Haggopian and Other Stories

I was glad that the moon was thinly horned, glad the desert was not more brightly illumined, for I could not be sure that there were no sentries out from the unquiet city. Whatever joys Dylath-Leen may once have held for me, now the place was unquiet. No normal lights shone in its streets and squares, but, as night came more quickly, there soon sprang up many thousands of tiny points of evil red, and in one certain area a great morbidly red blotch glowed in strange reminiscence of Jupiter’s huge eye-like spot, glimpsed often in my youth through a friend’s telescope. Empty though the city now was of all normal life, that poisoned jewel in the main square still filled the town with its loathsomeness, a terror ignored by the abnormal traders as the statues of past heroes are ignored in saner places.

Half way round the city’s perimeter there came to my ears the strains of music—if such evilly soul-disturbing sounds warrant placing in any such category—and leaping fires sprang up in Dylath-Leen’s outer streets, so that I could see and shudder at the horned figures that leapt and cavorted round those ritual hell-fires, observing the way their squat bodies jerked and shook to the jarring cacophony of bone-dry crotala and strangled flutes. I could neither bear to hear nor watch, so I passed quickly on, chanting breathlessly to myself and feeling about me a weird magic building up to a thrill of unseen energies in the night air.

I was more than three-quarters towards the eastern side of the bay when I heard behind me a distant sound that stiffened the short hairs on the back of my neck and brought a chill sweat to my brow. It was the terrified cry of my yak, and following that single shrill scream of animal fear there came another sound—one which caused me to quicken my pace almost to a run as I emerged from the dunes to the washed pebbles of the shore—the horrid, ululant cry of alarm of the horned ones!

Stranded on the beach was a small one-man craft as used of old by the octopus fishers of Dylath-Leen. Frail and unsafe though it looked, beggars cannot be choosers, and thus thinking I leapt within its tar-planked shell and found the round-bladed paddle. Still chanting those mad words of Atal’s deciphering I paddled strongly for the black outline of the far side of the bay, and ungainly though my craft had at first looked it fairly cleft the dark water as I drove furiously at the paddle. By now there were squattish outlines on the shore behind me, dancing in anger at my escape to the sea, and I wondered if the horned ones had a means of communication with which more orthodox creatures—such as men!—were unfamiliar. If so, then perhaps I would find monstrous welcomers awaiting my beaching on the western point!

Half-way across the bay things happened to make me forget the problem of what might wait for me on landing. I felt a tug at my paddle from the oily water and a dark mass rose up out of the depths before my boat. I screamed then, as the thin moonlight lit on the sharp teeth of that unknown swimmer, and lashed out with my paddle as it came alongside, taking a deep breath when it turned away and submerged. I continued then with my frenzied paddling and chanting until the western point loomed out of the dark and the shallow keel of my boat bit sand. As I leapt overboard into the night-chill water I imagined soggy gropings at my legs and ploughed in an agony of terror for the pebbles of the beach—

—And in that same instant, as I touched dry land, there loped out of the dark from the direction of the city the squat forms of a dozen or so of those foul, horned creatures whose brothers dwell in nighted Leng! Before they could reach me, even as their poisonous paws stretched out for me, I raced across my starting point and there came a clap of magical thunder that flung me down face first into the sand. I leapt up again, to my feet, and there within arm’s length, clawing at an unseen barrier—the Wall of Naach-Tith—were those thwarted horned ones of elder dreams. Hateful their looks and murderous their strangled intent as they clawed with vile purpose at thin air, held back by the invisible spell of Naach-Tith’s barrier.

Without pause I snatched out the second of those papers given me by Atal and commenced the invocation of the Fly-the-Light, the spell to draw forth the horror from the ruby! As the first of those weird syllables passed my lips the horned ones fell back, unbelievable terror twisting their already awful features…

“Tetragrammaton Thabaite Sabaoth Tethiktos—:” and as I chanted on, by the dim light of that thin-horned moon, the snarls of those creatures at bay turned to pleading mewls and gibbers as they began to grovel at the base of the Wall of Naach-Tith; and eventually I spoke the last word and there came a silence which was as that quiet that rules at the core of the moon.