Haggopian and Other Stories

The next morning I was up early. I was short of writing materials and had decided to catch the lone morning bus into Radcar. I left before Sir Amery was awake and during the journey I thought back on the events of the previous day and decided to do a little research while I was in the town. In Radcar I had a bite to eat and then I called at the offices of the Radcar Recorder where a Mr. McKinnen, a sub-editor, was particularly helpful. He spent some time on the office telephones making extensive enquiries on my behalf. Eventually I was told that for the better part of a year there had been no tremors of any importance in England, a point I would obviously have argued had not further information been forthcoming. I learned that there had been some minor shocks and that these had occurred at places as far as Goole, a few miles away (that one within the last twenty-four hours) and at Tenterden near Dover. There had also been a very minor tremor at Ramsey in Huntingdonshire. I thanked Mr. McKinnen profusely for his help and would have left then—but, as an afterthought, he asked me if I would be interested in checking through the paper’s international files. I gratefully accepted and was left on my own to study a great pile of interesting translations. Of course, most of it was useless to me but it did not take me long to sort out what I was after. At first I had difficulty believing the evidence of my own eyes. I read that in August there had been ’quakes in Aisne of such severity that one or two houses had collapsed and a number of people had been injured. These shocks had been likened to those of a few weeks earlier at Agen in that they seemed to be caused more by some settling of the ground than by an actual tremor. In early July there had also been shocks in Calahorra, Chinchon and Ronda in Spain. The trail went as straight as the flight of an arrow and lay across—or rather under—the Straits of Gibralter to Xauen in Spanish Morocco, where an entire street of houses had collapses. Farther yet, to… But I had had enough. I dared look no more; I did not wish to know—not even remotely—the whereabouts of dead G’harne…

Oh! I had seen more than sufficient to make me forget about my original errand. My book could wait, for now there were more important things to do. My next port of call was the town library where I took down Nicheljohn’s World Atlas and turned to that page with a large, folding map of the British Isles. My geography and knowledge of England’s counties are passable and I had noticed what I considered to be an oddity in the seemingly unconnected places where England had suffered those minor ’quakes. I was not mistaken. Using a second book as a straight edge I lined up Goole in Yorkshire and Tenterden on the south coast and saw, with a tingle of monstrous forboding, that the line passed very close to, if not directly through, Ramsey in Huntingdonshire. With dread curiosity I followed the line north and, through suddenly fevered eyes, saw that it passed within only a mile or so of the cottage on the moors! I turned more pages with unfeeling, rubbery fingers until I found the leaf showing France. For a moment I paused—then I fumblingly found Spain and finally Africa. For a long while I just sat there in numbed silence, occasionally turning the pages, automatically checking names and locations… My thoughts were in a terrible turmoil when I eventually left the library and I could feel upon my spine the chill, hopping feet of some abysmal dread from the beginning of time. My previously wholesome nervous system had already started to crumble…

During the journey back across the moors in the evening bus, the drone of the engine lulled me into a kind of half-sleep in which I heard again something Sir Amery had mentioned—something he had murmured aloud while sleeping and presumably dreaming. He had said:

“They don’t like water… England’s safe… Have to go too deep…” The memory of those words shocked me back to wakefulness and filled me with a further icy chill which got into the very marrow of my bones. Nor were these feelings of horrid foreboding misleading, for awaiting me at the cottage was that which went far to completing the destruction of my entire nervous system…