Haggopian and Other Stories

And moreover, as if these books were not puzzling enough, there was that other thing!! What of the indescribable, droning chant which I often heard issuing from Sir Amery’s room in the dead of night? This first occurred on the sixth night I spent with him and I was roused from my own uneasy slumbers by the morbid accents of a language it seemed impossible for the vocal chords of Man to emulate. Yet my uncle was weirdly fluent with it and I scribbled down an oft-repeated sentence-sequence in what I considered the nearest written approximation of the spoken words I could find. These words—or sounds—were:

Ce’haiie ep-ngh fl’hur G’harne fhtagn,

Ce’haiie fhtagn ngh Shudde-M’ell.

Hai G’harne orr’e ep fl’hur,

Shudde-M’ell ican-icanicas fl’hur orr’e G’harne…

Though at the time I found the thing impossible to pronounce as I heard it, I have since found that with each passing day, oddly, the pronunciation of those lines comes easier—as if with the approach of some obscene horror I grow more capable of expressing myself in that horror’s terms. Perhaps it is just that lately in my dreams, I have found occasion to speak those very words and, as all things are far simpler in dreams, my fluency has passed over into my waking hours. But that does not explain the tremors—the same inexplicable tremors which so terrorized my uncle. Are the shocks which cause the ever-present quiverings of the seismograph stylus merely the traces of some vast, subterrene cataclysm a thousand miles deep and five thousand miles away—or are they caused by something else? Something so outré and fearsome that my mind freezes when I am tempted to study the problem too closely…

III

There came a time, after I had been with him for a number of weeks, when it seemed plain that Sir Amery was rapidly recovering. True, he still retained his stoop,—though to me it seemed no longer so pronounced—, and his so-called eccentricities, but he was more his old self in other ways. The nervous tic had left his face completely and his cheeks had regained something of their former colour. His improvement, I conjectured, had much to do with his never-ending studies of the seismograph: for I had established. by that time that there was a definite connection between the measurements of that machine and my uncle’s illness. Nevertheless, I was at a loss to understand why the internal movements of the Earth should so determine the state of his nerves. It was after a trip to his room, to look at that instrument, that he told me more of dead G’harne. It was a subject I should have attempted to steer him away from…

“The fragments,” he said, “told the location of a city the name of which, G’harne, is only known in legend and which has in the past been spoken of on a par with Atlantis, Mu and R’lyeh. A myth and nothing more. But if you give a legend a location you strengthen it somewhat—and if that location yields up relics of the past, of a civilization lost for aeons, then the legend becomes history. You’d be surprised how much of the world’s history has in fact been built up that way.

“It was my hope, a hunch you might call it, that G’harne had been real—and with the deciphering of the fragments I found it within my power to prove, one way or the other, G’harne’s elder existence. I have been in some strange places, Paul, and have listened to even stranger stories. I once lived with an African tribe who declared they knew the secrets of the lost city and their story-tellers told me of a land where the sun never shines; where Shudde-M’ell, hiding deep in the honeycombed ground, plots the dissemination of evil and madness throughout the world and plans the resurrection of other, even worse abominations!

“He hides there in the earth and awaits the time when the stars will be right, when his horrible hordes will be sufficient in number, and when he can infest the entire world with his loathsomeness and cause the return of others more loathsome yet! I was told stories of fabulous star-born creatures who inhabited the Earth millions of years before Man appeared and who were still here, in certain dark places, when he eventually evolved. I tell you, Paul,” his voice rose, “that they are here even now—in places undreamed of! I was told of sacrifices to Yog-Sothoth and Yibb-Tstll that would make your blood run cold and of weird rites practiced beneath prehistoric skies before old Egypt was born. These things I’ve heard make the works of Albertus Magnus and Grobert seem tame and De Sade himself would have paled at the hearing.”

My uncle’s voice had been speeding up progressively with each sentence, but now he paused for breath and in a more normal tone and at a reduced rate he continued: