A Coven of Vampires

by Brian Lumley

  “That second time,” he continued, “everyone believed I had fallen into the tank in my sleep, and this was by no means a wild stretch of the imagination; as a boy I had been something of a somnambulist. At first even I believed it was so, for at that time I was still blind to the creature’s power over me. They say that the hagfish is blind, too, Mr Belton, and members of the better known species certainly are—but my hag was not blind. Indeed, primitive or not, I believed that after the first three or four times he was actually able to recognise me! I used to keep the creature in the tank where you saw the hammerheads, forbidding anyone else entry to that room. I would pay my visits at night, whenever the—mood—came on me; and he would be there, waiting for me, with his ugly mouth groping at the glass and his queer eyes peering out in awful anticipation. He would go straight to the steps as soon as I began to climb them, waiting for me restlessly in the water until I joined him there. I would wear a snorkel, so as to be able to breathe while he—while it….”

  Haggopian was trembling all over now and dabbing angrily at his face with his silk handkerchief. Glad of the chance to take my eyes off the man’s oddly glistening features, I finished off my drink and refilled my glass with the remainder of the beer in the bottle. The chill was long off the beer by then—the beer itself was almost stale—but in any case, understandably I believe, the edge had quite gone from my thirst for anything of Haggopian’s. I drank solely to relieve my mouth of its clammy dryness.

  “The worst of it was,” he went on after a while, “that what was happening to me was not against my will. As with the sharks and other host-fish, so with me. I enjoyed each hideous liaison as the alcoholic enjoys the euphoria of his whisky; as the drug addict delights in his delusions; and the results of my addiction were no less destructive! I experienced no more periods of delirium, such as I had known following my first two ‘sessions’ with the creature, but I could feel that my strength was slowly but surely being sapped. My assistants knew that I was ill, naturally—they would have had to be stupid not to notice the way my health was deteriorating or the rapidity with which I appeared to be ageing—but it was my wife who suffered the most.

  “I could have little to do with her, do you see? If we had led any sort of normal life then she must surely have seen the marks on my body. That would have required an explanation, one I was not willing—indeed, unable—to give! Oh, but I waxed cunning in my addiction, and no one guessed the truth behind the strange ‘disease’ which was slowly killing me, draining me of my life’s blood.

  “A little over a year later, in 1958, when I knew I was on death’s very doorstep, I allowed myself to be talked into undertaking another voyage. My wife loved me deeply still and believed a prolonged trip might do me good. I think that Costas had begun to suspect the truth by then; I even caught him one day in the forbidden room staring curiously at the cyclostome in its tank. His suspicion became even more aroused when I told him that the creature was to go with us. He was against the idea from the start. I argued however that my studies were incomplete, that I was not finished with the hag and that eventually I intended to release the fish at sea. I intended no such thing. In fact, I did not believe I would last the voyage out. From sixteen stone in weight I was down to nine!

  “We were anchored off the Great Barrier Reef the night my wife found me with the hagfish. The others were asleep after a birthday party aboard. I had insisted that they all drink and make merry so that I could be sure I would not be disturbed, but my wife had taken very little to drink and I had not noticed. The first thing I knew of it was when I saw her standing at the side of the tank, looking down at me and the…thing! I will always remember her face, the horror and awful knowledge written upon it, and her scream, the way it split the night!

  “By the time I got out of the tank she was gone. She had fallen or thrown herself overboard. Her scream had roused the crew and Costas was the first to be up and about. He saw me before I could cover myself. I took three of the men and went out in a little boat to look for my wife. When we got back Costas had finished off the hagfish. He had taken a great hook and gaffed the thing to death. Its head was little more than a bloody pulp, but even in death its suctorial mouth continued to rasp away—at nothing!

  “After that, for a whole month, I would have Costas nowhere near me. I do not think he wanted to be near me—I believe he knew that my grief was not solely for my wife!

  “Well, that was the end of the first phase, Mr Belton. I rapidly regained my weight and health, the years fell off my face and body, until I was almost the same man I had been. I say ‘almost’, for of course I could not be exactly the same. For one thing I had lost all my hair—as I have said, the creature had depleted me so thoroughly that I had been on death’s very doorstep—and also, to remind me of the horror, there were the scars on my body and the greater scar on my mind which hurt me still whenever I thought of the look on my wife’s face when last I had seen her.

