Haggopian and Other Stories

Crow nodded, smiling again. “You’re a clever man, Henri, yes—but you’ve missed the most important aspect of the thing. But never mind that for now, let me get back to my story…

“I have said that I set about to discover all I could of this fellow with the strange name, the camera-shy manner, the weight of a vast international concern behind him—and the power to frighten the living daylights out of me, which no other man ever had before. And don’t ask me how, but I knew I had to work fast. There wasn’t a great deal of time left before…before whatever was coming came.

“First, however, I contacted a friend of mine at the British Museum, the curator of the Special Books Department, and asked him to search something out for me in the Necronomicon. I must introduce you one day, Henri. He’s a marvellous chap. Not quite all there, I fancy—he can’t be, to work in that place—but so free of vice and sin, so blindly naive and innocent, that the greatest possible evils would bounce right off him, I’m sure. Which is just as well, I suppose. Certainly I would never ask an inquiring or susceptible mind that it lay itself open to the perils of Alhazred’s book.

“And at last I was able to concentrate on Magruser. This was about midday and my mind had been working frantically for several hours, so that already I was beginning to feel tired—mentally if not physically. I was also experiencing a singular emotion, a sort of morbid suspicion that I was being watched, and that the observer lurked somewhere in my garden!

“Putting this to the back of my mind, I began to make discreet telephone inquiries about Magruser, but no sooner had I voiced his name than the feeling came over me again, more strongly than before. It was as if a cloud of unutterable malignity, heavy with evil, had settled suddenly over the entire house. And starting back from the telephone, I saw once again the shadow of a nodding dust devil where it played with leaves and twigs in the centre of my drive.

III

“Now my fear turned to anger. Very well, if it was war…then I must now employ weapons of my own. Or if not weapons, defences, certainly.

“I won’t go into details, Henri, but you know the sort of thing I mean. I have long possessed the necessary knowledge to create barriers of a sort against evil influences; no occultist or student of such things worth his salt would ever be without them. But it had recently been my good fortune to obtain a certain—shall we call it ‘charm’?—allegedly efficacious above all others.

“As to how this ‘charm’ happened my way:

“In December Thelred Gustau had arrived in London from Iceland, where he had been studying Surtsey’s volcanic eruption. During that eruption, Gustau had fished from the sea an item of extreme antiquity—indeed, a veritable time capsule from an age undreamed of. When he contacted me in mid-December, he was still in a high fever of excitement. He needed my skills, he said, to help him unravel a mystery ‘predating the very dinosaurs’. His words.

“I worked with him until mid-January, when he suddenly received an offer from America in respect of a lecture tour there. It was an offer he could not refuse—one which would finance his researches for several years to come—and so, off he went. By that time I had become so engrossed with the work I almost went with him. Fortunately I did not.” And here he paused to refill our glasses.

“Of course,” I took the opportunity to say, “I knew you were extremely busy with something. You were so hard to contact, and then always at Gustau’s Woolwich address. But what exactly were you working on?”

“Ah!” he answered. “That is something which Thelred Gustau himself will have to reveal—which I expect he’ll do shortly. Though who’ll take him seriously, heaven only knows. As to what I may tell you of it—I’ll have to have your word that it will be kept in the utmost secrecy.”

“You know you have it,” I answered.

“Very well… During the course of the eruption, Surtsey ejected a…a container, Henri, the ‘time capsule’ I have mentioned. Inside—fantastic!

“It was a record from a prehistoric world, Theem’hdra, a continent at the dawn of time, and it had been sent to us down all the ages by one of that continent’s greatest magicians, the wizard Teh Atht, descendant of the mighty Mylakhrion. Alas, it was in the unknown language of that primal land, in Teh Atht’s own hand, and Gustau had accidentally lost the means of its translation. But he did have a key, and he had his own great genius, and—”

“And he had you.” I smiled. “One of the country’s greatest paleographers.”