Haggopian and Other Stories

At the city end of Bart’s road, almost half-way to Nuttall’s flat and within half a mile of Bart’s door, they saw a man atop a ladder attending to an apparently malfunctioning street lamp. The light flickered, flared, then died as they approached the lamp-post and the base of the ladder.

“These people,” Bart asserted with a little shudder, “are the grafters. Out here all hours of the night—just to make sure that we have…light.”

Without a breath of warning, simultaneous with Bart’s shivery uttering of the word “light”, the great bowl of the street lamp crashed down from above to shatter into a million glass fragments at their feet.

“My God!” Nuttall shouted up at the black silhouette clambering unsteadily down the ladder. “Take it easy, old chap. You bloody near dropped that thing right on our heads!”

The two men stopped in the dark street to steady the precarious-looking ladder and, as they did so, a splattering of liquid droplets fell from above, striking their hands and upturned faces. In the darkness they could not see those liquid droplets…but they could feel the clinging sliminess of them! Frozen in spontaneous horror, they stared at each other through the shrouding night as the figure on the ladder stepped down between them.

Bart’s pocket torch cut a jerky swath of light across Nuttall’s frozen features until it played upon the face of the man from the ladder. That face—stickily wet and hideously vacant, dripping nightmare slime as it was—was nevertheless the face of Millwright!

Millwright, the pawn of the Black One, fled from the mortuary—where Bugg-Shash had found his body in the dark—to accomplish that Being’s purpose, the purpose He must pursue before He could return to His own hellish dimension!

Only blind instinct, the instinct of self-preservation, had caused Bart to reach for his torch; but the sight revealed by its beam had completely unnerved him. His torch fell from uselessly twitching fingers, clattering on the pavement, and the dead man’s heel came down upon it with shattering force. Again the darkness closed in.

Then the slimy figure between the two men moved and they felt fingers like bands of iron enclosing their wrists. The zombie that was Millwright exerted fantastic strength to hold them—or rather, Bugg-Shash exerted His strength through the occultist’s corpse—as dead lips opened to utter the ghastly, soul-destroying strains of the reversed Third Sathlatta!

In the near-distant darkness faint, delighted chitterings commenced; and the weird trio thrashed about across the road, to and fro in a leaping, twisting, screaming tug-o’-war of death as, at last, the thing that Bart had forgotten came back to his collapsing, nightmare-blasted mind:

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…

• • •

The hellish dance lasted, as did the screaming, until they felt the lips of Bugg-Shash and his monstrous kisses…

De Marigny`s Clock

In May to June 1979, when I was a recently promoted Sergeant and had been at the recruiting office for just a few months, I found the time to write “De Marigny’s Clock”, a story that August Derleth liked at first sight. It would fit right into The Caller of The Black, he said, which it did, two years later. It’s another one of those stories with quite a long printing history, but I won’t go into it here. Suffice it to say that it features Titus Crow and the world’s strangest timepiece, a sort of longcase clock that you might even call a “spacetimepiece”. The clock wasn’t my invention; it belonged to Lovecraft and E. Hoffman Price long before me, but Titus Crow and his ward, Henri Laurent De Marigny would later borrow it to take them on some of their weirdest adventures: even to frozen Borea, and beyond that to the home of the Elder Gods themselves—in far Elysia!