Haggopian and Other Stories

But there; I have just finished reading the letter through a second time—and already I begin to feel a stiffening of my limbs… My father’s manuscript has arrived barely in time. I have long been worried by my growing differences. The webbing on my hands now extends almost to the small, first knuckles and my skin is fantastically thick, rough and ichthyic. The short tail which protrudes from the base of my spine is now not so much an oddity as an addition; an extra limb which, in the light of what I now know, is not an oddity at all but the most natural thing in my world! My hairlessness, with the discovery of my destiny, has also ceased to be an embarrassment to me. I am different from men, true, but is that not as it should be? For I am not a man…

Ah, the lucky fates which caused me to pick up that newspaper in Cairo! Had I not seen that picture or read that article I might not have returned so soon to my moors and I shudder to think what might have become of me then. What would I have done after The First Change had altered me? Would I have hurried, disguised and wrapped in smothering clothes, to some distant land—there to live the life of a hermit? Perhaps I would have returned to Ib or the Nameless City, to dwell in ruins and solitude until my appearance was again capable of sustaining my existence among men. And what after that—after The Second Change?

Perhaps I would have gone mad at such inexplicable alterations in my person. Who knows but there might have been another inmate at Oakdeene? On the other hand my fate might have been worse than all these; for I may have been drawn to dwell in the depths, to be one with the Deep Ones in the worship of Dagon and Great Cthulhu, as have others before me.

But no! By good fortune, by the learning gained on my far journeys and by the help given me by my father’s document I have been spared all those terrors which others of my kind have known. I will return to Ib’s Sister City, to Lh-yib, in that land of my birth beneath these Yorkshire moors; that land from which was washed the green figurine which guided me back to these shores, that figurine which is the duplicate of the one I raised from beneath the pool at Sarnath. I will return to be worshipped by those whose ancestral brothers died at Ib on the spears of the men of Sarnath; those who are so aptly described on the Brick Cylinders of Kadatheron; these who chant voicelessly in the abyss. I will return to Lh-yib!

For even now I hear my mother’s voice; calling me as she did when I was a child and used to wander these very moors. “Bob! Little Bo! Where are you?”

Bo, she used to call me and would only laugh when I asked her why. But why not? Was Bo not a fitting name? Robert—Bob—Bo? What odds? Blind fool that I have been! I never really pondered the fact that my parents were never quite like other people; not even towards the end…Were not my ancestors worshipped in grey stone Ib before the coming of men, in the earliest days of Earth’s evolution? I should have guessed my identity when first I brought that figurine up out of the slime; for the features of the thing were as my own features will be after The First Change, and engraved upon its base in the ancient letters of Ib—letters I could read because they were part of my native language, the precursor of all languages—was my own name!

Bokrug:

Water-Lizard God of the people of Ib and Lh-yib, the Sister City!

Note:

Sir,

Attached to this manuscript, “Annex ‘A’” to my report, was a brief note of explanation addressed to the NECB in Newcastle and reproduced as follows:

Robert Krug,

Marske,

Yorks.,

Evening—19 July ’52

Secretary and Members,

NECB, Newcastle-on-Tyne.

Gentlemen of the North-East Coal-Board: