The Cthulhu Casebooks - Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic Monstrosities
Author: James Lovegrove
Date: 2017-11-21 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction; Mystery & Detective; General; Fantasy; Paranormal; Crime; Horror
Description: It is the spring of 1895, and more than a decade of combating eldritch entities has cost Dr John Watson his beloved wife Mary, and nearly broken the health of Sherlock Holmes. Yet the companions do not hesitate when they are called to the infamous Bedlam lunatic asylum, where they find an inmate speaking in R’lyehian, the language of the Old Ones. Moreover, the man is horribly scarred and has no memory of who he is. The detectives discover that the inmate was once a scientist, a student of Miskatonic University, and one of two survivors of a doomed voyage down the Miskatonic River to capture t
Publisher: Titan
Rights: Copyright © 2017 by James Lovegrove

CONTENTS

Cover

Also Available from James Lovegrove and Titan Books

Title Page

Copyright

Preface

Foreword

Part One

Chapter One: Living Targets

Chapter Two: The Anonymous Inmate

Chapter Three: The Stories and Real Life

Chapter Four: A Catch from the Trawl

Chapter Five: The Dead Menagerie

Chapter Six: Arbiters Upon the Unspeakable

Chapter Seven: Back to Bedlam

Chapter Eight: The Impossible Rather than the Improbable

Chapter Nine: Most Irregular Irregulars

Chapter Ten: The Near-Dead Detective

Chapter Eleven: The Looking-Glass World

Chapter Twelve: The Book and the Compass

Chapter Thirteen: To the Farmhouse

Chapter Fourteen: Attack of the Nightgaunt

Chapter Fifteen: The Nangchen Lamasery Liquor of Supremacy

Chapter Sixteen: A Banquet of Terror

Chapter Seventeen: Bearding the Lion in His Den

Chapter Eighteen: Flight to Far Cathuria

Chapter Nineteen: The Thing in the Cage

Part Two

Chapter Twenty: An Undergraduate in Arkham

Chapter Twenty-One: The Omnireticulum

Chapter Twenty-Two: The Innsmouth Belle

Chapter Twenty-Three: The R’luhlloig Peccadillo

Chapter Twenty-Four: Fort Fredericks

Chapter Twenty-Five: Black Water, Red Leech

Chapter Twenty-Six: The Mi-Go Expedition

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Forbidden Places

Chapter Twenty-Eight: A Realm of Twilight

Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Thing in the Pit

Chapter Thirty: Night of the Shoggoth

Chapter Thirty-One: Uncharted Waters

Chapter Thirty-Two: “You Cunnin’ Fellas Went An’ Made Yerselves a Monster”

Chapter Thirty-Three: A Foretaste of Damnation

Chapter Thirty-Four: What Motivates a Monster

Chapter Thirty-Five: The Terrible Arrogance of Gods

Chapter Thirty-Six: A Betrayer Betrayed

Chapter Thirty-Seven: A Well-Woven Web

Chapter Thirty-Eight: A Terrible Tug-of-War

Epilogue

THE CTHULHU CASEBOOKS

SHERLOCK HOLMES
and the Miskatonic Monstrosities

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM
JAMES LOVEGROVE AND TITAN BOOKS

THE CTHULHU CASEBOOKS

Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows

Sherlock Holmes and the Sussex Sea-Devils (November 2018)

THE NEW ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

The Stuff of Nightmares

Gods of War

The Thinking Engine

The Labyrinth of Death

The Devil’s Dust (June 2018)

Sherlock Holmes and the Christmas Demon (November 2019)

JAMES LOVEGROVE

TITAN BOOKS

The Cthulhu Casebooks: Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic Monstrosities

Hardback edition ISBN: 9781783295951

Paperback edition ISBN: 9781785652929

Electronic edition ISBN: 9781783295968

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark St, London SE1 0UP

First edition: November 2017

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

This is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2017 by James Lovegrove. All Rights Reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

PREFACE

BY JAMES LOVEGROVE

HERE IS THE SECOND OF THE THREE MANUSCRIPTS I inherited recently in a somewhat roundabout way from a distant relative, the late Henry Prothero Lovecraft of Providence, Rhode Island. As with the first, it was written by Dr John Watson, a man known to millions across the globe as the chronicler of the exploits of his great friend, that pre-eminent Victorian Sherlock Holmes; and like the previous book, published under the title Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows, this one recounts an adventure of the world’s first consulting detective which in tone and content is largely at odds with the canon of four novels and fifty-six short stories hitherto published.

As Watson himself said in his foreword to The Shadwell Shadows, that book and its sequels “lay bare all that [Holmes] really did, all that he really achieved over the course of his life. They make up, for better or worse, an alternate history of his career, one that has the benefit of being unimpeachably true.”

Now, some may query that last statement. These three books deal, after all, with subject matter that seems far removed from everyday reality and contradict the ethos of rationalism and empiricism that Holmes customarily brought to his investigations. He was always dismissive of the supernatural. In “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire”, for example, he is on record as refusing even to consider the idea that a mother is feasting on the blood of her infant. The thought that vampires might exist provokes nothing but derision from him: “Rubbish, Watson, rubbish! What have we to do with walking corpses who can only be held in the grave by stakes driven through their hearts? It’s pure lunacy.”

Yet The Shadwell Shadows shows him developing a belief in, and then confronting, just the sort of paranormal phenomena to which he gives such short shrift in the quotation above. Similarly this book, The Miskatonic Monstrosities, and the last of the three, The Sussex Sea-Devils, depict a Holmes – and a Watson – aware of the fact that ancient entities of godlike power and hostile intent lurk at the fringes of our world and striving to mitigate the harm and havoc these beings can wreak on human lives.

The trilogy ventures into territory marked out by the famed master of uncanny literature, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, with whom Watson corresponded a great deal in his declining years. Lovecraft and several contemporaries – principally Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, Robert Bloch, Frank Belknap Long, Henry Kuttner and Fritz Leiber – between them codified the nature and lore of what is nowadays called the Cthulhu Mythos. Watson, who by his own admission read some of their output in American pulp magazines such as Weird Tales during the 1920s, seems to have alighted eagerly on their shared preoccupation and found it intriguing and familiar.

This would be because, by then, Sherlock Holmes had spent a lifetime secretly combating various manifestations of the Great Old Ones and the Outer Gods, with loyal Watson constantly at his side. That is the story that these three books, collectively known as The Cthulhu Casebooks, tell.

There are those who might argue that the evidence points in the opposite direction. Such people would contend that Watson became infected by “Cthulhu fever” and decided, for some reason or other, to reinvent the history of Holmes’s career to incorporate Lovecraftian elements of cosmic horror. Since he wrote the three books very late in life, it has even been suggested that they are the product of a man succumbing to the delusions and confusion of old age; that as Watson’s body was deteriorating, so was his mind. Senile dementia left him prey to fantasies which his younger, fitter self would have had no difficulty rejecting.

I would refute this assertion simply by saying that the writing in the trilogy is as sharp and focused as any he produced, and if anything more honest and impassioned. If Watson was losing his marbles, there’s no sign of it in the novels’ execution.

I would also refute accusations made by various people – in online forums, in reviews of The Shadwell Shadows – that the author of The Cthulhu Casebooks isn’t Watson at all, but me. As evidence I would point them no further than this very book. For one thing, its structure mimics closely that of two of the canonical Sherlock Holmes novels, A Study in Scarlet and The Valley of Fear. It is divided into two parts. The first involves Holmes directly; the second, containing a subsidiary narrative nested within the primary narrative, details past events which illuminate the case he investigates. From a purely forensic point of view, this would surely indicate authenticity. The format is as individual as a fingerprint.

Then there’s the narrative-within-a-narrative itself, which with its high-flown reportage style bears a strong resemblance to the writing of Lovecraft. If this book is my handiwork, then I would be pastiching not just one author but two. Only a very bold person, or a very foolhardy one, would attempt that. Anyone who knows me will be able to tell you that I’m neither of those things.

In my preface to The Shadwell Shadows I tentatively advanced the possibility that Henry Prothero Lovecraft was the trilogy’s true author, and thus the perpetrator of a hoax. In my considered view, though, there is no question that these books are genuinely the work of Watson. It’s an older, wiser, more sombre Watson than readers are perhaps used to, who has gone through more than his fair share of hellish situations and stared too deeply into the abyss, but still the same redoubtable, earnest figure we know from the canon, the sidekick who endured so much ridicule from Holmes because he knew what a privilege it was to be that man’s one and only real friend.

J. M. H. L., EASTBOURNE
November 2017

FOREWORD

BY DR JOHN WATSON, MD

“I HAVE NEVER KNOWN MY FRIEND TO BE IN BETTER FORM, both mental and physical, than in the year 1895.”

I may have written thus about Sherlock Holmes in the first line of the story known as “The Adventure of Black Peter”, but it could not have been more false. In fact, the very opposite was true. I never knew him to be in worse form than in that year.

The tale shows him as being at the pinnacle of his career as a consulting detective, with illustrious clients fairly hammering down the door at 221B Baker Street in their eagerness to engage his services. During the opening paragraphs I indulged in a little judicious name-dropping, an aristocrat here, a pontiff there. In others of my published accounts of his exploits in ’95 I had Holmes unmask a Central American despot who was in hiding in London, engineer the arrest of a foreign spy determined to acquire top-secret plans for a submarine, and fathom the identity of the bearded cyclist who followed Miss Violet Smith on her journey from Chiltern Grange to Farnham railway station every Saturday morning.

All of this served to give the impression that the man was flourishing professionally, that his health was good, his bank balance sound, his public status at its zenith, his zest for life inexhaustible.

Would that it had been so.

Holmes, in truth, was in very poor shape. It was fifteen years since he and I had stumbled upon a new world – a world of profane cosmic entities, hidden races, black magic and ancient evils – a world in which rationality, the rule of law and the comforts of Christianity had no place. From that time on we dedicated ourselves to combating the forces of darkness wherever they manifested, defeating them when we could, corralling them when we couldn’t. We had come to the aid of people caught up in conspiracies so inexplicable that no policeman might resolve them, or even any priest. We had banished horrors, vanquished monsters, and rescued more than one bedevilled innocent from the clutches of madness.

Most of these incidents were so blood-curdlingly horrific I can hardly bear to recollect them now. Moreover, I could not have made them a matter of public record, not without revealing too much of the sinister reality that lies beneath the placid surface of what we call civilisation. Yet neither could I not write about them in some form or other, if only so as to rid my mind of a portion of their encumbrance. Thus, commencing in 1886, I set about putting down on paper the adventures in which Holmes and I participated; but I recast them in such a way that they would appear entirely credible to any who read them and would carry not the merest whiff of the supernatural.

My initial efforts, the novels A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four, received a decent enough critical reception, although they were poorly served by their publisher Ward Lock & Co., as was I. The first of the twain drew upon autobiographical elements – my service in Afghanistan, my first meeting with Sherlock Holmes – but re-envisioned them to seem more mundane than they genuinely were. The majority of the book was all my own invention.

The second novel likewise incorporated aspects of my own history, principally the happy confluence of fate that brought me and Mary Morstan together and led to her becoming, for all too brief a span, my beloved wife. Much of the narrative cleaves to events as they happened, but I downplayed certain of the less easily palatable aspects. One-legged Jonathan Small, for instance, was no mere ex-soldier with a grudge but a man who had become a student of the mystical arts during his time in India, learning at the feet of swamis and sadhus. Accordingly, his accomplice-in-crime was not a diminutive Andaman islander called Tonga but a loathsome homunculus whom Small kept contained in a spirit jar and was able to conjure up in corporeal form when required. Furthermore, the debilitating illness from which Major Sholto suffered was not malaria but rather the leprosy-like effects of a curse laid upon him by Small. As for the Agra treasure, I shudder whenever I recall what was contained in that iron box with the Buddha hasp. If only it had been something as beautiful and inert as jewels.

As the years went by, I continued to turn Holmes’s and my adventures into fiction. Largely I confined myself to short stories, but there were two further novels, The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Valley of Fear. All of these literary endeavours George Newnes was good enough to publish in his magazine The Strand, the novels in serialised form. Newnes compensated me appropriately, too, unlike Messrs Ward and Lock. The stories became a huge success and furnished me with a considerable extra income to add to my earnings as a general practitioner. This was necessary, since Holmes himself made very little money from his labours and I supported him financially throughout his entire career.

The stories which proved so popular and are well-known by so many, are almost all of them neat and pleasing disguises for hard-to-stomach truths. What would my readers think, I wonder, if they learned what really lay in the cardboard box which the spinster Miss Susan Cushing brought to us? Would they believe that the eerie, expressionless yellow face seen peering from an upstairs window by Mr Grant Munro was not a mask worn by a young half-Negro girl but another, more sinister kind of mask; a pallid, featureless one that hid the sense-shattering face of a creature born to Munro’s wife following a highly ill-advised liaison with something not of this earth? Would they wish to know about the beast patrolling the grounds of Copper Beeches, which was no mere mastiff, and the thing behind the barred door in that same country house, which was not Alice Rucastle?

I suppose I could have presented these episodes to the world uncensored, in all their phantasmagorical glory, and billed them as works of uncanny fiction, in the manner of Poe. That, however, would have been to their detriment, as well as Holmes’s. His analytical powers deserved to be celebrated in their purest form, I felt, and the best way to do that was to strip away anything that might distract from them. Only in a context of realism would his genius be seen to its best advantage. My portrait of him would be all the more striking if encompassed by a plain frame rather than some ornately carved one with an ormolu patina.

It was an aesthetic decision, but it proved to be justified both commercially and in terms of Holmes’s reputation. I was in many senses the making of him. I helped create the image of Sherlock Holmes that grabbed the public’s attention and endures to this day.

Yet how different things were some thirty-three years ago, when on a bright summer’s afternoon Holmes and I received an invitation from Inspector Gregson that was to lead us once more into the grim, chilling domain to which we had perforce become so accustomed…

J. H. W., PADDINGTON
1928

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

Living Targets

IT WAS EARLY ONE MORNING IN THE SPRING OF 1895, and Sherlock Holmes and I were, as usual, running for our lives.

When I say “as usual”, I should qualify the remark by stating that this was far from being an everyday occurrence. It was not, by the same token, uncommon. Nor do I wish it to appear that I had grown accustomed to the experience or blasé about it. I most assuredly had not.

Running for our lives was nonetheless something our habitual forays into the supernatural demimonde often obliged us to do, and on this particular occasion the urgency entailed was perhaps greater than it had ever been.

The venue of our desperate, headlong flight was an Underground tunnel to the west of the Aldgate terminus. As for our pursuers, they were a trio of humanoid beings who kept after us in a series of powerful leaps, propelled by hind legs so heavily muscled they put a kangaroo’s to shame. Both Holmes and I were sprinting flat out, yet the creatures matched our pace seemingly without effort. I could hear them behind us as they landed upon the track with a clatter of hooves and took off again in a single bound. I could hear their panting breaths, so much wider spaced and more measured than my rapid, stertorous own. I could sense them getting closer and closer, and knew that if they overtook us we would not stand a chance. They would tear us apart and feast upon our still-warm remains.

It was bad enough being aware of the penalty for failure to escape the beasts’ ravening clutches. Worse still was the fact that we were actively inciting them to chase us, for in my jacket pocket, as in Holmes’s, lay a slip of paper upon which was inscribed a summoning sigil. This drew the monsters like a beacon, and were I to have discarded mine, there is every probability they would have left me alone; Holmes likewise. The sigils made us living targets. Bearing these irresistible attractants upon our persons was nothing short of suicidal.

Onward we ran, the beams of our dark-lanterns bobbing frantically before us, affording fleeting glimpses of rail, sleeper and the moist, rugged brickwork of the tunnel wall. I was flagging. We had been racing full tilt for the best part of a mile and I was not sure I could keep going at this demanding pace much longer. My heart was hammering; my lungs burned. A minute at most, I thought, remained before exhaustion overwhelmed me and I had to stop.

“How— how much further?” I gasped.

“Nearly there,” replied Holmes. He sounded less winded than I was but only marginally so. “Around the next bend we should— yes!”

The tunnel opened out ahead and dimly I glimpsed the edge of one of the platforms at Aldgate. There lay our ultimate destination. Once we reached the station, we might just have a hope of survival.

I darted a glance over my shoulder, only to see a noseless face and a pair of deep-set, pallid eyes looming directly behind me. The owner of these unprepossessing features was within arm’s length. One sweep of its taloned paw could have felled me, sending me sprawling to the track, never to rise again.

I tapped into reserves of energy hitherto undreamt of. I put on a turn of speed that would have done champion mile-runner Fred Bacon proud.

Within seconds I had arrived at the station, Holmes hot on my heels.

“This is it, Watson!” my companion cried. “Exactly as we rehearsed, remember!”

The station was dark and deserted, for it was not yet five o’clock. Metropolitan trains would not begin service for at least another hour. Holmes and I scrambled up onto the platforms on either side of the dual tracks. The three creatures pursuing us appeared at the tunnel’s mouth and, as one, came to a halt. Something made them pause. Some instinct, perhaps, was telling them that to proceed might be unwise.

I groped for a length of rope, which dangled from the roof. Holmes did the same.

“On my mark,” said he. “Wait for it. Wait for it.”

One of the creatures loped forth from the tunnel, just a step or so. It, like its two brethren, was the size of a small horse and sheathed in the knotty, rugose hide akin to that of a rhinoceros. Its questing eyes were without irises, moon-like beneath an all but non-existent brow. It turned its empty gaze upon me, then upon Holmes. Indecision was writ large in its bearing.

“Come on,” Holmes urged. “Come on, you hideous beauty. You and your confederates must oblige us by venturing all the way out into the open, else our efforts will have been for naught.” He snatched the summoning sigil from his pocket and waved it. “Here is the charm that has so entranced you. Come and get it.”

The monster fixed its attention upon the weird, curlicued symbol, a pattern delineated in ink that was partly composed of human blood – Holmes’s own, to be precise. Though lacking anything that resembled nostrils, the creature seemed to be scenting the air, in the manner of a hunting beagle. All at once it leapt from the track onto the platform, as lightly and easily as a grasshopper. The other two instantly followed suit.

“Watson!”

I did not need to be told twice. This was it, the moment for which we had painstakingly planned. We had spent all night setting up the trap. Now we sprang it.

By dint of tugging on the ropes, Holmes and I released the various bolts of heavy black cloth that we had tacked over the station’s skylights. One after another they fell away, each pulling down the neighbour to which it was attached. The material – the same cotton drapery fabric used for stage backdrops – tumbled to the floor, and the gleam of dawn filtered in through the skylight glass.

As it radiated downward, the grey illumination bathed the three creatures. They, in unison, raised their heads, opened their mouths and screamed.

It was as far from a human sound as can be imagined, that ululation. It was screeching and mournful, a hoarse, high-pitched threnody of suffering, and I could scarcely bear to listen to it. All three creatures shrank before the nascent daylight, pinned in place by their helpless agonies, howling. I watched them collapse one by one, and I continued to watch while their bodies twisted and warped elastically, wracked by terrible fatal spasms.

It took five minutes, all told, for the monsters to die. Their demise was not merciful, but then the creatures themselves had shown little mercy to their victims. If nothing else, there was a primitive, retributory justice at work here.

* * *

So perished a triumvirate of ghasts, anthropophagous abominations who had been lurking in the deeper strata of London’s underground railway system for several months. Their presence had been drawn to Holmes’s attention and mine thanks to the death of a man called Cadogan West, a clerk at the Woolwich Arsenal. His body had been discovered lying upon the tracks not far from this spot, horribly mauled and mutilated. His fiancée, Miss Violet Westbury, had come to our rooms at 221B Baker Street, begging that Holmes investigate the matter. It was assumed by the police that West must have fallen from a Metropolitan line train while passing between carriages and been dragged beneath its wheels. Miss Westbury had reason to suspect otherwise.

Upon examining the body in the morgue, Holmes found the torn remnants of a sigil in West’s pocket, an eldritch totem that would have acted as catnip to the ghasts. He was able to deduce, too, from an indentation in the skull, that West had been killed before the ghasts got to him, the recipient of a savage blow to the head. His corpse had then been hurled from the window of a house overlooking a stretch of line near Gloucester Road Station where the tracks temporarily go above ground. It had landed on the roof of a passing train, and had later slipped off, dislodged when the train passed over points at the junction just outside Aldgate.

Inspector Gregson, at Holmes’s instigation, arrested the culprit. His name was Captain Valentine Walter and he was the brother of West’s superior at the Arsenal, Sir James Walter. Valentine Walter was a scurrilous old rogue known for the seduction of young women who took his fancy. Often he would resort to occult methods for gaining their compliance, plying them with wine that was laced with an aphrodisiac philtre whose recipe may be found amid the scraps of ancient, forbidden lore known as the Pnakotic Fragments or, more commonly, the Pnakotic Manuscripts. Then he would have his wicked way with the hapless female at his flat in Caulfield Gardens, Kensington, the backs of which terrace overlook the railway. Afterwards the victim would leave with nothing but a hazy, confused recollection of the offence committed against her and an erroneous belief that she had been a willing participant.

Walter had developed a liking for Miss Westbury, which he pursued with an ardour that only intensified the more it was robustly repudiated. The final straw for the lady was when he began to make veiled threats against both her and Cadogan West, implying that the two of them might suffer dire consequences if she did not oblige him. She was too scared to tell her husband-to-be what had transpired, for she feared he might confront Walter. A contretemps between him and his employer’s brother might well jeopardise his future prospects.

Frustrated, Valentine Walter elected to remove what he thought was the only obstacle standing between him and Miss Westbury’s capitulation, namely Cadogan West. He was aware that ghasts had taken up residence in the Underground; the creatures had, it transpired, been responsible for the mysterious disappearances of several Metropolitan Railway employees in recent weeks. Walter thought that by summoning them to West’s defenestrated body with the sigil they would consume it whole and thus dispose of the evidence. He had, however, overestimated their numbers, or their appetite, or both. The three ate their fill but inconveniently left enough of the corpse behind that it could be identified.

Holmes had devised a scheme for eliminating the ghasts, for whom direct natural light was as lethal as cyanide gas. It necessitated him and me making bait of ourselves in order to lure the creatures to the Aldgate terminus, whereupon the rays of the rising sun, freed from the obscuring black cloth, would do the rest.

Now, as the echoes of the ghasts’ death throes drifted amongst the station’s rafters, my friend and I regarded each other across the tracks. I slumped to a seated posture, elbows upon knees, while Holmes leaned against a pillar. If my face looked anything like his, then it was smudged with soot and streaked with perspiration, framing eyes that stared white and wild and were more than a little bloodshot.

“Well,” said Holmes eventually, “now that the danger is past, I must go and alert Inspector Gregson, who is waiting outside. Do you mind remaining here? I shall not be long, and someone needs to placate any railway staff who may happen along.”

I blearily waved a hand. “I doubt I have anything to fear from a trio of cadavers. Go.”

In the eerie quiet that fell after Holmes’s departure, I began musing upon how I might transform this escapade into a fictional adventure. Inspired by the nature of West’s employment, I wondered what if there were some top-secret blueprints involved? Something military, vital to our nation’s security – patented plans for a new kind of submarine, perhaps – and an enemy spy eager to get his grubby hands on them?

A story, a bowdlerisation of the truth, purged of all otherworldly elements and thus made suitable for public consumption, began to take shape in my mind. It was the kind of tale I could easily see gracing the pages of The Strand and, in the States, Collier’s Weekly. I would probably omit any mention of Inspector Gregson, substituting Lestrade in his place. Gregson was the man we invariably turned to when dealing with matters supernatural, for he was almost as well versed in them as we were, but his more literal-minded colleague seemed a better fit with the prosaic yarn I was spinning. Neither of them would mind. Lestrade enjoyed taking credit for work he had not done, whereas Gregson, being of a more self-effacing bent, preferred to shun the limelight.

The exercise was pointless, in any case, since I would not be publishing further chronicles of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. My literary career had gone on hiatus and I had no idea when, or indeed if, it would ever be resuscitated.

Holmes presently returned, accompanied by Gregson. The Scotland Yard official brought with him two constables who he said could be counted on both for their discretion and their strong constitutions. One of them gave the lie to the latter part of the assertion when, upon seeing the ghasts, he was immediately overcome by nausea, with the inevitable rebarbative consequences.

“What in heaven’s name are those things?” the fellow declared, wiping his mouth.

“Circus freaks, escaped from their cages,” Gregson said with brisk authority. “Now sharpen up and set to work, lads. You know what you have to do.”

The constable got a grip on himself and, if still somewhat whey-faced, joined his colleague in removing the ghasts. They bundled the creatures up in lengths of the black cloth and lugged the corpses out to a waiting Black Maria.

“The Thames will dispose of the evidence,” Gregson said. “Tide’s on the turn. My men will toss the bodies into the river. The current will carry them out to sea.” He cast a speculative eye over Holmes and me. “You both look like you could do with several good nights’ sleep. Jolly time, was it?”

“Delightful,” I said.

“And how did you catch the monsters?”

Holmes explained.

“Ah,” said Gregson. “Doctor, did you not employ a similar method with that marauding phantom hound on Dartmoor a few years back? You each carried some sort of amulet, is that right?”

I nodded. “An amulet bearing the soul-symbol of a corpse-eating cult of Leng. The hound was drawn inexorably to it, and we in turn led the hound towards a Portal of Banishment we had set up in the Great Grimpen Mire.”

“But the creature got away from you.”

“Alas it did, and Holmes and I were lucky to escape with our lives.”

I can never forget the awful baying of that spectral hound as it pursued us across the moor. Nor can I forget stumbling on a tussock of grass and falling head over heels, and the hound, glowing like the moon, rearing up to pounce on me. Its claws, although intangible, had the power to scoop away a portion of a man’s soul with a single swipe, and its fangs could rob a man of his senses; I would even now be a gibbering, half-sane wreck, were it not for Holmes’s quick-wittedness. He came to my rescue by interposing himself between me and the beast, brandishing a medallion made of greenish soapstone with an Elder Sign etched into it. Repelled by the protective glyph, the hound veered away, retreating into the mist until it was just an incandescent dog-shaped outline, a canine will-o’-the-wisp, flickering then gone.

“It was a close shave,” Holmes said. “The creature continues to haunt the moor to this day, a hazard to anyone unfortunate or unwary enough to stray into its path, but it will be some five years before an appropriate alignment of stars recurs to make a Portal of Banishment viable again in that region of the country. I cannot say I look forward to our second meeting.”

“Me neither,” I said.

“I don’t blame you,” said Gregson. “There is only so much of this sort of stuff a fellow can handle. Frankly, I have no idea how the two of you manage it, day in, day out. Helping you clean up the aftermath is bad enough. I’ve got more grey hairs than someone my age ought to, and I pin the blame firmly on my dealings with Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson.”

“We are, alas, sharers in a terrible secret,” I said. “The three of us and Holmes’s brother. It is a heavy burden.”

Gregson nodded with feeling. “Sometimes I fancy that everyone else is sleepwalking through their lives, and we are the only ones awake. Even Mrs Gregson does not know about any of this, though I hate to keep anything from her. Equally, because I love my wife, I prefer that she remains oblivious, for her own peace of mind. It isn’t just the monsters that infest this city and its environs; that is bad enough. It is the other things. The ‘gods’.”

One could quite clearly hear the inverted commas with which he bracketed the word. It seemed sacrilegious to dub them gods, those terrible ancient beings that lay at the fringes of the universe and in the depths of the planet, biding their time, ever ready to arise and enslave mankind. Yet creatures so numinously powerful could scarcely be called anything else.

The police official shuddered. “Civilisation is thin ice, is it not? With a cold darkness below. And most people skate on it all unknowing, little realising how it could give way beneath them at any moment.”

We all three exchanged glances of sombre acknowledgement. Since the events of Christmas 1880, which I have related in The Shadwell Shadows, Holmes, Gregson and I, along with Mycroft Holmes, had forged a secret brotherhood. Together we had made a pact to keep the world safe from unholy horrors and unearthly threats, and we had stuck by it during the intervening fifteen years, albeit at a cost to each of us in his own way. Gregson, for instance, might well have advanced further up the police hierarchy, were he not repeatedly being diverted from his usual cases in order to assist Holmes in extracurricular excursions about which he could not tell his peers or superiors. He had become notorious at the Yard for the frequency with which he disappeared from his desk without explanation and, as a result, had garnered a reputation for unreliability.

“While I’m here,” said he, “something has come to my attention which may warrant yours.”

“Go on,” said Holmes, evincing no considerable enthusiasm. If he was as worn out as I was, then all he craved right now was a bath and bed.

“It may be nothing,” Gregson said, “but then again it may not. I have an arrangement with an attendant at Bethlem Royal Hospital. This fellow, whom I first encountered in a professional capacity, is under instruction to let me know if anything out of the ordinary, anything truly perplexing, comes his way.”

“A useful contact.”

“Indeed. And yesterday McBride – that is his name – sent a note to tell me the asylum has recently taken in a new inmate. The man was brought in a few days ago, stark naked. He had been found wandering somewhere in the region of Purfleet, dazed and disorientated, shortly after sunrise, by a farmhand on his way to work. He was covered in scratches and bruises, and also the marks of older, more severe injuries. There was no form of identification upon him. Enquiries have been made but no one has any idea who he might be, and he himself is no help in that regard. He was catatonic to begin with, and lately he has begun to show signs of life, but according to McBride, when he speaks, what comes out is a barely comprehensible babble.”

“So far, so unremarkable.”

“Yes, but here’s the rub. He has scrawled things on the walls and floor of his cell, shapes or pictograms or something. McBride is of the view that they are words in a foreign alphabet, but if so, nobody can recognise which. The letters hang off horizontal bars rather in the manner of Sanskrit but, according to a half-caste Indian doctor who works there, they are most certainly not Sanskrit.”

I glanced at Holmes, he at me.

Gregson, seeing our looks, said, “Yes. Thought that might pique your interest. As I said, it may be nothing. Nevertheless…”

“I am grateful to you for that, Inspector,” said Holmes, “and for your assistance this morning.”

The policeman touched a finger to the brim of his bowler. “We do what we can, Mr Holmes. Fighting the bad fight.”

CHAPTER TWO

The Anonymous Inmate

HOLMES AND I REPAIRED TO BAKER STREET, WHERE we cleaned ourselves up, donned fresh clothing, and ate a hearty repast provided by Mrs Hudson, before setting out again.

A hansom took us to Southwark and St George’s Fields, where lay the Bethlem Royal Hospital, popularly known as Bedlam. The institution’s central block loomed before us, fronted by a colonnaded, dome-capped portico. Three-storey-high wings stretched to either side for nearly a hundred yards. It was a huge and intimidating pile, its dark brick façade seemingly overhung by shadow for all that the day was sunny and bright and the sky a cloudless blue. As we climbed the front steps a faint, anguished scream emanated from a far window. This was answered by a torrent of oaths from somewhere also indoors but nearer by, then a shrill cry from somewhere else in a voice that sounded only tangentially human.

“The call of the wild,” said Holmes.

My reply was merely a mirthless grin.

We entered that place of madness, and Holmes presented his card at the reception desk and asked for McBride. Shortly the attendant arrived, a brawny redheaded Scotsman with a handshake like a bear trap and eyebrows as bristly as gorse. His white tunic was crisply starched and tightly buttoned.

“Welcome tae ye both, gentlemen. Gregson said you’d come. ’Tis an honour tae meet the mighty Sherlock Holmes. You too, Doctor. I’m an admirer of your stories. If you ask me you’re every bit as skilled a wordsmith as Scott or Stevenson.”

“How kind.”

“Now, if ye’d both care tae follow me…”

McBride led us towards the east wing, where he explained the male inmates were kept. The other wing was reserved for female inmates.

As we ascended a narrow, otherwise unoccupied stairwell, the attendant paused, turned to Holmes and said, “Would ye mind if…? Nay.” He shook his head. “I shouldnae ask.”

“Ask what?”

“It’s just that I’ve read so many times how ye can just look at a man and tell everything there is tae know about him. I was wondering, would ye mind doing it on me?”

There was a sharp intake of breath from Holmes. “You’ll forgive me, Mr McBride, but Watson and I are somewhat pressed for time…”

The Scotsman looked abashed. “Of course, of course. Rude of me.”

I nudged Holmes from behind.

“But,” my friend said, “I do not suppose there is any harm in me furnishing a basic summary of facts about you. You are from Edinburgh, obviously.”

“That I am.”

“The soft brogue is distinctive. But we can be more geographically precise than that. You were born and brought up in Cowgate, a slum area of that city.”

“I wouldnae say it was Auld Reekie’s loveliest spot. How did ye ken?”

“Your surname is Irish, and many of Irish descent in Edinburgh are inhabitants of Cowgate’s tenements. Statistically, the probability was high that you used to be amongst their number.”

“That is true an’ all.”

“Upon moving to London, you fell into a life of crime. Our mutual friend Inspector Gregson has already hinted that you have a shady past, for he told us that he met you ‘in a professional capacity’. When a policeman says that, more often than not it means he has felt the collar of the person to whom he is referring. I would go further and state that you were a cracksman.”

Beneath those wiry ginger eyebrows, McBride’s eyes were downcast. “Hardly my proudest boast, but when I first came down south I was on my uppers and had tae earn a living somehow. I’m a good soldier now, keeping the covenant. How did ye ken I used tae burgle houses?”

“One hand bears a scar, the particular shape of which indicates it can only have been caused by a jemmy slipping from your grasp and its tip gouging deep into the palm. Doubtless you served time for your misdemeanours.”

“Two hard years in Pentonville.”

“But to return to your upbringing, I would aver that your father was a drunkard and a brute, who used you ill as a boy.”

“Aye. Right beast he was, my da. How does it show?”

“Your left wrist hangs bent to one side when at rest, suggestive of a break inflicted during youth, the kind commonly known as a greenstick fracture. Were the injury the result of an accident, the break would most likely have occurred in line with your arm. The way your wrist is kinked tells me your hand was instead twisted radially, by force. The most probable cause of that is violence, and since you are a large man, well able to defend himself, the reasonable inference is that it occurred before adulthood. The likeliest suspect, then, would be a close relative, and in most instances such abuse is inflicted by the father. As for the man being a drunkard, you referred to yourself just now as a ‘good soldier’ who was ‘keeping the covenant’. Such phrases are common currency amongst those who have pledged themselves to the eleven doctrines of the Salvation Army, the so-called Articles of War. The obvious inference is that you are a member of that organisation.”

“I volunteer on my days off, giving out food tae the poor at my local mission.”

“Since one of the requirements of any Salvationist is that he be teetotal, I can draw the conclusion that you do not drink alcohol, and a credible reason why that might be is because your father did, in the worst possible way. By abstaining, you are explicitly rejecting the poor example he set.”

“The whisky was my da’s best friend, only love, an’ great ruin. I have vowed it will never be mine.”

“In short, Mr McBride, what I see is a man brought up with limited prospects, who fell from grace but has paid the penalty and risen again to become a productive citizen. You are an object lesson in turning one’s life around, and for that you are to be commended.”

McBride seemed both amazed and moved. His eyes were wide and sparkling, close to tears. “It really is uncanny,” said he, “an’ just as Dr Watson describes it in his tales.”

Holmes made an upward-ushering gesture. “Now, might we resume?”

The stairs emerged onto a corridor, which was a kind of gallery, with a row of barred doors leading off on either side. We proceeded along it past wretches in various states of psychic distress and physical disarray. One man was plucking invisible flies from the air and inspecting each imaginary insect with a connoisseur’s eye before popping it into his mouth. Another paced in circles, hammering his brow with the heel of his hand and reciting nonsensical rhyming verse. A third simply glared at us through the bars as we passed, scratching the intimate crevices of his body, while a fourth, who was chained by an iron collar to his bedpost, growled at us and gnashed his teeth, more a feral animal than a human being.

I tried to remain impassive at these sights, but inwardly I quailed. It was not the inmates’ sordor and mental enfeeblement that chilled me so much as the thought that, were I not careful, I might one day join their ranks. All too often in recent years I had felt my sanity to be on a precarious footing. Only a small amount of extra pressure would be needed to tip it over the edge.

“Here we are,” said McBride. “Our mystery man.” Removing a ring full of keys from his belt, he unlocked the door. “Right, you,” he said sternly to the inmate. “Visitors. Be on your best behaviour.” To us he remarked, “He’s not any trouble tae be honest, but keep out o’ his reach all the same, just tae be on the safe side. Ye ne’er can tell with these bampots. One moment meek as lambs, the next trying tae rip your throat out.”

We entered the cramped cell. The inmate was a man in his mid-to-late twenties. He was clad in a soiled smock and was on his knees in one corner, busy drawing upon the floor with a stub of charcoal. I saw straight away that he was missing one hand; his left arm ended just above the wrist. The injury looked old, the stump long healed.

But that was not all. The left half of his face was a ruin, the skin riven with so much scar tissue that it resembled melted candle wax. The eye on that side peered out through lids that were so distended one could only just glimpse its sclera, a little glistening lozenge in a cave of puckered skin. The scarring extended all the way down his neck to his trapezius muscle. Like the amputation of his hand, the facial injuries looked to be old. Two or three years had passed, I estimated, since their infliction. There were, however, more recent wounds too. I spied numerous fresh cuts, scratches and scrapes, and even what I thought were bite marks.

As Gregson had said, the walls and floor of the cell were festooned with jagged hieroglyphs inscribed onto the brickwork at criss-crossing angles. The inmate was using the charcoal to add to them.

“Aye,” said McBride, seeing Holmes’s and my interest in the man’s activities. “He started doing that afore he started speaking. At first he used his own filth for ink, I regret tae say. Since he wouldn’t stop and us attendants became fed up scrubbing away the mess, I got permission for him tae have sticks of charcoal instead. He’s been happy with those ever since.”

I approached the nearest wall and peered at the madman’s work. The hieroglyphs were R’lyehian, three phrases repeated over and over:

R’luhlloig

Grah’n wgah’n

Sgn’wahl nyth

Roughly translated, this meant:

The hidden mind

The lost one controls

Shares space with the servant

The last of my decipherings, however, was not exact. The line could equally have been “The servant shares space”. The trouble with rendering R’lyehian into English is that it is terse and utilitarian. Grammar and syntax are pared down to the bare minimum, and therefore ambiguity of interpretation is rife.

I grimaced at Holmes, and he reciprocated by setting his lips in a thin, sombre line. R’lyehian was never welcome in any context. It invariably betokened bad things.

Holmes moved directly into the inmate’s line of sight. Bending down before him but receiving no sign of acknowledgement, he waved a hand to attract his attention. Slowly, almost indifferently, the inmate ceased writing and looked up.

“Sir,” said Holmes. “My name is Sherlock Holmes. And you are…?”

“I…” The inmate hesitated, seeming puzzled. “I am… I don’t belong here.” The words came out slurred, thick-sounding, and were couched in an accent which I thought was American.

“I am sure you feel you do not,” said Holmes. “Yet you would not be where you are without good reason. Your incarceration is for your own wellbeing, at least, if not also the wellbeing of others.”

“No,” the inmate insisted. “Here.” He jabbed a forefinger – his only forefinger – at his chest. “I don’t belong here.”

“The laddie’s been telling us that a lot,” said McBride. “Plenty of ’em say the same. Usually it’s the ones who think they’re Napoleon or Julius Caesar or whoever. ‘I’m the emperor of France. Where’s my palace gone?’”

“Or do you mean you belong in Boston, rather than London?” said Holmes to the inmate. “For Boston is where you are from originally, if I do not miss my guess.”

“Boston?” The inmate’s tone was wistful, almost dreamy. “Boston… No, not Boston.”

“Your intonation is distinctly Bostonian.”

The man shook his head, not so much in disagreement or defiance as in puzzlement.

Holmes motioned to the hieroglyphs. “R’luhlloig,” he said. “Grah’n wgah’n. Sgn’wahl nyth. Yes?”

Now the inmate looked truly confused. It was as though he had never before heard spoken out loud the very words he was writing.

“R’luhlloig?” Holmes enquired. “Grah’n? Nafl-kadishtu. Phleg.” In English: “The hidden mind? The lost one? I do not understand. Explain.”

McBride tapped my elbow. “What’s he saying?” he murmured. “What language is that?”

“It is… the Algonquin tongue,” I said, extemporising. “Evidently our anonymous New Englander has had contact with members of that Red Indian tribe.”

“Ye don’t say! And Mr Holmes is conversant in it? Well now, my admiration for the man increases. Is there nothing he cannae do?”

I had not expected McBride to accept my explanation quite as readily as he did, but then he was a fairly simple soul. Moreover, as a Salvationist he would have no truck with the occult and thus would be oblivious to it in its less familiar guises. Something overtly satanic he might be attuned to, but not the subtler, more insidious evils that were our beat. Gregson had chosen his “useful contact” in Bethlem well.

Holmes quizzed the Bostonian further in R’lyehian but it was fruitless. He was greeted with nothing but blank incomprehension.

He abandoned the effort, at which point the inmate spoke again. “I am… wrong,” he said, trying strenuously to frame his thoughts in speech. “I am not what I seem. I do not belong.”

“You are not what you seem?” said Holmes. “You seem mad. Are you saying you are sane?”

“No. Do not belong. Not here. Not here.”

The man repeated those two words while jabbing his forefinger at himself with increasing emphasis. Eventually he gave it up and collapsed back onto his haunches with a guttural sigh of exasperation.

“Very well,” said Holmes. “I understand that you feel you are not meant for the madhouse. Now…” He stretched out both hands. “I would like to inspect you, if I may.”

“I wouldnae do that if I were ye, Mr Holmes,” McBride cautioned. “Ye’ve no idea how unpredictable folk like him can be.”

“I shall take great care. I do not believe our friend is violent. He seems more confused and displaced than anything.”

With a surprisingly gentle touch Holmes took the inmate’s truncated arm and studied it, then ran fingertips over the disfigured side of his face. He examined the man’s surviving hand and finished by giving his head a thorough going-over: ears, hair, neck, teeth. The inmate submitted to his ministrations, weirdly serene. I had to wonder how long it had been since anyone had done anything but manhandle him. Bethlem was not known for the delicacy with which its denizens were treated.

“Watson, what do you make of this?”

Summoning me over with a flick of his fingers, Holmes drew to my notice a tiny round scab at the back of the inmate’s neck.

“It could be an insect bite of some sort,” I suggested. “I would not be surprised if the fellow has lice or fleas.”

“An insect bite?” said Holmes. “Perhaps.”

“You think not?”

“Were he riddled with vermin there would be other bites, not just this one.”

“A single mosquito bite, then.”

“I see none of the customary inflammation. Do you? Nor are mosquitoes common in London.”

“They might be in Purfleet, where he was found. It is fairly rural around there.”

“All the same, to me this looks very much like a puncture, such as might have been caused by a hypodermic needle.”

“That was my first thought,” I said, “but I dismissed the possibility. To insert a needle at the base of the skull, into the cervical vertebrae, is more than hazardous. There is no sound medical reason for injecting there, and every reason not to. What if the spinal cord were injured in the process? The consequences could be catastrophic: hypertonic spasticity, muscle atrophy, tetraplegia…”

“It is a queer location for an injection, I agree, but the mark of a needle is distinctive.”

Holmes’s expression added an unspoken suffix: And I should know.

As well he should, for beneath his sleeves countless such punctures adorned his arms. My friend’s dependency on cocaine was then, in the mid-1890s, at its height. Elsewhere I have portrayed his habit of resorting to the stimulant as the product of boredom, an almost whimsical indulgence to stave off ennui during the periods when clients were thin on the ground. In reality he availed himself regularly of a seven per cent solution of the drug – and sometimes a stronger dosage than that – simply in order to keep himself functioning beyond the normal limits of human endurance. Cocaine sped up his thought processes and combated tiredness, but the corollary was that it ravaged his nervous system. He worked more effectively under its influence but cumulatively, over the years, use of the drug was taking its toll. I had badgered him long and hard to give it up, but it would not be until 1897 that my campaign was successful.

“Well…” Holmes rose to his feet. “I believe I have seen enough.”

“Ye ken who the fellow is?” said McBride.

“His actual identity? No. That would be a miracle. But I have gathered sufficient clues to lay a foundation for finding out.”

“I should be interested tae learn more.”

“And I have no interest in telling you,” Holmes said curtly. “You have already exacted one display of analytical reasoning from me, Mr McBride. Be content with that.”

CHAPTER THREE

The Stories and Real Life

“THERE WAS NO NEED TO BE QUITE SO BRUSQUE with the man,” I said to Holmes half an hour later at a hammam on Waterloo Road. My friend had insisted we take a Turkish bath in order to revive ourselves, and now we were perched in the hot-room, naked save for towels around our waists, our skin pinkened and perspiring freely. “You hurt McBride’s feelings, poor fellow. He was quite crestfallen as he escorted us out.”

My companion shrugged. “I have little patience with these people who expect me to perform for them. ‘What can you deduce about me from this fob watch, Mr Holmes?’ ‘Tell me everything you can about me from the condition of my walking stick, Mr Holmes.’ As though I am some trained bear, ever ready to rise up on my hind legs and dance about when they clap their hands.”

“It is harmless, surely.”

“It is trivial, and it is an imposition, and it wastes my talents, and I blame you for it, Watson. I blame you and your stories” – he buried the word stories in a contemptuous snort – “wherein you depict me as some sort of winking guru, dispensing gnomic pronouncements and shrewd insights with gay abandon.”

“I have been at pains to show you in a positive light in my fiction,” I retorted. “I never demean you. What you must not forget is that these stories you are so scornful of keep a roof over your head and clothes on your back.”

“I earn my own money.”

“Some. Not much.”

“I have clients.”

“A few, their problems trivial, the fees they pay insubstantial. I am your principal benefactor, I and my fiction. And if the price of my patronage is strangers occasionally asking you to act in a manner not dissimilar to the character I have created, well, it is hardly an exorbitant fee. They do it because they are fans.”

“Fans of a literary alter ego who is not me.”

“It is you, but a heightened version of you. For heaven’s sake, anyone else might be grateful for being turned into a celebrity. Not so Mr Sherlock Holmes. He finds it irksome. Why, it must be a relief that I have not published any tales for over two years.”

“Yes, you have ‘killed me off’, and now I exist in limbo, dead on the page, alive in real life. That has not deterred the curious, though, has it? If anything it makes them more demanding. They regard me with a mixture of incredulity and reverence, as though I am second in their estimation only to a certain Nazarene.”

“You go too far!” I ejaculated heatedly. “Besides, as I recall, it was at your behest that I laid down my pen, much though I would rather not have. Do you know how much Newnes at The Strand is offering me for new Sherlock Holmes adventures? Upward of a thousand pounds per tale!”

“A tidy sum.”

“I have all the materials to hand – notes, ideas, plot outlines – to provide us with a more than comfortable income, yet you insist I let them go to waste and preserve a literary silence. It is beyond vexing. It is all but unconscionable.”

We glared at each other for several seconds, narrow-eyed, tight-lipped. Then Holmes broke the impasse with a loud, hearty guffaw.

“Oh, Watson! How ever do you put up with me? I am possibly the most churlish, least appreciative friend a man could have.”

“You are not wrong there,” I said, laughing too.

