Haggopian and Other Stories Page 3

  Now, Blowne House is a sprawling bungalow, and one particularly suited to my own singular tastes. I had utilised the unique design of the place in my plan and was satisfied that my present position offered the maximum of safety from the assault which I was reasonably sure was about to commence.

  Presently I heard the car again and this time it stopped right outside the house. Before the sound of the motor died away I heard the distinct crunch of gravel which told me the car had entered my driveway. After a few seconds a knock sounded upon the outside door. Again came the knock, following a short silence, but I remained quiet, not moving a fraction from my chair. As my hair stood slowly on end, a few more seconds crawled by and then I heard the outer door groan open. With a shock I realised that the sudden constriction I felt in my chest was caused by lack of air. Such was my concentration I had momentarily stopped breathing.

  My nerves had started to silently scream and though every light in the house was on, the place may as well have been as dark as the pit the way I felt. Slow footsteps sounded in the hall, approached past my study and halted just beyond the door facing me. My nerves stretched to breaking point and then, with startling abruptness, the door flew open to admit Gedney.

  As he strode in I rose from my seat and put down the book of poems. I was still acting but this time, though I tried to appear just a trifle drunk, my main role was one of utter astonishment. As I got to my feet I burst out:

  “Gedney! What on Earth…?” I leaned forward aggressively over the table. “What the devil’s the meaning of this? Who invited you here?” My heart was in my mouth but I played my part as best I could.

  “Good evening, Mr. Crow.” Gedney smiled evilly. “Who invited me? Why! You did; by your refusal to accept my warning and by your unwillingness to use your telephone. Whatever it is you know about me is matterless, Crow, and doomed to die with you tonight. At least you have the satisfaction of knowing that you were correct. I do have access to strange knowledge; knowledge which I intend to use right now. So I repeat: Good evening, Mr. Crow—and goodbye!”

  Gedney was standing between the table and the door, and as he finished speaking he threw up his hands and commenced bellowing, in a cracked, droning tone, an invocation of such evil inference that merely hearing it would have been sufficient to mortify souls only slightly more timid than mine. I had never heard this particular chant before, though I have heard others, but as the crescendo died away, its purpose became immediately apparent. During the invocation I had been frozen, literally paralysed by the sound of the thing, and I could fully understand how it was that Symonds had been forced to listen to it over his ’phone. From the first word Symonds would have stood like a statue with the receiver pressed to his ear, unable to move as his death-certificate was signed over the wire.

  As the echoes of that hideous droning died away Gedney lowered his hands and smiled. He had seen the envelope at my fingertips—and as his awful laugh began to fill the room I discovered the meaning of “The Black”…

  No witch-doctor’s curse this but an aeon-old fragment of sorcery handed down through nameless centuries. This came from a time in Earth’s abysmal past when unthinkable creatures from an alien and unknown universe spawned weird things in the primeval slime. The horror of it…

  A black snowflake landed on me! That is what the thing looked like. A cold, black snowflake which spread like a stain on my left wrist. But before I had time to examine that abnormality another fell onto my forehead. And then, rapidly, from all directions they came, ever faster, settling on me from out of the nether-regions. Horror-flakes that blinded and choked me.

  Blinded?…Choked?

  Before my mind’s eye, in shrieking letters, flashed those passages from Geoffrey, the Necronomicon and the Ibigib. “Thief of Light—Thief of Air…” The inscriptions at Geph, “…The spell of running water…” Alhazred— “That which is in water drowneth not…”

  The bait was taken; all that remained was to spring the trap. And if I were mistaken?

  Quickly, while I was still able, I drew the curtains at my left to one side and flicked the still-unopened envelope towards Gedney’s feet. Shedding my dressing-gown I stepped naked onto the tiles behind the curtains, tiles which were now partly visible to the fiend before me. Frantic, for a gibbering terror now held me in its icy grip, I clawed at the tap. The second or so the water took to circulate through the plumbing seemed an eternity, in which thousands more of those blasphemous flakes flew at me, forming a dull, black layer on any body.

