Haggopian and Other Stories

More daring now, I moved further into the cave, examining more of the green pods as I came upon them, still finding them frightful in some strange way but unable to account completely for my fear. And then I stopped dead. I had almost forgotten just what I was looking for—but now I remembered…

In a dark corner one of the plant-things stood all alone with its lower roots trailing in the soupy pool. It would have been just like all the other specimens except for one shocking difference… It was wearing the dressing-gown I had loaned to Matthew!

And more: as I swung my torch beam in disbelief up and down the length of the thing it blinked at me! It blinked—thin slits opened and closed where eyes should be, and in that moment of madness, in that instant of utter insanity, as my very mind buckled—I looked into the agonised eyes of Matthew Worthy!

How to describe the rest.

Oh, I was transformed in one mind-shattering moment. My torch fell from nerveless fingers and I heard myself scream a hoarse, babbling scream of horror. I threw up my hands and staggered back, away from what I had seen, away from the brainblasting abnormality against the wall. Then I turned to flee full tilt—shrieking, splashing through the vileness of the pool—through a maze of dripping stalactites, past a host of green, insinuously oozing things—bumping in my haste from wall to wall, sometimes coming into contact with slimy obscenities which had no right to exist. And all the time I screamed and babbled shamelessly, even as I clawed my way up the dangling rope and hauled myself out into the daylight, even as I plummeted headlong down the steep slope heedless of life or limb, until I tripped and flew forward into merciful oblivion…

Merciful oblivion, I say, and it is the truth, for had I not knocked myself unconscious I have no doubt that I would have remained permanently mindless. What I had seen had been terrible enough without the other. That other which I had heard had been, if anything, worse. For even as the torch fell from my fingers and I screamed, other voices had screamed with me! Voices which could not be “heard” physically—for their owners were incapable of physical speech—voices I heard with my mind alone, which were utterly horrible and alien to me and full of eternal misery…

• • •

When I came to my senses I was lying at the foot of the knoll. I refrained from an immediate mental examination of what I knew now to be the horrible truth, for therein lay a return to madness. Instead I brushed myself off and hurried back as quickly as my throbbing head would allow to Eeley. My house and practice lay at the extreme edge of the village, but nonetheless I approached it from the fields and let myself in at the back door. I burnt my waders immediately, noting especially that the slime upon them blazed fiercely with a sulphurous brightness. Later, after I had scrubbed myself from head to toe, examining each limb minutely and finding no trace of the horror, I remembered the rock crystal I had put in my pocket.

In the clear daylight it was obviously not a crystal; it appeared to be more like a bracelet of some sort, and yet this fact did not properly surprise me. The soft metal links must have long since oxidized, for as I examined the rotted thing, all of it—with the exception of a small flat circle or disc—crumbled away in my hands. Even this solid, circular portion, about an inch and one half across, was mostly slimy and green. I placed it in a flask of dilute acid to clean it; by which time, of course, I knew what it was.

• • •

As I watched the acid doing its work I began, involuntarily, to tremble. My mind was a turmoil of terrible thoughts. I knew what my nephew had become, and presumably the partly eaten thing which had provided this metal clue had also once been human. Certainly it had been some sort of being from any one of many periods of time. I could not help but ask myself: in the latter stages of change or after the change was complete, could the pit-creatures feel anything?

Watching the seething mass in the flask I suddenly began to babble idiotically and had to battle consciously with myself to stop it. No wonder Matthew had been baffled with regard to the reproductory system of these pitiful horrors. How does a magnet cause a pin to become magnetic? Why will one rotten apple in a barrel ruin all the other fruit? Oh, yes—eating from one of the things had helped Matthew contract the change, but that was not what had started the thing. Proximity was sufficient! Nor was the horror truly a disease, as Matthew had tried to tell me in his awful note, but a devolution—a gestalt of human being and thing—both living, if such could be called life, and dependent one upon the other.