Haggopian and Other Stories (14 page)

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.

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 them 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 expect 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.