“An apology is in order.”

“We are both fatigued. We both spoke out of turn. If there is an apology going begging, I would rather it went to McBride. Since he is not here, however, I am willing to accept one in his stead.”

“Rest assured that, through all the trials and ordeals we have faced and those we have yet to face, I would not care to have anyone else by my side but you.”

“That is good, since I doubt anyone else could bear to endure them with you.”

We moved from the hot-room to a cold pool into which we plunged ourselves up to the necks. The water was icy, eliciting a burning sensation that hovered on the border between pleasurable and painful. We shared the pool with perhaps a half-dozen fellow bathers, each of whom sat with head bowed, keeping his own counsel.

“So,” I said, after I had recovered from the shock of immersion, “what have you gleaned about our Bethlem-incarcerated Bostonian?”

“As I told McBride, I cannot yet say who he is, but I know what he is.”

“Go on.”

“He is a man of education and breeding, from a moneyed background.”

“His appearance suggests otherwise.”

“His superficial appearance, yes, but from closer examination of him the tell-tale signs are all there. He is no labourer, that much is for certain. His skin is soft and white all over, the parts usually exposed to the elements as pale as those that would be covered by clothing. He lacks muscle definition. Furthermore his one remaining hand lacks the extensive callusing of the man who earns a living by the sweat of his back. Rather, I would submit that the fellow earns a living by the sweat of his brow, for there is a single small callus upon the side of his middle finger, which betokens the frequent use of a pen. You yourself have one, Watson. Even though you are no longer an author, you nonetheless have to write copiously thanks to the reports and prescriptions that form an integral part of your profession.”

“Nothing so far intimates a moneyed background,” I said. “He could be a bank clerk or a legal secretary. A doctor, even.”

“Quite so,” said Holmes. “But we can at least safely aver that he has not led a life of significant hardship. Rather, he is an intellectual, or was, before the disruption of his mental faculties.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I have drawn your attention at least twice in the past to the equation between a sizeable head and a sizeable brain. It was true of Charles Augustus Milverton, and it was true of Mr Henry Baker, whom we met a few Christmases back.”

It was true also of Holmes himself, whose high forehead seemed sometimes to bulge with the strain of containing the grey matter within.

“Our man in Bethlem has substantial cranial capacity, and such a volume is wasted if it is not filled,” he continued. “Also of interest was his hand.”

“There was more there than just the callus?”

“There were a number of tiny patches of scar tissue adorning the fingers and wrist. The patterning of them is suggestive. I have a fair few myself.”

Holmes showed me his hand and wrist. Dots of shiny fibrous tissue stippled the skin here and there, like constellations of stars. I cannot recall having noticed these before, but then the cicatrices were so small as to be all but undetectable to the naked eye.

“From smoking?” I hazarded.

“Hardly! They are from working with chemicals, as I used to do extensively at university and after, until my practical researches took a turn for the arcane. Splashes of acid are an unavoidable by-product of chemical experimentation. However careful one is, accidents happen.”

“So our man is a scientist.”

“I would wager good money on it. There is one final detail, however, which is the most telling of all: his accent.”

“You have established that he is from Boston.”

“But he is not just any Bostonian. There are clear traces of Anglicisation in his speech. Did you notice how he said ‘here’? ‘I don’t belong heah’, with a distinct rising intonation at the end. That and the general refinement of his pronunciation mark him out as belonging to Boston’s upper class, those so-called Brahmins whose adherence to their English heritage is strong and who are renowned for their wealth and their attention to lineage and good schooling. The Brahmins are aristocracy in a nation that purports to have done away with heredity, and I tell you, Watson, the Bethlem inmate is one of them. He is gentry and no mistake.”

“If so, does it help us in identifying him?”

“Not as much as one might wish,” my friend allowed. “His status as a Boston Brahmin is insufficient to affix a name to our unknown, but that in tandem with his interest in chemistry does narrow down the scope of our search somewhat. There must be thousands of Americans at large on our shores, if not tens of thousands, but amongst those only a small percentage match our friend’s description: in his twenties, from Boston, well-born, well-read, a scientist.”

“Not to mention minus one hand and half a face.”

Holmes uttered a wry laugh. “Those surely are his most distinguishing characteristics, and you are right to make the point. How long ago did he receive the injuries, would you reckon? Two years? Three?”

“In my estimation, something like that.”

“Then if he has been in this country for any significant duration, he will surely have made an impression upon any who have met him. His identity should not be too hard to pin down, and I shall put out feelers forthwith. The more intriguing and challenging aspect of all this is, of course, how he came to be as he is.”

“There must be some connection between his state of mind and the R’lyehian he wrote on his cell walls.”

“Indubitably,” said Holmes. “Only too often do the two things go hand in hand: mental derangement and the mother tongue of the Elder Gods.”

“Unless you happen to be one of those gods yourself.”

“Even then. Are they mentally deranged or sane? How do we know? How can we mere mortals, with our limited faculties and circumscribed perceptions, measure those fathomless minds of theirs? How can we hope to divine the motivations, the emotions, of star-spawned beings from beyond? Everything about them is utterly alien. Perhaps they are all quite mad. Perhaps the eons spent in the gulfs of space and the depths of the earth have driven them over the brink of rationality and there is nothing within them now but howling chaos.”

“And evil.”

“Or something we only call evil because we cannot interpret it any other way. To them it might be necessity, or whim, or expedience.”

“The will to subjugate and eliminate the human race surely cannot be considered any of those things,” I said.

“Really? Imagine you are a wasp and I swat you with a rolled-up newspaper. Does that make me evil? I was only ridding myself of a nuisance. Or, let us say you are a sheep and I shear you for your wool then send you to the abattoir to become mutton. I am not a thief or a murderer. I am a farmer.”

“A fair point, I suppose.”

“What if, by believing the Outer Gods and the Great Old Ones hate us, we are exalting our own importance unduly? What if they harbour nothing for us but, at best, a mild disdain? So great is their power compared with ours that they have no real cause to fear us. It is, contrariwise, our fear of them that leads us to interpret their actions as evil. Why should Azathoth give a fig about me or you? Why should Shub-Niggurath? Yog-Sothoth? Yig? Cthulhu?”

I could not help but feel a prickle up my spine as Holmes intoned this roll call of names. Simply to speak them aloud was a transgressive act, akin to yelling obscenities during evensong. But to the average eavesdropper, Holmes would appear to be spouting just a stream of gibberish words, like something out of Lear or Carroll.

“If they pay human beings so little heed,” I said, “why do they wish to be worshipped?”

“Do they?” came the reply. “Do they care at all about obeisance and sacrifice? Such may be offered to them, but whether they court it, or even notice it, is debatable. If they respond, it might merely be the result of happenstance or inquisitiveness. The veneration in which some people hold the gods says more about those people than about the gods – their need for primordial gratification, their sense of their own insignificance and lack of worth. Cthulhu and his ilk hold up a black mirror to ourselves, and in it some see repugnant visions, something to shun, while others their own reflections, clear as day. I deem Professor Moriarty, for example, to belong in the latter category.”

I felt a prickle up my spine again. In many ways I loathed Moriarty’s name more than I did any of the gods’.

“Despicable man,” I said. “Fifteen years on, and I still find myself haunted by the memory of him. We have bested many villains since, yet somehow Moriarty stands out amongst them. Perhaps it is because he, along with the Chinaman Gong-Fen Shou, inaugurated us into the field of investigation we now pursue. He robbed us of our blissful innocence.”

“To put it another way, he opened our eyes to the truth,” said Holmes. “We owe him for that.”

“We owe him nothing but our everlasting enmity. He meant to feed us to Nyarlathotep. Do you not remember?”

“I remember all too well. I remember, also, that he himself ended up as Nyarlathotep’s victim, dragged down by that Crawling Chaos into the nether realms and consumed.”

“As you tell it, since you alone were witness to his demise, he allowed it to happen. He surrendered rather than resisted. I continue to wonder why.”

“So do I. I can only assume that, at the last, he loved death more than life and chose the one over the other. He had the mindset of a nihilist and pursued that philosophy to its inevitable bitter conclusion. I know he still obsesses you, Watson. Why else would you make him my opponent in ‘The Final Problem’?”

“I suppose I wanted to exorcise him from my mind. Hence I hurled him over a cliff into a maelstrom.”

“And me along with him,” said Holmes. “Was I in need of being exorcised too?”

“You asked for a conclusive ending to your fictional endeavours. Very little is more conclusive than being dead.”

Yet there was nonetheless a modicum of truth in Holmes’s observation. By having him perish alongside Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls, I had to some degree been working out my less charitable feelings towards my friend. I could simply have had him emerge the victor from the struggle with Moriarty and thereafter retire. Instead, my decision to “kill” him could be regarded as an expression, albeit a subconscious one, of a wish to untether myself from a man whose companionship could often be burdensome and whose self-destructive tendencies posed a danger to me as well. I had imagined a world without Sherlock Holmes. Perhaps I was actually fantasising about a life without him.

“Well,” said he, “the fictional Holmes may be at rest but the flesh-and-blood one has work to do.” He rose from the pool. “Are you with me?”

“No time for a massage?”

“We have dallied enough, I feel.”

I was tired to the very marrow of my bones. The visit to the hammam had made precious little impact on the brittle shell of enervation that seemed to encase my brain. I wanted – craved – the rejuvenating oblivion of sleep.

All the same I said, “Very well.” What else could I, faithful Watson, do but follow in Sherlock Holmes’s wake? It was always that way in the stories, after all. How should real life be any different?

CHAPTER FOUR

A Catch from the Trawl

HOLMES PUT OUT FEELERS, AS HE HAD SAID HE would, regarding our anonymous Bostonian. I did not like his use of the word: feelers. There was something too arthropodal about it for comfort, too tentacular. It put me in mind of the images of the Great Old Ones, the Elder Gods and the Outer Gods contained in various of the books that crowded the shelves in our rooms. For many of the gods, feelers was not a metaphor; rather, it was biology.

Holmes’s feelers took the form of letters to a number of recipients around London describing the Bethlem inmate in as much detail as he could. Of the venues these missives went to, most were illustrious academic institutions, including the Royal Society, the Royal Geographical Society, the Royal Academy and my alma mater the University of London. After all, an intellectual and scientist would surely seek out the company of other intellectuals and scientists. Outside the capital, Holmes contacted Camford and the better known boarding schools, where the Bostonian could have held a teaching post. At my prompting he tried our principal hospitals too, since the fellow may well have had to visit one in order to receive treatment, if his injuries had been inflicted while he was in England rather than in his homeland, or else for complications arising from them after the event. Adding to this extensive list were the major libraries and museums, and sundry gentlemen’s clubs, amongst them his brother’s favourite haunt the Diogenes.

This flurry of activity occupied the rest of the day, after which there was a lull. Come nightfall I took to my bed, Holmes to his needle and thence his violin. The scraping of bow on strings did not keep me awake but did infiltrate my dreams, becoming the yowling of a thousand cats who roamed the cobblestoned streets of a village I somehow knew to be called Ulthar. I, in my dream, had slain one of the countless cats of Ulthar – I had no idea how or why – and now its feline brethren were stalking me with malicious intent. Wherever I went along a maze of narrow lanes and alleyways, there cats waited for me, tails twitching, eyes aglow with a hunger for vengeance.

I do not recall how this nightmare ended. Either it elided into another, pleasanter but more forgettable dream or else it dwindled into nothingness. I do recall that I awoke to a becalmed Sherlock Holmes who now sat in his armchair by the window overlooking the street, knees drawn up to chin, amid a cocoon of pipe smoke. Around him lay books in haphazard profusion, the sitting-room shelves now full of gaps like missing teeth. These volumes constituted Holmes’s private library of the forbidden and the arcane, an extensive collection of grimoires, rare reference works and encyclopaedias of the abstruse, which he had accumulated steadily over the past decade and a half. It was clear he had been up all night perusing their contents.

He was in an uncommunicative state, not even deigning to answer my “good morning”, so I ate a solitary breakfast in silence, then took myself off to my practice. After an uneventful day of coughs, corns and colic I returned to Baker Street where the morose, withdrawn Holmes of the morning had been replaced by an ebullient whirlwind of energy.

“Watson! There you are! Good God, man, where have you been?”

“Where do you think I have been?” I said. “Seeing patients.”

“I have been waiting for you for hours.”

“You saw me leave with my medical bag. You know when I normally come home. How was the duration of my absence in any way unforeseeable?”

“Never mind. Never mind.” He flapped a telegram under my nose. “The trawl has brought in a catch. The president of the Royal Society, no less, the Right Honourable William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin, has replied to my enquiry. ‘Have encountered nobody matching description given,’” Holmes read from the telegram. “‘However, have met another young Yankee scientist, Nathaniel Whateley of Miskatonic University, Massachusetts. Resident in London for past two years pursuing studies here. Last encountered at Society’s Christmas function.’”

“Then this is no lead at all. Your catch is not even a tiddler.”

“But with a tiddler one may bait the hook for a larger fish. The Lord Kelvin seems to think that this Whateley might know our mystery man. Whateley hails, after all, from the same state. He is of similar age. He too is a scientist. Each of those factors increases exponentially the probability that their paths may have crossed.”

“Do they? London is a big place. So, for that matter, is Massachusetts. We do not even know that the unfortunate in Bethlem lived in London. Purfleet lies some six or seven miles outside the bounds of the metropolitan boroughs.”

“At the very least, if we can meet Nathaniel Whateley, we can interrogate him. Odds are he will have heard of a fellow New Englander with only half a face and one arm.”

“And thus be able to furnish us with a name. Where does Whateley live?”

“Kelvin avers, albeit without much certainty, that he resides in Pimlico.”

“No address?”

“None. But at least we have somewhere to start. Let us sally forth and hail a hansom. The game, as you so often have me declare in your stories, is afoot.”

* * *

Pimlico I have always found a dark, odd backwater of London. It seems defined not by what it is but by what it is not. It is neither Westminster nor Belgravia nor Chelsea, but rather occupies a trapezoidal space bounded by those three well-heeled and desirable boroughs and, to the south, by the Thames, as though it were created merely to fill a gap in the capital’s geography, like some sort of architectural patch. Its Regency-style terraces, for all their white frontages, look drab and forlorn, its treeless streets joyless.

This impression I found all the more marked as our cab clattered towards its destination beneath a sinking, reddening sun. Children in broken shoes darted across the unswept roadway, yelling and shrieking. Curtains billowed listlessly from half-open windows. Unseen dogs desultorily barked.

“How do we go about finding Whateley’s house?” I asked. “Are we simply to knock on doors until we chance upon the correct one?”

“More or less,” came the reply. “There is, at times, no substitute for good old-fashioned legwork. Come!”

For the next hour Holmes and I travelled from house to house, asking at each whether a Nathaniel Whateley lived there and, failing that, if the occupants knew of a young American gentleman by that name in the vicinity. It was dull, dispiriting work, and often as not we were greeted with a gruff rebuke. Polite though we were, some of the householders seemed to regard our presence on their doorstep as an imposition, while others, mistaking us for rent collectors or bailiffs, were frankly hostile.

Just as I was abandoning all hope of success, Holmes proposed a change of tack. Spying a band of urchins loitering on a corner, he said to me, “It is a truth universally acknowledged amongst gold prospectors that the least promising-looking terrain can yield the most profitable seams.”

I doubted this was demonstrable fact, yet nonetheless I followed him as he approached the assembled ragamuffins and queried them about Whateley.

One lad, perhaps the grubbiest-faced of them all, piped up. “The Yank, you say? I know where you can find ’im.”

“Nathaniel Whateley?” said Holmes. “You’re sure?”

“If that’s ’is name,” said the lad with a shrug. “Ain’t many Yanks as live around ’ere. Something of a toff, ’e is, for an American. Dresses nice. Shoes always shiny. Lobs me the odd penny now and then.”

“Ah. Then doubtless you will not vouchsafe his whereabouts without a suitable inducement.”

“If you mean do I want paying to tell you what you want to know, you’re not wrong, sir.”

“Watson? Give the boy something.”

I delved into my pocket. “Here. A shilling.” The urchin stretched out a smut-blackened paw. “No,” I said, snatching the coin out of his reach. “It is yours only if you lead us to the right house.”

“Sixpence now, sixpence if it’s the right ’ouse. Take it or leave it.”

“He’s a hard bargainer, this youngster, Watson,” said Holmes. “I wouldn’t haggle further lest we lose his patronage altogether.”

The boy led us to a four-storey terraced house hard by the river, a building that was better kempt than most of its neighbours but still somewhat down-at-heel. In answer to our knock, the door was opened by a maid, who affirmed that Mr Nathaniel Whateley did live there but was not at home. I flipped a second sixpence towards our young guide, who caught the coin in mid-air and made it disappear into the pocket of his threadbare poplin jacket. A moment later, the boy himself disappeared, scurrying off down an alleyway.

“When is Mr Whateley expected back?” Holmes asked the maid.

“That I can’t say, sir,” replied she. “You’d have to ask Mrs Owen, my mistress. It’s her house. Mr Whateley just rents part of it.”

“Then may we see Mrs Owen?”

The maid withdrew into the house, and a few moments later a middle-aged woman came bustling out to take her place. Holmes presented his card, which she peered at with a sceptical eye before scrutinising his face and mine.

“I’ve heard of you, Mr Holmes,” said she eventually. “Who hasn’t? I thought you died in Switzerland.”

“Artistic licence on Watson’s part. It was merely a walking holiday during which I took a nasty spill down a rock face. He transformed this into a fatality. The newspapers have since reported my continued existence.”

“You are no ghost, that’s for sure. But I still don’t know whether I should let you in.”

“Why ever not, my dear woman?”

“Well, for one thing, Mr Whateley is not at home.” “So the maid told us. It is a pity.”

“Nor have I been informed by him to expect visitors.”

“We have come unannounced. If he is not present, we shall trouble you no further. Might I prevail upon you, however, to tell us when he is due to return, so that we may arrange to call another time?”

Mrs Owen cast a furtive glance back into the shadowy interior of the house. “That,” she said, “I cannot say. It is…” Conflicting emotions were plainly visible upon her face. “Mr Whateley’s current whereabouts are unknown to me. It is, to be frank, somewhat worrisome.”

“How so?”

“He is usually so reliable. He is apt to disappear from time to time, but never fails to give notice beforehand. He’s a naturalist, you see. Often he takes himself off on field trips, either into the countryside or to the Continent. He always lets me know when he is scheduled to return, and he is sure to leave sufficient money if he is to be away when the rent falls due. Quite punctilious about that, is Mr Whateley. One hears about Americans being brash and arrogant, but not he. I would not call him a kind man, but he is steady and reputable. I have not minded keeping house for him, and there are precious few tenants I can say that about.”

“When did he go?” Holmes asked.

Mrs Owen still seemed unsure how much more she should reveal and if she had not revealed too much already. She struck me as being hewn from the same marble as our own Mrs Hudson. For a woman like her, discretion was her watchword.

“Maybe you should come in, gentlemen,” she said, relenting. “You have a certain reputation, Mr Holmes; it might be to my advantage to confide in you.”

As we crossed the threshold I darted a look at Holmes, as if to say, See? Your literary fame opens doors, and whom do you have to thank?

He saw the look but studiously ignored it.

* * *

Mrs Owen sat us down in her sitting room, which formed part of a small suite of rooms at the rear of the house that was her exclusive domain; the rest was her tenant’s. A handkerchief was in her hands and she wrung it as we talked, as though transferring her inner tensions into that lace-trimmed square of cloth.

“As I said, Mr Whateley is often away, seeking out specimens for his collection. He is seldom gone long. I think the month he spent in Egypt was his lengthiest absence, but normally it’s a fortnight at most. I always know he is about to leave because he tells me as much. Sometimes he will even lay out his prospective itinerary. ‘Dover to Calais, then south-east through Germany into Austria-Hungary and onward to the Carpathians.’ That’s the sort of thing. If he is delayed on his way home, he will wire to let me know. However…”

There was a lot of weight in that however, a depth of disquiet.

“Go on,” said Holmes.

“Wednesday last, he just vanished. It was mid-morning. I heard him gather his hat and coat from the stand in the hallway, and then he was out the front door without so much as a goodbye.”

“Nothing precipitated this event?”

“Nothing as I can recall. Nothing occurred that was out of routine. No, wait. Come to think of it, he did receive a parcel that morning, by the first post.”

Holmes’s eyebrows arched. “A parcel containing what?”

“How should I know? It was addressed to him, not me. I brought it to him in his study along with the rest of his correspondence, as is my wont, and left him to it.”

“Does Whateley often receive such parcels?”

“Not frequently. Usually it will be a book he has ordered.”

“What were the parcel’s dimensions?”

“I should say not more than a few inches on each side.”

“Be more exact, if you will.”

“Perhaps ten long, eight wide, one thick. That’s the best I can estimate.”

“Then it could well have been another book.”

“I suppose so.”

“How was the parcel wrapped?”

“Plain brown paper, fastened with string.”

“And there was a return address?”

“Not that I saw.”

“Do you still by any chance have the paper? The string?”

“Mr Whateley threw them in the wastepaper basket,” said Mrs Owen, “which I emptied into the dustbin the next day. The dustcart has come by since.”

“That is a pity,” said Holmes. “Much could have been gleaned from the handwriting, the knots used, the way the paper was folded… Do you think that whatever was in the parcel may have caused Mr Whateley to depart with such haste?”

“I am loath to say. As I told you, I handed him the parcel and left him to it. Next thing I knew, a few minutes later, he was making his hasty exit.”

“Taking the parcel’s contents with him?”

“Presumably. I have since found nothing in his study that was not there before.”

“And he gave you no indication where he was going?”

“None. He was not back by suppertime. Nor was he in bed when Kitty – that’s the maid – brought him up his tea the next morning. The door to his room was ajar, the bed unslept-in. That was when I started to become anxious.”

“Understandably, given his regular habits. And you have not seen him since?”

“Neither hide nor hair,” said Mrs Owen, shaking her head. “Not for nearly a week now.”

“Singular,” said Holmes. “Tell me, does Mr Whateley receive guests here?”

“Hardly ever. I have a rule about visitors, female ones in particular. They may call but they may not stay past nightfall. In Mr Whateley’s case it has not been a problem. He is a well-spoken, presentable man, distinguished, but somewhat aloof. He has engaged in no romantic entanglements that I know of, nor does he seem to have many friends.”

“So you have not by any chance seen him in the company of a fellow approximately his own age, with grotesque disfigurements?”

The landlady frowned. “What kind of disfigurements?”

“Severe scarring here.” Holmes indicated the left side of his face. “And missing a hand on the same side.”

Mrs Owen laughed sharply. “No. I think I should remember such an individual had I laid eyes on him.”

“I am sure you would. I felt it worth asking.”

“Mr Holmes…” Mrs Owen paused, then forged ahead. “Your arrival at my door asking after Mr Whateley, coupled with his unaccountable disappearance, inclines me to think that my concerns about him are well-founded. That is why I am going to share with you a detail of his life that I would ordinarily keep to myself, as it may have some bearing on the situation. It somewhat undermines the portrait I have painted of him thus far, you see.”

She drew a deep breath before continuing.

“Mr Whateley is a model tenant, yes. I have no complaints about him. I am none too fond of the way he has commandeered my attic, but I am prepared to overlook it. Perhaps I am just squeamish.”

Holmes’s eyes narrowed in curiosity but he said nothing. I could see him filing away this remark for later exploration.

“All the same,” Mrs Owen continued, “he does have one peculiar characteristic which has always perturbed me. He talks to himself.”

“Not so strange,” I said. “As a naturalist, he must spend a considerable amount of time alone in the wild, stalking and trapping his quarry. I imagine he has got into the habit of talking to himself simply so as to hear a human voice. Besides, the profession tends to attract eccentrics.”

“I grant you that, Doctor. I myself murmur under my breath every now and then, and I have even been known to speak to my late husband, before I remember that he is no longer with me. But what I am describing is hardly the same. Mr Whateley conducts conversations. I have overheard him on several occasions.”

“Conversations?” said Holmes.

“Long, sometimes disputatious conversations. It is as though he is using one of those newfangled devices – what are they called? A telephone. He is speaking to someone not present in the room. There is the to-and-fro of dialogue but only his side is audible. There are pauses between his statements, as though he is listening to an interlocutor. At times he seems to be answering the other’s question, or posing one himself. I don’t know what to make of it. The queerest aspect of the phenomenon is that the party to whom he speaks would appear to have a name. A double-barrelled one, and Irish at that.”

Holmes’s mouth turned up at the corners in a smirk. “Irish indeed,” he murmured.

“Reilly-Logue,” said Mrs Owen. “That is what Mr Whateley calls him.”

The smirk vanished. “Reilly-Logue? You are quite certain that is the name?”

“That or something very like. I’m hard pressed to account for it.”

I could not see why Holmes found “Reilly-Logue” so noteworthy. Yet he was bent forward now in an attitude of quivering agitation. Evidently he had made a connection I had not.

I repeated the name a few times in my head, hoping it might strike a chord.

Reilly-Logue, Reilly-Logue…

Then it came to me.

R’luhlloig.

“Mrs Owen,” said Holmes, “you have been so forthcoming already that I can scarcely bring myself to beg another indulgence of you, yet I shall. You mentioned that Whateley has ‘commandeered’ your attic.”

“Yes, as a workplace. He keeps his collection of specimens there.”

“May we take a look?”

CHAPTER FIVE

The Dead Menagerie

“I SHAN’T GO IN WITH YOU,” SAID MRS OWEN AS WE arrived at the top of the stairs. “I’ve seen it twice. That is enough.” She motioned at the door that stood across a small landing from us. “It is not locked, but kindly take care not to touch anything. Mr Whateley is protective of his collection. He does not even allow me to dust in there, lest I accidentally break something. I do not mind in the least.”

“You make it sound as though the room holds appalling sights,” I said.

“Maybe I am oversensitive. All I know is that, for a naturalist, Mr Whateley likes the unnatural.”

So saying, the landlady retreated downstairs.

“Reilly-Logue, R’luhlloig,” I muttered to Holmes when she was out of earshot. “Please tell me it is coincidence.”

“There is no such thing,” came the reply, “not in the demimonde that you and I inhabit. Now—” he reached for the door handle “—if Mrs Owen’s dire warnings hold any water, we must brace ourselves.”

The attic was large, occupying practically the full breadth and depth of the house, and since it was situated beneath a mansard roof, there was a decent amount of headroom throughout. The walls were whitewashed, the floorboards limed, and there were projecting casement windows front and back, which would have let in plenty of illumination were their panes not occluded with rectangles of brown paper gummed securely into place.

Holmes lit the nearest gas jet, whose glow revealed dozens upon dozens of glass containers arrayed on shelves. They were specimen jars of varying shape and size, each with a label hung around its neck. The smallest was no bigger than a pint pot, the largest the dimensions of a firkin barrel. All were filled to the brim with a clear, yellowish liquid which, to judge by the sickly-sweet smell that hung in the air, was formaldehyde.

In each floated a creature, dead.

At first I assumed they were simply animals of the kind one might find in any pet shop or zoo or indeed at the home of Mr Sherman of Pinchin Lane, Lambeth, purveyor of exotic and not so exotic fauna. The jar nearest to me, for instance, held what looked like a tarantula, albeit larger and hairier than the example I had seen on display at the Natural History Museum. Only on closer inspection did I realise that this spider had ten legs instead of the customary eight and that transparent wings sprouted from its back. The label stated that it hailed from the jungles of the Niger basin.

Likewise, what I took at first glance to be a coiled-up snake – some kind of constrictor, its body as thick around as my forearm – proved to be more akin to a worm. It had skin rather than scales and two weird slits at one end, which were either eyes or nostrils. Then there were a score of tadpole-like things floating in a cluster, their place of origin a lake at Plitvice, Croatia. The body of each was larger than my fist and their tails were fused together at the tips, so that in all they resembled the head of a flower, albeit one made of flesh rather than vegetable matter.

There was more. More and worse. Whichever way one turned, one’s gaze fell upon the lifeless remains of some animal that would not be found in any normal bestiary. Some of them appeared to be wayward evolutionary offshoots of well-known species, while others bore physical traits that were readily identifiable – batlike wings, a lizard head, flippers, feathers, fins – but combined them with physical traits that had no obvious existing analogue or with which they simply, by the laws of nature, did not belong.

“Are these real?” I said wonderingly, moving from jar to jar, from monster to monster in this dead menagerie.

“Do you mean are they fakes?” said Holmes. “Has Whateley assembled them himself, rather as P.T. Barnum did when he attached the mummified head and torso of a monkey to the tail of a fish and created his ‘Feejee mermaid’? I fear not. This is no cabinet of curiosities, Watson. Or rather, it is, but not one for public consumption.”

My eye was caught by a true aberration: a jellyfish whose greyish pulpy frame was studded with dozens of protruding spheres. Organelles or polyps, I thought, leaning in for a closer look.

Then one of the spheres split open along a fissure to reveal an eye.

I leapt back with a startled cry. In my shock I collided with one of the larger specimen jars. It rocked on its shelf, formaldehyde slopping around inside. I caught and steadied it, breathing hard.

Holmes chuckled darkly. “What gave you such a fright?”

“That… that abhorrent jellyfish thing,” I said. “It opened its eye. It… it looked at me.”

My companion approached the jar. “I doubt that. The creature is long dead. The pressure of your foot upon the floorboard disturbed the balance of the shelf, which in turn disturbed the jar and its contents.”

“I hope you are right.”

“It would seem friend Whateley is a collector of biological anomalies,” Holmes said, “and a follower of the Dutch zoologist Anthonie Cornelis Oudemans, who also pursues the incongruous in nature and is renowned as the discoverer of the black crested mangabey of the Congo. Look.” He pointed to a workbench upon which sat several large leather-bound reference works. “Here is Oudemans’ book on sea serpents. It is well thumbed and, if the slips of paper sprouting from between the pages are anything to go by, well annotated by Whateley himself. And there beside it is a copy of Unaussprechlichen Tieren, or Unnameable Beasts, Friedrich Wilhelm von Junzt’s lesser-known work, a companion volume to his Unaussprechlichen Kulten. Again, Whateley appears to have consulted the tome assiduously.”

Holmes commenced leafing through an assortment of papers, which littered the workbench alongside the books.

“Mrs Owen advised us not to touch anything,” I pointed out.

“You almost knocked over one of the specimen jars,” my companion replied. “Next to that sin, what I am doing is a mere peccadillo.”

“Hurry it up, at least.”

“Do you fear Whateley’s untimely return? Or is it that you dislike being in this room?”

“Principally the latter. Well, no, wholly the latter.”

“These corpses are not attractive, but their being dead presents an insurmountable obstacle to hurting us. I thought you were made of sterner stuff, Watson.”

Normally I was but, truth to tell, the way the jellyfish creature had “looked” at me had left me thoroughly discomfited. I could not help but think that at any moment another of the specimens might exhibit sudden locomotion. That one there, for instance, which was like some mutated elephant foetus; or that one, which was seemingly a hybrid of rat, centipede and eel and, according to the label, came from England’s own Severn Estuary. These misbegotten creatures should not exist, so by extension whatever hold death had over them could well be tenuous. Any of them could yet snap into life at the least provocation.

“A-ha!” exclaimed Holmes. “What is this?” From amongst the papers he withdrew a letter. “The handwriting is more than familiar. It is, in point of fact, familial. Do you recognise it? You should.”

“Even if you had not dropped such a heavy hint, Holmes, the heading on the notepaper gives the game away. The Diogenes Club, Pall Mall, St James’s. In light of that and your remarks, who else can the letter’s author be but your brother?”

“Quite so, Watson. You are not nearly the dullard you make yourself out to be in your tales. Now, what can Mycroft want with our American specialist in the extremities of the animal kingdom? Hum! That is interesting. The letter is inviting Whateley to the Diogenes to give a talk.”

“A talk? At the Diogenes?” The club, of course, was famous for the rule that speech was forbidden on the premises. Any member caught violating this directive three times was blackballed.

“I think we both know what that means,” said Holmes. “The talk was intended for the ears of that select subset of Diogenes members who belong to a certain clandestine club-within-a-club.”

“The Dagon Club.”

“Indeed. Brother Mycroft requested the pleasure of Nathaniel Whateley’s presence this April just past ‘to share with us your knowledge of non-Linnaean species and taxonomical deviations’.”

“Did Whateley accept the invitation?”

“There is one way to find out for certain.” Holmes consulted his watch. “But we must make haste. It is nearly eight, and Mycroft’s habits of punctuality are unbending.”

CHAPTER SIX

Arbiters Upon the Unspeakable

WE MADE IT TO THE DIOGENES CLUB WITH ONE minute to spare. Mycroft was in the lobby, collecting his belongings in readiness to leave at his usual time of departure, twenty past eight on the dot. He seemed disgruntled by our arrival, for he suspected – not without justification – that whatever business we were on would throw out the finely calibrated clockwork of his daily routine. His nod of greeting was of the most peremptory and unenthusiastic. Nonetheless he beckoned us to adjourn with him to the Stranger’s Room, the one corner of the club wherein conversation was permitted.

“To what do I owe the honour, Sherlock?” the corpulent older Holmes asked. “Does this have anything to do with the letter I received from you yesterday? You should know by now that I respond to such enquiries in my own good time. Not that I have a response for you in this instance. I know of no person such as you have described.”

“I have come on a not unrelated matter.”

“Well, get on with it. A working dinner awaits me at the Pugin Room. Westminster grandees require my direction on the questions of the annexation of Tongaland and the unrest in Borneo. If I do not tell them exactly what to do, doubtless they will formulate some foolish and inappropriate policy that will cost the nation dear.”

“Did, or did not, a Mr Nathaniel Whateley give a talk to the Dagon Club in April?”

“He did,” said Mycroft. “Had the nerve to demand payment for it, what’s more, but that is Americans for you. I threw a couple of pounds his way and he seemed content.”

“How did the talk go?”

“It was fairly interesting. Whateley, of course, had no idea he was addressing a secret inner circle of the Diogenes, a body of men dedicated to collating and cross-referencing every scrap of data we can about the Elder Gods, Old Ones and so forth. He might perhaps have wondered why we asked so many questions and made such copious notes, but I believe he took it to indicate fascination and was appropriately flattered.”

The Dagon Club, incidentally, was no mere intellectual exercise. Mycroft and his cohorts were not simply dedicated to compiling extensive files on all known materialisations of the cosmic gods and the activities of those who worshipped them. Each man also occupied a position of influence within a particular national sphere, be it the press, politics, or the judiciary. Each was therefore well placed to control how such arcane affairs were addressed at the highest levels.

In large part this consisted of preventing the public promulgation of details about the subject. Newspaper reports that even hinted at the existence of powerful, hostile interstellar entities were ruthlessly spiked. Should a rumour of a relevant nature begin to trickle through the halls of the Palace of Westminster, it was quashed. Criminals of the kind Holmes and I repeatedly ran up against, those individuals rash enough to truck with Cthulhu and his kin, never got to expound upon their deeds in court; either their defence barristers browbeat them into silence, or their cases never reached trial and they themselves were summarily consigned to penal servitude and more or less left to rot.

Mycroft had set up the Dagon in the early 1880s as a way of helping counteract the gods’ malign machinations. As he himself put it, “The aim is to create a hidden bulwark between ordinary citizens and the forces that threaten our world, so that the one remains oblivious to the other.” After the events detailed in The Shadwell Shadows, and being hardly a man of action, Mycroft resolved to do it on his own terms, in a manner that suited him and his proclivities. Siting the Dagon within the Diogenes was not just a personal convenience, but also ironically fitting. A place where speech was forbidden, where a handful of men would arbitrate upon the unspeakable. The Dagon Club, alas, is no more; but I shall deal with the matter of its grim demise in the final volume of this trilogy.

“Whateley,” said Holmes now, “may have some connection with another American whose identity I have yet to establish but whose plight shows every sign of contact with Outer Gods and the Great Old Ones.”

Mycroft’s double chin sprouted a third fold as he lowered his head to look speculatively at his brother. “Tell me more.”

After Holmes had outlined our recent exploits, Mycroft said, “Well now, here’s a thing. I first heard of Whateley after a colleague drew my attention to an abstract of his work published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. Up until two years ago Whateley was pursuing postgraduate research at Miskatonic University, his area of specialism being zoological oddities. Miskatonic University, as I am sure you are aware, is situated in Arkham, a town just north of Boston which happens to be the locus of a disproportionately high incidence of occult phenomena.”

“Arkham is not unknown to me,” said Holmes, “nor is Miskatonic University. One can hardly delve into the mysteries we do and fail to have heard of either place.”

“Likewise. Arkham crops up again and again in the Dagon Club’s files. That whole corner of Massachusetts is a hotbed of Outer God and Old One manifestation. It is almost as though there is some sort of eldritch faultline there, a crack in the world that draws the gods to it.”

“London is not so dissimilar.”

“One might argue that the metropolis – any metropolis – is likely to yield a greater than average quantity of uncanny events due to its concentration of human beings. Arkham, by contrast, is a relatively small conurbation with a population of no more than twenty thousand, yet the per capita rate of weirdness is extraordinary, far in excess of that found anywhere else. You should read the Arkham Gazette some time. I have copies sent over, and it is a veritable treasure trove of the abnormal. And what is true of Arkham is true of neighbouring towns such as Dunwich, Innsmouth and Kingsport, and true too of its rural environs; the forests, hills and swamps that sprawl for miles around, dotted here and there with small farms and lonely villages but otherwise sparsely populated and largely uncivilised. But I digress. Nathaniel Whateley. Amongst the many subjects he touched upon in his talk was a journey he undertook by paddle steamer up the Miskatonic River in ’93. His stated goal was to discover and bring back a shoggoth.”

Both Holmes and I were taken aback.

“A madman!” I declared. “The very idea of it! How would one go about capturing one of those protoplasmic giants? How could one hope to corral and contain it?”

“Not a madman,” said Mycroft. “Whateley struck me as quite a clever and enterprising young individual. Ambitious though misinformed. To him a shoggoth was just another semi-mythical wild beast, like the yeti of the Himalayas or its North American counterpart the sasquatch. ‘I hear of shoggoths everywhere,’ he said to us, ‘and was keen to bag one for myself.’ He thought reports of the creature’s enormous size and amoeboid propensities, not to mention its vicious rapacity, were exaggerated. At any rate, the expedition did not end well; something to do with an attack upon the boat by Red Indians, which he was lucky to survive. His companions did not, all save one, a fellow student, name of…” Mycroft frowned, rifling through the extensive filing cabinets of his brain for the morsel of information. “Conroy. That’s it. Zachariah Conroy. He too made it out alive but, sad to say, not without receiving horrendous injuries at the hands of the savages.”

“Horrendous how?” said Holmes.

“Dismemberment or mutilation of some kind. Again, Whateley did not go into specifics. I was later to discover, via a contact at Miskatonic University, that the failure of the expedition led to his being stripped of his research funding and expelled.”

“I wonder that he mentioned the expedition at all to you and your fellow Dagon Club members,” I said. “Given its outcome, would he not have been wiser to keep quiet about it, especially before such an august audience?”

“I thought so myself, Doctor,” said Mycroft, “but there struck me as being a certain shamelessness about Whateley, along with a deep-seated iconoclastic streak. He seemed almost to revel in the audacity of the enterprise and to feel that its dark conclusion somehow justified rather than invalidated it. At any rate, it is clear that he was obliged to leave Arkham under a cloud and relocate to London where he continues to conduct his studies, with a whole ocean dividing him from the ignominy. I believe an inheritance keeps him solvent financially.”

“One presumes no shoggoth was found,” I said.

“I doubt, if Whateley had managed to track one down, any of the expedition would have lived to tell the tale,” said Mycroft. “So, Sherlock, with the revelation about Zachariah Conroy, have I furnished you with the identity of the unknown American about whom you wrote to me? Or is there another badly mutilated young Yankee scientist we know nothing about?”

“It is at least feasible that Conroy is the man in Bethlem.”

“Perhaps I ought to have made the connection myself, but Whateley was vague on the nature of Conroy’s wounds. ‘Injuries inflicted by savages’ could cover a multitude of sins. I presumed he had been scalped or burned with hot coals, as is the usual fate of the Red Indian’s captured enemies. A missing hand and a half-melted face seem just as liable to be the result of accident as of deliberate action.”

“I concur, yet it is not impossible that a tormentor might derive satisfaction from harming a victim thus.”

“The question remains, though, what is Conroy doing over here too? Does it have something to do with Whateley?”

“Assuming the inmate is Conroy, it is knowledge I can endeavour to tease out of him. The very mention of his own name might well snap him out of his fugue state. Do you not agree, Watson?”

“It might serve as a key to the door, as it were,” I said.

“What puzzles me somewhat,” said Mycroft, “is the term that both he and Whateley have employed – r’luhlloig – and that serves to link the two of them. You are sure Whateley’s landlady had it right?”

“Mrs Owen seems a reliable witness,” said Holmes. “It is possible that Whateley was uttering something else altogether and she misconstrued it as an Irish surname, which we in turn have misconstrued as the word Conroy used. The odds are against, however. The simpler explanation is the more persuasive.”

“And you say it means ‘hidden mind’?”

Holmes and I both nodded.

“I shall take your word for it,” said Mycroft, “not being as well versed in R’lyehian as you two. What can it signify?”

“Mrs Owen said that Whateley appeared to be addressing his comments to ‘Reilly-Logue’, hence she took it to be a name. She might be correct in that surmise, but if so, it is not a name that I have come across before.”

“Nor I.”

“On the other hand, she might be mistaken. R’luhlloig could be some abstract concept, hitherto unrecorded in any of the literature. I did search for instances of it last night in my reference library but turned up none.”

“What if it were a phrase concocted by Whateley and Conroy together? A kind of secret code shared between them? That would account for their both uttering it. Did that not occur to you, Sherlock?”

One could easily forget that Mycroft, by Holmes’s own admission, was the cleverer of the two. His bulk and apparent indolence belied a keen intellect and it was always surprising when he set forth a hypothesis that had escaped his younger sibling. It was also, from my vantage point, refreshing to see my friend put on the back foot for once.

“It did not,” Holmes confessed, with a smidgeon of chagrin, “and that is a line of investigation I shall pursue. Good work, Mycroft.”

His brother dismissed the compliment with a wave. “Our lives may not dovetail much, brother, but it is always a pleasure to have an opportunity to collaborate directly. The struggle we are engaged in exacts a heavier toll upon you than upon me, but rest assured I am your staunch ally. Speaking of which, are you in need of a small subscription by any chance? The hems of your trouser cuffs are starting to look a little frayed and the knees a touch shiny, while your boots are definitely showing their age.”

“I keep body and soul together,” Holmes said stiffly.

“I realise that the good doctor supports you, but I have deep pockets and low overheads. We could call it a loan.”

“No.” My companion lowered his gaze. There was upon his features a ghost of embarrassment, which he exorcised with a sudden laugh. “No indeed! Corporeally, materially, I subsist, but the mind still flourishes.” He turned to me. “Watson, come. We find ourselves armed with fresh intelligence. Let us put it to good use.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Back to Bedlam

OUR HANSOM CROSSED THE THAMES AT WESTMINSTER Bridge and rumbled south-east towards St George’s Fields. Night was falling and I was growing weary. Holmes, on the other hand, who by now had not slept for forty-eight hours, remained buoyant. His reserves of energy – boosts of cocaine notwithstanding – seemed all but inexhaustible. At forty-one, he had the stamina of someone half that age. He also had the greyish pallor and sunken cheeks of someone far older. Wrinkles wreathed his eyes and there were vertical grooves on either side of his mouth so entrenched they looked as if they had been carved with a blade, while the hair at his temples bore more than a smattering of silver. I could see an old man lurking within him, closer to the surface than he ought to be. It was not difficult to predict how Sherlock Holmes would look twenty years hence. It was as though, in order to keep going at the furious pace he set himself, he was burning through his allotted lifespan faster than most, like a quick-match fuse.

No doubt as a consequence of tiredness depressing my spirits, I found myself sinking into mournful musings about my late wife. This route was one I used to travel regularly during the weeks of our engagement, when I would leave Baker Street to visit her at the Forresters’ house in Lower Camberwell where she lived and worked as a governess.

Mary had loved this hour of day, the onset of dark on a summer’s eve in the city. The deep purplish-blue of the eastern sky reminded her of her early childhood in Bombay, where twilights simmered and the stars emerged in such brilliant profusion that you could read a book by their light. Now and then I would ask her if she longed to go back to India, and she, with that gentle sincerity so typical of her, would reply that she could never be where her heart was not, and her heart lay here. To illustrate the statement she would point not at London but at me, whereupon I would be suffused with a joy so great it was nigh inexpressible.

“I want my very last words to be your name, John,” she said to me once. “When I am on my deathbed, I want to call out to you and have you come to me.”

“You will outlive me by far, Mary,” I replied.

“But don’t you see? Even if you predecease me, I shall still call to you and you will still come. Our souls will be together in the hereafter just as we are together now.”

And when Mary did die, my name was indeed the very last thing upon her lips. She screamed it in agony, as a slobbering, ravening byakhee tore her to pieces before my eyes.

“You are remembering the late Mrs Watson,” said Holmes, intruding upon my melancholy reverie.

“How can you tell?”

“I have seen, many times since her funeral, the particular solemn demeanour that has now come over you. More tangible evidence is afforded by the fact that you are plucking at your shirtcuff in a rather wistful manner.”

“My shirtcuff?” I had indeed been performing this action unawares. “What has that got to do with anything?”

“Did you not once tell me that you and your wife made a formidable partnership at cards?”

“We did.”

“And that at the root of your success at the card table, when playing bridge or whist with friends, was a system of secret signs which the two of you had devised to indicate to each other what play you were about to make?”

“Yes. It is not something I am especially proud of, and we utilised it only when we were up against our neighbours the Atwells. They are a pleasant enough couple except when it comes to cards. Competitiveness brings out the worst in them, and Mary and I resolved that we would rather beat them by cheating than lose to them and be subjected to mockery.”

“You told me that if either of you was about to play a trump, you would alert the other to this by discreetly plucking at your right shirtcuff with your left hand. Seeing you do so now, I could only infer that your mind must be on Mary. I have noted that often when she is the topic of conversation, you adopt this unconscious practice, in remembrance of happier times and the intimate conjugal sympathies you and she shared. Ergo, it stands to reason that you would do the same whenever she crops up as the object of your inner contemplation.”

“It is two years now since Mary was taken from me,” I said, “and sometimes it seems like yesterday and at other times an age ago. Whenever I feel that the pain might have begun to dim, it returns anew, as acute as ever, if not more so. I… I could have saved her. I could have prevented it. The byakhee… Had I been a fraction quicker off the mark I could have killed it before it pounced.” My voice shook with emotion. “Holmes, I am as guilty of Mary’s death as that creature.”

“You are not!” my friend exclaimed. “How dare you say that, Watson, let alone think it. You and your wife were ambushed. Given that you were taken by surprise, it is remarkable that you responded with the alacrity that you did; a lesser man would have been paralysed with fear, but not John Watson. He got off a shot and killed the beast.”

