Haggopian and Other Stories

“My men managed to net the strange fish without too much trouble and took it aboard, but they seemed to be having some difficulty getting it back out of the net and into the tank. You must understand, Mr. Belton, that these tanks were sunk into the decks, with their tops level with the planking. I went over to give a hand before the fish expired, and just as it seemed we were sorting the tangle out the creature began thrashing about! It came out of the net with one great flexing of its body—and took me with it into the tank!

“My men laughed at first, of course, and I would have laughed with them—if that awful fish had not in an instant fastened itself on my body, its suction-pad mouth grinding high on my chest and its eyes boring horribly into mine!”

III

After a short pause, during which pregnant interval his shining face worked horribly, the Armenian continued:

“I was delirious for three weeks after they dragged me out of the tank. Shock?—poison?—I did not know at the time. Now I know, but it is too late; possibly it was too late even then.

“My wife was with us as cook, and during my delirium, as I had feverishly tossed and turned in my cabin bed, she had tended me. Meanwhile my men had kept the hagfish—a previously unknown species of Myxinoidea—well supplied with small sharks and other fish. They never allowed the cyclostome to completely drain any of its hosts, you understand, but they knew enough to keep the creature healthy for me no matter its loathsome manner of taking nourishment.

“My recovery, I remember, was plagued by recurrent dreams of monolithic submarine cities, cyclopean structures of basaltic stone peopled by strange, hybrid beings part human, part fish and part batrachian; the amphibious Deep Ones, minions of Dagon and worshippers of sleeping Cthulhu. In those dreams, too, eerie voices called out to me and whispered things of my forebears—things which made me scream through my fever at the hearing!

“After I recovered the times were many I went below decks to study the hagfish through the glass sides of its tank. Have you ever seen a hagfish or lamprey close up, Mr. Belton? No? Then consider yourself lucky. They are ugly creatures, with looks to match their natures, eel-like and primitive—and their mouths, Belton—their horrible, rasp-like, sucking mouths!

“Two months later, toward the end of the voyage, the horror really began. By then my wounds, the raw places on my chest where the thing had had me, were healed completely; but the memory of that first encounter was still terribly fresh in my mind, and—

“I see the question written on your face, Mr. Belton, but indeed you heard me correctly—I did say my first encounter! Oh, yes! There were more encounters to come, plenty of them!”

At this point in his remarkable narrative Haggopian paused once more to dab at the rivulets of moisture seeping from behind his sun-glasses, and to drink yet again from the cloudy liquid in his glass. It gave me a chance to look about me; possibly I still sought an immediate escape route should such become necessary.

The Armenian was seated with his back to the great bungalow, and as I glanced nervously in that direction I saw a face move quickly out of sight in one of the smaller, porthole windows. Later, as mine host’s story progressed, I was able to see that the face in the windows belonged to the old servant woman, and that her eyes were fixed firmly upon him in a kind of hungry fascination. Whenever she caught me looking at her she withdrew.

“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—