  And then, mercifully, as the water poured over me, “The Black” was gone! The stuff did not wash from me—it simply vanished. No, that is not quite true—for it instantly reappeared elsewhere!

  Gedney had been laughing, baying like some great hound, but as I stepped into the shower and as the water started to run, he stopped. His mouth fell open and his eyes bugged horribly. He gurgled something

  unrecognisable and made ghastly, protesting gestures with his hands. He could not take in what had happened, for it had all been too fast for him. His victim was snatched from the snare and he could not believe his eyes. But believe he had to as the first black flakes began to fall upon him! The shadows darkened under his suddenly comprehending eyes and his aspect turned an awful grey as I spoke these words from the safety of the shower:

  “Let him who calls The Black,

  Be aware of the danger

  His victim may be protected

  by the spell of running water

  And turn the called-up darkness

  Against the very caller…”

  Nor did this alone satisfy me. I wanted Gedney to remember me in whichever hell he was bound for; and so, after repeating that warning of the elder Ptetholites, I said:

  “Good evening, Mr. Gedney—and goodbye…”

  Cruel? Ah! You may call me cruel—but had not Gedney planned the same fate for me? And how many others, along with Symonds and Chambers, had died from the incredible sorceries of this fiend?

  He had started to scream. Taken by surprise, he was almost completely covered by the stuff before he could move but now, as the horrible truth sank in, he tried to make it across the room to the shower. It was his only possible means of salvation and he stumbled clumsily round the table towards me. But if Gedney was a fiend so, in my own right, was I—and I had taken precautions. In the shower recess I had previously placed a windowpole, and snatching it up I now put it to use fending off the shrilly shrieking object before me.

  As more of “The Black,” the evil blood of Yibb-Tstll, settled on him, Gedney began the frantic brushing motions which I remembered so well, all the while babbling and striving to fight his way past my windowpole. By now the stuff was thick on him, inches deep, a dull, black mantle which covered him from head to toe. Only one eye and his screaming mouth remained visible and his outline was rapidly becoming the bloated duplicate of that hideous shadow I had seen on the night of Chambers’ death.

  It was now literally snowing black death in my room and the end had to follow quickly. Gedney’s bulging eye and screaming, frothing mouth seemed to sink into the ever thickening blackness and the noises he was making were instantly shut off. For a few seconds he did a monstrous, shuffling dance of agony, and unable to bear the sight any longer I used the pole to push him off his feet. My prayer that this action would put a quick end to it was answered. He pulsed! Yes, that is the only way I can describe the motion of his smothered body: he pulsed for a moment on the carpet—and then was still. Briefly then, the lights seemed to dim and a rushing wind filled the house. I must have momentarily fainted for I awoke to find myself stretched out full length on the carpet with the shower still hissing behind me. As mysteriously as it had come, “The Black” had departed, back to that other-dimensional body which housed it, taking Gedney’s soul and leaving his lifeless shell behind…

  Later, after a stiff drink, I opened the envelope and found the flaking, brittle shards I had expected. Later still, with the rapidly stiffening, lolli
ng corpse beside me, I drove out towards Gedney’s country home. I parked his car in a clump of trees, off the road, and in the small hours made my way back on foot to Blowne House. The brightening air was strangely sweet.

  Haggopian

  This one was written in mid-1970, by which time it seems I had improved somewhat! Still in the Army, I was a recruiting Sergeant in Leicester. When business was slow you would find me scribbling away at my desk. I did send a copy of “Haggopian” to Derleth at Arkham House, but he was ill and in 1971 died tragically young, leaving a gaping hole in the publishing of weird fiction which no one else seemed capable of plugging. The story was accepted by Jerry Page, for his magazine Coven 13 (later Witchcraft & Sorcery)—which almost immediately ceased publication! Finally, via my agent, Kirby McCauley, it found a home in the prestigious Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and appeared in the issue for June 1973. Haggopian was, and still is, one of my personal favourites.

