Haggopian and Other Stories (17 page)

He paused to pour more brandy and I leaned closer to him, fascinated to find out exactly what he was getting at. “Now,” he finally continued, “I’m an odd sort of chap, as you’ll appreciate, but I’m not eccentric—not in the popular sense of the word. Or if I am,” he hurried on, “it’s of my choosing. That is to say, I believe I’m mentally stable.”

“You are the sanest man I ever met,” I told him.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” he answered, “and you may soon have reason for reevaluation, but for the moment I
am
sane. How then might I explain the loathing, the morbid repulsion, the absolute shock of horror which struck me almost physically upon opening the pages of my morning newspaper and coming upon that picture of Magruser? I could not explain it—not immediately…” He paused again.

“Presentiment?” I asked. “A forewarning?”

“Certainly!” he answered. “But of what, and from where? And the more I looked at that damned picture, the more sure I became that I was on to something monstrous! Seeing him—that face, startled, angered, trapped by the camera—and despite the fact that I could not possibly know him, I
recognised
him.”

“Ah!” I said. “You mean that you’ve known him before, under his former name?”

Crow smiled, a trifle wearily I thought. “The world has known him before under several names,” he answered. Then the smile slipped from his face. “Talking of names, what do you make of his forename?”

“Sturm? I’ve already considered it. German, perhaps?”

“Good! Yes, German. His mother was German, his father Persian, both nationalized Americans in the early 1900s. They left America to come here during McCarthy’s Unamerican Activities witch-hunts. Sturm Magruser, incidentally, was born on first April 1921. An important date, Henri, and not just because it was April Fool’s Day.”

“A fairly young man,” I answered, “to have reached so powerful a position.”

“Indeed.” Crow nodded. “He would have been forty-three in a month’s time.”

“Would have been?” I was surprised by Crow’s tone of finality. “Is he dead then?”

“Mercifully, yes,” he answered, “Magruser and his project with him! He died the day before yesterday, on fourth March 1964, also an important date. It was in yesterday’s news, but I’m not surprised you missed it. He wasn’t given a lot of space, and he leaves no mourners that I know of. As to his ‘secret weapon’”—and here Crow gave an involuntary little shudder— “the secret has gone with him. For that, too, we may be thankful.”

“Then the cemetery you mentioned in your note is where he’s to be interred?” I guessed.

“Where he’s to be cremated,” he corrected me. “Where his ashes are to be scattered to the winds.”

“Winds!” I snapped my fingers. “Now I have it!
Sturm
means ‘storm’—it’s the German word for storm!”

Crow nodded. “Again correct,” he said. “But let’s not start to add things up too quickly.”

“Add things up?” I snorted. “My friend, I’m completely lost!”

“Not completely,” he denied. “What you have is a jigsaw puzzle without a picture to work from. Difficult, but once you have completed the frame the rest will slowly piece itself together. Now, then, I was telling you about the time three weeks ago when I saw Magruser’s picture.

“I remember I was just up, still in my dressing gown, and I had just brought the paper in here to read. The curtains were open and I could see out into the garden. It was quite cold but relatively mild for the time of the year. The morning was dry and the heath seemed to beckon me, so that I made up my mind to take a walk. After reading the day’s news and after breakfast, I would dress and take a stroll outdoors. Then I opened my newspaper—and Sturm Magruser’s face greeted me!

“Henri, I dropped the paper as if it were a hot iron! So shaken was I that I had to sit down or risk falling. Now, I’m a fairly sturdy chap, and you can well imagine the sort of shock my system would require so to disturb it. Then as I sat down in my chair and stooped to recover the newspaper—the other thing.

“Out in the garden, a sudden stirring of wind. The hedgerow trembling and last year’s leaves blowing across my drive. And birds startled to flight, as by the sudden presence of someone or thing I could not see. And the sudden gathering and rushing of spiralling winds, dust devils that sucked up leaves and grit and other bits of debris and shot them aloft. Dust devils, Henri, in March—in England—half a dozen of them that paraded all about Blowne House for the best part of thirty minutes! In any other circumstance, a marvellous, fascinating phenomenon.”

“But not for you?”

“No.” He shook his head. “Not then. I’ll tell you what they signified for me, Henri. They told me that just as I had recognised
something
, so I had been recognised! Do you understand?”

“Frankly, no,” and it was my turn to shake my head.

“Let it pass,” he said after a moment. “Suffice it to say that there were these strange spiralling winds, and that I took them as a sign that indeed my psychic sense had detected something unutterably dangerous and obscene in this man Sturm Magruser. And I was so frightened by my discovery that I at once set about to discover all I could of him, so that I should know what the threat was and how best to deal with it.”

“Can I stop you for a moment?” I requested.

“Eh? Oh, certainly.”

“Those dates you mentioned as being important, Magruser’s birth and death dates. In what way important?”

“Ah! We shall get to that, Henri.” He smiled. “You may or may not know it, but I’m also something of a numerologist.”

Now it was my turn to smile. “You mean like those fellows who measure the Great Pyramid and read in their findings the secrets of the universe?”

“Do not be flippant, de Marigny!” he answered at once, his smile disappearing in an instant. “I meant no such thing. And in any case, don’t be in too great a hurry to discredit the pyramidologists. Who are you to say what may or may not be? Until you have studied a thing for yourself, treat it with respect.”

“Oh!” was all I could say.

“As for birth and death dates, try these: 1889, 1945.”

I frowned, shrugged, said: “They mean nothing to me. Are they, too,
important?”

“They belong to Adolf Hitler,” he told me; “and if you add the individual numbers together you’ll discover that they make five sets of nine. Nine is an important number in occultism, signifying death. Hitler’s number, 99999, shows him to have been a veritable Angel of Death, and no one could deny that! Incidentally, if you multiply five and nine you get forty-five, which are the last two numbers in 1945—the year he died. This is merely one example of an ancient science. Now, please, Henri, no more scoffing at numerology…”

Deflated, still I was beginning to see a glimmer of light in Crow’s reasoning. “Ah!” I said again. “And Sturm Magruser, like Hitler, has dates which add up to forty-five? Am I right? Let me see: the 1st of the 4th 1921—that’s eighteen—and the 4th of the 3rd 1964. That’s forty-five!”

Crow nodded, smiling again. “You’re a clever man, Henri, yes—but you’ve missed the most important aspect of the thing. But never mind that for now, let me get back to my story…

“I have said that I set about to discover all I could of this fellow with the strange name, the camera-shy manner, the weight of a vast international concern behind him—and the power to frighten the living daylights out of me, which no other man ever had before. And don’t ask me how, but I knew I had to work fast. There wasn’t a great deal of time left before…before whatever was coming came.

“First, however, I contacted a friend of mine at the British Museum, the curator of the Special Books Department, and asked him to search something out for me in the
Necronomicon.
I must introduce you one day, Henri. He’s a marvellous chap. Not quite all there, I fancy—he can’t be, to work in that place—but so free of vice and sin, so blindly naive and innocent, that the greatest possible evils would bounce right off him, I’m sure. Which is just as well, I suppose. Certainly I would never ask an inquiring or susceptible mind that it lay itself open to the perils of Alhazred’s book.

“And at last I was able to concentrate on Magruser. This was about midday and my mind had been working frantically for several hours, so that already I was beginning to feel tired—mentally if not physically. I was also experiencing a singular emotion, a sort of morbid suspicion that I was being watched, and that the observer lurked somewhere in my garden!

“Putting this to the back of my mind, I began to make discreet telephone inquiries about Magruser, but no sooner had I voiced his name than the feeling came over me again, more strongly than before. It was as if a cloud of unutterable malignity, heavy with evil, had settled suddenly over the entire house. And starting back from the telephone, I saw once again the shadow of a nodding dust devil where it played with leaves and twigs in the centre of my drive.

III

“Now my fear turned to anger. Very well, if it was war…then I must now employ weapons of my own. Or if not weapons, defences, certainly.

“I won’t go into details, Henri, but you know the sort of thing I mean. I have long possessed the necessary knowledge to create barriers of a sort against evil influences; no occultist or student of such things worth his salt would ever be without them. But it had recently been my good fortune to obtain a certain—shall we call it ‘charm’?—allegedly efficacious above all others.

