Haggopian and Other Stories Read Free Page B

to an unbearable pitch and the tottering, clawing shadow grew yet larger. Then, abruptly, the screams gurgled into silence, the shadow’s diseased scrabbling at itself became a convulsive heaving and the bloated arms lifted jerkily, as if in supplication. Larger still the monstrous silhouette grew as its owner stumbled, seemingly unseeing, towards the window. And then, briefly as it fell against the thinly latticed panes, I saw it. A great, black imitation of a human, it crashed through the window, shattering the very frame outwards in a tinkling of broken glass and a snapping of fractured lats. Tumbling into the night it came, to fall with a sickening, bone-breaking crunch at my feet.
    The broken thing which lay before me on the gravel of the drive was the quite ordinary, quite lifeless body of Cabot Chambers!
    When I was able to bring my shrieking nerves under a semblance of control, I dared to prise open the tightly clenched right hand of the corpse and found that which I had guessed would be there. Those stiffening fingers held crushed, brittle shards which I knew had once had the outlines of a card of some sort. On some of the larger pieces I could make out characters which, so far as I know, can only be likened to certain cuneiform inscriptions on the Broken Columns of Geph.
    I ’phoned the police anonymously and quickly left the place, for the smell of weird, unnatural death now hung heavily over the entire house. Poor Chambers, I thought as I drove away—seeing that second Mercedes he must have thought his other visitor was I. I tried not to think about the shadow or what it meant.
    I did not sleep too well that night. The first thing I did when I awoke the next morning was to discreetly check up on the activities of a certain Mr. James D. Gedney. I have many friends in positions which, to say the least, make them extremely useful to me when a bit of detective work is necessary. These friends helped me now and through their exertions my task was made considerably easier. I checked Gedney’s telephone number, which was not in the book, and made notes of his personal likes and dislikes. I memorized the names of his friends and the clubs and places he frequented and generally built up my picture of the man. What I discovered only confirmed Chambers’ opinion. Gedney’s contacts were the worst sort of people and his favourite haunts were, in the main, very doubtful establishments. He had no visible means of support yet appeared to be most affluent—owning, among his many effects, a large country house and, most interesting yet, a brand-new Mercedes. All the other things I discovered about Gedney paled beside that one fact.
    My next logical step, having completed my “file” on Gedney, was to find out as much as I could about that mystical identity “The Black,” and towards this end I spent almost a week in the pursuit of certain singular volumes in dim and equally singular archives at the British Museum and in the perusal of my own unusual books. At the museum, with the permission of the Curator of the Special Books Department, another friend, I was allowed to study at my leisure all but the most secret and hideous of volumes. I was out of luck. The only reference I found—a thing which, in the light of what I later learned, I find of special significance—was, as was that other reference I have mentioned, in one of my own books. Justin Geoffrey supplied this second fragment in his raving People of the Monolith ; but apart from these four inexplicable lines of poetry I found nothing more:
     
On monoliths did ancients carve their warning
To those who use night’s forces lest they bring
A doom upon themselves that when, in mourning,
They be the mourned…
     
    Then I remembered an American friend of mine; a man wonderfully erudite in his knowledge of folklore and things of dread and darkness. He had studied in bygone years under that acknowledged genius of Earth’s elderlore, Wilmarth of Miskatonic