  I

  Richard Haggopian, perhaps the world’s greatest authority on ichthyology and oceanography, to say nothing of the many allied sciences and subjects, was at last willing to permit himself to be interviewed. I was jubilant, elated—I could not believe my luck! At least a dozen journalists before me, some of them so high up in literary circles as to be actually offended by so mundane an occupational description, had made the futile journey to Kletnos in the Aegean to seek Haggopian the Armenian out; but only my application had been accepted. Three months earlier, in early June, Hartog of Time had been refused, and before him Mannhausen of Weltzukunft, and therefore my own superiors had seen little hope for me. And yet the name of Jeremy Belton was not unknown in journalism; I had been lucky on a number of so-called “hopeless” cases before. Now, it seemed, this luck of mine was holding. Richard Haggopian was away on yet another ocean trip, but I had been asked to wait for him.

  It is not hard to say why Haggopian excited such interest among the ranks of the world’s foremost journalists; any man with his scientific and literary talents, with a beautiful young wife, with an island-in-the-sun, and (perhaps most important of all), with a blatantly negative attitude toward even the most beneficial publicity, would certainly have attracted the same interest. And to top all this Haggopian was a millionaire!

  Myself, I had recently finished a job in the desert—the latest Arab-Israeli confrontation—to find myself with time and a little money to spare, and so my superiors had asked me to have a bash at Haggopian. That had been a fortnight ago and since then I had done my best towards procuring an interview. Where others had failed miserably I had been successful.

  For eight days I had waited on the Armenian’s return to Haggopiana—his tiny island hideaway two miles east of Kletnos and midway between Athens and Iraklion, purchased by and named after himself in the early 40s—and just when it seemed that my strictly limited funds must surely run out, then Haggopian’s great silver hydrofoil, the Echinoidea, cut a thin scar on the incredible blue of the sea to the south-west as it sped in to a mid-morning mooring. With binoculars from the flat white roof of my Kletnos—hotel?—I watched the hydrofoil circle the island until, in a blinding flash of reflected sunlight, it disappeared beyond Haggopiana’s wedge of white rock. Two hours later the Armenian’s man came across in a sleek motorboat to bring me (I hoped) news of my appointment. My luck was indeed holding! I was to attend Haggopian at three in the afternoon; a boat would be sent for me.

  At three I was ready, dressed in sandals, cool grey slacks and a white T-shirt—the recommended civilised attire for a sunny afternoon in the Aegean—and when the sleek motorboat came back for me I was waiting for it at the natural rock wharf. On the way out to Haggopiana, as I gazed over the prow of the craft down through the crystal-clear water at the gliding, shadowy groupers and the clusters of black sea-urchins (the Armenian had named his hydrofoil after the latter), I did a mental check-up on what I knew of the elusive owner of the island ahead:

  Richard Hemeral Angelos Haggopian, born in 1919 of an illicit union between his penniless but beautiful half-breed Polynesian mother and millionaire Armenian-Cypriot father—author of three of the most fascinating books I had ever read, books for the layman, telling of the world’s seas and all their multiform denizens in simple, uncomplicated language—discoverer of the Taumotu Trench, a previously unsuspected hole in the bed of the South Pacific almost seven thousand fathoms deep; into which, with the celebrated Hans Geisler, he descended in 1955 to a depth of twenty-four thousand feet—benefactor of the world’s greatest aquariums and museums in that he had presented at least two hundred and forty rare, often freshly discovered specimens to such authorities in the last fifteen years, etc., etc….

  Haggopian the much married—three times, in fact, and all since the age of thirty—apparently an unfortunate man where brides were concerned. His first wife (British) died at sea after nine years’ wedded life, mysteriously disappearing overboard from her husband’s yacht in calm seas on the shark-ridden Barrier Reef in 1958; number two (Greek-Cypriot) died in 1964 of some exotic wasting disease and was buried at sea; and number three—one Cleanthis Leonides, an Athenian model of note, wed on her eighteenth birthday—had apparently turned recluse in that she had not been seen publicly since her union with Haggopian two years previously.

  Cleanthis Haggopian—yes! Expecting to meet her, should I ever be lucky enough to get to see her husband, I had checked through dozens of old fashion magazines for photographs of her. That had been a few days ago in Athens, and now I recalled her face as I had seen it in those pictures—young, naturally, and beautiful in the Classic Greek tradition. She had been a “honey”; would, of course, still be; and again, despite rumours that she was no longer living with her husband, I found myself anticipating our meeting.

  In no time at all the flat white rocky ramparts of the island loomed to some thirty feet out of the sea, and my navigator swung his fast craft over to the left, passing between two jagged points of salt-incrusted rock standing twenty yards or so out from Haggopiana’s most northern point. As we rounded the point I saw that the east face of the island looked far less inhospitable; there was a white sand beach, with a pier at which the Echinoidea was moored, and, set back from the beach in a cluster of pomegranate, almond, locust and olive trees, an immensely vast and sprawling flat-roofed bungalow.

  So this was Haggopiana! Hardly, I thought, the “island paradise” of Weber’s article in Neu Welt! It looked as though Weber’s story, seven years old now, had been written no closer to Haggopiana than Kletnos; I had always been dubious about the German’s exotic superlatives.

  At the dry end of the pier my quarry waited. I saw him as, with the slightest of bumps, the motorboat pulled in to mooring. He wore grey flannels and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled down. His thin nose supported heavy, opaquely-lensed sunglasses. This was Haggopian—tall, bald, extremely intelligent and very, very rich—his hand already outstretched in greeting.

  • • •

  Haggopian was a shock. I had seen photographs of him of course, quite a few, and had often wondered at the odd sheen such pictures had seemed to give his features. In fact the only decent pictures I had seen of him had been pre-1958 and I had taken later shots as being simply the result of poor photography; his rare appearances in public had always been very short ones and unannounced, so that by the time cameras were clicking he was usually making an exit. Now, however, I could see that I had short-changed the photographers. He did have a sheen to his skin—a peculiar phosphorescence almost—that highlighted his features and even partially reflected something of the glare of the sun. There must, too, be something wrong with the man’s eyes. Tears glistened on his cheeks, rolling thinly down from behind the dark lenses. He carried in his left hand a square of silk with which, every now and then, he would dab at this telltale dampness; all this I saw as I approached him along the pier, and right from the start I found him strangely—yes, repulsive.

  “How do you do, Mr. Belton?” his voice was a thick, heavily acc
ented rasp that jarred with his polite inquiry and manner of expression. “I am sorry you have had to wait so long. I got your message in Famagusta, right at the start of my trip, but I am afraid I could not put my work off.”

  “Not at all, sir, I’m sure that this meeting will more than amply repay my patience.”

  His handshake was no less a shock, though I tried my best to keep him from seeing it, and after he turned to lead me up to the house I unobtrusively wiped my hand on the side of my T-shirt. It was not that Haggopian’s hand had been damp with sweat, which might be expected—rather, or so it seemed to me, I felt as though I had taken hold of a handful of garden snails!

  I had noticed from the boat a complex of pipes and valves between the sea and the house, and now, approaching that sprawling yellow building in Haggopian’s wake (his stride was clumsy, lolling), I could hear the muffled throb of pumps and the gush of water. Once inside the huge, refreshingly cool bungalow, it became apparent just what the sounds meant. I might have known that this man, so in love with the sea, would surround himself with his life’s work. The place was nothing less than a gigantic aquarium!

  Massive glass tanks, in some cases room length and ceiling high, made up the walls, so that the sunlight filtering through from exterior, porthole-like windows entered the room in greenish shades that dappled the marble floor and gave the place an eerie, submarine aspect.

  There were no printed cards or boards to describe the finny dwellers in the huge tanks, and as he led me from room to room it became clear why such labels were unnecessary. Haggopian knew each specimen intimately, his rasplike voice making a running commentary as we visited in turn the bungalow’s many wings: