Free Haggopian and Other Stories by Brian Lumley Page B

strangely beautiful pearly spheres. They measured about four inches in diameter and though he had been unable to positively identify the material from which they were made, he was able to tell me that it appeared to be some unknown combination of calcium, chrysolite and diamond-dust. How the things had been made was, as he put it, “anybody’s guess.” The spheres, he told me, had been found at the site of dead G’harne—the first intimation he had offered that he had actually found the place—buried beneath the earth in a lidless, stone box which had borne upon its queerly angled sides certain utterly alien engravings. Sir Amery was anything but explicit with regard to those designs , merely stating that they were so loathsome in what they suggested that it would not do to describe them too closely. Finally, in answer to my probing questions, he told me they depicted monstrous sacrifices to some unnameable, cthonian deity. More he refused to say but directed me, as I seemed so “damnably eager,” to the works of Commodus and the hag-ridden Caracalla. He mentioned that also upon the box, along with the pictures, were many lines of sharply cut characters much similar to the cuneiform etchings of the G’harne Fragments and, in certain aspects, having a disturbing likeness to the almost unfathomable Pnakotic Manuscripts. Quite possibly, he went on, the container had been a toy-box of sorts and the spheres, in all probability, were once the baubles of a child of the ancient city; certainly children—or young ones—were mentioned in what he had managed to decipher of the odd writing on the box.
    It was during this stage of his narrative that I noticed Sir Amery’s eyes were beginning to glaze over and his speech was starting to falter—almost as though some strange, psychic block were affecting his memory. Without warning, like a man suddenly gone into a hypnotic trance, he began muttering of Shudde-M’ell and Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth and Yibb-Tstll— “alien Gods defying description” and of mythological places with equally fantastic names; Sarnath and Hyperborea, R’lyeh and Ephiroth and many more…
    Eager though I was to learn more of that tragic expedition I fear it was I who stopped Sir Amery from saying on. Try as I might, on hearing him babbling so, I could not keep a look of pity and concern from showing on my face which, when he saw it, caused him to hurriedly excuse himself and flee to the privacy of his room. Later, when I looked in at his door, he was engrossed with his seismograph and appeared to be relating the markings on its graph to an atlas of the world which he had taken from his library. I was concerned to note that he was quietly arguing with himself.
    Naturally, being what he was and having such a great interest in peculiar, anthropoligical problems, my uncle had always possessed—along with his historical and archaeological source books—a smattering of works concerning elder-lore and primitive and doubtful religions. I mean such works as the Golden Bough and Miss Murray’s Witch Cult. But what was I to make of those other books which I found in his library within a few days of my arrival? On his shelves were at least nine works which I know are so outrageous in what they suggest that they have been mentioned by widely differing authorities over a period of many years as being damnable, blasphemous, abhorrent, unspeakable and literary lunacy. These included the Cthaat Aquadingen by an unknown author, Feery’s Notes on the Necronomicon , the Liber Miraculorem, Eliphas Lévi’s History of Magic and a faded, leather-bound copy of the hideous Cultes des Goules. Perhaps the worst thing I saw was a slim volume by Commodus which that “Blood Maniac” had written in AD 183 and which was protected from further fragmentation by lamination.
    And moreover, as if these books were not puzzling enough, there was that other thing!! What of the indescribable, droning chant which I often heard issuing