Haggopian and Other Stories (8 page)

“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 rib-cage, 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 eyes
!”

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 gill-slits 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 fish-eyes—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 even now, and one other yet to come!”

Cement Surroundings

Two months before writing “The Caller of The Black”, in June 1967 I had finished “Cement Surroundings”, which August Derleth had immediately accepted for
Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos
, an anthology he was then preparing for publication. I took my payment (seventy-five dollars—wow!—for which I was most grateful) in Arkham House books. This was a wise move; those books would be worth a fortune now, if I still owned them! But while I might shed a tear now and then I can’t complain, because they’ve saved my skin (financially speaking) on several occasions. Anyway, in due time “Cement Surroundings” did indeed appear in
TOTCM
along with one other Lumley tale, plus stories by a good many literary heroes of mine and various contemporaries. “Cement Surroundings” didn’t rest there, however, for I then used it as a chapter in my first Mythos novel—
The Burrowers Beneath
.

I

It will never fail to amaze me how certain allegedly Christian people take a perverse delight in the misfortunes of others. Just how true this is was brought forcibly home to me by the totally unnecessary whispers and rumours which were put about following the disastrous decline of my closest living relative.

There were those who concluded that just as the moon is responsible for the tides, and in part the slow movement of the Earth’s upper crust, so was it also responsible for Sir Amery Wendy-Smith’s
behaviour
on his return from Africa. As proof they pointed out my uncle’s sudden fascination for seismography—the study of earthquakes—a subject which so took his fancy that he built his own instrument, a model which does not incorporate the conventional concrete base, to such an exactitude that it measures even the most minute of the deep tremors which are constantly shaking this world. It is that same instrument which sits before me now, rescued from the ruins of the cottage, at which I am given to casting, with increasing frequency, sharp and fearful glances. Before his disappearance my uncle spent hours, seemingly without purpose, studying the fractional movements of the stylus over the graph.

For my own part I found it more than odd the way in which, while Sir Amery was staying in London after his return, he shunned the underground and would pay abortive taxi fares rather than go down into what he termed “those black tunnels”. Odd, certainly—but I never considered it a sign of insanity.

Yet even his few really close friends seemed convinced of his madness, blaming it upon his living too close to those dead and nigh-forgotten civilizations which so fascinated him. But how could it have been otherwise? My uncle was both antiquarian and archaeologist. His strange wanderings to foreign lands were not the result of any longing for personal gain or acclaim. Rather were they undertaken out of a love of the life, for any fame which resulted—as frequently occurred—was more often than not shrugged off onto the ever-willing personages of his colleagues. They envied him, those so-called contemporaries of his, and would have emulated his successes had they possessed the foresight and inquisitiveness with which he was so singularly gifted—or, as I have now come to believe, with which he was cursed. My bitterness towards them is directed by the way in which they cut him after the dreadful culmination of that last, fatal expedition. In earlier years many of them had been “made” by his discoveries but on that last trip those “hangers-on” had been the uninvited, the ones out of favour, to whom he would not offer the opportunity of fresh, stolen glory. I believe that for the greater part their assurances of his insanity were nothing more than a spiteful means of belittling his genius.

Certainly that last safari was his
physical
end. He who before had been straight and strong, for a man his age, with jet hair and a constant smile, was seen to walk with a pronounced stoop and had lost a lot of weight. His hair had greyed and his smile had become rare and nervous while a distinct tic jerked the flesh at the corner of his mouth.

Before these awful deteriorations made it possible for his erstwhile “friends” to ridicule him, before the expedition, Sir Amery had deciphered or translated—I know little of these things—a handful of decaying, centuried shards known in archaeological circles as the
G’harne Fragments.
Though he would never fully discuss his findings I know it was that which he learned which sent him, ill-fated, into Africa. He and a handful of personal friends, all equally learned gentlemen, ventured into the interior seeking a legendary city which Sir Amery believed had existed centuries before the foundations were cut for the pyramids. Indeed, according to his calculations, Man’s primal ancestors were not yet conceived when G’harne’s towering ramparts first reared their monolithic sculptings to pre-dawn skies. Nor with regard to the age of the place, if it existed at all, could my uncle’s claims be disproved. New scientific tests on the
G’harne Fragments
had shown them to be pre-triassic and their very existence, in any form other than centuried dust, was impossible to explain.

It was Sir Amery, alone and in a terrible condition, who staggered upon an encampment of savages five weeks after setting out from the native village where the expedition had last had contact with civilization. No doubt the ferocious men who found him would have done away with him there and then but for their superstitions. His wild appearance and the strange tongue in which he screamed, plus the fact that he had emerged from an area which was “taboo” in their tribal legends, stayed their hands. Eventually they nursed him back to a semblance of health and conveyed him to a more civilized region from where he was slowly able to make his way back to the outside world. Of the expedition’s other members nothing has since been seen or heard and only I know the story, having read it in the letter my uncle left me. But more of that later.

Following his lone return to England, Sir Amery developed those eccentricities already mentioned and the merest hint or speculation on the part of outsiders with reference to the disappearance of his colleagues was sufficient to start him raving horribly of such inexplicable things as “a buried land where Shudde-M’ell broods and bubbles, plotting the destruction of the human race and the release from his watery prison of Great Cthulhu…” When he was asked
officially
to account for his missing companions he said that they had died in an earthquake and though, reputedly, he was asked to clarify his answer, he would say no more…