Haggopian and Other Stories (36 page)

I waited for the ghost of my dead ancestor to proceed, and when he did not immediately do so cried out: “Say on then, forebear mine! Say on and be done with beguiling me!”

He sighed for reply and answered very low: “As you command…

“At length I sought me out a man rumoured to be well versed in the ways of the Great Ones; a hermit, dwelling in the peaks of the Eastern Range, whose visions and dreams were such as were best dreamed far removed from his fellow men. For he was wont to run amuck in the passion of his nightmares, and was reckoned by many to have bathed in the blood of numerous innocents, ‘to the greater glory of Loathly Lord Cthulhu!’

“I sought him out and questioned him in his high cave, and he showed me the herbs I must eat and whispered the words I must howl from the peaks into the storm. And he told me when I must do these things, that I might then sleep and meet with Cthulhu in my dreams. Thus he instructed me…

“But as night drew nigh in this lonely place my host became drowsy and fell into a fitful sleep. Aye, and his ravings soon became such, and his strugglings so wild, that I stayed not but ventured back out into the steep slopes and thus made away from him. Descending those perilous crags only by the silver light of the Moon, I spied the madman above me, asleep yet rushing to and fro, howling like a dog and slashing with a great knife in the darkness of the shadows. And I was glad I had not stayed!

“Thus I returned to Tharmoon, taking a winding route and gathering of the herbs whereof the hermit had spoken, until upon my arrival I had with me all the elements required for the invocation, while locked in my mind I carried the Words of Power. And lo!—I called up a great storm and went out onto the balcony of my highest tower; and there I howled into the wind the Words, and I ate of the herbs mixed so and so, and a swoon came upon me so that I fell as though dead into a sleep deeper by far than the arms of Shoosh, Goddess of the Still Slumbers. Ah, but deep though this sleep was, it was by no means still!

“No, that sleep was—
unquiet
! I saw the sepulchre of Cthulhu in the Isle of Arlyeh, and I passed through the massive and oddly-angled walls of that alien stronghold into the presence of the Great One Himself!”

Here the outlines of my ancestor’s ghost became strangely agitated, as if its owner trembled uncontrollably, and even the voice of Mylakhrion wavered and lost much of its doomful portent. I waited for a moment before crying: “Yes, go on—what did the awful Lord of Arlyeh tell you?”

“…Many things, Teh Atht. He told me the secrets of space and time; the legends of lost universes out beyond the limits of man’s imagination; he outlined the hideous truths behind the N’tang Tapestries, the lore of dimensions other than the familiar three. And at last he told me the secret of immortality!

“But the latter he would not reveal until I had made a pact with him. And this pact was that I would be his priest ever and ever, even until his coming. And believing that I might later break free of any strictures Cthulhu could place upon me, I agreed to the pact and swore upon it. In this my fate was sealed, my doom ordained, for no man may escape the curse of Cthulhu once its seal is upon him…

“And lo, when I wakened, I did all as I had been instructed to attain the promised immortality; and on the third night Cthulhu visited me in dreams, for he knew me now and how to find me, and commanded me as his servant and priest to set about certain tasks. Ah, but these were tasks which would assist the Great One and his prisoned brethren in breaking free of the chains placed upon them in aeons past by the wondrous Gods of Eld, and what use to be immortal forever more in the unholy service of Cthulhu?

“Thus, on the fourth day, instead of doing as bidden, I set about protecting myself as best I could from Cthulhu’s wrath, working a veritable frenzy of magicks to keep him from me…to no avail! In the middle of the fifth night, wearied nigh unto death by my thaumaturgical labours, I slept, and again Cthulhu came to me. And he came in great anger—even
great
anger!

“For he had broken down all of my sorcerous barriers, destroying all spells and protective runes, discovering me for a traitor to his cause. And as I slept he drew me up from my couch and led me through the labyrinth of my castle, even to the feet of those steps which climbed up to the topmost tower. He placed my feet upon those stone stairs and commanded me to climb, and when I would have fought him he applied monstrous pressures to my mind that numbed me and left me bereft of will. And so I climbed, slowly and like unto one of the risen dead, up to that high tower, where without pause I went out onto the balcony and threw myself down upon the needle rocks a thousand feet below…

“Thus was my body broken, Teh Atht, and thus Mylakhrion died.”

As he finished speaking I stepped closer to the swirling wall of mist where Mylakhrion stood, black-robed and enigmatic in mystery. He did not seem so tall now, no taller than I myself, and for all the power he had wielded in life he no longer awed me. Should I, Teh Atht, fear a ghost? Even the ghost of the world’s greatest sorcerer?

“Still you have not told me that which I most desire to know,” I accused.

“Ah, you grow impatient,” he answered. “Even as the smoke of the Zha-weed loses its potency and the waking world beckons to you, so your impatience grows. Very well, let me now repeat what Cthulhu told me of immortality:

“He told me that the only way a mere man, even the mightiest wizard among wizards, might perpetuate himself down all the ages was by means of reincarnation! But alas, such as my return would be it would not be complete; for I must needs inhabit another’s body, another’s mind, and unless I desired a weak body and mind I should certainly find resistance in the person of that as yet unborn other. In other words I must
share
that body, that mind! But surely, I reasoned, even partial immortality would be better than none at all. Would you not agree, descendant mine?

“Of course, I would want a body—or part of one—close in appearance to my own, and a mind to suit. Aye, and it must be a keen mind and curious of mysteries great and small: that of a sorcerer! And indeed it were better if my own blood should flow in the veins of—”

“Wait!” I then cried, searching the mist with suddenly fearful eyes, seeking to penetrate its greyness that I might gaze upon Mylakhrion’s unknown face. “I…I find your story most…disturbing…my ancestor, and—”

“—and yet you must surely hear it out, Teh Atht,” he interrupted, doom once more echoing in his voice. And as he spoke he moved flowingly forward until at last I could see the death-lights in his shadowy eyes. Closer still he came, saying:

“To ensure that this as yet unborn one would be all the things I desired of him, I set a covenant upon my resurrection in him. And this condition was that his curiosity and sorcerous skill must be such that he would first call me up from the Land of Shades ten times, and that only then would I make myself manifest in his person…
And how many times have you called me up, Teh Atht
?”

“Ten times—fiend!” I choked. And feeling the chill of subterranean pools flowing in my bones, I rushed upon him to seize his shoulders in palsied hands, staring into a face now visible as a reflection in the clear glass of a mirror. A mirror? Aye! For though the face was that of an old, old man—
it was nonetheless my own
!

And without more ado I fled, waking to a cold, cold morn atop the Mount of the Ancients, where my tethered yak watched me with worried eyes and snorted a nervous greeting…

• • •

But that was long ago and in my youth, and now I no longer fear Mylakhrion, though I did fear him greatly for many a year. For in the end I was stronger than him, aye, and he got but a small part of me. In return I got all of his magicks, the lore of a lifetime spent in the discovery of dark secrets.

All of this and immortality, too, of a sort; and yet even now Mylakhrion is not beaten. For surely I will carry something of him with me down the ages. Occasionally I smile at the thought and feel laughter rising in me like wind over the desert…but rarely. The laughter hardly sounds like mine at all and its echoes seem to linger o’erlong.

The Sister City

With this one we’re back to my first year as a writer, 1967, and one of the first half-dozen stories I sent to August Derleth at Arkham House. You know something, I’m still astonished that Derleth even gave me a shot. Not that my stories themselves were bad, but the way I presented them most definitely was. Try to picture it: sitting at his desk, Derleth opens the cardboard tube that I sent—surface mail, to save on postage—from Berlin. Inside he finds a story, or rather a scroll, that he has to nail to his desk top in order to read the damn thing! And it’s typed single-space, sometimes on both sides of the military, scribble-pad sized sheets! It’s a wonder he didn’t go out of his mind! But no, he was gathering stories for
Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos
, and this one was the right size and shape. “The Sister City” made it into
TOTCM
, since when it has seen many a reprint, not least as a chapter in my novel
Beneath the Moors
.

This manuscript attached as 

“Annex ‘A’” to report number 

M-Y-127/52, dated 7th August 1952.

Towards the end of the war, when our London home was bombed and both my parents were killed, I was hospitalised through my own injuries and forced to spend the better part of two years on my back. It was during this period of my youth—I was only seventeen when I left the hospital—that I formed, in the main, the enthusiasm which in later years developed into a craving for travel, adventure and knowledge of Earth’s elder antiquities. I had always had a wanderer’s nature but was so restricted during those two dreary years that when my chance for adventure eventually came I made up for wasted time by letting that nature hold full sway.

Not that those long, painful months were totally devoid of pleasures. Between operations, when my health would allow it, I read avidly in the hospital’s library, primarily to forget my bereavement, eventually to be carried along to those worlds of elder wonder created by Walter Scott in his enchanting
Arabian Nights
.

Apart from delighting me tremendously, the book helped to take my mind off the things I had heard said about me in the wards. It had been put about that I was different; allegedly the doctors had found something strange in my physical make-up. There were whispers about the peculiar qualities of my skin and the slightly extending horny cartilage at the base of my spine. There was talk about the fact that my fingers and toes were ever so slightly webbed and being, as I was, so totally devoid of hair, I became the recipient of many queer glances.

These things plus my name, Robert Krug, did nothing to increase my popularity at the hospital. In fact, at a time when Hitler was still occasionally devastating London with his bombs, a surname like Krug, with its implications of Germanic ancestry, was probably more a hindrance to friendship than all my other peculiarities put together.

With the end of the war I found myself rich; the only heir to my father’s wealth, and still not out of my teens. I had left Scott’s Jinns, Ghouls and Efreets far behind me but was returned to the same
type
of thrill I had known with the
Arabian Nights
by the popular publication of Lloyd’s
Excavations on Sumerian Sites
. In the main it was that book which was responsible for the subsequent awe in which I ever held those magical words “Lost Cities”.

In the months that followed, indeed through all my remaining—formative—years, Lloyd’s work remained a landmark, followed as it was by many more volumes in a like vein. I read avidly of Layard’s
Nineveh and Babylon
and
Early Adventures in Persia, Susiana and Babylonia.
I dwelled long over such works as Budge’s
Rise and Progress of Assyriology
and Burckhardt’s
Travels in Syria and the Holy Land
.

Nor were the fabled lands of Mesopotamia the only places of interest to me. Fictional Shangri-La and Ephiroth ranked equally beside the reality of Mycenæ, Knossos, Palmyra and Thebes. I read excitedly of Atlantis and Chichén-Itzá; never bothering to separate fact from fancy, and dreamed equally longingly of the Palace of Minos in Crete and Unknown Kadath in the Colde Waste.

What I read of Sir Amery Wendy-Smith’s African expedition in search of dead G’harne confirmed my belief that certain myths and legends are not far removed from historical fact. If no less a person than that eminent antiquarian and archaeologist had equipped an expedition to search for a jungle city considered by most reputable authorities to be purely mythological… Why! His failure meant nothing compared with the fact that he had
tried…

While others, before my time, had ridiculed the broken figure of the demented explorer who returned alone from the jungles of the Dark Continent I tended to emulate his deranged fancies—as his theories have been considered—re-examining the evidence for Chyria and G’harne and delving ever deeper into the fragmentary antiquities of legendary cities and lands with such unlikely names as R’lyeh, Ephiroth, Mnar and Hyperborea.