Haggopian and Other Stories

For the spot where the spring grass is twisted and yellow continues to glow feebly at night. Only a week ago I decided to clear the very soil from that area but as soon as I drove my spade into the ground I was sure I saw something black and wriggly—like a looped off root—squirm quickly down out of sight! Perhaps it is my imagination but I have also noticed, in the dead of night, that the floorboards sometimes creak beneath my room—and then, of course, there is that other thing.

I get the most dreadful headaches.

Dylath-Leen

In my first couple of months as a recruiter—in March 1969, to be precise—I wrote my first Dreamlands story, “after” HPL of course. While “Dylath-Leen” would later go into my Titus Crow/De Marigny Mythos novel The Clock of Dreams as a chapter in its own right, at the time of writing it was my first attempt at this sort of story. As such it was mainly unconnected to later Dreamlands stories that would feature David Hero (called “Hero of Dreams”) and his fellow adventurer Eldin (“the Wanderer”), which wouldn’t be written until the late 1970s–early ’80s. Anyway, after reading the story in my Arkham collection The Caller of The Black, L. Sprague de Camp particularly liked it and wrote to ask if he might include it in a fantasy collection he was planning. Well, that never happened, but in any case it was nice to know that this fine author had enjoyed it. And it’s my hope that you will too.

“If aught of evil ever befalls the 

people of Dylath-Leen, through their 

traffick with certain traders of ill 

repute, then it will not be my fault.”

—Randolph Carter

I

Three times only have I visited the basalt-towered, myriad-wharved city of Dylath-Leen; three curious

visits which spanned I fancy almost a century of that city’s existence. Now I pray that I have seen it for the last time; for though Dylath-Leen exists only in dream, beyond the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber, when I think back on my visits there—remembering my waking studies and those tales heard in my youth of dreams and how they affect the waking world—then I shudder in strange dread.

I went there first in my late teens, filled with a longing—engendered by continuous study of such works as The Arabian Nights and Gelder’s Atlantis Found—for wondrous places of antique legend and fable and centuried cities of ages past; nor was my longing disappointed.

I first saw the city from afar, wandering in along the river Skai with a caravan of merchants from distant places, and at sight of the tall black towers which form the city’s ramparts I felt a strange fascination for the place. Later, lost in awe and wonder, I took leave of my merchant friends to walk Dylath-Leen’s ancient streets and alleys, to visit the wharfside sea-taverns and chat with seamen from every land on Earth—and with a few from more distant places. I never once pondered my ability to chatter in their many tongues, for often things are simpler in dream, nor did I wonder at the ease with which I fitted myself into the alien yet surprisingly friendly scene; after all, I was attired in robes of dream’s styling, and my looks were not unlike those of many of dream’s peoples. I was a little taller than average, true, but overall Dylath-Leen’s diverse folks might well have passed for those of any town of the waking world, and vice versa.