A Coven of Vampires

HAGGOPIAN

1
Richard Haggopian, perhaps the world's greatest authority on ichthyology and oceanography, to say nothing of the many allied sciences and subjects, was at last willing to permit himself to be interviewed. I was jubilant, elated - I could not believe my luck! At least a dozen journalists before me, some of them so high up in literary circles as to be actually offended by so mundane an occupational description, had made the futile journey to Kletnos in the Aegean to seek Haggopian the Armenian out; but only my application had been accepted. Three months earlier, in early June, Hartog of Time had been refused, and before him Mannhausen of Weltzukunft, and therefore my own superiors had seen little hope for me. And yet the name of Jeremy Belton was not unknown in journalism; I had been lucky on a number of so-called 'hopeless' cases before. Now, it seemed, this luck of mine was holding. Richard Haggopian was away on yet another ocean trip, but I had been asked to wait for him.
It is not hard to say why Haggopian excited such interest among the ranks of the world's foremost journalists; any man with his scientific and literary talents, with a beautiful young wife, with an island-in-the-sun, and (perhaps most important of all), with a blatantly negative attitude toward even the most beneficial publicity, would certainly have attracted the same interest. And to top all this Haggopian was a millionaire!
Myself, I had recently finished a job in the desert - the latest Arab-Israeli confrontation - to find myself with time and a little money to spare, and so my superiors had asked me to have a bash at Haggopian. That had been a fortnight ago, and since then I had done my best towards procuring an interview. Where others had failed miserably I had been successful.
For eight days I had waited on the Armenian's return to Haggopiana - his tiny island hideaway two miles east of Kletnos and midway between Athens and Iraklion, purchased by and named after himself in the early forties - and just when it seemed that my strictly limited funds must surely run out, then Haggopian's great silver hydrofoil, the Echinoidea, cut a thin scar on the incredible blue of the sea to the south-west as it sped in to a mid-morning mooring. With binoculars from the fiat white roof of my Kletnos -hotel? - I watched the hydrofoil circle the island until, in a blinding flash of reflected sunlight, it disappeared beyond Haggopiana's wedge of white rock. Two hours later the Armenian's man came across in a sleek motorboat to bring me (I hoped) news of my appointment. My luck was indeed holding! I was to attend Haggopian at three in the afternoon; a boat would be sent for me.
At three I was ready, dressed in sandals, cool grey slacks and a white T-shirt - the recommended civilized attire for a sunny afternoon in the Aegean - and when the sleek motorboat came back for me I was waiting for it at the natural rock wharf. On the way out to Haggopiana, as I gazed over the prow of the craft down through the crystal-clear water at the gliding, shadowy groupers and the clusters of black sea-urchins (the Armenian had named his hydrofoil after the latter), I did a mental check-up on what I knew of the elusive owner of the island ahead: Richard Hemeral Angelos Haggopian, born in 1919 of an illicit union   between his penniless but beautiful half-breed
Polynesian mother and millionaire Armenian-Cypriot father - author of three of the most fascinating books. I had ever read, books for the layman, telling of the world's seas and all their multiform denizens in simple, uncomplicated language - discoverer of the Taumotu Trench, a previously unsuspected hole in the bed of the South Pacific almost seven thousand fathoms deep; into which, with the celebrated Hans Geisler, he descended in 1955 to a depth of twenty-four thousand feet - benefactor of the world's greatest aquariums and museums in that he had presented at least two hundred and forty rare, often freshly discovered specimens to such authorities in the last fifteen years, etc., etc.
Haggopian the much married - three times, in fact, and all since the age of thirty - apparently an unfortunate man where brides were concerned. His first wife (British) died at sea after nine years' wedded life, mysteriously disappearing overboard from her husband's yacht in calm seas on the shark-ridden Barrier Reef in 1958; number two (Greek-Cypriot) died in 1964 of some exotic wasting disease and was buried at sea; and number three - one Cleanthis Leonides, an Athenian model of note, wed on her eighteenth birthday - had apparently turned recluse in that she had not been seen publicly since her union   with Haggopian two years previously.
Cleanthis Haggopian-yes! Expecting to meet her, should I ever be lucky enough to get to see her husband, I had checked through dozens of old fashion magazines for photographs of her. That had been a few days ago in Athens, and now I recalled her face as I had seen it in those pictures - young, naturally, and beautiful in the Classic Greek tradition. She had been a 'honey'; would, of course, still be; and again, despite rumours that she was no longer living with her husband, I found myself anticipating our meeting.
In no time at all the flat white rocky ramparts of the island loomed to some thirty feet out of the sea, and my navigator swung his fast craft over to the left, passing between two jagged points of salt-incrusted rock standing twenty yards or so out from Haggopiana's most northern point. As we rounded the point I saw that the east face of the island looked far less inhospitable; there was a white sand beach, with a pier at which the Echinoidea was moored, and, set back from the beach in a cluster of pomegranate, almond, locust and olive trees, an immensely vast and sprawling flat-roofed bungalow.
So this was Haggopiana! Hardly, I thought, the 'island paradise' of Weber's article in Neu Weltl It looked as though Weber's story, seven years old now, had been written no closer to Haggopiana than Kletnos; I had always been dubious about the German's exotic superlatives.
At the dry end of the pier my quarry waited. I saw him as, with the slightest of bumps, the motorboat pulled in to mooring. He wore grey flannels and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled down. His thin nose supported heavy, opaquely-lensed sunglasses. This was Haggopian - tall, bald, extremely intelligent and very, very rich - his hand already outstretched in greeting.
