Haggopian and Other Stories

Suddenly he laughed. “You know, Julia, there might just be some truth in what you say—about someone having us on, I mean. It’s just struck me: you know this old monk Debrec was going on about? Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be his uncle or something! All these hints of spooky goings-on could be just some sort of put-on, a con game, a tourist trap. And here we’ve fallen right into it! I’ll give you odds it costs us five pounds a head just to get inside the place!” And at that they both burst out laughing.

• • •

The sky was overcast and it had started to rain when they drove away from the inn. By the time they reached the track that led off from the road and through the grey woods in the direction of the ruined church, a ground mist was curling up from the earth in white drifting tendrils.

“How’s this for sinister?” Harry asked, and Julia shivered again and snuggled closer to him. “Oh?” he said, glancing at her and smiling. “Are you sorry we came after all, then?”

“No, but it is eerie driving through this mist. It’s like floating on milk!…Look, there’s our ruined church directly ahead.”

The woods had thinned out and now high walls rose up before them, walls broken in places and tumbled into heaps of rough moss-grown masonry. Within these walls, in grounds of perhaps half an acre, the gaunt shell of a great Gothic structure reared up like the tombstone of some primordial giant. Harry drove the car through open iron gates long since rusted solid with their massive hinges. He pulled up before a huge wooden door in that part of the building which still supported its lead-covered roof.

They left the car to rest on huge slick centuried cobbles, where the mist cast languorous tentacles about their ankles. Low over distant peaks the sun struggled bravely, trying to break through drifting layers of cloud.

Harry climbed the high stone steps to the great door and stood uncertainly before it. Julia followed him and said. with a shiver in her voice: “Still think it’s a tourist trap?”

“Uh? Oh! No, I suppose not. But I’m interested anyway. There’s something about this place. A feeling almost of—”

“As if you’d been here before?”

“Yes, exactly! You feel it too?”

“No,” she answered, in fine contrary fashion. “I just find it very drab. And I think my headache is coming back.”

For a moment or two they were silent, staring at the huge door.

“Well,” Harry finally offered, “nothing ventured, nothing gained.” He lifted the massive iron knocker, shaped like the top half of a dog’s muzzle, and let it fall heavily against the grinning metal teeth of the lower jaw. The clang of the knocker was loud in the misty stillness.

“Door creaks open,” Julia intoned, “revealing Bela Lugosi in a black high-collared cloak. In a sepulchral voice he says: ‘Good evening…’” For all her apparent levity, half of the words trembled from her mouth.

Wondering how, at her age, she could act so stupidly girlish, Harry came close then to telling her to shut up. Instead he forced a grin, reflecting that it had always been one of her failings to wax witty at the wrong time. Perhaps she sensed his momentary annoyance, however, for she frowned and drew back from him fractionally. He opened his mouth to explain himself but started violently instead as, quite silently, the great door swung smoothly inward.

The opening of the door seemed almost to pull them in, as if a vacuum had been created…the sucking rush of an express train through a station. And as they stumbled forward they saw in the gloom, the shrunken, flame-eyed ancient framed against a dim, musty-smelling background of shadows and lofty ceilings.

The first thing they really noticed of him when their eyes grew accustomed to the dimness was his filthy appearance. Dirt seemed ingrained in him! His coat, a black full-length affair with threadbare sleeves, was buttoned up to his neck where the ends of a grey tattered scarf protruded. Thin grimy wrists stood out from the coat’s sleeves, blue veins showing through the dirt. A few sparse wisps of yellowish hair, thick with dandruff and probably worse, lay limp on the pale bulbous dome of his head. He could have been no more than sixty-two inches in height, but the fire that burned behind yellow eyes, and the vicious hook of a nose that followed their movements like the beak of some bird of prey, seemed to give the old man more than his share of strength, easily compensating for his lack of stature.

“I…that is, we…” Harry began.

“Ah!—English! You are English, yes? Or perhaps American?” His heavily accented voice, clotted and guttural, sounded like the gurgling of a black subterranean stream. Julia thought that his throat must be full of phlegm, as she clutched at Harry’s arm.

“Tourists, eh?” the ancient continued. “Come to see old Möhrsen’s books? Or perhaps you don’t know why you’ve come?” He clasped his hands tightly together, threw back his head, and gave a short coughing laugh.