Haggopian and Other Stories

…handed down to their priests by the hideous gods of inner-Earth before the earliest civilisations of the Nile came into existence—a “gateway” to unknown spheres and worlds of hellish horror in the shape of a mirror. Worshipped, it was; by the pre-Imer Nyahites in Ptathlia at the dawn of Man’s domination of the Earth, and eventually enshrined by Nephren-Ka in a black crypt on the banks of the Shibeli. Side by side it lay with the Shining Trapezohedron, and who can say what things might have been reflected in its depths? Even the Haunter of the Dark may have bubbled and blasphemed before it! Stolen, it remained hidden, unseen for centuries, in the bat-shrouded labyrinths of Kith, before finally falling into Nitocris’ foul clutches. Numerous the enemies she locked away, the mirror as sole company, full knowing that by the next morning the death-cell would be empty save for the sinister, polished glass on the wall. Numerous the vilely chuckled hints she gave of the features of those who leered at midnight from out the bronze-barriered gate. But not even Nitocris herself was safe from the horrors locked in the mirror, and at the midnight hour she was wise enough to gaze but fleetingly upon it…

The midnight hour! Why! It was ten already. Normally I would have been preparing for bed by this time; yet here I was, so involved now with the diary that I did not give my bed a second thought. Better, perhaps, if I had…

I read on. Brown-Farley had eventually found Abu Ben Leis and had plied him with liquor and opium until finally he managed to do that which the proper authorities had found impossible. The old Arab gave up his secret—though the book hinted that this knowledge had not been all that easy to extract—and the next morning Brown-Farley had taken a little-used camel-track into the wastes beyond those pyramids wherein lay Nitocris’ first burial place.

But from here on there were great gaps in the writing—whole pages having been torn out or obliterated with thick, black strokes, as though the writer had realised that too much was revealed by what he had written—and there were rambling, incoherent paragraphs on the mysteries of death and the lands beyond the grave. Had I not known the explorer to have been such a fanatical antiquarian (his auctioned collection had been unbelievably varied) and were I not aware that he had delved, prior to his search for Nitocris’ second tomb, into many eldritch places and outré settings, I might have believed the writer mad from the contents of the diary’s last pages. Even in this knowledge I half believed him mad anyway.

Obviously he had found the last resting place of Nitocris—the scribbled hints and suggestions were all too plain—but it seemed there had been nothing left worth removing. Abu Ben Leis had long since plundered all but the fabled mirror, and it was after Brown-Farley had taken that last item from the ghoul-haunted tomb that the first of his real troubles began. From what I could make out from the now-garbled narrative, he had begun to develop a morbid fixation about the mirror, so that by night he kept it constantly draped.

But it was no good; before I could continue my perusal of the diary I had to get down my copy of Feery’s Notes on the Necronomicon. There was something tickling me, there at the back of my mind, a memory, something I should know, something which Alhazred had known and written about. As I took down Feery’s book from my shelves I came face to face with the mirror. The light in my study was bright and the night was quite warm—with that oppressive heaviness of air which is ever the prelude to violent thunderstorms—yet I shuddered strangely as I saw my face reflected in that glass. Just for a moment it had seemed to leer at me.

I shrugged off the feeling of dread which immediately sprang up in my innermost self and started to look up the section concerning the mirror. A great clock chimed out the hour of eleven somewhere in the night and distant lightning lit up the sky to the west beyond the windows of my room. One hour to midnight.

Still, my study is the most disconcerting place. What with those eldritch books on my shelves, their aged leather and ivory spines dully agleam with the reflection of my study light; and the thing I use as a paperweight, which has no parallel in any sane or ordered universe; and now with the mirror and diary, I was rapidly developing an attack of the fidgets unlike any I had ever known before. It was a shock for me to realise that I was just a little uneasy.

I thumbed through Feery’s often fanciful reconstruction of the Necronomicon until I found the relevant passage. The odds were that Feery had not altered this section at all, except, perhaps, to somewhat modernise the “mad” Arab’s old-world phraseology. Certainly it read like genuine Alhazred. Yes, there it was. And there, yet again, was that recurring hint of happenings at midnight: