A Coven of Vampires (21 page)

“Mind and body are linked, Miles,” I continued. “It’s not just a one-way deal—each controls the other. The problem is your guilt. You’re doing this to yourself!”

His interest at once turned to anger. Which was what I’d more than half expected. “Am I really paying you for this?” he said. “You mean you think I’m eating my own side away? That everything that’s happening to me is generated up here?” He tapped his head. “And does that explain why my bed’s a swamp every time I sleep in it, after Uzzi’s visited me? I mean, are you really telling me that I’m—”

“Insane? But that’s what you came to find out, isn’t it?”

He closed his grimacing mouth, slumped down in his chair. “And am I?”

“No,” I shook my head. “You just feel guilty, that’s all, and you feel you have a great debt to pay.”

His eyes opened wide and I knew he was hooked. And I believed I knew how to cure him. “A debt?” he said. “To the girl, d’you mean?”

I nodded. “To her, and to Uzzi.”

He shrank down again. “You’re forgetting something,” he said. “I’ve
seen
Uzzi!”

“But only in the night, in the dark, when you’re half asleep and your conscience is most vulnerable. Only wake up, turn on the light, and—no Uzzi. It’s a figment of darkness, of the night,
of your mind
!”

“Guilt….” he said. But there was hope in his eyes.

“Oh, yes!” I drove my point home. “Guilty, because you can’t be sure even now that you were driving on the correct side of the road. Guilty—
because you’d let your attention wander. Guilty, of course, for you drove your car into that poor girl and broke her body. Guilty, because there was nothing you could do to save her—and more especially guilty, in your own mind, because you got off scot-free. But worst of all: guilty because you couldn’t even honour her last request, that you look after Uzzi! And so your mind’s paying your debt for you, and in so doing is slowly destroying your body—and must soon destroy itself, too. Except we won’t allow that. Psychosomatic, as I said.”

He put his face in his hands and sobbed, real tears that dripped from between his fingers. “God, yes!” his muffled, racked voice came to me. “God, I
am
guilty!”

“But you’re not,” I told him, “and there is a cure.”

He looked up and his face was pink jelly. “A…a cure?”

“Of course. To begin with, you weren’t to blame for the accident. Now, I know you’ve
said
you weren’t to blame, but you have to really believe it. After all, that young German policeman saw the whole thing, didn’t he? So that’s all it was, an accident. There are thousands just like it, all over the world, every day. As for Uzzi: you were probably right. A pet kitten, or maybe a dog. But Germany’s a civilized country. Uzzi will be taken care of.”

He stood up, stumbled to my desk, almost fell across it to grasp my hand. “Lord, if only I could be sure of that!”

“Listen,” I said. “You can be sure. It was that promise you made, that’s all, when you swore you’d look after him. That’s what made the connection in your mind. A wrong connection. And now all we have to do is break it.”

“And you can do that?” He was crushing my hand. I gently freed myself, said:

“Of course. For I have no belief in such things. Now, Miles, I want you to try very hard and remember everything we’ve talked about. You’ll very soon see how it all makes sense. And I want you to believe that you’re going to be OK. As for Uzzi: you can forget all about that. You see, I’ll take care of Uzzi. I swear I will!”

• • •

That was a week ago. I’ve tried to contact Clayton but he’s in Switzerland. I understand they make fabulous chocolates there. My God, chocolates!

My bedroom’s a mess and there’s this horrible sore in the middle of my chest and my wife has run away, where I don’t know.

I woke up this morning at 4.00, and Uzzi was lying on me like some obscene nightmare lover, with those…
appendages
sliming on my face.

That’s why I’ve made up a story—similar to Clayton’s. Except mine is a false one, about a gypsy curse—which I plan to tell to that fat greasy bastard Powell. Yes, I’ll refer my case to him, and then I’ll take a nice long trip abroad somewhere. No guilt will attach to me, for I don’t believe in such. And I know that Powell doesn’t either. After all, he has my office, the girl I should have, the house I should rightly occupy. So why shouldn’t he have this, too?

It couldn’t happen to a nicer fellow.

Uzzi…Uzzi…Uzzi….

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, pur chased 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 southwest as it sped in to a midmorning mooring. With binoculars from the flat 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 after noon; 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.

Clean this 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 Welt
!
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 photo graphers. 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.