myself within a curious hall,

Lined with bronze columns, somber-black and tall;

On them I heard the evil gray waves break.

Sudden the granite floor began to shake;

A monster strode from out an iron stall;

Before his gryphon feet I reeled, to fall

As one who, dreaming, struggles to awake.

Upon my lips he set his grisly mouth

As to allay some fierce, demoniac drouth.

A broken shell, I tread the earth in vain;

My comrades are the goblin and the troll,

Since One in that forgotten, sunken fane

In evil hunger sucked from me my soul.

Weird Tales, September 1937

I dreamed a stony idol striding came

Out of the shadows of a brooding land,

And drew me, with unspoken, grim command

Into the dark. He named a monstrous Name,

And when I shrank with more than earthly shame,

He raised me high, gripped in his granite hand,

And crushed me—then to stain the silver sand,

My blood dripped down in jets of crimson flame.

I woke, and cold with horror of this dream,

Rose in my bed, crossed white with moonlight’s bars.

Sudden a monstrous shadow seemed to loom

Above my bed; I lay and could not scream.

Across the sky a shadow passed like doom,

And for an instant, blotted out the stars.

Weird Tales, October 1937

Small poets sing of little, foolish things,

As more befitting to a shallow brain

That dreams not of pre-Atlantean kings,

Nor launches on that dark uncharted Main

That holds grim islands and unholy tides,

Where many a black mysterious secret hides.

True rime concerns her not with bursting buds,

The chirping bird, the lifting of the rose—

Save ebon blooms that swell in ghastly woods,

And that grim, voiceless bird that ever broods

Where through black boughs a wind of horror blows.

Oh, little singers, what know you of those

Ungodly, slimy shapes that glide and crawl

Out of unreckoned gulfs when midnights fall,

To haunt a poet’s slumbering, and close

Against his eyes thrust up their hissing head,

And mock him with their eyes so serpent-red?

Conceived and bred in blackened pits of hell,

The poems come that set the stars on fire;

Born of black maggots writhing in a shell

Men call a poet’s skull—an iron bell

Filled up with burning mist and golden mire.

The royal purple is a moldy shroud;

The laurel crown is cypress fixed with thorns;

The sword of fame, a sickle notched and dull;

The face of beauty is a grinning skull;

And ever in their souls’ red caverns loud

The rattle of cloven hoofs and horns.

The poets know that justice is a lie,

That good and light are baubles filled with dust—

This world’s slave-market where swine sell and buy,

This shambles where the howling cattle die,

Has blinded not their eyes with lies and lust.

Ring up the demons from the lower Pit,

Since Evil conquers goodness in the end;

Break down the Door and let the fires be lit,

And greet each slavering monster as a friend.

Let obscene shapes of Darkness ride the earth,

Let sacrificial smokes blot out the skies,

Let dying virgins glut the Black Gods’ eyes,

And all the world resound with noisome mirth.

Break down the altars, let the streets run red,

Tramp down the race into the crawling slime;

Then where red Chaos lifts her serpent head,

The Fiend be praised, we’ll pen the perfect rime.

(”Golden Goats . . .”)

Weird Tales, November 1937

Golden goats on a hillside black,

Silken hose on a wharf-side trull,

Naked girl on a silver rack—

What are dreams in a shadowed skull?

I stood at a shrine and Chiron died,

A woman laughed from the bawdy roofs,

And he burned and lived and rose in his pride

And shattered the tiles with clanging hoofs.

I opened a volume dark and rare,

I lit a candle of mystic lore—

Bare feet throbbed on the outer stair

And the candle faltered to the floor.

Ships that sail on a windy sea,

Lovers that take the world to wife,

What doth the harlot hold for me

Who scarce have lifted the veil of Life?

(“And so his boyhood . . .”)

Weird Tales, Dec. 1937

And so his boyhood wandered into youth,

And still the hazes thickened round his head,

And red, lascivious nightmares shared his bed

And fantasies with greedy claw and tooth

Burrowed in the secret parts of him—

Gigantic, bestial and misshapen paws

Gloatingly fumbled each white youthful limb,

And shadows lurked with scarlet gaping jaws.

Deeper and deeper in a twisting maze

Of monstrous shadows, shot with red and black,

Or gray as dull decay and rainy days,

He stumbled onward. Ever at his back

He heard the lecherous laughter of the ghouls.

Under the fungoid trees lay stagnant pools

Wherein he sometimes plunged up to his waist

And shrieked and scrambled out with loathing haste,

Feeling unnumbered slimy fingers press

His shrinking flesh with evil, dank caress.

Life was a cesspool of obscenity—

He saw through eyes accursed with unveiled sight—

Where Lust ran rampant through a screaming Night

And black-faced swine roared from the Devil’s styes;

Where grinning corpses, fiend-inhabited,

Walked through the world with taloned hands outspread;

Where beast and monster swaggered side by side,

And unseen demons strummed a maddening tune;

And naked witches, young and brazen-eyed,

Flaunted their buttocks to a lustful moon.

Rank, shambling devils chased him night on night,

And caught and bore him to a flaming hall,

Where lambent in the flaring crimson light

A thousand long-tongued faces lined the wall.

And there they flung him, naked and a-sprawl

Before a great dark woman’s ebon throne.

How dark, inhuman, strange, her deep eyes shone!

Weird Tales, Feb. 1938

The walls of Luxor broke the silver sand

When stars were golden lepers in the night,

And, granite monsters in the pallid light,

They lurched like drunken Titans through the land,

With giant strides, most terrible and grand.

They ringed me when the slender moon was bright,

And gazing up their cold, inhuman height,

I shrieked and writhed and beat them with my hand.

Then dawn spread far her amaranthine gleam,

And I could feel my brain to opal turn

That on the iron hinges of the dream

Shattered to glowing shards that freeze and burn.

God grant my bones lie silver on the plain

Ere yet the walls of Luxor come again.