Haggopian and Other Stories

“Your mother is two years younger than George and me,” my aunt informed me. “She went to live with her grandparents down South when she was thirteen. Sis, you see, was the brilliant one. George was a bit dim; I was clever enough; but Sis, she was really clever. Our parents sent Sis off to live with Granny, where she could attend a school worthy of her intelligence. She stayed with Gran from then on. We simply drifted apart…

“Mind you, we’d never been what you might call close, not for sisters. Anyhow, we didn’t come together again until she married and came back up here to live, by which time George must have written to her and told her one or two things. I don’t know what or how much he told her, but—well, she never bothered with me—and anyway I was working by then and had a flat of my own.

“Years passed, I hardly ever saw Sis, her little boy came along—you, Love—I fell in with a spiritualist group, making real friends for the first time in my life; and, well, that was that. My interest in spiritualism, various other ways of mine that didn’t quite fit the accepted pattern, the unspoken thing I had done to George…we drifted apart. You understand?”

I nodded. I felt sorry for her, but of course I could not say so. Instead I laughed awkwardly and shrugged my shoulders. “Who needs people?”

She looked shocked. “We all do, Love!” Then for a while she was quiet, staring into the fire.

“I’ll make a brew of tea,” she suddenly said, then looked at me and smiled in a fashion I well remembered. “Or should we have cocoa?”

“Cocoa!” I instinctively laughed, relieved at the change of subject.

She went into the kitchen and I lit a cigarette. Idle, for the moment, I looked about me, taking up the loose sheets of paper that Aunt Hester had left on her occasional table. I saw at once that many of her jottings were concerned with extracts from exotic books. I passed over the piece she had read out to me and glanced at another sheet. Immediately my interest was caught; the three passages were all from the Holy Bible:

“Regard not them that have familiar spirits, neither seek after wizards, to be defiled by them.” Lev. 19:31.

“Then said Saul unto his servants, Seek me a woman that hath a familiar spirit, that I may go to her and enquire of her. And his servants said to him, Behold, there is a woman that hath a familiar spirit at En-dor.” I Sam. 28:6,7.

“Many of them also which used curious arts brought their books together, and burned them before all men.” Acts 19:19.

The third sheet contained a quote from Today’s Christian:

“To dabble in matters such as these is to reach within demoniac circles, and it is by no means rare to discover scorn and scepticism transformed to hysterical possession in persons whose curiosity has led them merely to attend so-called ‘spiritual séances’. These things of which I speak are of a nature as serious as any in the world today, and I am only one among many to utter a solemn warning against any intercourse with ‘spirit forces’ or the like, whereby the unutterable evil of demonic possession could well be the horrific outcome.”

Finally, before she returned with a steaming jug of cocoa and two mugs, I read another of Aunt Hester’s extracts, this one again from Feery’s Notes on the Necronomicon:

“Yea, & I discovered how one might, be he an Adept & his familiar Spirits powerful enough, control the Wanderings or Migration of his Essence into all manner of Beings & Persons—even from beyond the Grave of Sod or the Door of the Stone Sepulchre…”

I was still pondering this last extract an hour later, as I walked Harden’s night streets towards my lodgings at the home of my friend.

• • •

Three evenings later, when by arrangement I returned to my aunt’s cottage in old Castle-Ilden, she was nervously waiting for me at the gate and whisked me breathlessly inside. She sat me down, seated herself opposite and clasped her hands in her lap almost in the attitude of an excited young girl.

“Peter, Love, I’ve had an idea—such a simple idea that it amazes me I never thought of it before.”

“An idea? How do you mean, Aunt Hester—what sort of idea? Does it involve me?”

“Yes, I’d rather it were you than any other. After all, you know the story now…”

I frowned as an oddly foreboding shadow darkened latent areas of my consciousness. Her words had been innocuous enough as of yet, and there seemed no reason why I should suddenly feel so—uncomfortable, but—

“The story?” I finally repeated her. “You mean this idea of yours concerns—Uncle George?”

“Yes, I do!” she answered. “Oh, Love, I can see them; if only for a brief moment or two, I can see my nephew and niece. You’ll help me? I know

you will.”