A Coven of Vampires (22 page)

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 rasp-like voice making a running commentary as we visited in turn the bungalow’s many wings:

“An unusual coelenterate, this one, from three thousand feet. Difficult to keep alive—pressure and all that. I call it
Physalia haggopia
—quite deadly. If one of those tentacles should even brush you…
phttt
!
Makes a water-baby of the Portuguese Man-o’-War” (this of a great purplish mass with trailing, wispy-green tentacles, undulating horribly through the water of a tank of huge proportions). Haggopian, as he spoke, deftly plucked a small fish from an open tank on a nearby table, throwing it up over the lip of the greater tank to his “unusual coelenterate”. The fish hit the water with a splash, swam down and straight into one of the green wisps—and instantly stiffened! In a matter of seconds the hideous jellyfish had settled on its prey to commence a languid ingestion.

“Given time,” Haggopian gratingly commented, “it would do the same to you!”

In the largest room of all—more a hall than a room proper—I paused, literally astonished at the size of the tanks and the expertise which had obviously gone into their construction. Here, where sharks swam through brain and other coral formations, the glass of these miniature oceans must have been tremendously thick, and backdrops had been arranged to give the impression of vast distances and sprawling submarine vistas.

In one of these tanks hammerheads of over two metres in length were cruising slowly from side to side, ugly as hell and looking twice as dangerous. Metal steps led up to this tank’s rim, down the other side and into the water itself. Haggopian must have seen the puzzled expression on my face for he said: “This is where I used to feed my lampreys—they had to be handled carefully. I have none now; I returned the last of my specimens to the sea three years ago.”

Three years ago? I peered closer into the tank as one of the hammerheads slid his belly along the glass. There on the white and silver underside of the fish, between the gill-slits and down the belly, numerous patches of raw red showed, many of them forming clearly defined circles where the close-packed scales had been removed and the suckerlike mouths of the lampreys had been at work. No, Haggopian’s “three years” had no doubt been a slip of the tongue—three days, more like it! Many of the wounds were clearly of recent origin, and before the Armenian ushered me on I was able to see that at least another two of the hammerheads were similarly marked.

I stopped pondering my host’s mistake when we passed into yet another room whose specimens must surely have caused any conchologist to cry out in delight. Again tanks lined the walls, smaller than many of the others I had so far seen, but marvellously laid out to duplicate perfectly the natural environs of their inhabitants. These inhabitants were the living gems of almost every ocean on earth; great conches and clams from the South Pacific; the small, beautiful
Haliotis excavata
and
Murex monodon
from the Great Barrier Reef; the amphora-like
Delphinula formosa
from China, and weird uni- and bivalves of every shape and size in their hundreds. Even the windows were of shell—great, translucent, pinkly-glowing fan-shells, porcelain thin yet immensely strong, from very deep waters—suffusing the room in blood tints as weird as the submarine dappling of the previous rooms. The aisles, too, were crammed with trays and showcases full of dry shells, none of them indexed in any way, and again Haggopian showed off his expertise by casually naming any specimens I paused to study and by briefly describing their habits and the foreign deeps in which they were indigenous.

My tour was interrupted here when Costas, the Greek who had brought me from Kletnos, entered this fascinating room of shells to murmur something of obvious importance to his employer. Haggopian nodded his head in agreement and Costas left, returning a few moments later with half-a-dozen other Greeks who each, in their turn, had a few words with Haggopian before departing. Eventually we were alone again.

“They were my men,” he told me, “some of them for almost twenty years, but now I have no further need of them. I have paid them their last wages, they have said their farewells, and now they are going away. Costas will take them to Kletnos and return later for you. By then I should have finished my story.”

“I don’t quite follow you, Mr Haggopian. You mean you’re going into seclusion here? What you said just then sounded ominously final.”

“Seclusion? Here? No, Mr Belton—but final, yes! I have learned as much of the sea as I can from here, and in any case only one phase in my education remains. For that phase I need no…tuition! You will see.”

