Haggopian and Other Stories

If I had to choose a favourite story by a favourite author, it would be somewhere between Jack Vance’s Dying Earth fantasies and HPL’s horror stories: an especially difficult choice. If we were to restrict the subject matter to horror, however, then I know which way I would have to vote: I would have to settle for H.P. Lovecraft, whose story would be (please forgive my English spelling) “The Colour Out of Space”; which in a way, in connection with this current volume, is something of a paradox because “Colour” isn’t a Mythos story! You won’t find a single mention of Cthulhu in it, or any other god or demon of the Mythos pantheon, nor any of the standard titles of those volumes of dark lore we’re so used to, nor anything else to connect it to the Cthulhu Mythos, except perhaps its New England location. The paradox I mentioned is that in my first year of writing—in September 1967, to be exact—I was so steeped in Mythos lore that I had written “The Thing From the Blasted Heath” as an homage to HPL, and to the Mythos. It’s a peripheral Mythos tale, to be sure, but Mythos for all that, and it saw print in hardcovers, in The Caller of the Black, my first Arkham House collection, in 1971.

That which I once boasted of as being the finest collection of morbid and macabre curiosities outside of the British Museum is no more—and still I am unable to sleep. When night’s furtive shadow steals over the moors I lock and bolt my door to peer fearfully through my window at that spot in the garden which glows faintly, with its own inexplicable light, and about which the freshly grown grass is yellow and withered. Though I constantly put down seeds and crumbs no bird ever ventures into my garden, and without even the bees to visit them my fruit trees are barren and dying. No more will Old Cartwright come to my house of an evening to chat in the drowsy firelight or to share with me his home-pressed wines; for Old Cartwright is dead.

I have written of it to my friend in New England, he who sent me the shrub from the blasted heath, warning him never to venture again where once he went for me lest he share a similar fate.

From the moment I first read of the blasted heath I knew I could never rest until I had something of it in my collection. I found myself a pen-friend in New England, developed a strong friendship with him and then, when by various means I had made him beholden to me, I sent him to do my bidding at the blasted heath. The area is a reservoir now, in a valley west of witch-haunted Arkham, but before men flooded that grey desolation the heath lay like a great diseased sore in the woods and fields. It had not always been so. Before the coming of the fine grey dust the place had been a fertile valley, with orchards and wildlife in plenty—but that was all before the strange meteorite. Disease had followed the meteorite and after that had come the dust. Many and varied are the weird tales to come filtering out of that area, and fiction or superstition though they may or may not be the fact remains that men will not drink the water of that reservoir. It is tainted by a poison unknown to science which brings madness, delirium and a lingering, crumbling death. The entire valley has been closed off with barbed-wire fences and warning notices stand thick around its perimeter.