Haggopian and Other Stories

“It was easy,” Arnold continued, “—for a man with nerves of steel! While yet The Black settled on him in an ever thickening layer, he simply stepped into his shower and turned on the water!”

Backing away from Arnold, Gifford opened his mouth and bayed like a great hound. “Oh, yes!” he laughed. “Yes! Can’t you just picture it? The great James Gedney cheated like that! And how he must have fought to get into the shower with Crow, eh? For of course Crow must have given him his card back, turning The Black ‘against the very caller…’ And Crow fighting him off, keeping him out of the streaming water until The Black finished its work and carried Gedney’s soul back to Yibb-Tstll in his place. Ah!—what an irony!”

Arnold too had backed away, and now the modern magicians faced each other across the rubble of Blowne House.

“But no running water here tonight, my friend.” Arnold’s grin was

ferocious, his face a white mask in the moonlight.

“What?” Gifford’s huge body quaked with awful mirth. “A threat? You wouldn’t dare!”

“Wouldn’t I? Your left-hand coat pocket, Gifford—that’s where it is!”

And as Gifford drew out the rune-inscribed card, so Arnold commenced to gabble out loud that nightmarish invocation to summon Yibb-Tstll’s poisoned blood from a space beyond all known spaces. That demented, droning, cacophonous explosion of sounds so well rehearsed, whose effect as its final crescendo reverberated on the heath’s chill night air immediately began to make itself apparent—but in no wise as Arnold had anticipated!

“Fool, I named you,” Gifford taunted across the rubble of Blowne House, “and great fool you are! Did you think I would ignore a power strong enough to snuff out a man like Gedney?” As he spoke his voice grew louder and even deeper, at the last resembling nothing so much as a deep bass croaking. And weird energies were at work, drawing mist from the earth to smoke upward in spiralling wreaths, so that the tumbled remains of the house between the two men now resembled the scene of a recent explosion.

Arnold backed away more yet, turned to run, tripped over moss-grown bricks and fell. He scrambled to his feet, looked back—and froze!

Gifford was still baying his awful laughter, but he had thrown off his overcoat and was even now tearing his jacket and shirt free and tossing them to the reeking earth. Beneath those garments—

—The gross body of the man was black!

Not a Negroid black, not even the jet of ink or deepest ebony or purest onyx. Black as the spaces between the farthest stars—black as the black blood of Yibb-Tstll himself!

“Oh, yes, Arnold,” Gifford boomed, his feet in writhing mist while his upper torso commenced to quiver, a slithering blot on normal space. “Oh, yes! Did you think I’d be satisfied merely to skim the surface of a mystery? I had to go deeper! Control The Black? Man, I am The Black! Yibb-Tstll’s priest on Earth—his High-Priest, Arnold! No longer born of the dark spaces, of alien dimensions, but of me! I am the host body! And you dare call The Black? So be it…” And he tore in pieces the rune-written card and pointed at the other across the smoking ruins.

It seemed then that darkness peeled from Gifford, that his upper body erupted in myriad fragments of night which hovered for a moment like a swarm of midnight bees—then split into two streams which moved in concert around the outlines of the ruins.

Geoffrey Arnold saw this and had time, even in his extreme of utter terror, to wonder at it. But time only for that. In the next moment, converging, those great pythons of alien matter reared up, swept upon him and layered him like lacquer where he stood and screamed. Quickly he turned black as the stuff thickened on him, and his shrill screams were soon shut off as the horror closed over his face.

Then he danced—a terrible dance of agony—and finally fell, a bloated blot, to the mist-tortured earth. For long seconds he jerked, writhed and twisted, and at last lay still.

Benjamin Gifford had watched all of this, and yet for all that he was a devotee of evil had gained little pleasure from it. Wizard and necromancer though he was, still he knew that there were far greater sources of evil. And for Great Evil there is always Great Good. The balance is ever maintained.

Now Gifford stopped laughing, his mouth slowly closing, the short hairs rising at the back of his neck. He sniffed like a hound at some suspicious odour; he sensed that things were far from right; he questioned what had happened—or rather, the way it had happened—and he grew afraid. His body, naked now and slenderer far than when The Black shrouded him, shivered in the spiralling mists.

Those mists, for example: he had thought them part of Arnold’s conjuring, a curious side-effect. But no, for Arnold was finished and still the reeking, strangely twisting mists poured upward from the ruins of the old house. The ruins of Titus Crow’s old house…