Haggopian and Other Stories (43 page)

“Lock your doors, doctor!” he hoarsely yelled as he saw me. “There’s something horrible loose on the moors—something
horrible
!”
Without pausing in his stumbling run he went by my gate and gradually vanished into the mist. To an extent I was relieved; he would not be reporting the nature of what he had seen to the police. Not immediately at any rate—not with that brace of fine hares swinging round his neck. I watched Ben until the mist had completely swallowed him up and then I rapidly donned a raincoat and plunged out into the darkness.

My task was hopeless. With night already settled on the moors and a thickening mist to contend with, I stood no chance of finding him. Indeed I was fortunate in the end, over an hour later, even to find the road back to Eeley. Nonetheless I knew that with the dawn I would have to go out on the moors and try again. I could not leave him out there in that state. What if someone else were to find him?

Obviously Matthew had headed for the pit—his scrawled note had made that much at least clear—but how was I ever to find that terrible place without a clue as to its whereabouts? It was then that I remembered the map upon which Matthew said he had marked his location on the knoll. The map—of course!

I found it in his room…

• • •

I hardly slept at all that night—my dreams would not permit sleep—and early morning found me setting out over the moors. I will not describe the route I took for reasons which must be perfectly obvious. Heaven forbid it, but in the event of my final plan not working it is best that no one else knows of that place on the moors.

Eventually, in mid-morning, I found the terrible hole in the ground where all of this evil had begun. Even to my untrained eyes it was all too plain that there was something hideously wrong with the vegetation around the mouth of that pit. The plants, even those which were common and recognisable, were all strangely withered and mutated.
Sehr sonderbare, mysteriöse Unkräuter!

I knew that if I was ever to be sure of what I had started to suspect, if I was ever to have definite proof, then I would have to climb down into the hole. All along I had foreseen this, but now the very thought of it was more than sufficient to cause me to shudder horribly… And my flesh was still creeping as I hammered my stake into the earth and made fast my rope, for even up there in the misty morning sunlight the air was tainted with an all too familiar smell.

Hurriedly now, for I feared my courage would soon desert me, I lowered myself into the hole. Climbing down into dimness, I was immediately aware of the poisonous quality of the atmosphere; but I was given little chance to dwell on the thought for soon my feet found the platform of stones which Matthew had built.

In the feeble light I could see that part of the platform had tumbled down, and close by there was a monstrously suggestive depression in the sandy shingle of the shelf. As I studied this hollow it suddenly, shockingly dawned on me that in his condition Matthew would never have been able to climb down here, even though his rope was still hanging where he had left it. The difficulties he must have faced even in the climbing of the knoll seemed insurmountable; yet I was certain that he had managed it and was even now somewhere nearby in the dimness. I was certain because of that depression in the shingle…

For while there were other marks in the sand—the signs of my nephew’s previous visit—this one was plainly deeper, fresher, and
different
. It was exactly the kind of hollow one would expect a falling body to make in wet sand!… I turned my mind hurriedly away from the thought.

Matthew had described the glowing moss on the walls of the place, and sure enough it was there, but I was unwilling to explore any further in its light alone. I took out my pocket-torch and switched it on. The torch must have received a bang in my climbing for its beam was now weak and intermittent. Nor did the mist, which was thickening up above, help any; it only served to shut out the dim light filtering down from the crack.

First I shone the beam of my torch around the pallid walls and over the surface of the soupy water; then I sought out the natural archway where the pool passed out of sight. Feeling my courage ebbing again I quickly waded into the pool. The way that slime
oozed
around my legs made me tremble violently and I was vastly relieved that the foul muck did not reach the tops of my waders.

I went straight to the archway, lowering my head and bending my back to pass beyond it. There, in the dingy confines of the cave, the first things that showed in the flickering light of my torch were the hanging daggers of stone depending from the vaulted ceiling. Then, as I turned to my left, the beam passed over something else—a shape slumped against the wall.

Not daring to move I stood there, shaking feverishly, a cold sweat upon my brow. The only sound other than my pounding heart was the slow drip, drip, drip of falling droplets of God only knows what evil moisture.

The hair of my neck bristled in a fearful dread but as my fear gradually subsided I began slowly to move again, swinging my torch around to the right. This time when my beam picked out the thing against the wall I gripped my torch firmly and moved closer. It was one of the plants—but not quite as Matthew had described them. This one hung soggily from the wall of the cave and there was no firmness about it. I concluded that it was either dead or dying and saw that I must be correct when I swung my beam down the length of the thing. A great portion of it had been stripped away. I guessed that this had been the specimen from which my nephew had eaten.

Then something else caught my eye, something which very dully reflected the light from my torch. Reaching out with my free hand I touched the hard object which seemed to be imbedded in the plant about halfway up its length. Whatever it was, possibly a metallic crystal of some sort, it came away in my hand and I put it in my pocket for future reference.

More daring now, I moved further into the cave, examining more of the green pods as I came upon them, still finding them frightful in some strange way but unable to account completely for my fear. And then I stopped dead. I had almost forgotten just what I was looking for—but now I remembered…

In a dark corner one of the plant-things stood all alone with its lower roots trailing in the soupy pool. It would have been just like all the other specimens except for one shocking difference…
It was wearing the dressing-gown I had loaned to Matthew!

