Haggopian and Other Stories

What was it James had said that time, of alien procreation? Something about, “A melding, a substitution, a flowing together and explosive multiplication”? Well, what was happening in the cell may not have been procreation—unless it was by assimilation and duplication—but it was certainly everything else he had spoken of. The scuttling insect-octopus-dragons were invading the radiance of our disintegrating guinea-pig subjects only to emerge in a stream of yet more fantastic shapes and figures; and as James and Jason melted to nothingness, so the star-spawn multiplied in number, bursting forth from those—consumed?—human remnants to come nosing, thrusting at the tiny cameras.

They bloated large on our screens; they knew we were looking at them, scrabbled to send hairy, spiked and multi-jointed legs right through the audio and visual systems—through the screens themselves—into our control room! While in the cell the globe containing the lens shivered to shards and something huge, black, bloated and baneful began to squeeze through from some Other Place, some other space, into ours.

One of our military men was leaning forward, his hands supporting him on the ledge in front of his screen, hypnotised by what he could see but scarcely believe was taking place in the cell. A vibrating black spider-leg eighteen inches long stabbed through the screen into his mouth and out the back of his skull—and he jerked like a puppet as he hung there suspended on it.

I cried out—a gurgled shriek, something quite inarticulate—and aimed a blow at the back of our technician, catching him between the shoulder blades. Driven forward, he flailed his arms; his hand came down on one of the controls…sheer luck!

Five pipes or shafts, pneumatic conduits descending at different angles to locations buried in the steel walls, hummed and pulsed. And from up above five star-stones hurtled under pressure down these channels to form the points of a pentagram surrounding the cell. With which it was over.

The alien insect things shrivelled to nothing; the cell exploded with such force that the walls were actually scarred and even buckled in several places; the gonging reverberations were such that my eardrums burst and I lost consciousness. But I was fortunate, for the others with me lost a lot more

than that…

• • •

From then until now I have kept mainly silent, and from time to time I’ve mimicked the conditions of my four surviving colleagues, which has meant spending time in various institutions. But I did not want anyone questioning me too deeply; I did not want to become any kind of guinea pig in my own right; I had no more interest in any facet of the Mythos Investigation.

You see, I know why I was the sole survivor—the only one to live through it with his person and sanity intact—for I, too, had heard their singing; They saw me as a possible future vessel, or as a radio signal, or a lighthouse to guide them in to harbour. Which is why it is only now, as my cancer kills me and I have mere days to live, that I’m able to report the occurrences of that time as they happened.

As for the lens Gateway: it was vaporised in the blast, of course. I can only hope no other device of that sort exists in our world. The star-stones were likewise destroyed; I hope and pray others have been discovered, or that you, my once colleagues in The Foundations are at least seeking them out.

And meanwhile:

I have come to believe in God and would even be a regular churchgoer…except I cannot bring myself to attend services in the harvest time. There is a certain hymn they’d be sure to sing, and I know I couldn’t abide it. Even now I find it difficult to think about it, and even harder to write the words of the song down. But since this is probably the best way to make you understand:

Waiting for the harvest, and the time of reaping,

We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.

Bringing in the sheaves, bringing in the sheaves,

We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.

Sometimes I dream of great lizards—dinosaurs stampeding in terror through tree-fern forests—and then I wonder about all the other mass extinctions our planet has known. But—

—I long ago retired to Dublin, Ireland, where I discovered that while white wine doesn’t help a lot with my sleeplessness, Guinness does the trick every time.

Synchronicity or Something