Even now I can vividly recall – how could I ever forget? – the moment when the byakhee invaded our house. Mary and I were enjoying a companionable evening by the fireside, she busy with her needlepoint, I perusing the latest edition of The Lancet. A picture of domestic contentment, and then there was an almighty shattering of glass as a nightmarish beast broke through our sitting-room window – a large hulking thing with webbed feet and membranous wings; an amalgamation of buzzard, bat, wasp and more besides, but also corpse-like in appearance, rotted-looking and emaciated.

Giving vent to an unholy screech, the byakhee prowled menacingly across the carpet towards Mary, who sat frozen in her chair, face slack with shock and incomprehension. I, for my part, lunged instinctively for the chiffonier in which I kept my service revolver. The time it took me to cross the room, yank open the drawer and pull out the revolver felt like hours. I could not kill the byakhee with my bare hands; the creature was too strong for that. A well-placed bullet, though, would fell it, for byakhees are far from invulnerable. They may be able to fly through the vacuum of space, interstellar steeds for those with the wherewithal to tame them and the audacity to ride them, but they can nonetheless be brought down by small arms fire like any conventional animal.

The byakhee moved with appalling swiftness, far faster than I could have imagined. It was upon Mary even as I swivelled round to confront it. Its talons were dug into her torso, rending. Its beak-like maw was clamped around her neck. She cried out my name, her words dissolving into a thick, wet gurgle.

Next instant, the byakhee was dead.

A minute later, cradled in my arms, Mary was too.

“Furthermore,” said Holmes, “we found the culprits, did we not? The trio who cast the spell to conjure up the byakhee and sent it to your house.”

I nodded. “Abdullah Khan. Mahomet Singh. Dost Akbar.” I reeled off the names in a litany of hatred. Each tasted like acid upon my tongue.

These were the three Sikhs whom, along with Jonathan Small, had been cheated out of their ill-gotten booty by that blackguard Bartholomew Sholto. Sholto was under the misapprehension that he had got his hands on a box containing a cache of jewels that included the fabled “Great Mogul” diamond, said to be the second largest such stone in existence. What the box actually held was a small idol chiselled from sea-green stone and fashioned to represent Bokrug, the god worshipped by the semi-amphibian Thuum’ha race who dwelled in the city of Ib in the long-lost land of Mnar some ten thousand years ago. The idol was stolen by the inhabitants of neighbouring city Sarnath, an altogether more human-like race, after they had committed genocide upon the Thuum’ha, repelled by their soft, batrachian bodies. Sarnath’s victorious warriors set up the idol in their city’s main temple as a trophy but it disappeared that same night, the only witness to its removal the high priest Taran-Ish, who was found dying on the temple floor, his face distended in terror. A thousand years later, magical revenge was enacted upon Sarnath when a feast celebrating the destruction of Ib was disrupted and the revellers were mysteriously transformed into green, flabby, voiceless beings much like the murdered Thuum’ha. The humbler citizens of Sarnath fled in terror, never to return.

During the millennia since the Bokrug idol vanished from Sarnath, it resurfaced now and then, changing hands, passing from owner to owner and bringing nothing but misery to any who touched it. By the 1870s it had fetched up in the possession of a rajah in the northern provinces of India. He had added it to his hoard of gold and gems believing it to be nothing more than a decorative jade effigy of a water-lizard.

With the Raj tightening its control over the subcontinent, the rajah began fearing for his wealth. In a cunning feint he secured what he reckoned his least valuable item, the idol, in an iron box with a Buddha hasp and despatched it to the fort at Agra for safekeeping. He told the servant into whose care he entrusted the box, a man called Achmet, that its contents accounted for half his worldly goods, whereas in truth practically everything he had was stowed away in the vaults beneath his palace.

Achmet, posing as a merchant, arrived at Agra with Dost Akbar as a travelling companion. He had revealed the nature of the box’s contents to Akbar, who was Abdullah Khan’s foster brother, and that sealed his fate.

Together, Small, Khan, Akbar and Singh killed Achmet and opened the box. Their disappointment at finding not a king’s ransom of jewels within but rather a paltry-seeming artefact was great. Khan, however, was a widely read autodidact with an interest in the arcane and he recognised the idol for what it was. He knew that, humble though it seemed, this lump of weathered stone harboured significant power, and he managed to persuade his co-conspirators that the idol was worth more than all the riches in the world, for with the right incantations it might be wielded like a weapon. Indeed, if used appropriately, it had the capacity to make the four of them gods amongst men. Accordingly, they stashed the box in a hole in a wall of the fort, agreeing to retrieve it once things had settled down in the country; but they never got the chance. Achmet’s body was discovered and the four killers were arrested.

At the penal colony in the Andamans, Small fell in with two of the officers in charge, Major Bartholomew Sholto and Captain Arthur Morstan. He told them about the box, with a view to securing their agreement to recover it from its hiding place on his behalf. He lied about the contents, however, thinking that neither man would be interested in a crudely made heathen idol but would be motivated by the thought of a share of a treasure trove. Sholto then betrayed Small and Morstan, making off alone with the box.

Small spent the rest of his time on Blair Island plotting vengeance. In this he was aided by an Andaman Islander he befriended, a witch-doctor who taught him how to inflict sickness through a curse and to command a homunculus to do his bidding. Morstan, meanwhile, returned to England and disappeared shortly afterwards in mysterious circumstances. In fact, he died of a heart attack during an altercation with Sholto, who disposed of the body and told no one.

Morstan’s daughter Mary was the conduit through which Holmes and I became embroiled in the affair. She had begun receiving strange, cryptic letters consisting only of an inked sigil akin to an Elder Sign but with its central star sporting four points rather than the traditional five. The letters proved to have been posted by Small, who suspected that Mary knew the whereabouts of the iron box, although she did not, as her father had never mentioned it to her. In fact she had not seen or heard from Captain Morstan since he came home on leave some ten years earlier.

The sigil – which Holmes dubbed an Elder Sign of Four – was part of a plan by Small to unsettle and unnerve Mary. By sending one to her repeatedly, he meant to undermine her mental equilibrium to the point where he could swoop in and take advantage, cajoling from her perturbed mind the information he sought. It would have been dangerously provocative to send her a real Elder Sign, so he devised a version of his own, sinister-seeming but essentially innocuous.

Once Holmes and I had put paid to Small’s scheme, we thought the matter over and done with. What we did not count on was his erstwhile co-conspirators. A few years later the three Sikhs, who had each received a life sentence for Achmet’s murder, escaped from prison in Madras and made their way to London. Abdullah Khan had read my novel The Sign of Four and, with his inside knowledge, had easily divined the true story embedded within its pages. He inferred correctly that the Bokrug idol was now in Sherlock Holmes’s hands. He and his fellows wanted it back and determined that the best way to go about this was to kill me using a byakhee. Through striking at Holmes’s closest friend and ally, they thought that they would leave him so crippled by grief that he would prove easy prey.

Perhaps it might have worked. However, by inadvertently killing Mary instead, the Sikhs brought down upon their heads the righteous wrath of both Holmes and her widower. Our hunt for the culprits was relentless and our treatment of them, when we caught them, brutal. I am not proud of what we did. Nor am I ashamed. We gave them back their idol. At the same time, we invoked its terrible power upon them. Doom came to Khan, Singh and Akbar in a cascade of strange lights and a welter of green mist, from which they emerged transfigured, their bodies reduced to a mute, hunchbacked, froglike condition. Thereafter I executed them summarily with bullets to the brain, but even before I produced the gun, I swear I saw abject terror in their black, bulging eyes, and it was a source of huge satisfaction to me. The three were aware of what had befallen them. They knew how they had been altered, how odious and noisome they had become. Death must have seemed to them a merciful release. To me, it was sweet and merited justice.

“It was my fault,” I insisted.

“How in God’s name have you arrived at that conclusion, Watson?”

I drew a breath and sighed it out. “Because I wrote that book.”

“The Sign of Four?”

“Yes, and it led the three Sikhs to my door as surely as any signpost.”

Holmes fixed me with a grave stare. “You have never said this before.”

“It has been stewing within me all this time. I have tried to reason it out with myself, with decreasing success. I have told myself that the Sikhs would have found us eventually, regardless of whether I had published the novel or not. The book merely made their task easier and hastened the inevitable.”

“Absolutely.”

“Yet perhaps I should have camouflaged the true story better. I should have changed names as well as facts, so as to throw people off the scent. I felt misgivings even as I was composing the first draft, but dismissed them. I wanted to celebrate Mary. I felt I was writing her a love letter. Instead, I was writing her death sentence.”

I turned aside from Holmes. My eyes were pricking, tears brimming in them, and I did not wish him to see.

He patted my shoulder. “Now I understand why your pen has fallen idle. It was not to comply with any request of mine, or at least not solely. Since losing Mary, you have become ‘gun-shy’.”

I nodded. “You had already asked me before then, more than once, not to write about you any more. It seemed the perfect pretext. Mary was not long in the ground, and the three Sikhs too, and I was beginning to realise that these chronicles of mine were not mere harmless diversions. So I wrote one more short tale, a capstone to the career of the fictional Sherlock Holmes wherein I consigned him to oblivion, and Professor Moriarty with him. I was acceding to your demands but I was also trying to purge myself of the guilt I was feeling over The Sign of Four. I did not appreciate that at the time but have come to do so since, in hindsight. The upshot is that even if you were to give me licence to ‘resurrect’ you at some point in the future, I am not sure I would. My stories have become a double-edged sword. For all the benefits they have brought us, they have hurt us too.”

“In light of what you have just told me,” said Holmes, “our argument at the hammam yesterday now seems all the more regrettable. I am an insensitive blunderer sometimes, Watson.”

“Sometimes?” I echoed with a brittle smile, which he reciprocated.

“Yet I am not unsympathetic. You know that. I wish you had confided in me before today. I vow to be more perceptive of your feelings.”

“You cannot break the habit of a lifetime, surely.”

He chuckled. “Well, no. Maybe it is asking too much of myself. But I shall endeavour henceforth to be aware that my Watson, redoubtable as he is, has his vulnerabilities just like any other man. Behind that stalwart exterior there lies— Oh-ho! What is this?”

The hansom was pulling up outside Bethlem, and Holmes’s attention had been caught by something that I myself, with my eyesight still somewhat blurry, had not observed. He swung open the waist-high doors in front of us and leapt down to the kerb.

“Pay the man, Watson,” he called out as he hastened off towards the asylum.

Moments later I rejoined Holmes. He now formed part of a small knot of people that was gathered on the concourse facing the building’s east wing. The knot consisted of two others, a uniformed attendant and a man in a suit. The latter was a potbellied Anglo-Indian whom I took to be a resident specialist, recalling Gregson’s mention of a “half-caste” Bethlem doctor. He was crouched on his haunches, absorbed in inspecting a body upon the ground. As I arrived, he concluded his examination with a sorrowful shake of the head.

“Poor wretch,” he said, straightening up. “Nothing I can do. You say you found him like this, Burrell?”

“Not five minutes ago, Dr Joshi,” replied the attendant.

I moved to get a better view of the body. Even had I not overheard the doctor’s pronouncement, I would have known I was looking at a corpse. The head was canted at an unnatural angle to the torso. The tongue protruded dumbly from the mouth. The whites of the wide-staring eyes were suffused with scarlet.

Then it dawned on me that I knew this man. Sudden, violent death may have deformed his features, but the carroty hair and bristling eyebrows were distinctive.

It was McBride.

My breath caught in my throat. The Scottish attendant, amongst whose charges was the inmate we thought to be Zachariah Conroy, had met a grisly end. One did not have to be Sherlock Holmes to fathom how it had happened, either, for the body was surrounded by shards of glass and flinders of painted wood. Holmes was looking upward, and I followed the line of his gaze to see a broken window on the third floor. The window was a jagged, gaping hole with no pane left intact. The few splintered transoms and mullions still in place were all angled outward like snaggle teeth. McBride had either leapt or been hurled through it, falling three storeys to a neck-snapping death.

Dropping his gaze, Holmes announced himself with a double clearing of the throat. Dr Joshi spun round, having been hitherto oblivious to both my companion’s presence and mine.

“Who the devil are you?” he barked.

“Sherlock Holmes. And you are?”

“Dr Simon Joshi, alienist. Ah yes. Of course. I heard that the illustrious Mr Holmes had paid us a visit yesterday morning. I have no idea what has brought you back but I do not believe you could have come at a worse time.”

“The evidence for that is quite plain,” said Holmes, gesturing at the body. “Poor McBride.”

“He has indeed suffered a most terrible fate,” said Dr Joshi. “Moreover, the inmate who I can only assume is responsible for this death has absconded from his cell. We made that discovery several minutes before McBride here was found, and I already have attendants out combing the vicinity. Rest assured, the culprit will be recovered.”

“Who is it? Who has absconded?”

“I am not sure it is any of your business, sir,” Joshi said, puffing himself up. “It is a matter for the hospital administration and if need be, should my men’s searches not bear fruit, for the police. Not for an amateur detective, however highly esteemed he may be in some quarters.”

Holmes was undeterred by the other’s dismissive tone. “Is the aforementioned inmate by any chance a man with a scarred face and a missing hand?”

Dr Joshi’s startled blink was all the answer needed.

“The window,” Holmes explained, “is the fourth along from the staircase, on this side. The cell of the inmate I have described is the fourth along on that floor, on the same side. The inference is, as friend Watson here so insists on having me say, elementary.”

Dr Joshi undertook a moment’s inner debate, then said, “I reprimanded McBride for allowing you onto the premises. The days when Bethlem was open to all and sundry are long past. Our inmates are not meant to be a laughing stock, a public entertainment. We do not invite people in to ogle at them any more, and charge a fee for the privilege. The asylum plays host to unwell human beings who deserve compassion and the appropriate treatment, both of which we supply.”

“We never came to ‘ogle’, as you put it. We were pursuing a case.”

“Nonetheless there are rules, and McBride infringed them. However,” Dr Joshi continued, “it is, to say the least, a peculiar coincidence that the inmate you refer to, the one whom you came to see yesterday, today breaks out of his cell and kills an attendant in the process. All the more so since until now he has not proved in any way violent. I am wondering if the one event gave rise to the other.”

“Our visit provoked an unexpected reaction?” said Holmes. “But surely, if that were the case, it would have happened straight away, not a day and a half later.”

“For which reason, and which reason alone, I am giving you the benefit of the doubt, Mr Holmes. All the same, I remain suspicious.”

“If you will allow Dr Watson and me to view the cell in question, there is every chance I can allay your suspicions.”

Dr Joshi weighed up the proposal. “Do you think you can provide some insight into why the inmate broke out and where he might have gone? Not that I am clutching at straws,” he added, although to me he seemed to be doing just that. “But any assistance, however unorthodox, might be welcome, given that we have learned next to nothing about the man during the short time he has been here.”

“I will try my utmost to be of use,” Holmes said with a gracious bow, “although I make no promises.”

Dr Joshi was by now mollified. “I suppose it cannot hurt. Burrell, find something to cover the body with, a sheet or what have you. Gentlemen, if you will follow me…”

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Impossible Rather than the Improbable

THE ENTIRE THIRD FLOOR OF THE EAST WING LIVED up to the hospital’s nickname. All along the corridor inmates were moaning and fretting in their cells, agitated to a markedly higher degree than during our previous visit. The one whom I had last seen tethered to his bedpost by a chain was now straining at his leash, mouth agape in a perpetual silent scream of anguish. The iron collar was chafing the skin of his neck so much it had drawn blood. Other inmates bayed like wolves, and two attendants were struggling to install one fellow in a straitjacket. He fought them every inch of the way, gnashing his teeth, trying to inflict bites. His lips were coated in a froth of sputum like a rabid animal’s.

Dr Joshi did his best to maintain a sanguine, phlegmatic air, despite the pandemonium around us. “You must understand,” he said, voice raised above the din, “an escape of this nature is all but unheard of. We are scrupulous about keeping inmates under lock and key at all times, the passive ones just as much as the aggressive ones. In this instance, as you shall see, the precaution was more or less redundant.”

That was indeed the case, for the door to the scarred man’s cell stood ajar but hardly in a manner that suggested it had been opened in the usual way. Rather, it hung askew from its hinges, one of which was snapped clean through, the other twisted at an angle.

“The door has been forced,” said Dr Joshi.

“You don’t say,” murmured Holmes, squinting at both hinges.

“A deed requiring some considerable strength.”

“Superhuman strength, one might call it.”

“Well, quite. It is on record that ordinary men are capable of extraordinary physical feats under the right provocation. Fear, panic, or the desire to rescue a loved one from peril inspires a surge of vitality, which lends unaccustomed might to the muscles. That, I am sure, is what occurred here. The inmate, overcome by a sudden, powerful mania, wrenched the door practically off its mounting. We may also infer that McBride rushed in to restrain him and the inmate hurled him through the window. Thereafter, the man fled, exiting the building by a somewhat unorthodox method.”

“Of what nature?”

“There is a window at the far end of this corridor. You can probably just discern it from here. It, too, is broken like the one in the cell. My assumption is that the inmate gained egress through it and shinned down a nearby drainpipe to the ground.”

“That, all told, is a perfectly plausible scenario,” said Holmes, “and one I would endorse. I recommend that you use it in any report you give about this incident, Doctor. You have elucidated the facts most satisfactorily.”

The alienist’s anxious face relaxed a little and something like a smile played upon his lips.

“If I may,” Holmes continued, “I should like to examine the cell itself in detail, purely for my own gratification. You doubtless have other matters to attend to – overseeing the recapture of your escapee amongst them – and I would not wish to impose any further upon your time.”

“You are asking me to leave you unchaperoned.”

“For a mere ten minutes or so. As I said, your summation of events cannot be anything but accurate. I, however, am a punctilious sort who likes all his ‘i’s dotted and ‘t’s crossed. I crave your indulgence to do just that.”

When it suited his purposes, Holmes could deploy a remarkable suavity that almost always got him his way. Now was no exception. Dr Joshi prevaricated for scarcely a moment before giving his assent.

“Very well, Mr Holmes. Conduct your examination. Then, if you would, depart.”

“You are too kind, Doctor.”

As the alienist hastened away, Holmes stepped around the crooked door and into the cell. I followed, and was relieved that the walls offered some insulation from the caterwauling of the madmen around us. Their clamour had begun to grate upon my nerves.

“You do not credit Dr Joshi’s interpretation of the evidence,” I said.

“Not for one instant, but it seemed prudent to reinforce what he already believed. Now he has something to tell the board of trustees and, if necessary, the press. Confirmation of his assumptions from Sherlock Holmes, if not authoritative, is at least emboldening.”

I gazed around at the words of R’lyehian scrawled upon the floor and walls in charcoal. The same three phrases recurred, as before, but there were, I reckoned, more of them than last time. Zachariah Conroy, if it was he, had kept himself busy since our visit.

Holmes, meanwhile, inspected the shattered window. With gimlet-eyed attention he ran a hand carefully over the jutting glass shards and splintered wood. A light breeze wafted in, stirring the tails of his topcoat.

“Ah!” he declared. His fingers had alighted upon a morsel of something adhering to the apex of one of the shards. He plucked it free and held it out to me. “Watson, what do you make of this?”

I peered. “It would seem to be a scrap of leather. Black leather. From an item of apparel? McBride’s shoe perhaps? A fragment could have been torn off as he hurtled through the window.”

“Could have been, but for the fact that the leather of his shoes is brown, not black, and the shoes themselves are, as far as I could tell when I observed his body just now, intact. The uppers were a little scuffed but exhibited no more than the usual wear and tear. Moreover, note the softness of this substance.” He waggled the scrap in the air. It had a pliant, jelly-like consistency. “It is not cured. It is fresh tissue, until very recently part of a living creature.”

“I do not like where this is heading.”

“Neither do I. Yet the conclusion seems indisputable. Our inmate did not escape. He was abducted.”

“By whom?”

“The more accurate relative pronoun would be ‘what’. Unfortunately, in our abstruse line of work we often find ourselves looking not for any human agency but rather an inhuman one. That dictum you have ascribed to me about ‘eliminating the impossible’ seldom applies in our lives. We are far more likely to pursue the impossible than the improbable in our quest for truth. The impossible in this instance would be a beast capable of flight and possessed of a rudimentary sentience, one large and powerful enough to carry off a fully grown man, one that is nocturnal in its habits… Have I narrowed down the species for you yet?”

“It could be any one of a number. A byakhee springs to mind.”

“It is unsurprising that byakhees should be at the forefront of your thoughts, in light of our recent conversation. This piece of flesh, however, does not bear the hallmarks of that creature. Its stretchiness and flexibility to me suggest that it originates from a wing, and a byakhee’s wing is rigid and diaphanous like a wasp’s. We must consider a more bat-like candidate, I feel. Still none the wiser? Well, let us take a look at the other window Dr Joshi mentioned, the one via which the missing man allegedly removed himself from the premises.”

We traversed the remaining length of the corridor to the far end. On the way we were subjected to a barrage of howls and hectoring by the inmates. One of them, the resident of the furthermost cell along, hopped up and down and flapped his arms at us. I could not help but think that he was enacting, in his muddled, incoherent way, the passage of a winged creature in flight.

“We would appear to be in the company of an eyewitness,” said Holmes. “Did you see it, my good man? Did you see what entered through this window?”

The inmate continued hopping and flapping, oblivious to my companion’s entreaty. His boggling, unfocused eyes suggested he was far past the bounds of sanity.

“Entered?” I said. “But Dr Joshi said it was out of this window that the inmate went. He said nothing about something else coming in.”

“Oh, Watson, Watson! Dr Joshi was only speculating. Against blatant evidence to the contrary, what is more. Behold the glass on the floor here. Look how much there is of it. This is one of the most basic deductions anyone can make. A child could tell that the window was broken from the outside, not the inside. Even a Scotland Yarder.”

“Oh. Oh yes.”

“Making the window a point of ingress, not egress.” Holmes leaned out, craning his neck left and right. “There is, as Dr Joshi said, a drainpipe, but it is a good five yards distant. Conceivably one might leap from the window ledge, catch hold of it and clamber down, but it is not a risk I would wish to take. It is highly likely one would fall short of the drainpipe or fail to gain purchase upon it, with the inevitable disastrous consequences.”

“No face. No face.”

This, a muffled muttering, came from the cell opposite that of the flight-mimicking man. Its occupant stood erect at the door, as if at attention, with both hands clasped over his face.

“Like so,” the inmate said. “No face. How do I see? How do I smell? How do I eat? How do I talk? I have no face.”

“You have no face?” asked Holmes. “Or something you have seen has no face?”

“I cannot see. I did not see.” The man, for all the calm solemnity with which he spoke, was riven with fear. Every tendon in his frame was taut, like a wire under tension. “No face.”

Holmes pressed him further, to no avail. The inmate was lost in a sort of confused, dissociative state whereby he was identifying with a thing he had seen while denying he had ever seen it.

Abandoning the attempt, Holmes said, “Neither he nor his companion across the corridor is supplying what might be called unimpeachable testimony, but each in his way confirms my hypothesis, as does the condition of the window. A flying creature burst in, proceeded along the corridor, pulled open the door to a particular cell, and made off with the occupant, but not before slaying McBride, who courageously went to the inmate’s assistance. The aperture the beast created by throwing the attendant outside became a convenient means of departure, although in the process a tiny piece of its leathery wing was torn off. The monster in question is faceless, with a black cartilaginous hide and—”

“A nightgaunt,” I said, at last putting the pieces of the puzzle together.

“About time, old friend. A nightgaunt indeed. That is our culprit. At any rate, that is the instrument of the inmate’s abduction but not, I would suggest, the instigator. Nightgaunts, as a rule, shun mankind. They haunt remote, desolate spots and tend to kill any person who intrudes upon their territory. Yet it has been known for them to be trained to follow commands, like a falcon or gundog. If caught young enough and raised with the right regimen of punishment and reward, they are biddable.”

“Someone sent a tame nightgaunt to kidnap Conroy.”

“That is my reading of the situation,” said Holmes. “What remains to be established is who that someone might be.”

CHAPTER NINE

Most Irregular Irregulars

MIDNIGHT FOUND US STANDING ON THE FORESHORE of the Thames, up to our ankles in mud. The tide was at its lowest ebb, so that the river was reduced to a narrow trickle flecked with silvery glints of moonlight. We were by that spur of land known as the Isle of Dogs, an appendix of the East End mainly given over to docks. Wharf buildings loomed around us, along with the canted masts and funnels of ships that had been beached by the receding water.

During the daytime it was one of London’s busiest and most bustling areas, resounding to the cries of sailors and stevedores. At this late hour, however, all was still and hushed. The growl of the rest of the city could be heard, but distantly, at one remove, as though it emanated from another world. Meanwhile the slop of the river and the stench of the mud spoke of a more primordial epoch, an age before civilisation.

“Holmes,” I whispered. It seemed appropriate to keep one’s voice low. Not only did one not want to attract the attention of any bystanders in the vicinity, but conversation at the normal volume would have sounded jarringly loud.

“Not now, Watson. I know that tone. I have no desire for another of your lectures.”

“I simply wish to have it on record that I think this is a poor idea. There are better ways of conducting searches.”

“If you would rather be elsewhere,” came the somewhat acerbic reply, “then by all means go. I am perfectly capable of managing on my own.”

“That is not what I meant and you know it,” I said. “I do not approve of your consorting with the individuals whom you are about to muster, nor do I much care for the method by which you muster them.”

“Your approval is not required,” said Holmes, “and as for these ‘individuals’, why not use the collective name I have applied to them? It is, if nothing else, ironically amusing.”

“Your ‘Irregulars’. As disingenuous a euphemism as ever there was.”

“Yet apposite nonetheless. It has a nice poetic ring to it, too. And when an unobtrusive, city-wide manhunt is required, the Irregulars are a force to be reckoned with. Their powers of scent alone put any bloodhound’s to shame. Even a certain lop-eared, waddling lurcher-spaniel cross of our acquaintance is no match for them.”

“But in order to employ them, it is not as if you simply have to reach into your pocket and produce a shilling or two. The cost is much greater and more personal.”

“Would you rather I engaged a gang of street Arabs, as in your tales, like some sort of law-abiding Fagin? Rough-hewn guttersnipes who will run honest errands in return for coin? How sentimental you sometimes are as an author, Watson. As though I would even think of marshalling an army of waifs and strays at Baker Street and expect them to do anything save disappear with my money – and Mrs Hudson’s best silver, no doubt – never to be seen again.”

With a snort of derision, Holmes drew from a leather portmanteau the object he had brought with him from our home. Passing me the empty bag to hold, he raised the item aloft. Moonbeams glinted off its intricate bronze contours and lent an eerie semblance of life to the trio of snake heads that adorned its front.

It was the diadem known as the Triophidian Crown, and the very sight of it sent my mind reeling back to the cavern beneath St Paul’s church, Shadwell, where Professor Moriarty had attempted to sacrifice us to Nyarlathotep at the foot of a vast subterranean pyramid. Not in fact one of the original Triophidian Crowns, of which just three had survived into the modern era, this particular one was Moriarty’s own homemade replica, albeit no less effective for that. Imbued with eldritch power, it gave the wearer mastery of all forms of reptile, including those of a hominid persuasion. Holmes had retained it since our defeat of Moriarty back in 1880 and employed it from time to time when certain types of reconnaissance and pursuit were required.

Now, as he lifted it up to place it upon his head, I endeavoured one last time to dissuade him from this course of action.

“The crown exacts a toll,” I said. “It imposes huge demands upon the energies of the user. You are, if I may say so, not at your healthiest. You have gone far too long without sleep and you have not eaten properly since the morning before last. As a physician—”

“Not my physician.”

“I might as well be, given that you have no other. As I was saying, as a physician I would counsel you at least to postpone using the crown until after you have rested.”

“The trail of our missing inmate is still fresh. Now is the time to look for him, not later.”

“Then we should look for him by conventional means.”

“Why, when unconventional means will be more effective? The Irregulars may disconcert you, Watson, but they get the job done, and in the end that is all that matters.”

“Is it? And not your wellbeing?”

Holmes shrugged. It really seemed as though he no longer cared what happened to him. The war he was waging consumed him. Winning, at any price, was everything.

He lodged the Triophidian Crown atop his head. Almost immediately, skeins of green light began to flicker along its braided bronze coils and a weird throbbing hum filled the air. As Holmes’s brow furrowed in concentration, so the tendrils of light brightened and multiplied and the hum deepened. Soon the entire diadem was aglow, emitting a nimbus of coruscating emerald luminosity that was too bright to look at directly. The ripples of the nearby river were lit up greenly, while the mud in a twenty-yard radius around us took on a mossy viridian aspect.

It was Holmes’s own physical energy that was powering the crown, providing fuel for this uncanny display of light – and fuel, of course, is a finite resource. How soon, I wondered, before he would be drained? How much life force did he have to spare at present? I had seen him before in the immediate aftermath of using the Triophidian Crown. It left him exhausted even when he was in peak condition, and at this moment he was a man worn down to the nub.

This time, might the crown put him dangerously near death? Might it perhaps kill him?

“I call you forth,” said he in R’lyehian. His words rolled across the river to the far bank, echoing darkly back. “I summon you from your underground homes, your nests, your lairs. I will you to come. Answer my call! Make your way here with all haste, you denizens of the nether reaches of this city. Iä! Hear your master. Come hither to do my bidding. Iä! Iä!”

For a time, nothing happened. Holmes continued to chant. The Triophidian Crown continued to shine lambently, bathing the scene in green phosphorescence.

Then they arrived.

* * *

They emerged from the mouth of a sewer outfall some fifty yards upriver and made their way across the mud towards us at a slow, unhurried pace. Some were on their bellies, crawling, slithering. Those that walked upright did not move as a person should; their limbs seemed looser, their joints more flexible than any ordinary man’s.

They were snake men, Homo sapiens reptiliensis, members of a race Holmes and I had first encountered in the crypt of St Paul’s Shadwell, a race that had dwelled in London since time immemorial; arguably the city’s true natives, with a more deserving claim to proprietorship of this plot of land than any Englishman. They were of all shapes and varieties, some more serpentine than human, others more human than serpentine, with hides of every hue and often a beautiful patterning to their scales. A couple of them were hooded like cobras. One was a man from the waist up but the rest of him was thick, coiling tail that propelled him along sinuously.

In all they numbered perhaps twenty, and as they neared I was seized by the almost irresistible urge to run. I shifted my feet in the mud, which clung thickly around my boots and appeared, as in a nightmare, to hold me fast. My Webley was in my pocket. I slipped a hand about the grip, for reassurance. As long as Holmes exerted control over the snake men through the Triophidian Crown, we were safe. Should his influence on them waver for any reason, however, they might well choose to look upon us as prey. Then a few well-aimed rounds could mean the difference between survival and an ugly death.

“Halt,” said Holmes, still speaking in R’lyehian.

The snake men duly stopped in their tracks. Bulbous slitted eyes regarded us warily, appraisingly. These creatures’ instincts were telling them we were the enemy. The crown’s power was helping to keep their innate aggression in check, but still they were, in essence, wild animals and not to be trusted.

“We are here,” said one of them, the largest of the group. A forked tongue darted from his lipless maw, there then gone in an instant. He bore distinctive markings, bands of gold and black somewhat like a tiger’s stripes. “We have anssswered your sssummonsss.”

I am transliterating the snake men’s sibilant dialect of R’lyehian into an English equivalent. What I cannot convey on the page is how hideous and profane the language sounded coming from the snake man’s mouth, even more so than it did from any other being’s.

“I appreciate your attendance, W’gnns,” said Holmes.

The gold-and-black snake man tipped his head to one side, a gesture that appeared both submissive and sceptical. W’gnns was indeed his name, or as close an approximation of that guttural appellation as I can render in prose.

“I have a favour to ask,” Holmes continued.

“Asssk it,” said W’gnns, although he seemed to know as well as Holmes and I did that it was no favour; it was a command that needed obeying, and no refusal of it would be brooked. “You have the crown that compelsss. We mussst sssubmit.”

“I seek a man. He was spirited away from a place of confinement by a nightgaunt. It is the latter I wish you to track, in the expectation that it will lead to the whereabouts of the former.”

“Nightgaunt.” W’gnns uttered the word with a trepidation that was shared by his fellows. One of the snake men moaned, a couple of them cringed, and I understood then that even monsters found some things monstrous. There was a hierarchy amongst horrors.

“Here.” Holmes took from his pocket the scrap of nightgaunt wing, which he had wrapped in a handkerchief. “You may derive its scent from this.”

The snake men gathered round the ragged bit of flesh. Several flicked their forked tongues at it, while others simply sniffed with their noses as an ordinary human might.

“Got it?”

The snake men nodded.

“The nightgaunt will have delivered its cargo somewhere reasonably close by. Large and powerful though it is, the creature cannot carry a fully grown man far in a single flight. Therefore its destination will be still within the bounds of London or, if not, only a little further afield.”

“We will ssseek the nightgaunt’sss trail. We will pursssue it throughout the ssssity, remaining in the damp, ssshadowy placesss, the tunnelsss and channelsss and crevicesss that are our realm, ssstaying ever unssseen. Asss long asss the nightgaunt hasss left dissscernible ssspoor, we will find where it went.”

“Very good. I will meet you here, at this same hour, every night for the next three nights. If by the third night you have not met with success, I will consider your duty discharged and release you from service.”

“Mossst graciousss of you, Missster Holmesss,” W’gnns said with more than a soupçon of archness. “At leassst our ssslavery will not be permanent. We thank you for that.”

“Now look here.” Holmes’s spine stiffened and his eyes flashed sternly. “Have you forgotten who it was who unearthed and reopened the onyx obelisk that kept you and your people trapped permanently underground? Who secured your escape from that cavern network that was your entire world and allowed you the full run of London’s subterranea? Who released you from your subservience to Nyarlathotep and your reliance on cannibalism to survive?”

“You. But only after imposing sssertain caveatsss we mussst abide by.”

“Yes, that you take all pains to avoid showing yourselves to humans and that you catch and kill no living creature larger than a cat for sustenance. Thanks to me, you can breathe fresh air. You can emerge under cover of darkness, as now, and see the stars and moon that were hitherto denied you. Remember that, W’gnns. Remember that I am your benefactor. I have given you far more than I will ever ask in return.”

Suitably chastened, W’gnns lowered his head. “You are right of courssse, sssir. I forgot my place. I beg your forgivenessss. I and my fellowsss ssshall comply with your demandsss.”

“Good. Off with you, then. We shall rendezvous in twenty-four hours.”

The snake men departed with varying degrees of haste, some trotting, some trudging. W’gnns was the last to leave, sidling back to the sewer outfall, head still bent in humility. Had he been human I might have felt pity for him as the recipient of a tongue-lashing from Holmes; might have felt a certain kinship, too. As it was, I was only too glad to see the back of him. Not only did the snake men remind me of our experiences in Shadwell fifteen years earlier, they also brought back vividly the horrors I had witnessed in the lost city of Ta’aa some months before that, during my service in Afghanistan, when I and a contingent of soldiers had run afoul of a race of Cthulhu-worshipping lizard men, the snake men’s near relatives.

As if on cue, my shoulder injury – the legacy of a lizard man’s slashing talons – began to ache. I worked my arm in a circle, alleviating some of the discomfort but not all.

“Old wound giving you pain?” said Holmes as he removed the crown from his head and passed it to me.

“Some,” I replied, stowing the diadem away in the portmanteau. “I have to say, Holmes, I am still not happy that you freed the snake men.”

“Why ever not? The Irregulars have proved useful on numerous occasions. That alone justifies my decision.”

“But what if one day they cease to be content with staying out of sight? What if they succumb to their baser impulses and start attacking people?”

“They are more sophisticated than you give them credit for. We have a pact, the snake men and I, and they have so far kept their end of it. Moreover, upon each encounter with the Irregulars I reinforce the pecking order. Through the crown, W’gnns and company are firmly reminded who is their master and who may, if the need arises, quash them. They convey this lesson to their fellows, and the status quo is maintained.”

“Singlehandedly you hold an entire species to ransom.”

“You anticipate a rebellion in the future? A popular uprising amongst Homo sapiens reptiliensis?” Holmes essayed a wan smile. “Only if I give them an inch of latitude, which I will never… never…”

His voice trailed off. He sank to his knees.

“Holmes!” I cried, rushing to his side. “Holmes, speak to me.”

“I am fine, Watson,” replied he, feebly. “A momentary light-headedness. Help me up, would you?”

I lodged my good shoulder beneath his armpit and hoisted him upright, but he was more or less dead weight. Together, side by side, we staggered to the bank. There, I hauled him onto dry land and laid him out flat, before wading back through the mud to retrieve the portmanteau. Tempted though I was simply to abandon the bag and let the rising river sweep it and its contents out to sea, I knew Holmes would never forgive me if I did.

By the time I had returned to him my companion was sitting up, but he looked unsteady and his face had gone so white it resembled a skull. We found our way to the main road and I managed to hail a passing hansom, but the driver baulked when he saw the condition Holmes was in.

“Drunk, is he? I’m not ’aving anyone in my cab who’s falling-down drunk. I like my seats clean, I do.”

I thrust a one-pound note into his hand, which promptly changed his tune, and within half an hour we were at Baker Street and Holmes and I were climbing the seventeen steps to our rooms, I all but carrying him up them.

CHAPTER TEN

The Near-Dead Detective

FOR THREE DAYS HOLMES WAS A DEPLORABLE spectacle. He lay abed, flitting in and out of consciousness. When asleep he was inert, corpse-like. The rise and fall of his chest was only just perceptible and his pulse was a fickle thing, hard to discern even by my experienced touch. When awake, he scarcely had the strength to raise his head from the pillow. I spooned soup between his lips every time the opportunity presented itself and gave him doses of various patent tonics. The occasions when I myself needed rest, I left him in the care of Mrs Hudson, with strict instructions that she was to rouse me if he so much as intimated he wanted to get dressed and venture out. I told her that he had contracted some form of “coolie disease” while working at a case down at Rotherhithe, in an alley near the river. It was either Tapanuli fever or the black Formosa corruption, and he would recover of his own accord as long as he did not exert himself.

“Those sound horrible,” our landlady declared with a shudder. “Are they contagious?”

I assured her that they were not, which was no word of a lie since both ailments were entirely fabricated.

By the third day Holmes had regained the power of speech and used that facility to berate me roundly.

“How could you have let me languish here, Watson? You know I was supposed to be at the Isle of Dogs both last night and the night before. W’gnns will be wondering what has become of me. He and the other Irregulars may well have abandoned their search prematurely, on the assumption that I am no longer interested in learning the result. Oh, this is a fine debacle. All that trouble, all that effort, for nothing.”

“That effort, as you put it, almost killed you, Holmes. You overtaxed yourself intolerably, using the crown.”

“Nonsense.”

“Really? Tell me then. How do you feel right now?”

“Fit as a fiddle.”

“Prove it. Get out of bed.”

Holmes propelled himself up to a seated position, but only by enlisting the aid of the bedstead for support and with considerable exertion. The moment he tried to stand, he nearly passed out. “Heavens above,” he said with a grim, self-deprecating laugh. “I have rather overdone it, have I not?”

“That is something of an understatement.”

“Yet I must still make the meeting with the Irregulars tonight. If they have intelligence for me, I need to know it. What if they have located our abductee? He may not stay in one place for long. He may since have been moved out of London, beyond the Irregulars’ ambit.”

“Holmes,” I said, “you are in no fit state to go out gallivanting in the chilly night air. Nor, for that matter, have you recuperated sufficiently to use the crown again with any surety of safety.”

“There is no alternative,” he insisted. “Unless…” He fixed his bleary grey gaze upon me. “Unless,” he said, “someone were to go in my stead.”

* * *

Thus it was that I wound up back at the Isle of Dogs, ankle-deep in mud again and with the Triophidian Crown in my hands.

I had even less desire to be there this time than the last. I had remonstrated strenuously with Holmes for over an hour, maintaining that I was neither willing nor able to use the crown. I could not stand the thought of confronting the snake men alone, never mind attempting to impose my will upon them. I would rather be dipped in tar and set alight.

Yet somehow I had capitulated. Holmes had told me I was braver than I made out and possessed of a robust constitution that was more than adequate to the task. Whether I liked it or not, these blandishments did help sway me.

The sky was clear save for a herd of fat clouds, which traipsed westward across the stars. The moon hung low and full. The hands on my watch stood at twenty past twelve. I eyed the sewer outfall, praying fervently but guiltily that the snake men would failt to appear. Disappointed twice by the non-appearance of Holmes, they would not bother a third time.

Alas, my hopes were dashed. Sure enough, the Irregulars crawled from the aperture, the distinctive black-and-gold frame of W’gnns to the fore.

With nervous hands I lifted the Triophidian Crown and lowered it into position. I braced myself.

Holmes had given me some idea of what to expect. “You will feel a kind of mental surge,” he had said, “like a rush of blood to the head. You will hear the crown speak to you. It has a scratchy, wheedling sort of voice. One might liken it to the voice of an inner demon. I warn you, whatever you do, pay it no heed. The crown wishes to take command of you. You must instead take command of it.”

This seemed fanciful stuff, yet I had no doubt it was a fair summation of the facts. Holmes did not indulge in airy imprecision.

Sure enough, no sooner was the crown seated in place than I became aware of a soft whispering, like a tickle within my brain, insistent and insinuating. I cannot accurately reproduce here what the voice said. I am not certain it even used words as such. It was more an urge, a compulsion. The crown was inviting me to surrender to it. Hypnotically it crooned and lilted, singing a sinister lullaby. I felt as though it would be to my benefit to give in. I should offer up my belly, like a complaisant dog. I should extend my neck so that my throat might be slit open like a sacrificial lamb’s.

No.

I may have uttered the negative aloud. I may only have thought it. Either way, I made clear my refusal. I knew what the crown wanted from me: my life force. It wished to latch onto me in the manner of a vampire and suck until I was drained.

No, I would not be the Triophidian Crown’s willing victim. I would not be parasitised.

The voice quailed before my resolve. Now, all at once, the crown was submissive. It was eager to please. What did I want from it?

I directed my gaze upon the approaching snake men. The crown knew its duty. It could grant me control over them. All it asked for in return was a little of my energy, a mere sample, a taste…

This was untrue, of course. The Triophidian Crown never took “just a little”. Invariably it exacted its pound of flesh – or more – from the wearer. The wearer simply had to ensure that he got something in return, making the crown earn its keep.

Green light began to radiate from the diadem. The humming from its bronze coils drilled through my skull, causing my teeth to vibrate in their sockets and my sinuses to click like crickets. I regarded the snake men with fresh eyes. Suddenly it seemed as though I understood them. I knew not only their thoughts but their way of thinking. Some deep-seated part of my brain had an affinity with theirs. We were strange siblings, they and I. Somewhere far back in our evolutionary pasts, eons ago, we had been more alike than different. We shared a common ancestry.

I will not call this sensation sympathy, but it was close to that. The snake men were no longer alien to me, or repugnant. I was experiencing a lofty compassion for them, underpinned by the realisation that they were beings with as much right to exist as any, part of Nature’s warp and weft. Moreover, their needs were modest, and I had the ability to influence them. They were there to be guided. As with a horse, where all that was required to tame it was the judicious application of whip, spur and rein, the snake men had to be taken in hand. They did not know what was best for them until told so by the wearer of the Triophidian Crown.

“You will stop right there,” I said.

The snake men did not do as asked. Instead they continued to prowl towards me at a slow, menacing pace. I felt a stab of panic. Was the crown malfunctioning? Was I not using it correctly?

Inwardly, the crown nudged me. I had made a mistake, it was saying, an elementary error.

I could have kicked myself. I had spoken in English, a language in which the snake men were not conversant.

I repeated the command in R’lyehian – “N’rhn!” – and this time the snake men responded instantly. They halted in a rough semicircle around me, W’gnns standing slightly ahead of the others.

“You are not Missster Holmesss,” said he. “Where isss Missster Holmesss?”

“Indisposed,” I replied.

“He did not come when he wasss meant to, and now, adding to the insssult, inssstead of appearing himssself he sssendsss hisss proxxxy. It ssseemsss disssressspectful.”

“Do not be insolent,” I chided. The crown thrummed more intently upon my head and its glow brightened. I puffed up my chest, feeling myself the snake men’s superior in every respect. I would not abide insubordination from them.

W’gnns nodded humbly. “I apologissse, Dr Watssson. I ssspoke out of turn.”

“See that it does not happen again.”

“It ssshall not.”

Somewhere faintly and afar I heard a cackling, and realised that it came from the crown. The more I lorded it over the snake men, the more energy it leeched from me. At the same time, the power I had over these creatures was attractive, even intoxicating, and I was eager to keep exercising it. I was aware that I was falling into a trap. The crown, by enabling me to make thralls of the snake men, was in turn making me its thrall. This was a Faustian bargain. Yet somehow I did not care.

“Just because I am not Sherlock Holmes,” I said, “it does not entitle you to treat me with any less deference. I am in fact his equal. My words carry as much weight as his. Don’t you forget that.”

Brighter still the Triophidian Crown shone, causing the snake men’s reptilian irises to contract to the thinnest of slivers. A couple of them raised hands to shield their eyes against its glare.

I was at once exhilarated and incensed. This light was my doing. It was generated by me. Rightly should the snake men be dazzled by it. But should they not bask in it as well? Should they not genuflect before it, as the Ancient Egyptians did before the sun?

The crown was now overcome with glee, and so was I, even though I knew perfectly well that I should not be. Any joyousness the crown exhibited came at my expense. I could feel how it had its hooks in me. I could feel it supping upon my very essence. A numb lassitude was creeping over me, a kind of anaesthesia, like rivulets of ice water through my veins, yet I had no wish to stop. How thrilling it was to have the snake men kowtowing to me! I could make them do anything – anything – I wished.

“Kneel,” I said, and they did. “Bow,” I said, and they did that too. “Grovel,” I said, and they abased themselves in the Thames mud, writhing, groaning.

“Thisss…” said W’gnns, straining to speak. “Thisss isss… not right, sssir.”

“It is if I say it is,” I barked.

“You… abussse usss. Pleassse desssissst. We have information for you. We know where the nightgaunt went. I will tell you where, on condition that you leave usss be.”

“You will tell me regardless, without condition.” I accompanied the declaration with a burst of indignant rage so strong it made the crown crackle audibly.

W’gnns clutched his head. Many of the other snake men did likewise. “It hurtsss,” he wailed. “What you are doing to usss. It bringsss pain.”

“Tell me, you grub, you worthless devil. Tell me! Now!”

Trembling in distress, W’gnns spat out his answer. “Due eassst. Where the sssity petersss out. Where the river mergesss with the land. Thither did the nightgaunt fly. We traced the placesss where it alighted. Where it resssted upon the way. Sssomewhere in thossse marssshes did it land lassst of all.”

“Be more precise.”

“I cannot. I cannot! We dared ssstray no further than that from our hauntsss. To do ssso would be to risssk exxxposing ourssselves. Pleassse, Dr Watssson! We can take no more.”

The voice of the crown was adamant that they could – and indeed should. It was telling me that I was entitled to increase the torment until they begged for death. Indeed, if the mood took me I could actually destroy the snake men by scorching their psyches from the inside out until nothing remained. And would that be so bad? I despised this race, after all. I disapproved wholeheartedly of the way Holmes had given them the run of the city, setting himself up as their noble liberator. If I got rid of the Irregulars, what a message it would send to the rest of their kind. Never would London have anything to fear from them. They would stick to their benighted underworld, cowed and cowering.