  “During the next year I finished my book, but mentioned nothing of my discoveries during the course of my ‘Manatee Survey’, and nothing of my experiences with the awful fish. I dedicated the book, as you no doubt know, to the memory of my poor wife; but yet another year was to pass before I could get the episode with the hagfish completely out of my system. From then on I could not bear to think back on my terrible obsession.

  “It was shortly after I married for the second time that phase two began….

  “For some time I had been experiencing a strange pain in my abdomen, between my navel and the bottom of my ribcage, but had not troubled myself to report it to a doctor. I have an abhorrence of doctors. Within six months of the wedding the pain had disappeared—to be replaced by something far worse!

  “Knowing my terror of medical men, my new wife kept my secret, and though we neither of us knew it, that was the worst thing we could have done. Perhaps if I had seen about the thing sooner—

  “You see, Mr Belton, I had developed—yes, an organ! An appendage, a snout-like thing had grown out of my stomach, with a tiny hole at its end like a second navel! Eventually, of course, I was obliged to see a doctor, and after he examined me and told me the worst I swore him—or rather, I paid him—to secrecy. The organ could not be removed, he said, it was part of me. It had its own blood vessels, a major artery and connections with my lungs and stomach. It was not malignant in the sense of a morbid tumour. Other than this he was unable to explain the snout-like thing away. After an exhaustive series of tests, though, he was further able to say that my blood, too, had under gone a change. There seemed to be far too much salt in my system. The doctor told me then that by all rights I ought not to be alive!

  “Nor did it stop there, Mr Belton, for soon other changes started to take place—this time in the snout-like organ itself when that tiny navel at its tip began to open up!

  “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 trick ling 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 fisheyes—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!

  At last I understood the strange magnetism Haggopian had held for her, that magnetism not unlike the unholy attraction between the morbid hagfish of his story and its all too willing hosts! I understood, too, my previous interest in her classic, almost aristocratic features—for now I could see that they were those of a certain Athenian model lately of note! Haggopian’s third wife, wed to him on her eighteenth birthday! And then, as my swirling thoughts flashed back yet again to that second wife, “buried at sea”, I knew finally, cataclysmically, what the Armenian had meant when he said: “There is one who awaits me even now, and one other yet to come!”

  THE PICKNICKERS

  This story comes from a long time ago. I was a boy, so that shows how long ago it was. Part of it is from memory, and the rest is a reconstruction built up over the years through times when I’ve given it a lot of thought, filling in the gaps; for I wasn’t privy to everything that happened that time, which is perhaps as well. But I do know that I’m prone to nightmares, and I believe that this is where they have their roots, so maybe getting it down on paper is my rite of exorcism. I hope so.

  The summers were good and hot in those days, and no use anyone telling me that that’s just an old man speaking, who only remembers the good things; they were better summers! I could, and did, go down to the beach at Harden every day. I’d get burned black by the time school came around again at the end of the holidays. The only black you’d get on that beach these days would be from the coal dust. In fact there isn’t a beach anymore, just a sloping moonscape of slag from the pits, scarred by deep gullies where polluted water gurgles down to a scummy, foaming black sea.

  But at that time, men used to crab on the rocks when the tide was out, and cast for cod right off the sandbar where the small waves broke. And the receding sea would leave blue pools where we could swim in safety. Well, there’s probably still sand down there, but it’s ten foot deep under the strewn black guts of the mines, and the only pools now are pools of slurry.

  It was summer when the gypsies came, the days were long and hot, and the beach was still a great drift of aching white sand.

  Gypsies. They’ve changed, too, over the years. Now they travel in packs, motorized, in vehicles that shouldn’t even be on the roads: furtive and scruffy, long-haired thieves who nobody wants and who don’t much try to be wanted. Or perhaps I’m prejudiced. Anyway, they’re not the real thing anymore. But in those days they were. Most of them, anyway….

  Usually they’d come in packets of three or four families, small communities plodding the roads in their intricately painted, hand-carved horse-drawn caravans, some with canvas roofs and some wooden; all brass and black leather, varnished wood and lacquered chimney-stacks, wrinkled brown faces and shiny brown eyes; with clothes pegs and various gewgaws, hammered trinkets and rings that would turn your fingers green, strange songs sung for halfpennies and fortunes told from the lines in your hand. And occasionally a curse if someone was bad to them and theirs.

  My uncle was the local doctor. He’d lost his wife in the Great War and never remarried. She’d been a nurse and died somewhere on a battlefield in France. After the war he’d travelled a lot in Europe and beyond, spent years on the move, not wanting to settle. And when she was out of his system (not that she ever was, not really; her photo graphs were all over the house) then he had come home again to England, to the northeast where he’d been born. In the summers my parents would go down from Edinburgh to see him, and leave me there with him for company through the holidays.

  This summer in question would be one of the last—of that sort, anyway—for the next war was already looming; of course, we didn’t know that then.

  “Gypsies, Sandy!” he said that day, just home from the mine where there’d been an accident. He was smudged with coal dust, which turned his sweat black where it dripped off him, with a pale band across his eyes and a white dome to his balding head from the protection of a miner’s helmet.

  “Gypsies?” I said, all eager. “Where?”

  “Over in Slater’s Copse. Seen ’em as I came over the viaduct. One caravan at least. Maybe there’ll be more later.”

  That was it: I was supposed to run now, over the fields to the copse, to see the gypsies. That way I wouldn’t ask questions about the accident in the mine. Uncle Zachary didn’t much like to talk about his work, especially if the details were unpleasant or the resolution an unhappy one. But I wanted to know anyway. “Was it bad, down the mine?”

  He nodded, the smile slipping from his grimy face as he saw that I’d seen through his ruse. “A bad one, aye,” he said. “A man’s lost his legs and probably his life. I did what I could.” Following which he hadn’t wanted to say any more. And so I went off to see the gypsies.

  Before I actually left the house, though, I ran upstairs to my attic room. From there, through the binoculars Uncle Zachary had given me for my birthday, I could see a long, long way. And I could even see if he’d been telling the truth about the gypsies, or just pulling my leg as he sometimes did, a simple way of distracting my attention from the accident. I used to sit for hours up there, using those binoculars through my dormer window, scanning the land all about.

  To the south lay the colliery: “Harden Pit”, as the locals called it. Its chimneys were like long, thin guns aimed at the sky; its skeletal towers with their huge spoked wheels turning, lifti
ng or lowering the cages; and at night its angry red coke ovens roaring, discharging their yellow and white-blazing tonnage to be hosed down into mounds of foul-steaming coke.

  Harden Pit lay beyond the viaduct with its twin lines of tracks glinting in the sunlight, shimmering in a heat haze. From here, on the knoll where Uncle Zachary’s house stood—especially from my attic window—I could actually look down on the viaduct a little, see the shining tracks receding toward the colliery. The massive brick structure that sup ported them had been built when the collieries first opened up, to provide transport for the black gold, one viaduct out of many spanning the becks and streams of the northeast where they ran to the sea. “Black gold”, they’d called coal even then, when it cost only a few shillings per hundred weight!

  This side of the viaduct and towards the sea cliffs, there stood Slater’s Copse, a close-grown stand of oaks, rowans, hawthorns and hazelnuts. Old Slater was a farmer who had sold up to the coal industry, but he’d kept back small pockets of land for his and his family’s enjoyment, and for the enjoyment of everyone else in the colliery communities. Long after this whole area was laid to waste, Slater’s patches of green would still be here, shady oases in the grey and black desert.

  And in the trees of Slater’s Copse…Uncle Zachary hadn’t been telling stories after all! I could glimpse the varnished wood, the young shire horse between his shafts, the curve of a spoked wheel behind a fence.

  And so I left the house, ran down the shrub-grown slope of the knoll and along the front of the cemetery wall, then straight through the graveyard itself and the gate on the far side, and so into the fields with their paths leading to the new coast road on the one side and the viaduct on the other. Forsaking the paths, I forged through long grasses laden with pollen, leaving a smoky trail in my wake as I made for Slater’s Copse and the gypsies.