A Coven of Vampires (23 page)

“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 Islands—
Iâ-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 overexcitement.”

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 geo logical 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 jewellery 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!

“
Iâ-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 Arme nian 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 pre pared, 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 de camping 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 tow 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—
if 
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 under stand, 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
en counter! 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 sunglasses, and to drink yet again from the cloudy liquid in his glass. It gave me a chance to look about me; possibly I still sought 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.