The crown was offering me an unparalleled opportunity, and I had a vague inkling of the cost. In order for me to kill the Irregulars the crown would have to reach deep and extract every last iota of energy from me. It would mine me until the seam ran dry.

For a moment – a very long moment – I considered this a price worth paying.

Then it hit me. What was I doing? I was a doctor, a man dedicated to preserving life. I did not kill except as a last resort, in self-defence or to safeguard innocents. Yet here I was, contemplating the slaughter of a score of sentient beings who were at least partway human.

A wave of disgust swept over me – a disgust aimed not at the beleaguered Irregulars but at myself. With a grunt of protest I snatched the Triophidian Crown off my head and hurled it into the mud.

The sudden absence of that coarse, provocative voice in my mind was a blessing. I felt cleaner, more wholesome, as though I had purged myself of something poisonous and sickening.

The Irregulars ceased their agonised contortions. One by one they picked themselves up off the ground. They looked haggard and worn after the ordeal I had put them through. Several clung to their neighbours for support.

W’gnns, his stripes besmirched with riverbed filth, fixed me with a malevolent stare.

“Missster Holmesss would never have done sssuch a thing,” he snarled.

“I know, I know. I can only express regret. The crown – it possessed me. I had no idea what it would be like, wearing it. Holmes warned me, but even so. The power. It was hard to resist.”

“That isss not what I meant. I meant he would never have been ssso carelesss.”

“I was careless, yes, but—”

“Ssso carelesss asss to drop the crown where I might reach it.”

With that, W’gnns darted forward. He moved with snakelike speed, quick as any cobra striking its prey. In an eye-blink the Triophidian Crown was in his clutches.

* * *

“Give that back,” I said.

“Why?” retorted W’gnns. “Why ssshould I? It isss an inssstrument of tyranny. With it, you sssubjugate and caussse sssuffering. Without it, you are nothing. Just a sssoft-ssskinned mammal.”

The other Irregulars hissed assent. Still reeling from the misery I had inflicted upon them, they perceived nonetheless that the balance of power had abruptly shifted. I was no longer the master. I was merely a lone human whom they outnumbered twenty to one. My fate was in their hands now.

W’gnns gestured, and one of the Irregulars – he who was wholly snake from the waist down – slithered towards me. I was slow to react, doubtless because the debilitating effects of using the crown still lingered, dulling my reflexes. I went for my revolver, which I had once again, as last time, made the precaution of bringing along. Before my hand even made it to my pocket, however, the snake man had coiled his lower portions around me, wrapping me from knee to neck. My arms were pressed against my sides and my legs were locked together. I was helpless, entwined in a long, thick cylinder of muscle. I knew then how a monkey must feel when caught in the grip of a boa constrictor. I struggled, but the snake man only tightened his hold upon me. I felt my bones creak. I was having difficulty drawing breath. To make matters worse, the ammoniac reek of the snake man’s body filled my throat and nostrils chokingly. This would be an awful way to die, and I was all but powerless to do anything about it. My only hope of escaping the predicament was to talk my way out.

“W’gnns,” I gasped. “Think. If I do not return home tonight, Holmes will soon work out why. He will know what has become of me and who is to blame. He will come looking for you, all of you, and his anger will be terrible. None of you will escape it.”

“But he will not have thisss.” W’gnns waved the crown under my nose. “We therefore will have that much lesss reassson to fear him.”

“Crown or no crown, Sherlock Holmes is a force to be reckoned with. Listen to me. Do not do this. For all your sakes.”

“Ssshould I ssshow you mersssy?” W’gnns mused. “When you yourssself ssseem ssso lacking in that quality?”

The other snake men snarled that I should not be allowed to live. Let their colleague suffocate me. Let him crush me until my every bone snapped and my organs burst.

“But I did not, did I?” I said. “I relented. I saw sense. You can do the same. You do not want my death on your conscience.”

“From threatsss to an appeal to my better nature.” W’gnns’s lipless mouth grinned starkly, revealing sharp, sickle-shaped fangs. “What nexxxt? Pleading?”

“Never,” I declared. “An Englishman does not plead for his life. If nothing else, an Englishman knows how to die with dignity.”

“Englissshman,” W’gnns echoed quizzically, for I had spoken the word in my native tongue, knowing no easy way of translating it into R’lyehian. “Isss that your tribal affiliation? Isss that what you are?”

“Amongst other things, yes.”

“Well then, Englissshman, you will get your wisssh.”

For one dreadful, vertiginous moment I thought that my claim about dying with dignity was going to be put to the test. I steeled myself for what was to come. I had faith that beyond the pain, as my soul parted company with my body and flew to its ultimate destination, Mary would be there to greet me. I saw myself prostrate before her, imploring her to forgive me for my failure to protect her. I saw her reaching down a benevolent hand, her features lit up with a radiant, loving smile. I felt then that I could die with equanimity at least, if not dignity, knowing what awaited me on the other side.

“You will live,” said W’gnns. “But,” he added, brandishing the Triophidian Crown, “thisss isss oursss now. Never again ssshall Missster Holmesss, or anyone elssse, ussse it upon usss. We will continue to obssserve our pact with him. My race ssshall not impinge upon yoursss. That will be, however, on the underssstanding that the reverssse alssso holdsss true. Your kind ssshall not be troubled by usss again asss long asss we are not troubled by you. Isss that clear?”

Still enmeshed within the snake man’s coils, I nodded.

W’gnns gestured again, and the snake man gave a final squeeze, exerting an almost intolerable pressure upon my ribcage. Then he relinquished his grasp, unravelling himself, and I could breathe freely once more.

The Irregulars ambled off to the sewer outfall while I stood mired in the Thames mud, feeling both relieved and rueful. The tide rose, but only when the edge of the widening river began lapping at my feet did I stir myself to move.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Looking-Glass World

HOLMES WAS IRATE. I HAD ANTICIPATED THAT. From his sickbed he raged at me for several minutes, and I took it, head bent, hands behind back, like a contrite schoolboy summoned to the headmaster’s study over some infraction of the rules.

“In my defence,” I said, when the tempest had abated, “you failed to convey quite how insidious the Triophidian Crown is.”

“Perhaps I ought to have been clearer about that,” Holmes said, recanting somewhat. “I thought that a paragon of probity such as yourself would have sufficient moral fibre not to give in to the crown’s enticements. I misjudged. That does not, however, alter the fact that I have lost a powerful weapon in my arsenal. I mean not just the crown but the Irregulars. Both are irreplaceable, and I fear that their loss will come back to bite us at a later date.” He sighed. “Regardless, I shall soldier on. Tell me again what W’gnns said about the nightgaunt.”

I had prefaced the bad news about the crown with the good news that the Irregulars had identified where the nightgaunt had flown to. Now I repeated the rather vague directions W’gnns had furnished.

“Fetch me my atlas of Britain, would you?” Holmes said.

In the sitting room I went to the section of bookshelf where he kept non-occult works of reference – it formed a comparatively small portion of his total collection – and took down the volume requested, returning with it to his bedroom. Holmes leafed through until he came to a map of London and environs. After some study, he jabbed a forefinger at the page.

“There,” said he. “‘Due east. Where the city peters out. Where the river merges with the land.’ W’gnns could very well have been talking about Rainham Marshes. The place matches all three criteria.”

“But it’s a barren, largely uninhabited area. It covers several hundred acres. I am loath to use the cliché ‘a needle in a haystack’, but…”

“You are looking at the problem the wrong way, Watson. Yes, Rainham Marshes is a wilderness, but that makes our task easier, not harder.”

“How so?”

“Let us presume the nightgaunt was acting under instruction. I think we can both agree that that is more probable than not. The targeting of the inmate, the fact that he was specifically singled out for abduction, invites no other reasonable interpretation of the data. Bear in mind, too, the condition in which the man was first found – covered in scratches and bruises – and where he was found, namely near Purfleet.”

He pointed to the small town on the map. It lay adjacent to Rainham Marshes.

“Does this not suggest to you that our abductee was, immediately prior to his consignment to Bethlem, an escapee?” he said. “That the nightgaunt brought him back to where he had been previously held against his will? That it was carrying out a retrieval?”

“Gracious!” I exclaimed. “Yes. I see that now. He must have picked up his superficial injuries during his escape.”

“They seem consistent with the kind of damage one might sustain while fleeing through inhospitable terrain, stark naked, in a state of blind panic, tripping, falling repeatedly, treading barefoot on sharp stones, forcing one’s way through clumps of reeds and thorn bushes. He was doing it in pitch darkness, what is more.”

“How can you know that?”

“Gregson said the man was discovered by a farmhand early in the morning. That implies he made his escape during the night. The night in question was overcast, the moon at its newest. There would have been virtually no natural light by which to see his way. Little wonder he stumbled so often.”

“So prior to that he was being held in some sort of dwelling?”

“And has been reinstalled there now by the nightgaunt, or rather by its master. Such was my suspicion all along but I needed confirmation, which the Irregulars have provided. Happily for us, the paucity of human habitation in the marshes means we will have many fewer locations to check, many fewer doors to knock on.”

“When do you propose we commence doing so?” I enquired.

“If I said ‘right away’ you would certainly chastise me for it,” Holmes said.

“And justly so. You are still not strong enough yet.” His outburst of some minutes beforehand, however, told me that Holmes was well on the way to recovery. A day ago he would never have been up to such an effort.

“Then first thing tomorrow morning,” he said.

“Too soon. The day after tomorrow, maybe.”

“Tomorrow noon. That is my final offer.”

I had no alternative but to accept this compromise. I counted myself victorious, and assuredly Holmes did likewise.

* * *

Holmes was dressed, shaved, and tucking into breakfast when I tumbled out of bed the next morning. He looked much improved, although still far from hale. I, for my part, ached all over from my rough treatment by the snake men, my ribs in particular feeling tender. That was bad enough, but worse was the throbbing of my head. It was as though I had spent the previous evening drinking heavily.

“A Triophidian Crown hangover,” my friend observed as, with a shaky hand, I helped myself to a cup of tea. “All the unpleasantness of a traditional hangover but with none of the enjoyment that engenders it.”

“For your sake it may be no bad thing that that damned artefact is now in the snake men’s possession. You will no longer have to put up with feeling like this the morning after.”

“Oh, normal use of the crown was no great hardship,” Holmes said airily. “It might leave me a bit listless, nothing a shot of cocaine could not rectify. You should try that remedy yourself. It will fix you up in no time.”

“Thank you, but this is all the stimulant I require,” I said, indicating my tea. “That and some of those poached eggs I see, and a rasher or two of bacon.”

“While you partake of Mrs Hudson’s cuisine – which, as we all know, is as good as any Scotchwoman’s, at least where breakfast is concerned – you might want to cast an eye over this.”

Holmes thrust an envelope across the table to me. It had already been unsealed and inside was a letter on Diogenes Club headed notepaper, along with a newspaper clipping.

“From your brother?” I said.

“Your powers of deduction do you credit.”

The letter was a terse covering note:

Sherlock

Thought you might be interested in the enclosed. The name Zachariah Conroy having bubbled to the surface of my brain during your visit the other day, I then belatedly recalled coming across a mention of it in the Arkham Gazette a couple of years back. It has taken some while to unearth the relevant article from my archives, a task undertaken during infrequent bulls between dealing with affairs of state. Not much to go on but I hope it is of some pertinence.

Mycroft

The clipping, slightly yellowed with age, was dated Saturday 11th February 1893, and read as follows:

M.U. UNDERGRADUATE MAKES STARTLING CLAIM

We at the Gazette have become accustomed to unconventional and indeed bizarre experiments being conducted in the science halls of Miskatonic University, and will no doubt be reporting on such to our readers for many years to come.

Here, however, for your delectation, is news of yet another singularity originating from that august institution of which we Arkhamites are so proud and by which we are often so baffled. One Zachariah Conroy, a freshman pursuing a degree in biology, asserts that he has successfully transplanted the consciousness of a parrot into the brain of a capuchin monkey.

Said primate now passes its days seated upon a perch in a cage, flapping its arms and pecking at sunflower seeds, all courtesy of a process which young Conroy has grandiosely dubbed “Intercranial Cognition Transference”. The practicalities of this method are unclear, beyond a reliance upon certain serums of its inventor’s own devising.

Conroy’s professors admit to being unconvinced both by the outcome of the experiment and by its instigator’s less than crystalline elucidation of its workings. One such eminent academic, an emeritus professor by the name of Nordstrom, has told this newspaper that he sincerely doubts Conroy has accomplished that which he asserts to have accomplished.

“It smacks to me of fraud,” says the venerable greybeard. “One can train a monkey to behave more or less however one wishes, even to the point of mimicking avian characteristics.

“Conroy is considered a bright student with good prospects,” Nordstrom adds, “but he has an unfortunate predisposition towards precocity, unorthodoxy, and even at times impertinence. He may well go far in his chosen discipline, but only if he learns to temper his more wilful inclinations.”

It sounds to us as though young Conroy is more prankster than prodigy. He certainly seems to be making a monkey out of faculty members!

“The tone is facetious,” Holmes said when I looked up after finishing the piece. “Nevertheless the content intrigues.”

“You do not believe Conroy actually did what he says? Inserted the consciousness of a bird into a monkey? It is preposterous.”

“Who is to say what is and is not preposterous these days, Watson? You and I have met with more than our fair share of situations to which the average member of the public would apply that adjective. Yet the reality of such events is not in question.”

“But that is the paranormal. Conroy alleges to have performed a miracle of science, which is not the same thing. Science deals in empirical absolutes, predicated upon the proving of theory by fact. Had Conroy said he had magically pulled off this bird-to-monkey transfer, I might at least have given it a second thought. But scientifically?”

“Such is the looking-glass world in which you and I find ourselves,” said Holmes with a smile. “We doubt science but have implicit faith in the supernatural. Ask yourself, though, what if Conroy did use eldritch means but passed them off as science, so as not to raise too many eyebrows?”

“No more eyebrows than he already raised. Granted, it is possible, but when all is said and done, what is the point of the whole exercise? What does anyone stand to gain from creating a birdlike monkey, beyond its curiosity value?”

“Which might be considerable. Such a unique animal could fetch a tidy sum from zoos or private collectors. Equally, as Conroy is ostensibly a scientist, might this experiment of his not be a prototype? A first step along the road to something greater and more ambitious? That is the way with science, after all. Demonstrate that it can be done under laboratory conditions, then widen one’s scope.”

Holmes reached for his clay pipe and the Persian slipper in which he kept his tobacco.

“At any rate,” he said, stuffing strands of coarse black shag into the pipe bowl with practised ease, “Zachariah Conroy has become decidedly more interesting than he was previously.” He struck a match. “I am looking forward more than ever to our expedition this afternoon, should the object of it turn out to be that selfsame young man.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Book and the Compass

ALIGHTING FROM THE TRAIN AT PURFLEET STATION, we hired a dog-cart and drove out into the marshes. The afternoon sun beat down upon our heads, its rays occluded now and then by the passage of a thick cloud. Holmes seemed in high spirits, gazing at the scenery with a lively eye and a hint of a smile. I, by contrast, still toiled under the after-effects of the Triophidian Crown. I found the lurching motion of the dog-cart, as it trundled along rutted lanes, nauseating. Even the warm breeze on my face was disagreeable, like ants crawling.

Added to that, we were heading into potential danger. There was every likelihood that somewhere in these marshes lurked a nightgaunt, one of the deadliest beasts ever to walk the earth. Moreover, we might have to confront it. We had come appropriately equipped, but all the same, I was hardly relishing the prospect.

“Gentlemen,” said our driver eventually, reining in his horse. “This here’s as good a spot as any. Plenty for you to see: lapwings, redshanks, godwits, pipits, avocets – you name it, chances are there’ll be one flying about.”

“Thank you, my good fellow,” Holmes said, leaping nimbly down from the cart. He had told the driver we were ornithologists, an unimprovable pretext for two men visiting a bird-rich area such as this.

“Will you be wanting picking up later?”

“No. We shall make our own way back to Purfleet.”

“Right you are. Happy spotting! Or whatever it is you bird fanciers say.”

As the dog-cart clattered out of sight, Holmes inhaled and exhaled. “Nothing like a lungful of fresh country air, is there, Watson? Gets the blood pumping and clears away the cobwebs. One of these fine days I shall make myself a home in a place like this, away from the tumult of the city. There surely has to come a time when our war is done and I can depart from the battlefield to a well-deserved rural rest.”

“You will not live to see that day, Holmes, if you continue to fight so intensely.”

“Can I help it if the enemy harries constantly? I must meet their every incursion without fail. If I let up for one moment, all is lost. I guard the gate. I am virtually the only thing standing between mankind and unimaginable chaos and depravity. It is not a responsibility I take lightly.”

So saying, he began to rummage around in the same leather portmanteau he had used to transport the Triophidian Crown to the Isle of Dogs. From it he extracted various items – trinkets, one might call them if one knew no better – which he laid out carefully atop a flat rock. Last came a large book swaddled in an oilcloth. He unwrapped the tome with a distinct delicacy of touch, and handled the book itself similarly. Even though it had been in his possession for several years and he had had recourse to consult it upon many an occasion, it was not something to be treated casually or with disrespect; nor could one ever be comfortable in its presence or claim a sense of familiarity with it.

It was the Necronomicon, that dread grimoire first set down during the eighth century by the half-crazed poet and mystic Abdul Alhazred and considered ever since to be the key text in matters pertaining to the cosmic gods. In the view of some it was, in fact, a conduit between their realm and ours, a route by which one might gaze into the abyss and see the abyss gaze back.

This edition had previously been the property of the British Museum, contained within that institution’s cache of proscribed books, the little-known and little-frequented Sequestered Volumes section. There it would have remained, had it not been stolen in 1879 by Professor Moriarty right under the nose of the section’s guardian, the librarian Miss Chastity Tasker. After we wrested the Necronomicon from Moriarty’s clutches, Holmes had duly returned it to her. When, however, that venerable lady took retirement seven years later, the museum board made the decision to close down Sequestered Volumes. So few people availed themselves of its contents that it was considered not worth the money spent maintaining it.

Miss Tasker, having learned that the books were to be auctioned off, proposed that Holmes should be the keeper of the most infamous volumes, the ones which should never fall into the hands of the mentally unstable or the congenitally feeble. She smuggled over thirty books out to Baker Street, hidden in her Gladstone bag, before leaving her post.

Now, as Holmes exposed the Necronomicon to the open air of the marshes, two things happened. The first was that the sun went in. The clouds, which had been intermittent, all at once seemed to fuse together into a single whole. The light grew hazy, as though dusk were descending several hours prematurely.

The other thing was that the countryside around us fell silent. There had been the breeze and the sound of insects – flies buzzing, bees droning, dragonflies whirring. There had been, above all, birdsong; a continuous chorus of whistles and chatters, almost deafening in its stridency.

Then nothing. Was this coincidence? I think not. Nothing is coincidental where the Necronomicon is concerned.

The book’s jet-black binding and page edges made it look like an oblong of absolute darkness, a chunk of void, as though someone had excised a piece of the world. It was the absence of all that was bright and good. It was the antithesis of life.

As Holmes opened the cover, a bird of prey – I think it was a marsh harrier – shot up from a reed bed close by. The flutter of its wings was shockingly loud, more so the shriek the harrier gave as it soared into the firmament. I cannot deny that I jumped in surprise, nor can I describe that shrill ululation as anything other than a cry of alarm.

One might wonder how a book, a mere concatenation of paper, ink and leather, could cause such a preternatural silence and induce panic in wildlife. But then the Necronomicon is a book like no other. Each copy is imbued with the very essence of evil. Even the title, which translates from the Greek as “an image of the law of the dead”, resonates with wrongness, although not perhaps as much as its original Arabic title, Al Azif, a phrase commonly held to refer to the sound of insects at night which, in Middle Eastern tradition, is equated with the howling of demons. Then one must consider the trail of misery and death the book has left in its wake, with almost anyone who has been involved in printing, translating or using it meeting a grisly end. To call it cursed would be to sell it short. The Necronomicon is truly something any sensible person would shun.

Holmes found the page he sought. On it, alongside several paragraphs of text in a dense Gothic typeface, was a woodcut illustration of a nightgaunt. The creature was depicted in a hunched posture, its batlike wings spread out and its barbed, devilish tail curling behind it like a cat’s. A pair of backward-pointing horns capped its head, and its limbs were long and etiolated. Where a face should have been there was only blankness.

The illustration was crudely rendered, almost childlike in its simplicity. It had a certain raw impact nonetheless. The more one looked at it, the more vivid it became. Indeed, after several seconds of staring I thought I saw the nightgaunt move. Its head shifted upon its neck, as though it were turning towards me, and it articulated one set of prehensile, talon-tipped fingers, somewhat in the manner of a concert pianist warming up before a recital.

With a start, I tore my gaze away from the picture. When I dared look again, the nightgaunt was back in its original pose. I told myself it had only been a trick of the mind. The page had stirred in the breeze. Yes, that was it. Stirred, giving the illusion that the nightgaunt had stirred too.

Holmes, meanwhile, had been devoting attention to the other items from the portmanteau. Amongst these was a circular brass dial with the cardinal and intercardinal directions engraved around its perimeter. Upon the centre of this he placed a conical fulcrum and upon that, in turn, he set a sliver of rock, adjusting the balance of it until it attained equilibrium. The sliver was shaped roughly like a teardrop and was composed of a metallic ore that was a dull brownish colour, shot through with streaks of some shinier, iridescent substance.

Essentially he had constructed a compass, but this was no commonplace version of the device. Far from it. The teardrop-shaped sliver of rock was a magnetised lodestone, formerly part of a meteorite that fell to earth at a place called Clark’s Corners in Massachusetts, not far from Arkham, in the early 1880s.

Certain professors at Miskatonic University took a sample of the meteorite for study. The sample vanished a week later, as did the space-borne rock itself, destroyed by a lightning strike and leaving no trace but the crater it had gouged in the earth upon impact. Rumours had abounded thereafter of poisoned vegetation and livestock in the crater’s vicinity, of farmers gone missing, and of explosions and strange lights in the night sky, none of which I would for a moment discount, yet which were regarded by most outside the region as the idle yarn-spinning of rural Yankee folk with too much time on their hands and plenty of home-brewed liquor to fire their imaginations.

Similar charges might be levied against the Miskatonic University professors. The rock sample they took did not, after all, simply vanish from the lead-lined container in which it had been deposited. What actually became of it was much less inexplicable. Some light-fingered undergraduate purloined it and broke it up into smaller pieces, which he sold as “rare aerolite fragments”. To cover up the theft – and their own incompetence when it came to laboratory security – the academics put about a story that the sample had gradually shrunk until it disappeared altogether, through some chemical or physical process as yet unknown to science. In a place like Arkham, where the unusual was the everyday, such a lie seemed more than plausible and was readily swallowed.

The aerolite fragments brought their purchasers little but suffering and calamity. All who owned them rapidly fell ill, succumbing to various cancers or organ failure that in nearly every instance precipitated an early death. One by one the pieces of rock found their way onto the black market that exists for curios of this kind, kept thriving by a fraternity of collectors with a penchant for artefacts that carry the taint of morbidity. The specimen that lay before us had come to Holmes after the resolution of a case involving a goose that had discovered the fragment upon a ground-floor windowsill, mistaken it for food and heedlessly gobbled it up, thereafter developing grotesque physical abnormalities and a homicidal temperament. My long-time readers, in the event that any were to be privy to the content of this manuscript, would recognise here the raw material out of which I wove an altogether more whimsical, Christmas-themed tale about a stolen gemstone, property of a fictitious countess.

Holmes was punctilious about keeping the sliver in a lead-lined box at all times, so as to mitigate its malign emanations, and whenever he took it out for use, he made sure to expose himself to it for brief periods only. With his compass now complete, he let the lodestone revolve freely upon its fulcrum until it came to rest pointing to magnetic north, as was its natural wont. He aligned the dial below accordingly. Then, with reference to the text of the Necronomicon, he began to chant in R’lyehian. The words seemed to pollute the pristine rustic air, like an aural miasma. They filled the preternatural stillness around us much as algal growth fills a millpond.

The R’lyehian for nightgaunt – n’ghftzhryar – recurred in his invocation, and slowly, twitchily, the compass took its cue and began to respond. The “needle” of aerolite swerved away from north, swivelling back and forth upon its fulcrum, now clockwise, now anticlockwise, as though questing. Holmes was inviting it to indicate in which direction the nightgaunt lay.

As the sliver of rock rotated, the streaks of iridescence within its brownish surface changed. Whereas before they had reflected the dimmed sunlight in shimmering prismatic sparkles, now they adopted a uniform hue. The colour defies my powers of description. It was not like this shade or that; it was unlike all shades. No artist’s palette could ever reproduce it. It had no analogue in the standard visible spectrum.

Nor could it be beheld easily. The eye perceived it as something inimical, an affront to the retina. By dint of great willpower one could force oneself to look at it, but the act provoked a kind of vertigo, as though one were falling down a bottomless hole.

It was, simply put, a colour that should not be.

The needle abruptly halted, locked in position, quivering. Its sharper end, which could be considered its “point”, was aimed north-north-west.

“There,” said Holmes. “We have a bearing.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

To the Farmhouse

OF COURSE THE MATTER WAS NOT AS SIMPLE AS following a single bearing until we reached our destination. For one thing, the pathways through the marshes did not run in a straight line. They meandered and twisted, sometimes doubling back on themselves. For another, our course did not lead exclusively over dry land. There were tracts of boggy ground to be negotiated, deep pools to be circumvented, reed beds to be ploughed through, drainage ditches to be vaulted over.

All of this meant we deviated again and again from true. That, in turn, required us to pause, reassemble the aerolite compass and take a fresh bearing. We must have done so at least a dozen times that afternoon. On each occasion Holmes was obliged to reopen the Necronomicon and chant the relevant portions of the text all over again.

“You must know the words by heart now, surely,” I said after the fifth or sixth rendition. “You do not need to keep taking out that damned book.”

“There is more to the incantation than mere language,” Holmes replied. “Immediate physical proximity of the Necronomicon to the lodestone is crucial. The one casts its influence over the other. My role is to facilitate the exchange verbally. By speaking aloud I awaken the book’s latent power, which in turn activates the compass.”

“In other words, you are fulfilling the function of a messenger boy conveying a telegram from post office to recipient.”

“If you must be so absurdly bathetic with your metaphors, Watson, then yes. Something like that.”

Onward we went, and as the afternoon wore on, the cloud cover that had settled above us with the first opening of the Necronomicon remained in place, acting as a lid over the land, sealing in the day’s heat. The atmosphere of the marshes became oppressive, and I began to resent it. I resented the squelching of my feet within my boots, which were sodden from repeated immersions in water. I resented the sweat that made my shirt cling to my armpits and my collar stick to my neck. I resented the vastness of the grey sky, which stretched high and wide over us to the distant horizon, and the unrelieved flatness of the landscape. I had no desire to be here, and the marshes left me under no illusion that the feeling was mutual.

Now and then we came upon an outpost of civilisation, be it a tiny crooked cottage or a wooden hovel with unglazed windows. The residents of these meagre dwellings eyed us with suspicion as we passed by. One shabbily clothed and shaggily bearded smallholder rushed out with an ancient blunderbuss, which he waved at us while barking threats. Holmes was amused. Once the fellow was out of sight, he said, “I would have loved to see what happened when he pulled the trigger. That weapon was so old, I will wager it would have blown up in his face.”

“It is not something I would like to have put to the test.”

“Well, perhaps not. At least we have established that the natives are unfriendly. I fancy Stanley and Livingstone met a warmer reception in Africa than we have met here.”

“I do not know how you can be in such a cheery mood, Holmes.”

“And I do not know how you can be so glum, Watson. The resolution to our little conundrum is close at hand. Surely a cause for celebration?”

“If we survive.”

“Pooh! We have confronted unnatural beasts before and lived to tell the tale.”

“Never a nightgaunt.”

“Think of it as a challenge, then. An assay of our worthiness.”

There was no reasoning with him when he was in one of his manically upbeat moods. All I could do was trudge on beside him and hope for the best.

Around six o’clock we took a break. Mrs Hudson had prepared us a picnic of ox-tongue sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs, which we ate by the edge of a small lake. A pair of teal swam up to our feet. I fed them my crusts.

Then we were on our way again, Holmes insisting that we were homing in on our quarry. “The compass’s reactions are getting more definite,” he said. “Wherever the lodestone points, it points there swiftly, with less and less hesitancy.”

That had been my observation too, but I was conscious of time slipping away. We had perhaps two hours of decent daylight left.

“We know that a nightgaunt is nocturnal,” I said.

“The clue is in the name. Your point being…?”

“Well, it would be best if we were to locate it before sunset, would it not? I mean, one presumes it is sleeping at present. We stand a better chance against it if we encounter it before it is yet awake or when it is only just stirring.”

“Indeed, and had we embarked upon this escapade first thing, as I suggested last night, we would not be cutting things so fine. Still, we are near. We should be all right.”

Not long after that, we had our first glimpse of the farmhouse.

* * *

The farmhouse perched on a low rise, elevated perhaps no more than twenty feet above the surrounding marshland. Initially it was no more than a black dot on the horizon, and the rise the merest blister.

As soon as Holmes’s eye fell upon it, he halted and went through the rigmarole of taking yet another bearing. This time, the compass seemed to spring to attention. There was no vacillating, no indecision. It pointed straight towards the rise and the building atop it.

“Journey’s end,” said Holmes, evincing a grim pleasure.

I myself felt a mixture of relief and trepidation. Glad though I was that there was not much further to go, I was not exactly enthused by the thought of what might await us at the farmhouse. As the crow flies, we were perhaps three miles from the place. We could have covered the distance in less than an hour, had the going been level and uninterrupted.

In the event, we spent twice that amount of time getting there. Our first obstacle was a river, a tributary of the Thames’s lower reaches, at least twenty yards wide and fast-flowing. We attempted to wade across, but having slithered down the steep muddy bank into the water, we immediately found ourselves submerged to the waist, with the current tugging remorselessly at our legs, doing its best to sweep them from under us. A few steps further on, and the river was up to our chests. By mutual consent, we retreated, scrambling back up the bank. It would have been foolhardy to continue.

Upstream we came to a rickety footbridge. Little more than planks perched upon stilts, lashed together by ropes, it did not look much safer than the body of water it traversed. We went over one at a time, Holmes first. The structure wobbled precariously under him, and more so under me when my turn came, for I was the heavier of us by a couple of stone. At one point the footbridge lurched so far to one side, so abruptly, that I was nearly pitched headlong into the river. Thereafter, the rest of the way, I held on to its rudimentary handrail for dear life.

A further obstacle presented itself in the form of a field of cattle. Presiding over a herd of cows, like a pasha over his harem, was a bull who regarded any interlopers upon his domain as potential rivals, to be repelled with all available aggression. The hulking great quadruped charged at us, snorting hard, his eyes murderously crimson. We fled.

A third and final obstacle was an expanse of marsh so deep and slimy it surpassed even the Great Grimpen Mire. We ventured into this treacherous morass thinking it would be no worse than any of the other patches of marsh we had forged through earlier in the day. Within seconds we were stuck fast, like flies on flypaper. Not only that but we were sinking, getting sucked down through the grassy top layer into the saturated earth beneath.

The situation might have been amusing, were it not so serious: two grown men, up to their knees in the ground and descending by increments. Holmes and I looked at each other with a kind of weary bemusement. I think we may even have shared a laugh.

Then we set about the business of extricating ourselves, which we did by each simultaneously providing support for the other as he hauled one leg out of the marsh, lodged it on the nearest area of solid ground, and bore down upon it so as to lever the rest of him to freedom.

“I do believe,” I said, as we laboriously detoured around the marsh, “that this place hates us.”

“Think how much worse it must have been for the man we seek,” said Holmes. “Fleeing through this landscape in the dark, effectively blind.”

“That will be us too, if we do not make haste.” The sun was by now touching the horizon, a pale and hazy disc. The air had already cooled significantly, and a frog had begun croaking in anticipation of nightfall.

By the time we got our first close-up view of the farmhouse, several hundred other frogs had joined in. To the accompaniment of their rasping cacophony, and the occasional plaintive wail of a curlew, we crouched amongst a thicket of bulrushes, covertly surveying the premises from a few dozen yards away.

The farmhouse must have been a couple of centuries old, and its sagging roof and moss-clad walls spoke of long neglect. The same was true of its outbuildings, which consisted of a stables and a small barn. There were paddocks around it that had become overgrown, and enclosing these were a few rotted, tumbledown runs of post-and-rail fence that were more gap than barrier. Over the entire site hung an air of desolation. The house was the only abode for miles around, and even on a summer’s eve – admittedly, this was not a glorious one – it looked cold and lonely.

“Does anyone even live there?” I wondered.

“You have your answer,” said Holmes, gesturing at the chimney, from which a thin plume of smoke had just started to rise. Shortly afterwards, the glow of a lamp filled a downstairs window. I peered to make out movement within but saw none.

“How do you suggest we approach?” I said. “Walk up to the front door and introduce ourselves?”

Holmes overlooked the flippancy in my tone. “It is one option. We may assume that the occupant is he who has mastery over the nightgaunt and is our quarry’s captor. Presenting ourselves brazenly to him, rather than adopting subtler measures, might put him on the back foot. One should never underestimate the value of the element of surprise. Equally, we could…”

“Could what, Holmes? Holmes?”

My companion did not respond. I assumed that he had become distracted, until I noticed that his eyes had grown wide and his jaw had slackened. He was staring fixedly past me, and at that moment a surge of dread flooded my belly. The sensation worsened as Holmes’s mouth set in a tight, narrow line. His entire body had gone rigid. Whatever lay over my shoulder, just to the right of me, he could not tear his gaze from it.

“Watson,” he hissed.

“Please do not say it, Holmes. Please do not.”

“The nightgaunt, Watson.”

“Oh my God.”

“The nightgaunt. It is here. It is right here.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Attack of the Nightgaunt

THE NIGHTGAUNT HAD ARRIVED SILENTLY, WHILE Holmes and I were busy spying upon the farmhouse. Without a sound it had descended beside us, touching down amongst the bulrushes. Its wingbeats were no louder than a breath of wind. It had stalked us from on high with all the lethal stealth of an owl.

I did not want to turn.

I dared not turn.

I had to turn.

I turned.

Turning brought me face to face with it – or rather, face to no face. The nightgaunt’s featureless visage loomed over me, black and smooth with a kind of rubbery, oily sheen. The creature canted its head, as though regarding me with curiosity, much the same way the woodcut image in the Necronomicon had. Its wings were outstretched, spanning some fifteen feet from tip to tip. Even in my state of abject terror I noted the small nick in the lower edge of the left one, where the nightgaunt had caught itself on the shard of windowpane at Bethlem.

Now a hand came up, each finger twice the length of a man’s and crowned with a wickedly curving talon, as shiny as obsidian. The nightgaunt brought one of these talons to my trembling cheek and dragged it slowly down the skin. The action was somewhere between a scratch and a caress, both gentle and painful. The talon scored a furrow just deep enough to draw blood.

The sting of the wound galvanised me. I had been frozen, too scared to move, but the banal reality of pain had a rousing effect. I stumbled away from the nightgaunt, almost colliding with Holmes.

The creature made no effort to pursue me. Rather, it raised its hand to that empty oval face and examined the bloodied talon. I say “examined” because that at least was what it appeared to do. Whether it was looking at the talon, sniffing it, tasting it, or even listening to it, I have no idea. How a nightgaunt perceives the world is a mystery.

“Watson,” Holmes whispered in my ear, “I am unprepared. I have the means to stop this creature, but I need time to get it ready.”

“How much time?”

“Five minutes should suffice.”

He did not need to say any more. He was asking me to buy him those five minutes. Somehow I had to distract the nightgaunt for that long. And somehow I had to manage to do so without getting myself killed.

While Holmes delved into the portmanteau, I delved into my jacket pocket. Out came my service revolver. The gun was slippery in my grasp. Before crossing the river earlier I had transferred it temporarily to the portmanteau, which Holmes had taken care to hold above the surface of the water. Thus had he kept the revolver and everything else in the bag dry. Since then, however, the gun had resided in my pocket once again and had picked up some of the moisture that permeated my clothing.

I prayed that the cartridges in the cylinder were unimpaired. The last thing I needed was for the powder to have become damp and cause a misfire.

I was already fairly certain that the rounds – standard Eley’s – would be unable to penetrate the nightgaunt’s hide. Holmes himself had averred as much that morning, before we left Baker Street for Purfleet. He had added that no method of necromantic doctoring, such as daubing them with a Seal of Unravelling, would enhance their effectiveness against this particular monster. At best the bullets would cause it pain and give it pause for thought, but in all other respects the nightgaunt – unlike, say, a byakhee – would be impervious to them. Its sole weak spot was the membranous skin of its wings, as proven by the tear inflicted by the shard of glass, but a gunshot wound there was hardly likely to be mortal, or even debilitating.

All the same, the revolver was the only defence I had, and the only means of offence. There was no doubt in my mind that I must use it.

“Come on, you abomination,” I snarled at the nightgaunt. “Come and get me.”

I darted clear of the bulrushes, giving the creature an open invitation to follow by tossing a few further choice insults its way. The nightgaunt hesitated. It seemed to be trying to decide which of us to attack. Holmes was directly in front of it and making no effort to flee. I, on the other hand, was running away and doing my utmost to antagonise it. The creature was nonplussed. Should it go for the easy, stationary prey or the noisier and more active?

I made up its mind for it. I aimed at its chest and fired.

The bullet ricocheted off that leathery torso, whining past Holmes, mere inches from his head. He cast me a look of reproof, then resumed pulling items from the portmanteau.

With the echoes of the gun report rippling across the marshes, the nightgaunt swung towards me. I cannot pretend that I saw anything even approaching an expression upon its obscenely blank face, but I inferred that it was irritated. An assault that would have ended an ordinary man’s life had, at the very least, piqued it. Now it had no alternative but to retaliate.

It came at me, and it was fast, so fast! Propelling itself into the air with wafting wingbeats, it closed the distance between us, body parallel with the ground, taloned fingers to the fore.

I reacted purely on reflex. I threw myself flat on my face.

The nightgaunt whirred above me, borne by its own momentum. I rolled over and came up to a crouching position, resting on one knee. The nightgaunt swerved in mid-air and darted back. Sighting down the gun barrel, I gave it a bullet straight in the face. The creature recoiled at the impact, deviating to one side.

Without a moment’s delay I sprang upright and took to my heels, racing to the edge of the farmhouse’s rise. The nightgaunt gave chase. I knew I could not outrun it, but ahead lay a thick, stunted tree – an alder, I think – behind which I was able to take cover.

From this vantage point I got off two more shots. One rebounded off the bony portion of one wing. The other passed straight through the same wing’s skin, leaving a clean, bloodless hole.

The nightgaunt settled upon the tree and began clawing at its leafy boughs, tearing them apart as though they were made of spun sugar. It was not so much trying to get at me as offering a display of raw might. What it was doing to the alder, it could likewise do to John Watson. The one was as easy for it to rend limb from limb as the other.

By wounding the nightgaunt, however slightly, I had succeeded in making a deadly otherworld beast, already irked, downright enraged. Whereas before it might have been content with simply slaying me, now the nightgaunt wished me to suffer. My death at its hands would be prolonged and messy.

Had I had the leisure to pat myself on the back, I would have.

Instead, like the gambler I am, I elected to double down. I loosed off my last two rounds at the creature, aiming up through the thrashing tree branches. The range was no more than five yards, and bulletproof or not, the thing did not enjoy being hit twice at such proximity. If it had had a mouth, I imagine it would have screamed.

The nightgaunt swooped down from the tree and padded towards me with an air of unmistakable menace. The setting sun was at its back, so that the creature became a silhouette of pure blackness, a demonic cameo.

I retreated, fumbling in my pocket for spare cartridges.

That was when I remembered that the box was still in the portmanteau. I had neglected to retrieve it when taking back the revolver.

I was out of ammunition.

“Oh, you absolute dolt, Watson,” I murmured.

Had I given Sherlock Holmes his five minutes yet? I did not think so. I reckoned I had side-tracked the nightgaunt for two minutes only, three at most. Now I was facing it unarmed, vulnerable, and with still a couple of minutes left until Holmes could implement his method of stopping it.

One might think that, under the circumstances, I would have fallen prey to despair.

One might be right.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The Nangchen Lamasery Liquor of Supremacy

THE NIGHTGAUNT SEEMED AWARE THAT I HAD, AS it were, shot my bolt. Its pointed tail twitched from side to side in a manner that evoked both the eagerness of a dog and the fierce concentration of a prowling cat. Its horned head was cocked suggestively, and I could readily picture a grin splitting that absent face, a leering gleam in those non-existent eyes. Talons once more to the fore, the nightgaunt continued to tread towards me, sublimely confident, or so it appeared, secure in the knowledge that I was as good as dead.

“You will not find me easy pickings, you devil,” I said, mustering up all the bravado I could. The words rang hollow to my own ears but any kind of defiance was better than none. “I shall fight you to my last breath.”

The nightgaunt was undeterred. Now there was a mere two-yard gap between us. I began to move backwards, matching my pace to its. We must have looked as though we were engaged in a weird dance. My arms were spread wide, as were the nightgaunt’s. I was braced to wrestle with it, for all the good that would do. Anything to give Holmes crucial extra seconds.

“Watson!” he cried out. “I am close to completion. Can you lead that thing back this way? I need to have its undivided attention if this is to work.”

“That should not be a problem. I believe it has grown very attached to me.”

I began circling back towards Holmes, the nightgaunt with me. It seemed to enjoy our strange man-and-monster gavotte.

I muttered encouragement: “Yes, that’s it, my beauty. Stay with me. Pay no mind to the man over there with the big black book and the phial of potion that he is about to drink. Do not even think about that cantrip he is reciting. It is definitely not a spell that charges the potion up with magical essence. Oh no, definitely not.”

The potion was the result of an hour Holmes had spent at his acid-scarred chemistry bench, brewing together ingredients such as aconite, mandrake root and camphor in a flask suspended by a clamp from a retort stand. To these he had added the shred of the nightgaunt’s wing, heating the mixture over a flame until it reduced to a thick, dark brown sludge. The smell of it had been obnoxious, and one could only assume the taste of it would be no better. Moreover, the concoction was at least mildly toxic. Aconite alone, taken in sufficient quantity, can induce fatal hypotension and cardiac arrhythmia, camphor has been known to cause hallucinations and sometimes liver damage when ingested, and who knows what the effect of consuming nightgaunt meat might be?

This substance, however, was what Holmes was proposing to swallow, in the full expectation that it would grant him control over the nightgaunt. The potion, known as the Nangchen Lamasery Liquor of Supremacy, was first devised by Tibetan monks in order to counter the threat of rakshasas, their term for various anthropophagous demons. Abdul Alhazred has it that by eating the flesh of a flesh-eating demon one enters into a kind of compact with the creature, and it is through this weird reciprocity that the Liquor of Supremacy operates. Ludwig Prinn, in his De Vermis Mysteriis, agrees with Alhazred while adding the proviso that the potion leaves the user liable to develop lasting cannibalistic tendencies, a caveat which the compiler of the Necronomicon ought to have had the courtesy to mention and might indeed have done, had he been less of a lunatic.

Nightgaunts may not be flesh eaters, but the Liquor of Supremacy is equally effective on them. The same theurgical principles pertain, as do the same drawbacks.

Holmes, of course, was perfectly well aware of the risks involved in drinking it but, for him, a certain level of personal danger acted always as an incentive, not a constraint. The phial of potion was now at his lips, and I and the nightgaunt were within a few paces of where he stood. As the liquid perfused his system, so would influence over the nightgaunt radiate out from him. The closer he and the creature were, the quicker and more efficacious the Nangchen Lamasery Liquor of Supremacy would be.

Then, from the direction of the farmhouse, a voice rang out.

“No,” it said, softly but with a clarity that carried.

That was all, the one word, and whether it was aimed at Holmes, me or the nightgaunt, we all three went stock still.

From the front doorway of the farmhouse stepped a young man. He was somewhere in his mid-twenties and dressed with a smartness that was incongruous given our surroundings, his patterned silk waistcoat and dandyish pointed-toe shoes in particular looking out of place. He strode down the rise to join our little tableau of three, his bearing both commanding and condescending.

“Away,” he said with a sidelong sweep of the arm, and this time it was clear he was addressing the nightgaunt.

The creature instantly did as bidden, withdrawing to a distance of some ten yards and then settling into a squatting position, its arms upon its knees and its wings gathered about it like a cloak.

“Good boy,” the man said, much as one might compliment an obedient hound. The nightgaunt seemed to preen, basking in the approval.

The man extended a hand to my companion, who set down the phial in order to accept it and shake it.

“Please allow me to introduce myself.”

“No need,” said Holmes. “Mr Nathaniel Whateley, I presume.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

A Banquet of Terror

THE YOUNG MAN CHUCKLED. “YOU HAVE ME AT A disadvantage,” said he in his refined Yankee accent. “You know me, yet I do not know you. How can this be?”

“Sherlock Holmes,” said Holmes, disengaging from the handshake.

“Sherlock…?” One of Nathaniel Whateley’s eyebrows rose. “Oh well. Then it makes sense. The famous detective. No one’s identity can be a secret from him. Which must make you…” He turned to me. “Dr Watson, unless I very much miss my guess.”

“Your servant, sir,” I said warily. I clasped his proffered hand for a mere half-second. I was unsure what to make of this turn of events. Moments ago I had been battling for my life against the nightgaunt; now I was engaging in polite formalities with a stranger.

“I trust Nordstrom there did not cause you undue distress,” said Whateley.

“Nordstrom?”

“That’s what I call him.” Whateley pointed at the nightgaunt. “Cyrus Nordstrom was an emeritus professor at Miskatonic University, my former school. Still is, for all I know. Terrible old tyrant. Made my life, and many others’, a misery. So it’s kind of a joke, see, naming a nightgaunt after him. Retribution, after a fashion.”

“I see.” The name Nordstrom rang a bell. It had cropped up in the clipping from the Arkham Gazette that Holmes had been sent by his brother. “Well, I cannot say we had the creature on the ropes, but a knockout blow was definitely in the offing. Was it not, Holmes?”

My companion was subjecting Whateley to close scrutiny. “Hmm? What’s that, Watson?”

“I said we nearly had the nightgaunt beaten, didn’t we?”

“Yes. I should say so.”

“With a draught of the Nangchen Lamasery Liquor of Supremacy,” said Whateley, glancing at the phial. “Potent stuff. Disgusting, but potent.”

“You are familiar with it?” I said.

“How else do you account for my dominance over Nordstrom? A devastatingly magnetic personality isn’t enough. You’ve got to have something more. The question is, would it have worked, Mr Holmes using the liquor as well? I daresay it might have. It would have been a matter of his domination of Nordstrom supplanting mine – one man’s will overriding another’s. And from what I know of you, Mr Holmes, you are not lacking in willpower. Maybe you would have won the contest.” Whateley shrugged. “We shall never know.”

