Haggopian and Other Stories

There is not much more to tell. When I recovered consciousness I was still half insane. In a gibbering delirium I staggered to the woodshed and returned with the axe. Moaning in morbid loathing I cut the tree—once, twice—deeply across the trunk, and in a fit of uncontrollable twitching I watched the horror literally bleed to death!

The end had to be seen to be believed. Slowly the evil roots withdrew from Cartwright’s body, shuddering and sluggishly pulling back underground, releasing their grisly internal hold on his bloodless form. The branches and leaves writhed and twined in a morbid dance of death; the horrible veins—real veins—pulsed to a standstill and the whole tree started to slope sideways as a terrible disintegration took hold on it. The unnatural glow surrounding the thing dimmed as it began visibly to rot where it stood. The smell of utter corruption which soon started to exude from the compost the hell-plant was rapidly becoming forced me to back away, dragging Old Cartwright’s corpse after me.

I was brought up short by the garden fence and that was where I stayed, shivering and staring at the rapidly blackening mass in the garden.

When at last the glow had died away completely and all that remained of the tree was an odorous, sticky, reddish-black puddle, I noticed that the first light of dawn was already brightening the sky. It was then that I formed my plan. I had had more than my fill of horror—all I wanted to do was forget—and I knew the authorities would never believe my story; not that I intended trying to tell it.

I made a bonfire over the stinking spot where the plant had been, and as the first cock crowed in the distance I set fire to the pile of leaves and sticks and stood there until there was only a blackened patch on the grass to show that the horror from the heath had ever stood there. Then I dressed and walked into Marske to the police station.

• • •

No one could quite understand the absence of Old Cartwright’s blood or the damage to his mouth and the other—internal—injuries which the post-mortem later showed; but it was undeniable that he had been “queer” for a long time and lately had been heard to talk openly about things that “glowed at night” and trees with hands instead of leaves. Everyone had known, it appeared, that he would end up “in a funny way”.

After I made my statement to the police—about how I had found Old Cartwright’s body at dawn, in my garden—I put through another call to London and told my botanist friend that the tree had been destroyed in a garden fire. He said that it was unfortunate but did not really matter. He had to catch an evening plane to South America anyway and would be away for many months.

He asked me to see if I could get another specimen in the meantime.

• • •

But that is not quite the end of the story. All that I have related happened last summer. It is already spring. The birds have still not returned to my garden and though each night I take a sleeping pill before locking my door I cannot rest.

I thought that in ridding myself of the remainder of my collection I might also kill the memory of that which once stood in my garden. I was wrong.

It makes no difference that I have given away my conches from the islands of Polynesia and have shattered into fragments the skull I dug from beneath the ground where once stood a Roman ruin. Letting my Dionaea Muscipulas die from lack of their singular nourishment has not helped me at all! My devil-drums and death-masks from Africa now rest beneath glass in Wharby Museum along with the sacrificial gown from Mua-Aphos. My collection of ten nightmare paintings by Pickman, Chandler Davies and Clark Ashton Smith now belong to an avid American collector, to whom I have also sold my complete set of Poe’s works. I have melted down my Iceland meteorite and parted forever with the horribly inscribed silver figurine from India. The silvery fragments of unknown crystal from dead G’harne rest untended in their box and I have sold in auction all my books of Earth’s elder madness.

Yes, that which I once boasted of as being the finest collection of morbid and macabre curiosities outside of the British Museum is no more; yet still I am unable to sleep. There is something—some fear that keeps me awake—which has caused me of late to chain myself to the bed when I lie down.

You see, I know that my doctor’s assurance that it is “all in my mind” is at fault, and I know that if ever I wake up in the garden again it will mean permanent insanity—or worse!