Haggopian was a shock. I had seen photographs of him of course, quite a few, and had often wondered at the odd sheen such pictures had seemed to give his features. In fact the only decent pictures I had seen of him had been pre-1958 and I had taken later shots as being simply the result of poor photography; his rare appearances in public had always been very short ones and unannounced, so that by the time cameras were clicking he was usually making an exit. Now, however, I could see that I had short-changed the photographers. He did have a sheen to his skin - a peculiar phosphorescence almost - that highlighted his features and even partially reflected something of the glare of the sun. There must, too, be something wrong with the man's eyes. Tears glistened on his cheeks, rolling thinly down from behind the dark lenses. He carried in his left hand a square of silk with which, every now and then, he would dab at this tell-tale dampness; all this I saw as I approached him along the pier, and right from the start I found him strangely -yes, repulsive.
'How do you do, Mr. Belton?' his voice was a thick, heavily accented rasp that jarred with his polite inquiry and manner of expression. 'I am sorry you have had to wait so long. I got your message in Famagusta, right at the start of my trip, but I am afraid I could not put my work off.'
'Not at all, sir, I'm sure that this meeting will more than amply repay my patience.'
His handshake was no less a shock, though I tried my best to keep him from seeing it, and after he turned to lead me up to the house I unobtrusively wiped my hand on the side of my T-shirt. It was not that Haggopian's hand had been damp with sweat, which might be expected - rather, or so it seemed to me, I felt as though I had taken hold of a handful of garden snails!
I had noticed from the boat a complex of pipes and valves between the sea and the house, and now, approaching that sprawling yellow building in Haggopian's wake (his stride was clumsy, lolling), I could hear the muffled throb of pumps and the gush of water. Once inside the huge, refreshingly cool bungalow, it became apparent just what the sounds meant. I might have known that this man, so in love with the sea, would surround himself with his life's work. The place was nothing less than a gigantic aquarium!
Massive glass tanks, in some cases room length and ceiling high, made up the walls, so that the sunlight filtering through from exterior, porthole-like windows entered the room in greenish shades that dappled the marble floor and gave the place an eerie, submarine aspect.
There were no printed cards or boards to describe the finny dwellers in the huge tanks, and as he led me from room to room it became clear why such labels were unnecessary. Haggopian knew each specimen intimately, his rasplike voice making a running commentary as we visited in turn the bungalow's many wings:
'An unusual coelenterate, this one, from three thousand feet. Difficult to keep alive - pressure and all that. I call it Physalia haggopia - quite deadly. If one of those tentacles should even brush you . . . phtttMakes a water-baby of the Portuguese Man-o'-War' (this of a great purplish mass with trailing, wispy-green tentacles, undulating horribly through the water of a tank of huge proportions). Haggopian, as he spoke, deftly plucked a small fish from an open tank on a nearby table, throwing it up over the lip of the greater tank to his 'unusual coelenterate'. The fish hit the water with a splash, swam down and straight into one of the green wisps - and instantly stiffened! In a matter of seconds the hideous jelly-fish had settled on its prey to commence a languid ingestion.
'Given time,' Haggopian gratingly commented, 'it would do the same to you!'
In the largest room of all - more a hall than a room proper - I paused, literally astonished at the size of the tanks and the expertise which had obviously gone into their construction. Here, where sharks swam through brain and other coral formations, the glass of these miniature oceans must have been tremendously thick, and backdrops had been arranged to give the impression of vast distances and sprawling submarine vistas.
In one of these tanks hammerheads of over two metres in length were cruising slowly from side to side, ugly as hell and looking twice as dangerous. Metal steps led up to this tank's rim, down the other side and into the water itself. Haggopian must have seen the puzzled expression on my face for he said: 'This is where I used to feed my lampreys -they had to be handled carefully. I have none now; I returned the last of my specimens to the sea three years ago.'
Three years ago? I peered closer into the tank as one of the hammerheads slid his belly along the glass. There on the white and silver underside of the fish, between the gill-slits and down the belly, numerous patches of raw red showed, many of them forming clearly defined circles where the close-packed scales had been removed and the suckerlike mouths of the lampreys had been at work.
No, Haggopian's 'three years' had no doubt been a slip of the tongue - three days, more like it!
Many of the wounds were clearly of recent origin, and before the Armenian ushered me on I was able to see that at least another two of the hammer-heads were similarly marked.
I stopped pondering my host's mistake when we passed into yet another room whose specimens must surely have caused any conchologist to cry out in delight. Again tanks lined the walls, smaller than many of the others I had so far seen, but marvellously laid out to duplicate perfectly the natural environs of their inhabitants. These inhabitants were the living gems of almost every ocean on earth; great conches and clams from the South Pacific; the small, beautiful Haliotis excavata and Murex monodon from the Great Barrier Reef; the amphora-like Delphinula formosa from China, and weird uni- and bi-valves of every shape and size in their hundreds. Even the windows were of shell -great, translucent, pinkly-glowing fan-shells, porcelain thin yet immensely strong, from very deep waters - suffusing the room in blood tints as weird as the submarine dappling of the previous rooms. The aisles, too, were crammed with trays and show-cases full of dry shells, none of them indexed in any way, and again Haggopian showed off his expertise by casually naming any specimens I paused to study and by briefly describing their habits and the foreign deeps in which they were indigenous.
My tour was interrupted here when Costas, the Greek who had brought me from Kletnos, entered this fascinating room of shells to murmur something of obvious importance to his employer. Haggopian nodded his head in agreement and Costas left, returning a few moments later with half-a-dozen other Greeks who each, in their turn, had a few words with Haggopian before departing. Eventually we were alone again.
'They were my men,' he told me, 'some of them for almost twenty years, but now I have no further need for them. I have paid them their last wages, they have said their farewells, and now they are going away. Costas will take them to Kletnos and return later for you. By then I should have finished my story.'
'I don't quite follow you, Mr. Haggopian. You mean you're going into seclusion here? What you said just then sounded ominously final.'
'Seclusion? Here? No, Mr. Belton - but final, yes! I have learned as much of the sea as I can from here, and in any case only one phase in my education remains. For that phase I need no ... tuition*. You will see.'
He saw the puzzled look on my face and smiled a wry smile. 'You find difficulty in understanding me, and that is hardly surprising. Few men, if any, have known my circumstances before, of that I am reasonably certain; and that is why I have chosen to speak now. You are fortunate in that you caught me at the right time; I would never have taken it upon myself to tell my story had I not been so persistently pursued - there are horrors best unknown - but perhaps the telling will serve as a warning. It gives me pause, the number of students devoted to the lore of the sea that would emulate my works and discoveries. But in any case, what you no doubt believed would be a simple interview will in fact be my swan-song. Tomorrow, when the island is deserted, Costas will return and set all the living specimens loose. There are means here by which even the largest fishes might be returned to the sea. Then Haggopiana will be truly empty.'
'But why? To what end - and where do you intend to go?' I asked. 'Surely this island is your base, your home and stronghold? It was here that you wrote your wonderful books, and-'
'My base and stronghold, as you put it, yes!' he harshly cut me off. 'The island has been these things to me, Mr Belton, but my home? No more! That - is my home!' He shot a slightly trembling hand abruptly out in the general direction of the Cretean Sea and the Mediterranean beyond. 'When your interview is over, I shall walk to the top of the rocks and look once more at Kletnos, the closest landmass of any reasonable size. Then I will take my Echinoidea and guide her out through the Kasos Straits on a direct and deliberate course until her fuel runs out. There can be no turning back. There is a place unsuspected in the Mediterranean - where the sea is so deep and cool, and where-'
He broke off and turned his strangely shining face to me: 'But there - at this rate the tale will never be told. Suffice to say that the last trip of the Echinoidea will be to the bottom - and that I shall be with her!'
'Suicide?' I gasped, barely able to keep up with Haggo-pian's rapid revelations. 'You intend to - drown yourself?'
At that Haggopian laughed, a rasping cough of a laugh that somehow reminded me of a seal's bark.
'Drown myself? Can you drown these?' he opened his arms to encompass a miniature ocean of strange conches; 'or these?' he waved through a door at a crystal tank of exotic fish.
For a few moments I stared at him in dumb amazement and concern, uncertain as to whether I stood in the presence of a sane man or-?
He gazed at me intently through the dark lenses of his glasses, and under the scrutiny of those unseen eyes I slowly shook my head, backing off a step.
Tm sorry, Mr Haggopian - I just . . .'
'Unpardonable,' he rasped as I struggled for words, 'my behaviour is unpardonable! Come, Mr Belton, perhaps we can be comfortable out here.' He led me through a doorway and out on to a patio surrounded by lemon and pomegranate trees. A white garden table and two cane chairs stood in the shade. Haggopian clapped his hands together once, sharply, then offered me a chair before clumsily seating himself opposite. Once again I noticed how all the man's movements seemed oddly awkward.
An old woman, wrapped around Indian-fashion in white silk and with the lower half of her face veiled in a shawl that fell back over her shoulders, answered the Armenian's summons. He spoke a few guttural yet remarkably gentle words to her in Greek. She went, stumbling a little with her years, to return a short while later with a tray, two glasses, and (amazingly) an English beer with the chill still on the bottle.
I saw that Haggopian's glass was already filled, but with no drink I could readily recognize. The liquid was greenly cloudy - sediment literally swam in his glass - and yet the Armenian did not seem to notice. He touched glasses with me before lifting the stuff to his lips and drinking deeply. I too, took a deep draught, for I was very dry; but, when I had placed my glass back on the table, I saw that Haggopian was still drinking! He completely drained off the murky, unknown liquid, put down the glass and again clapped his hands in summons.
At this point I found myself wondering why the man did not remove his sunglasses. After all, we were in the shade, had been even more so during my tour of his wonderful aquarium. Glancing at the Armenian's face I was reminded of his eye trouble as I again saw those thin trickles of liquid flowing down from behind the enigmatic lenses. And with the re-appearance of this symptom of Haggopian's optical affliction, the peculiar shiny film on his face also returned. For some time that - diffusion? - had seemed to be clearing; I had thought it was simply that I was becoming used to his looks. Now I saw that I had been wrong, his appearance was as odd as ever. Against my will I found myself thinking back on the man's repulsive handshake . . .
'These interruptions may be frequent,' his rasp cut into my thoughts. 'I am afraid that in my present phase I require a very generous intake of liquids!'
I was about to ask just what 'phase' he referred to when the old woman came back with a further glass of murky fluid for her master. He spoke a few more words to her before she once more left us. I could not help but notice, though, as she bent over the table, how very dehydrated the woman's face looked; with pinched nostrils, deeply wrinkled skin, and dull eyes sunk deep beneath the bony ridges of her eyebrows. An island peasant-woman, obviously - and yet, in other circumstances, the fine bone-structure of that face might almost have seemed aristocratic. She seemed, too, to find a peculiar magnetism in Haggopian; leaning forward towards him noticeably, visibly fighting to control an apparent desire to touch him whenever she came near him.
'She will leave with you when you go. Costas will take care of her.'
'Was I staring?' I guiltily started, freshly aware of an odd feeling of unreality and discontinuity. 'I'm sorry, I didn't intend to be rude!'
'No matter - what I have to tell you makes a nonsense of all matters of sensibility. You strike me as a man not easily . . . frightened, Mr Belton?'
'I can be surprised, Mr Haggopian, and shocked - but frightened? Well, among other things I have been a war correspondent for some time, and-'
'Of course, I understand - but there are worse things than the man-made horrors of war!'
'That may be, but I'm a journalist. It's my job. I'll take a chance on being - frightened.'
'Good! And please put aside any doubts you may by now have conceived regarding my sanity, or any you may yet conceive during the telling of my story. The proofs, at the end, will be ample.'
I started to protest but he quickly cut me off: 'No, no, Mr Belton! You would have to be totally insensible not to have perceived the - strangeness here.'
He fell silent as for the third time the old woman appeared, placing a pitcher before him on the table. This time she almost fawned on him and he jerked away from her, nearly upsetting his chair.
He rasped a few harsh words in Greek and I heard the strange, shrivelled creature sob as she turned to stumble away.
'What on earth is wrong with the woman?'
'In good time, Mr Belton,' he held up his hand, 'all in good time.' Again he drained his glass, refilling it from the pitcher before commencing his tale proper; a tale through which I sat for the most part silent, later hypnotized, and eventually horrified to the end.
2
'My first ten years of life were spent in the Cook Islands, and the next five in Cyprus,'
Haggopian began, 'always within shouting distance of the sea. My father died when I was sixteen, and though he had never acknowledged me in his lifetime he willed to me the equivalent of two-and-one-half millions of pounds sterling! When I was twenty-one I came into this money and found that I could now devote myself utterly to the ocean - my one real love in life. By that I mean all oceans. I love the warm Mediterranean and the South Pacific, but no less the chill Arctic Ocean and the teeming North Sea. Even now I love them - even now!
'At the end of the war I bought Haggopiana and began to build my collection here. I wrote about my work and was twenty-nine years old when I finished The Cradle Sea. Of course it was a labour of love. I paid for the publication of the first edition myself, and though money did not really matter, subsequent reprints repaid me more than adequately. It was my success with that book - I used to enjoy success - and with The Sea: A New Frontier, which prompted me to commence work upon Denizens of the Deep. I had been married to my first wife for five years by the time I had the first rough manuscript of my work ready, and I could have had the book published there and then but for the fact that I had become something of a perfectionist both in my writing and my studies.
In short there were passages in the manuscript, whole chapters on certain species, with which I was not satisfied.
'One of these chapters was devoted to the sirenians. The dugong and the manatee, particularly the latter, had fascinated me for a long time in respect of their undeniable connections with the mermaid and siren legends of old renown; from which, of course, their order takes its name.
However, it was more than merely this initially that took me off on my "Manatee Survey", as I called those voyages, though at that time I could never have guessed at the importance of my quest. As it happened, my inquiries were to lead me to the first real pointer to my future - a frightful hint of my ultimate destination, though of course I never recognized it as such.' He paused.
'Destination?' I felt obliged to fill the silence. 'Literary or scientific?'
'My ultimate destination!'
'Oh!'
I sat and waited, not quite knowing what to say, an odd position for a journalist! In a moment or two Haggopian continued, and as he spoke I could feel his eyes staring at me intently through the opaque lenses of his spectacles:
'You are aware perhaps of the theories of continental drift - those concepts outlined initially by Wegener and Lintz, modified by Vine, Matthews and others - which have it that the continents are gradually 'floating' apart and that they were once much closer to one another? Such theories are sound, I assure you; primal Pangaea did exist, and was trodden by feet other than those of men.
Indeed, that first great continent knew life before man first swung down from the trees and up from the apes!
'But at any rate, it was partly to further the work of Wegener and the others that I decided upon my "Manatee Survey" - a comparison of the manatees of Liberia, Senegal and the Gulf of Guinea with those of the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. You see, Mr Belton, of all the shores of Earth these two are the only coastal stretches within which manatees occur in their natural state.
Surely you would agree that this is excellent zoological evidence for continental drift?
'Well, with these scientific interests of mine very much at heart, I eventually found myself in Jacksonville on the East Coast of North America; which is just as far north as the manatee may be found in any numbers. In Jacksonville, by chance, I heard of certain strange stones taken out of the sea - stones bearing weathered hieroglyphs of fantastic antiquity, presumably washed ashore by the back-currents of the Gulf Stream. Such was my interest in these stones and their possible source - you may recall that Mu, Atlantis and other mythical sunken lands and cities have long been favourite themes of mine - that I quickly concluded my "Manatee Survey" to sail to Boston, Massachusetts, where I had heard that a collector of such oddities kept a private museum. He, too, it turned out, was a lover of oceans, and his collection was full of the lore of the sea; particularly the North Atlantic which was, as it were, on his doorstep. I found him most erudite in all aspects of the East Coast, and he told me many fantastic tales of the shores of New England. It was the same New England coastline, he assured me, whence hailed those ancient stones bearing evidence of primal intelligence - an intelligence I had seen traces of in places as far apart as the Ivory Coast and the islands of Polynesia?