So saying, he snatched up the phial and raised it aloft to dash it to the ground.

I moved to seize the little glass bottle from him, but Whateley forestalled me, holding up the index finger of his free hand and wagging it.

“Ah, ah, ah, Doctor. Remember, I am still Nordstrom’s master. I can have him on you with but a thought.”

The nightgaunt shifted position, tensing as though ready to spring.

“Your revolver,” he added, “is empty, of course. I counted six shots, and you have not had the chance to reload. Keep it out if you wish, if its visible presence reassures you, but this would be so much more civilised if you were to stow it away. What do you say?”

“Might as well do as he asks, Watson,” counselled Holmes. “After all, Mr Whateley has the upper hand. He is holding us at ‘gauntpoint’, one might say. Still, I am convinced he intends us no harm. Is that not so, Mr Whateley?”

“It all depends. I guess as long as the two of you play ball, there won’t be any unpleasantness.”

“Unpleasantness?” I said, reluctantly returning the revolver to my pocket. “Sending your pet nightgaunt to molest us does not count?”

“Are you the worse off for it? Aside from that scratch on your face, I think not. I was being prudent, is all. Two men loitering outside the house, looking suspicious, like they’re spying on the place. What’s a fellow to make of that? Of course I was going to unleash my guard dog. Nordstrom wasn’t really going to hurt you, though. Rough you up a little, maybe. Get you to scram. Above all, give you a fright.”

“That last, in my case at least, he certainly achieved.”

“Yes, and I bet he got a big old bellyful out of it, too.”

“A bellyful? What do you mean?”

“Well, it is my understanding that nightgaunts feed off fear,” said Whateley. “So the scholarly arcane literature tells us. Not having mouths or any other kind of orifice, they have to derive sustenance somehow in order to live, and the general consensus is they obtain it from the fear that people naturally exude in their presence. You, Doctor, were giving Nordstrom plenty to get his teeth into. And now he’s pretty well fed. Aren’t you, boy?”

The nightgaunt craned its neck in a manner which, in the light of Whateley’s comments, did seem to suggest repleteness.

“You cannot imagine how delighted I am to have been a source of nutrition,” I said. “That does not alter the fact that this so-called ‘Nordstrom’ of yours gave every appearance that it was trying to kill me.”

“That was just him getting excited,” said Whateley. “Nordstrom would never harm anyone, except if I wanted him to. I have him fully under my sway at all times. You were never in any real danger. He’d never have used those talons of his to rip out your heart, even though he is perfectly capable of that. I wouldn’t have let him.”

How obliging of Whateley to spell out what the nightgaunt could have done to us, while reminding us that it might still happen unless we behaved ourselves.

“Now where was I?” he continued. “Oh yes. This.”

He hurled the phial down at his feet. It did not break, but its treacly brown contents began seeping from its open neck into the soil. Whateley placed his heel upon it and bore down until it shattered. Then he ground the smashed pieces to dust underfoot, mixing them and the potion together into a gritty paste.

“There. That’s that dealt with. Don’t have to worry about someone else commandeering Nordstrom any more. Oh, but where the heck are my manners?” He punctuated the remark with a comical slap of the forehead. “You two have travelled a long way, and not had an easy time of it, by the looks of you. You must be wanting to put your feet up. I’d be a poor host if I didn’t invite you in. Gentlemen?”

He made an ushering gesture, embellishing it with a small bow.

I glanced at Holmes. I did not think we were being asked. We were being ordered. Holmes appeared to agree.

“That would be most welcome, Mr Whateley,” said he. His tone was as amiable as the American’s, but his eyes betrayed a distinct steeliness. “A brief sojourn under your roof is something from which Watson and I, footsore and bedraggled as we are, would surely benefit.”

He gathered up the Necronomicon and bundled it back into the portmanteau. Then, with Whateley leading the way, we set off up the slope of the rise towards the farmhouse. The nightgaunt accompanied us to the front door, where it settled down next to the step like a sentry at his post. It was clearly not there to keep anyone out. It was there to make sure Holmes and I did not leave.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Bearding the Lion in His Den

EFFORTS HAD BEEN MADE TO RENDER THE INTERIOR of the farmhouse more homely than its ramshackle exterior. The sitting room into which Whateley escorted us had a Turkish rug covering the bare floorboards and curtains which, if not brand new, were not the moth-eaten rags one might have expected. The furniture likewise, though clearly second-hand, or even third-hand, was of decent quality. The arms of the sofa were somewhat threadbare and its springs creaked as I lowered myself onto it, but I had sat in far less accommodating chairs while visiting households that considered themselves perfectly genteel.

“It’s customary in England to offer guests tea,” said Whateley. “What do you say?”

“A cup of tea would not go amiss,” Holmes replied brightly. “How about you, Watson?”

Taking my cue from him, I smiled and nodded. “I have never knowingly refused one.”

Whateley disappeared to an adjoining kitchen, whence we shortly heard the rattle of water gushing from a tap and then the clank of a kettle being set upon a stove.

I took advantage of his absence to whisper to Holmes, “Is this wise? I appreciate we did not have much choice, but still. Surely we have walked straight into the lion’s den.”

“Where better to beard the lion?” came the reply. “Besides, I am keen to learn more about friend Whateley, and this is as good an opportunity as I am likely to get.”

“I do not trust the man.”

“Never was a more justified statement uttered. Nathaniel Whateley, for all his breezy colonial charm, is a liar. Did you set any store by his tale of sending the nightgaunt out to confront us because he found us suspicious? Or his assertion that he thought we were spying on him?”

“Well, we were.”

“Yet the nightgaunt was already in the air before we even reached the house. Otherwise we would have seen it take flight while we were conducting our surveillance.”

“Yes, unless he is not keeping it here. What if it has a lair elsewhere?”

“You do not allow a creature like a nightgaunt free rein, if it is your thrall. You keep it close at hand at all times so that the bond between you and it is maintained. Distance weakens the Liquor of Supremacy’s effect. Separation for too long a period can erode the psychical connection altogether. No, the nightgaunt resides here at the farm, almost certainly in the barn. You observed, of course, how the barn’s windows were boarded up.”

“As a matter of fact, I did. What of it? Is that definitive proof that the nightgaunt is kept there?”

“It is if you consider the fact that the planks are new. They are light-coloured, fresh from the timber yard, and show almost no weathering. I would estimate they were purchased and nailed over the windows not more than a couple of months ago. The barn door, likewise, has been patched up with new planks. Every hole and rotten section has been painstakingly mended, and there are two bolts upon it that betray not a speck of rust.”

“One presumes Whateley is renting the property. Perhaps it is the landlord’s handiwork.”

“It does not matter whose the handiwork is – the landlord’s, Whateley’s, or the man in the moon’s,” said Holmes. “What matters is that nowhere else on the premises have repairs of that sort been carried out, at least not so far as we have seen, and these ones have made the barn the perfect daytime hideout for a nightgaunt: dark, dry and roomy.”

He had more to say, but just then, Whateley returned.

“The water is coming to the boil,” the American said. “It shouldn’t be long now. Perhaps the two of you are hungry as well. I have some ham, some cheese, a loaf of bread. The bread is a tad stale but still edible. Obtaining supplies out here in the boondocks is not easy. I am able, however, to purchase milk and eggs from a local dairy farmer, and the nearest village has a grocery store. The walk takes a couple of hours each way, but I enjoy the exercise.”

“All rather a far cry from Pimlico, eh?” said Holmes.

“Pimlico?” Whateley frowned briefly. Then his expression cleared. “Yes, Pimlico. Well, much though I appreciate the conveniences of city life, I am able to do without them. I travel a great deal, often to remote and inhospitable places, and am not unfamiliar with privation. In many ways I am better adjusted temperamentally to this mode of living than to a softer, more sophisticated environment.”

“In a place like this, too, one may hide away a beast the size of a nightgaunt without fear of arousing curiosity, or for that matter inadvertently terrorising the neighbours.”

“There is that.”

“Is it the only specimen of exotic fauna you have here?”

“What do you mean?”

“At your Pimlico address you keep a host of zoological anomalies in jars. Dead ones. I was merely wondering whether this farmhouse serves as a repository for others. Live ones. Large ones. Like your nightgaunt.”

“Oh no. It’s just Nordstrom here. Nothing else.”

“And how long have you been using the house for that purpose?”

“Long enough. Long enough. Is that the kettle I hear? Excuse me. I shall be right back.”

“Holmes,” I whispered as soon as Whateley had exited, “what is behind this line of interrogation? You are probing with purpose, I can tell. You are onto something.”

“As yet, I have only the vaguest inkling of how things stand, Watson. There are undercurrents at work beneath the surface. I am beginning to grasp their direction of flow.”

“Care to enlighten me?”

“Not while I myself remain largely in the dark. If there is anything more useless than a theory, it is a half-formed theory.”

Once more Whateley re-entered the room, now bearing a tray of tea things, which he held somewhat queerly. One hand gripped the tray’s handle, while the other, his left, supported the tray from underneath, although nothing appeared to be amiss with the handle on that side. This meant that, when he set the tray down upon an occasional table, he did so with some awkwardness.

“I am cold,” said he. “Are you not cold, gentlemen? In those damp clothes you must be. The nights get chilly quickly out here, even during what passes for summer in England. While the tea steeps, I shall light a fire.”

He busied himself at the hearth, soon kindling a small blaze from the logs laid in the grate. Then he proceeded to pour out the tea, handing a cup to Holmes and me. Once again I noticed that there seemed to be a problem with his left hand; he used it to keep the teapot lid in place as he poured, but with little dexterity. The fingers seemed stiff and unwieldy. I wondered whether the hand was afflicted by some sort of mild paralysis.

After milk and sugar were dispensed, Whateley raised his cup to his lips. “Your health,” he said.

I made to copy him, but then a thought occurred. What if the tea were poisoned?

I tried to console myself with the fact that Whateley had said he intended us no harm. Still, there was something about this whole situation that did not sit right with me. Whateley had made such a song and dance about preparing the tea and playing the good host, it inclined me to believe that he had an ulterior motive. Had he spared us from death at the hands of the nightgaunt only to inflict another kind of death, one that was more intimate and perhaps more excruciating?

I gave my tea a surreptitious sniff. It smelled fine, but then many poisons were odourless, and indeed tasteless. I glanced across at Holmes. He was holding cup and saucer but had yet to drink. Was he thinking as I was?

Whateley too had not yet drunk. There was a moment when all three of us were in stasis, each poised as if waiting for another to make a move. I was put in mind of gunslingers facing off in the main street of some dusty town in the American West. Instead of six-guns, we had teacups.

Then the impasse was broken as Whateley, with a queer, secretive smile, took a sip. When he had swallowed it down, Holmes duly followed suit. Only then did I feel it was safe to drink.

“It is remarkable to me,” said Holmes to Whateley, “that you are so adept when it comes to a creature like a nightgaunt and the methods required to tame one. You are more than a mere devotee of zoological oddities, it would seem.”

“And, by the same token, sir, you are more than a mere solver of crimes. We each of us have hidden depths.”

“I have had cause, at times in my career, to investigate mysteries that lie outside the mundane. I have, accordingly, developed a certain level of expertise in that sphere.”

“One would not know it from Dr Watson’s published oeuvre.”

“Such cases go unrecorded. You can perhaps appreciate why.”

“That I most assuredly do. Your reputation rests on pragmatism, and you fear you might be cold-shouldered by polite society were any occult dabblings made known.”

“You sound as though you speak from experience.”

“A little. My interest in exotic beasts has led me further afield than I first thought it might.” Whateley flicked a lock of hair away from one eye. He wore it collar-length, in the manner of an aesthete. “Initially I was fascinated only by the wilder, weirder fringes of natural history. As a child I loved to read about duckbilled platypuses, Tasmanian devils, mole rats, manatees and the like – all those reports brought back from the far-flung corners of the earth by naturalists, explorers and missionaries about animals so bizarre and misbegotten, one could hardly believe they were real. From there grew a curiosity about legendary creatures, of which there are a plethora in the United States alone: Bigfoot, the thunderbird, the wendigo, along with any number of swamp men and lake monsters. To me, there was a correlation. There had to be. What most would dismiss as folklore or superstition, I regarded simply as things that science had yet to discover and classify. I knew that that was to be my life’s work, creating a taxonomy of the semi-mythical, and I devoted all my energies in that direction. I graduated from Miskatonic University with a degree in biology and duly stayed on to pursue studies in more recondite areas of that discipline. I fancied myself a latter-day Linnaeus, building upon the foundations he laid to unite the worlds of the natural and the supernatural into one.”

“Which led you eventually to mount an expedition up the Miskatonic River in ’93 to catch a shoggoth.”

“Now how would you know about that, Mr Holmes?” said Whateley with bemusement.

“I should have thought it was obvious. The talk you gave.”

“The talk I gave?”

“A few months back.”

“I give talks all the time. You will have to be more specific.”

“To members of the Diogenes Club.”

“Ah yes. That one. You were there? I am sure I would have remembered if you were.”

“Not I. My brother.”

“Oh right,” said Whateley. “Yes. Your brother. Whose name is…?”

“Mycroft.”

“Yes. Mycroft Holmes. And he told you about the expedition?”

“He did. Both its purpose and its rather ignominious end.”

Whateley flinched. “Yes. One could hardly call it my finest hour.”

“By your own account, Indians beset you and your team as you were journeying upriver. There was a slaughter from which only you and another escaped, one Zachariah Conroy, a university colleague of yours.”

“Zachariah. A good man. It… it pains me to recall how he suffered.”

“You and Mr Conroy have had no dealings since?” Holmes asked.

I had been trying my best to fathom the approach Holmes was taking. At first it had seemed as though he was simply sounding Whateley out. Now I apprehended that his goal was to catch Whateley out. He was laying careful snares for him, with a view to establishing once and for all that Conroy was the inmate at Bethlem and Whateley behind his abduction.

I settled back in my seat, feeling oddly calm, as though a spectator at some sporting event watching two opponents vie for a trophy and knowing that my man was surely the more skilled of the two. The scent of woodsmoke in the room was sweetly pungent, almost perfumed. Whateley must have laid the fire with logs from some sort of resinous evergreen, I thought. The blaze itself was soothingly warm, and I welcomed its heat.

“Why do you ask, Mr Holmes?” said Whateley. “Why the interest in poor Zachariah?”

“Because unless I am much mistaken, Mr Conroy has been a visitor to England of late. Did you not know?”

“I… I believe I may have heard something to that effect. Yes, come to think of it, a mutual acquaintance mentioned it to me the other day. It was a case of: ‘I bumped into someone you might know from your alma mater. Name of Conroy. Remember him?’ A passing reference, is all.”

“You did not pursue the connection?”

“I guess, given what had happened, I felt Zachariah might not be best pleased to see me again. He was hurt quite badly, you know, and blames me for his injuries. It wasn’t my fault, of course. I told him that over and over. I couldn’t have predicted that our boat would be attacked by Red Indians, and there was nothing I could have done to prevent it. Boy, those savages were terrifying. They came at us in the night, out of nowhere, whooping like banshees, tomahawks flashing in the moonlight…”

Whateley shook his head sombrely at the memory. I, meanwhile, had a sudden lucid vision of the scene he was describing. I imagined the Indians swarming over him and his cohorts, their faces striped with war paint, their heads adorned with feathers, and the carnage that ensued. For a second or two I was seeing the event as though it were taking place right there before me, and I the Indians’ next victim whose scalp they would slice clean off the skull before they hacked me to pieces.

I took a couple of deep breaths to steady myself. The woodsmoke was reassuringly pleasant in my nostrils.

“It sounds appalling, Mr Whateley,” said Holmes. “You have my commiseration. I can see why you might not have wished to renew acquaintance with Mr Conroy, if he felt such animus towards you. Then again, one must speculate upon his reasons for coming to England in the first instance. He surely must have been aware that this is where you had fetched up.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows what might be going through his head.”

“You do not suppose he was seeking you out?”

“If so, he never found me.” Whateley stroked his cheek in a manner that seemed not so much contemplative as self-regarding.

“That strikes me as singular,” said Holmes, “in as much as I would have thought he would have no difficulty locating your whereabouts in London, if he wished.”

“London is a big city.”

“But an enterprising, reasonably intelligent man would need only spend a day or two making enquiries to yield a result.”

“Perhaps he didn’t want to. Perhaps he didn’t even know I was over here.”

Holmes leaned forward, setting his teacup aside. “What also strikes me as singular is this: you, Mr Whateley, have not once queried Watson’s and my presence here in Rainham Marshes. You seemed, if I may say, almost to have been expecting us.”

“Did I?” Whateley waved a hand dismissively. “Could it be just that I am a phlegmatic person, able to take all manner of unusualness in my stride? My vocation has taught me, if nothing else, to expect the unexpected. So perhaps—”

“Do that again,” I said. I was startled to hear myself voice the demand. Normally politeness would have hindered me from interrupting someone mid-sentence. Yet for some reason the inhibition was not there.

“Do what again?”

“Your hand. Wave it.”

“Like so?” Whateley repeated the gesture.

Something was awry. The hand left a trail behind it as it moved, a kind of sparkling rainbow studded with hand-shaped afterimages.

“What is it, Doctor?” he said, peering at me intently. “What do you see?”

“I… I am not sure.” I rubbed my eyes. “Some optical phenomenon. I am tired. That might account for it.”

“Are you experiencing distortions of vision?”

“No. I don’t…”

Whateley’s face had started to sag. The flesh of it was melting, dripping downwards with glutinous slowness, like tallow. One of his eyes bulged larger than the other. His mouth pulsed like a sea anemone.

I blinked hard. Normality returned. Except that now the floor was distending. Its rectangle became a parallelogram, which in turn became a diamond. The floorboards warped. The patterns on the Turkish rug came alive, chasing one another round in circles, while the rug’s tasselled ends rippled like millipede legs. The walls bowed inward like wind-billowed sails.

“Watson?” said Holmes.

“Holmes?” I said, although it sounded as though I was hooting.

“Watson, why dun hair plea fan?”

“Holmes, I can’t understand you. What are you saying?”

Another stream of nonsense syllables issued from my companion’s lips, and then his face, as Whateley’s had, began to melt. I clutched my own face, for fear that it would follow suit. I thought that I might be able somehow to hold it in position.

The room was darkening. I glimpsed Holmes rising to his feet, then staggering. Little wonder he did, for the floor had become a steep slope. It was a miracle that he did not slide completely off it.

In the event, he sank to his knees. He pointed an accusing finger at Whateley. His mouth moved, and the words it emitted came to me as though from miles away, slurred and somewhat delayed, but this time intelligible at least.

“You did this,” he said. “You have drugged us. Not the tea. The firewood. Damn you, Whateley. The smoke. You…”

Then everything went grey.

And after that, nightmare.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Flight to Far Cathuria

THERE WERE STEPS, SEVENTY OF THEM, AND I descended.

There were two high priests, both lushly bearded and wearing tall crowns reminiscent of Ancient Egyptian headdresses, in a cavern temple lit by a pillar of flame. They were called Nasht and Kaman-Thah, and they approved of me, and so my journey continued, down another seventy steps.

Then I was in a dark, enchanted wood. Gigantic twisted tree trunks surrounded me, and fungi grew in preponderance amidst the leaf litter, their caps phosphorescent, glowing like multi-coloured stars. Large brown rodent-like creatures scurried about my ankles, muttering to one another in some strange fluting tongue.

They were hostile, these cat-sized rat-things that were known as zoogs. Individually none would pose an insurmountable threat, but I feared they might attack me en masse. If only I might fly, up above the treetops. Then not only would I escape the zoogs but I might perhaps find civilisation, some sort of sanctuary.

And so I flew. I did it without conscious thought. All at once I was aloft, and I glided through the warm night air, beneath constellations I did not recognise and a moon whose face was not that of the Earth’s satellite, its features somehow less benign.

The Enchanted Wood extended for many miles, but from my eagle’s-eye vantage I saw, beyond its bounds, rivers that gleamed like silver veins. I saw, too, volcanic mountains to the north and south whose summits rose higher than those of the Alps. Somehow I knew their names. Mount Lerion. Mount Hatheg-Kla. Mount Ngranek. Their snowy peaks were as white as fangs.

Ahead loomed the mighty basalt pillars of the West atop promontories on either side of a strait through which the Southern Sea channelled itself in a torrent. I followed the course of the rushing water, between those vast cyclopean columns. Men had toiled generation after generation to erect them, spending their lives piling stone upon stone, all in the pursuit of divine preferment.

I had no doubt that I was headed for Cathuria. A land of ideals, bedecked with splendid cities built of marble and porphyry, their roofs made of gold. Even the lowliest of its inhabitants lived like kings, dining on luscious fruits and drinking wine made from grapes whose skins were a delicate shade of magenta.

Yet the land I saw now was a far cry from the Cathuria of repute. The countryside was blasted. The cities had fallen, their crumbled architecture blackened by fire. The surviving Cathurians were a depleted, bedraggled lot. They lived as refugees in makeshift camps upon barren plains, huddled together beneath canvas or in shelters crudely built from sticks and foliage; miserable, starving, terrified.

Meanwhile, through the ruins of their former homes, amid splintered bones and shattered skulls, roamed monsters. Monsters who were gods. Gods who were monsters. All shapes and sizes, each a living horror, they strutted about with a cocksure arrogance, rulers of all they surveyed. Once, they had been worshipped and sacrificed to, and they had been content with that. They had enjoyed listening to the hymns and prayers that were intoned in their name and smelling the smoke of burnt offerings and the fumes of wine libations, even if they found such things fripperies and affected apathy towards them.

They were different now, these Outer Gods who were known, here, as the Other Gods. They had changed. Something had roused them from the indolence and the infighting that had characterised their lives over the past several millennia. Something had instilled ambition in them, and a renewed sense of purpose. They had travelled from the outermost edges of the universe to wreak havoc.

I saw how they behaved towards one another when they met. Where before they might have exchanged insults, perhaps even been at one another’s throats, now they shared a greeting – a hailing hand, a flashing compound eye, the flaring of a dorsal fin, the uttering of a sublime mathematical equation. They were, if not cordial, at least courteous in their interactions.

One word recurred in their conversation. One word seemed an emblem of the accord that had lately arisen amongst them.

R’luhlloig.

The Outer Gods had laid Cathuria waste. They had rebelled against their role as deities. They wished to be something more, something worse. And the catalyst for this upheaval was, it seemed, none other than R’luhlloig, the Hidden Mind.

Daemon-sultan Azathoth was one who had violently cast off the shackles; Tulzscha, the Green Flame, another. So was Yog-Sothoth, who is known as the Lurker at the Threshold, and Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young. They and more paraded through the devastation they had created, puffed up with newfound pride, like cruel, hideous children who have plucked the wings off butterflies and are revelling in the insects’ suffering.

“R’luhlloig,” they said to one another, those of them that had mouths grinning.

“R’luhlloig,” they sang, in voices that were either ethereally lovely or infernally loathsome.

“R’luhlloig,” they cackled, with malicious glee.

It was a rallying cry, a call to arms, and I sensed that the Hidden Mind had done more than simply incite a spasm of wanton destruction. This was just a first step.

“Come,” the Outer Gods cried. “Come, you so-called Great Old Ones. We call you forth. Hear us in your prisons, your chambers, your fastnesses, where you skulk and slumber. Come and face us. Stop us, if you have the strength. Come, if you dare!”

The Outer Gods were on the warpath.

Watson.

They were amassing, marshalling themselves.

Watson, can you hear me?

There was impending conflict in the air, loud as drumbeats.

Watson, snap out of it, man.

And at the heart of it all lay R’luhlloig.

A “new god”, they were calling him. A “beacon of hope”. Even a “messiah”.

“Watson!”

* * *

The word hit me like a slap in the face.

Then I realised that I had just been slapped in the face.

I blinked, my cheek stinging. “Holmes? Is that you?”

“Who else? I apologise for striking you, old friend, but verbal imprecation alone seemed not to be doing the trick.”

Cathuria was gone. I was back in the real world. But I could see nothing. Holmes’s voice was coming from directly in front of me, but of Holmes himself there was not even the slightest glimmer. Was I blind?

“You are not blind,” Holmes said as if in answer to my unasked question. “It is merely that we are somewhere almost entirely devoid of light. Your eyes will adjust to the gloom in due course. How are you feeling?”

“Confused,” I said. “I have been… I do not know where I have been. Elsewhere.”

“The Enchanted Wood, I’ll be bound. The Southern Sea. The Basalt Pillars of the West. Cathuria.”

“Yes!” I declared. “How on earth could you know?”

“Because I have been there too, Watson. I have seen all that you have just seen.”

“But… how? How can that be?”

“Because we have both been voyagers, old friend. We have both been sent involuntarily on a journey to the Dreamlands.”

“The Dreamlands?”

“You have heard of them, surely.”

“Vaguely. I recall reading about them once or twice.”

“They do not merit many mentions in the literature. They are a place men may visit only in their sleep, as the name implies, or else while under the influence of some powerful narcotic. Mystics may travel there at will but only after years of practice. Alhazred, Prinn, von Junzt and the rest give them short shrift because the influence of the Great Old Ones and the Outer Gods upon them is minimal.”

“Was minimal, you mean,” I said. “If what I saw is anything to go by, all that has changed.”

“Indeed. Cathuria is lost. The Outer Gods, at the urging of R’luhlloig, have claimed it for their own, and if their belligerence goes unchecked Cathuria will not be the last place to fall to them. A worrisome development.”

“But how can you and I have had the exact same vision? It is not possible.”

“How many times, Watson?” Holmes heaved an exasperated sigh. “We are long past defining things as either possible or impossible. There is only what is and what is not. In this instance, we were both being guided while we were in the Dreamlands. We were being shown that which someone wished us to see.”

“Someone? Who? Whateley?”

“He could well have been murmuring instruction in our ears, influencing our progress through the Dreamlands. That or some other, subtler force was at work.”

“And how did he drug us? Was it something in the fireplace, as I heard you intimating just before I passed out?”

“An hallucinogenic plant, secreted amongst the logs. The psilocybin mushroom, perhaps, or fly agaric, or datura. My money, however, is on the Devil’s-foot root. It is used as an ordeal poison by medicine men in areas of West Africa and has a distinctive sweetish smell when burned. In large doses it is positively toxic. In lesser quantities, however, it can induce vivid waking visions. Witch-doctors in the Ubangi country, for instance, administer it to young warriors on the cusp of manhood as part of an initiation rite. It is supposed to temper the spirit and banish fear.”

“The Devil’s-foot root,” I said.

“It sounds as if the seed of a story idea has just been planted,” my companion observed.

He was right, although it would be some years before it germinated.

“But how was Whateley immune to its effects?” I said. “He was there in the room with us.”

“If I were forced to guess – and you know how much I hate guessing – he could have built up a resistance to it beforehand, through repeated exposure. There may, though, be another, subtler reason,” he added cryptically. “Something Whateley is hiding from us.”

“Care to expand on that?”

“Not yet. In due course.”

I at last was beginning to perceive shapes amidst the darkness. Holmes’s face, in aquiline profile, glimmered before me. I also became aware of smells. Musty dampness predominated, but the aroma of straw was distinguishable too, and another odour, which I recognised all too well from both the operating theatre and the theatre of war. It was blood. But more than just blood. It was the smell of freshly cut flesh, of a body opened up and on display.

“You are sniffing, Watson,” said Holmes. “Your nose has detected something untoward.”

“You can smell it too, can you not?”

“Very much so.”

“Is it you? Are you hurt?”

“No. I, however, have been conscious longer than you and my eyes have had time to adapt fully. I know what is in here with us. And I should warn you, my friend. It is not pretty.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The Thing in the Cage

AT LAST I FATHOMED WHERE WE WERE. WE HAD been consigned to the boarded-up barn.

The origin of the blood smell, however, remained unknown to me, and I was reluctant to learn whence it came. I am not a squeamish man. How can I be when I have amputated limbs on the battlefield and had my hands inside a man’s stomach cavity while attempting to repair shrapnel damage? Nonetheless Holmes’s warning filled me with unease. If he himself, as inured as I was to gore, considered something “not a pretty sight”, then it most assuredly was as advertised.

“I can spare you the anticipation, if you would like,” said he. “I have perceived that there is an oil lantern to hand, and next to it a box of matches. Whateley has left them for us.”

“How courteous of him.”

“All I need do is light the lantern.”

“Then by all means let us get this over with.”

A match was struck, its flame blindingly bright. Soon the lantern wick was burning, snug within its glass funnel.

There was a cage. It occupied one corner of the barn, a thing of sturdy iron construction, some eight feet long on each side. The area of floor that it encompassed was covered with a thick layer of straw.

Within were two humanoid forms.

One was a corpse, the naked remains of a man clad in the tatters of a white gown or nightshirt. The belly had been ripped open. The face had been torn off. Not one limb remained intact. The straw around it was caked with dried blood. Organs were scattered everywhere, some whole, some not.

Adjacent lay a creature who looked dead too but was in fact, I quickly gathered, only asleep. It was stretched out prone on the straw, head resting upon its arms. Its facial features were doglike, while its hands resembled paws and its feet were cloven hooves. Its ribs flared in and out like bellows with every slumbering breath.

Dark wet smears around the creature’s muzzle and over its arms, all the way up to the elbow, spoke of the terrible depredations it had visited upon the corpse. It had dined heartily on human flesh and was now sleeping off its meal, like a tiger after the kill.

“A ghoul,” I said, with equal parts revulsion and hatred.

Twice in the past had Holmes and I encountered this obnoxious species, notorious for its unclean habits and vile predilections. On the first occasion, back in ’87, a band of ghouls had been responsible for the abduction – and partial consumption – of a prize racehorse from its stables at King’s Pyland on Dartmoor. On the second occasion, two years later, a lone ghoul had caused minor but irreparable harm to the person of hydraulic engineer Victor Hatherley. The common thread in both cases is, of course, the creature’s carnivorous appetite, which shows a preference for raw meat, ideally torn from a still-living victim. As for the source of that meat, the creature is not fussy. If it feels moved to assuage its hunger on the highest of sentient beings, then so be it. The ghoul knows no better.

“Upon my word,” I breathed. “That vile thing has been there all along, no more than ten feet from us!”

“That thing and its repast,” said Holmes. “It is securely locked up in the cage, though. It cannot reach us.”

“Even so. To think that we have been lying unconscious in a – a charnel house.”

“You exaggerate, but the point is taken. It is disquieting. If only you had your revolver still, then we might at least be able to defend ourselves.”

I checked my pocket; the gun was gone. “Whateley must have taken the precaution of removing it.”

“Yes, its comforting bulge is absent from your jacket. And I am deprived of my portmanteau. We are weaponless. If there is any sort of silver lining to this cloud, we may note that our quest has achieved its objective, in however gruesome and anticlimactic a fashion.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Has it not occurred to you, Watson, whose corpse that is?”

“I suppose I have not yet given attention to the matter, owing to the fact that we are shut up in a barn with a ghoul.” My voice carried a slight edge of hysteria, which I felt it was reasonable to indulge in under the circumstances. Somewhat more placidly, I said, “Doubtless you have the answer, Holmes, and are keen to share it.”

“Observe the victim’s left arm.”

“What of it? It is a mutilated mess, like the rest of him.” “There is no hand.”

“No, and I can tell you where it now resides: inside the ghoul.”

“Really, old man, there is no need for that mulish tone. We have seen this arm before and the neat stump in which it terminates. The hand was not gnawed off by the ghoul. It has long since been absent.”

“Conroy?” I said, peering at the limb.

“Zachariah Conroy,” said Holmes with a nod. “What is left of him, at any rate, and of his Bethlem inmate’s smock. He was conveyed here by the nightgaunt and fed to the ghoul.”

I shuddered. “A hideous end.”

“An ignominious one, too.”

“Whateley. He is a callous, cold-hearted monster.”

“And more.”

“Are we next? Is that to be our fate as well? Served up to a ghoul on a platter?”

Holmes shrugged. “Only if we allow it. We are alive for now, and that is enough. While we remain so, there is always hope. There is also… that.”

With a tap of his foot, he indicated a heap of clothing not far from where we sat, beside several bundles of straw.

“Conroy’s?”

“Must be. From when he was first held prisoner here, before he escaped and fetched up in Bethlem. What interests me is not so much the clothes themselves but the book that lies on top.”

He went over to retrieve said book, which he brought back to within the aura of the lantern.

“It appears to be a journal,” I said.

It was indeed a journal, bound in calfskin, the sort of thing one might buy at any stationer’s. Nothing was written upon the cover to suggest whose it was or what it contained. Holmes opened the cover.

“You are planning on reading it?” I said.

“Why not? We do not have anything better with which to occupy our time.”

“How about escaping?”

“I have already tried the door and windows. They are secure.”

“We could kick out the window planks without too much difficulty, I imagine.”

“And then what? Have you forgotten about the nightgaunt? You can rest assured it is waiting for us outside. Indeed, I believe I have heard its soft tread once or twice.”

“Oh. Oh yes.”

“A far more effective gaoler than any prison warder. We would not get ten paces before it was upon us. No, we are in this barn until dawn at least, when the nightgaunt will surely have to rest – unless, that is, Whateley comes for us sooner. I have the impression, besides, that we are meant to have spotted the journal. Why else was the lantern here and the book in plain view? Whateley has set all of this up with a specific purpose. There is an air of ‘stage management’ about the situation. There has been ever since we got here.”

“For what it’s worth, that has been my impression too.”

“Nathaniel Whateley is more than devious. He is duplicitous.”

“You will have no argument from me on that front.”

“I mean it almost literally. Duplicitous in the sense of having two elements or parts, being twofold or dual. His interior and exterior do not match.”

“Now you are losing me.”

“Then I shall endeavour to lift the fog of befuddlement. Tell me this. Have you noticed Whateley’s left hand?”

“Indeed I have. It appears to be suffering from palsy. That or an injury damaged the nerves.”

“But Mycroft did not mention any such disability when recounting the talk Whateley gave at the Diogenes, and I am certain he would have.”

“It could have happened since then.”

“Whateley’s landlady Mrs Owen said nothing about it either, and she saw him far more recently than Mycroft. More to the point, do you not think it a queer coincidence that the hand which is malfunctioning is the same hand that Conroy is –was –lacking?”

“If there is something wrong with a man’s hand, then there are even odds of it being the same one as that of another man who also has something wrong with his hand,” I said. “So no, on those grounds I do not find it that coincidental. You obviously beg to differ.”

“You noticed, too, the way Whateley touched his face while he was talking to us? Once to sweep aside a lock of hair, another time to stroke his cheek.”

“An affectation. He is the affected type.”

“It did not seem to you that he was feeling his own skin?”

“No.”

“That is how it struck me.” Holmes returned his attention to the journal. “So. Shall we…?”

Within the book lay page upon page of dense handwriting. The penmanship was neatly formed but betrayed a certain jagged intensity. At times emotion seemed to have got the better of the writer, and the words escaped the constraints of the printed lines or else degenerated into a scrawl, while still remaining just the right side of legible.

Holmes flicked through, then returned to the first page.

An Account of a Voyage up the Miskatonic River and What We Found There
by Zachariah Conroy

The title was followed by these opening words:

I hereby set forth that which is both confession and accusation. It is a true testimony and calls into doubt, in large part, the accepted narrative of events as promulgated by one Nathaniel Whateley of Arkham, Massachusetts.

Holmes and I read on, he turning the pages, I looking over his shoulder. We did so for the next couple of hours, with increasing absorption and fascination, until at last almost everything we had experienced over the preceding few days began to make sense – to me, certainly, although Holmes had inferred most of the truth already – and we were left both enlightened and filled with dark foreboding.

PART TWO

A NOTE ON PART TWO

IN THE SECOND PORTION OF THIS MANUSCRIPT, from chapters twenty to thirty-four, I present the text of Zachariah Conroy’s journal in full, unexpurgated and unaltered save for the interpolation of chapter breaks and the addition of chapter titles of my own invention. From chapter thirty-five onwards, I resume my original narrative.

J. H. W.

A NOTE ON DR WATSON’S NOTE ON PART TWO

UNLIKE THE ILLUSTRIOUS DOCTOR, I HAVE TAMPERED with the text of Conroy’s journal. All I’ve done, however, is change the American spellings to UK English ones. I do this with apologies to my American readers, excusing myself on the grounds that if I didn’t standardise the spellings in this book, I’d risk driving my editor Miranda to apoplexy. Any author will tell you that an irate editor is a fiercer menace than Professor Moriarty, while an appeased one is a stauncher ally than Sherlock Holmes.

J. M. H. L.

CHAPTER TWENTY

An Undergraduate in Arkham

An Account of a Voyage up the Miskatonic River and What We Found There

BY ZACHARIAH CONROY

I HEREBY SET FORTH THAT WHICH IS BOTH confession and accusation. It is a true testimony and calls into doubt, in large part, the accepted narrative of events as promulgated by one Nathaniel Whateley of Arkham, Massachusetts. I myself was complicit in the advancement of that narrative, but it was under duress, at Nate’s behest; and besides, at the time I was sound neither in mind nor in body. I have since benefited from medical treatment that has restored me to some semblance of health, and I wish now to recant everything I have hitherto stated in connection with the river journey we undertook and its fateful conclusion. What I formerly maintained, I repudiate. I did it to oblige Nate, whom I once so admired. I now accept that I was misguided in that course of action. I wish to set the record straight. I wish to make things right and apportion blame to he who was squarely in the wrong.

* * *

I came to Arkham in the fall of 1892 from my hometown of Boston. I had won a place at Miskatonic University on a scholarship; yet the lustre of that achievement had been dulled by recent tragedy, for my older brother Absalom had died that summer, victim of a boating accident. He and several friends were aboard a private yacht, enjoying a pleasure cruise in Massachusetts Bay, when a sudden squall arose. The weather had been set fair and no storm was forecast, and local trawlermen and whalers have since declared that they had none of them ever encountered the likes of the tempest that brewed up that day, seemingly out of nowhere, around noon. From smooth blue tranquillity, tumultuous waves manifested, and gale-force winds howled in from the north-east. None on the yacht, the Lively Lass, was an experienced seaman. (My brother certainly was not.) The boat was owned by Derwent Baslow, patriarch of the Beacon Hill Baslows, a family of affluence with deep political connections. His son Jack and my brother were fast friends, and it was Jack who was captaining the vessel when she ran into difficulties. Perhaps, had the young Baslow been more than an amateur sailor, he would have known how to ride out the conditions. As it was, the yacht was overcome, and lost with all hands. Not one of the half-dozen young men crewing her was seen again. No bodies washed ashore during the days that followed, or ever. The sea swallowed them and never returned them.

Affected badly though I was by the shock of bereavement, this was nothing compared to the suffering my parents underwent. Absalom was the preferred son. He had known it. I knew it. Even my mother and father knew it, for all that they feigned otherwise and professed to treat us both equally. Absalom was blond, cheery and bright, a tall lad with broad shoulders, academically gifted and a fine football player to boot, who quarterbacked for the varsity team at Yale and accumulated a coterie of high-class friends both there and at home. His facility for moving comfortably within society was a source of satisfaction particularly to my father, for we Conroys were a family in decline, of no great standing. Once, a couple of generations prior, we had been counted amongst the elite of the city, Boston Brahmins with substantial banking interests and a lineage reaching back all the way to the Mayflower. We retained the lineage but the fortune was all but gone, squandered through poor investments by my grandfather. Our brownstone overlooking the Charles River was our sole remaining asset of substance, but dilapidated and in need of repairs we could ill afford. Absalom was the family’s hope of a return to prestige. He would restore the Conroy name to its former glory.

I, by contrast, was a darkly shadowed fellow, of medium height, with jet-black hair and the brooding pallor and stooped shoulders of one who prized intellectual pursuits above all else. I was more intelligent than Absalom, but lacked his charm. I was ever at pains to make myself presentable and had, I believe, some social graces, yet I was never as immediately likeable as my brother. He could win over just about any girl who crossed his path, whilst I had a tendency to flounder, tongue-tied, should a pretty eye turn my way. The amorous arts were something I found a mystery, although I was told several times that I was handsome enough. I suppose I lacked the self-confidence that Absalom had in abundance.

His death hit us hard, as I say, and my parents retreated into mourning. The drapes were permanently drawn at our house. My mother took to dressing in black with all the avidity of an Italian widow, while my father scarcely left his study and, I regret to relate, took to the bottle with a vengeance. That summer, when I should have been looking forward to commencing at Miskatonic University, was a dismal season. In fact, I found it something of a relief to leave home when the time came. Neither parent even came out to wave me goodbye as my coach left. They had lost the light of their lives. I barely impinged upon their thoughts any more. I was Zachariah, my brother had been Absalom. I was the Z to his A, the omega to his alpha, the Esau to his Jacob. My parents would not miss me, of that I was almost certain. And several weeks into the new semester, when I had not heard one word from them, not even a brief letter, I knew it for sure. If there had ever been any hope of my rivalling their other son in their esteem, it was over. In memory he became sainted. Alive, I could not hold a candle to Absalom dead.

* * *

My first sight of Arkham, as we approached it along the Salem road, was unpropitious. A drizzle had set in, and through the coach’s steamed-up, rain-beaded windows I had glimpses of sagging gambrel roofs and, beneath, dun-coloured houses that seemed to crouch rather than rise. Parades of copper-leaved trees lined avenues that were somehow not quite broad enough, certainly not when compared with Boston’s, while streets meandered as though unconvinced of their own direction. I do not doubt that my depressed frame of mind did not incline me to look upon the town with magnanimity, yet I cannot say that any aspect of Arkham’s appearance evoked even a tiny leap of joy within my soul. Its one presiding virtue was that it was not, at least, Boston, which I had grown to associate only with misery and neglect.

Arrival on the campus of Miskatonic University itself did little to lift my spirits. The bulky buildings looked forbidding when set against the glowering grey sky, more like fortresses than seats of learning. Students scurried about with their heads bent beneath the incessant rain, and their hither-and-thither dashing seemed mindless to me, almost insect-like. I began to wonder whether I had made a mistake in coming. Until then I had been quite content with the scientific investigation and experimentation I had been conducting at home. Already, on my own initiative, I had made several biological advances that I considered noteworthy, not least those pertaining to the brain. Numerous were the cerebra I had dissected and pored over – mainly animal but occasionally, when I could procure one, human – piercing with my scalpel the deeper mysteries of that organ with the tenacity of a jungle explorer hacking through undergrowth. I had discovered within it sub-organs and discrete regions not recorded in the anatomical textbooks, and had also been able to ascribe specific functions of the nervous system to certain areas of the brain which even the pioneering Italian neuroscientist Camillo Golgi of the University of Pavia – whose work was an inspiration to me – had failed to identify. Using electricity and microscopy I had traced the paths of synapses through tissue, thus establishing a cerebral cartography as accurate and detailed as any geographical map. The brain was my particular love, and I reckoned there was little about the thing known colloquially as “grey matter” that anyone could teach me. I have said that I was not self-confident, and I was not, but in this one respect I regarded myself the equal of all others. While the professors at Miskatonic University might be capable of adding to the general sum of my biological knowledge, I doubted they could significantly enhance my understanding in my one true field of expertise.

Hence it was with misgiving and no little pessimism that I stood before the university’s imposing Alumni Hall, with its beetling bell tower, and contemplated my immediate future. Being granted a scholarship – a generous one, to boot – was nothing to be sniffed at, and it betokened the faculty’s faith in my prowess. Yet it would have been just as profitable for me, educationally if not financially, to have remained at home and continued my solitary studies there. I had made so many breakthroughs already by the tender age of eighteen, unaided, that there was no reason to think I could not continue to do so under the same conditions.

It was just then, at that wavering, indecisive moment, that two events conspired to make up my mind for me. The first was that a man whom I shortly learned was Professor Cyrus Nordstrom appeared out of nowhere and started bellowing at me. I had contrived somehow to be in his way. My various pieces of luggage lay around me, and Professor Nordstrom’s passage was impeded by them, or so he claimed. I was far from being the only student present in the situation of having his possessions piled about him and looking rather bewildered. The steps of the Alumni Hall and the greensward in front were littered with suitcases, valises and trunks. Nonetheless Nordstrom wished to pass directly through the couple of square yards of ground I currently occupied, and he chose to treat me as an obstruction that he must remove by shouting rather than simply divert around.

I confess to being taken aback by the sheer blunt force of the old fellow’s vituperation. His cheeks flushed crimson as he harangued me and his long black academic gown billowed behind him like the wings of some giant bat. He demanded my name, and I gave it to him quaveringly, along with a stammered apology, even though in my opinion I had done nothing wrong. Yet this drove him to greater heights of indignation, as though by saying sorry I was somehow admitting culpability.

How long I endured that scything boreal wind of rage from Nordstrom, I do not know. It seemed as though it would never end, and the unwanted attention of dozens of bystanders was being focused on me. It was acutely uncomfortable, and then all at once relief arrived in the shape of a young man, three or four years my senior, who swept in and positioned himself between me and my tormenter, his hand held up in a manner demanding silence. This he did not receive from Nordstrom, who swivelled towards him and with scarcely a pause began castigating him instead. The main criticisms Professor Nordstrom had of him were the length of his hair, which was “disgraceful”, and the air of disrespect that he exuded, and I quote, “like a skunk gives off stink”.

This colourful simile was Nordstrom’s parting shot, after which he stalked away muttering to himself until, shortly thereafter, he found another poor innocent upon whom to unleash a tirade of unmerited reproof. I, meanwhile, turned to my saviour and expressed the profoundest gratitude, which he deflected with a gracious shake of the head and wave of the hand. “Don’t mention it,” he said. “Old Nordstrom is a right tyrant, but stand up to him and, like any blowhard, he soon enough backs down. It comes of his being an emeritus professor. His best days are behind him and he has nothing to occupy his time, so he prowls around campus finding fault where there is none. I’m Nathaniel Whateley, by the way, but my friends call me Nate, and I’m very much hoping you’ll be one of them.”

* * *

I was more than a little daunted by Nathaniel Whateley, and more than a little awestruck. Not only was he remarkably handsome, but he had a loose, easy-going manner that I found irresistibly appealing. From that very first encounter I wanted nothing else than to remain in close orbit of him, like a planet circling a sun. He offered to help me with my bags. He escorted me to my dorm room. Then, before taking his leave, he told me that if I needed something, anything, all I had to do was come looking for him and he would do his best to oblige. He had digs in a boarding house on Lich Street, right on the edge of campus, but he said that more often than not he was to be found in the biology labs, which lay on the north side of the main quadrangle. When I admitted that I happened to be a biology major myself, Nate grinned and said he knew already. In fact, he was perfectly well aware who I was, and he looked forward to getting better acquainted with me, for Zachariah Conroy, in his words, had a reputation that preceded him. Everyone in the department had heard about this freshman whose examination papers had so impressed the faculty and who had given such a good account of himself in his interview with the admissions board that not only had the offer of a full scholarship been extended but words like “genius” were being bandied about. It wasn’t everyone who came to Miskatonic riding the crest of such a wave of expectation, and Nate was keen to get in with me before anybody else did. As soon as he overheard me telling Professor Nordstrom my name, he had spied an opportunity to ingratiate himself with “the wonder kid”. “In rescuing you from the old coot,” he said, “I was actually doing myself a favour. We’re no longer strangers now, you and I, and in time we’re going to become, I’m sure, the best of pals.” To that I replied that I could think of nothing I would like more; and so, with a handshake that felt like the sealing of a deal, Nate departed.

