Haggopian and Other Stories

“I know of three or four others in England of more than ordinary power, yes,” Millwright answered, pondering their problem. Then he shook his head. “No use to contact them, however. They wouldn’t help me. I might as well admit it right now—my reputation in occult circles is not good. I’ve used what I know of the dark powers to my own ends far too often for the liking of certain lily-livered contemporaries, I’m afraid. There are so-called ‘ethics’ even in matters such as these. The only men I know who might have helped—though even that is doubtful—have also fallen foul of some evil, I fear.

“You’ve heard of Titus Crow and Henri-Laurent de Marigny? Yes? Well, they disappeared together some months ago, when Crow’s home was destroyed in a freak lightening storm. That rules them out. No, if I’m to beat this thing, then I’m to do it on my own…but you two will help me. Now, we’ve much to do. There’ll be no sleep for us tonight. Personally, I doubt if I shall ever sleep again!”

II

With all the lights of the flat ablaze, midnight found the three in various attitudes of uneasy study. Millwright had heard their story through once more in all its detail before deciding on a definite course of action. At the mention of the newspaper article that quoted Millwright and had sparked off Nuttall’s interest in the progressive group, Fried Spiders, the occultist admitted that his only interest at the time had been in gaining publicity for his recent book on occult themes. In fact, he had never so much as heard the LP in question.

Millwright concluded that the two accidentally hit upon the perfect atmosphere and setting, leading up to the conjuration. Doubtless the soft drugs Nuttall had access to had helped bring about a proper connection with outside spheres, had contributed in forming a link, as it were, with alien dimensions. When the group had finished their few lines of intoned invocation, Nuttall had taken up the chant to its conclusion… And then came the Black One! Never guessing that any such visitation might actually occur, Nuttall had failed to take the traditional precaution of prisoning the horror in a pentagram.

And it was a horror! A thing with invisible, evil eyes that saw in the dark, with mouths and lips that sucked and slobbered. They had driven it off simply by switching on the light. If they had not…then soon they would have drowned in its hideous residual slime, the juices it exuded from alien agglutinous pores.

Having driven the thing off, they had thought that they were rid of it. However, later that night, after cleaning up, when Bart sought to leave Nuttall’s place to return home, out in the dark the thing had come to him again. He had barely been able to make it back to Nuttall’s door and the sanctuary of the blessed light within.

Now, unseen, the Black One waited for the summons of its beloved darkness, when it could return again with its sucking mouths to drown its liberators in loathsome slime. And now, too, it waited for Millwright…

The occultist was only too well aware of the horror of living with this nightmare—of never knowing when the lights might fail; the constant fear of accidentally knocking oneself unconscious and waking at night in a darkened room, or perhaps not waking at all! Now, at the midnight hour, tired as he was, he patiently turned the leaves of a great and anciently esoteric textbook, hopeful of finding some clue as to the nature of the thing his visitors had called up from the darker spheres.

Nuttall and Bart were similarly employed, albeit with lesser works of reference. Only the dry rustles of flipped pages, the occasional muttered curse as a promising stream of research went dry and the ticking of Millwright’s wall-clock disturbed the silence. Their task seemed impossible; and yet by morning, through sheer diligence and hard work—engendered of a dreadful fear—they had learned much of the horror that even now stalked the dark places and awaited them hungrily. Though what they had discovered had only served to increase their terror.

This creature, being or power, had been known in the predawn world to the earliest Black Magicians and Necromancers. Records had come down even from predeluge Atlantis of “The Night Thing”— “The Black One”—”The Filler of Space”— “Bugg-Shash the Terrible”—a demon whom Eibon of Mhu Thulan himself had written of as being:

One of the darkest Beings of the Netherworld, whose Trail is as that of a monstrous Snail, who hails from the blackest Pits of the most remote Spheres. Cousin to Yibb-Tstll, Bugg-Shash, too is a Drowner; His lips do suck and lick; His Kiss is the slimy Kiss of the hideous Death. He wakes the very Dead to His Command, and encased in the horror of His Essence even the worm-ravaged Lich hastens to His Bidding…

This from that tome so carefully scrutinized and guarded from the view of his two assistants by Millwright.