For some time Haggopian had been showing a strange and increasing agitation, and now he sat wringing his hands and moving restlessly in his chair. 'Ah, yes, Mr Belton - was it not a discovery? For as soon as I saw the American's basalt fragments I recognized them! They were small, those pieces, yes, but the inscriptions upon them were the same as I had seen cut in great black pillars in the coastal jungles of Liberia - pillars long cast up by the sea and about which, on moonlit nights, the natives cavorted and chanted ancient liturgies! I had known those liturgies, too, Belton, from my childhood in the Cook Island - la-, R'lyeh! Cthulhu fhtagn?
With this last thoroughly alien gibberish fluting weirdly from his lips the Armenian had risen suddenly to his feet, his head aggressively forward, and his knuckles white as they pressed down on the table. Then, seeing the look on my face as I quickly leaned backwards away from him, he slowly relaxed and finally fell back into his seat as though exhausted. He let his hands hang limp and turned his face to one side.
For at least three minutes Haggopian sat like this before turning to me with the merest half-apologetic shrug of his shoulders. 'You - you must excuse me, sir. I find myself very easily given these days to over-excitement.'
He took up his glass and drank, then dabbed again at the rivulets of liquid from his eyes before continuing: 'But I digress, mainly I wished to point out that once, long ago, the Americas and Africa were Siamese twins, joined at their middle by a lowland strip which sank as the continental drift began. There were cities in those lowlands, do you see? And evidence of those prehistoric places still exists at the points where once the two masses co-joined. As for Polynesia, well, suffice to say that the beings who built the ancient cities - beings who seeped down from the stars over inchoate aeons - once held dominion over all the world. But they left other traces, those beings, queer gods and cults and even stranger - minions!
'However, quite apart from these vastly interesting geological discoveries, I had, too, something of a genealogical interest in New England. My mother was Polynesian, you know, but she had old New England blood in her too; my great-great-grandmother was taken from the islands to New England by a deck hand on one of the old East India sailing ships in the late 1820s, and two generations later my grandmother returned to Polynesia when her American husband died in a fire. Until then the line had lived in Innsmouth, a decaying New England seaport of ill repute, where Polynesian women were anything but rare. My grandmother was pregnant when she arrived in the islands, and the American blood came out strongly in my mother, accounting for her looks; but even now I recall that there was something not quite right with her face -something about the eyes.
'I mention all this because . . . because I cannot help but wonder if something in my genealogical background has to do with my present - phase.'
Again that word, this time with plain emphasis, and again I felt inclined to inquire which phase Haggopian meant -but too late, for already he had resumed his narrative:
'You see, I heard many strange tales in Polynesia as a child, and I was told equally weird tales by my Boston collector friend - of things that come up out of the sea to mate with men, and of their terrible progeny!'
For the second time a feverish excitement made itself apparent in Haggopian's voice and attitude; and again his agitation showed as his whole body trembled, seemingly in the grip of massive, barely repressed emotions.
'Did you know,' he suddenly burst out, 'that in 1928 Innsmouth was purged by Federal agents?
Purged of what, I ask you? And why were depth-charges dropped off Devil's Reef? It was after this blasting and following the storms of 1930 that many oddly fashioned articles of golden jewelry were washed up on the New England beaches; and at the same time those black, broken, horribly hieroglyphed stones began to be noticed and picked up by beachcombers!
'Ia-R'lyeh! What monstrous things lurk even now in the ocean depths, Belton, and what other things return to that cradle of Earthly life?'
Abruptly he stood up to begin pacing the patio in his swaying, clumsy lope, mumbling gutturally and incoherently to himself and casting occasional glances in my direction where I sat, very disturbed now by his obviously aberrant mental condition, at the table.
At that distinct moment of time, had there been any easy means of escape, I believe I might quite happily have given up all to be off Haggopiana. I could see no such avenue of egress, however, and so I nervously waited until the Armenian had calmed himself sufficiently to resume his seat. Again moisture was seeping in a slow trickle from beneath the dark lenses, and once more he drank of the unknown liquid in his glass before continuing:
'Once more I ask you to accept my apologies, Mr Belton, and I crave your pardon for straying so wildly from the principal facts. I was speaking before of my book, Denizens of the Deep, and of my dissatisfaction with certain chapters. Well, when finally my interest in New England's shores and mysteries waned, I returned to that book, and especially to a chapter concerning ocean parasites. I wanted to compare this specific branch of the sea's creatures with its land-going counterpart, and to introduce, as I had in my other chapters, oceanic myths and legends that I might attempt to explain them away.
'Of course, I was limited by the fact that the sea cannot boast so large a number of parasitic creatures as the land. Why, almost every land-going animal - bird and insect included - has its own little familiar living in its hair or feathers or feeding upon it in some parasitic fashion or other.
'None the less I dealt with the hagfish and lamprey, with certain species of fish-leech and whale-lice, and I compared them with fresh-water leeches, types of tapeworm, fungi and so on. Now, you might be tempted to believe that there is too great a difference between sea- and land-dwellers, and of course in a way there is - but when one considers that all life as we know it sprang originally from the sea . . . ?'
'When I think now, Mr. Belton, of the vampire in legend, occult belief and supernatural fiction - how the monster brings about hideous changes and deteriorations in his victim until that victim dies, and then returns as a vampire himself- then I wonder what mad fates drove me on. And yet how was I to know, how could any man foresee . . . ?