The foregoing exchange was conducted in front of my new roommate, Hieronymus Lake, a fellow biology freshman, who now introduced himself. He too had heard in advance about “the prodigious Zachariah Conroy”, and said he was honoured to be sharing accommodation with me. Lake hailed from Minnesota and possessed the kind of open, honest face one traditionally associates with denizens of that state, and the corn-hued hair and slow Midwestern drawl to match. He looked out of place at an Ivy League college in New England, and for that reason alone I decided I could like him. His ambition, he said, was to study biology all the way to a professorship, with a view to specialising in cold-weather life forms. One day he would like to mount expeditions to the poles – the Arctic, the Antarctic, he didn’t mind which, preferably both – and conduct research into the seal, the walrus, Ursus maritimus, and especially the penguin. The last was the queerest of birds, so clumsy on land and yet so graceful underwater, and he believed there to be species of sphenisciform yet to be discovered. His hope was eventually to have one such named after him, Aptenodytes lakensis perhaps, as a lasting monument to his life’s work. Sometimes, as a scientist, the most that one could aspire to was to leave behind one’s name – a mark on the wall of posterity.

I agreed, and yet for myself I hoped for so much more.

* * *

I did not see Nate again during the next few days, although I learned more about him from my fellow undergrads. The Whateleys were an important family around Arkham, with branches all across Essex County. There was money in their background, much of it from farming, and locally they were considered aristocracy, of a kind. Landed gentry, one might say, although it was rumoured too that there was a streak of madness in the genealogy, a recessive trait that emerged now and then and manifested as devil worship, compulsive monomania, even homicidal savagery. None of those attributes had I discerned in Nate Whateley, for all that I had been in his presence for no longer than twenty minutes. Instead I had seen displayed a bonhomie and outgoingness that reminded me of Absalom. With hindsight it is plain to me that I was drawn to Nate principally by virtue of his resemblance to my late brother. He filled a significant absence in my life. Absalom had not been unaffectionate towards me, and while we were growing up he had more than once delivered me from the hands of bullies who took exception to my bookishness and felt the appropriate punishment was to manhandle me and hurl my school satchel into the mud. Absalom would send them packing, usually with a cuff round the ear, and while each time I was delighted that my antagonists got their comeuppance, I hated the fact that another had had to defend me. Churlishly I would tell Absalom that I could fight my own fights, to which his inevitable reply was that plainly I could not. He brushed off my resentment with a breezy, forgiving smile, and I loved him all the more deeply for it, even as the sense of my own physical inadequacy grew all the more entrenched. Nate Whateley had made me feel the same way, but somehow without the lacerating self-recrimination.

When Nate’s path and mine next intersected, it was as I was walking back to my dorm one evening from the refectory after dinner. With me was Lake, whose company I had been finding increasingly congenial, but the moment Nate appeared, it was as though my Minnesotan chum ceased to exist. Nate hailed me, and with barely a glance at Lake asked if I had plans for the rest of the night. I avowed that I had none, even though Lake and I had been intending to collaborate on the transection of the rostral portion of a carrier pigeon’s brain in hopes of unearthing some clue as to that bird’s uncanny homing ability. Nate then grabbed me by the wrist and told me to come with him. Meekly I consented.

He led me to his boarding house and up to his bedroom, which was spacious enough to double as a study. Here, upon shelves, were laid out various aberrations of nature in glass jars, steeped in formaldehyde. He asked if I had ever seen such a cavalcade of grotesqueries, and I admiringly confessed that I had not. I spent an hour studying this collection. There were furry things and spiny things and tentacled things and things whose phylum I could not even guess at, and things that filled some evolutionary niche I had never known existed. It had taken Nate several years to acquire them. Some he had bought, others he had tracked down himself in the wilds of Essex County and beyond, not least in the region to the west of Arkham known as Clark’s Corners, near a reservoir which now filled what had once been an inhabited valley and which had been superstitiously avoided by the locals ever since the landing of a meteorite the previous decade. There, strange fauna roamed and equally strange flora flourished, organisms such as might be found nowhere else on the planet. For Nate, with his evident obsession for anomalous animals, it was a happy hunting ground.

He asked if I would care to study the brain of one of the specimens, any I fancied. I jumped at the chance, and presently we were drying the formaldehyde off a mammal that had the hyper-developed hind legs of a hare and the prehensile tail of a lemur but also the cumbrous head of a cephalopod. No sooner had I penetrated this extraordinary amalgam’s cranium with a bone saw, than I learned it lacked a traditional cerebrum. Instead it boasted a network of small brain-like lobes distributed throughout its fore-body, each of which appeared to control a separate autonomic function while together, in concert with its brethren, providing the higher level of cognitive coordination that we call sentience. The reason for this arrangement, I postulated, was to mitigate the impact of trauma to that part. The creature could sustain severe damage to one or more of the lobes and continue to operate much as normal. I even put forward the theory that the other lobes might, as it were, pick up the slack for those that were no longer viable, rewiring themselves to accommodate losses elsewhere. If that were so, then it was a unique survival mechanism, enabling the creature to endure injuries that would have left a similar mammal with a single, non-distributed brain either dead or so seriously incapacitated it could not fend for itself any more.

Exhilarated by this foray into an alien anatomy, I proposed that Nate and I go out for a drink. I was not usually the sort to carouse, but something about the situation seemed to demand a celebration. Nate readily agreed, and so followed a night of traipsing through Arkham’s range of saloons, some of them more salubrious than others. During the small hours we wound up back at Miskatonic, somewhat the worse for wear, and Nate said he had something to show me. Next I remember, we were breaking into the university library via the back door, and there, amid the dusty shelves, Nate took me to a section devoted to esoterica and rare incunabula and fetched down a copy of a tome entitled the Necronomicon. Chortling merrily, he riffled through its pages until he came to one whereon was depicted something called a “nightgaunt”. “Remind you of anybody?” he enquired, and I, viewing the image through the swimming blur of inebriation, was forced to admit that a certain resemblance to Professor Nordstrom was undeniable. I wished to know more about the strange book, for I had seen nothing like it before and felt a peculiar, chilly sensation when looking at it, as though I were staring at an inert and manufactured object which was nonetheless in some ineffable way alive. This Necronomicon seemed both attractive and repellent, and therefore was not un-akin to the organ that was of such scientific significance to me. For I was well aware that the brain’s intimate mass of tissue, with its jelly-like texture and gnarled contours, lacked aesthetic charm, while remaining, in terms of its intricacy, its sheer convoluted functionality, a thing of beauty.

Nate described the Necronomicon as a compendium of ancient knowledge and arcane lore which some people believed to have validity – power, even – while others considered it just so much preposterous hogwash. There were spells in it that could conjure up beings from the nether regions, demons and hell-spawned monstrosities and entities that might be deemed godlike, or so it was reputed. For him, the book served as an intriguing bestiary, a reference work that he consulted on a regular basis in connection with his research into zoological oddities. Whenever he trapped some animal he had never seen before, or purchased the preserved remains of one from a fellow collector or from one of Arkham’s many labyrinthine curio shops, he would go to the Necronomicon to check if it qualified for a mention there. More often than not it didn’t, but he returned to the book again and again all the same, admitting to me that it exerted a hold over him that he could not quite explain. The mere act of glancing through it was inordinately comforting, he said, like some quasi-religious ritual.

That was when he first used a word that I was to hear many times more over the ensuing weeks and months, and would eventually come to loathe and fear. “R’luhlloig,” he murmured, softly, almost tenderly, half to himself, half to the book. I immediately queried the utterance, assuming he had said something in English that I had not quite caught. As we were both still rather drunk, my hearing and his diction were neither of them as sharp as could be. “Rolly log?” I said. “Did I get that aright? What do you mean by ‘rolly log’, Nate?” (I now know, of course, not only how to spell the word but what it signifies.)

He burst into laughter. I started laughing too. I did not know why my remark was so funny, or why Nate’s guffaws bore such a brittle, inhibited note, as though he was laughing heartily in spite of himself. Humour is a chimera, and sometimes it imposes itself upon one contrary to one’s wishes. One is amused not because one is happy but because one hopes to be or is expected to be. And so, over that sinister, black-bound tome, Nate and I laughed.

* * *

I have no memory of leaving the library or returning to my dorm, although I do recall feeling quite dismal the next morning, and also being the target of a certain amount of reproach from my roommate. It seemed, from what I could glean from a grumbling Lake, that I had crashed into the premises at an ungodly hour, reeking of liquor and formaldehyde, had stumbled into bed fully clothed, and had proceeded to fall into a deep sleep during which I had thrashed between the sheets, moaning loudly and incoherently, caught up in the throes of some violent dream of which I had no memory upon waking.

Thereafter, Nate and I were to be found consorting on a daily basis. The night of revelry and shared secrets had cemented a bond between us, and I once more had the older brother I had lost, albeit in a new and less predictable form. We took meals together, we compared notes on our individual disciplines, and we looked askance at various of the faculty members, Professor Nordstrom foremost, deeming them hidebound and ignorant, an old guard who would soon fall before the onslaught of young upstarts such as ourselves with our restless energy and innovative ideas. We became a citadel of two that no outsider could breach. Other friendships, that with Lake principally, fell by the wayside. I detected envy amongst my fellow freshmen that I had become the favoured coeval of such a prominent campus figure as Nathaniel Whateley. A couple of my professors considered him a bad influence on me and drew me aside to tell me so. I did not care about any of it, not a whit. Nate was the best thing that had happened to me in a long time, and I failed to perceive that, as a spider does a fly, he was drawing me inexorably into his web.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The Omnireticulum

EMBOLDENED BY ENCOURAGEMENT FROM NATE, I began to pay greater attention to my own private research instead of following the academic curriculum. I had more to offer the world, Nate said, than being just another head for professors to dump facts into. Why waste myself listening to them pontificate when I was capable of striking out on my own into territories their timid minds would never dare explore? Accordingly, I spent less time at lectures, and more time in the laboratory. This naturally earned me the disapproval of the faculty, and towards semester’s close I was called to the dean’s office. The dean reminded me that, as a scholar, I had a responsibility towards the school, which after all was subsidising me to be there. I was expected to hand in my essays when they were due and maintain an unblemished class-attendance record. He warned me that if I did not change my ways my grant might be taken away and given to someone more deserving.

Nate had advised me on how to handle the matter, and accordingly I grovelled and told the dean I was sorry and would strive to do better in future. I did not mean a word of it, but the dean was hoodwinked and all was well. After semester ended I passed a sad, listless Christmas at home (where there was not a single festive decoration in the house, not even a paper chain) and returned to Arkham in January with renewed zeal. Not only was I pleased to be reunited with Nate after the vacation, I was keen to resume work. To that end, I began availing myself of the cadavers from Miskatonic’s medical school or, to be precise, one portion of the cadavers. Since the medical students were being taught how to fix bodies only – skin, muscles, bones, heart, lungs, intestines and the like – brains were generally held to be surplus to requirements. To others they were redundant; to me they were a precious resource.

The procedure that I began to develop, I termed “Intercranial Cognition Transference”; it was predicated upon my discovery of a tiny cerebral gland lodged between the amygdala and the hippocampus, a fleshy nodule not much larger than a shelled peanut that I had become convinced served as a conduit, a kind of clearing-house for every neurosynaptical event that occurred in the rest of the organ. Within this gland, which was common to all the higher forms of animal life and which I took to calling the “omnireticulum”, there remained the residue of all that the possessor of the brain had ever done, thought or uttered. One might liken it to a series of photographic plates retaining the impression of every image to which they were exposed. If one were being fanciful, one might even describe it as the seat of the soul.

By means of a small-bore drill, long-needled hypodermic syringes and certain injectable serums I had concocted, I was able to distil the content of the omnireticulum down to its essence and then draw it out in liquid form. I practised the technique on cadaver brains until I had it down pat. The serums were derived from blood – my own – that was infused with acids and reagents, which enabled the cells to mimic properties of other cells they came into contact with. There were three of them in all, each a complex compound of proteins, ethers and phosphates that I took to calling, with a certain elegant simplicity, Conroy’s Solution A, Conroy’s Solution B and Conroy’s Solution C. Injected in that order, in carefully calibrated quantities, they acted upon the omnireticulum to dissolve it into its constituent cells, which then bonded with the blood cells in the serum. The extractable end product was a reddish fluid in amounts averaging around half a fluid ounce. This, when inserted into the omnireticulum of another living being, had the effect of supplanting that host gland, imbuing it with the contents of the donor omnireticulum. (One might draw comparisons with a palimpsest, where the original text is erased and overwritten with a new text.) It was a one-way process, of course, since the donor omnireticulum had to be effectively destroyed in order for it to be made transferrable. The benefit was that the exchange was less invasive and potentially fatal than a straight surgical transplant, if such a thing was even feasible; it could, moreover, be conducted between different species.

In demonstration of this, and to put theory into practice once and for all, in early February of 1893 I performed Intercranial Cognition Transference from a parrot to a capuchin monkey, my maiden effort with live specimens. The latter creature I was able to render insensible with chloroform before the injections began, but the former thwarted my best efforts to sedate it, being of a belligerent and pecking inclination, so I was obliged to work upon it while it was awake and in full possession of its faculties. Nate had volunteered to serve as my laboratory assistant, and he was the one who secured the parrot in place on a table using clamps, the bird protesting volubly and resisting strenuously when subjected to such undignified treatment. Even after it was pinned down and immobilised, its screeches were ear-splitting, not least as the drill-bit burrowed into the base of its skull and the hypodermic needles followed one after another, each delivering its tiny load of serum, which then had to be left for a precise number of seconds so that it could take effect. Blood and feathers bedecked the table top, and by the end the parrot was left a squalling, twitching mess, a shell of its former self.

Into the insensible capuchin monkey went the distillation of the parrot’s omnireticulum, after which it was simply a matter of waiting until the small primate came round. In the meantime, Nate took it upon himself to deal with the bird. He released it from its bonds and held it in his hands in readiness for wringing its neck. The parrot’s beady eyes rolled in their sockets, and its beak gaped, lumpen black tongue lolling out. Soft pathetic squawks escaped its throat. Hard though it is to define what constitutes sanity in an animal that sits so relatively low in the intelligence rankings, I would have said that the parrot had gone mad. At the very least there was nothing left of the scant personality it had had, as though by depriving it of its omnireticulum I had also taken away something fundamental to its brain function, the “glue” that bound the whole together. Its absence left a vacuum from which there was no recovery; the rest of the brain was beyond repair. Such was my inference, at any rate, and further experimentation would prove it true. For now, the parrot had to be disposed of – a more sensitive person would say “put out of its misery” – and Nate did the honours, wrenching the head round one way, the body round the other, with a crack of separating vertebrae.

An hour later the monkey regained consciousness, and almost immediately it began exhibiting atypical behaviour. It tried to preen itself but seemed not to realise that it lacked a beak or feathers, so that its teeth clacked repeatedly on empty air. It gave vent to an indignant caw, which although undeniably monkey-like, had the timbre and shrillness of a tropical bird’s cry. Then it attempted to fly. It flapped its arms and launched itself off the floor, only to come back down to earth with an unceremonious bump. The look of bafflement upon its little face was priceless. The monkey simply could not think why it had failed to get airborne. It tried again, several times, without success, before retreating into a corner to ponder its sudden attack of flightlessness. For Nate and me, these abortive avian-aping antics were utterly uproarious. We laughed, bent double, until tears were rolling down our cheeks and we could barely draw breath. The tension I had been feeling during the procedure, born of a fear that it would fail, now came surging out of me as a kind of hysteria. Doubtless it was the same with Nate, although he seemed, too, to derive a certain cruel satisfaction from the monkey’s absurd plight.

“Well, Zach, old man,” he said, clapping me on the back, “you’ve done it. You really have!” Nate is the only person whom I allowed to call me Zach. Not even Absalom was granted that familiarity. I have never liked the abbreviation, deeming it déclassé, the province of range-riding cowboys; but for Nate Whateley I made an exception.

We placed the capuchin in what had been the parrot’s cage, and the primate seemed to feel quite at home there. It squirmed its way onto the tiny wooden perch and crouched down with its arms folded behind its back as though they were wings – which, as far as it was concerned, they were. When offered sunflower seeds, the bird’s staple diet, it plucked them up off the floor of the cage with its mouth in a pecking motion, whereas ordinarily a monkey would have used its dextrous hands.

At that moment of high triumph, who should enter to ruin it but Professor Cyrus Nordstrom? The old man barged into the room, gown flowing behind him, cheeks choleric crimson. He demanded to know what we were up to. He had had reports of a tremendous hullabaloo coming from the laboratory, as though creatures were being tortured. His gaze fell upon the dead parrot, which we had yet to consign to the trash, and then upon the monkey, which was looking at him quizzically from its perch, bending its head to either side and hopping from foot to foot. He asked if any of the experimentation Nate and I were conducting was authorised. Had we obtained permission from the faculty to perform vivisection? There were protocols that must be observed. I detected a distinct gloat in his eye. He had caught us red-handed, he knew, in the commission of an offence against university regulations. He could scarcely credit his luck.

Nate blustered, as did I, but we were in breach of the rules. We had not sought the requisite permission, reasoning that it would likely not be granted because neither of us was then held in high regard by the faculty. I had squandered virtually all of the goodwill that had surrounded me upon my arrival, while Nate was considered something of an embarrassment, allowed to remain at Miskatonic only because he paid his own way and because the university, like so many institutions in the area, had benefited materially from Whateley family largesse over the years. Moreover, the dean hailed from Dunwich and had been a member of the same Lodge there as an uncle of Nate’s, Noah Whateley. The bond of Masonic fraternity between the two men lingered, even if they had since gone their separate ways, and it afforded Nate a certain immunity at Miskatonic. However, Nate had progressively pushed the boundaries of that immunity, to the point where the dean felt he could no longer give him the same latitude. In short, my friend was one misstep away from expulsion. Nordstrom was well aware of this, and reckoned he now had the wherewithal to rid the university of Nate once and for all. Besides, I don’t think he had ever forgiven Nate for standing up to him on my behalf at the beginning of the fall semester.

He duly reported our activities to the dean, and we were severely reprimanded. Nate threw himself on the dean’s mercy, pleading for both of us to be given another chance. We had, he said, allowed our enthusiasm to get the better of us. What we were most guilty of was youthful hot-headedness and a lack of good judgement. His uncle Noah was much the same, was he not? He had a tendency to lose his temper for no good reason, to the discomfort of his neighbours, and his wife had died in circumstances that aroused suspicion, if not the attention of the police; he had also earned the nickname “Wizard” owing to his antics at one of the mysterious hilltop stone circles near the town. The dean nodded in assent, but offered that at least Noah had an excuse for his aberrant behaviour, namely that his father Oliver had been lynched by the townsfolk of Dunwich after accusations of witchcraft. That would surely warp a man’s mind, growing up with such a terrible event hanging over him. What was Nate’s excuse?

Nonetheless Nate had his way. He worked his wiles upon the dean, and we were let off with a warning and a black mark on our permanent records. The dean advised me that I should keep my nose clean from here on after, and I promised I would, with a sincerity that was entirely feigned yet so convincing I almost believed it myself. Who was this honey-tongued liar I had become? How had timid, compliant Zachariah Conroy evolved into a blithely conniving renegade? The answer is obvious: Nathaniel Whateley.

* * *

Professor Nordstrom was thwarted but not defeated. He still had a trick up his sleeve. A snide article about me ran in the following weekend’s Arkham Gazette, garlanded with statements from Nordstrom himself. He had done his homework, as had the reporter, whose name I never discovered. There was mention of Intercranial Cognition Transference, and a fair description of my parrot-minded monkey. As soon as I read it, I went straight to Nate. He made light of the matter, saying that Miskatonic often attracted scathing comment from the Gazette. Arkham had long had a peculiar dichotomous relationship with the university, seeing it both as a source of prestige and as a regrettable haven for oddballs. Of all of the Ivy League colleges, Miskatonic attracted the largest proportion of eccentrics, many of them drawn to the place seemingly because the town itself had a chequered past, having been founded in the early sixteen hundreds by freethinkers and then not long after been infected by the witch-burning fever that spread from neighbouring Salem. Arkham did not like to be reminded of its murky genesis, preferring instead to think of itself as a successful port, even though the sea trade was not what it once was, and latterly a thriving mill town, if not a rival to Amesbury or Haverhill. The article about me was just the latest in a long line of gentle beatings the town had delivered upon the little academic enclave in its midst – beatings that involved more than a touch of self-flagellation. I should ignore it, Nate said. Nothing would come of it.

If only he had been right. Instead, I was once again hauled before the dean, and this time no amount of begging or contrition could save me. The article had made it impossible for the dean to overlook my misdemeanour any more. The university must be seen to comport itself with dignity. I asserted that my monkey experiment was not as absurd as it might seem to the inexpert eye. It betokened much grander things – incredible things. I simply needed time to expand upon it, and not just time but liberty from interference. With regret, the dean said, he could offer me neither. I was entitled to remain at Miskatonic, and was welcome to do so, but without the benefit of funding. In other words, my scholarship was rescinded, effective immediately. Of course, if my family were able to pay for me, or I was able to find some other sponsor, my tuition would continue as normal. He left it to me to decide how to proceed.

“Devastated” does not come close to encapsulating how I felt. The blow was almost physical. I was left reeling, nauseated, stunned. I knew my father could just about afford the college fees, now that he was no longer supporting Absalom at Yale, but I was loath to ask him. Mourning my brother’s death had widened the rift that already existed between me and my parents, turning an awkward gap into an unbridgeable chasm. My scholarship to Miskatonic was my one, perhaps my only redeeming feature in their eyes, and I had tossed it aside. My father was hardly likely to be inclined to reach into his pocket now, when I had shown myself to be so unreliable. I wrote to him all the same, pleading my case. The response was as dusty and indifferent as I had predicted. “If you cannot hold on to a source of income extended benevolently by an august body,” he said, “why should I be expected to bail you out?”

I went to Nate in a state of despair. He opened a bottle of wine and plied me with the contents until I was calmer. Then he said that perhaps my predicament was a blessing in disguise. When I asked what he meant, he replied that he was busy on a project, one that would benefit from the participation of a likeminded individual, somebody he knew he could trust and rely on. Providence seemed to have bestowed him with exactly such a person, one who with great good fortune had just become available. “Let’s face it, Zach,” he said. “You are wasting your time at Miskatonic. There is nothing this university can teach you that you don’t already know, and much that you can be doing to get on in the world. Why spend three years of your life kowtowing to professors who are your intellectual inferiors, when there are other, better opportunities on offer?” I wanted to know what he was proposing, and his answer was “a journey”. But, he added, a journey like no other. A journey that would open my eyes to the wilder frontiers of science and be of more practical value than any diploma.

Intrigued, what else could I do but demand to be told more?

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The Innsmouth Belle

FOR SOME WHILE, NATE HAD BEEN PLANNING A river trip. Not just any river trip, mind you, but a scientific survey of the Miskatonic River upstream from Arkham as far as it was navigable. He wished to examine the wildlife along its banks, especially any that fell outside the Linnaean norm and therefore into his own particular sphere of interest. Study of certain passages of the Necronomicon had led him to conclude that the upper reaches of the Miskatonic would prove unusually fruitful in that regard, for the deep forests and the mountain country through which the river ran were rife with legend and folklore pertaining to queer beasts, many of which matched descriptions contained in entries in that dread black tome.

He had already secured the hire of a small sternwheeler paddle steamer, and the crew to go with it, and there was a spare cabin on the upper deck that he could readily see me occupying. I would, furthermore, be free to avail myself of a well-equipped laboratory on board, where I could continue my development of Intercranial Cognition Transference unimpeded. Nobody would interfere with my work, and the only interruptions to my routine would come in the form of expeditions onto dry land to trap specimens. Nate said he would be glad of my company on those, for he might have need of my breadth of knowledge and my keen intellect.

It sounded almost too good to be true. Nate was right about one thing, certainly: I had no place at Miskatonic. I began to think that the university had been lucky to have me, not the other way round, and that depriving me of my scholarship was rank ingratitude on the dean’s part, not to mention ignorance. In later years Miskatonic would have been proud to have been associated with me and honoured to call me an alumnus. Well, it had blown that chance. Zachariah Conroy would go on to become one of the greats of science – another Newton, another Darwin – and Miskatonic University would be nothing but a footnote in his life history, and an insignificant one at that. It would be forever known as the school that failed to nurture the brightest talent ever to have crossed its threshold.

But would this expedition really be the sensible next step for me? I bombarded Nate with further questions. How long did he anticipate the voyage would last? Was it likely to be dangerous? And why had he neglected to mention anything about it before now?

Nate had his answers ready. He estimated we would be away for two months, three at the most. He could not guarantee that there would be no risk, but we would be well armed and he would never knowingly put me in harm’s way. As for not mentioning it before, he had merely been waiting for the right moment. Already much of the groundwork for the expedition had been laid, but he had been intending to broach the subject with me only when a departure date had been fixed and his plans were further developed. He could not have foreseen that I would run into difficulties at Miskatonic, and it was a tragedy for sure, but from his point of view it was also propitious. He could not think of anyone he would rather have making discoveries with him than his best friend, who was also one of the finest biologists to walk the earth.

I heard the words “best friend” and knew I was hooked. Nate and I shook hands and polished off the rest of the bottle of wine, then another. That night I slept in my dorm room for the very last time. The next morning I packed up my belongings and bade goodbye to Lake, who said he was sorry to see me go but seemed, to judge by the curtness of his farewell, far from heartbroken. I moved into a vacant room at Nate’s boarding house, the rent for which he paid on my behalf, and together we set about preparing for the trip in earnest.

* * *

The ensuing few weeks flew by in a whirl of activity. There was much to be organised, and I took the onus of it upon myself. I wanted to prove to Nate that I was committed and that I was grateful to have been invited along. Without this opportunity I didn’t know what I would have done with myself. Going home to Boston with my tail between my legs was never an option. I felt that I was better off considering myself an orphan from now on, my parents effectively dead to me. This caused me some regret but at the same time invigorated me, instilling in me a resolve to stand on my own two feet.

There were provisions to be bought, including dry goods, laboratory materials, weapons and ammunition, and clothing appropriate to the climate and terrain we would be encountering, along with a few trinkets such as paste jewellery and coloured crayons, for it was conceivable that we might run into Indians en route and would need something to barter with in exchange for supplies such as fresh meat or else offer as bribes in order to secure safe passage through hostile territory. The prospect of meeting wild Indians unnerved me. I was aware that some of the regional tribes had a fierce reputation and did not take kindly to “paleface” interlopers. Yet I was also excited. I was soon to be going on an adventure, something that so far had been in short supply during my life. I reckoned I would come back from the Miskatonic expedition older, wiser and with a fund of entrancing stories to tell. It would be, all said and done, an experience.

The paddle steamer Nate had hired, when I first clapped eyes on her at Arkham’s docks, did somewhat dampen my enthusiasm. She had seen much better days, indeed better decades. Her hull was in need of a good scraping and repainting, and the seams between her timbers could have done with fresh caulk. Her gunwales were bumped and scuffed from countless minor collisions. Her superstructure – two storeys of deck amidships – had a worrying list to it, as though at any moment it might shear diagonally and collapse. Her paddle wheel, meanwhile, consisted of planks that looked half-rotten set within an iron framework that was mostly rust. She was a respectable size, measuring some sixty feet from bow to stern, and robustly broad in the beam, but I was not entirely convinced of her river-worthiness. A submerged rock, a sandbar, even just rough water might cause sufficient damage to put paid to her progress and possibly put a hole in her. I consoled myself with the thought that we were only going to be on a river, not in the middle of the ocean. Should disaster strike, the shore, and safety, would never be more than a short swim away. I suppose I had in the back of my mind thoughts of Absalom and his seagoing demise. I surely did not have to fear a similar fate befalling me, yet a certain feeling of apprehension was inescapable.

The steamer was called the Innsmouth Belle, the name emblazoned upon her bow in jaunty but faded letters. Her captain was Abner Brenneman, a man for whom the term “grizzled” seemed to have been invented. He was in his sixties and said to me – in a New Englander accent so thick I sometimes struggled to understand him – that he had plied his trade on steamers since boyhood, primarily along the inland waterways and coastal inlets of Essex County. He had owned the Belle since 1881 and used her in the capacity of a freighter, lugging cargo between points as far apart as Marblehead and Rockport. He knew the Miskatonic intimately, at least from Kingsport to Lake Makadewa, beyond which body of water he had never needed to go. The boat herself he had purchased off an Innsmouther for what he considered “a song”.

“In fact the fellow was more than keen ter be rid o’ her,” he said, taking a swig from the hipflask that was never far from his side, “complainin’ ter me as haow Innsmouth jest ain’t never been right since the plague o’ ’46. Since then, the town’s a-sunk into decline an’ degeneracy, it an’ most everywhere else araound those parts – Devil’s Reef, the Manuxet river, Plum Island – has become the haunt o’ things, unnameable things, things that walk like men but ain’t, things that seem more at haome in the water than on the land. There’s no work there, he said ter me, not for a sane, normal human being, hence him sellin’ the Belle and retirin’ ter Ipswich. An’ he could go ter his grave happy if he never heard the word ‘Innsmouth’ agin.”

Brenneman, who preferred to be addressed as “Skipper”, chuckled through his shaggy whiskers as he recounted this anecdote, and seemed to wish to dismiss the seller’s assertions as just so much nonsense, but his rheumy old eyes hinted otherwise. He showed us around the steamer, enumerating her many qualities with pride, not least her boom-mounted block-and-tackle pulley with a load-bearing capacity of up to five hundredweight, and her twenty-horsepower engine, able to defy the Miskatonic’s current even during spring when snowmelt turned entire stretches into raging torrents. Luckily, he said, the past winter had been relatively mild, with little snowfall, so we need not worry too much on that account. He certainly appeared fond of the Belle, but not to the extent that he lavished a great deal of attention upon her upkeep. I got the impression that he felt tied to her but tired of her, like a husband unhappily married to a shrewish wife and trying to make the best of the arrangement.

The first mate was his son, known to all as Junior. In his thirties, he was the spit of his father but the inner qualities that had crystallised in the senior Brenneman as a wry, truculent curmudgeonliness were, in Junior, taking a meaner turn. You could see it in his cagey eyes and hyena grin, the rangy lope of his gait, the louche, sneering drawl with which he spoke. By the time he reached his father’s age, he would not be as likeable. He would be altogether a more brittle, less reliable proposition.

Rounding out the crew’s complement was a giant of a Negro by the name of Charley. He had no clearly defined role aboard the Belle but seemed to be a general factotum – deckhand, cook, coal shoveller, lookout; whatever the circumstances required. My parents had Negro maids, so I was accustomed to dealing with his sort. What struck me immediately about Charley, however, was that unlike Harriet and Susannah, who rarely met one’s eye, he was vivacious and garrulous. He even clapped me on the shoulder as I shook hands with him, and although I deemed this a mark of overfamiliarity, I was prepared to pardon it because he had a wide, winning smile and such an air of geniality about him. As it happened, Charley would become the crewman whom, of the three, I trusted the most and who showed me the greatest courtesy. The other two would earn my enmity.

* * *

By late March we were all set. Then heavy rains arrived, swelling the Miskatonic to perilous heights and causing it to burst its banks in several places, flooding adjacent farmland. We waited until the river subsided, but it was not until early April that Skipper Brenneman finally declared we could get under way.

The day of our departure dawned bright and clear. The Miskatonic was turbid but not intimidatingly so. A great pillar of black smoke purled up from the Innsmouth Belle’s funnel as Nate and I climbed the gangplank. The deck thrummed underfoot with the vibration of the idling engine. We had on board everything we required to see us through the next hundred days, and I must admit to feeling, as I embarked, a sense of anticipation that was three parts eagerness to one part trepidation. It was not as though we were voyaging into the unknown, not exactly. This was no Lewis and Clark enterprise. The Miskatonic had been mapped all the way to its source, and there were settlements along its banks even past Lake Makadewa, albeit meagre ones. Yet there were still regions of land along its course that none save the native Indians had ever ventured into; whole tracts of rough country that civilised folk like us had not explored and tamed.

Nate and I stood side by side at the prow as Junior cast off the ropes and the skipper in his for’ard-situated pilothouse guided the Belle away from dock. Nate slid an arm around my shoulders, and his face was one enormous grin. “This is it, Zach,” he said. “Two thousand dollars it is costing me, but I know it is going to be worth every penny.”

I nodded, and believed it to be true, because back then everything Nate said I believed to be true.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The R’luhlloig Peccadillo

FROM ARKHAM TO LAKE MAKADEWA, THE VOYAGE was plain sailing. The Miskatonic flowed broad and smooth. The Innsmouth Belle behaved herself, although not without the occasional hiccup when her engine underperformed and Skipper Brenneman had to go below decks to coax full speed back out of it, which he did using a wrench and plenty of oaths. The weather remained fair but there was still a chill in the air, which deepened at night to frostiness. We passed small riverside towns – villages really – and sprawling forests where the trees’ bare branches bore a shimmering haze of green, the spring sunshine enticing leaf shoots into life upon hickory, oak, dogwood and birch. We were making good headway, averaging around four knots, a little above a brisk walking pace, although the skipper said the Belle could go faster if needed. “But I wouldn’t want ter push the old girl,” he added, “not at her age. Wouldn’t be seemly. Nor, fur that matter, safe.”

I kept myself busy in the laboratory, which occupied what had been the boat’s stateroom. We had brought with us a supply of animals – rats, pigeons, stray cats and dogs from the Arkham pound – upon which I could experiment. They were kept in the hold, and Charley was tasked with feeding them and cleaning out their cages. He did this cheerily, saying he was fond of “critters”. So fond of them was he, that whenever I asked him to bring one up for me to operate on, he carried out the order with reluctance. Sometimes I had to pry the animal from his grasp, for he would otherwise have been happy to pet it indefinitely. I reminded him time and again that the creatures were scientific test subjects, that was all; one should not become attached to them. Charley understood, but the compassion never left his face and remained all the more in evidence when the time came for a corpse to be disposed of after use. I believe I heard him, more than once, muttering a small prayer as he tossed the limp little body overboard. I perhaps should have treated him with greater sternness than I did and berated him for his sentimentality, but I found it oddly endearing.

With each experiment I was further refining Intercranial Cognition Transference. I was getting the levels of the Conroy’s Solutions down to an art, and likewise the length of the waiting period necessary for each to take effect. There was, nonetheless, the odd mishap. One rat, into which I inserted the contents of a cat’s omnireticulum, went into an absolute frenzy. There was some sort of dissonance, an inability to adjust, and the rodent went careening around the laboratory like a small furry rocket, shrieking all the while and sending equipment flying. I eventually cornered it and ended the mayhem, and its life, with a blow from a ceramic pestle, but not before the rat had managed to bite me several times on the hand. The majority of the experiments, however, fared better. The process seemed to work particularly well when the transference took place from cat to dog and vice versa. It appeared that the more akin two species were, the better each was able to accommodate an injection of omnireticular serum from the other. I ended up producing some of the most obedient, loyal cats and aloof, independent dogs ever known to man.

I even let one of the former live, and gave it to Charley to keep as a pet, much to his delight. He took the cat – a homely, brindled thing – in his arms and it wagged its tail in a display not of feline irritation but canine avidity, and licked his face. He called it Bessie, and from then on the pair of them were inseparable. Bessie slept with Charley in his bunk, trotted at his heels around the boat all day long, ate scraps from his plate, and even played fetch with a small stick. “I don’t know what you’ve done to that cat, Mr Conroy,” he said to me, “but she’s the best darned companion a man can ask for.”

Nate checked in on me several times a day. He wanted to learn all he could about my invention, and I readily shared my knowledge with him. On one occasion we ended up discussing commercial applications. I had to confess that I had not had any thoughts in that direction. For me, the science itself was reward enough. Nate, however, felt there were uses to which my procedure could be put, ones that were potentially very lucrative. For instance, if Intercranial Cognition Transference were feasible between human beings…

I was taken aback. It simply had not occurred to me to try it out on people. Well, if I am honest, it had occurred but I had rejected the idea instantly. Putting one man’s mind in another’s brain? Who would want such a thing? Under what circumstances would it be worth even contemplating?

Nate laid out one possible scenario. Suppose an elderly man is sick, close to death. Suppose he has no desire to go to his “great reward” but would rather continue to live. Suppose a suitable host body were found into which his consciousness might be implanted. Could that not happen? More to the point, would the dying man not be prepared to pay a great deal of money – just about any sum you could name – to make it happen?

“Yes, but the moral implications,” I protested, “the legal considerations too…”

Nate nodded but pursued his theme. The host body would have to be that of a younger man, obviously. An old man would not want to be installed in the frame of someone of a similar age to him. He would want a lithe, vibrant shell within which to carry on his existence, one with plenty of years left in it. But how would one go about finding a young man willing to give up his own life in order to extend someone else’s? Perhaps a child might be prepared to do it for a parent, but that seemed unlikely. Sacrifice typically went the other way, the previous generation ceding to the next. But what if the host body belonged to a stranger, someone who no longer had need of it?

I wondered if he meant an indigent who had wasted his life, who had contributed little to the world and whom the world would not miss. Nate replied that that was an interesting possibility, although one would have to ensure that the pauper was in reasonably good health and had not destroyed himself too much. If drink had left him with a cirrhotic liver, say, or cardiomyopathy, he would hardly be a prime candidate. He proposed an alternative suggestion: the body of someone who had lost his mind. A madman, a complete raving lunatic, incurably insane, beyond redemption. Asylums were full of those. The body might still be in good condition, even if the psyche was damaged past repair. Essentially it would be a vacant house, waiting for a new tenant to move in and take possession.

I could see the logic in this, but I could also see the flaws. How would one go about gaining the madman’s permission, or more pertinently that of his next of kin? Nate said that sufficient money would grease that particular cog. And what of this hypothetical dying old man? So far, Intercranial Cognition Transference had had one consistent side-effect, namely that the donor was left mindless, almost literally. Remember the parrot?

Nate’s shrugging response was that then nothing had been gained and nothing had been lost. You had one drooling incompetent before; you were left with another one afterwards. The equation was balanced. The sole difference was that a young madman was replaced by an old madman. Some might call that a net gain, since the old madman would be shorter lived than his young counterpart and thus less time, money and effort would be expended upon caring for him.

That was all well and fine, I averred, but there remained one insuperable problem. I had no idea if the procedure would work on a person. The human brain was more complex than its animal equivalents by several orders of magnitude. Who could say if everything contained in its omnireticulum could be relocated successfully, without loss or degradation?

“I’m sure you’re equal to the challenge, Zach,” said Nate.

“Equal to it maybe, but desirous of it?” I replied. “To perform such an operation on a human being… Where would one even find a pair of suitable subjects? How would one square it with the authorities? No, Nate, it cannot be done, for so many reasons.”

Nate was equable. He said he had simply been airing an idea. Call it a thought experiment. Of course if I baulked at the prospect, that was my prerogative. No harm done.

* * *

That night I could not sleep. The Innsmouth Belle was hoved to beside the riverbank, her ropes tethered to stakes driven into the ground. We did not travel after dark. I paced the deck, listening to the susurration of water rippling around the steamer’s hull and the cries of a mockingbird and a whippoorwill who seemed to be arguing with each other from their respective roosts on either side of the river. Similarly a debate was raging in my head. The conversation I had had with Nate was preying upon me. On the one hand, I refused even to countenance what he had been suggesting. It was beyond unethical. It was unconscionable. On the other hand, why not? I imagined how it would be, having the power to offer the human race the option of living past one’s allotted span of years. Life after death – that in effect was the upshot of my procedure. Who would not jump at the chance? Aside from those of a devout religious persuasion, for whom death was just a gateway to eternal paradise, there could surely be no one who would not at least consider it; and even men of faith might think twice. There was scope here for me to make millions, as long as I was careful to take out patents and keep the details of my Conroy’s Solutions a secret so that they could not be replicated by unscrupulous usurpers. Edison would have nothing on me. I could become the greatest scientific pioneer of the age, not to mention the wealthiest. Then would the Conroy name once more be venerated in Boston, and not just in Boston but across the whole of America – the whole of the planet!

As I was taking yet another agitated turn around the deck, I noticed a chink of light under the door of Nate’s cabin. I had assumed I was the only one awake, the hour being well past midnight. It seemed I was not. I decided to go and knock him up, with a view to resuming our discourse. As I approached the door, however, I heard his voice coming from the other side. He was talking to someone, or so I initially thought. As I listened further, however, it became apparent that there was nobody else in the cabin with him. There was only one voice: his.

Yet it sounded like a conversation all the same. Nate would speak, then would come a pause, after which he would speak again. I was put in mind of an actor rehearsing his lines solo, leaving gaps for the other players’ dialogue. I could not make out clearly all that Nate was saying. I caught snatches of sentences, with muffled unintelligible segments in between:

“I am doing everything you ask of me… your obedient servant… R’luhlloig… all that you have promised… you are a mighty leader, R’luhlloig… when the time comes… fulfil your wishes… adversaries… unleash havoc… the winning side…”

That was as much as I could make out after two minutes of listening. The fact that I was eavesdropping on Nate made me uncomfortable, but I could not tear myself away. It was the word “R’luhlloig” that kept me glued to the spot, for it was the same word I had heard my friend mutter while perusing the Necronomicon (and misconstrued as “rolly log”). From the way he was using it, it could only be someone’s name; the name, indeed, of his inaudible interlocutor. For a moment I fancied he had snuck someone aboard the Belle; with a name like R’luhlloig it could be an Indian, I supposed. Perhaps this R’luhlloig had come aboard just tonight, in fulfilment of some prearranged rendezvous. That, however, would not account for Nate’s mention of the name in the university library, back in the fall of the previous year, unless by chance he had been projecting his thoughts forward to the meeting right now. Nor did it explain the submissive note Nate was striking.

I became rather lost in this maze of musing, so much so that I failed to notice a set of rapid footfalls within the cabin until they were right by the door. The next instant, the door was flung open and there stood Nate. A scowl of anger contorted his face, clearing in a trice when he beheld me, although the smile that replaced it was uneasy, a little too narrow to be wholly heartfelt.

“Zach! My stars! Whatever are you doing outside my cabin?”

I tried desperately not to look as though I had been skulking outside the door, listening as my friend held a one-sided conversation with somebody called R’luhlloig. I stuttered out something about not being able to sleep and seeing the light on in his cabin and wondering if he might feel like joining me in a nightcap. Nate looked as though he was weighing up this excuse, evaluating whether or not it held water. I had put enough truth in it to make it viable, I hoped.

“What did you overhear?” Nate said.

“Nothing,” I replied.

“Don’t kid a kidder, Zach. You heard me talking, right? You’ve been standing outside a while, I reckon.”

I stated that I had thought he had company; that was why I had hesitated about making my presence known. I made a show of glancing past him into the cabin and noting that there was nobody else in there, in order to be able to tell him that evidently I had been under a misapprehension.

That was when my eye fell upon the small writing desk that occupied one corner of the cabin. To be precise, it was one drawer of the desk that caught my attention, for it stood partly open and within it sat a familiar object. The object was poking out at an angle, which led me to infer that Nate had hidden it in haste before coming to the door.

This supposition was confirmed by the expression that came over his face as he followed the line of my gaze. Chagrin vied with annoyance. Nevertheless he made the best of it, affecting a nonchalant laugh.

“Ah. Careless of me.”

“Nate, what the heck are you doing with that here?”

The object in question was the Necronomicon. Nate went to the drawer and pulled the book out all the way. There it was in its jet-black binding, the title embossed into the front cover, the letters somehow a darker shade even than the plain leather around them. I enquired whether it was his own copy, somehow knowing the answer already. Nate’s frank reply was that it was not. The Necronomicon was a fantastically rare publication. There were perhaps only a dozen copies in existence, most of them in the hands of private collectors. English translations such as this one were rarer still. What I was looking at was, of course, the copy held by the library at Miskatonic University.

“You were able to borrow it?”

Nate shook his head, a touch condescendingly. “The Necronomicon is not supposed to leave the premises. I… took it out without permission.”

The obvious question was: why did he need it aboard the Innsmouth Belle? To that, Nate responded with a certain brusqueness. “For reference purposes, of course. Why else?”

I don’t know what prompted me to ask what I asked next. I guess I felt that Nate ought not to be concealing anything from me. I had no secrets from him. I kept him abreast of everything I got up to in the laboratory. That attitude should be reciprocated.

“Who is R’luhlloig?” I said.

Nate’s face contorted. There was disappointment, self-blame, and even what seemed like furtive guilt. It was as though I had accused him of some heinous misdeed and he did not know quite how to react. For one worrisome moment I even thought he might strike me.

Then his features settled, composing themselves into a cool nebulosity. “R’luhlloig, not that it is any of your business, is the name of one of the Outer Gods. It crops up now and then in the Necronomicon. I was studying the book and practising the pronunciation. It is hard to pronounce, is it not? R’luhlloig, R’luhlloig, R’luhlloig. A proper tongue-twister.”

I considered the explanation. It did not completely account for what I had overheard, for I could have sworn that Nate had been addressing this R’luhlloig, not merely trying the name on for size. In the end, I elected to give him the benefit of the doubt. He was Nate, after all. My patron, my colleague, my friend. I chalked it up to eccentricity on his part.

And so the matter was put to bed. We spoke idly for a minute or so further, then I repaired to my cabin. The next morning, it was as if nothing had happened.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Fort Fredericks

ONWARD WE WENT, EVER UPSTREAM. THE Miskatonic remained a wide, winding thoroughfare, barely frequented. From time to time we might encounter a rowboat, or a lighter, or a cross-river ferry that was little more than a glorified raft. For the most part we had the river to ourselves. The Miskatonic was not a commercial waterway, nothing on a par with the Hudson or the Potomac. It was a thing of sinuous curves and broad sloping banks, somehow strangely lonely and, at twilight, eerie, for the hush that fell over it during that hour was like a breath being held; the setting of the sun ceremonial, akin to a coffin being lowered into the grave.

We were a day’s travel east of Lake Makadewa when we had our first sight of Indians, two of them paddling a dugout canoe. Their attire was less flamboyant than I expected: buckskin tunics and trousers with tasselled fringes, moccasins, long dark hair tied back with bands of beads, but no feather headdresses, no war paint. They stayed their paddles as the Innsmouth Belle chugged by, eyeing us in a blankly neutral manner, projecting neither aggression nor curiosity. If they felt anything at all about the paddle steamer and her crew, they kept it well hidden.

Junior Brenneman, by contrast, was considerably more forthcoming when it came to expressing his sentiments about the Indians. He coughed up a great wad of phlegm and expectorated it loudly and showily over the side of the boat. In case the Indians had not got the message first time around, he repeated the action. He also gesticulated at the Belle, yelling, “Lousy goddamn redskins. This here’s how you get about in the goddamn modern age. You don’t paddle a piece of tree trunk like cavemen.”