“As to how this ‘charm’ happened my way:

“In December Thelred Gustau had arrived in London from Iceland, where he had been studying Surtsey’s volcanic eruption. During that eruption, Gustau had fished from the sea an item of extreme antiquity—indeed, a veritable time capsule from an age undreamed of. When he contacted me in mid-December, he was still in a high fever of excitement. He needed my skills, he said, to help him unravel a mystery ‘predating the very dinosaurs’. His words.

“I worked with him until mid-January, when he suddenly received an offer from America in respect of a lecture tour there. It was an offer he could not refuse—one which would finance his researches for several years to come—and so, off he went. By that time I had become so engrossed with the work I almost went with him. Fortunately I did not.” And here he paused to refill our glasses.

“Of course,” I took the opportunity to say, “I knew you were extremely busy with something. You were so hard to contact, and then always at Gustau’s Woolwich address. But what exactly were you working on?”

“Ah!” he answered. “That is something which Thelred Gustau himself will have to reveal—which I expect he’ll do shortly. Though who’ll take him seriously, heaven only knows. As to what I may tell you of it—I’ll have to have your word that it will be kept in the utmost secrecy.”

“You know you have it,” I answered.

“Very well… During the course of the eruption, Surtsey ejected a…a
container
, Henri, the ‘time capsule’ I have mentioned. Inside—fantastic!

“It was a record from a prehistoric world, Theem’hdra, a continent at the dawn of time, and it had been sent to us down all the ages by one of that continent’s greatest magicians, the wizard Teh Atht, descendant of the mighty Mylakhrion. Alas, it was in the unknown language of that primal land, in Teh Atht’s own hand, and Gustau had accidentally lost the means of its translation. But he did have a key, and he had his own great genius, and—”

“And he had you.” I smiled. “One of the country’s greatest paleographers.”

“Yes,” said Crow, matter-of-factly and without pride, “second only to Professor Gordon Walmsley of Goole. Anyway, I helped Gustau where I could, and during the work I came across a powerful spell against injurious magic and other supernatural menaces. Gustau allowed me to make a copy for myself, which is how I came to be in possession of a fragment of elder magic from an age undreamed of. From what I could make of it, Theem’hdra had existed in an age of wizards, and Teh Atht himself had used this very charm or spell to ward off evil.

“Well, I had the thing, and now I decided to employ it. I set up the necessary paraphernalia and induced within myself the required mental state. This took until well into the afternoon, and with each passing minute the sensation of impending doom deepened about the house, until I was almost prepared to flee the place and let well alone. And, if I had not by now been certain that such flight would be a colossal dereliction of duty, I admit I would have done so.

“As it was, when I had willed myself to the correct mental condition, and upon the utterance of certain words—the effect was instantaneous!

“Daylight seemed to flood the whole house; the gloom fled in a moment; my spirits soared, and outside in the garden a certain ethereal watchdog collapsed in a tiny heap of rubbish and dusty leaves. Teh Atht’s rune had proved itself effective indeed…”

“And then you turned your attention to Sturm Magruser?” I prompted him after a moment or two.

“Not that night, no. I was exhausted, Henri. The day had taken so much out of me. No, I could do no more that night. Instead I slept, deeply and dreamlessly, right through the evening and night until the jangling of my telephone awakened me at nine o’clock on the following morning.”

“Your friend at the Rare Books Department?” I guessed.

“Yes, enlisting my aid in narrowing down his field of research. As you’ll appreciate, the
Necronomicon
is a large volume—compared to which Feery’s
Notes
is a pamphlet—and many of its sections appear to be almost repetitious in their content. The trouble was, I wasn’t even certain that it contained what I sought; only that I believed I had read it there. If not—” and he waved an expansive hand in the direction of his own more than appreciable occult library “—then the answer must be here somewhere—whose searching out would form an equally frustrating if not utterly impossible task. At least in the time allowed.”

“You keep hinting at this urgency.” I frowned. “What do you mean, ‘the time allowed?’”

“Why,” he answered, “the time in which Magruser must be disposed of, of course!”

“Disposed of?” I could hardly believe my ears.