Free Haggopian and Other Stories by Brian Lumley

almost aristocratic features— for now I could see that they were those of a certain Athenian model lately of note! Haggopian’s third wife, wed to him on her eighteenth birthday! And then, as my whirling thoughts flashed back yet again to that second wife, “buried at sea”, I knew finally, cataclysmically, what the Armenian had meant when he said: “There is one who awaits even now, and one other yet to come!”

Cement Surroundings

    Two months before writing “The Caller of The Black”, in June 1967 I had finished “Cement Surroundings”, which August Derleth had immediately accepted for Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos , an anthology he was then preparing for publication. I took my payment (seventy-five dollars—wow!—for which I was most grateful) in Arkham House books. This was a wise move; those books would be worth a fortune now, if I still owned them! But while I might shed a tear now and then I can’t complain, because they’ve saved my skin (financially speaking) on several occasions. Anyway, in due time “Cement Surroundings” did indeed appear in TOTCM along with one other Lumley tale, plus stories by a good many literary heroes of mine and various contemporaries. “Cement Surroundings” didn’t rest there, however, for I then used it as a chapter in my first Mythos novel— The Burrowers Beneath .
    I
    It will never fail to amaze me how certain allegedly Christian people take a perverse delight in the misfortunes of others. Just how true this is was brought forcibly home to me by the totally unnecessary whispers and rumours which were put about following the disastrous decline of my closest living relative.
    There were those who concluded that just as the moon is responsible for the tides, and in part the slow movement of the Earth’s upper crust, so was it also responsible for Sir Amery Wendy-Smith’s behaviour on his return from Africa. As proof they pointed out my uncle’s sudden fascination for seismography—the study of earthquakes—a subject which so took his fancy that he built his own instrument, a model which does not incorporate the conventional concrete base, to such an exactitude that it measures even the most minute of the deep tremors which are constantly shaking this world. It is that same instrument which sits before me now, rescued from the ruins of the cottage, at which I am given to casting, with increasing frequency, sharp and fearful glances. Before his disappearance my uncle spent hours, seemingly without purpose, studying the fractional movements of the stylus over the graph.
    For my own part I found it more than odd the way in which, while Sir Amery was staying in London after his return, he shunned the underground and would pay abortive taxi fares rather than go down into what he termed “those black tunnels”. Odd, certainly—but I never considered it a sign of insanity.
    Yet even his few really close friends seemed convinced of his madness, blaming it upon his living too close to those dead and nigh-forgotten civilizations which so fascinated him. But how could it have been otherwise? My uncle was both antiquarian and archaeologist. His strange wanderings to foreign lands were not the result of any longing for personal gain or acclaim. Rather were they undertaken out of a love of the life, for any fame which resulted—as frequently occurred—was more often than not shrugged off onto the ever-willing personages of his colleagues. They envied him, those so-called contemporaries of his, and would have emulated his successes had they possessed the foresight and inquisitiveness with which he was so singularly gifted—or, as I have now come to believe, with which he was cursed. My bitterness towards them is directed by the way in which they cut him after the dreadful culmination of that last, fatal expedition. In earlier years many of them had been “made” by his discoveries but on that last trip those “hangers-on” had been the uninvited, the ones out of favour,