The Hound of the Baskervilles: The Curse of the Baskervilles

Dr. Mortimer took an old, yellow manuscript from his pocket, and Holmes guessed from the handwriting that it had been written in the early eighteenth century.Sir Charles Baskerville, who had died suddenly three months earlier, had left it in the doctor’s care, and it told an old legend of a curse on the Baskerville family.Holmes leaned back and closed his eyes, and Dr. Mortimer began to read the strange old story in a high, cracking voice.

Long ago, Hugo Baskerville, the master of Baskerville Hall, was a wild and cruel man whose name was known throughout the west of England.One autumn day he and his drunken friends carried off a farmer’s daughter, who feared his bad name and had always avoided him, while her father and brothers were away from home.They shut her in an upstairs room and sat down below to eat, drink and shout, and the poor girl, half mad with fear, climbed down the ivy on the wall and ran home across the moor.

When Hugo found the room empty, he flew into a terrible rage, jumped onto the table, and cried that he would give his soul to the Powers of Evil if he could catch her that night.He let his hounds out of their kennel, gave them a scarf of the girl’s to smell, and galloped over the moor in the moonlight with the dogs in full cry, while thirteen of his friends took horses and followed.On the way they met a frightened shepherd, who told them that Hugo had passed on a black mare with a huge silent hound of hell running behind him; then the mare galloped back with an empty saddle.

The riders found Hugo’s hounds whimpering at the head of a narrow valley, and only three of the boldest dared to ride down into it.In a clearing between two ancient standing stones they saw the girl, dead of fear and tiredness, and Hugo lying dead beside her, and over him stood a great black beast, shaped like a hound but larger than any hound that ever lived.The beast turned its burning eyes on the three men, and they screamed and rode for their lives; one of them died that very night from what he had seen, and the other two were broken men for the rest of their days.

Ever since then, the writer of the manuscript warned, the hound had troubled the family, and many Baskervilles had died suddenly and strangely, so he told his sons never to cross the moor at night, when the powers of evil are strong.“Do you find it interesting?” asked Dr. Mortimer, and Holmes yawned and answered that it was interesting only to a collector of fairy tales.So the doctor took a newspaper from his pocket and read out the report of Sir Charles’s death: his body had been found at the end of the yew alley in the grounds of Baskerville Hall, with no mark of violence on it.

Then Dr. Mortimer admitted that Sir Charles had believed in the curse so strongly that he would not go out on the moor at night, and that the dead man’s face had been twisted with horror.But the doctor had noticed something that the police had missed, a little distance from the body, fresh and clear in the ground, and he whispered: “Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!”