Haggopian and Other Stories

by Brian Lumley

  From the open door in the House of Cthulhu, whereinto the host of greedy reavers had rushed to discover the treasure, there now came loud and singularly hideous cries of fear and torment, and of a sudden an even more hideous stench. And now Zar-thule knew truly indeed that there was no treasure.

  Great ebony clouds gathered swiftly and livid lightning crashed; winds rose up that blew Zar-thule’s long black hair over his face as he crouched in horror before the open door of the House of Cthulhu. Wide and wide were his eyes as he tried to peer beyond the reeking blackness of that nameless, ancient aperture—but a moment later he dropped his great sword to the ground and screamed; even the Reaver of Reavers, screamed most terribly.

  For two of his wolves had appeared from out the darkness, more in the manner of whipped puppies than true wolves, shrieking and babbling and scrambling frantically over the queer angles of the orifice’s mouth…but they had emerged only to be snatched up and squashed like grapes by titanic tentacles that lashed after them from the dark depths beyond! And these rubbery appendages drew the crushed bodies back into the inky blackness, from which there instantly issued forth the most monstrously nauseating slobberings and suckings before the writhing members once more snaked forth into the dawn light. This time they caught at the edges of the opening, and from behind them pushed forward—a face!

  Zar-thule gazed upon the enormously bloated visage of Cthulhu and he screamed again as that terrible Being’s awful eyes found him where he crouched—found him and lit with an hideous light!

  The reaver king paused, frozen, petrified, for but a moment, and yet long enough that the ultimate horror of the thing framed in the titan threshold seared itself upon his brain forever. Then his legs found their strength. He turned and fled, speeding away and over the low black hills, and down to the shore and into his ship, which he somehow managed, even single-handed and in his frantic terror, to cast off. And all the time in his mind’s eye there burned that fearful sight—the awful Visage and Being of Lord Cthulhu.

  There had been the tentacles, springing from a greenly pulpy head about which they sprouted like lethiferous petals about the heart of an obscenely hybrid orchid; a scaled and amorphously elastic body of immense proportions, with clawed feet fore and hind; long, narrow wings ill-fitting the horror that bore them in that it seemed patently impossible for any wings to lift so fantastic a bulk—and then there had been the eyes! Never before had Zar-thule seen such evil, rampant and expressed, as in the ultimately leering malignancy of Cthulhu’s eyes!

  And Cthulhu was not finished with Zar-thule, for even as the king reaver struggled madly with his sail the monster came across the low hills in the dawn light, slobbering and groping down to the very water’s edge. Then, when Zar-thule saw against the morning the mountain that was Cthulhu, he went mad for a period; flinging himself from side to side of his ship so that he was like to fall into the sea, frothing at the mouth and babbling horribly in pitiful prayer—aye, even Zar-thule, whose lips never before uttered prayers—to certain benevolent gods of which he had heard. And it seems that these kind gods, if indeed they exist, must have heard him.

  With a roar and a blast greater than any before, there came the final shattering that saved Zar-thule for a cruel future, and the entire island split asunder; even the bulk of Arlyeh breaking into many parts and settling into the sea. And with a piercing scream of frustrated rage and lust—a scream which Zar-thule heard with his mind as well as his ears—the monster Cthulhu sank Him down also with the island and His House beneath the frothing waves.

  A great storm raged then such as might attend the end of the world. Banshee winds howled and demon waves crashed over and about Zar-thule’s dragonship, and for two days he gibbered and moaned in the rolling, shuddering scuppers of crippled Redfire before the mighty storm wore itself out.

  Eventually, close to starvation, the one-time Reaver of Reavers was discovered becalmed upon a flat sea not far from the fair strands of bright Theem’hdra; and then, in the spicy hold of a rich merchant’s ship, he was borne in unto the wharves of the city of Klühn, Theem’hdra’s capital.

