Haggopian and Other Stories

“There he was, in a telephone kiosk, and he hadn’t seen me. I ducked back quickly and got out of sight in a recessed doorway from where I could watch him. I was lucky he hadn’t seen me, but he seemed solely interested in what he was doing. He was using the telephone, crouched over the thing like a human vulture astride a corpse. God! But the look on his face when he came out of the kiosk! It’s a miracle he didn’t see me for he walked right past my doorway. I had got myself as far back into a shadowy corner as I could—and while, as I say, he failed to see me, I could see him all right. And he was laughing; that is, if I dare use that word to describe what he was doing with his face. Evil? I tell you I’ve never seen anyone looking so hideous. And, do you know, in answer to his awful laugh there came a distant scream?

“It was barely audible at first but as I listened it suddenly rose in pitch until, at its peak, it was cut off short and only a far-off echo remained. It came from the direction of Symonds’ flat.

“By the time I got there someone had already called the police. I was one of the first to see him. It was horrible. He was in his dressing-gown, stretched out on the floor, dead as a doornail. And the expression on his face! I tell you, Crow, something monstrous happened that night.

“But—taking into account what I had seen before, what Gedney had been up to in the telephone kiosk—the thing that really caught my eye in that terrible flat, the thing that scared me worst, was the telephone. Whatever had happened must have taken place while Symonds was answering the ’phone—for it was off the hook, dangling at the end of the flex…”

Well, that was just about all there was to Chambers’ story. I passed him the bottle and a new glass, and while he was thus engaged I took the opportunity to get down from my shelves an old book I once had the good fortune to pick up in Cairo. Its title would convey little to you, learned though I know you to be, and it is sufficient to say that its contents consist of numerous notes purporting to relate to certain supernatural invocations. Its wording, in parts, puts the volume in that category ‘not for the squeamish’. In it, I knew, was a reference to The Black, the thing Gedney had mentioned to Chambers and Symonds, and I quickly looked it up. Unfortunately the book is in a very poor condition, even though I have taken steps to stop further disintegration, and the only reference I could find was in these words:

Thief of Light, Thief of Air…

Thou The Black—drown me mine enemies…

One very salient fact stood out. Regardless of what actually caused Symonds’ death, the newspapers recorded the fact that his body showed all the symptoms of suffocation…

I was profoundly interested. Obviously Chambers could not tell his story to the police, for what action could they take? Even if they were to find something inexplicably unpleasant about the tale, and perhaps would like to carry out investigations, Chambers himself was witness to the fact that Gedney was in a telephone kiosk at least a hundred yards away from the deceased at the time of his death. No, he could hardly go to the police. To speak to the law of Gedney’s other activities would be to involve himself—

in respect of his “initiation”—and he did not want that known. Yet he felt he must do something. He feared that a similar fate to that which had claimed Symonds had been ordained for him—nor was he mistaken.

Before Chambers left me to my ponderings that night, I gave him the following instructions. I told him that if, in some manner, he received a card or paper like the one Symonds had mentioned, with a peculiar design upon it, he was to contact me immediately. Then, until he had seen me, he was to lock himself in his house admitting no one. Also, after calling me, he was to disconnect his telephone.

After he had gone, checking back on his story, I got out my file of unusual newspaper cuttings and looked up Symonds’ case. The case being recent, I did not have far to search. I had kept the Symonds cuttings because I had been unhappy about the coroner’s verdict. I had had a suspicion about the case, a sort of sixth sense, telling me it was unusual. My memory had served me well. I reread that which had made me uneasy in the first place. The police had discovered, clenched in one of Symonds’ fists, the crushed fragments of what was thought to have been some type of card of very brittle paper. Upon it were strange, inked characters, but the pieces had proved impossible to reconstruct. The fragments had been passed over as being irrelevant.