As if to undermine his point, the Belle chose that moment to have one of her little fits. Her engine faltered and she started to lose speed. Charley took the wheel while Skipper Brenneman attended to the problem. By the time we were cruising smoothly along again, the Indians and their canoe were well out of sight.

* * *

Junior did not confine his contempt for other races to Indians. He also despised Negroes, which made it tricky for him to be shipmates with Charley. He used racial epithets whenever referring to the man, as often to his face as behind his back, and while I did not find the words offensive per se, the frequency with which he resorted to them became wearisome. Charley himself seemed able to take it on the chin. I asked him once whether he minded how Junior spoke to him. He just shrugged and said, “There’s nothin’ I can do ’bout it, Mr Conroy, so there’s no point me frettin’ ’bout it. I been on the Belle three years now, and in all that time Mr Junior ain’t changed his tune. I don’t listen to it no longer. I figure he don’t hate me. He just wants me to know my place. If he hated me, he’d have done much worse by now than simply call me names. ’Sides, even if I wanted to stand up for myself, his pa’s the captain. Ain’t going to risk upsettin’ the boss.”

One had to admire such forbearance. But Charley’s easy-going character seemed to insulate him from attack like armour. He had a kind of quiet self-possession that I considered hard-won and estimable.

The Miskatonic disgorged us onto Lake Makadewa the next morning, and we put in at the river-mouth settlement of Fort Fredericks to resupply. The place had been a military frontier outpost during colonial times and was still circumvallated by the remnants of a tall wooden stockade. Its inhabitants numbered no more than fifty, comprising three extended families and a handful of solitary fur trappers and outdoorsmen, spread across a score of log cabins. The crew of the Belle were familiar faces to them, and the skipper was able to purchase fresh meat, bread and water for us at a comparatively fair price; complete strangers would have been fleeced.

As I wandered the tiny township, finding it odd but bracing to be able to walk around freely after several days confined to a boat, I observed that the denizens of Fort Fredericks were in dire need of new breeding stock. Everywhere there were signs of genetic limitation, from mild defects such as jug ears and boss eyes to more serious deformities such as a club foot, a hunchback and, in more than one instance, an extra finger. Nobody had taught these people about the dangers of consanguinity and homozygosity. I foresaw only increasing malformation, dwindling health and eventual sterility in their future.

An old woman – seventy if she was a day – waylaid me as I ambled past, plucking my sleeve with a hand as scrawny as a chicken’s foot and offering me a gurning grimace that revealed but two remaining teeth, and both of those clinging on for dear life. I thought she was after money, and delved into my pocket to see if I had a spare nickel or two; I would have paid anything to rid myself of her.

The crone, however, wished merely to talk, and what she had to offer, between wheezy whistling breaths, was some kind of admonition. I cannot recall the precise wording she used, for it all came out pell-mell from her repellent gummy maw, but it amounted to this. She had heard that I and my fellow travellers were traversing the lake to rejoin the Miskatonic on the far side. If we insisted upon doing that, she said, then we must make the crossing in haste and at a single go. For it was the spawning time of year, and Fort Fredericks folk left the lake well alone during that time. No one fished it nor ventured upon it until after the mating frenzy was done and the waters became calm.

Naturally I enquired what creatures were spawning and why this was so hazardous to shipping. The old woman shook her head in a grave manner, as if to elucidate would be to invite disaster. She told me simply to heed what she had said. God willing, our boat would skate across the lake in no time flat and there would be no repercussions.

I reported her ominous maunderings to the skipper, who allowed that he had heard similar things in the past but had discounted them, mainly because he had never had cause to cross the lake before. Fort Fredericks had always been the apogee of his voyages, the point beyond which he had no reason to go. He surmised that the spawning the old woman had talked about was the by-product of an annual migration of Atlantic salmon. If they congregated in sufficient numbers, then he supposed their antics might make the lake impassable, since no steamer paddle could plough through a teeming mass of fish. At any rate, with the Belle going at flank speed and encountering no impediment, we should be able to span the lake in a couple of hours. In such a short space of time, what could possibly go wrong?

* * *

Quite a lot, as it happened. For no sooner had we put out from shore than a mist descended. Fort Fredericks, barely five hundred yards behind us, vanished from view, and all became swirling evanescent whiteness. Skipper Brenneman contemplated turning back but decided against it. Lake mists tended to burn off fairly rapidly, he declared.

So, on we went, across water that was as still as glass. “Makadewa” is Algonquin for “black”, and the lake certainly lived up to its name. I had never seen aqueous depths so darkly, unfathomably impenetrable. It was like sailing over pure starless night.

An hour passed, and in the pilothouse the skipper steered confidently onward, consulting his compass every now and then. I wanted to work in the laboratory but felt too discombobulated to concentrate. The crone’s warning echoed in my ears. I took up position at the bow, gazing at the bare few yards of water the mist allowed one to see. Nate joined me, and soon picked up on my apprehension. When he enquired what the matter was, I made some jocular offhand comment about mating salmon.

“Salmon?” he mused. “That’s funny. I’m led to understand that this lake is home to a very different form of aquatic species.”

“You know something, Nate. What have you heard?”

Dropping his voice to a low, confidential tone, he told me that the timing of our journey had worked in our favour. Had our departure from Arkham not been postponed by the rains, we might have reached Lake Makadewa too soon. As it was, we were here just at the right moment, and if we were lucky we might observe a phenomenon that was without rival anywhere in the natural world. We might even have the opportunity to capture our first specimen.

Evidently the creatures that spawned in the lake were anomalous, and my apprehension deepened, even as feelings of intrigue stirred. I kept a sharper lookout. Several times I fancied I saw movement in the water, but it was only a thickening or thinning of the mist, which gave an illusion of animation.

Then the Belle’s engine began to judder, and shortly after that it let out a mournful squeal and a loud gushing hiss, and went silent. All at once we were coasting through the water, gradually decelerating, the revolutions of the paddle wheel slowing, until our momentum diminished to nothing and we were stationary. With a curse, Skipper Brenneman headed below decks to the engine room. The mist drifted over us. Water tapped at the hull like a hundred impatient fingertips. Other than that and the muffled clanking of the skipper’s tools, there was no sound.

I became more agitated, recalling how the crone had said that we should cross the lake “at a single go”. Here we were, in contravention of that instruction, becalmed. What might that mean for us? Nothing, I hoped, but I could not help thinking that the sooner the Belle got under way again, the better.

Then Bessie, the canine cat, began to whimper. Charley swept the animal up in his arms, and it shivered in his embrace, peering dolorously around, ears flattened.

“Bessie ain’t happy,” Charley observed, somewhat redundantly. “There’s somethin’ out there. Somethin’ she don’t cotton to.”

“Maybe it’s having a coloured breathing his stink breath all over her she don’t cotton to,” said Junior.

I told the first mate to shut up, and he gave me the eye but did as I said.

That was when it came: a soft, slopping splash, as of a body breaking the lake surface. We all swung in the direction of the noise.

“What was that?” said Junior. “Otter? Beaver maybe?”

“No,” said Nate. “Charley, fetch me a net from the hold. A large one.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Black Water, Red Leech

SKIPPER BRENNEMAN POKED HIS HEAD UP THROUGH the engine room hatch and announced that a valve had blown on the secondary low-pressure cylinder. Fixing it was going to take twenty minutes, maybe half an hour. Nate said we would surely find something to occupy us in the interim.

As the skipper ducked back down below, there was another of those splashes, this one closer than the last. Whatever had caused it was no fish, or if it was, it was bigger by far than any freshwater genus I knew of, its proportions more those of a dolphin or porpoise. Perhaps some preternaturally huge catfish? A third splash erupted just off the starboard side, and we rushed, as one, to the rail, only to see the aftermath of the breaching: a seething white turbulence upon the black water. My estimate of its maker’s size had been more or less correct, judging by the dimensions of the disturbance, which spread rapidly outwards in ebbing concentric circles.

Bessie, whom Charley had left with us when he went to fetch the net, was now whining inconsolably. Junior Brenneman aimed an irritable kick at the cat, and it scurried away, taking refuge behind a water butt.

The splashes began occurring all around the Innsmouth Belle. Through the mist I glimpsed slimy wet shapes bursting briefly up from the lake. They were dark red, the colour of coagulating blood, and had a horrid smooth texture, not unlike that of a sea anemone when it has retracted its fronds and resembles a blister.

“What in tarnation…?” Junior breathed.

Charley came running up with a long-handled net in his hands. Its mesh was made of sturdy woven-silk filaments and could have accommodated an infant, but not, I thought, one of the creatures cavorting around us, not securely.

“We’re going to need a bigger net,” I said to Nate.

“We don’t have one,” he replied. “We shall just have to manage with what we’ve got.”

More and more of the creatures were putting in an appearance. The water around the Belle churned with them, like boiling stew. It seemed as though her floating, inert presence had drawn them like a rallying point. I glimpsed them wriggling just below the surface, every so often rolling above it. They were snakelike, but fleshy rather than squamous, with bodies that were broad and blunt at the leading end but tapered to a narrow tip at the other. One came up right below where I stood, its mouth gaped roundly, and I saw plump, sucker-like lips surrounding spiralling rows of teeth – teeth that were sharp, curved and inward-pointing – and suddenly I knew what these beasts were, or at least what they were analogous to.

“Leeches,” I said. “They’re giant leeches.”

“Yes,” said Nate. “Now help me with this, Zach. I’m going to lean out and try to snag one. Grab my belt and, for heaven’s sake, whatever you do, don’t let go!”

Nate bent over the gunwale, and I seized his belt, bent my knees and locked my feet in position. My friend lowered the net to the water, which was alive with the rubicund leeches. They were everywhere, hundreds of them, thousands, writhing, thrashing, coiling around one another in one huge repugnant slippery orgy. Whether they were adults copulating or newly hatched younglings, I could not tell. I hoped the former, for if the latter then the fully grown version of this leech would be a thing of truly behemothic proportions.

Nate swept the net through the nightmarishly glistening throng of annelids, but each time one was caught up in the mesh it slithered straight out again before he could hoist it from the water. Even with his arms at full stretch the end of the net only just reached the lake, so that it was hard to control and he had inadequate leverage. He declared that he was going to lean further over. I enlisted the aid of Charley, for I knew I could not support Nate’s weight all by myself. Together the big Negro and I eased him over the rail so that he was hanging upside down from the waist, his upper half more or less perpendicular, his legs angled in mid-air, with both of us gripping his belt tight. Should we lose our hold on him or his belt break, there was every chance he would plunge head-first into that mass of bloodsuckers, and that would surely be the last anyone saw of him.

The net swished to and fro, Nate grunting with effort. At last one of the leeches squirmed into its coils and Nate was able to raise the net clear of the water before it squirmed out again.

“Quick! Quick!” he cried. “Pull me up! Now!”

We pulled, and Nate came sliding over the rail, clutching the shaft of the net with both hands for all he was worth, desirous of not losing his prize. He landed on the deck on his belly, while the leech flopped beside him, folded double within the bulging silken mesh. Its loathsome mouth opened and shut in what looked like a paroxysm of speechless rage. We all stared down at it with varying degrees of disgust, all save Nate, whose eyes were filled with something close to adoration.

Then, with a sudden flexing, quick as a blink, the leech contrived to free itself from the net. Next thing anyone knew, it was slithering across the deck with appalling speed, making a beeline for Junior Brenneman. He stood rooted to the spot, too shocked to move, and the thing reared up before him and pounced. It clamped its mouth onto his thigh, and there was a scissoring, rending sound, and then Junior was screaming.

“It’s biting me! Jesus Christ, the goddamned b––––––is biting me! Somebody do something!”

I leapt forward. Much though I had no desire to touch the leech, all I could think of to do was seize hold of its tail end and try to pull it off. This, however, proved counterproductive, for Junior’s screams only increased in pitch. He yelled that I was tearing his leg, and I realised that the leech had its teeth so firmly embedded in his flesh that it would not come free without taking a chunk of muscle with it. Letting go of the creature, I turned to Nate in desperation, and in that moment beheld a look upon his face such as I had never seen before. Nate exhibited no concern whatsoever for Junior. Rather, as he lay where he had fetched up on the deck, prone, propped up on his elbows, he observed the first mate’s plight with a detachment that was not just dispassionate but quietly gleeful. It was almost as though he was relishing the suffering of a fellow human being. It was how one imagines a vindictive god might look while meting out divine punishment on some hapless mortal.

I had no great fondness for Junior, but I did not wish to see the life drained out of him by a monstrous leech. For that was what the creature was trying to do. Blood was spreading over Junior’s pants leg in a crimson cloud around the leech’s mouth, and the thing’s body was pulsing and contracting in gluttonous peristaltic waves. We had to detach it from him somehow, else he would surely perish. Since Nate appeared not to care what happened to the first mate, I turned to Charley, hoping to appeal for assistance. It was only then that I realised that he was nowhere to be seen. I presumed the horror of the situation had got the better of him and he had found some place to hide.

How wrong I was. The very next instant, Charley came charging out from the galley, and with him he had a drum of cooking salt. This he unlidded and tipped up, dumping its contents over the leech. The creature immediately began to shrivel and foam. Relinquishing its grip upon Junior, it collapsed to the deck. Oily bubbles formed and popped across its skin, and it vomited up much of the blood it had ingested. As the salt continued to do its desiccatory work, the leech darkened and withered, like a chunk of wood burning in a fireplace. Soon its agony-wracked death throes ceased, and all that remained of it was a gently effervescing black lump as thin and long as a baseball bat.

For several moments, all any of us could do was draw panting breaths and wait for our elevated heart rates to subside.

Then Skipper Brenneman popped up from the engine room hatch again. “Done,” he stated. “Whut? Did I miss suthin’?”

* * *

The spawning leeches lost whatever interest they had had in the Innsmouth Belle as soon as her engine started chugging away again. The turning of her paddle wheel seemed to alarm them, and they sank out of sight. In a short while the lake surface was as placid as before, and then the mist started to lift, and a half-hour later the far shore appeared as a thin dark line on the horizon.

Nate got straight down to dissecting the slain leech, and made copious notes on his findings. I detected a distinct disgruntlement on his part that the creature had been largely destroyed. He would have preferred an intact specimen. Equally, he had shown no willingness to fish a second leech out of the lake, given our unpleasant experience with the first. Clearly scientific curiosity only went so far.

Junior’s wound, ugly though it was, was superficial. I applied salve and a bandage, and told him that he should rest the leg and keep the affected area dry. There was no reason to think he would not make a full recovery, with no inhibition to his locomotion, although the scarring would be extensive.

In the wake of the incident, the atmosphere aboard the Belle was febrile, everyone on edge, including me. I thought that our encounter with the oversized annelids was as bad as it would get, but as we entered the next section of the Miskatonic, things only got worse.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The Mi-Go Expedition

A SENSIBLE PERSON MIGHT PRESUME THAT JUNIOR Brenneman’s attitude towards Charley would improve after the way the resourceful Negro had come to his rescue. At the very least he would exhibit some gratitude towards him.

Alas, the opposite was the case. Junior was, if anything, sourer in his dealings with his shipmate. I think he resented Charley being the hero of the hour and his saviour. His persecution of the giant thereupon became positively vicious, little short of a vendetta. Never once did he miss an opportunity to castigate or insult him. Charley took it well, with stoic fortitude, but in his eyes and hunched shoulders there was the constant flinch of a man awaiting the inevitable next blow from the scourge.

I took the skipper aside for a quiet word about his son, hoping that a piece of gentle fatherly remonstrance might temper Junior’s tongue. To my disappointment, but perhaps not to my surprise, the older Brenneman sided with the younger. Although he wasn’t blind to Junior’s less attractive traits, he said, the boy was an adult, beyond the reach of parental correction. Blood was blood, moreover, and the skipper could not put Charley’s considerations above those of family. He had a healthy respect for Charley, not least because the fellow was such a hard worker. All said and done, though, he was just a deckhand.

“I may have erred in a-givin’ him employment,” he said. “Junior’s always hed certain tendencies, an’ maybe I should have known better than ter force him ter live in close quarters, day an’ night, with a Negro. I thought it might if nothin’ else do him some good, show him that people’s people whatever the colour o’ their skin. Learn him suthin’. Clearly, if there’s been no change in him after three years, there never will be. I guess if it becomes too much for Charley he can always quit. I’d hate ter lose him, but I’d hate ter lose my son more. That make sense?”

I cannot say that it did, but the skipper appeared no less resistant to change than his son, so I refrained from pressing him any further.

* * *

West of Lake Makadewa, the Miskatonic grew steadily narrower and the landscape around it hillier and more densely forested. There was a sense of the wilderness tightening its grip on us. The trees loomed ever larger, with towering dark conifers coming to outnumber their deciduous counterparts and casting long saw-toothed shadows across the river. At times we had to navigate around rocky outcrops in midstream, with bare inches of leeway to port and starboard. Skipper Brenneman nudged the Belle past these boulder obstacles with considerable skill, drawing on his many years of experience as a waterman. Charley assisted, fending off with a boathook whenever the paddle steamer ventured too near a potentially hull-holing hazard. Junior, for his part, did little except limp about on his wounded leg and gripe. His injury excused him from all but the lightest duties, leaving Charley to shoulder his workload, which the Negro did uncomplainingly. In truth, it was not a heavy burden, since Junior did not do that much anyway. His position aboard the Belle was the very epitome of nepotism, and I presumed his father kept him on as crew simply because the fellow would have found it difficult earning an income anywhere else.

On the third day following the events at the lake, Nate requested that we put in at the northern bank so that he might mount an expedition inland. The skipper obliged, and Nate and I sallied forth bearing various items of equipment; primarily a length of rope, a flask of chloroform and a Winchester repeater. Only when we were some distance from the Belle did Nate vouchsafe the objective of our sortie. Around these parts, it transpired, there had been sightings of man-sized beasts that resembled nothing so much as winged crustaceans. Eyewitnesses reported coming across lone specimens of such creatures which, caught unawares, either scuttled off into the undergrowth or took to the air on their chiropteran wings. Singly, then, the beasts were prone to skittishness. When encountered in numbers, however, they were apt to go on the offensive, sometimes lethally so. Hence the Winchester, which Nate carried fully loaded. Just in case.

They were known as “mi-go”, these monsters, and many a local Indian legend had sprung up around them. Originating from the stars, they had visited Earth since the Jurassic Period, to mine certain minerals that could not be obtained elsewhere in the universe and which they ferried back to whatever distant celestial body they called home. So said men of the Pennacook nation, and the Penobscot, and the Abenaki, and the Huron, and others besides, with a consistency that was remarkable given how disparate and widely dispersed those tribes were. This, to Nate, suggested that the folklore was likelier a set of observed, attested facts than myth. The mi-go, moreover, were not animals, their appearance notwithstanding. They were instead agglomerations of fungus, capable of locomotion and communication, achieving the latter by means of their heads, which changed colour to express feelings and convey information. They could also, it was averred, replicate human speech, by means of rudimentary vocal cords.

What a coup it would be to catch one of them, Nate declared. What a triumph for science to have a mi-go in captivity, and then upon the dissecting table, teasing apart its secrets. How could a fungus attain sentience? Was a mi-go actually several different forms of fungus that had evolved to operate in concert? Was each individual a small collaborative community, which in turn formed part of a larger collective? To what use did they put the minerals that they unearthed with such troglodytic industriousness? Was it as a foodstuff? Fuel? Imagine being the one to plumb these mysteries and divine the answers.

Nate’s eyes were alive with excitement, that zeal for intellectual advancement that I myself knew so well. As we tramped up hill and down dale, his enthusiasm kept my spirits high and my apprehension at bay. The miles we walked seemed to pass like nothing, until all at once we came to the spot where mi-go were reputed to roam. Here, the forest petered out, ceding to rocky terrain interspersed with spills of scree. The sun seemed cooler and the breeze sharper, generating a mournful sough as it raked across the barren land. Nate advised me to keep my ears pricked. In particular I should listen out for a subtle whispering not unlike the buzzing of bees which might or might not contain snatches of English, for mi-go were at least passingly familiar with the languages of all who dwelled in the region, obtained perhaps through a form of telepathy, unless it was mere mimicry like that of the mynah bird. By this insidious whispering they were known to disorientate and lead astray intruders upon their territory, rather as the “little people” of Celtic myth were wont to do.

Nate wished to take a mi-go alive if possible, drugging it then binding it with rope to lug back to the boat. Failing that, dead would suffice. He gave me the rifle to hold and demonstrated the lever action that transferred a round from the magazine into the breech and at the same time re-cocked the hammer. Clutching the flask of chloroform, its cork loosely in place, he proceeded stealthily forward.

We must have patrolled for three or four hours through that rugged no-man’s-land, ever alert for the slightest untoward noise, the merest flicker of movement. Often I heard what I thought was a weird whispering, only to realise it was the wind causing a scrap of vegetation to shiver. Similarly my eye was caught time and again by something darting across the periphery of my vision, which in the event proved to be nothing more sinister than a jackrabbit or a chipmunk. My forefinger remained perpetually on the trigger of the Winchester and I was quite prepared to shoot first should a mi-go rear its head, rather than wait for Nate to douse the thing with chloroform. Who knew if the anaesthetic would even work on such a creature and, if so, how rapidly? As far as I was concerned, a dead specimen was as good as a living one. Safer, certainly.

The sun was well past its zenith when Nate at last admitted defeat. Rumours of mi-go infestation hereabouts were, it seemed, greatly exaggerated. I was relieved as we began retracing our steps. Nate professed disappointment at the expedition’s outcome but remained upbeat, saying we might have better luck next time. For myself, while it would have been something to have “bagged” one of the queer fungal organisms, I could not honestly say I was sad that the expedition had proved fruitless. Lacking my friend’s intrepid streak, I found the failure bearable.

It was twilight when we arrived back at the river, only to discover that life aboard the Innsmouth Belle had taken a turn for the murderous.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Forbidden Places

A COMMOTION OF VOICES – ANGRY SHOUTING – REACHED our ears. No sooner had we climbed the gangplank than we found Junior and Charley at loggerheads on the stern deck, with Skipper Brenneman interposed between them, striving to keep them apart. The two younger crewmembers looked ready to tear out each other’s throats.

We swiftly ascertained the bone of contention. Put simply, Junior had killed Bessie. He insisted that it had been an accident. The cat had got underfoot and he had inadvertently trampled it to death. Charley maintained otherwise. He had been in the galley preparing supper when a piteous whimpering had reached his ears, followed by loud reverberant thumps upon the decking as of a booted foot descending repeatedly. Rushing out, he had come upon the cat’s bloodied remains just aft of the cabin structure. Junior was hunkered nearby, wide-eyed and pink-cheeked from exertion.

The big Negro shed hot tears as he spat out this indictment, while Junior glared at him with jeering defiance, chest puffed up. I myself had no doubt as to the latter’s culpability. It was just like him to strike at Charley through such a vicious, vindictive act.

Yet it was his word against Charley’s, and inevitably his father favoured him. The skipper ordered Charley to back down and said he would not tolerate such insubordination. If Junior claimed it was an accident, then it was an accident, and that was an end to it.

Charley begged to differ. He lunged forward, fist clenched to strike Junior. Such was his raw strength, it was all Nate and the skipper could do to restrain him. Eventually he calmed down and withdrew, hooded-eyed and muttering, to his cabin. At that point Junior exclaimed that the death of the cat was “no great loss”. The animal “weren’t proper” and should never have been allowed to exist in the first place. Pointing a forthright, accusatory finger at me, he said that I was up to no good in that laboratory of mine, messing around with Mother Nature and turning out freaks like a cat that thought it was a dog. All he, Junior, had done was fix a mistake. Not that he had done it on purpose, he hastened to add.

I felt a rage of my own mounting within me. It was born both of indignation on Charley’s behalf and of a sense of professional affront, for Junior had destroyed my handiwork – one of my greatest scientific successes – with as much consideration as if it were a child’s toy. Although I have never been one to engage in physical altercation, I found my hands balling into fists and was seized by the urge to take a swing at the first mate. His smug insouciance was hard to bear, and I reckoned that driving a punch into his nose would erase the expression very nicely. What prevented me from turning thought into reality was the fear that my pugilism would be inadequate to the task and that Junior’s retaliation, even though hampered by his leg, would be comprehensive.

The matter became moot anyway, since at that very moment we were hailed from the riverbank.

* * *

There were five of them, a group of Red Indians with bows and arrows who sought to come aboard, and the solemn politeness with which we were addressed by their spokesman – the largest and most imposing amongst them – seemed to brook no refusal. Nate deferred to Skipper Brenneman. The Belle was his boat and he should have say over who trod her decks. The skipper deflected the responsibility back onto Nate. It was Nate’s money that was financing the trip. The decision should be his.

Nate enquired of the Indians whether they came in peace, to which their spokesman’s reply was that if they came with hostile intent, we would all be dead by now. The remark amused his fellow tribesmen, and Nate belatedly and awkwardly answered their laughter with a laugh of his own. He beckoned the Indians aboard. At the same time, I saw him cast an eye towards the Winchester, which lay where I had set it down upon our return to the boat, leaning against the rail, not far from his reach. The skipper, meanwhile, surreptitiously drew the corner of a tarpaulin over the remains of Bessie.

The Indians having joined us on the Belle, their spokesman – whose English was excellent – wasted no time in making introductions. He was Amos Russell, known amongst his own people as Swift Brown Bear, and was sachem of the Pocasset, a subdivision of the Wampanoag tribe. He shook hands with all of us, his grip leathery and firm, and chose not to remark upon the fact that Junior reciprocated the amicable gesture with the utmost grudgingness and wiped his palm on the seat of his pants straight after. When the skipper asked him if they had come to trade – wampum for tobacco, perhaps – Russell shook his head and said that he merely wished to offer some advice.

The Wampanoag chief turned to Nate and me and, in a voice that was deep and husky, not unlike a growl, proceeded to inform us that we had strayed where we ought not to go. He and his companions had been out hunting when they happened upon us wandering through the woods from the direction of one of “the forbidden places”. They had followed us at a distance as we made our way back to the boat, and had elected to deliver this warning lest we should choose to make another journey to that same spot. We had been lucky not to run into something that might end our lives, and might not be so lucky a second time. There were certain sites where humans were not welcome, the haunts of “bad spirits” who were known to cause harm. The Wampanoag and all the other Indian nations in the region were at pains to shun these places, and we should too. The most sensible course of action we could take was to turn our boat around and head back downriver whence we came. Nothing in this corner of Massachusetts was safe for people like us, white men who were ignorant of the secret ways of the world and who blundered headlong into peril, foolishly believing that our science and our gunpowder would protect us.

As he uttered the word “gunpowder” Russell wafted a hand towards the Winchester dismissively. The rifle’s proximity had not escaped his attention but did not appear to concern him in the least. With some justification, he seemed to feel that he and his four comrades had little to fear from us. Aside from the Winchester we carried no arms, whereas the Indians had their bows and also tomahawks, lodged in their waistbands. They were, moreover, sinewy and lithe individuals. In their eyes even the weather-beaten, rugged old skipper must have looked foppish and sedate, and I doubt Charley, had he been present at this powwow, would have intimidated them, for all his great bulk.

Nate heard out the sachem with a marked show of respect, which I found surprising, my expectation being that he would have pooh-poohed him, if not scorned him outright. He told Russell that he appreciated the admonition and the philanthropic intent behind it, and that he would hereupon act accordingly. He then invited the Wampanoag braves to share a drink with us. He had some single malt whiskey – “top-notch firewater” – and a glass or two would cement cordial relations between white man and redskin, a liquid peace pipe.

In hindsight I can see that this was not the magnanimous gesture it might appear. The problems Indians had with strong liquor were well known. With no natural tolerance for alcohol, they were as susceptible to its deleterious effects as they were to the ravages of smallpox and influenza. Nate must have known that, and I realise now that when Amos Russell hesitated in responding, it was because he discerned the calculated insult hidden within the offer. The sachem’s topaz eyes briefly took on a flinty aspect, as though he were gauging whether or not to inveigh against Nate. In the end, he played my friend at his own game, with all the mannered sophistication of a blue-blood socialite, regretfully declining the invitation.

No sooner had the Wampanoag braves departed, gliding soundlessly into the forest and out of sight, than Nate let out a bark of delight. “Hah! Did you hear him? Did you, Zach? Big chief Amos just told us what we needed to know.”

I professed myself puzzled. Surely Russell had said nothing other than that there was danger hereabouts, a fact of which we were not exactly unaware. And, I added, common sense dictated that we heed his words. I was not advocating going home, just that we should tread henceforth with greater caution.

Junior Brenneman chipped in, stating that when an “Injun” started spouting guff about bad spirits and suchlike, a white man ought to pay it no nevermind. That was his duty as a civilised being and a Christian. The skipper agreed, as did Nate, although the latter’s reasons for disregarding Russell’s warning were more specific, as he confided to me later that evening in private. The sachem had, it transpired, given away more than he meant to. “Nothing in this corner of Massachusetts is safe for people like you,” he had said, from which Nate inferred that there were more things out there like mi-go, stranger things, more wondrous things. His reading of the Necronomicon had suggested as much. Amos Russell had confirmed it. “The forbidden places,” Nate added. “Places plural. Zach, we may have struck out today, but I sincerely believe that further upriver lie a wealth of opportunities. There will be more expeditions and they will not all be wild goose chases.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

A Realm of Twilight

IN THE DAYS FOLLOWING, THE INNSMOUTH BELLE PUT IN AT the riverbank several times so that Nate and I could explore the vicinity. Each time we returned with nothing to show for our efforts except sore feet. That is not to say that we found nothing. More than once we pursued a creature through those vast, trackless forests, only to discover, once we had it cornered, that it was a muskrat or a deer. Equally, there were occasions when we wound up on the trail of a beast that neither looked nor behaved like any normal animal. Even now, after all the other horrors I have endured, I cannot recall without a shudder the slithering thing that led us a merry dance through a sheer-sided valley, staying ever ahead of us, ever just out of sight, yet enticing us with an eerie chittering cry and leaving a glistening mucous spoor in its wake not unlike a snail’s. We never did catch up with it, or even lay eyes upon it, and somehow I do not regret that. Then there was the agile anthropoid with moth-like wings and glowing eyes, which inhabited the treetops and defied our every attempt to bring it down with the Winchester. It seemed to mock us from its high roost, answering our futile bullets by flinging pinecones at us as though they were Ketchum grenades. I also should note the loping, lupine mammal that led us to its den – a deep cave – into which Nate ventured some twenty paces while I prudently remained outside. He would have gone further were it not for the caterwaul of unearthly howls that arose from the cave’s nethermost depths and the strange acrid odour he reported smelling, eye-wateringly repellent in its intensity. I am still not sure whether what we encountered that day was not merely some rare, previously undocumented species of wolf; yet this would not account for the noises and reek from the cave, or for the bristling ridge of spikes that I glimpsed upon the creature’s back, reminiscent of a porcupine’s quills.

The Miskatonic was becoming narrower and shallower with every passing mile, and we had gone far beyond the point where a paddle steamer such as the Belle might reasonably be expected to travel. Her draught was fairly small, a shade under three feet, but even so her keel often scraped the riverbed, and Skipper Brenneman began to grumble about the likelihood of her being beached. Nate offered to lighten her by removing the majority of the animal cages from the hold and depositing them ashore. These were no longer required since I had worked my way through our entire stock of test subjects by then. The skipper affirmed that it might help, and so Nate, Charley and I offloaded all but the largest three cages. During this labour Charley remained morose and taciturn, as he had been since the death of Bessie. The spark was gone from his eyes. His big frame, once full to the brim with vigour, now seemed too large for him, like a many-roomed mansion with but a single occupant. It was an awful shame.

The Belle, riding ever so slightly higher in the water, chuntered onward. The removal of the cages brought us a reprieve but the skipper foresaw another problem that we would have to confront at some point in the near future, namely that if the river continued to narrow – and there was no reason to think it would not – then a time would come when the boat could not turn round. Assuming that the Miskatonic kept thinning at a consistent rate, then we had perhaps two days’ journey left, three at best. Nate asked if there might be wider patches upstream, where the current’s erosion through softer soil created pools, lagoons even. The skipper averred that his map of the river’s course was far from accurate but there was nothing on it to suggest the possibility.

Thus we now had a time limit imposed on us, a boundary past which we would be prohibited from going. I sensed in Nate a certain desperation setting in. So far the trip had been a waste of time, money and effort, at least for him. For me it had been productive, in as much as I had been able to hone and refine Intercranial Cognition Transference to a degree whereby performing the procedure had become second nature and I had a fund of expertise upon which to draw, every success and failure contributing to my knowledge and proficiency. I had no doubt that were I to take the next step and, as Nate had proposed, try to decant the omnireticulum of one human being into the omnireticulum of another, I could do it. The sole barrier inhibiting me was an ethical one; that and, of course, the practical difficulty of finding appropriate patients.

Nate resorted to the Necronomicon, scouring the book for clues. I overheard him in his cabin, leafing loudly through its pages and murmuring all the while. Unsurprisingly the word “R’luhlloig” passed his lips more than once. The Necronomicon, like some gazetteer of the uncanny, had promised Nate spoils, or so it seemed. Yet here we were, very near to journey’s end, and he had not managed to catch one example of anomalous fauna.

His frustration was palpable. A day passed, then another, and he stayed cooped up in his cabin, emerging only at mealtimes to eat in a desultory fashion and converse with the rest of us in monosyllables. I found it dispiriting to see him so low (to me, Nate Whateley was the embodiment of bullish optimism, a living hurricane who blasted all obstacles before him to flinders) but my encouraging comments fell on deaf ears.

A third day dawned, and even I, a novice when it came to fluvial navigation, could tell that the Miskatonic was now only just wide enough for the Belle to be able to make a full 180º rotation, with perhaps a yard to spare fore and aft. I enquired of the skipper if we might forge on regardless, accepting that when the time came we could head back downriver using reverse thrust until we reached a turning place. He just chuckled and said that paddle steamers were nigh on impossible to steer in reverse, sternwheelers in particular. She would be as manoeuvrable as a brick. “It’s naow or never, really, Mr Conroy,” he said. “The decision will have ter come from Mr Whateley, but any further and we run the risk of a-gettin’ ourselves stuck. An’ I shall be tellin’ him as much, when he finally shaows his face.”

Nate came out of his cabin a short while later, and miraculously, overnight, his demeanour had changed, being now as bright and resolute as I had ever seen it. He clapped his hands together briskly, saying that today was an auspicious day. He had it on good authority – and I did not need to enquire as to the source of that authority – that within a mile of this spot, we should find ourselves in a bountiful location. Skipper Brenneman allowed that a mile would probably not make much difference to the Belle’s fortunes. “But no more, mind. Not unless you’re willing to be harnessed up like a barge horse, Mr Whateley, and made to tow her back the way she came.”

Taking me to one side, Nate told me in a low voice that he and I would form an advance party, scouting out the lie of the land. If we found what he expected we would find, then we would need to come back mob-handed, four of us at least, if not all five, in order to secure it.

“It is no mean creature we are after here, Zach,” he said. “Be under no illusion. If I have interpreted the Necronomicon aright, we are closing in on the lair of one of the most terrifying apparitions ever to crawl across the face of the earth. Do you hear me? To take such a thing captive, though, would be the apex of my career. The papers I could write! I shall not have to write off this whole adventure as a loss after all. Rather, I am looking at an accomplishment beyond all reckoning.”

* * *

Maybe I was just tired. Maybe there were limits to how far my admiration of Nate could stretch. Somehow his excitement sounded forced to me, and I was not swept up by it as once I might have been. Perhaps the seeds of this disenchantment had been sown earlier, when I first happened upon him talking to the Necronomicon and was given cause to wonder about his sanity; now, they were putting forth shoots and flourishing.

That walk through the woods, then, saw me looking askance at Nate many a time and asking myself whether the thoroughbred to which I had hitched my wagon was actually an out-of-control bronco. Did this “terrifying apparition” he had talked of even exist? Might it be just some figment of a fevered imagination? Were we embarking on a last-ditch effort to wrest victory from the jaws of defeat, chasing some chimera of nebulous provenance? My faith in Nate was at breaking point. My friend, my hero, my surrogate older brother, was turning out to be as flawed and compromised as anybody else. Why this should come as a shock I do not know, but it did.

Within an hour we had come to a dark part of the forest. I use “dark” both in the literal sense and the figurative. The trees clustered close together, screening out much of the daylight, but there was more to it than that. There was a feeling, an atmosphere. It is hard to describe but I had come to recognise it over the course of our previous expeditions. Whenever we neared the spot where lurked one of those creatures of questionable classification, my hackles would begin to rise and my nerves would be set on edge. Possibly some primordial instinct within me was coming to the fore; some ancient, deep-buried sense of alarm was being triggered. To put it plainly, I always knew when we were verging on one of those forbidden places of which Amos Russell had spoken, but I knew without knowing quite how I knew.

The darkness – of both varieties – deepened, even as the forest grew hushed around us. Birdcalls faded and the rustling of branches was stilled. Then we arrived at the clearing.

It was an almost perfectly semicircular area, some half a mile in radius, where no trees grew. It backed onto a crag, a sheer granite bluff that towered against the sky and, being as it was oriented east to west and had a north-facing aspect, shrouded the clearing in shadow. Even in midsummer, I doubted whether much solar illumination reached the ground here. This was a zone of perpetual eclipse, a realm of twilight. The only plant life that burgeoned was weeds, and these there were in abundance, covering everything in such thick profusion that it was not immediately apparent – not until after Nate and I had surveyed the scene for two full minutes or more – that beneath lay ruins. What at first glance one might take for a knoll or a bushy outcrop were, it turned out, the remains of buildings. Here rose the broken spar of a stone column; here the corner of what must have been a house; here the collapsed husk of some sort of temple or hall. We moved amidst the vegetation-wreathed masonry with bemusement and a tinge of awe. This was – had been – a town. A town in the middle of nowhere, reached by no road, surrounded by barely penetrable forest, and of some antiquity.

The town’s age, indeed, was almost impossible to determine. From what we could see of the stonework through the dense greenery, it was composed of granite, the selfsame stuff as the crag. The construction, moreover, had been of some quality, for the crevices between the individual blocks were tight and mortar-less, so thin one could not have slid a sheet of paper into them, although the outer edges of the blocks had been eroded by weathering.It was not the handiwork of any Indian, that much we could determine, for the redskin in the States, although known to build stone walls, does not go in for construction on a megalithic scale. Nate hazarded that the architecture bore the mark of Mayan or Aztec craftsmanship, yet none of the great Mesoamerican empires is known to have extended as far north as New England. I wondered whether the builders hailed from some forgotten Stone Age civilisation, a primordial race with stoneworking skills unrivalled at the time and access to tools available nowhere else in the world. I was not entirely serious in this conjecture, but not entirely facetious either. “It is a marvel,” Nate concluded, and although he was talking about what was effectively rubble, he was right.

We could discern long gaps between the tumbledown rocks; these once must have been streets. They radiated outwards like spokes from a central point on the straight edge of the semicircle, which of course was the crag. The town had had a hub, and Nate and I picked our way towards it, wrestling through swathes of ivy and creeper, compelled by an unspoken curiosity. The feeling of “darkness” was strong in this place, stronger than I had ever felt it before, like an intangible wintry breeze blowing over my skin and raising gooseflesh. All the same, a fire of fascination burned within me, an intellectual heat.

The hub was a piazza hard by the base of the crag, and Nate and I speculated whether it might have served as marketplace, meeting place, or something else. Our gazes were drawn to the crag itself, in whose beetling flank we descried an aperture all but engulfed by the strangling tide of undergrowth. We might neither of us have noticed it at all were it not for the carved lintel surmounting it, which sported runic symbols that to some degree resembled Sanskrit but struck me as cruder, more jagged, lacking that script’s elegant curvaceousness. Nate stated that the writing was likely a language called R’lyehian, to which the Necronomicon made plentiful reference. R’lyehian, he said, predated even the oldest of known tongues such as Sumerian and Akkadian. Its origins were shrouded in mystery but the general assumption was that it was spoken by the very earliest of Earth’s inhabitants: beings who may or may not have travelled here from the stars.

I made some expostulation, albeit in a muted fashion. Certainly, if the ruined town’s residents had been a star-borne race, it would account for their ability to work stone in a way no other contemporary human could. If they had had the technological wherewithal to traverse the interstellar gulfs, then hewing granite with remarkable precision would surely have presented them no problem.

Even as I digested Nate’s remarkable and perhaps preposterous assertion, he had begun wading through the weeds to the aperture. He ducked under the lintel, peering in. The dim daylight did not penetrate far, but he said he was able to make out a chamber within. I joined him, and saw a chamber far larger than the rather meagre aperture might have led one to infer. Just about visible were the rear wall and the ceiling, each approximately a hundred feet distant. Visible, too, was a plinth or some similar structure near the chamber’s epicentre, an oblong chunk of stone ornamented with R’lyehian glyphs.

I had no intention of crossing the threshold. Nate, on the other hand, had no compunction about doing so. In he went, tiptoeing around the tendrils of creeper that infiltrated the chamber from outside and splayed out to form a leafy, tapering delta. He might well have been the first man to set foot within that spacious cavity for several thousand years, since whenever the town was abandoned and lapsed into decay – the first man to disturb its solemn, archaic pristineness. He approached the plinth and, circumnavigating it, halted the other side. In a quiet, clear voice he said, “Zach? Come. You have to see this.”

Loath though I was to comply, I did so. Tentatively I joined Nate on the far side of the plinth, and there he, with an elaborate swaggering sweep of the arm, like a prestidigitator concluding a conjuring trick, showed me what he had discovered.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The Thing in the Pit

THE PIT WAS SEVEN FEET IN DIAMETER AND TWICE as deep. Its sides were bare, smooth rock. It was a perfect cylindrical shaft bored into the earth. And it was not empty. At the bottom, occupying almost the entirety of the circular base area, sat a mounded jet-black mass, the surface of which was adorned with lumps, offshoots and protrusions. This object – its contours just visible by the faint daylight filtering in from the chamber entrance – lay completely unmoving, which prevented one readily discerning whether it was animal, vegetable or mineral. Its outer casing appeared flexible, and I thought I spied openings, feasibly part of some kind of respiratory system, like pores in skin perhaps, but perhaps also akin to the stomata in the underside of a leaf or the spiracles in the chitinous exoskeleton of an insect. Then, too, there were superficial appendages, some like cysts and others like the cilia on a bacterium, still others possibly pseudopodal or tentacular.

Above all, beyond being roughly spherical, the thing seemed to be of no fixed, defined shape. Though it was static, I had the impression of flux. It was as if what Nate and I were gazing at was a photograph of something in motion, like the spume of a wave cresting or the mane of a horse at full gallop, a moment in time frozen. If alive, this nameless whatever-it-was would be a fleshly black cloud, roiling with unseen pressures.

After a couple of minutes I regained the ability to speak, but I do not recall that I said anything especially meaningful or coherent. Nate stemmed my babble by placing a hand upon my shoulder. “At last,” he said. “We’ve done it, Zach. We’ve got something. A prize that makes all the others that slipped through our grasp irrelevant. We have found ourselves a shoggoth.”

That was what it was called, this bulbous, knotty blob: shoggoth. So said the Necronomicon, that bible of the profane, by whose providence we had come to the lost ancient town.

But was it alive or dead, the shoggoth? It certainly looked lifeless. Nothing could remain so still and be considered animate. Perhaps the shoggoth had lain in the pit as long as the town had lain deserted. But in which case it ought to have rotted to nothingness by now. There was no way it could have remained so well preserved, exhibiting not a hint of decay, unless it were somehow living.

Might it be petrified? I posed the question to Nate. Petrification would explain the appearance of intactness. Some action of the air within the chamber, maybe, working in concert with minerals in the ground, had induced gradual silicification or pyritisation.

Nate replied that he could observe in the shoggoth’s condition none of the coarse dullness and rigidity that invariably accompanied that process. His own view was that the creature was in a dormant state, an advanced form of hibernation. Its every life function had been reduced to the slowest conceivable rate, such that a single heartbeat might last a year. (If, that was, a shoggoth even had a heart. He was speaking metaphorically, of course.) The thing sat suspended between life and death, embracing neither the one nor the other fully.

What interested him more, however, was the reason for its being in the pit. The depression seemed purpose-built. The entire chamber, for that matter, seemed designed expressly to house the shoggoth. He wondered aloud whether this was a place of imprisonment or a place of worship, or both. The two things, after all, were not mutually exclusive. The plinth behind us, overlooking the pit, certainly had much in common with the traditional church altar. Could the inhabitants of the town have once venerated the shoggoth? Worshipped it as a god?

A thought hideous in its blasphemousness, and I felt a weird shiver as he expressed it. I longed to dismiss the notion but it carried a horrible plausibility. The R’lyehian script on the plinth might well have yielded the truth of the matter, had we been able to read it. Its very presence nonetheless seemed to lend weight to Nate’s supposition, for seldom are words inscribed into stone except for ritualistic purposes or to enshrine some official doctrine.

Feeling all at once faint, I exited the chamber to seek fresh air. Nate hastened out after me to check that I was well, and I soon recovered my mental equilibrium, but then vowed that I would never set foot in that damnable chamber again, not for any reason. The sheer oppressiveness of it was beyond enduring.

Nate replied that that was a pity but he understood. He could manage without me, he reckoned. Recovering the shoggoth looked like a four-man job, but he knew of three more or less able-bodied workers whose services he could enlist.

* * *

Thus it was that, a day later, Nate and I were back at the forgotten town, with Charley and the Brennemans in train. Every coil of rope on the Innsmouth Belle had been commandeered, along with a number of lanterns and some planks, nails, a saw and a hammer. I watched from the chamber entrance as the four of them gathered around the pit. The previous night, Nate had spent some time preparing the crewmen for what they were about to encounter. The shoggoth, he had said, was unhazardous, no more than an inert lump of protoplasm. He did not believe that manhandling it out of the pit would disturb its slumber. He had made this claim with such certitude that no one had seen fit to question it, and even after the three men were accorded their first view of the creature by the glare of the lanterns, they did not offer any quibbles, so carefully had Nate laid the groundwork beforehand. Junior Brenneman gave vent to several oaths, while his father made the sign of the cross and took a draught from his hipflask, but there was on both their faces, and to a lesser extent on Charley’s too, an amazed stupefaction that seemed to override all other considerations. Scratching the back of his head, the skipper said, “My Gawd. When you told me all those weeks ago, Mr Whateley, that you were plannin’ on bringin’ haome some biological curios an’ oddities, well, I’ll admit ter bein’ on the dubious side. I thought it was just so much bunkum, but then your coin was good so whut did I care? An’ naow, naow that I’m seein’ what I’m seein’ with my own eyes… This here is suthin’ as P.T. Barnum would have give his eyeteeth for.”

The crewmen then set about rigging a makeshift pulley system, fashioning the planks we had brought into a sturdy tripodal scaffold, Charley holding the lengths of wood in position while Junior hammered in the nails and the skipper himself supervised. It was the work of a day getting this contraption finished, and we repaired to the boat for the night and returned to the town in the morning to commence the next stage of the operation, which was the lowering of a man into the pit to attach ropes to the shoggoth.