  With long oars he was prodded ashore, stumbling and weak and crying out in his horror of living—for he had gazed upon Cthulhu! The use of the oars had much to do with his appearance, for now Zar-thule was changed indeed, into something which in less tolerant parts of that primal land might certainly have expected to be burned. But the people of Klühn were kindly folk; they burned him not but lowered him in a basket into a deep dungeon cell with torches to light the place, and daily bread and water that he might live until his life was rightly done. And when he was recovered to partial health and sanity, learned men and physicians went to talk with him from above and ask him of his strange affliction, of which all and all stood in awe.

  I, Teh Atht, was one of them that went to him, and that was how I came to hear this tale. And I know it to be true, for oft and again over the years I have heard of this Loathly Lord Cthulhu that seeped down from the stars when the world was an inchoate infant. There are legends and there are legends, and one of them is that when times have passed and the stars are right Cthulhu shall slobber forth from His House in Arlyeh again, and the world shall tremble to His tread and erupt in madness at His touch.

  I leave this record for men as yet unborn, a record and a warning; leave well enough alone, for that is not dead which deeply dreams, and while perhaps the submarine tides have removed forever the alien taint which touched Arlyeh—that symptom of Cthulhu, which loathsome familiar grew upon Hath Vehm and transferred itself upon certain of Zar-thule’s reavers—Cthulhu Himself yet lives on and waits upon those who would set Him free. I know it is so. In dreams…I myself have heard His call!

  And when dreams such as these come in the night to sour the sweet embrace of Shoosh, I wake and tremble and pace the crystal-paved floors of my rooms above the Bay of Klühn, until Cthon releases the sun from his net to rise again, and ever and ever I recall the aspect of Zar-thule as last I saw him in the flickering torchlight of his deep-dungeon cell:

  A fumbling grey mushroom thing that moved not of its own volition but by reason of the parasite growth which lived upon and within it…

  The Night Sea-Maid Went Down

  I wrote a handful of stories while serving as a recruiting Sergeant in Leicester. “Sea-Maid” was one of them and I completed it in mid-December 1969. Derleth liked it and found it suitable for inclusion in The Caller of The Black. Like quite a few other tales of mine, it hints strongly of my fascination with the sea—and with the Cthulhu Mythos, of course.

  J. H. Grier (Director) “Queen of the Wolds Inn,”

  Grier & Anderson, Cliffside,

  Seagasso, Bridlington,

  Sunderland, Yorks.

  Co. Durham. Nov. 29th

  Dear Johnny;

  By now I suppose you’ll have read my “official” report, sent off to you from this address on the fourteenth of the month, three days after the old Sea-Maid went down. How I managed that report I’ll never know—but anyway, I’ve been laid up ever since, so if you’ve been worried about me or wondering why I haven’t let on about my whereabouts till now, well, it’s not really been my fault. I just haven’t been up to doing much writing since the disaster. Haven’t been up to much of anything for that matter. But, as you’ll have seen from my report, I’ve made up my mind to quit, and suppose it’s only right I give you what I can of an explanation for my decision. After all, you’ve been paying me good money to gang-boss your rigs these last four years, and no complaints there. In fact I’ve no complaints period—nothing Seagasso could sort out at any rate—but I’m damned if I’ll sink sea-wells again. In fact I’m finished for good with all prospecting—sea, land…it makes no difference. Why!—when I think of what might have happened at any time in the last four years—

  And now it has happened!

  But there I go stalling again. I’ll admit right now that I’ve torn up three versions of this letter, pondering the results of the
m reaching you; but now, having thought it all out, frankly I don’t give a damn what you do with what I’m going to tell you. You can send an army of head-shrinkers after me if you like. One thing I’m sure of though…whatever I say you won’t suspend the North Sea operations—”The country’s economy”, and all that.

  At least my story will give old Anderson a laugh; the hard, unimaginative, stoic old bastard; and no doubt about it the story I have to tell is fantastic enough. I suppose it could be argued that I was “in my cups” that night (and it’s true enough, I’d had a few) but I can hold my drink, as you well know. Still, the facts—as I know them—drunk or sober, remain simply fantastic.