He saw the puzzled look on my face and smiled a wry smile. “You find difficulty in understanding me, and that is hardly surprising. Few men, if any, have known my circumstances before, of that I am reasonably certain; and that is why I have chosen to speak now. You are fortunate in that you caught me at the right time; I would never have taken it upon myself to tell my story had I not been so persistently pursued—there are horrors best unknown—but perhaps the telling will serve as a warning. It gives me pause, the number of students devoted to the lore of the sea that would emulate my works and discoveries. But in any case, what you no doubt believed would be a simple interview will in fact be my swansong. Tomorrow, when the island is deserted, Costas will return and set all the living specimens loose. There are means here by which even the largest fishes might be returned to the sea. Then Haggopiana will be truly empty.”

“But why? To what end—and where do you intend to go?” I asked. “Surely this island is your base, your home and stronghold? It was here that you wrote your wonderful books, and—”

“My base and stronghold, as you put it, yes!” he harshly cut me off. “The island has been these things to me, Mr Belton, but my home? No more! That—is my home!” He shot a slightly trembling hand abruptly out in the general direction of the Cretan Sea and the Mediterranean beyond. “When your interview is over, I shall walk to the top of the rocks and look once more at Kletnos, the closest landmass of any reasonable size. Then I will take my
Echinoidea
and guide her out through the Kasos Straits on a direct and deliberate course until her fuel runs out. There can be no turning back. There is a place unsuspected in the Mediterranean—where the sea is so deep and cool, and where—”

He broke off and turned his strangely shining face to me: “But there—at this rate the tale will never be told. Suffice to say that the last trip of the
Echinoidea
will be to the bottom—and that I shall be with her!”

“Suicide?” I gasped, barely able to keep up with Haggopian’s rapid revelations. “You intend to—drown yourself?”

At that Haggopian laughed, a rasping cough of a laugh that somehow reminded me of a seal’s bark. “Drown myself? Can you drown these?” he opened his arms to encompass a miniature ocean of strange conches; “or these?” he waved through a door at a crystal tank of exotic fish.

For a few moments I stared at him in dumb amazement and concern, uncertain as to whether I stood in the presence of a sane man or—?

He gazed at me intently through the dark lenses of his glasses, and under the scrutiny of those unseen eyes I slowly shook my head, backing off a step.

“I’m sorry, Mr Haggopian—I just….”

“Unpardonable,” he rasped as I struggled for words, “my behaviour is unpardonable! Come, Mr Belton, perhaps we can be comfortable out here.” He led me through a doorway and out onto a patio surrounded by lemon and pomegranate trees. A white garden table and two cane chairs stood in the shade. Haggopian clapped his hands together once, sharply, then offered me a chair before clumsily seating himself opposite. Once again I noticed how all the man’s movements seemed oddly awkward.

An old woman, wrapped around Indian-fashion in white silk and with the lower half of her face veiled in a shawl that fell back over her shoulders, answered the Armenian’s summons. He spoke a few guttural yet remarkably
gentle
words to her in Greek. She went, stumbling a little with her years, to return a short while later with a tray, two glasses, and (amazingly) an English beer with the chill still on the bottle.

I saw that Haggopian’s glass was already filled, but with no drink I could readily recognize. The liquid was greenly cloudy—sediment literally swam in his glass—and yet the Armenian did not seem to notice. He touched glasses with me before lifting the stuff to his lips and drinking deeply. I too, took a deep draught, for I was very dry; but, when I had placed my glass back on the table, I saw that Haggopian was still drinking! He completely drained off the murky, unknown liquid, put down the glass and again clapped his hands in summons.

At this point I found myself wondering why the man did not remove his sunglasses. After all, we were in the shade, had been even more so during my tour of his wonderful aquarium. Glancing at the Armenian’s face I was reminded of his eye trouble as I again saw those thin trickles of liquid flowing down from behind the enigmatic lenses. And with the reappearance of this symptom of Haggopian’s optical affliction, the peculiar shiny film on his face also returned. For some time that—diffusion?—had seemed to be clearing; I had thought it was simply that I was becoming used to his looks. Now I saw that I had been wrong, his appearance was as odd as ever. Against my will I found myself thinking back on the man’s repulsive handshake….

“These interruptions may be frequent,” his rasp cut into my thoughts.“I am afraid that in my present phase I require a very generous intake of liquids!”

I was about to ask just what “phase” he referred to when the old woman came back with a further glass of murky fluid for her master. He spoke a few more words to her before she once more left us. I could not help but notice, though, as she bent over the table, how very dehydrated the woman’s face looked; with pinched nostrils, deeply wrinkled skin, and dull eyes sunk deep beneath the bony ridges of her eyebrows. An island peasant-woman, obviously—and yet, in other circumstances, the fine bone structure of that face might almost have seemed aristocratic. She seemed, too, to find a peculiar magnetism in Haggopian; leaning forward towards him noticeably, visibly fighting to control an apparent desire to touch him whenever she came near him.

“She will leave with you when you go. Costas will take care of her.”

“Was I staring?” I guiltily started, freshly aware of an odd feeling of unreality and discontinuity. “I’m sorry, I didn’t intend to be rude!”

“No matter—what I have to tell you makes a nonsense of all matters of sensibility. You strike me as a man not easily…
frightened
,
Mr Belton?”

“I can be surprised, Mr Haggopian, and shocked—but frightened? Well, among other things I have been a war correspondent for some time, and—”

“Of course, I understand—but there are worse things than the manmade horrors of war!”

“That may be, but I’m a journalist. It’s my job. I’ll take a chance on being—frightened.”

“Good! And please put aside any doubts you may by now have conceived regarding my sanity, or any you may yet conceive during the telling of my story. The proofs, at the end, will be ample.”

I started to protest but he quickly cut me off: “No, no, Mr Belton! You would have to be totally insensible not to have perceived the—strangeness here.”

He fell silent as for the third time the old woman appeared, placing a pitcher before him on the table. This time she almost fawned on him and he jerked away from her, nearly upsetting his chair. He rasped a few harsh words in Greek and I heard the strange, shrivelled creature sob as she turned to stumble away.

“What on earth is
wrong
with the woman?”

“In good time, Mr Belton,” he held up his hand, “all in good time.” Again he drained his glass, refilling it from the pitcher before commencing his tale proper; a tale through which I sat for the most part silent, later hypnotized, and eventually horrified to the end.

2.

“My first ten years of life were spent in the Cook Islands, and the next five in Cyprus,” Haggopian began, “always within shouting distance of the sea. My father died when I was sixteen, and though he had never acknowledged me in his lifetime he willed to me the equivalent of two-and-one-half millions of pounds sterling! When I was twenty-one I came into this money and found that I could now devote myself utterly to the ocean—my one real love in life. By that I mean
all
oceans. I love the warm Mediterranean and the South Pacific, but no less the chill Arctic Ocean and the teeming North Sea. Even now I love them—even now!

“At the end of the war I bought Haggopiana and began to build my
collection here. I wrote about my work and was twenty-nine years old when I finished
The Cradle Sea
.
Of course it was a labour of love. I paid for the publication of the first edition myself, and though money did not really matter, subsequent reprints repaid me more than adequately. It was my success with that book—I used to enjoy success—and with
The Sea: A New Frontier
,
which prompted me to commence work upon
Denizens of the Deep
.
I had been married to my first wife for five years by the time I had the first rough manuscript of my work ready, and I could have had the book published there and then but for the fact that I had become something of a perfectionist both in my writing and my studies. In short there were passages in the manuscript, whole chapters on certain species, with which I was not satisfied.

“One of these chapters was devoted to the sirenians. The dugong and the manatee, particularly the latter, had fascinated me for a long time in respect of their undeniable connections with the mermaid and siren legends of old renown; from which, of course, their order takes its name. However, it was more than merely this initially that took me off on my ‘Manatee Survey’, as I called those voyages, though at that time I could never have guessed at the importance of my quest. As it happened, my inquiries were to lead me to the first real pointer to my future—a frightful hint of my ultimate destination, though of course I never recognized it as such.” He paused.