Haggopian and Other Stories

After sitting thus occupied, recovering himself, and regaining a little of his composure, Matthew took to exploring his prison. The place had a perceptibly foreboding aura about it, and hanging in the air was a sickly-sweet smell so heavy it seemed almost a taste rather than an odour. All was silent except for a distant drip, drip, drip of water. Little light entered the hole from above, but Matthew was not too disheartened for the stone walls were covered with a grey, semiluminescent moss that gave off a dim light.

He had left Eeley-on-the-Moor before noon, and he calculated that by now it must be about seven in the evening. He knew that in another hour or so I would begin to worry about him—but what could he do about it? He was virtually a prisoner, and try as he might he could think of no practical way out. Upon examining his rope he saw that it was badly frayed in two places. He cursed himself for not having checked it before setting out, then hung it over a projecting rock and swung on it to test its capacity to take his weight. The rope broke twice before he was finally left with a serviceable length of no more than twenty feet or so.

He tied one end of this remaining piece of rope to a fairly large stone but upon tossing it upwards was dismayed to find that it only reached a point a good two or three feet short of the lip of the crevice. All he could do now, he decided, was sit it out and hope that some search party would find him. He realised that no such search party would exist until early morning at the soonest, and so knew that it was pointless to try calling for help.

It did not become noticeably darker, though he knew it must fast be approaching night, and he put this down to the fact that the moss on the walls was supplementing the natural light. He knew his fancy to be correct when, a short while later, he saw twinkling through the crack above him the first stars in the night sky.

Thoroughly tired now, he sat down in the driest place he could find and fell asleep; but his sleep was troubled by nightmare visions of weird events and strange creatures. He awoke several times, stifled by the unnatural and oppressive warmth of the place, to find the echoes of his own cries of terror still ringing in the hole’s foul atmosphere. Even when wide awake the next morning the dreams persisted in his memory. In them he had seemed to understand all of the horrible and strangely threatening occurrences.

In one of these dreams there had been a misty landscape of queer rock formations, unfamiliar trees, and giant ferns; plants which, to the best of Matthew’s knowledge, had not existed on Earth since the dawn of time. He had been one of a crowd of loathsome ape-like beings, ugly, with flat faces and sloping foreheads. They had approached a forbidden place, a hole in the earth from which nameless vapours poured out a ghastly stench.

They had captives, these ape men, creatures like themselves—yet monstrously different—who had defied The Laws. These prisoners had lately trespassed upon this holy ground unbidden by the priests, and they had also dared to spy upon the God-things conjured in horrible rituals by those same hierophants. Because of the horror of what they saw they had practised sedition, calling for the overthrow of the priests and the expulsion of those Gods from Outside. Fearing that this call might somewhere be heard, the God-things had paused momentarily in their horrific pleasures to order their priests to punish the offenders—whom they would make recognisable through growing physiological differences!

And indeed those captives were different… They were slimy to the touch and seemed to exude a dreadful moisture which stank evilly. They stumbled rather than walked, apparently afflicted with some nervous disorder which caused their steps to be short and jerky.

But when in his dream Matthew had looked closer at those prisoners of the ape men, then he had seen that he was wrong. They suffered from no nervous disorder—the trouble was all physical. Their legs appeared to be joined from knee to groin by some ghastly fungoid growth, and their arms were similarly fastened to their sides. Their eyes were almost completely scaled over, and their mouths were gone, closed forever by strips of the horrid, scaly substance which was apparently growing over their whole bodies. Matthew knew somehow that this terrible leper-growth was the first phase of their punishment for what they had dared to do—and that the balance was still to be paid.

The entire unholy procession had been led by three creatures different again from the rest. Their foreheads were not so sloped, giving them a position somewhat higher on the evolutionary scale, and they were taller by a head than the others. These were the priests, and they wore the only clothing of the entire assembly: coarse, dark cloaks thrown about their shoulders.