  Now, you’ll remember that right from the start there was something funny about the “site” off Hunterby Head. The divers had trouble; the geologists, too, with their instruments; and it was the very devil of a job to float Sea-Maid down from Sunderland and get her anchored there; but nevertheless the preliminaries were all completed by late in September. Which, where I’m concerned, was where the trouble started.

  We hadn’t drilled more than six-hundred feet into the sea-bed when we brought up that first star-shaped thing. Now, Johnny, you know something?—I wouldn’t have given two damns for the thing—except I’d seen one before. Old Chalky Grey (who used to be with the “Lescoil” rig Ocean-Jem, out of Liverpool) had sent me one only a few weeks before his platform and all the crew, including Chalky himself, went down twelve miles out from Withnersea. Somehow, when I saw what came up in the big core—that same star-shape—well, I couldn’t help but think of Chalky and see some sort of nasty parallel. The one he’d sent me came up in a core, too, you see? And Ocean-Jem wasn’t the only rig lost last year in so-called “freak storms”!

  But anyway, regards those star-shaped stones, something more: I wasn’t the only one to escape with my life on the night Sea-Maid went down. No, that’s not strictly true, I was the only one to live through that night—but there was a certain member of the team who saw what was coming and got out before it happened—and it was mainly because of the star-shaped things that he went!

  Joe Borszowski was the man—superstitious as hell, panicky, spooked at the sight of a mist on the sea—and when he saw the star-thing…!

  It happened like this:

  We’d drilled that first difficult bore through some very hard stuff down to a depth of some six hundred feet when a core-sample produced the first of the stars. Now, Chalky had reckoned the one he sent me to be a fossilized star-fish of sorts from some time when the North Sea was warm, a very ancient thing; and I must admit that with its five-pointed shape and being the size of a small star-fish I believed him to be correct. Anyway, when I showed the Sea-Maid star to old Borszowski he nearly went crackers. He swore we were in for trouble and demanded we all stop drilling and head for land right away. He insisted that our location was “accursed” and generally carried on like a mad thing without attempting to offer anything like a real explanation.

  Well, of course I couldn’t just leave it at that. If one of the lads was round the twist, as it were (meaning Borszowski) he could well affect the whole operation, jeopardize the whole thing, especially if his madness caught him at an important time. My immediate reaction was to want him off the rig; but the radio had been giving us a bit of bother so that I couldn’t call in Wes Atlee, the chopper pilot. Yes, I’d seriously considered having the Pole lifted off by chopper. Riggers can be damned superstitious, as you well know, and I didn’t want Joe “infecting” the others. As it turned out, that sort of action wasn’t necessary, for in no time at all old Borszowski was round apologising for his outburst and trying to show he was sorry about all the fuss he’d made. Something told me, though, that he’d been quite serious about his fears—whatever they were. And so, to put the Pole’s mind at rest (if I possibly could) I decided to have the rig’s geologist, Carson, take the star to bits and have a closer look at it and let me know what the thing actually was.

  Of course, he’d tell me it was simply a fossilised star-fish—I’d report the fact to Borszowski—things would be back to normal. So naturally when Carson told me that the thing wasn’t a fossil, that he didn’t know exactly what it was, well, I kept that bit of information to myself and told Carson to do the same. I was sure that whatever the trouble had been with Borszowski it wouldn’t be helped any by telling him that the star-thing was not a perfectly ordinary, completely explicable object.

  The drilling brought up two or three more of the stars down to about a thousand feet but nothing after that, so for a period I forgot all about them. As it happened I should have listened a bit more willingly to old Joe—and I would have, too, if I’d followed my intuition. You see, I’d been spooked myself right from the start. The mists were too heavy, the sea too quiet—things were altogether too queer all the way down the line. Of course, I didn’t experience any of the early troubles the divers and geologists had known—I didn’t join the rig till she was in position, ready to chew—but I was certainly in on it from then on. It had really started with the sea-phones, even before those stars came along.

