Haggopian and Other Stories

Dazedly, desperately attempting to understand this monstrous thing come so suddenly upon my house, I worked all through the night and into the next morning; but having done everything I could think of to check the vile acceleration of Matthew’s affliction, and failing, I suggested calling in a specialist. It was the worst thing I could have done. Matthew reacted like a wild thing, screaming that there was nothing anyone could do for him and that “knowledge of those things in the pit must spread no further!” Plainly he believed that the disease had come back with him from the pit on the moors, that he had poisoned his system by eating of those obscene plants—and in all truth I was hardly able to dispute it.

Sobbing and shrieking, swearing that he would soon cease to be a bother to me, he made me promise not to tell anyone of the horror or bring in anyone to see him. I thought I knew his meaning about ceasing to be a bother: in all my textbooks I could find nothing like my nephew’s disease; only leprosy could be said even to approximate it, and leprosy did not have its fantastic acceleration. Reluctantly I calculated that the virulence of Matthew’s disease would kill him within a fortnight, and for this reason I agreed to his every request.

• • •

The next night, out for a breath of badly needed fresh air, I managed to catch Ginger, my cat. Since first Matthew returned from his prolonged ramble Ginger had refused to enter the house, preferring to howl horribly on the step outside for hours on end. I brought him in and left him in a very agitated state downstairs with a bowl of milk. The next morning—the fourth morning, I think, of the manifestation of the horror—I found Ginger’s fearful, death-stiffened corpse on the dispensary floor. One of the room’s small windowpanes was cracked where the unfortunate and terrified animal had tried to escape. But from what? Animals can sense things too deep for the blunted human mind to grasp—and what Ginger had sensed had frightened him to death.

Other animals, too, had noticed something strange about my house, and dogs in particular would come nowhere near the place. Even my pony, tied in a warm lean-to behind the house, had danced nervously in his stall all through those long nights…

On the same morning that I found Ginger dead, when I carefully slipped back the sheets from Matthew’s sleeping form, doctor though I am and despite the fact that my experience has included every type of illness and ailment, I recoiled in terror from that which lay upon the bed. Three hours later, at about eleven in the morning, when I was satisfied that I had done everything I possibly could, I laid down my tools. I had worked with surgical swabs and scrapers, sponges and acids, and my nephew’s body beneath the dressings was not a pretty sight. But at least it was clean—for the moment.

When the anesthetic wore off and Matthew awoke, though he was obviously in great pain, he managed to tell me of the new dream which had disturbed his sleep. He had seemed to be in a misty place where there was only a voice, continually repeating a phrase in an alien tongue, which as before he had somehow been able to understand. The voice had called:

“Ye shall not associate with them. Ye shall not know them or walk

among them or near them…” And Matthew had been afraid for his very soul.

• • •

That afternoon we slept. Both of us were near exhaustion and it was only later in the evening, when I was disturbed by his cries, that I awoke. He was having yet another nightmare and I listened intently by his bedside in case he said something new in connection with the horror. Had I roused him then I might have saved his mind, but I am glad now that I did nothing, being satisfied to sit listening while he rambled in his sleep. It seemed to me that he was better asleep; whatever dreams he experienced, they could in no way be worse than the reality.

I was deeply shocked by the poisonous odour that drifted up from his restless form, for only a few hours earlier I had cleansed him completely of every sign of the horror. I had hoped that my extreme surgical efforts might be sufficient to halt the rapid encroachment of the dread growth, but I had been grasping at straws. That smell made it all too obvious that my hopes had been in vain. Then, as I continued watching, Matthew began to writhe and gibber dementedly.

“No, no,” he gasped, “I will not stand like this, as though I were part of the place, with the muck dripping off me. I will not!” For a long moment his chest rose and fell spasmodically. Then, in a calmer voice, he continued: