Haggopian and Other Stories (33 page)

“Then forget it!” Nuttall grinned. “And while you’re at it, how about a drink? It’s your round.”

• • •

Against his better instincts, but not wanting Nuttall to see how desperately he feared the darkness still, Bart allowed himself to be talked into walking home. Nuttall lived in a flat in one of the rather more “flash” areas of the city, but walking they would have to pass Bart’s place first. Bart did not mind the dark so much—he said—so long as he was not alone.

Low, scudding clouds obscured the stars as they walked and a chill autumn wind blew discarded wrappers, the occasional leaf and loose, eerily-flapping sheets of evening “racing specials” against their legs.

Nuttall’s flat was city-side of a suburban estate, while Bart’s place lay more on the outskirts of the city proper. The whole area, though, was still quite new, so that soon the distances between welcome lamp-posts increased; there was no need for a lot of light way out here. With the resultant closing-in of darkness, Bart shuddered and pressed closer to his apparently fearless friend. He did not know it, but Nuttall was deep in worried thought. Bart’s words in the smokeroom of The Windsor had brought niggling doubts flooding to the forefront of his consciousness; he could quite clearly recall all that they had uncovered at Millwright’s home—including that which Bart had forgotten…

At the city end of Bart’s road, almost half-way to Nuttall’s flat and within half a mile of Bart’s door, they saw a man atop a ladder attending to an apparently malfunctioning street lamp. The light flickered, flared, then died as they approached the lamp-post and the base of the ladder.

“These people,” Bart asserted with a little shudder, “are the grafters. Out here all hours of the night—just to make sure that we have…light.”

Without a breath of warning, simultaneous with Bart’s shivery uttering of the word “light”, the great bowl of the street lamp crashed down from above to shatter into a million glass fragments at their feet.

“My God!” Nuttall shouted up at the black silhouette clambering unsteadily down the ladder. “Take it easy, old chap. You bloody near dropped that thing right on our heads!”

The two men stopped in the dark street to steady the precarious-looking ladder and, as they did so, a splattering of liquid droplets fell from above, striking their hands and upturned faces. In the darkness they could not see those liquid droplets…but they could feel the clinging sliminess of them! Frozen in spontaneous horror, they stared at each other through the shrouding night as the figure on the ladder stepped down between them.

Bart’s pocket torch cut a jerky swath of light across Nuttall’s frozen features until it played upon the face of the man from the ladder. That face—stickily wet and hideously vacant, dripping nightmare slime as it was—
was nevertheless the face of Millwright
!

Millwright, the pawn of the Black One, fled from the mortuary—where Bugg-Shash had found his body in the dark—to accomplish that Being’s purpose, the purpose He must pursue before He could return to His own hellish dimension!

Only blind instinct, the instinct of self-preservation, had caused Bart to reach for his torch; but the sight revealed by its beam had completely unnerved him. His torch fell from uselessly twitching fingers, clattering on the pavement, and the dead man’s heel came down upon it with shattering force. Again the darkness closed in.

Then the slimy figure between the two men moved and they felt fingers like bands of iron enclosing their wrists. The zombie that was Millwright exerted fantastic strength to hold them—or rather, Bugg-Shash exerted His strength through the occultist’s corpse—as dead lips opened to utter the ghastly, soul-destroying strains of the
reversed
Third Sathlatta!

In the near-distant darkness faint, delighted chitterings commenced; and the weird trio thrashed about across the road, to and fro in a leaping, twisting, screaming tug-o’-war of death as, at last, the thing that Bart had forgotten came back to his collapsing, nightmare-blasted mind:

He wakes the very Dead to His Command, and encased in the horror of his Essence even the worm-ravaged Lich hastens to His bidding…

• • •

The hellish dance lasted, as did the screaming, until they felt the lips of Bugg-Shash and his monstrous kisses…

De Marigny`s Clock

In May to June 1979, when I was a recently promoted Sergeant and had been at the recruiting office for just a few months, I found the time to write “De Marigny’s Clock”, a story that August Derleth liked at first sight. It would fit right into
The Caller of The Black
, he said, which it did, two years later. It’s another one of those stories with quite a long printing history, but I won’t go into it here. Suffice it to say that it features Titus Crow and the world’s strangest timepiece, a sort of longcase clock that you might even call a “spacetimepiece”. The clock wasn’t my invention; it belonged to Lovecraft and E. Hoffman Price long before me, but Titus Crow and his ward, Henri Laurent De Marigny would later borrow it to take them on some of their weirdest adventures: even to frozen Borea, and beyond that to the home of the Elder Gods themselves—in far Elysia!

Any intrusions, other than those condoned or invited,upon the privacy of Titus Crow at his bungalow retreat, Blowne House, on the outskirts of London, were almost always automatically classified by that gentleman as open acts of warfare. In the first place for anyone to make it merely to the doors of Crow’s abode without an invitation—often even
with
one—was a sure sign of the appearance on the scene of a forceful and dogmatic character; qualities which were almost guaranteed to clash with Crow’s own odd nature. For Blowne House seemed to exude an atmosphere all its own; an exhalation of impending
something
which usually kept the place and its grounds free even from birds and mice; and it was quite unusual for Crow himself to invite visitors. He kept strange hours and busied himself with stranger matters and, frankly, was almost antisocial even in his most “engaging” moments. Over the years the reasons for this apparent inhospitality had grown, or so it seemed to Crow, increasingly clear-cut. For one thing, his library contained quite a large number of rare and highly costly books, many of them long out of print and some of them never officially in print, and London apparently abounded with unscrupulous “collectors” of such items. For another his studies, usually in occult matters and obscure archaeological, antiquarian or anthropological research, were such as required the most concentrated attention and personal involvement, completely precluding any disturbances from outside sources.

Not that the present infringement came while Crow was engaged with any of his many and varied activities—it did not; it came in the middle of the night, rousing him from deep and dreamless slumbers engendered by a long day of frustrated and unrewarding work on de Marigny’s clock. And Titus Crow was not amused.

“What the hell’s going on here? Who are you and what are you doing in my house?” He had sat bolt upright in bed almost as soon as the light went on. His forehead had come straight into contact with a wicked-looking automatic held in the fist of a most unbeautiful thug. The man was about five feet eight inches in height, thickset, steady on legs which were short in comparison with the rest of his frame. He had a small scar over his left eye and a mouth that slanted downward—cynically, Crow supposed—from left to right. Most unbeautiful.

“Just take it easy, guv’, and there`ll be no bother,” the thug said, his voice soft but ugly. Crow’s eyes flicked across the room to where a second hoodlum stood, just within the bedroom door, a nervous grin twisting his pallid features. “Find anything, Pasty?” the man with the pistol questioned, his eyes never leaving Crow’s face for a second.

“Nothing, Joe,” came the answer, “a few old books and a bit of silver, nothing worth our while—yet. He’ll tell us where it is, though, won’t you, chum?”

“Pasty!” Crow exclaimed. “Powers of observation, indeed! I was just thinking, before hearing your name, what a thin, pasty creature you look—Pasty.” Crow grinned, got out of bed and put on his flame-red dressing-gown. Joe looked him up and down appraisingly. Crow was tall and broad-shouldered and it was plain to see that in his younger days he had been a handsome man. Even now there was a certain tawniness about him, and his eyes were still very bright and more than intelligent. Overall his aspect conveyed an impression of hidden power, which Joe did not particularly care much for. He decided it would be best to show his authority at the earliest opportunity. And Crow obligingly supplied him with that opportunity in the next few seconds.

The jibe the occultist had aimed at Pasty had meanwhile found its way home. Pasty’s retaliation was a threat: “Lovely colour, that dressing-gown,” he said, “it’ll match up nicely if you bleed when I rap you on your head.” He laughed harshly, slapping a metal cosh into his open palm. “But before that, you will tell us where it is, won’t you?”

“Surely,” Crow answered immediately, “it’s third on the left, down the passage…
ugh
!”
Joe’s pistol smacked into Crow’s cheek, knocking him sprawling. He carefully got up, gingerly fingering the red welt on his face.

“Now that’s just to show you that we don’t want any more funnies, see?” Joe said.

“Yes, I see,” Crow’s voice trembled with suppressed rage. “Just what do you want?”

“Now is that so difficult to figure out?” Pasty asked, crossing the room. “Money…we want your money! A fine fellow like you, with a place like this—” the lean man glanced appraisingly about the room, noting the silk curtains, the boukhara rugs; the original erotic illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley in their rosewood frames—“ought to have a good bit of ready cash lying about…we want it!”

“Then I’m sorry to have to disappoint you,” Crow told him happily, seating himself on his bed, “I keep my money in a bank—what little I’ve got.”

“Up!” ordered Joe briefly. “Off the bed.” He pulled Crow to one side, nodding to Pasty, indicating some sort of action involving the bed. Crow stepped forward as Pasty yanked back the covers from the mattress and took out a sharp knife.

“Now wait—” he began, thoroughly alarmed.

“Hold it, guv’, or I might just let Pasty use his blade on you!” Joe waved his gun in Crow’s face, ordering him back. “You see, you’d be far better off to tell us where the money is without all this trouble. This way you’re just going to see your little nest wrecked around you.” He waited, giving Crow the opportunity to speak up, then indicated to Pasty that he should go ahead.

Pasty went ahead!

He ripped open the mattress along both sides and one end, tearing back the soft outer covering to expose the stuffing and springs beneath, then pulling out the interior in great handfuls, flinging them down on the floor in total disregard of Crow’s utter astonishment and concern.

“See, gov’, you’re a recluse—in our books, anyway—and retiring sorts like you hide their pennies in the funniest places. Like in mattresses…or behind wall-pictures!” Joe gave Pasty a nod, waving his pistol at the Beardsleys.

“Well for God’s sake, just
look
behind them,” Crow snarled, again starting forward. “There’s no need to rip them off the walls!”

“Here!” Pasty exclaimed, turning an enquiring eye on the outraged householder. “These pictures worth anything then?”

“Only to a collector—you’d never find a fence for stuff like that,” Crow replied.

“Hah! Not so stupid, our recluse!” Joe grinned. “But being clever won’t get you anywhere, guv’, except hospital maybe… Okay, Pasty, leave the man’s dirty pictures alone. You—” he turned to Crow “—your study; we’ve been in there, but only passing through. Let’s go, guv’; you can give us a hand to, er, shift things about.” He pushed Crow in the direction of the door.

Pasty was last to enter the study. He did so shivering, an odd look
crossing his face. Pasty did not know it but he was a singularly rare person, one of the world’s few truly “psychic” men. Crow was another—one who had the
talent
to a high degree—and he sensed Pasty’s sudden feeling of apprehension.

“Snug little room, isn’t it?” he asked, grinning cheerfully at the uneasy thug.

“Never mind how pretty the place is—try the panelling, Pasty,” Joe directed.

“Eh?” Pasty’s mind obviously was not on the job. “The panelling?” His eyes shifted nervously round the room.

“Yes, the panelling!” Joe studied his partner curiously. “What’s wrong with you, then?” His look of puzzlement turned to one of anger. “Now come on, Pasty boy, get a grip! At this rate we’ll be here all bleeding night!”

Now it happened that Titus Crow’s study was the pride of his life, and the thought of the utter havoc his unwelcome visitors could wreak in there was a terrifying thing to him. He determined to help them in their abortive search as much as he could; they would not find anything—there was nothing to find!—but this way he could at least ensure as little damage as possible before they realised there was no money in the house and left. They were certainly unwilling to believe anything he said about the absence of substantive funds! But then again, to anyone not knowing him reasonably well—and few did—Crow’s home and certain of its appointments might certainly point to a man of considerable means. Yet he was merely comfortable, not wealthy, and, as he had said, what money he did have was safe in a bank. The more he helped them get through with their search the quicker they would leave. He had just made up his mind to this effect when Pasty found the hidden recess by the fireside.