Haggopian and Other Stories

Slowly all was revealed. We were not indigenous to England, my parents and I, and they had brought me here as an infant from our homeland, a land quite near yet paradoxically far away. The letter went on to explain how all the children of our race are brought here as infants, for the atmosphere of our home-land is not conducive to health in the young and unformed. The difference in my case had been that my mother was unable to part with me. That was the awful thing! Though all the children of our race must wax and grow up away from their homeland, the elders can only rarely depart from their native clime. This fact is determined by their physical appearance throughout the greater period of their life-spans. For they are not, for the better part of their lives, either the physical or mental counterparts of ordinary men.

This means that children have to be left on doorsteps, at the entrances of orphanages, in churches and in other places where they will be found and cared for; for in extreme youth there is little difference between my race and the race of men. As I read I was reminded of those tales of fantasy I had once loved; of ghouls and fairies and other creatures who left their young to be reared by human beings and who stole human children to be brought up in their own likenesses.

Was that, then, my destiny? Was I to be a ghoul? I read on. I learned that the people of my race can only leave our native country twice in their lives; once in youth—when, as I have explained, they are brought here of necessity to be left until they attain the approximate age of twenty-one years—and once in later life, when changes in their appearances make them compatible to outside conditions. My parents had just reached this latter stage of their—development—when I was born. Because of my mother’s devotion they had forsaken their duties in our own land and had brought me personally to England where, ignoring The Laws, they stayed with me. My father had brought certain treasures with him to ensure an easy life for himself and my mother until that time should come when they would be forced to leave me, the Time of the Second Change, when to stay would be to alert mankind of our existence.

That time had eventually arrived and they had covered up their departure back to our own, secret land by blowing up our London home; letting the authorities and I, (though it must have broken my mother’s heart), believe them dead of a German bomb raid.

And how could they have done otherwise? They dared not take the chance of telling me what I really was; for who can say what effect such a disclosure would have had on me, I who had barely begun to show my differences? They had to hope I would discover the secret myself, or at least the greater part of it, which I had done! But to be doubly sure my father left his letter.

The letter also told how not many foundlings find their way back to their own land. Accidents claim some and others go mad. At this point I was reminded of something I had read somewhere of two inmates of Oakdeene Sanatorium near Glasgow who are so horribly mad and so unnatural in aspect that they are not even allowed to be seen and even their nurses cannot abide to stay near them for long. Yet others become hermits in wild and inaccessible places and, worst of all, still others suffer more hideous fates and I shuddered as I read what those fates were. But there were those few who did manage to get back. These were the lucky ones, those who returned to claim their rights; and while some of them were guided back—by adults of the race during second visits—others made it by instinct or luck. Yet horrible though this overall plan of existence seemed to be, the letter explained its logic. For my homeland could not support many of my kind and those perils of lunacy, brought on by inexplicable physical changes, and accidents and those other fates I have mentioned acted as a system of selection whereby only the fittest in mind and body returned to the land of their birth.