Haggopian and Other Stories (6 page)

An old woman, wrapped around Indian-fashion in white silk and with the lower half of her face veiled in a shawl that fell back over her shoulders, answered the Armenian’s summons. He spoke a few guttural yet remarkably
gentle
words to her in Greek. She went, stumbling a little with her years, to return a short while later with a tray, two glasses, and (amazingly) an English beer with the chill still on the bottle.

I saw that Haggopian’s glass was already filled, but with no drink I could readily recognize. The liquid was greenly cloudy—sediment literally swam in his glass—and yet the Armenian did not seem to notice. He touched glasses with me before lifting the stuff to his lips and drinking deeply. I too took a deep draught for I was very dry; but, when I had placed my glass back on the table, I saw that Haggopian was still drinking! He completely drained off the murky, unknown liquid, put down the glass and again clapped his hands in summons.

At this point I found myself wondering why the man did not remove his sunglasses. After all, we were in the shade, had been even more so during my tour of his wonderful aquarium. Glancing at the Armenian’s face I was reminded of his eye trouble as I again saw those thin trickles of liquid flowing down from behind the enigmatic lenses. And with the reappearance of this symptom of Haggopian’s optical affliction, the peculiar shiny film on his face also returned. For some time that—diffusion?—had seemed to be clearing; I had thought it was simply that I was becoming used to his looks. Now I saw that I had been wrong, his appearance was as odd as ever. Against my will I found myself thinking back on the man’s repulsive handshake…

“These interruptions may be frequent,” his rasp cut into my thoughts. “I am afraid that in my present phase I require a very generous intake of liquids!”

I was about to ask just what “phase” he referred to when the old woman came back with a further glass of murky fluid for her master. He spoke a few more words to her before she once more left us. I could not help but notice, though, as she bent over the table, how very dehydrated the woman’s face looked; with pinched nostrils, deeply wrinkled skin, and dull eyes sunk deep beneath the bony ridges of her eyebrows. An island peasant woman, obviously—and yet, in other circumstances, the fine bone structure of that face might almost have seemed aristocratic. She seemed, too, to find a peculiar magnetism in Haggopian; leaning forward towards him noticeably, visibly fighting to control an apparent desire to touch him whenever she came near him.

“She will leave with you when you go. Costas will take care of her.”

“Was I staring?” I guiltily started, freshly aware 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 a nonsense of all matters of sensibility. You strike me as a man not easily…
frightened
, Mr. Belton?”

“I can be surprised, Mr. Haggopian, and shocked—but frightened? Well, among other things I have been a war correspondent for some time, and—”

“Of course, I understand—but there are worse things than the man-made horrors of war!”

“That may be, but I’m a journalist. It’s my job. I’ll take a chance on being—frightened.”

“Good! And please put aside any doubts you may by now have conceived regarding my sanity, or any you may yet conceive during the telling of my story. The proofs, at the end, will be ample.”

I started to protest but he quickly cut me off: “No, no, Mr. Belton! You would have to be totally insensible not to have perceived the—strangeness here.”

He fell silent as for the third time the old woman appeared, placing a pitcher before him on the table. 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; a tale through which I sat for the most part silent, later hypnotised, and eventually horrified to the end.

II

“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 though he had never acknowledged me in his lifetime he willed to me the equivalent of 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. I love the warm Mediterranean and the South Pacific, but no less the chill Arctic Ocean and the teeming North Sea. Even now I love them—even now!

“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.
Of course it was a labour of love. I paid for the publication of the first edition myself, and though money did not really matter, subsequent reprints repaid me more than adequately. 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 had the book published there and then but for the fact that I had become something of a perfectionist both in my writing and 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 dugong and the manatee, particularly the latter, had fascinated me for a long time in respect of their undeniable connections with the mermaid and siren legends of old renown; from which, of course, their order takes its name. However, it was more than merely this initially that took me off 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 inquiries were to lead me to the first real pointer to my future—a frightful hint of my ultimate 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!”

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 recognised 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 Island—
Iä 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 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, 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 geological 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!

“Iä-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 Armenian 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.