Haggopian and Other Stories

And why had The Black chosen to split and deflect around that smoking perimeter of ruin? Unless—

“No!” Gifford croaked, the dark iron vanished now from his voice. “No, that can’t be!” It could not be…could it?

No slightest vestige of life remained in Arnold now. The Black lifted en masse from his body where it lay contorted in death’s rigors, lifted like a jagged hole torn in normal space and paused, hovering at the edge of the ruins of Blowne House. And slowly that cloud of living evil formed into two serpents, and slowly they retraced their paths around the ruins.

Menacing they were, in their slow, sentient approach. And at last Gifford thought he knew why. Crow was long gone but the protections he had placed about Blowne House remained even now, would stay here until time itself was extinct and all magics—black and white—gone forever. The place was a focal point for good, genius loci for all the great benevolent powers which through all the ages men have called God! And those powers had not waned with Crow’s passing but had fastened upon this place and waxed ever stronger.

To have called The Black here, now, in this place was a blasphemy, and the caller had paid in full. But to have brought The Black here—to have worn it like a mantle, to have been Yibb-Tstll’s priest—that were greater blasphemy far. This place was sacrosanct, and it would remain that way.

“No!” Gifford croaked one last time, an instant before The Black fell upon him. Priest no more, he was borne under…

• • •

When the mists ceased their strange spiralling the ruins of Blowne House lay as before, silvered under a cleansing moon. Except that now there were corpses in the night. Pitiful shapes crumpled under the moon, where morning would find them chill as the earth where they lay.

But the earth would have a soul…

The Sorcerer’s Dream

If you read my introductory note to “The Black Recalled”, then here in respect of publishing data we have a similar situation. “The Sorcerer’s Dream” is a Primal Land story, the first of which (“The House of Cthulhu”,) had been the lead story in Stuart Schiff’s Whispers’ initial issue back in 1973. So, “The Sorcerer’s Dream” being the intended fade-out tale in some future Primal Lands volume, it seemed only right I should sell it to Schiff who had published the first one. Er, are we okay so far? Anyway, he did indeed buy and publish it in “Whispers No. 13/14” (a double issue) in October 1979. But let me reiterate: when I wrote “Dream” in February 1976, I never intended it to be the last Primal Lands story, only that it would be the final tale in the foreseen and/or hoped for, above mentioned, eventual, Primal Lands volume…(Phew!) Which is exactly how it worked out: I would write several Primal Lands tales in the following years, which eventually my good friend and publisher W. Paul Ganley (wouldn’t you just know it would be him?) would join up into one of Weirdbook Press’s fastest-selling titles. Namely, The House of Cthulhu & Others. And exactly as I had foreseen it, “Dream” was the last story in the book—just as it is here, at the very end…

As translated by Thelred Gustau, from Teh Atht’s Legends of the Olden Runes

I, Teh Atht, have dreamed a dream; and now, before dawn’s light may steal it from my old mind—while yet Gleeth the blind God of the Moon rides the skies over Klühn and the stars of night peep and leer hideously—I write it down in the pages of my rune-book, wherein all the olden runes are as legends unfolded. For I have pondered the great mysteries of time and space, have solved certain of the riddles of the Ancients themselves, and all such knowledge is writ in my rune-book for the fathoming of sorcerers as yet unborn.