Haggopian and Other Stories

The picture was poorly reproduced but was still clear enough for me to see that it depicted a small, green figurine—the duplicate of that which I had salvaged from the ruins of Sarnath beneath the still pool…

The article, as best I can remember, read like this:

“Mr. Samuel Davies, of 17 Heddington Crescent, Radcar, found the beautiful relic of bygone ages pictured above in a stream whose only known source is the cliff-face at Sarby-on-the-Moors. The figurine is now in Radcar Museum, having been donated by Mr. Davies, and is being studied by the curator, Prof. Gordon Walmsley of Goole. So far Prof. Walmsley had been unable to throw any light on the figurine’s origin but the Wendy-Smith Test, a scientific means of checking the age of archaeological fragments, has shown it to be over ten thousand years old. The green figurine does not appear to have any connection with any of the better known civilisations of ancient England and is thought to be a find of rare importance. Unfortunately,

expert pot-holers have given unanimous opinions that the stream, where it springs from the cliffs at Sarby, is totally untraversable.”

The next day, during the flight, I slept for an hour or so and again, in my dreams, I saw my parents. As before they appeared to me in a mist—but their beckonings were stronger than in that previous dream and in the blanketing vapours around them were strange figures, bowed in seeming obeisance, while a chant of teasing familiarity rang from hidden and nameless throats…

• • •

I had wired my housekeeper from Cairo, informing her of my returning, and when I arrived at my house in Marske found a solicitor waiting for me. This gentleman introduced himself as being Mr. Harvey, of the Radcar firm of Harvey, Johnson and Harvey, and presented me with a large, sealed envelope. It was addressed to me, in my father’s hand, and Mr. Harvey informed me his instructions had been to deliver the envelope into my hands on the attainment of my twenty-first birthday. Unfortunately I had been out of the country at the time, almost a year earlier, but the firm had kept in touch with my housekeeper so that on my return the agreement made nearly seven years earlier between my father and Mr. Harvey’s firm might be kept. After Mr. Harvey left I dismissed my woman and opened the envelope. The manuscript within was not in any script I had ever learned at school. This was the language I had seen written on that aeon-old pillar in ancient Ib; nonetheless I knew instinctively that it had been my father’s hand which had written the thing. And of course, I could read it as easily as if it were in English. The many and diverse contents of the letter made it, as I have said, more akin to a manuscript in its length and it is not my purpose to completely reproduce it. That would take too long and the speed with which The First Change is taking place does not permit it. I will merely set down the specially significant points which the letter brought to my attention.

In disbelief I read the first paragraph—but, as I read on, that disbelief soon became a weird amazement which in turn became a savage joy at the fantastic disclosures revealed by those timeless hieroglyphs of Ib. My parents were not dead! They had merely gone away, gone home…

That time nearly seven years ago, when I had returned home from a school reduced to ruins by the bombing, our London home had been purposely sabotaged by my father. A powerful explosive had been rigged, primed to be set off by the first air-raid siren, and then my parents had gone off in secrecy back to the moors. They had not known, I realised, that I was on my way home from the ruined school where I boarded. Even now they were unaware that I had arrived at the house just as the radar defences of England’s military services had picked out those hostile dots in the sky. That plan which had been so carefully laid to fool men into believing that my parents were dead had worked well; but it had also nearly destroyed me. And all this time I, too, had believed them killed. But why had they gone to such extremes? What was that secret which it was so necessary to hide from our fellow men—and where were my parents now? I read on…