Haggopian and Other Stories

“Titus Crow?” said Arnold. “Yes, well, we’ve all had reason to fear him in our time—but more so after Gedney. Actually, it was Crow who kept me underground all those years, keeping a low profile, as it were. When I picked up the reins from Gedney—became ‘chairman’ of the society, so to speak, ‘donned the Robes of Office’—it seemed prudent to be even more careful. Let’s face it, we hadn’t really been aware that such as Crow existed. But at the same time it has to be admitted that old Gedney really stuck his neck out. And Crow…well, he was probably one of the world’s finest headsmen!”

“Our mutual enemy,” Gifford nodded, “and yet here we pay him homage!” He turned down the corners of his mouth and still somehow summoned a sardonic grin. “Or is it that we’ve come to make sure he is in fact dead, eh?”

“Dead?” Arnold answered, and shrugged. “I suppose he is—but they never did find his body. Neither his nor de Marigny’s.”

“Oh, I think it’s safe to say he’s dead,” Gifford nodded. “Anyway, he’s eight years gone, disappeared, and that’s good enough for me. They took him, and when they take you…well, you stay taken.”

“They? The CCD, you mean? The Cthulhu Cycle Deities? Well, that’s what we’ve all suspected, but—”

“Fact!” Gifford cut him short. “Crow was one of their worst enemies, too, you know…”

Arnold shuddered—entirely from the chill night air—and buttoned the top button of his coat just under his chin. Gifford took out and lighted a cigarette, the flame of his lighter flickeringly illuminating his own and Arnold’s faces where they stood in what had once been the garden of Blowne House, residence of the white wizard, Titus Crow.

Arnold was small, thin-faced, his pale skin paper-thin and his ears large and flat to his head. He seemed made of candle wax, but his eyes were bright with an unearthly mischief, a malicious evil. Gifford was huge—bigger than Arnold remembered him from eight years earlier—tall and overweight; his heavy jowls were pock-marked in a face lined, roughened and made coarse by a life of unnatural excesses.

“Let’s walk,” the smaller man finally said. “Let’s see, one last time, if we can’t somehow resolve our differences, come to an agreement. I mean, when all’s said and done, we do both serve the same Master.” They turned away from the ruined house, whose stone chimney stack, alone intact, poked at the sky like a skeleton finger. Beyond the garden, both lost in their own thoughts, they followed a path across the heath.

Arnold’s mind had returned again to that morning eight years ago when, greatly daring, he had come to Leonard’s-Walk Heath and passed himself off as a friend and colleague of Crow, actually assisting the police in their search of the ruins. For on the previous night Blowne House had suffered a ferocious assault—a “localised freak storm” of unprecedented fury—which had quite literally torn the place to pieces. Of Titus Crow and his friend Henri-Laurent de Marigny, no slightest trace; but of the occultist’s books and papers, remains aplenty! And these were the main reason Geoffrey Arnold was there, the magnet which had lured him to Blowne House. He had managed to steal certain documents and secrete them away with him; later he had discovered among them Crow’s notes on The Black, that manifestation of Yibb-Tstll which years earlier Crow had turned back upon Arnold’s one-time coven-master, James D. Gedney, to destroy him.

Yibb-Tstll, yes…

Ben Gifford’s mind also centred upon that dark, undimensioned god of lightless infinities—his mind and more than his mind—and he too remembered James Gedney and the man’s use and misuse of black magic and powers born of alien universes. Powers which had rebounded in the end.

In those days Gifford and Arnold had been senior members of Gedney’s cult or coven. And they had prospered under the man’s tutelage and had shared his ill-gotten gains as avidly as they had partaken of his dark rites and demoniac practices. For Gedney had been no mere dabbler; his studies had taken him to all the world’s strange places, from which he rarely returned empty-handed. All the lore of elder earth lay in books, Gedney had claimed, and certainly his occult library had been second to none. But his power sprang from the way in which he understood and used those books.

It was as if, in James Gedney, a power had been born to penetrate even the blackest veils of myth and mysticism; an ability to take the merest fragments of time-lost lore and weave them into working spells and enchantments; a masterly erudition in matters of linguistics and cryptography, which would unlock for him even the most carefully hidden charm or secret of the old mages, those wizards and necromancers long passed into dust, whose legacy lay in Gedney’s decades-assembled library.