Haggopian and Other Stories

The Statement of Henry Worthy

Even before “What Dark God?”—in fact in September 1967—I had sent off this my, er, most ambitious story so far to August Derleth at Arkham House. He didn’t turn it down flat but said it needed work—which it did. When he saw my revision Derleth said it would go into his Lumley File for publication at a later date, perhaps in The Caller of The Black. But it wasn’t to be, for as with “What Dark God?” so with Statement. After Derleth died, several stories by various authors had been left drifting in a literary limbo without any foreseeable future. In my case: eventually Derleth’s survivors at Arkham House collected my loose stories from the “Lumley File”, plus a handful of others I’d written, and sold elsewhere, into a new book with the title The Horror at Oakdeene. Thus in 1977, all of ten years after I had written and revised it, at long last “The Statement of Henry Worthy” saw print in my third and last Arkham House book.

I

Difficult as it is to find a way in which to tell the truth of the hideous affair, I know that if I am to avoid later implication in the events leading up to and relevant to the disappearance of my poor nephew, Matthew Worthy, it is imperative that the tale be told. And yet…

The very nature of that alien and foulest of afflictions which contaminated Matthew is sufficient, merely thinking back on it in the light of what I know now, to cause me to look over my shoulder in apprehension and to shudder in an involuntary spasm—this in spite of the fact that it is far from chilly here in my study, and despite the effects of the large draught of whisky I have just taken, a habit rapidly grown on me over the last few days.

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Better, I suppose, to start at the very beginning, at that time in early July of this Year of Our Lord, 1931, when Matthew came down from Edinburgh to visit. He was a fine young man: tall, with a strong, straight back and a good, wide-browed, handsome face. He had a shock of jet hair which took him straight to the hearts of the more eligible young ladies of Eeley-on-the-Moor, and of the neighbouring village of High-Marske, which also fell within the boundaries of my practice; but strangely, at only twenty-one years of age, Matthew had little interest in the young women of the two villages. His stay, he calculated, would be too short to acquire any but the remotest of friendships; he was far too busy with his studies to allow himself to be anything but mildly interested in the opposite sex.

Indeed, Matthew’s professors had written to inform me of the brilliance of their pupil, predicting a great future for him. In the words of one of these learned gentlemen: “It is more apparent every day, from the intensity of his studies, the freshness with which he views every aspect of his work, and the hitherto untried methods which he employs in many of his tasks and experiments, that the day will come when he will be—for he surely has the potential—one of the greatest scientists in his field in the country and perhaps the whole world. Already he emulates many of the great men who, not so very long ago, were his idols, and the time draws ever nearer when he will have the capacity to exceed even the greatest of them.”

And now Matthew is gone. I do not say “dead”—no, he is, as I myself may well soon be, departed… And yet it is my hope that I might still be able to release him from the hell which at present is his prison.

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