And more: as I swung my torch beam in disbelief up and down the length of the thing
it blinked at me
!
It blinked—thin slits opened and closed where eyes should be, and in that moment of madness, in that instant of utter insanity, as my very mind buckled—I looked into the agonised eyes of Matthew Worthy!

How to describe the rest.

Oh, I was transformed in one mind-shattering moment. My torch fell from nerveless fingers and I heard myself scream a hoarse, babbling scream of horror. I threw up my hands and staggered back, away from what I had seen, away from the brainblasting abnormality against the wall. Then I turned to flee full tilt—shrieking, splashing through the vileness of the pool—through a maze of dripping stalactites, past a host of green, insinuously oozing
things
—bumping in my haste from wall to wall, sometimes coming into contact with slimy obscenities which had no right to exist. And all the time I screamed and babbled shamelessly, even as I clawed my way up the dangling rope and hauled myself out into the daylight, even as I plummeted headlong down the steep slope heedless of life or limb, until I tripped and flew forward into merciful oblivion…

Merciful oblivion, I say, and it is the truth, for had I not knocked myself unconscious I have no doubt that I would have remained permanently mindless. What I had
seen
had been terrible enough without the other. That other which I had
heard
had been, if anything, worse. For even as the torch fell from my fingers and I screamed, other voices had screamed with me! Voices which could not be “heard” physically—for their owners were incapable of physical speech—voices I heard with my mind alone, which were utterly horrible and alien to me and full of eternal misery…

• • •

When I came to my senses I was lying at the foot of the knoll. I refrained from an immediate mental examination of what I knew now to be the horrible truth, for therein lay a return to madness. Instead I brushed myself off and hurried back as quickly as my throbbing head would allow to Eeley. My house and practice lay at the extreme edge of the village, but nonetheless I approached it from the fields and let myself in at the back door. I burnt my waders immediately, noting especially that the slime upon them blazed fiercely with a sulphurous brightness. Later, after I had scrubbed myself from head to toe, examining each limb minutely and finding no trace of the horror, I remembered the rock crystal I had put in my pocket.

In the clear daylight it was obviously not a crystal; it appeared to be more like a bracelet of some sort, and yet this fact did not properly surprise me. The soft metal links must have long since oxidized, for as I examined the rotted thing, all of it—with the exception of a small flat circle or disc—crumbled away in my hands. Even this solid, circular portion, about an inch and one half across, was mostly slimy and green. I placed it in a flask of dilute acid to clean it; by which time, of course, I knew what it was.

• • •

As I watched the acid doing its work I began, involuntarily, to tremble. My mind was a turmoil of terrible thoughts. I knew what my nephew had become, and presumably the partly eaten thing which had provided this metal clue had also once been human. Certainly it had been some sort of being from any one of many periods of time. I could not help but ask myself: in the latter stages of change or after the change was complete,
could the pit-creatures feel anything
?

Watching the seething mass in the flask I suddenly began to babble idiotically and had to battle consciously with myself to stop it. No wonder Matthew had been baffled with regard to the reproductory system of these pitiful horrors. How does a magnet cause a pin to become magnetic? Why will one rotten apple in a barrel ruin all the other fruit? Oh, yes—eating from one of the things had helped Matthew contract the change, but that was not what had started the thing.
Proximity
was sufficient! Nor was the horror truly a disease, as Matthew had tried to tell me in his awful note, but a
devolution
—a gestalt of human being and thing—both living, if such could be called life, and dependent one upon the other.

This was the sort of thing I was babbling to myself as the acid completed its work, and I shook so that I had to steady myself before I was able to draw out from the acid the flat, now shiny disc.

What was it Matthew had dreamed? “They had walked this holy ground unbidden…” Had that been sufficient in the old days—in prehistory, when the area about the pit must have been far more poisonous than it was now—to bring about the change? I think that even at the beginning Matthew must have partly guessed the truth, for had he himself not told me that he found the cell structure to be “almost human”?

Poor Matthew—that name he screamed before going mad. At last I understood it all. There it all was before me: the final, leaping horror. My own nephew, an unwilling, though perhaps not completely
unknowing
anthropophagite. A cannibal!

For the shiny thing I held in my shuddering hand was a German watch of fairly modern appearance, and on the back was an inscription in German. An inscription so simple that even I, unversed in that language, could translate it to read:

“WITH LOVE, FROM GERDA TO HORST”…

Since then it has taken long hours to pull myself together sufficiently to formulate my plan, that plan I have already mentioned and yet which even now I hardly dare think about. I had fervently hoped that I would never have to use it but now, with the spread of the poison through my body, it appears that I must…

When the ashes of my house have cooled the police will find this manuscript locked in a safe in the deep, damp cellar, but long before the flames have died down I shall have returned to the pit. I will take with me as much petrol as I can carry. My plan is simple really, and I shall know no pain. Nor will the
inhabitants
of that place know pain, not if a powerful drug may yet affect them. As the anaesthetic takes hold and while I am still able, I shall pour the petrol on the surface of that evil pool.

My statement is at an end—

—Perhaps tonight puzzled observers will wonder at the pillar of sulphurous fire rising over the moors…

Dagon’s Bell