'But there - I anticipate, and that will not do. My revelation must come in its own time, you must be prepared, despite your assurances that you are not easily frightened.
'In 1956 I was exploring the seas of the Solomon Islands in a yacht with a crew of seven. We had moored for the night on a beautiful uninhabited little island off San Cristobal, and the next morning, as my men were decamping and preparing the yacht for sea, I walked along the beach looking for conches.
Stranded in a pool by the tide I saw a great shark, its gills barely in the water and its rough back and dorsal actually breaking the surface. I was sorry for the creature, of course, and even more so when I saw that it had fastened to its belly one of those very bloodsuckers with which I was still concerned. Not only that, but the hagfish was a beauty! Four feet long if it was an inch and definitely of a type I had never seen before. By that time Denizens of the Deep was almost ready, and but for that chapter I have already mentioned the book would have been at the printer's long since.
'Well, I could not waste the time it would take to two the shark to deeper waters, but none the less I felt sorry for the great fish. I had one of my men put it out of its misery with a rifle.
Goodness knows how long the parasite had fed on its juices, gradually weakening it until it had become merely a toy of the tides.
'As for the hagfish - he was to come with us! Aboard my yacht I had plenty of tanks to take bigger fish than him, and of course I wanted to study him and include a mention of him in my book.
'My men managed to net the strange fish without too much trouble and took it aboard, but they seemed to be having some difficulty getting it back out of the net and into the tank. You must understand, Mr Belton, that these tanks were sunk into the decks, with their tops level with the planking. I went over to give a hand before the fish expired, and just as it seemed we were sorting the tangle out the creature began thrashing about! It came out of the net with one great flexing of its body - and took me with it into the tank!
'My men laughed at first, of course, and I would have laughed with them - (/ that awful fish had not in an instant fastened itself on my body, its suction-pad mouth grinding high on my chest and its eyes boring horribly into mine!'
3
After a short pause, during which pregnant interval his shining face worked horribly, the Armenian continued:
'I was delirious for three weeks after they dragged me out of the tank. Shock? - poison? - I did not know at the time. Now I know, but it is too late; possibly it was too late even then.
'My wife was with us as cook, and during my delirium, as I had feverishly tossed and turned in my cabin bed, she had tended me. Meanwhile my men had kept the hagfish - a previously unknown species of Myxinoidea - well supplied with small sharks and other fish. They never allowed the cyclostome to completely drain any of its hosts, you understand, but they knew enough to keep the creature healthy for me no matter its loathsome manner of taking nourishment.
'My recovery, I remember, was plagued by recurrent dreams of monolithic submarine cities, cyclopean structures of basaltic stone peopled by strange, hybrid beings part human, part fish and part batrachian; the amphibious Deep Ones, minions of Dagon and worshippers of sleeping Cthulhu.
In those dreams, too, eerie voices called out to me and whispered things of my forebears - things which made me scream through my fever at the hearing!
'After I recovered the times were many I went below decks to study the hagfish through the glass sides of its tank. Have you ever seen a hagfish or lamprey close up, Mr Belton? No? Then consider yourself lucky. They are ugly
creatures, with looks to match their natures, eel-like and primitive - and their mouths, Belton - their horrible, rasp-like, sucking mouths!
'Two months later, toward the end of the voyage, the horror really began. By then my wounds, the raw places on my chest where the thing had had me, were healed completely; but the memory of that first encounter was still terribly fresh in my mind, and-
'I see the question written on your face, Mr Belton, but indeed you heard me correctly - I did say my first encounter! Oh, yes! There were more encounters to come, plenty of them!'
At this point in his remarkable narrative Haggopian paused once more to dab at the rivulets of moisture seeping from behind his sun-glasses, and to drink yet again from the cloudy liquid in his glass. It gave me a chance to look about me; possibly I still thought an immediate escape route should such become necessary.
The Armenian was seated with his back to the great bungalow, and as I glanced nervously in that direction I saw a face move quickly out of sight in one of the smaller, porthole windows. Later, as my host's story progressed, I was able to see that the face in the windows belonged to the old servant woman, and that her eyes were fixed firmly upon him in a kind of hungry fascination.
Whenever she caught me looking at her she withdrew.
'No,' Haggopian finally went on, 'the hagfish was far from finished with me - far from it. For as the weeks went by my interest in the creature grew into a sort of obsession, so that every spare moment found me staring into its tank or examining the curious marks and scars it left on the bodies of its unwilling hosts. And so it was that I discovered how those hosts were not unwilling!
A peculiar fact, and yet-
'Yes, I found that having once played host to the cyclostome, the fishes it fed upon were ever eager to resume such liaisons, even unto death! When I first discovered this odd circumstance I experimented, of course, and I was later able to establish quite definitely that following the initial violation the hosts of the hagfish submitted to subsequent attacks with a kind of soporofic pleasure!
'Apparently, Mr Belton, I had found in the sea the perfect parallel of the vampire of land-based legend. Just what this meant, the utter horror of my discovery, did not dawn on me until - until-
'We were moored off Limassol in Cyprus prior to starting on the very last leg of our trip, the voyage back to Haggopiana. I had allowed the crew - all but one man, Costas, who had no desire to leave the yacht - ashore for a night out. They had all worked very hard for a long time. My wife, too, had gone to visit friends in Limassol. I was happy enough to stay aboard, my wife's friends bored me; and besides, I had been feeling tired, a sort of lethargy, for a number of days.
