Haggopian and Other Stories

And Hadj’s body broken but not yet dead, flopping on the floor in terrible grip, his flesh melting and steaming away, as Tarra bent the bucket’s handle back into a hook and snatched up a length of good rope. And horror of horrors, now the other kraken slithering into view from out the dark, reaching to aid its evil twin!

Now the Hrossak cast for dear life, cast his hook up to where the lower rungs of the ladder dangled. Missed!—and another cast.

Hideous, hissing tentacles reaching for his ankles; vile vapour boiling up from no longer screaming fox; the entire chamber filled with loathsome reek and the hook catching at last, dragging ladder with it to slime-puddled floor.

Then Tarra was aloft, and later he would not remember his hands on rungs at all. Only the blind panic and shrieking terror that seemed to hurl him up and out of the hole and up the spiral steps and down the long tunnel of carven stalactites to the waterfall and so out into the night. And no pause even to negotiate the ledge behind the fall, but a mighty dive which took him through that curtain of falling water, out and down under the stars to strike the lake with hardly a splash; and then the exhausting swim back to shore against the whirlpool’s pull, to where a fire’s embers smouldered and guttered still.

After that—

Morning found a rich, rich man following the foothills east with his camels. And never a backward glance from Tarra Khash…

Aunt Hester

This one was written in December, 1971 and saw first publication in The Satyr’s Head (1975), an anthology edited by Dave Sutton, published in the UK by Corgi Books. Since when it has seen several reprints, most recently in Great Ghost Stories—a Carroll and Graf anthology, 2004—edited by R. Chetwynd Hayes and Stephen Jones. At the time of its writing I was an Operational Platoon Commander, in what was then West Germany. On publication, however, I had become the RMP Unit Quartermaster at our Scotland HQ in Edinburgh Castle. “Aunt Hester” is, of course, a Cthulhu Mythos story, in its way similar to Lovecraft’s “The Thing on the Doorstep”. But while HPL’s Mythos backdrop is clearly evident, his actual style of writing is nowhere to be found.

I suppose my Aunt Hester Lang might best be described as the “black sheep” of the family. Certainly no one ever spoke to her, or of her—none of the elders of the family, that is—and if my own little friendship with my aunt had been known I am sure that would have been stamped on too; but of course that friendship was many years ago.

I remember it well: how I used to sneak round to Aunt Hester’s house in hoary Castle-Ilden, not far from Harden on the coast, after school when my folks thought I was at Scouts, and Aunt Hester would make me cups of cocoa and we would talk about newts (“efts”, she called them), frogs, conkers and other things—things of interest to small boys—until the local Scouts’ meeting was due to end, and then I would hurry home.

We (father, mother and myself) left Harden when I was just twelve years old, moving down to London where the Old Man had got himself a good job. I was twenty years old before I got to see my aunt again. In the intervening years I had not sent her so much as a postcard (I’ve never been much of a letter-writer) and I knew that during the same period of time my parents had neither written nor heard from her; but still that did not stop my mother warning me before I set out for Harden not to “drop in” on Aunt Hester Lang.

No doubt about it, they were frightened of her, my parents—well, if not frightened, certainly they were apprehensive.

Now to me a warning has always been something of a challenge. I had arranged to stay with a friend for a week, a school pal from the good old days, but long before the northbound train stopped at Harden my mind was made up to spend at least a fraction of my time at my aunt’s place. Why shouldn’t I? Hadn’t we always got on famously? Whatever it was she had done to my parents in the past, I could see no good reason why I should shun her.