Haggopian and Other Stories (37 page)

As the years passed my body healed completely and I grew from a fascinated youth into a dedicated man. Not that I ever guessed what drove me to explore the ill-lit passages of history and fantasy. I only knew that there was something fascinating for me in the re-discovery of those ancient worlds of dream and legend.

Before I began those far-flung travels which were destined to occupy me on and off for four years I bought a house in Marske, at the very edge of the Yorkshire moors. This was the region in which I had spent my childhood and there had always been about the brooding moors a strong feeling of
affinity
which was hard for me to define. I felt closer to
home
there somehow—and infinitely closer to the beckoning past. It was with a genuine reluctance that I left my moors but the inexplicable lure of distant places and foreign names called me away, across the seas.

First I visited these lands that were within easy reach, ignoring the places of dreams and fancies but promising myself that later—later!!

Egypt, with all its mystery! Djoser’s step-pyramid at Saggara, Imhotep’s, Masterpiece; the ancient mastabas, tombs of centuries-dead kings; the inscrutably smiling sphinx; the Sneferu pyramid at Meidum and those of Chephren and Cheops at Giza; the mummies, the brooding Gods….

Yet in spite of all its wonder Egypt could not hold me for long. The sand and heat were damaging to my skin which tanned quickly and roughened almost overnight.

Crete, the Nymph of the beautiful Mediterranean…Theseus and the Minotaur; the Palace of Minos at Knossos…. All wonderful—but that which I sought was not there.

Salamis and Cyprus, with all their ruins of ancient civilizations, each held me but a month or so. Yet it was in Cyprus that I learned of yet another personal peculiarity—my queer abilities in water…

I became friendly with a party of divers at Famagusta. Daily they were diving for amphorae and other relics of the past offshore from the ruins at Salonica on the south-east coast. At first the fact that I could remain beneath the water three times as long as the best of them, and swim further without the aid of fins or snorkel, was only a source of amazement to my friends; but after a few days I noticed that they were having less and less to do with me. They did not care for the hairlessness of my body or the webbing, which seemed to have lengthened, between my toes and fingers. They did not like the bump low at the rear of my bathing-costume or the way I could converse with them in their own tongue when I had never studied Greek in my life.

It was time to move on. My travels took me all over the world and I became an authority on those dead civilisations which were my one joy in life. Then, in Phetri, I heard of the Nameless City.

Remote in the desert of Araby lies the Nameless City, crumbling and inarticulate, its low walls nearly hidden by the sands of uncounted ages. It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred the mad poet dreamed on the night before he sang his inexplicable couplet:

“That is not dead which can eternal lie,

And with strange aeons even death may die.”

My Arab guides thought I, too, was mad when I ignored their warnings and continued in search of that city of Devils. Their fleet-footed camels took them off in more than necessary haste for they had noticed my skin’s scaly strangeness and certain other unspoken things which made them uneasy in my presence. Also, they had been nonplussed, as I had been myself, at the strange fluency with which I used their tongue.

Of what I saw and did in Kara-Shehr I will not write. It must suffice to say that I learned of things which struck chords in my subconscious; things which sent me off again on my travels to seek Sarnath the Doomed in what was once the land of Mnar…

No man knows the whereabouts of Sarnath and it is better that this remains so. Of my travels in search of the place and the difficulties which I encountered at every phase of my journey I will therefore recount nothing. Yet my discovery of the slime-sunken city, and of the incredibly aged ruins of nearby Ib, were major links forged in the lengthening chain of knowledge which was slowly bridging the awesome gap between this world and my ultimate destination. And I, bewildered, did not even know where or what that destination was.

For three weeks I wandered the slimy shores of the still lake which hides Sarnath and at the end of that time, driven by a fearful compulsion, I once again used those unnatural aquatic powers of mine and began exploring beneath the surface of that hideous morass.

That night I slept with a small green figurine, rescued from the sunken ruins, pressed to my bosom. In my dreams I saw my mother and father—but dimly, as if through a mist—and they beckoned to me…

The nest day I went again to stand in the centuried ruins of Ib and as I was making ready to leave I saw the inscribed stone which gave me my first real clue. The wonder is that I could
read
what was written on that weathered, aeon-old pillar; for it was written in a curious cuneiform older even than the inscriptions on Geph’s broken columns, and it had been pitted by the ravages of time.

It told nothing of the beings who once lived in Ib, or anything of the long-dead inhabitants of Sarnath. It spoke only of the destruction which the men of Sarnath had brought to the beings of Ib—and of the resulting Doom that came to Sarnath. This doom was wrought by the Gods of the beings of Ib but of those Gods I could learn not a thing. I only knew that reading that stone and being in Ib had stirred long-hidden memories, perhaps even
ancestral
memories, in my mind. Again that feeling of closeness to home, that feeling I always felt so strongly on the moors in Yorkshire, flooded over me. Then, as I idly moved the rushes at the base of the pillar with my foot, yet more chiselled inscriptions appeared. I cleared away the slime and read on. There were only a few lines but those lines contained my clue:

“Ib is gone but the Gods live on. Across the world is the Sister City, hidden in the earth, in the barbarous lands of Zimmeria.
There The People flourish yet and there will The Gods ever be worshipped; even unto the coming of Cthulhu…”

Many months later in Cairo, I sought out a man steeped in elder lore, a widely acknowledged authority on forbidden antiquities and prehistoric lands and legends. This sage had never heard of Zimmeria but he did know of a land which had once had a name much similar. “And where did this Cimmeria lie?” I asked.

“Unfortunately,” my erudite adviser answered, consulting a chart, “most of Cimmeria now lies beneath the sea but originally it lay between Vanaheim and Nemedia in ancient Hyborea.”

“You say
most
of it is sunken?” I queried. “But what of the land which lies above the sea?” Perhaps it was the eagerness in my voice which caused him to glance at me the way he did. Again, perhaps it was my queer aspect; for the hot suns of many lands had hardened my hairless skin most peculiarly and a strong web now showed between my fingers.

“Why do you wish to know?” he asked. “What is it you are seeking?”

“Home,” I answered instinctively, not knowing what prompted me to say it.

“Yes…” he said, studying me closely. “That might well be… You are an Englishman, are you not? May I enquire from which part?”

“From the North-East.” I said, reminded suddenly of my moors. “Why do you want to know?”

“My friend, you have searched in vain,” he smiled, “for Cimmeria, or that which remains of it, encompasses all of that North-Eastern part of England which is your home-land. Is it not ironic? In order to find your home you have left it…”

That night fate dealt me a card which I could not ignore. In the lobby of my hotel was a table devoted solely to the reading habits of the English residents. Upon it was a wide variety of books, paper-backs, newspapers and journals, ranging from
The Reader’s Digest
to
The News of The World
, and to pass a few hours in relative coolness I sat beneath a soothing fan with a glass of iced water and idly glanced through one of the newspapers. Abruptly, on turning a page, I came upon a picture and an article which, when I had scanned the thing through, caused me to book a seat on the next flight to London.

The picture was poorly reproduced but was still clear enough for me to see that it depicted a small, green figurine—
the duplicate of that which I had salvaged from the ruins of Sarnath beneath the still pool…

The article, as best I can remember, read like this:

“Mr. Samuel Davies, of 17 Heddington Crescent, Radcar, found the beautiful relic of bygone ages pictured above in a stream whose only known source is the cliff-face at Sarby-on-the-Moors. The figurine is now in Radcar Museum, having been donated by Mr. Davies, and is being studied by the curator, Prof. Gordon Walmsley of Goole. So far Prof. Walmsley had been unable to throw any light on the figurine’s origin but the Wendy-Smith Test, a scientific means of checking the age of archaeological fragments, has shown it to be over ten thousand years old. The green figurine does not appear to have any connection with any of the better known civilisations of ancient England and is thought to be a find of rare importance. Unfortunately,
expert pot-holers have given unanimous opinions that the stream, where it springs from the cliffs at Sarby, is totally untraversable.”

