Haggopian and Other Stories

This was the sort of thing I was babbling to myself as the acid completed its work, and I shook so that I had to steady myself before I was able to draw out from the acid the flat, now shiny disc.

What was it Matthew had dreamed? “They had walked this holy ground unbidden…” Had that been sufficient in the old days—in prehistory, when the area about the pit must have been far more poisonous than it was now—to bring about the change? I think that even at the beginning Matthew must have partly guessed the truth, for had he himself not told me that he found the cell structure to be “almost human”?

Poor Matthew—that name he screamed before going mad. At last I understood it all. There it all was before me: the final, leaping horror. My own nephew, an unwilling, though perhaps not completely unknowing anthropophagite. A cannibal!

For the shiny thing I held in my shuddering hand was a German watch of fairly modern appearance, and on the back was an inscription in German. An inscription so simple that even I, unversed in that language, could translate it to read:

“WITH LOVE, FROM GERDA TO HORST”…

Since then it has taken long hours to pull myself together sufficiently to formulate my plan, that plan I have already mentioned and yet which even now I hardly dare think about. I had fervently hoped that I would never have to use it but now, with the spread of the poison through my body, it appears that I must…

When the ashes of my house have cooled the police will find this manuscript locked in a safe in the deep, damp cellar, but long before the flames have died down I shall have returned to the pit. I will take with me as much petrol as I can carry. My plan is simple really, and I shall know no pain. Nor will the inhabitants of that place know pain, not if a powerful drug may yet affect them. As the anaesthetic takes hold and while I am still able, I shall pour the petrol on the surface of that evil pool.

My statement is at an end—

—Perhaps tonight puzzled observers will wonder at the pillar of sulphurous fire rising over the moors…

Dagon’s Bell

One of Steve Jones’ first choices when he was gathering tales for his 1994 Fedogan & Bremer collection, Shadows over Innsmouth—after HPL’s ill-fated seaport and its batrachian inhabitants—“Dagon’s Bell” had been written all of eleven years earlier and had seen its initial printing in Paul Ganley’s Weirdbook in 1988. Written five years before that, in those somewhat bleak years after I had done my 22-year stint and left the financial security of my job in the British Army, this story is most definitely set against HPL’s Mythos backdrop. The location is my own, however (and nowhere near Innsmouth!), and so is the style of writing. I honestly believe that Lovecraft himself would have enjoyed this one.

I: Deep Kelp

It strikes me as funny sometimes how scraps of information—fragments of seemingly dissociated fact and half-seen or -felt fancies and intuitions, bits of local legend and immemorial myth—can suddenly connect and expand until the total is far greater than the sum of the parts, like a jigsaw puzzle. Or perhaps not necessarily funny…odd.

Flotsam left high and dry by the tide, scurf of the rolling sea; a half-obliterated figure glimpsed on an ancient, well-rubbed coin through the glass of a museum’s showcase; old-wives’ tales of hauntings and hoary nights, and the ringing of some sepulchral, sunken bell at the rising of the tide; the strange speculations of sea-coal gatherers supping their ale in old North-East pubs, where the sound of the ocean’s wash is never far distant beyond smoke-yellowed bull’s-eye windowpanes. Items like that, apparently unconnected.

But in the end there was really much more to it than that. For these things were only the pieces of the puzzle; the picture, complete, was vaster far than its component parts. Indeed cosmic…

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