Haggopian and Other Stories

The room itself was dry as dust, but the air passing gently through held the merest promise of moisture, and perhaps this rare combination had helped preserve the object on the couch. There she lay—central in her curtain-veiled cave, behind a circle of worn, vaguely patterned stone tablets, reminiscent of a miniature Stonehenge—a centuried mummy-parchment figure, arms crossed over her abdomen, remote in repose. And yet somehow…unquiet.

At her feet lay a leaden casket, a box with a hinged lid, closed, curiously like a small coffin. A design on the lid, obscure in the poor light, seemed to depict some mythic creature, half toad, half-dog. Short tentacles or feelers fringed the thing’s mouth. Harry traced the dusty raised outline of this chimaera with a forefinger.

“It is said she had a pet—a companion creature—which slept beside her in that casket,” said Möhrsen, again anticipating Harry’s question.

Curiosity overcame Julia’s natural aversion. “Who is…who was she?”

“The last true Priestess of the Cult,” Möhrsen answered. “She died over four hundred years ago.”

“The Turks?” Harry asked.

“The Turks, yes. But if it had not been them…who can say? The cult always had its opponents.”

“The cult? Don’t you mean the order?” Harry looked puzzled. “I’ve heard that you’re—ah—a man of God. And if this place was once a church—”

“A man of God?” Möhrsen laughed low in his throat. “No, not of your God, my friend. And this was not a church but a temple. And not an order, a cult. I am its priest, one of the last, but one day there may be more. It is a cult which can never die.” His voice, quiet now, nevertheless echoed like a warning, intensified by the acoustics of the cave.

“I think,” said Julia, her own voice weak once more, “that we should leave now, Harry.”

“Yes, yes,” said Möhrsen, “the air down here, it does not agree with you. By all means leave—but first there is the legend.”

“Legend?” Harry repeated him. “Surely not another legend?”

“It is said,” Möhrsen quickly continued, “that if one holds her hand and makes a wish…”

“No!” Julia cried, shrinking away from the mummy. “I couldn’t touch that!”

“Please, please,” said Möhrsen, holding out his arms to her, “do not be afraid. It is only a myth, nothing more.”

Julia stumbled away from him into Harry’s arms. He held her for a moment until she had regained control of herself, then turned to the old man. “All right, how do I go about it? Let me hold her hand and make a wish—but then we must be on our way. I mean, you’ve been very hospitable, but—”

“I understand,” Möhrsen answered. “This is not the place for a gentle, sensitive lady. But did you say that you wished to take the hand of the priestess?”

“Yes,” Harry answered, thinking to himself: “if that’s the only way to get to hell out of here!”

Julia stepped uncertainly, shudderingly back against the curtained wall as Harry approached the couch. Möhrsen directed him to kneel; he did so, taking a leathery claw in his hand. The elbow joint of the mummy moved with surprising ease as he lifted the hand from her withered abdomen. It felt not at all dry but quite cool and firm. In his mind’s eye Harry tried to look back through the centuries. He wondered who the girl had really been, what she had been like. “I wish,” he said to himself, “that I could know you as you were…”

Simultaneous with the unspoken thought, as if engendered of it, Julia’s bubbling shriek of terror shattered the silence of the vault, setting Harry’s hair on end and causing him to leap back away from the mummy. Furthermore, it had seemed that at the instant of Julia’s scream, a tingle as of an electrical charge had travelled along his arm into his body.

Now Harry could see what had happened. As he had taken the mummy’s withered claw in his hand, so Julia had been driven to clutch at the curtains for support. Those curtains had not been properly hung but merely draped over the stone surface of the cave’s walls; Julia had brought them rustling down. Her scream had originated in being suddenly confronted by the hideous bas-reliefs which completely covered the walls, figures and shapes that seemed to leap and cavort in the flickering light of Möhrsen’s candles.

Now Julia sobbed and threw herself once more into Harry’s arms, clinging to him as he gazed in astonishment and revulsion at the monstrous carvings. The central theme of these was an octopodal creature of vast proportions—winged, tentacled, and dragonlike, and yet with a vaguely anthropomorphic outline—and around it danced all the demons of hell. Worse than this main horror itself, however, was what its attendant minions were doing to the tiny but undeniably human figures which also littered the walls. And there, too, as if directing the nightmare activities of a group of these small, horned horrors, was a girl—with a leering dog-toad abortion that cavorted gleefully about her feet!