The next day, during the flight, I slept for an hour or so and again, in my dreams, I saw my parents. As before they appeared to me in a mist—but their beckonings were stronger than in that previous dream and in the blanketing vapours around them were strange
figures
, bowed in seeming obeisance, while a chant of teasing familiarity rang from hidden and nameless throats…

• • •

I had wired my housekeeper from Cairo, informing her of my returning, and when I arrived at my house in Marske found a solicitor waiting for me. This gentleman introduced himself as being Mr. Harvey, of the Radcar firm of Harvey, Johnson and Harvey, and presented me with a large, sealed envelope. It was addressed to me, in my father’s hand, and Mr. Harvey informed me his instructions had been to deliver the envelope into my hands on the attainment of my twenty-first birthday. Unfortunately I had been out of the country at the time, almost a year earlier, but the firm had kept in touch with my housekeeper so that on my return the agreement made nearly seven years earlier between my father and Mr. Harvey’s firm might be kept. After Mr. Harvey left I dismissed my woman and opened the envelope. The manuscript within was not in any script I had ever learned at school. This was the language I had seen written on that aeon-old pillar in ancient Ib; nonetheless I knew instinctively that it had been my father’s hand which had written the thing. And of course, I could read it as easily as if it were in English. The many and diverse contents of the letter made it, as I have said, more akin to a manuscript in its length and it is not my purpose to completely reproduce it. That would take too long and the speed with which The First Change is taking place does not permit it. I will merely set down the specially significant points which the letter brought to my attention.

In disbelief I read the first paragraph—but, as I read on, that disbelief soon became a weird amazement which in turn became a savage joy at the fantastic disclosures revealed by those timeless hieroglyphs of Ib.
My parents were not dead!
They had merely gone away, gone home…

That time nearly seven years ago, when I had returned home from a school reduced to ruins by the bombing, our London home had been purposely sabotaged by my father. A powerful explosive had been rigged, primed to be set off by the first air-raid siren, and then my parents had gone off in secrecy back to the moors. They had not known, I realised, that I was on my way home from the ruined school where I boarded. Even now they were unaware that I had arrived at the house just as the radar defences of England’s military services had picked out those hostile dots in the sky. That plan which had been so carefully laid to fool men into believing that my parents were dead had worked well; but it had also nearly destroyed me. And all this time I, too, had believed them killed. But why had they gone to such extremes? What
was
that secret which it was so necessary to hide from our fellow men—and where were my parents now? I read on…

Slowly all was revealed. We were not
indigenous
to England, my parents and I, and they had brought me here as an infant from our homeland, a land quite near yet paradoxically far away. The letter went on to explain how
all
the children of our race are brought here as infants, for the atmosphere of our home-land is not conducive to health in the young and unformed. The difference in my case had been that my mother was unable to part with me. That was the awful thing! Though all the children of our race must wax and grow up
away
from their homeland, the elders can only rarely depart from their native clime. This fact is determined by their physical
appearance
throughout the greater period of their life-spans.
For they are not, for the better part of their lives, either the physical or mental counterparts of ordinary men.

This means that children have to be left on doorsteps, at the entrances of orphanages, in churches and in other places where they will be found and cared for; for in extreme youth there is little difference between my race and the race of men. As I read I was reminded of those tales of fantasy I had once loved; of ghouls and fairies and other creatures who left their young to be reared by human beings and who stole human children to be brought up in their own likenesses.

Was
that,
then, my destiny? Was I to be a ghoul? I read on. I learned that the people of my race can only leave our native country twice in their lives; once in youth—when, as I have explained, they are brought here of necessity to be left until they attain the approximate age of twenty-one years—and once in later life, when
changes
in their appearances make them compatible to
outside
conditions. My parents had just reached this latter stage of their—development—when I was born. Because of my mother’s devotion they had forsaken their
duties
in our own land and had brought me personally to England where, ignoring The Laws, they stayed with me. My father had brought certain treasures with him to ensure an easy life for himself and my mother until that time should come when they would be
forced
to leave me, the Time of the Second Change, when to stay would be to alert mankind of our existence.