  Now you know I’m not knocking your ’phones, Johnny, they’ve been a damn good thing ever since Seagasso developed them, giving readings right down to the inch almost, so’s we could tell just exactly when the drill was going through into gas or oil. And they didn’t let us down this time either—we just failed to recognize or heed their warning, that’s all.

  In fact there were lots of warnings, but, as I’ve said, it started out with the sea-phones. We’d put a ’phone down inside each leg of the rig, right onto the sea-bed where they sat listening to the drill as it cut its way through the rocks, picking up the echoes as the bit worked its way down and the sounds of the cutting rebounded from the strata below. And of course, everything they heard we picked up on the surface—duplicated electronically and fed out to us through our computer. Which was why we believed initially that either the computer was on the blink or one of the ’phones was dicky. You see, even when we weren’t drilling—when we were changing bits, joining up lengths or lining the bore—we were still getting readings from the computer!

  Oh, the trouble was there all right, whatever it was, but it was showing up so regularly that we were fooled into believing the fault to be mechanical. On the seismograph it showed as a regular blip in an otherwise perfectly normal line; a blip that came up bang on time once every five seconds or so—blip…blip…blip—very odd! But, seeing that in every other respect the information coming out of the computer was spot on, no one worried over much about those inexplicable deviations. And, as you’ll see, it wasn’t till the very end I found a reason for them. Oh, yes, those blips were there right to the finish—but in between there came other difficulties; one of them being the trouble with the fish.

  Now, if that sounds a bit funny, well, it was a funny business. The lads had rigged up a small platform, slung twenty feet or so below the main platform and about the same height above the water, and in their off-duty hours when they weren’t resting or knocking back a pint in the mess, you could usually see one or two of them down there fishing. First time we found anything odd in the habits of the fish around the rig was one morning when Nick Adams hooked a beauty. All of three feet long, the fish was, wriggling and yellow in the cold November sunlight. Nick just about had the fish docked when the hook came out of its mouth so that it fell among some support-girders down near where leg number four was being washed by a slight swell. It just lay there, flopping about a bit, writhing around in the girders. Nick scrambled down after it with a rope round his waist while his brother Dave hung on to the other end. And what do you think?—when he got down to it, damned if the fish didn’t go for him! It actually made to bite him, flopping after him on the girders and snapping its jaws until he had to yell for Dave to haul him up. Later he told us about it—how the damned thing hadn’t even tried to get back into the sea, seeming more interested in setting its teeth in him than preserving its own life! Now, you’d expec
t that sort of reaction from a great eel, Johnny, wouldn’t you?—but hardly from a cod—not from a North-Sea cod!

  From then on Spelmann, the diver, couldn’t go down—not wouldn’t mind you, couldn’t—the fish simply would not let him! They’d chew on his suit, his air-hose—he got so frightened of them he became literally useless to us. I can’t see as I blame him though, especially when I think of what later happened to Davies.

  But of course, before Davies’ accident, there was that further trouble with Borszowski. It was in the sixth week, when we were expecting to break through at any time, that Joe failed to come back off shore-leave. Instead he sent me a long, rambling letter—a supposedly “explanatory” letter—and to be truthful, when I read it I figured we were better off without him.

  The man had quite obviously been cracking up for a long time. He went on about monsters (yes, monsters!), sleeping in great caverns underground and especially under the seas, waiting for a chance to take over the surface world. He said that those stone, star-shaped things were seals or barriers that kept these beings (“gods”, he called them) imprisoned; that these gods could control the weather to a degree; that they were even capable of influencing the actions of lesser creatures—such as fish, or, occasionally, men—and that he believed one of them must he lying there, locked in the ground beneath the sea, pretty close to where we were drilling. He was afraid we were “going to set it loose”! The only thing that had stopped him pressing the matter earlier (when he’d carried on so about that first star-thing), was that then, as now, he believed we’d all think he was mad! Finally, though, and particularly since the trouble with the fish, he had had to warn me. As he put it: “If anything should happen, I would never be able to forgive myself if I had not at least tried.”