Haggopian and Other Stories

Against all my protests—weakened by nausea, white and trembling with shock as he was—still Lord Marriot raced his car the remainder of the way to the house. There we dismounted and he entered through the door which hung mutely ajar. I would not go in with him but stood dumbly wringing my hands, numb with horror, before the leering entrance.

A minute or so later he came staggering to the door. In his hand he carried a leaf from Turnbull’s sketch pad. Before I could think to avert my eyes he thrust the almost completed sketch toward me, crying, “Look! Look!”

I caught a glimpse of something bulbous and black, hairy and red-eyed—a tarantula, a bat, a dragon—whose jointed legs were tipped with sharp, chitinous darts. A mere glimpse, without any real or lasting impression of detail, and yet—

“No!” I cried, throwing up my hands before my face, turning and rushing wildly back down the long drive. “No, you fool, don’t let me see it! I don’t want to know! I don’t want to know!”

Curse of the Golden Guardians

My “Primal Land” trilogy is set in a forgotten prehistoric Age of Man when Ma Nature hasn’t yet decided what talents men should or should not have: an age of wizards and weirdlings! The semi-barbarian Tarra Khash is an itinerant Hrossak, an adventurous steppesman whose wanderings carry him far and wide across the Primal Land. In that most ancient period our Earth was that much closer to Cthulhu’s era; the facts of His being were not nearly so esoteric; indeed certain of the darker mages of the era studied Him and His legends most assiduously, especially in their quest for immortality. They even built temples to Cthulhu and others of His cycle, some of which—like the tombs of the Pharaohs in far more recent times—were lost. In “Curse of the Golden Guardians”, Tarra Khash comes across just such a place, and then meets up with the ones who watch over it. The Primal Land tales were written in the early 1980s, this one in February 1984. W. Paul Ganley’s Weirdbook Press first published it, in Vol. 1 of The Compleat Khash (1991) along with five other stories.

Thin to the point of emaciation and burned almost black by a pitiless sun, Tarra Khash came out of the Nameless Desert into dawn-grey, forbidding foothills which, however inarticulate, nevertheless spoke jeeringly of a once exact sense of direction addled by privation and dune blindness. For those misted peaks beyond the foothills could only be the southern tip of the Mountains of Lohmi, which meant that the Hrossak had been travelling a little north of due east, and not as he had intended south-east toward his beloved and long-forsaken steppes.

Another might have cursed at sight of those distantly looming spires of rock in the pale morning light, but Tarra Khash was a true Hrossak for all his wanderlust and not much given to bemoaning his fate. Better to save his breath and use the time taking stock and planning afresh. Indeed, it could well prove providential that he had stumbled this way instead of that, for here at least there was water, and an abundance of it if his ears played him not false. Surely that was the thunder of a cataract he heard?—Aye, and just as surely his desiccated nostrils seemed to suck at air suddenly moist and sweet as the breath of his own mother, as opposed to the desert’s arid, acrid exhalations.

Water, yes!—and Tarra licked his parched lips.