Haggopian and Other Stories

A thing, a bubbling blasphemous shape from lunacy’s most hellish nightmare, was squeezing its flabby pulp out through the frame of the mirror into my room—and it wore a face where no face ever should have been.

I do not recall moving—opening my desk drawer and snatching out that which lay within—yet it seems I must have done so. I remember only the deafening blasts of sound from the bucking, silver-plated revolver in my clammy hand; and above the rattle of sudden thunder, the whine of flying fragments and the shivering of glass as the hell-forged bronze frame buckled and leapt from the wall.

I remember too, picking up the strangely twisted silver bullets from my Boukhara rug. And then I must have fainted.

• • •

The next morning I dropped the shattered fragments of the mirror’s glass overboard from the rail of the Thames Ferry and I melted down the frame to a solid blob and buried it deep in my garden. I burned the diary and scattered its ashes to the wind. Finally, I saw my doctor and had him prescribe a sleeping-draught for me. I knew I was going to need it.

I have said the thing had a face.

Indeed, atop the glistening, bubbling mass of that hell-dweller’s bulk there was a face. A composite face of which the two halves did not agree! For one of them was the immaculately cruel visage of an ancient Queen of Egypt and the other was easily recognisable—from photographs I had seen in the newspapers—as the now anguished and lunatic features of a certain lately vanished explorer!

The Second Wish

I wrote this story in 1976 for Arkham House’s Ramsey Campbell-edited New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos (1980). Not only a homage to Lovecraft (you will find several allusions to HPL’s stories in this one) but also to Robert E. Howard of Conan fame, “The Second Wish” is a fully fledged Mythos tale with just about every Mythos prop. But it’s also one of my personal favourites. Most recently it was reprinted in my hardcover collection, Beneath the Moors & Darker Places, TOR Books, 2002.

The scene was awesomely bleak: mountains gauntly grey and black towered away to the east, forming an uneven backdrop for a valley of hardy grasses, sparse bushes, and leaning trees. In one corner of the valley, beneath foothills, a scattering of shingle-roofed houses, with the very occasional tiled roof showing through, was enclosed and protected in the Old European fashion by a heavy stone wall.

A mile or so from the village—if the huddle of time-worn houses could properly be termed a village—leaning on a low rotting fence that guarded the rutted road from a steep and rocky decline, the tourists gazed at the oppressive bleakness all about and felt oddly uncomfortable inside their heavy coats. Behind them their hired car—a black Russian model as gloomy as the surrounding countryside, exuding all the friendliness of an expectant hearse—stood patiently waiting for them.

He was comparatively young, of medium build, dark-haired, unremarkably good-looking, reasonably intelligent, and decidedly idle. His early adult years had been spent avoiding any sort of real industry, a prospect which a timely and quite substantial inheritance had fortunately made redundant before it could force itself upon him. Even so, a decade of living at a rate far in excess of even his ample inheritance had rapidly reduced him to an almost penniless, unevenly cultured, high-ranking rake. He had never quite lowered himself to the level of a gigolo, however, and his womanizing had been quite deliberate, serving an end other than mere fleshly lust.

They had been ten very good years by his reckoning and not at all wasted, during which his expensive lifestyle had placed him in intimate contact with the cream of society; but while yet surrounded by affluence and glitter he had not been unaware of his own steadily dwindling resources. Thus, towards the end, he had set himself to the task of ensuring that his tenuous standing in society would not suffer with the disappearance of his so carelessly distributed funds; hence his philandering. In this he was not as subtle as he might have been, with the result that the field had narrowed down commensurately with his assets, until at last he had been left with Julia.