Haggopian and Other Stories

James: “Interesting. And of course I know what you mean! Do you think you’re more sensitive to this stuff than I am? I have been living with the knowledge of the truth of all this for…for longer than I care to think. Oh, yes. And I was dreaming my dreams long before they sat me in front of this thing.” He indicated the artefact, enlarged and distorted by the glass of its globe.

Jason, with perhaps a hint of amusement or gentle sarcasm in his voice: “You have always known you were, er, psychic?”

James: “My parapsychological or ESP skills are different from yours—each to his own mentality—but yes, I have always known. I feel things from afar, and in my dreams they are made manifest. Even though I am not given to understand everything, still I see what is now…unlike you who sees what will be.”

Jason, nodding, turning slivers of liver and bacon slices in his pan: “Or so I’ve lately discovered—but I didn’t know, not for sure. Or maybe I did, but tried to avoid it—because it worried me.”

James, with a snort: “Being able to see the future worried you? You were too dim to find a use for a skill like that? You scored 78 per cent on the Zener test, yet you were too poor to afford a wristwatch? And if you were ‘trying to avoid it’, why on earth did you answer the ad in the first place?”

Jason: “Because I was too poor to afford a wristwatch—or anything else for that matter! We weren’t all born with silver spoons in our mouths, you know! Anyway, why do I annoy you? Is there that about me which reminds you of something intolerably nasty that you stepped in at one time or another? Or could it be some kind of jealousy, because my skills are apparent while yours are—let’s face it—more or less, er, obscure?”

James, straightening up, narrowing his eyes more yet: “My skills may be obscure, as you put it, but our sponsors saw fit to choose me no less than you. In fact, I have always been…chosen. From the very first moment I read of (Cxxxxxx) and the others of the pantheon I knew that they were real; and that one day—when my stars were in the ascendant—I would communicate with them.”

Jason, not quite sneering, but with a cynical twist to his mouth: “Why can’t you say what you mean?”

James, sharply: “I beg your pardon?”

Jason: “Don’t you mean, ‘when the stars are right’?”

James, with a cold sidelong glance at Jason: “Interpret my words as you will—and (Axxxxxxx’s) if you dare! But he wasn’t such a madman, that old Arab. Or if he was, it was what he half knew but could not fathom that made him that way.” And, after a brief pause: “Doesn’t it concern you that you could be a millionaire instead of a pauper?”

Jason, returning to the table with two plates of sizzling food: “Are you talking about gambling again? How I could have beaten the bookies, cleaned up at roulette, broken the bank at Monte Carlo? But you know what they say about practice, how it makes perfect?… Maybe I didn’t want to perfect what I might have suspected I could do. Perhaps I didn’t want to see things—certain things—any clearer. It could even be that some of the futures I had seen were too clear by half.”

The pair, lapsing into silence while they eat. But after a while James asking: “What is it you saw that frightened you so? Myself, I have no fear with regard to the Mythos. I might possibly fear my own imaginings, which are not real, but I cannot fear what is real—and imminent! What is real exists, and what exists will find ways to impinge and may not be avoided. Wherefore what use to fear it?”

Jason, around his last mouthful of food: “But exactly! Que sera, sera! Ah, but would you really want to know the day, hour, and minute of your own death? And can’t you see how knowing it you would try to avoid it?—to no avail. Que sera, sera!”

James, his eyes fully open, staring now: “You saw your own death?”

Jason, thoughtfully: “Not my death, no—but my brother’s, and my mother’s. Enough to put me off.”

James: “Interesting. Can you tell me about it?”

Jason: “Not now. Some other time, maybe. But now I’m tired. A glass of white wine might help me sleep…hopefully not to dream.”

James: “But that is why we are here! Surely you’ve divined that much?”

Jason: “Of course. But still I get paid, whether I dream or not. And I prefer not.”

To which there is no answer…

• • •

Jason tosses, turns, and sweats in his sleep. He cries out, but feebly, on several occasions. The wine has not helped.

James is similarly affected. But he isn’t so much nightmaring as experiencing; which is to say that while Jason is trying to escape from whatever pursues or threatens, James accepts it. His claim that he does not fear the Mythos (the effects wrought by the artefact) appear to be borne out. Our psychiatric specialist is at least of that opinion: that unlike Jason, James has been having—or perhaps receiving?—dreams such as this for a long time, even as long as he claims, and has become inured.

But he is voluble.