Haggopian and Other Stories

“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 trickling 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 fish-eyes—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!