A Coven of Vampires (24 page)

“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 ribcage 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?
Iâ-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 recognise 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.

“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 ribcage, 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 under gone 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 trick ling 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 fisheyes—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!