Haggopian and Other Stories

“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!”