'I went to bed early. From my cabin I could see the lights of the town and hear the gentle lap of water about the legs of the pier at which we were moored. Costas was drowsing aft with a fishing-line dangling in the water. Before I dropped off to sleep I called out to him. He answered, in a sleepy sort of way, to say that there was hardly a ripple on the sea and that already he had pulled in two fine mullets.
'When I regained consciousness it was three weeks later and I was back here on Haggopiana. The hagfish had had me again! They told me how Costas had heard the splash and found me in the cyclostome's tank. He had managed to get me out of the water before I drowned, but had needed to fight like the very devil to get the monster off me - or rather, to get me off the monster!
'Do the implications begin to show, Mr Belton?
'You see this?' He unbuttoned his shirt to show me the marks on his chest - circular scars of about three inches in diameter, like those I had seen on the hammerheads in their tank - and I stiffened in my chair, my mouth falling open in shock as I saw their great number! Down to a silken cummerbund just below his rib-cage he unbuttoned his shirt, and barely an inch of his skin remained unblemished; some of the scars even overlapped!
'Good God!' I finally gasped.
'Which God?' Haggopian instantly rasped across the table, his fingers trembling again in that strange passion. 'Which God, Mr Belton? Jehovah or Cannes - the Man-Christ or the Toad-Thing - god of Earth or Water? la-R'lyeh, Cthulhu fhtagn; Yibb-Tstll; Yot-Sothothl! I know many gods, sir!'
Again, jerkily, he filled his glass from the pitcher, literally gulping at the sediment-loaded stuff until I thought he must choke. When finally he put down his empty glass I could see that he had himself once more under a semblance of control.
'That second time,' he continued, 'everyone believed I had fallen into the tank in my sleep, and this was by no means a wild stretch of the imagination; as a boy I had been something of a somnambulist. At first even I believed it was so, for at that time I was still blind to the creature's power over me. They say that the hagfish is blind, too, Mr Belton, and members of the better known species certainly are - but my hag was not blind. Indeed, primitive or not, I believed that after the first three or four times he was actually able to recognise me! I used to keep the creature in the tank where you saw the hammerheads, forbidding anyone else entry to that room. I would pay my visits at night, whenever the -mood- came on me; and he would be there, waiting for me, with his ugly mouth groping at the glass and his queer eyes peering out in awful anticipation. He would go straight to the steps as soon as I began to climb them, waiting for me restlessly in the water until I joined him there. I would wear a snorkel, so as to be able to breathe while he - while it. . .'
Haggopian was trembling all over now and dabbing angrily at his face with his silk handkerchief.
Glad of the chance to take my eyes off the man's oddly glistening features, I finished off my drink and refilled my glass with the remainder of the beer in the bottle. The chill was long off the beer by then - the beer itself was almost stale - but in any case, understandably I believe, the edge had quite gone from my thirst for anything of Haggopian's. I drank solely to relieve my mouth of its clammy dryness.
'The worst of it was,' he went on after a while, 'that what was happening to me was not against my will. As with the sharks and other host-fish, so with me. I enjoyed each hideous liaison as the alcoholic enjoys the euphoria of his whisky; as the drug addict delights in his delusions; and the results of my addiction were no less destructive! I experienced no more periods of delirium, such as I had known following my first two "sessions" with the creature, but I could feel that my strength was slowly but surely being sapped. My assistants knew that I was ill, naturally - they would have had to be stupid not to notice the way my health was deteriorating or the rapidity with which I appeared to be ageing - but it was my wife who suffered the most.
'I could have little to do with her, do you see? If we had led any sort of normal life then she must surely have seen the marks on my body. That would have required an explanation, one I was not willing - indeed, unable - to give! Oh, but I waxed cunning in my addiction, and no one guessed the truth behind the strange "disease" which was slowly killing me, draining me of my life's blood.
'A little over a year later, in 1958, when I knew I was on death's very doorstep, I allowed myself to be talked into undertaking another voyage. My wife loved me deeply still and believed a prolonged trip might do me good. I think that Costas had begun to suspect the truth by then; I even caught him one day in the forbidden room staring curiously at the cyclostome in its tank. His suspicion became even more aroused when I told him that the creature was to go with us. He was against the idea from the start. I argued however that my studies were incomplete, that I was not finished with the hag and that eventually I intended to release the fish at sea. I intended no such thing. In fact, I did not believe I would last the voyage out. From sixteen stone in weight I was down to nine!
'We were anchored off the Great Barrier Reef the night my wife found me with the hagfish. The others were asleep after a birthday party aboard. I had insisted that they all drink and make merry so that I could be sure I would not be disturbed, but my wife had taken very little to drink and I had not noticed. The first thing I knew of it was when I saw her standing at the side of the tank, looking down at me and the ... thing! I will always remember her face, the horror and awful knowledge written upon it, and her scream, the way it split the night!
'By the time I got out of the tank she was gone. She had fallen or thrown herself overboard. Her scream had roused the crew and Costas was the first to be up and about. He saw me before I could cover myself. I took three of the men and went out in a little boat to look for my wife. When we got back Costas had finished off the hagfish. He had taken a great hook and gaffed the thing to death. Its head was little more than a bloody pulp, but even in death its suctorial mouth continued to rasp away - at nothing!
'After that, for a whole month, I would have Costas nowhere near me. I do not think he wanted to be near me -1 believe he knew that my grief was not solely for my wife!
