Haggopian and Other Stories

She cried out and stood up, ripped bandages falling in tatters from strangely strong wrists. She mouthed again, staggering and patently disorientated. I fell back in dumb horror, knowing that something was very wrong and yet unable to put my finger on the trouble.

My aunt’s eyes were wide now and bulging, and for the first time she seemed to see me, stumbling toward me with slack jaw and tongue protruding horribly between long teeth and drawnback lips. It was then that I knew what was wrong, that this frightful thing before me was not my aunt, and I was driven backward before its stumbling approach, warding it off with waving arms and barely articulate cries.

Finally, stumbling more frenziedly now, clawing at empty air inches in front of my face, she—it—spoke: “No!” the awful voice gurgled over its wriggling tongue. “No, Hester, you…you fool! I warned you…”

And in that same instant I saw not an old woman, but the horribly alien figure of a man in a woman’s form!

More grotesque than any drag artist, the thing pirouetted in grim, constricting agony, its strange eyes glazing even as I stared in a paralysis of horror. Then it was all over and the frail scarecrow of flesh, purple tongue still protruding from frothing lips, fell in a crumpled heap to the floor.

• • •

That’s it, that’s the story—not a tale I’ve told before, for there would have been too many questions, and it’s more than possible that my version would not be believed. Let’s face it, who would believe me? No, I realised this as soon as the thing was done, and so I simply got rid of the torn bandages and called in a doctor. Aunt Hester died of a heart attack, or so I’m told, and perhaps she did—straining to do that which, even with her powers, should never have been possible.

During this last fortnight or so since it happened, I’ve been trying to convince myself that the doctor was right (which I was quite willing enough to believe at the time), but I’ve been telling myself lies. I think I’ve known the real truth ever since my parents got the letter from Australia. And lately, reinforcing that truth, there have been the dreams and the daydreams—or are they?

This morning I woke up to a lightless void—a numb, black, silent void—wherein I was incapable of even the smallest movement, and I was horribly, hideously frightened. It lasted for only a moment, that’s all, but in that moment it seemed to me that I was dead—or that the living me inhabited a dead body!

Again and again I find myself thinking back on the mad Arab’s words as reported by Joachim Feery: “…even from beyond the Grave of Sod…” And in the end I know that this is indeed the answer.

That is why I’m flying tomorrow to Australia. Ostensibly I’m visiting my uncle’s wife, my Australian aunt; but really I’m only interested in him, in Uncle George himself. I don’t know what I’ll be able to do, or even if there is anything I can do. My efforts may well be completely useless, and yet I must try to do something.

I must try, for I know now that it’s that or find myself once again, perhaps permanently, locked in that hellish, nighted—place?—of black oblivion and insensate silence. In the dead and rotting body of my Uncle George, already buried three weeks when Aunt Hester put her mind in his body—the body she’s now trying to vacate in favour of mine!

The Kiss of Bugg-Shash

In 1972 in the UK, Sphere Books had published an anthology titled New Writings in Horror and the Supernatural, Vol 2, which contained among others a story called “Demoniacal” by David Sutton. This story seemed to me so very much a Mythos-story that I obtained David’s permission to write a sequel. The sequel was/is the following story. Both tales would later (1978) appear in tandem in a pamphlet from Jon M. Harvey’s small press (Spectre Press), under the title Cthulhu 3. I believe they’ve subsequently seen print in The Crypt of Cthulhu, edited by Robert M. Price, and likewise in Price’s Fedogan & Bremer anthology, The New Lovecraft Circle, 1995.

I

You let it out?” Thomas Millwright incredulously repeated Ray Nuttall’s obliquely offered admission. Alan Bart, Nuttall’s somewhat younger companion, nodded in eager if apprehensive agreement, shivering despite the warmth of the Londoner’s city flat.