"The Plain of Sound" is a short story by Ramsey Campbell, originally published in The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants (Arkham House, 1964). It introduces the alien species called the S'gluhoans.
The story involves three university students, returning to Brichester from Severnford, who stumble across the titular Plain of Sound, a flat area with strange, almost unbearable noises. In the midst of the plain is a small stone house, within which the sounds cease.
Inside the house is a strange machine and a collection of occult books, including a copy of the The Revelations of Glaaki. There is also the diary of Arnold Hird, a former professor at Brichester University who moved to the stone house around 1930. There he was contacted in his dreams by aliens from a dimension called S'gluho, where our sounds become objects and their objects become sounds to us. They convince Hird to build the weird device, following instructions in the Revelations and the Necronomicon, whose purpose is to allow the aliens to cross over into our world.
Characters[]
- Les: A Brichester University student and the narrator of the story. He is noted for always carrying a compass.
- Frank Nuttall: Another Brichester University student; it's his idea to go to Severnford to visit the old inn.
- Tony Roles: The third student in the story, a bibliophile; he is unenthusiastic about going all the way to Severnford to get drunk. He is driven permanently insane by something he saw in S'gluho.
- Arnold Hird: A Brichester University professor in the 1920s. He was "asked to leave the university because he attacked someone when they disagreed with him," according to Les. He said he would "return and astonish everybody some day, but was never heard of again." His experiments in 1930 in a stone house near Severnford succeeded in making contact with S'gluho, but apparently led to his demise.
Publication History[]
The story was reprinted in the 1985 edition of Cold Print and in The New Lovecraft Circle (1996), and edited by Robert M. Price.