Haggopian and Other Stories

I ’phoned the police anonymously and quickly left the place, for the smell of weird, unnatural death now hung heavily over the entire house. Poor Chambers, I thought as I drove away—seeing that second Mercedes he must have thought his other visitor was I. I tried not to think about the shadow or what it meant.

I did not sleep too well that night. The first thing I did when I awoke the next morning was to discreetly check up on the activities of a certain Mr. James D. Gedney. I have many friends in positions which, to say the least, make them extremely useful to me when a bit of detective work is necessary. These friends helped me now and through their exertions my task was made considerably easier. I checked Gedney’s telephone number, which was not in the book, and made notes of his personal likes and dislikes. I memorized the names of his friends and the clubs and places he frequented and generally built up my picture of the man. What I discovered only confirmed Chambers’ opinion. Gedney’s contacts were the worst sort of people and his favourite haunts were, in the main, very doubtful establishments. He had no visible means of support yet appeared to be most affluent—owning, among his many effects, a large country house and, most interesting yet, a brand-new Mercedes. All the other things I discovered about Gedney paled beside that one fact.

My next logical step, having completed my “file” on Gedney, was to find out as much as I could about that mystical identity “The Black,” and towards this end I spent almost a week in the pursuit of certain singular volumes in dim and equally singular archives at the British Museum and in the perusal of my own unusual books. At the museum, with the permission of the Curator of the Special Books Department, another friend, I was allowed to study at my leisure all but the most secret and hideous of volumes. I was out of luck. The only reference I found—a thing which, in the light of what I later learned, I find of special significance—was, as was that other reference I have mentioned, in one of my own books. Justin Geoffrey supplied this second fragment in his raving People of the Monolith; but apart from these four inexplicable lines of poetry I found nothing more:

On monoliths did ancients carve their warning

To those who use night’s forces lest they bring

A doom upon themselves that when, in mourning,

They be the mourned…

Then I remembered an American friend of mine; a man wonderfully erudite in his knowledge of folklore and things of dread and darkness. He had studied in bygone years under that acknowledged genius of Earth’s elderlore, Wilmarth of Miskatonic University. We exchanged one or two interesting telegrams and it was this New Englander who first told me of the Ptetholites—a prehistoric, sub-human race who allegedly were in the habit of calling up devils to send against their enemies. At the very beginning of recorded time, if one can believe the legends of Hyperborea, the Ptetholites sent such devils against Edril Ghambiz and his Hell-Hordes, ensconced on the pre-neolithic isle of Esipish in what was then the North Sea. Unfortunately for the Ptetholites they had seemingly forgotten their own warnings, for it had been elders of their own tribe, in even older days, who had inscribed on the Broken Columns of Geph:

Let him who calls The Black

Be aware of the danger

His victim may be protected

By the spell of running water

And turn the called-up darkness

Against the very caller…

Hence, I believe, Geoffrey’s remarkable lines. Exactly what happened to the Ptetholites has gone unrecorded, or such records have been destroyed, except for the vaguest of hints in the most obscure tomes. There are, I now know, certain monks of a peculiar order in Tibet who know and understand many of these things. If history did pass down anything but the most sketchy details of the destruction of the Ptetholites such records were probably burned in the time of the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries; certainly, except in those few cases I have mentioned, such knowledge is non-existent today.