Haggopian and Other Stories (7 page)

“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.

“Nonetheless 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 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
!”

III

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 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 mine 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 soporific 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 Oannes—the Man-Christ or the Toad-Thing—god of Earth or Water?
Iä-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 recognize 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—I 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.