by Brian Lumley
“‘Was I staring?’ I started guiltily, aware suddenly 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 nonsense of all matters of sensibility. You strike me as a man not easily … frightened, Mr. Belton?’
“‘I can be surprised, sir—but frightened? Among other things, I've been a war correspondent, and—’
“’Of course, but there are worse things than the horrors of war.’
“‘That may be, but in any case I’m a journalist. I’ll take a chance on being—frightened.’
“‘Good! And please put aside any doubts you may by now have conceived with regard to my sanity.’
“I started to protest, but he quickly cut me off. ‘No, no, Mr. Belton! You would have to be totally insensible not to perceive the strangeness here.’
“He fell silent as for the fourth time the old woman appeared, placing a pitcher on the table before him. 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.
“‘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 willed to me 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, all great waters …
“‘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. 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 published the book there and then but for the fact that I had become something of a perfectionist both in my writing and in 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 manatee in particular had fascinated me for a long time, in respect of its undeniable connections with the mermaid and siren legends of old renown; from which, of course, the order takes its name. However, it was more than merely this that took me off initially 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 enquiries were to lead me to the first real pointer to my future—a frightful hint of my 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!’
“After a moment, Haggopian continued, and as he spoke I could feel his eyes staring at me intently through the opaque lenses:
“‘You are aware of the theories of continental drift, which have it that the continents are gradually floating apart and that they were once much closer to one another? Such theories are sound. Primal Pangaea did exist, trod by feet other than those of men. Indeed, that first great continent knew life long before the first man wondered at his place in the Universe.
“‘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 where manatees occur in their natural state: excellent zoological evidence for continental drift.
“‘Well, eventually I found myself in Jacksonville on the East Coast of North America. There, 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 collection of such oddities was kept in a private museum. There, when I saw those ancient stones bearing evidence of primal intelligence, I knew that I had conclusive proof of the floating continents theories. Why, I had seen evidence of that same intelligence in places as far apart as the Ivory Coast and the Islands of Polynesia!’
“For some time, Haggopian had been showing an 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 those 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 the great black Pillars of Geph in the coastal jungles of Liberia—pillars long uncovered by the sea and about which, on moonlight nights, the natives cavorted and chanted ancient liturgies. I had known those liturgies, too, Belton, from my childhood in the Cook Islands—Ia-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 where they pressed down on the table. Then, as I quickly leaned backwards away from him, he slowly relaxed and fell back into his chair 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 a half-apologetic shrug of his shoulders. ‘You—you must excuse me, sir. I find myself very easily given 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, and 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 … residua.
“‘However, quite apart from these vastly interesting geological discoveries, I had something of a genealogical interest in New England. My mother was Polynesian, you know, but she also had old New England blood in her. 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 after 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 returned to the islands, and the American blood came out strongly in my mother.
“‘I mention all this because … because I cannot help but wonder if something in my genealogical background has to do with …’
“‘You see, I had heard many strange tales in Polynesia as a child—tales 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 his whole body trembled, seemingly in the grip of massive, barely repressed emotions.
“‘Ia-R’lyeh!” he suddenly burst out again in that unknown tongue. ‘What monstrous things lurk even now in the ocean deeps, 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 incoherently to himself and casting occasional glances in my direction where I sat, very disturbed now by his obviously aberrant condition. But at last he sat down again and continued:
“‘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. Of course I was limited by the fact that the sea cannot boast so large a number of parasitic or symbiotic creatures as the land; none the less I dealt of the hagfish and lamprey, of certain species of fish-leech, whale lice, and clinging weeds, 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 …?’
“‘But to continue:
“‘In 1956 I was exploring the oceans 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 rough back and dorsal actually breaking the surface. I felt sorry for the creature, and even more so when I saw 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 before seen. 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 printers long since.
“‘Well, I could not waste the time it would take to tow the shark to deeper waters, so I had one of my men put it out of its misery with a rifle. Goodness only 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 a sunken tank. I went over to give a hand before the fish expired, and that was when 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, naturally, and I would have laughed with them—had that awful fish not in an instant fastened itself on my body, its suction-pad mouth grinding high up on my chest and its eyes boring horribly into mine!’
“After a short pause, during which Haggopian’s face worked hideously, he 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 feverishly tossed and turned in my cabin bed, she tended me. Meanwhile, the crew kept the hagfish—a previously unknown species of Myxinoidea—well supplied with small sharks and other fish. They never allowed the cyclostome to drain its hosts completely, you understand, but they knew enough to keep the creature healthy for me.
“‘My recovery, I remember, was plagued by recurrent dreams of monolithic submare cities. Cyclopean structures of basaltic stone people by strange hybrid beings: the amphibious Deep Ones, minions of Dagon and worshippers of dreaming Cthulhu. In these dreams eerie voices called out to me and whispered things of my forebears—things which made me moan through my fever at the hearing …
“‘After I recovered the times were many when I would go below decks to study the hagfish through the glass sides of its tank. Have you ever seen a hagfish close up, Mr. Belton? No? Consider yourself lucky. They are ugly, with looks to match their natures, eel-like and primitive. And their mouths—their horrible, rasp-like, sucking mouths …!
“‘Two months later, towards 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.”
“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 covertly to look about me. 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 Haggopian’s story progressed, I was able to see that the face in the window 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 would withdraw.
“‘No,’ Haggopian finally went on, ‘the hagfish was far from finished with me. 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! Later I was 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 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. My wife, too, had gone to visit friends in Famagusta. Myself: I was happy enough to stay aboard. I had known a tired feeling, a 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, saying that there was hardly a ripple on the sea and that already he had pulled in three fine mullets …
“‘When I regained consciousness it was three weeks later and I was back here on Haggopiana. The hagfish had had me yet 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 hammerhead—and I stiffened in my chair as I saw their great number. Down to the silken cummerbund he unbuttoned his shirt, and barely an inch of his skin remained unblemished. A number of the scars even overlapped.
“‘Good God!’ I finally managed to gasp.
“‘Which god?’ Haggopian instantly rasped, his fingers trembling again in that strang
e passion. ‘Which god, Mr. Belton? Jehova or Oannes—the Man-Christ or the Toad-Thing—god of earth, air or water? Ia-R’Iyeh, Cthulhu fhtagn, Yibb-Tstll, na Yot-Sottoth! 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; 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 believe 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, 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 in the water until I joined him there. I would wear a snorkel, so as to breathe while he—while it—‘
“Haggopian was trembling all over now and dabbing angrily at his face. 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, and it was flat. 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 drug addict delights in his delusions, and the results of my addiction were no less destructive.