Return of the Deep Ones: And Other Mythos Tales

by Brian Lumley

“‘I experienced no more periods of delirium, such as I had known following my first two meetings with the creature, but I could feel that my strength was slowly but surely being sapped. My assistants knew that I was ill, naturally, 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. Oh, but I waxed cunning in my addiction, and no one guessed the truth behind the strange sickness 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 door-step, 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 suspicions became more obvious, however, when I told him that the creature was to go with us. He was against the idea from the start. I argued that my studies were incomplete and that when I was finished with the hag I intended to release it at sea. I intended no such thing. In fact, I did not believe I would last the voyage out. From fourteen stone in weight, I was down to less than eight.

  “‘We were anchored off the Great Barrier Reef the night my wife found me with the hagfish. The others were asleep after a party aboard. I had insisted that they all drink and make merry so that I could be sure not to be disturbed, but my wife had remained sober 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, to no avail. When we got back, Costas had finished off the hagfish. He had 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 that he knew my grief was not solely for my poor wife …

  “‘Well, that was the end of the first phase, Mr. Belton. I rapidly regained my health, the years fell off my face and body, until I was almost the same man I had been. I could never be exactly the same, though. For one thing, I had lost all my hair. As I have said, the creature had taken me to death’s very doorstep. Also, to remind me of the horror, there were the scars on my body and a greater scar on my mind: the look on my wife’s face when last I had seen her.

  “‘During the next year I finished my book, mentioning nothing of my discoveries during the course of my Manatee Survey, nothing of my experiences with the awful fish. I dedicated the book 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 even 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 just above my navel, but had not troubled myself to see 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 tip 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 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 the tiny navel began to open up at its tip!

  “‘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 once more he wiped at his ghastly face. My own mouth had gone very dry again, and if I had had something to say, I very much doubt I could have managed it.

  “‘I—it seems—you—’ the Armenian half-gulped, half-rasped, then uttered 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: indeed, 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 may 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 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 whiles, like jet marbles, oozing painful tears in the constant ache of an alien environment—eyes adapted for the murky gloom 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 to be waiting even now, and one other yet to come!’

  “During the short trip back to Kletnos, numb though my mind ought to have been, the journalist in me took over and I thought back to Haggopian’s hellish story and its equally hellish implications. I thought of his great love of the ocean, of the strangely cloudy liquid which helped to sustain him, 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 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 sharks in the great tank, marks made by no ordinary parasite, for Haggopian had returned his lampreys to the sea all of three years earlier; and I thought of that second wife who, rumour had it, 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 face for the first time—and also the livid scars where they began just beneath her collarbone.

  “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 dehydrated face—which yet had classic features.

  “For now I could see that it was the face 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 I know to be waiting even now, and one other yet to come!’”

  VII: Escape!

  Despite my personal problems—or perhaps more correctly because of them—the horror of Belton’s tale reached out to me. And for all his journalistic background, I guessed that he had coloured the story not at all, that it had happened just the way he told it. But while during its telling there had been so much in the story I could relate to my own knowledge of the Deep Ones, still I had not in this instance found anything to prove conclusively their inimical nature. Instead, Haggopian’s case had inspired in me a sort of pity; I had felt a definite empathy with the man in his extremes of horror. Oh, I myself could now testify to the fact that the Deep Ones were devious in their ways, no doubt of that—but deadly? A threat to the world? To the universe? That was something entirely different.

  By now, however, my legs felt stiff from standing so awkwardly on the chair, and one of them was about to go to sleep on me. I told Belton I would be back in a few minutes, and got painfully down. Pacing back and forth for a little while in the confines of my tank until my joints were eased, I found myself dwelling morbidly on Haggopian’s dreams, which had seemed so reminiscent of my own, and on his peculiar genealogy. My background, too, had more than its fair share of anomalies, which I must certainly look into if ever my position permitted it.

  Then, as I was about to climb back up on to my chair, there came the sound of unhurried feet outside, and a few seconds later I heard Belton’s door once more thrown open. Almost immediately, the door was slammed shut and barred again, and the footsteps paused outside my own door. I heard Sarah's voice raised in what sounded like a request, and Semple’s firm refusal before all sounds passed on and faded away.

  After a little while, I got back up on my chair and tapped on the grille. Belton looked up and managed a wry smile. “They don’t intend to finish me just yet, at any rate,” he said. “Look here, I’ve been given a blanket!” Then his face hardened. “There were three of them—three Deep Ones.”

  I nodded, though he could hardly have seen more than the merest movement of my head through the grille. “You knew them by their looks?”

  “By their looks, their smell, their damned fish-eyes. They’re unmistakable. In New England it’s called the “Innsmouth Look”. Who is the big hulking one?”

  “Sargent, you mean? He’s some sort of servant around here.”

  Belton nodded. “A changeling who never quite made it. Faithful to the Deep Ones as a dog to its master.”

  “How do you mean, ‘changeling’?” I asked. “Not in Haggopian's way, surely?”

  He shrugged. “There are changelings and changelings. It was a long time after Haggopian that I started to look at the native legends and myth-patterns of the Solomon Islands. You’ll remember he found his hagfish off San Cristobal? Well, all anyone need do is pick up a book on Oceanic Mythology at any bookshop, and he’ll find more than enough evidence of the Deep Ones and changelings. The natives out there know well enough of the adaro, ‘sea-sprites’ who are part-human, part-fish. They visit men in their dreams and teach them strange songs and chants, and they call to them on conches and tempt them into the sea …” He paused for a moment, then continued: “But no, the half-people here in this place are not of Haggopian’s sort. I rather fancy that he was the first of his kind—‘protogenus’, you might say—and that his inherent Deep One genes were both activated and mutated by the advent of the hagfish. More than that I can’t say. I’m no biologist.” He looked up at me strangely, quizzically, I thought; but before I could comment, he went quickly on. “But as I was saying, these people are not Haggopian’s sort.”

  “Then just what sort are they?” I asked.

  “I haven’t seen them all,” he answered, “but there are three types here, at least. Sargent is landborn and didn't make the change. One of his parents was a Deep One, but the human side was dominant. And for all their prowess with drugs, the true Deep Ones haven’t been able to bring about the full change in him. Or perhaps they started on him too late, when he was too set in his human ways, or when his body was no longer able to accomplish the metamorphosis. Incidentally, one of the side-effects of their damned drugs when they don’t work is to stunt the mind and retard its processes. That poor devil Sargent looks to me to be a classic example.

  “Then there’s the one called Semple. He’s a half-breed, too, except that in his case the dominant side was all Deep One. He’s just about ready to take to the water, maybe already has, in which case he’s a true amphibian. And there was one in the car whose smell nearly turned my stomach. My guess is that he was an original Deep One, with no human blood in him at all. That type can’t stay out of the sea very long.” He paused, then after a moment went on.

  “Yes, it looks to me like they’re after a set-up here similar to what they once had in America. Back in the early 1920s, Innsmouth was crawling with all types of Deep Ones. It was one of their biggest strongholds, remote and decaying, and of course there was one of their submarine cities close by.”

  “Y’ha-Nthlei?” I asked, knowing that I was right.

  He frowned up at me. “Hmm! You know a bit more than I thought. Yes, Y’ha-Nthlei, and they had been mingling the blood for ages. That part of the American coastline, just like this part here in England, has always been ‘mermaid country’. You see what I mean? Anyway, in 1928, government agents got wind of what was going on and stepped in. They just about levelled half the place, but they in no way finished off the job … more’s the pity. I don’t suppose the government men really knew what they were dealing with …”

  As he finished speaking, the scientist in me suddenly rebelled against all I had already more than half-accepted. “Listen,” I began, with something of desperation in my voice, “a moment ago you mentioned that you’re not a biologist. Well, I am a biologist—a marine biologist—and I just can’t make myself accept that there could ever be issue from this sort of union. It’s just too fantas—”

  “No,” he shook his head, “it’s not too fantastic at all. You yourself could mate with a pygmy girl and raise six-foot sons.”

  “Of course I could,” I exploded. “But not with a damned frog!”

  “Oh?” He peered up at the grille. “It’s not so very long ago that they used to test a woman for pregnancy by injecting a female frog with her urine. If the frog spawned, the woman was pregnant. It actually works. Are you saying there’s no link?”

  “Oh, I know all about that,” I told him, “and if there were enough time, I could even explain it to you, but—”

  “But, but, but!” he cried out. “There can be no argument. It’s real, I tell you! Changelings? My God, just look at the life-cycle of the common frog! And as for why they want you—why, you’ve already answered that one yourself.”

  “What? How do you mean?”

  “You’re a biologist, aren’t you?”

  “A marine biologist, yes.”

  He nodded. “Yes, and they’ve been recrui
ting all sorts to their cause. Doctors, scientists, biologists … men, yes, human beings. Every man has his price, they say—and the Deep Ones know it.”

  “I still don’t follow you.”

  “Don’t you? You must know what a clone is.”

  “A clone? Of course I know what a—” I stopped short. “What are you getting at?”

  “Just this: I believe they’re about ready to start cloning Deep Ones!”

  “What?”

  “I have evidence, I tell you! And something else: in all of the experiments performed so far in cloning, which do you suppose have been most effective? What type of creature may most readily be cloned?”

  The short hairs rose of their own accord on the back of my neck, and I shuddered uncontrollably. “The amphibia!” I answered in a whisper.

  “Yes.” He vigorously nodded his head. “Damn frogs! And that’s what they’re after: an entire submarine world full of Deep Ones—every body of water on Earth swarming with them—and when there are too many of them for us to handle …”

  “Then?”

  He hugged his blanket around his shoulders. “We’ll be herded, like cattle—and then they’ll be able to concentrate on their main objective.”

  “Which is?”

  “To release Cthulhu, of course. To set that ageless monster free!”

  “But surely Cthulhu is a purely mythical creature?” I argued. “The ‘god’ of their faith? And the way they tell it, he’s benign and—”

  “Benign?” He choked on the word. “My God! Do you know what you're saying? Not only is Cthulhu real, he’s responsible for half of this crazy world’s madness! Those are not ordinary dreams he sends out from R'lyeh, but nightmares! Hideous visions to turn the minds of men and drive them mad!”

  For a moment, I was gripped by the intensity of his belief—dragged by it to the rim of a chasm of utmost lunacy—but still something in me, some imp of the perverse, refused to let me finally accept the truth of his statements.

  “No,” I said. “I just can’t believe it. The rest of it I’ll allow, everything, but Cthulhu—”