'Well, that was the end of the first phase, Mr Belton. I rapidly regained my weight and health, the years fell off my face and body, until I was almost the same man I had been. I say "almost", for of course I could not be exactly the same. For one thing I had lost all my hair - as I have said, the creature had depleted me so thoroughly that I had been on death's very doorstep - and also, to remind me of the horror, there were the scars on my body and the greater scar on my mind which hurt me still whenever I thought of the look on my wife's face when last I had seen her.
'During the next year I finished my book, but mentioned nothing of my discoveries during the course of my "Manatee Survey", and nothing of my experiences with the awful fish. I dedicated the book, as you no doubt know, to the memory of my poor wife; but yet another year was to pass before I could get the episode with the hagfish completely out of my system. From then on I could not bear to think back on my terrible obsession.
'It was shortly after I married for the second time that phase two began . . .
'For some time I had been experiencing a strange pain in my abdomen, between my navel and the bottom of my ribcage, but had not troubled myself to report it to a doctor. I have an abhorrence of doctors. Within six months of the wedding the pain had disappeared - to be replaced by something far worse!
'Knowing my terror of medical men, my new wife kept my secret, and though we neither of us knew it, that was the worst thing we could have done. Perhaps if I had seen about the thing sooner-
'You see, Mr Belton, I had developed - yes, an organ! An appendage, a snout-like thing had grown out of my stomach, with a tiny hole at its end like a second navel! Eventually, of course, I was obliged to see a doctor, and after he examined me and told me the worst I swore him - or rather, I paid him - to secrecy. The organ could not be removed, he said, it was part of me. It had its own blood vessels, a major artery and connections with my lungs and stomach. It was not malignant in the sense of a morbid tumour. Other than this he was unable to explain the snout-like thing away. After an exhaustive series of tests, though. he was further able to say that my blood, too, had undergone a change. There seemed to be far too much salt in my system. The doctor told me then that by all rights I ought not to be alive!
'Nor did it stop there, Mr Belton, for soon other changes started to take place - this time in the snout-like organ itself when that tiny navel at its tip began to open up!
'And then . . . and then . . . my poor wife . . . and my Once more Haggopian had to stop. He sat there gulping like - like a fish out of water! - with his whole body trembling violently and the thin streams of moisture trickling down his face. Again he filled his glass and drank deeply of the filthy liquid, and yet again he wiped at his ghastly face with the square of silk. My own mouth had gone very dry, and even if I had had anything to say I do not believe I could have managed it. I reached for my glass, simply to give myself something to do while the Armenian fought to control himself, but of course the glass was empty.
'I - it seems - you -' mine host half gulped, half rasped, then gave a weird, harshly choking bark before finally settling himself to finishing his unholy narrative. Now his voice was less human than any voice I had ever heard before:
'You - have - more nerve than I thought, Mr Belton, and - you were right; you are not easily shocked or frightened. In the end it is I who am the coward, for I cannot tell the rest of the tale. I can only - show you, and then you must leave. You can wait for Costas at the pier . . .'
With that Haggopian slowly stood up and peeled off his open shirt. Hypnotized I watched as he began to unwind the silken cummerbund at his waist, watched as his - organ -
came into view, as it blindly groped in the light like the snout of a rooting pig! But the thing was not a snout!
Its end was an open, gasping mouth - red and loathsome, with rows of rasp-like teeth - and in its sides breathing gillslits showed, moving in and out as the thing sucked at thin air!
Even then the horror was not at an end, for as I lurched reelingly to my feet the Armenian took off those hellish sunglasses! For the first time I saw his eyes; his bulging fisheyes - without whites, like jet marbles, oozing painful tears in the constant ache of an alien environment - eyes adapted for the murk of the deeps!
I remember how, as I fled blindly down the beach to the pier, Haggopian's last words rang in my ears; the words he rasped as he threw down the cummerbund and removed the dark-lensed sunglasses from his face: 'Do not pity me, Mr Belton,' he had said. 'The sea was ever my first love, and there is much I do not know of her even now - but I will, I will. And I shall not be alone of my kind among the Deep Ones. There is one I know who awaits me even now, and one other yet to come!'
On the short trip back to Kletnos, numb though my mind ought to have been, the journalist in me took over and I thought back on Haggopian's hellish story and its equally hellish implications. I thought of his great love of the ocean, of the strangely cloudy liquid with which he so obviously sustained himself, and of the thin film of protective slime which glistened on his face and presumably covered the rest of his body. I thought of his weird forebears and of the exotic gods they had worshipped; of things that came up out of the sea to mate with men! I thought of the fresh marks I had seen on the undersides of the hammerhead sharks in the great tank, marks made by no parasite for Haggopian had returned his lampreys to the sea all of three years earlier; and I thought of that second wife the Armenian had mentioned who, rumour had it, had died of some 'exotic wasting disease'! Finally, I thought of those other rumours I had heard of his third wife: how she was no longer living with him - but of the latter it was not until we docked at Kletnos proper that I learned how those rumours, understandable though the mistake was, were in fact mistaken.
For it was then, as the faithful Costas helped the old woman from the boat, that she stepped on her trailing shawl. That shawl and her veil were one and the same garment, so that her clumsiness caused a momentary exposure of her face, neck and one shoulder to a point just above her left breast. In that same instant of inadvertent unveiling, I saw the woman's full face for the first time - and also the livid scars where they began just beneath her collar-bone!
At last I understood the strange magnetism Haggopian had held for her, that magnetism not unlike the unholy attraction between the morbid hagfish of his story and its all too willing hosts! I understood, too, my previous interest in her classic, 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 me even now, and one other yet to come!'