Haggopian and Other Stories

He nodded. “One of them was a gigantic, wraithlike, nebulous figure rising from the mists over Kettlethorpe Dene, seen by travellers on the old coach road or by fishermen returning to Harden along the cliff-top paths. But the interesting thing is this: if you look at a map of the district, as I’ve done, you’ll see that the farm lies in something of a depression directly between the coach road and the cliffs. Anything seen from those vantage points could conceivably be emanating from the farm itself!”

I was again beginning to find the nature of David’s discourse disturbing. Or if not what he was saying, his obvious involvement with the concept. “You seem to have gone over all of this rather thoroughly,” I remarked. “Any special reason?”

“Just my old thirst for knowledge,” he grinned. “You know I’m never happy unless I’m tracking something down—and never happier than when I’ve finally got it cornered. And after all, I do live at the place! Anyway, about the giant mist-figure: according to the legends, it was half-fish, half-man!”

“A merman?”

“Yes. And now—” he triumphantly took out a folded sheet of rubbing parchment and opened it out onto the table—“Ta-rah! And what do you make of that?”

The impression on the paper was perhaps nine inches square; a charcoal rubbing taken from a brass of some sort, I correctly imagined. It showed a mainly anthropomorphic male figure seated upon a rock-carved chair or throne, his lower half obscured by draperies of weed bearing striking resemblance to the deep kelp. The eyes of the figure were large and somewhat protuberant; his forehead sloped; his skin had the overlapping scales of a fish, and the fingers of his one visible hand where it grasped a short trident were webbed: The background was vague, reminding me of nothing so much as cyclopean submarine ruins.

“Neptune,” I said. “Or at any rate, a merman. Where did you get it?”

“I rubbed it up myself,” he said, carefully folding the sheet and replacing it in his pocket. “It’s from a plate on a lintel over a door in one of the outbuildings at Kettlethorpe.” And then for the first time he frowned. “Fishy people and a fishy symbol…”

He stared at me strangely for a moment and I felt a sudden chill in my bones—until his grin came back and he added: “And an entirely fishy story, eh?”

We left the library and I walked with him to his car. “And what’s your real interest in all of this?” I asked. “I mean, I don’t remember you as much of a folklorist?”

His look this time was curious, almost evasive. “You just won’t believe that it’s only this old inquiring mind of mine, will you?” But then his grin came back, bright and infectious as ever.

He got into his car, wound down the window and poked his head out. “Will we be seeing you soon? Isn’t it time you paid us a visit?”

“Is that an invitation?”

He started up the car. “Of course—any time.”

“Then I’ll make it soon,” I promised.

“Sooner!” he said.

Then I remembered something he had said. “David, you mentioned two manifestations of this—this ghostliness. What was the other one?”

“Eh?” He frowned at me, winding up his window. Then he stopped winding. “Oh, that. The bell, you mean…”

“Bell?” I echoed him, the skin of my neck suddenly tingling. “What bell?”

“A ghost bell!” he yelled as he pulled away from the kerb. “What else? It tolls underground or under the sea, usually when there’s a mist or a swell on the ocean. I keep listening for it, but—”

“No luck?” I asked automatically, hearing my own voice almost as that of a stranger.

“Not yet.”

And as he grinned one last time and waved a farewell, pulling away down the street, against all commonsense and logic I found myself remembering the old woman’s words outside the church: “What about the other bell, eh?”

What about the other bell, indeed…

IV: “Miasma”

Half-way back to Harden it dawned on me that I had not chosen a book for myself. My mind was still full of David Parker’s discoveries; about which, where he had displayed that curious excitement, I still experienced only a niggling disquiet.

But back at Harden, where my home stands on a hill at the southern extreme of the village, I remembered where once before I had seen something like the figure on David’s rubbing. And sure enough it was there in my antique, illustrated two-volume Family Bible; pages I had not looked into for many a year, which had become merely ornamental on my bookshelves.

The item I refer to was simply one of the many small illustrations in Judges XIII: a drawing of a piscine deity on a Philistine coin or medallion. Dagon, whose temple Samson toppled at Gaza.

Dagon…

With my memory awakened, it suddenly came to me where I had seen one other representation of this same god. Sunderland has a fine museum and my father had often taken me there when I was small. Amongst the museum’s collection of coins and medals I had seen…