Haggopian and Other Stories

With this one we’re back to my first year as a writer, 1967, and one of the first half-dozen stories I sent to August Derleth at Arkham House. You know something, I’m still astonished that Derleth even gave me a shot. Not that my stories themselves were bad, but the way I presented them most definitely was. Try to picture it: sitting at his desk, Derleth opens the cardboard tube that I sent—surface mail, to save on postage—from Berlin. Inside he finds a story, or rather a scroll, that he has to nail to his desk top in order to read the damn thing! And it’s typed single-space, sometimes on both sides of the military, scribble-pad sized sheets! It’s a wonder he didn’t go out of his mind! But no, he was gathering stories for Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, and this one was the right size and shape. “The Sister City” made it into TOTCM, since when it has seen many a reprint, not least as a chapter in my novel Beneath the Moors.

This manuscript attached as

“Annex ‘A’” to report number

M-Y-127/52, dated 7th August 1952.

Towards the end of the war, when our London home was bombed and both my parents were killed, I was hospitalised through my own injuries and forced to spend the better part of two years on my back. It was during this period of my youth—I was only seventeen when I left the hospital—that I formed, in the main, the enthusiasm which in later years developed into a craving for travel, adventure and knowledge of Earth’s elder antiquities. I had always had a wanderer’s nature but was so restricted during those two dreary years that when my chance for adventure eventually came I made up for wasted time by letting that nature hold full sway.

Not that those long, painful months were totally devoid of pleasures. Between operations, when my health would allow it, I read avidly in the hospital’s library, primarily to forget my bereavement, eventually to be carried along to those worlds of elder wonder created by Walter Scott in his enchanting Arabian Nights.

Apart from delighting me tremendously, the book helped to take my mind off the things I had heard said about me in the wards. It had been put about that I was different; allegedly the doctors had found something strange in my physical make-up. There were whispers about the peculiar qualities of my skin and the slightly extending horny cartilage at the base of my spine. There was talk about the fact that my fingers and toes were ever so slightly webbed and being, as I was, so totally devoid of hair, I became the recipient of many queer glances.

These things plus my name, Robert Krug, did nothing to increase my popularity at the hospital. In fact, at a time when Hitler was still occasionally devastating London with his bombs, a surname like Krug, with its implications of Germanic ancestry, was probably more a hindrance to friendship than all my other peculiarities put together.

With the end of the war I found myself rich; the only heir to my father’s wealth, and still not out of my teens. I had left Scott’s Jinns, Ghouls and Efreets far behind me but was returned to the same type of thrill I had known with the Arabian Nights by the popular publication of Lloyd’s Excavations on Sumerian Sites. In the main it was that book which was responsible for the subsequent awe in which I ever held those magical words “Lost Cities”.

In the months that followed, indeed through all my remaining—formative—years, Lloyd’s work remained a landmark, followed as it was by many more volumes in a like vein. I read avidly of Layard’s Nineveh and Babylon and Early Adventures in Persia, Susiana and Babylonia. I dwelled long over such works as Budge’s Rise and Progress of Assyriology and Burckhardt’s Travels in Syria and the Holy Land.