Junior, as the lightest of us, and as someone who knew about tying knots, was “volunteered” for the role. Down he went, with a rope about his waist being paid out, hand over hand, by Charley. It struck me that here was an ideal opportunity for the Negro to get his own back on the man; all he had to do was pretend to lose his grip and Junior would plunge to the pit floor and, at best, break a limb or crack his skull. The temptation, however, if it was there, was resisted. Junior made it safely to the bottom, whereupon he set about fastening ropes around the shoggoth’s bulk. He let everyone know in no uncertain terms that he did not relish being in such close proximity to the creature. He announced, too, that its body was warm to the touch, and weirdly soft, like taffy. To his credit, though, he persevered. Much as I disliked Junior, I cannot deny it took guts to descend into the pit and secure the shoggoth the way he did. I could never have done it myself. I would never have dared.

Another length of rope was lowered into the pit, and Junior attached the end of it to the cat’s cradle of ropes in which he had swathed the shoggoth. Then Charley hauled him out, and all three crewmen applied themselves to hoisting up the shoggoth. Inch by inch the insensate creature rose from its resting place, the three men heaving as one in time to exhortations from the skipper, while the wooden scaffold creaked and quivered under the strain as the supporting rope slid tautly over its apex. At last the shoggoth dangled free above the pit. Nate leaned over to steer it onto solid ground as the crewmen released the supporting rope slowly. By this means did the shoggoth come to rest gently upon the chamber floor.

There it lay, parts of it bulging around the ropes entwining it, like a pudding in a string bag. I estimated the creature to be seven feet across and more or less the same in height, although the effect of gravity on its gelatinous mass flattened it somewhat at the top, making it an oblate spheroid rather than a full sphere. Any concerns I had had that manhandling it might awaken it were allayed. Even after the inelegant treatment it had just received, the shoggoth remained torpid, and that boded well for the third phase of our undertaking: getting it to the boat.

* * *

When I say that the process of transporting the shoggoth through the forest was uneventful, I do not mean that it was easy. I mean that nothing undesirable happened, aside from us flogging ourselves to the point of exhaustion. To carry the creature, the scaffold was dismantled and the planks reconfigured into a crude sledge, onto which we rolled the shoggoth. Then, with Charley lashed to the front of the sledge and pulling like a carthorse and the rest of us shoving at the rear, we began strenuously moving our prize through the town. Yard by toilsome yard the sledge ploughed across the weeds and then across the forest floor. It was painfully slow going, interspersed with frequent pauses, primarily for Junior to rest his bad leg and for me to catch my breath. Were it not for Charley and his terrific strength, we might never have accomplished our goal; we undoubtedly would not have done it within the course of that same day. Assisting us too was the fact that the land began to slope downward as we neared the river, so that the shoggoth’s bulk began to work in our favour instead of against us. For all that, night was falling when we reached the Belle, and it was agreed that we should delay transfer of the shoggoth to the steamer’s hold until daybreak.

So the creature was left on the bank, still trussed up, while we ate a weary supper and trudged to our cabins to sleep.

But there would not be much sleeping done that night.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Night of the Shoggoth

I WAS SO PHYSICALLY DRAINED BY THE DAY’S exertions that I dropped off as soon as head touched pillow, but only a few fitful hours passed before I was suddenly wide awake. Something had roused me, some sound. It had seemed to belong in a dream – a scream of terror. When it came again, I knew it was real. Somewhere nearby, a man let out a howl of such anguish, such soul-seared horror, that my entire body quailed.

I was torn between leaping out of bed to investigate and pulling the covers over my head. A third time the scream arose, now with a hoarse, pleading tenor to it, as though he who voiced it was begging inarticulately for clemency. I heard footfalls too, the soft beat of stockinged feet running past my cabin door. I could not determine in which direction they were headed, but it seemed that someone was going to the screaming man’s aid, and I felt emboldened. I poked my head out of the door.

The first thing I saw was Nate. He was poised in the doorway of his cabin, looking inquisitive but showing, too, a singular composure. I asked if he knew what the matter was, and he shook his head. Together in single file, Nate leading the way, we went aft, towards the screams.

Would that I could forget the sight that greeted us as we reached the stern of the Innsmouth Belle. Would that there existed some sort of mental India-rubber eraser that could efface the memory wholly from my brain.

Moonlight bathed the scene. At first, I could scarcely comprehend what I beheld. Junior lay prone upon the deck, under assault by a dark, pulsating shape that engulfed his legs up to the thighs. It was as though a dense swarm of flies had descended upon him. Then I perceived that actually it was pulling him, this dark shape, dragging the first mate helplessly towards the side of the boat adjacent to the shore. Its progress – a kind of slithering, rolling, oozing motion – was laborious but inexorable. Junior was clinging onto anything within reach to thwart his abduction, but to no avail. The dark shape was stronger than he, and remorseless.

On the riverbank, ropes lay upon the grass in an empty tangle. The shoggoth had awoken, escaped its bonds, and clambered aboard the Belle to claim a victim. After those initial panic-wracked screams, Junior was concentrating his efforts on resisting. His teeth were clenched in grim fixity. He would not go gently.

I knew I should help him somehow, yet I hesitated. The disgust engendered in me by the sight of the active shoggoth – the sheer wrongness of it, as its gelatinous body rippled and purled like black curdled cream – had me shrinking away. Every fibre of my being was repelled. Yet somehow I summoned up the courage to take a step forward.

A hand seized my arm, and Nate hissed in my ear, “No, Zach. Don’t. Not if you value your life or your sanity.” I retorted that somebody must do something, to which he said, “Not you. Not my good friend. I would not have you risk your neck for an insignificant wretch such as Junior Brenneman. I have an idea what to do. But you must wait here. Do not go near that thing. Swear?” I nodded, feeling guiltily relieved. Nate had given me permission not to get involved. My inaction was therefore not cowardice; it was duty.

As Nate hurried off back towards his cabin, a figure appeared from the other side of the steamer’s superstructure. It was Charley, and he took in Junior Brenneman’s plight at a glance and, seemingly without a second thought, snatched up a boathook and launched himself at the shoggoth, brandishing the implement above his head. I cried out to him, hoping to warn him against this rash impetuosity, but Charley must not have heard.

At that same moment, the shoggoth gained the side of the boat and dropped straight over, still hauling Junior. The first mate grasped hold of the rail, but was pulled overboard with alarming swiftness, losing several fingernails in the process. The shoggoth hit the riverbank with a lumpen, dispersed thud, unscathed, whereas Junior landed altogether more sharply, his body snapping like a whip. There was a splintering crack, as of bones breaking, and the scream that the impact elicited from him was, unlike its predecessors, one of pure pain.

Charley had arrived at the rail a fraction of a second too late to bring the boathook to bear upon the shoggoth. Still, he did not relent. He vaulted one-handed over the side of the boat, and no sooner had he alighted on the bank than he swung the boathook down hard onto the shoggoth’s carapace (or hide, or whatever name one might give its integument). This had little discernible effect on the creature, yet he persisted, pursuing the shoggoth even as it continued to slither across the ground with a glutinous, peristaltic motion like some huge spherical maggot, bearing the still-screaming Junior with it. The vile thing withstood the offensive, absorbing the blows with its soft, doughy resilience, until all of a sudden it seemed to decide it had had enough. Halting, it extruded a dozen tentacles simultaneously. These fleshy strands lashed outward, seizing the boathook and wresting it from Charley’s clutches as easily as though taking a lollipop from an infant. Not content with disarming its adversary, however, the shoggoth then generated more tentacles, wrapping these around Charley’s limbs. For a moment I thought it was going to start dragging the Negro away too, but the shoggoth appeared to have another fate in mind for him. It reeled Charley in until his face was mere inches from its flank. He strained and flailed, but the creature’s grasp was ineluctable.

Then something in its side opened up, like a sphincter dilating. It was one of those pores that I had hypothesised was a stoma or a spiracle. Now I reckoned it to serve an altogether different function. It was some kind of portal, a means of interface between the shoggoth and the world around it, a breach allowing access from its environment to its inmost self and vice versa. One might term it mouth or eye or ear, or even nostril, but one would be wrong. It was all of those at once and more besides, and it gaped in front of Charley and he stared deep into its hollowness, and then he began to shriek, a high-pitched, quavering wail quite at odds with the low rumble of his normal speaking voice. It was an aria of horror, as though his very spirit was escaping like steam from a boiling kettle. His body shuddered, his eyes rolled up until only the whites showed, and even Junior, for all his abject distress, fell silent, rendered dumbstruck by the greater, more heartfelt torment of another.

How long Charley shrieked like that, cutting the night air with his stark threnody, I cannot state with any accuracy. All I know is that the hideous, ear-splitting keen ended only when Nate reappeared. With him he had the Necronomicon, and he began reading aloud. The words were unintelligible to me, all viscous syllables and glottal stops, and I presumed them – a presumption Nate would later verify – to be R’lyehian that had been transliterated phonetically on the page into the Roman alphabet. They constituted a chant – indeed, as again Nate later verified, a spell – which had a profound effect on the shoggoth. As Nate uttered it over and over, so the creature relinquished its hold on both Charley and Junior. It seemed to flinch and shrivel, as though in discomfort. Gradually, with palpable reluctance, the shoggoth began to squirm away, leaving Junior lying broken on the ground and Charley next to him, on his knees, arms dangling limp by his sides. In short order the creature had reached the treeline, and then it was gone into the blackness of the forest, swallowed up by nocturnal shadow.

In the hush that ensued, the only sound was Junior Brenneman’s whimpering, until a loud curse emanated from beside me and I turned to find that the skipper had at last stumbled from his bed. How he had managed to sleep through all the commotion I do not know, although the reek of liquor emanating from him was a clue. He stared blearily at his injured son and incapacitated deckhand, then looked at Nate and said, “You, Mr Whateley, are a-havin’ some questions ter answer. Help me fetch those two back onto the board, an’ then we’re settin’ sail, an’ never mind the haour. I ain’t spendin’ one minute longer here.”

* * *

The skipper got up steam and turned the Belle hard about, leaving Nate and me to care for the injured. Junior was in bad shape. His pelvis was fractured, one shoulder was dislocated, but worst of all several of his ribs were shattered and, to judge by the gobbets of blood he kept coughing up, the splintered end of one of them had been driven inward and pierced a lung. Charley, meanwhile, was in good physical condition, as far as I could tell. His mind, however, was a different matter. He lay on his bunk where we had deposited him, staring blankly up at the ceiling. Now and then he might move his mouth as though attempting to speak, but no words came out, only meaningless wet clicks. His eyes were as vacant and glassy as a porcelain doll’s.

Come daybreak, we were several miles downstream from the scene of the shoggoth’s attack, and the skipper was steaming as fast as he dared along that winding, obstacle-strewn stretch of the river, halting the boat every now and then to go down to the engine room and re-stoke the furnace. Charley’s condition remained unchanged, but Junior was ailing. I dosed him with morphia to ease his pain but he was coughing up increasing quantities of blood. Though not a doctor, I was sure he would die within hours if he did not receive proper medical attention, and even if by some miracle a hospital suddenly appeared on the horizon, I would not have rated his chances highly. In short, because we were several days’ travel from the nearest civilisation, Junior was doomed.

That was when Nate aired his proposition.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Uncharted Waters

“FATE,” SAID NATE, “HAS PRESENTED US WITH A fortuitous opportunity.” Thus, with that offhandedly euphemistic remark, did he broach the topic with me. We had everything we could have hoped for, he continued, right here on the boat – more or less the exact criteria we had earlier discussed.

I was punch-drunk with tiredness and still reeling from the events of the night gone by. My brain seemed unable to grasp what Nate was driving at. Then the import of it filtered through.

My immediate response was rejection. He was talking about Intercranial Cognition Transference. He was proposing we take it to the next level and conduct the procedure upon human beings. To wit: we remove Junior’s consciousness from his dying body and insert it into the traumatised brain of Charley.

After all, Nate said, Charley was almost entirely bereft of his senses. Whatever the shoggoth had done to him – whatever awfulness he had been exposed to via that opening in its exterior – it had robbed him of his wits. His mind was now a tabula rasa upon which we could write anew, imprinting it with Junior’s cerebral essence. We might never get another chance like this. The very scenario Nate had outlined not so long ago had, through a stroke of extraordinary good fortune, come into being. We would be foolish – no, mad – to pass it up.

“Look at it this way,” he insisted. “At the rate he’s going, Junior Brenneman is unlikely to last the day. Charley is lost to us, even while his physical self remains in fine fettle. In granting the one a continued existence within the vacant, healthy frame of the other, as a hermit crab takes up residence inside the discarded shell of another mollusc, we may give Junior a new lease of life.”

I replied that we did not know whether Charley’s state of trancelike delirium was temporary or permanent, and until it could be established which, we would be acting pre-emptively. Then, too, there was the matter of dignity. How could we imbue his body with the consciousness of someone who so openly despised him? It was like some cruel jest, a final insult after all the copious other abuses he had suffered at Junior’s hands. I had found Charley to be an utterly honourable man, and even to contemplate subjecting him to the procedure was egregiously disrespectful.

Furthermore, I added, we would surely need the permission of Junior’s next of kin before we could begin – the man himself was insensible – and I doubted the skipper would grant it.

As to that, Nate said, he didn’t think it would be a problem. He could present the case in such a way that the skipper would see the sense in it and give his consent. My own refusal, he avowed, was more of a hindrance, but nothing that could not be got around.

So saying, he strode off insouciantly to the pilothouse, leaving me to carry on tending to the unconscious Junior. When he returned some while later, he looked satisfied. Skipper Brenneman’s compliance had been secured, it seemed. He had been reluctant at first, and deeply sceptical too, but Nate – silver-tongued Nate, who could charm the birds from the trees – had won him round. Above all else the skipper did not want to lose his son. If Nate could really help Junior live on, even in the body of another, then as far as the skipper was concerned there was nothing else for it. Especially since the alternative for Junior was a protracted, painful death.

I went to remonstrate with the skipper, but his mind was made up and it was like arguing with a block of adamantine. He was fairly drunk, what’s more, and became belligerent when I persisted. “Git gone with you, you bleatin’, lily-livered b–––––––!” he thundered, shaking a coal-blackened fist at me. “Mr Whateley knows what’s what, if’n you don’t. He has some backbone, that fella, some gumption. You made a cat act like as it were a dog, din’tcha? You used yer Ivy League smarts fur that. Naow use ’em ter save my boy!”

Had Junior Brenneman been one iota more decent a human being, and Charley one iota less so, I might well have capitulated and gone along with Nate’s scheme. But I simply could not bring myself to, and I thought that my continued steadfast demurral would leave it stillborn. I thought that I had some say in the matter.

It turned out that I did not. When I informed Nate that, the skipper’s wishes notwithstanding, I would still not undertake the procedure, my friend merely laughed derisively.

“What makes you think I need you?” he said. “I have been privy to the evolution of your experiments, their every up and down, their every in and out. I know as much about the omnireticulum and Intercranial Cognition Transference as you do. You are, to put it bluntly, Zach, surplus to requirements. Now, you can either help me or get out of my way. Which is it to be?”

His face was stony, his tone condescending and contemptuous. This was a Nate Whateley I did not recognise, a Nate Whateley who appeared to have cast aside all semblance of friendship and civility. I have likened him elsewhere in this memoir to a hurricane, and now I saw that I was just another of those obstacles that he could ride roughshod over and smash to smithereens. Any notion that I had been special to him, a younger brother, a soulmate, seemed illusory. Had I been kidding myself ? Had Nate been kidding me?

I was crestfallen, shattered, but I stood my ground regardless. I told Nate I would not help him perform the procedure. In fact, if he insisted on going ahead with it, I would actively prevent him from doing so.

When he scornfully asked how I intended to make good on that threat, I committed the mistake of telling him. I said I would go to the laboratory and destroy the necessary chemicals and utensils. My notes as well, if it came to that. There would be an end to the affair.

“Oh, Zach, Zach, Zach,” Nate said, with a pitying shake of the head. His expression hardened. “You really think you can give me an ultimatum? Me, Nathaniel Whateley? You would really be that rash?”

Drawing myself up to my full height, which was a couple of inches shy of his, I unleashed a defiant “yes”.

Next thing I knew, there was pain, an explosion of lights in my vision, and then a profound and all-encompassing blackness.

* * *

When I came to, my jaw was aching, my head was spinning, and I felt nauseous. It was some while before I could raise myself from the bed I was lying on, some further while still before I managed to stagger upright. I was in my cabin. I tried the door. It was locked from the outside. I hammered upon it with my fists and called out. No one came.

I retreated back to the bunk and took stock. The Innsmouth Belle was still chugging eagerly eastward, downriver. Scenery scrolled past the porthole window. It was gone three o’clock in the afternoon. I had been out for five hours. My best friend had knocked me out cold, and all because I had had the temerity to stand up to him.

Five hours was more than enough time for Nate to have carried out the operation on Charley and Junior Brenneman. Had it been a success? I must confess to feeling a certain sneaking curiosity as to the outcome. A part of me was appalled at what Nate was attempting, but another part – the rational scientist in me, never far from the surface – had its ears pricked and its tail raised. There was knowledge in the offing. There was the tantalising prospect of an unprecedented accomplishment.

Eventually, shortly before six, Nate came to unlock the door and release me. He eyed me with concern, registering the egg-sized bruise that swelled my jawline and offering an apology that sounded not a million miles from sincere.

I could not help myself. I wanted to rail angrily at him, but all I could say was: “Did it work?”

“Come and see, Zach. Come and see what we’ve done.”

* * *

Junior was dead. His corpse lay in his bunk, a sheet drawn up over the face. Charley, conversely, was up and about – and bewildered. He stood in his cabin staring at his hands, brow furrowed, turning the twin appendages over and over, backs then palms, palms then backs, as though seeing them for the very first time. When I addressed him, he seemed not to recognise his own name. When Nate addressed him as “Junior”, his head twitched, as though he were hearing a snatch of a familiar song issuing from a distant window.

The operation had gone smoothly, Nate told me. There had been no complications. Both patients (neither having much say in the matter) had submitted passively to being chloroformed. Gauging the requisite composition of the three separate Conroy’s Solutions had seemed a daunting challenge, but my notes were thorough – admirably so – and left little scope for misconstruction. Now all that remained for us to do was to keep the patient under observation and see how things developed.

We left Charley – or was it Junior? – to recuperate, and went to Nate’s cabin for a celebratory glass of wine. As twilight descended over the Miskatonic, Skipper Brenneman hove to shore and joined us. Nate’s patently ebullient mood answered the question he seemed poised to ask.

“So it come aout all right, eh? Well, there’s a relief. I sorta wanted ter know and sorta didn’t, if’n that makes sense. Kin I go an’ see him naow?”

“Why not?” said Nate. “Remember, he may still be disorientated. His mind is having to adapt to an entirely new physiological schema. His body is not the one he had been accustomed to for thirty-odd years. There are no hard and fast rules for a situation like this. We are in uncharted waters. Him seeing your face may be beneficial, however. A lighthouse to guide him out of the mists of confusion.”

It did not go quite like that. No sooner did Charley’s dark brown eyes fix upon the skipper than a moan escaped him. He gesticulated at the older man, even as the moaning continued, a thick, guttural, animalistic noise like the lowing of a cow crossed with the grunting of a hog. He held out his hands, as though asking a question. I could see it etched in his face: What has happened? Who am I?

The skipper was at a loss. He reached out several times half-heartedly to Charley, as though wishing to make contact then thinking better of it. The lines on his face doubled and deepened until it was a mask of furrows. This impassioned tableau lasted until the skipper abruptly turned on his heel and quit the cabin. I caught up with him outside, where he was taking great agitated draughts from his hipflask.

“Is that my boy?” he said. “I mean, it’s Charley on the outside sure enough, but he ain’t a-holdin’ hisself like he used ter. He’s got that kinder forward lean, jus’ like Junior used ter have, an’ I kin tell he’s trying ter communicate, only the words ain’t comin’ aout. I’m not sure we done the right thing here, Mr Conroy.”

I did what I could to reassure him. Uncharted waters, I said, reiterating Nate’s metaphor. Nobody had ever attempted a feat of this nature before. All we could do was monitor the patient’s progress and hope for the best.

“Hope fur the best? That’s a tall order. You hed better be right, is all I kin say. Otherwise we’ve done gone damned my son’s mortal soul, sir, an’ I reckon as haow we may’ve damned our own inter the bargain.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

“You Cunnin’ Fellas Went An’ Made Yerselves a Monster”

CHARLEY, OR RATHER JUNIOR WHO NOW INHABITED Charley’s body, showed little sign of improvement the next day, or the day after. If anything, he worsened. He would not eat. He barely slept. He stayed in his cabin, sometimes groaning softly to himself, sometimes sobbing, but for the most part maintaining a silence that was disconcerting in its profundity. I could not help but think of this behaviour as signifying depression, even despair, although the blank affect that now typified Charley’s mien made interpretation of his emotions just so much guesswork.

Obviously we could not keep Junior’s corpse aboard the Belle indefinitely, and so it was consigned to the waters of the Miskatonic, with a bed sheet serving as its shroud and rocks weighing it down. The skipper muttered such fragments of the funeral rites as he could remember while the body slipped below the surface and a tear trickled down his whiskery, thread-veined cheek. Nate, attempting a conciliatory note, suggested that this was not an end for Junior but a new beginning, at which the skipper rounded on him and looked as though he was going to subject him to a sharp rebuke. Instead, however, the old man merely shook his head sorrowfully and traipsed away. Moments later the steamer’s engine coughed into life and we were moving downriver once more.

On the third day after the operation there came what we thought was a breakthrough. Charley (I still thought of him as Charley and had resolved to continue to do so until given incontrovertible proof of Junior’s tenancy) stepped out from his cabin and took a turn about the deck. His shuffling circuit of the superstructure was followed by a return to his quarters, where he remained for the rest of the day. He also drank a few sips of broth. I felt as though he was trying to establish some kind of normality for himself but was struggling. His movements were slow and heavy, uncoordinated, like a somnambulist’s.

Nate said – and it seemed plausible – that he just needed time. After all, he pointed out, not all of the animals I had experimented upon had got used to their altered condition straight away. Some had undergone a quiescent period first, a kind of chrysalis stage.

I refrained from reminding him that some had not adjusted at all, like the cat-in-a-rat that had gone crazy. I was desperate now for the Charley/Junior interchange to succeed. The pragmatic side of me had fully asserted itself. I wanted this leap in the dark, for all that I had not instigated it nor had the power to reverse it, to fulfil its promise. It would be a vindication of my life’s work and doubtless herald untold riches and renown. If my name was ever to go down in the annals of history, it hinged on Charley’s recovery, or rather on the ultimate ascendance of Junior’s consciousness within Charley.

* * *

A broken mirror was the first indication that things were unravelling. Charley drove his fist into the looking-glass that hung in his cabin, causing several deep lacerations to his hand, which I bandaged up as best I could. Prior to striking the mirror, I had watched him stare into it for minutes on end. I wondered if he had been trying to recognise himself.

Later that same day he flew into a sudden rage while eating his dinner. In hindsight, I realised that what had provoked his outburst was catching sight of his reflection in the blade of a table knife. He threw his plate across the room and started thumping the wall hard enough to make the timbers shake. I spoke softly and soothingly to him, and he calmed down.

I was unnerved, however. Nate dismissed the incidents as temper tantrums, but to me they were evidence of a deeper disorder. Beneath the surface, pressures were building within Charley. Nate suggested that the pupa was breaking out of its cocoon, often a tortuous process. The arrival of the imago, he said, would validate the tribulations of its emergence.

In the middle of the night, Charley smashed up his cabin. Every stick of furniture was left in pieces. The porthole was put out. We took him to what had been Junior’s cabin, and he seemed more at home there, surrounded by the younger Brenneman’s few meagre keepsakes such as a faulty brass alarm clock and a faded tintype of his mother.

The lull, though, did not last long. The rages came and went, but the intensity of each amplified and the intervals between shortened. Still no cogent speech had come from Charley. He might growl as he stormed about the cabin, or mewl piteously in his quieter moments, but language appeared alien to him, a forgotten skill. Nate and I took the time to show him various everyday items – a shoe, a book, a fountain pen – and rehearse their names loudly and clearly, in the hope of reigniting the spark of intelligence within him, but it was useless. Often these elementary tutorials would simply stir him to anger again, as though he felt we were mocking his inability to talk, and we would beat a hasty retreat until the fit abated.

In the end there was nothing for it but to sequester him in the cabin under lock and key. Both Nate and I felt in physical danger from him. So far Charley had restricted himself to taking his frustration out upon inanimate objects, or upon himself, clawing at his face and beating his flanks and thighs, but how soon before he turned his ire on someone else?

All the while, Skipper Brenneman grew more embittered and disconsolate, resorting to his hipflask with ever greater dependency. He had been promised his son back. What he had got instead was a dumb, brutish hulk of a man in whom very little of Junior, indeed almost nothing, could be detected. From dawn to dusk the skipper stationed himself in the pilothouse and drove the Innsmouth Belle hard, pausing only to shovel fresh coal into her furnace. It was as though he was fleeing something, and yet, in a Tartarean twist, that which he was fleeing was on board the steamer with him. No matter how he tried, he could not get away from it.

The boat did not take kindly to the treatment being meted out to her. Smoke spewed out in increasingly thicker, blacker gouts from her funnel, while her engine developed a wheeze and a bronchitic rattle. Our stop-start progress was contributing to her malaise, it seemed, her aged machinery not enjoying having to work in short bursts rather than functioning evenly over a long period. In order to help matters I volunteered to serve as coal shoveller, but Skipper Brenneman merely cast an eye over my soft, slender hands and narrow, stooped shoulders and scoffed. A lad like me had never done a day’s hard labour in his life, he said (not inaccurately). He would wager good money on me not lasting “a half-haour” in the engine room. The job demanded a workhorse, not a prancing show pony.

And so the Belle toiled laboriously onward, downstream.

* * *

It was on the evening of the sixth day after the operation, when the Innsmouth Belle had just moored up for the night, that Charley went all-out berserk.

Nate was on observation duty at the time and, by his account, barely got out of the cabin alive. One moment, Charley was sitting on the bunk, gazing into the middle distance. The next, he was a roaring madman, his hands clamped around Nate’s neck. Nate fought him off with all his might, but it wasn’t until his groping fingers found Junior’s alarm clock that he gained a weapon that evened the odds. He pounded Charley’s skull with the brass timepiece, the third blow both destroying the clock and stunning Charley sufficiently that he let go. Nate wasted no time in vacating the room and locking the door behind him.

The commotion brought me and the skipper running, and we stood outside the cabin listening to Charley pummel on the door hard enough to make it rattle within its frame. The vocalisations coming from the other side were appalling – howls of unbridled fury interspersed with low slobbering growls.

Skipper Brenneman wrung his hands impotently while Nate and I debated what to do. If Charley continued to subject the door to punishment, sooner or later he would break it down. In the end we decided we had no alternative but to corral him more securely inside the cabin, and this, with the aid of planks and nails, we set about doing. As if in response to the sounds of our impromptu carpentry outside, Charley redoubled his efforts. The doorjamb began to splinter, then the door itself. The planks we fastened across it provided reinforcement, and his escape bid was thwarted, but we knew this was only a stopgap measure. Unless he gave up – and there was no indication of him doing that any time soon – he would demolish his way through eventually. Clearly something within Charley had snapped. He was pure animus, no longer even close to rational. The berserker frenzy might pass of its own accord, but then again it might not, and either way it would doubtless not be satisfied until he had inflicted dire harm upon one or all of us.

I proposed that we chloroform him, but Nate shot the idea down. How would we apply a handkerchief soaked in the chemical to Charley’s face? The skipper tendered the most straightforward solution. “We got ter kill him,” he said. “It’s the only thing for it. Kill him afore he kills us. Whatever that creature in there makin’ all that ruckus is, it ain’t Charley and it ain’t my Junior neither. You cunnin’ fellas went an’ made yerselves a monster. He’s got ter go, and if neither of you’s got the sand ter do the deed, I guess it’s up ter me.”

Against our protests, the skipper went to fetch the Winchester from Nate’s cabin. We knew we had less than a minute to salvage the situation somehow. I for one did not want Charley killed, for his destruction would signal that the experiment was an abject failure. Yet, unless he could be pacified by some non-lethal means, what choice was there?

All at once Nate grabbed hold of one of the planks barricading the door, leaned back and started wrenching it off. “Quick! Help me!” he urged. “Charley is a sitting duck if we leave him where he is. The skipper has only to shoot him through the door, and it’s done. If we let him out, however, he stands a chance of survival.”

“You would free him?” I said, aghast. But then I saw the sense in it. Freed, Charley might escape. He might abandon the Belle and hare off into the wilderness, whence we could retrieve him later after he had calmed down, assuming he did. As long as Charley lived, Intercranial Cognition Transference between humans remained a viable possibility. As long as he lived, the experiment was not yet over, and neither were my prospects of a brilliant future.

I can see, in retrospect, the rank illogicality of this train of thought. The phrase “clutching at straws” has rarely been so apt. Nevertheless, in that moment of crisis, my desperate, fevered brain wished nothing more than to keep the flame of hope alight, at whatever cost, even if it risked the deaths of us all. Success mattered more to me than life. Somewhere along the course of that journey up and down the Miskatonic I had, it would seem, lost all perspective. I had, too, perhaps lost a portion of my sanity.

I joined Nate in prying loose the planks. The door continued to shudder under assault from Charley. It would not hold out much longer.

The skipper reappeared, brandishing Nate’s Winchester. We had by then pulled the last plank free. He beheld our handiwork and knew in a flash what had motivated it. Cursing us, he took up a shooting stance in front of the door, rifle butt lodged in the crook of his shoulder. He cocked the lever and aimed at a spot where Charley’s torso would be on the other side.

“Don’t even try ter stop me,” he snarled at us. “Either o’ you does, an’ the next bullet’ll be fur him. This ends right here an’—”

He never did finish the sentence. The door burst outwards, shattering free from its frame, crashing to the deck. Startled, off balance, the skipper loosed off a round, but the shot went wild. Next instant, out Charley came. His face was contorted in pure mindless ferocity. His lips were flecked with spittle. He lunged straight for the skipper, who frantically pumped the lever of the Winchester but not in time. Charley seized the rifle, tugged it from his grasp with terrible ease, and struck him with it. The blow sent the skipper sprawling to the deck, whereupon Charley began clubbing him mercilessly with the repeater. Down the gun went with an unremitting, almost metronomic regularity, each impact sounding softer and wetter than the last as Skipper Brenneman’s cranium disintegrated beneath the onslaught. At some point he ceased to cry out in distress. Then there was only the thud of the rifle butt striking the hideous, pulpy ruin his head had become. Charley continued to beat away until the wood of the rifle was making contact with the wood of the deck, and he halted only when the Winchester began to fall apart in his hands, stock and barrel parting company, bolt mechanism coming to pieces.

Nate and I had stood as mute, stupefied witnesses to this act of butchery. Now, as Charley dropped the broken Winchester, we began belatedly to back away. The Negro’s eyes, which had once been so lively and full of compassion, contained nothing but murderous malignance. There was no trace of Charley in them, and if it was Junior who now glared out through those wild, vein-webbed orbs, it was a Junior bereft of all reason and morality.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

A Foretaste of Damnation

WE FLED AFT, AND THE MADDENED CHARLEY lumbered after us. The stern of the boat was not quite a dead end, for the gangplank was available. It had been shipped for the night but we could have slid it out over the rail into position, had we had the time and leisure. In the event, our choices were to leap ashore, at the risk of breaking an ankle; consign ourselves to the Miskatonic and swim to safety; or make a stand.

I was all in favour of swimming. There was no telling whether Charley would pursue us into the water. Perhaps, in his deranged state, he no longer had the power of natation. He might baulk at diving in, or he might sink straight under and drown.

Nate – bravely, or perhaps rashly – elected to confront Charley. He snatched up a small barrel and hurled it at the marauding giant with some force. The barrel rebounded off Charley’s sternum, throwing him off balance. As he reeled, I spied an opening. I will say, in all modesty, that what I did then was the boldest thing I have ever done, and to this day I do not know what possessed me. In the heat of the moment my natural timorousness took flight. I may speculate that it was a combination of self-interest and altruism. Not only was I in mortal danger but Nate too. One often has more courage when defending others rather than just oneself.

At any rate, I charged at Charley, head down like a linebacker in the scrimmage. I struck him side-on. He lost all remaining equilibrium and went tumbling off the boat. As luck would have it, this happened on the side adjacent to the bank, so that he landed on solid ground, not in the river. He hit hard but was up on his feet in no time. He leapt for the rail, with the obvious intention of hauling himself back aboard, but tall though he was, its rim was just too high. He kept trying, hollering all the while in indignation, but his efforts were for naught.

I had won us a reprieve, and Nate did not waste it. He untied the mooring rope and cast the Innsmouth Belle adrift. The steamer began to draw away from the bank, borne by the Miskatonic’s slow but insistent current. Charley gave voice to a screech of outrage and began dogging us along the bank. It was not difficult for him to keep pace with the boat, and even when he came to rocks or overhanging trees he was not waylaid for long. Scrambling, wading, diverting around, he fell behind but soon caught up again once he came to an uninterrupted stretch of shoreline.

Simply by floating along, it seemed we would not outpace him. I feared Charley would keep harrying us indefinitely, tireless in his pursuit. And at present we had no control over the steamer. What if some quirk of the current rammed us into the bank, or stranded us in shallows?

I announced that we must get the Belle started and drive her. It was our only hope. Nate said that he had watched the skipper in the pilothouse. There was a rudder wheel and a lever that regulated the steamer’s speed and another lever that switched the paddle wheel between forward and reverse. Mastering these controls would surely not be much of a challenge, and the moon, which had just arisen, was on the wane but still shedding enough light to navigate by.

Accordingly, we went below decks to the engine room and set about firing up the boiler. Then I at last got to learn how arduous the life of a coal shoveller was – and it was arduous indeed. Stripped to my shirtsleeves, I was soon filthy, my skin caked in a paste made of coal dust and sweat. My arms ached. My back hurt. My lungs rasped. Nevertheless the furnace was raging and the Belle was moving under her own steam, with Nate as captain, manning the controls.

I thought we had done it. With the boat picking up speed, and the current assisting, we would soon be going fast enough to leave Charley far behind.

How foolish of me, how naïve, to believe that we could escape Nemesis so easily.

* * *

I reckon it was an hour, no more than that, before problems set in – an hour of plain sailing before the beleaguered engine began to sputter and groan. I wonder if we did something wrong, if we inadvertently mistreated the steamer in our eagerness to be under way. I do not know. All I know is that the Innsmouth Belle was voicing complaint. Every inch of her from stem to stern was creaking and shuddering. Whatever was amiss, it was acute and it was worsening. She had, it would seem, taken as much abuse as she could bear. Cumulatively, over days and weeks, she had been pushed to her limit of endurance, and we were forcing her past it.

I climbed the ladder to the deck and consulted with Nate. We must stop, I told him. Could he not hear how the boat was cavilling? Could he not feel it?

He could, of course, but there was a grim fixity of purpose about him that prevented him from admitting it. Charley was still coming for us. Even above the Belle’s calamitous rumblings, we could hear him hooting and howling some few hundred yards to our rear. We had not built up nearly as much of a lead as we would have liked. Nate ordered me to go back below and carry on shovelling. I did as bidden, albeit not without hesitation. The engine room was hellish, an inferno of heat and noise, clanking, thundering, hissing, smoke-choked, lit by the furnace’s red glare – a foretaste of damnation, one might say. I, poor suffering soul, bent to my task once more. Mentally I cursed Nate’s name with each shovel-load of fuel I heaved from the coal hopper into the furnace’s maw. I blamed him for our predicament, yet knew myself to be as much at fault. It was simply a question of whose hubris had been greater, mine or his. I reckoned him the more culpable of us twain, but only by a tiny margin.

Of the explosion, I have no memory whatsoever. I cannot even say definitively that it occurred at all, yet the evidence is incontrovertible. I need only look at my left hand, or rather where my left hand used to be. I need only glance in a mirror and behold the twisted ruin of one half of my face, my left eye just visible as it peers from its tight, puckered hollow. The scars I bear attest immutably to the violent detonation of which I was the proximal victim, but when I try to recollect it, I draw a blank. I do not remember a vast thunderclap of noise, or a sudden powerful concussion, or being hurled bodily across the engine room to fetch up against the bulkhead. I know all this must have happened, but a precise and unbreachable amnesia has set in, drawing a veil across the incident for ever. For that, I suppose I should be thankful.

This much I do recall: one moment I was diligently shovelling coal. The next, Nate was dragging me off the burning boat, down the gangplank, onto the bank. I was dazed. I was disorientated. Somehow I realised I was in terrific pain but I did not register it as such. I was disconnected from it. It seemed too huge for my mind to encompass.

I lay on the bank, watching through one eye – the other refused to open for some reason – as Nate scrambled back onto the Belle and hastened to his cabin. I remember asking myself why he would return to the boat when half of her was engulfed in flames and she was listing to starboard. It was madness even to contemplate boarding a vessel so evidently doomed. Yet Nate was on an errand of some urgency, and it was only when he emerged from the cabin with a bulky black book under his arm that comprehension dawned. The Necronomicon was, it appeared, too precious to be left behind.

I must have passed out briefly, for the next thing I recall is seeing the Belle, now aflame from end to end, heeling over. The river partially extinguished the conflagration, and steam billowed up in a great cloud, but the portion of the boat that remained above water continued to burn lustily. The roar and crackle of blazing timbers was tremendous. The incandescence, in the dark, was blinding.

There was another spell of insensibility, and then I was aware of Nate shaking me. His voice was fraught with panic. “Zach. Zach! You must wake up. You must get up. He is coming. He is near.”

I did not need to ask who “he” was. Charley. He had made up ground. He was, to judge by the hound-like baying coming through the trees, but a few hundred yards distant.

I strove to stand but failed. Even with Nate’s assistance it was useless. The pain that had seemed so far removed was beginning to permeate through to me, like a gas lamp being steadily brightened. I caught sight of my left hand and saw a bloodied, shredded mess. I screamed then, with everything I had in me. I screamed in agony and in loss and in fury and in horror. I screamed until my chest throbbed and my throat was raw.

When the screams subsided to sobs and I was more in control of my faculties, I looked up to find that Nate was gone. Without a word, without the least attempt to aid me further, he had abandoned me.

Then Charley came crashing through the undergrowth. Lit sidelong by the glow from the burning Belle, he was a figure of shadows and lambent orange, demonic in the darkness. I was certain then that my time had come. I could not rise. I could not run. I could not protect myself in any way. Charley stalked towards me, a great ghoulish grin on his face. At last I perceived what lurked within him. It was Junior Brenneman. I am sure of it. Junior was present in that gleeful leer, albeit a twisted, tormented version. He had been driven past sanity by the Intercranial Cognition Transference, his sense eroded until only a residue remained, the worst of him, all the hatred and truculence and prejudice, the dregs.

This was all my doing. Mine and Nate’s. I accepted this, and in my helpless, pain-wracked condition, as I watched Junior – it was definitely Junior – shamble closer and closer still, I almost welcomed what lay in store for me. Let him slay me with his bare hands. I deserved it.

Junior staggered. He looked down at his chest. All at once there was an arrow shaft sprouting from it. A second appeared alongside, embedded in his ribcage, its fletched end quivering. Then a third, a fourth…

Junior advanced a couple of steps further, then faltered. The mighty machine of Charley’s body, pierced deep by four arrows, was shutting down. A fifth arrow entered Junior’s skull through the eye socket. His head snapped back. He tottered and toppled. He fell mere inches away from me, crashing to earth like a redwood after the final blow from the lumberjack’s axe – quilled with arrows and quite dead.

I, once again, passed out.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

What Motivates a Monster

THERE IS NOT MUCH MORE TO TELL. BY THAT I mean that the ensuing events may be summarised thus: I was saved.

My saviours were Wampanoag Indians, the very same band of Pocasset braves with whom we had met and parleyed a fortnight earlier. To them, and in the main to their sachem Amos Russell, also known as Swift Brown Bear, I owe my life. I cannot put it more plainly than that. First of all, Russell bound my wounds, having applied beforehand a certain salve made from chokecherry bark, which augments healing and staves off infection. (This ancient native remedy proved as efficacious in its function as any modern medicine, if not more so.) Then he ordered his cohorts to fashion a travois from birch branches and a blanket, and I, bound by leather thongs to this canted stretcher, was dragged all the way to Fort Fredericks, a journey of some four and a half days by foot. Nate walked with us but not once did he assume the burden of the travois and its passenger. That was a task the Indians alone undertook. All Nate carried was the Necronomicon, swaddled in his jacket and pressed to his chest like a babe in arms.

Let me state it again: the hunting party of Wampanoag Indians saved me. They saved Nate too. Having been summoned to the scene by the tumult of the Belle’s demise, they arrived just in time to see me being menaced by Junior-in-Charley. Their deadly intervention not only bought my life but Nate’s as well, for there is no doubt that once our adversary had despatched me he would have gone after Nate and done his utmost to visit the same fate upon him. We owe our continued existence to the Indians’ courage and the accuracy of their arrows.

Nate was – and is – well aware of that. My understanding is that when he ran away, leaving me to face Junior alone, he did not go far before espying the Indians. He witnessed them slaying Junior and then tending to me. Realising that these men presented his best hope of rescue, he emerged from hiding and threw himself on their mercy. Although I was not conscious to see it, I imagine he approached them with a mixture of swagger and sheepishness as only he could manage.

Now, of course, he would have everyone believe that the Wampanoag were responsible for the Miskatonic expedition’s disastrous conclusion. Out of the blue, unprovoked, the Indians launched an attack on us which only Nate and I survived. They killed the Belle’s three crewmen and set the steamer alight, and Nate and I only just managed to get away. That is a calumny I have done my bit to promote, and I regret it now and hereby recant. I am setting the record straight. The contents of this account are the truth, pure and unadulterated. Nate Whateley has lied; I have lied; but only one of us is sorry that he did.

* * *

After depositing us at the gates of Fort Fredericks, the Indians took their leave, but not before Amos Russell had this to say to us: “I do not know what you did back there upriver. I do not wish to know. It is clear, all the same, judging by the demon in man’s guise that attacked you, that you ignored my advice and strayed into territory where you did not belong. The price you have paid is terrible, and I trust you have learned your lesson. Would that white men could be confined to reservations, as we Indians are, so that they may stay where they are safe and can bring harm neither to themselves nor to others.”

With that wry admonition and a hand raised in a solemn wave, the sachem and his companions departed. Only when they were out of earshot did Nate murmur something uncomplimentary about savages not knowing their place.

A fur trapper in Fort Fredericks had some facility as an amateur doctor. Upon examining me, he determined that the remainder of my hand must go, so that gangrene did not set in. He was concerned about my left eye, too, but reckoned it salvageable. Once the burnt tissue surrounding it healed, I should be able to reopen it, if only partway.

He proceeded to ply me with whiskey until I was so drunk I could barely move. Dimly I was conscious of this rough-and-ready, ruddy-cheeked fellow strapping me to a table and applying a tourniquet to my left arm above the elbow. Then there were hacking, rasping noises, which it took me a while to register as the sound of a large serrated knife working through the bones, tendons and muscles of my wrist. The pain, as the crude surgical procedure was conducted, was severe. Somehow worse, however, was the attendant sensation of tugging and pulling, my arm being treated much as though it were a joint of meat on the butcher’s block.

He did a decent job, that much I can say. Under the circumstances, the fur-trapper-cum-sawbones (whose name, if I ever learned it, I do not recall) acquitted himself well. He left a flap of skin, which he folded over the stump and sewed up with cotton thread, and the finished product – as I look at it now, some months on – is tidier and far less unsightly than it might otherwise have been. Dr Champlain, our family physician in Boston, has pronounced it as good an example of “homespun resection” as he has ever seen.

Nate secured us passage on the next supply boat that called in at the outpost town. We shared a cramped, poorly appointed cabin aboard the humble vessel, and on the way to Arkham, I challenged him more than once over the way he had deserted me in my hour of need, as I had lain helpless with pain and Junior had loomed menacingly before me. Nate made some excuse about going to find a weapon, perhaps a tree branch with which to repel Junior, and I wanted to believe him but somehow could not. It was quite clear to me that he had been saving his own neck.

In turn, throughout the journey Nate prevailed upon me to corroborate a different version of the expedition’s outcome than the one we had both experienced – a version in which neither of us was at fault and the blame for the catastrophe was the Indians’. I should think of the disgrace that might result, he said, from revealing all that had gone awry. It would be tantamount to professional suicide. Who would ever grant either of us sponsorship or patronage in our future endeavours, knowing what we had unleashed? Our names would be mud forever after. We would be the butt of ridicule and perhaps also the subject of criminal proceedings. Better by far to stick to a story which, though false, had at least some basis in fact, and exonerated us from all accountability. We did meet with Wampanoag Indians, after all. We did have a disagreement with them, of sorts. We did watch them kill one of our number. These things could not be gainsaid. So why not exaggerate somewhat? There was no one alive who could contradict us, no one save the Indians themselves, who would not be believed even if they could be tracked down in order to give testimony. Our word against theirs? No contest.

My every instinct rebelled against going along with this. I could see Nate now for what he was: corrupt, innately devious, recklessly destructive to all around him. I had almost died because of his actions. Charley, Junior and the skipper had died because of his actions. I knew I should go to the authorities and tell them the truth, whatever the consequences for me.

But damn him, his words made a kind of sense, increasingly so the more he harped on at his theme. In the end I found myself overcoming my misgivings and consenting to his proposal. I was in a way complicit in his misdeeds, a partner in crime, and the last thing I wanted was to become a pariah. There was a stain forever attached to my soul, and to Nate’s, but was it not better if only we two knew of it?

* * *

Once we were back in Arkham, I endured a spell in hospital, where I was interviewed by a police detective. After it was finished, the man looked over his notes and seemed satisfied. In fact the interview had been, he said, little more than a formality. My account of events jibed in every respect with the one already given him by Mr Whateley, and hence the matter, as far as he was concerned, was closed. The detective wished me a speedy recovery and left.

When I was well enough to be discharged, the first person I went to see was Nate. He had not visited me in hospital, which I felt more than a little slighted about. At his lodgings, however, I found him packing up his belongings. I arrived just as he was loading the last of his menagerie of biological aberrations onto the back of a covered wagon. He seemed surprised to see me, and his manner was, I think, furtive.

In his near-empty rooms I enquired where he was off to. He was evasive. “Staying with relatives” was all he would say, appending some vague remark about “relocating to Europe thereafter, England most likely”.

“Nate,” I said, “it upsets me that you would consider departing without even so much as a goodbye. It upsets me, too, that you have let me languish in hospital without calling by once. Even Lake had the decency to come to see me, and he and I are on the outs.”

“I have been busy,” Nate said. “Of course you have never been far from my thoughts, Zach, but I have been musing at length on our little river excursion and its unfortunate dénouement, and I feel that, in my own best interests, I should put some distance between me and Arkham. Alas, that means putting distance between me and you as well. I am sorry about that.” He could have sounded sorrier. “Even just to look at you,” he went on, “pains me. It is a reminder that we ought to have been more careful. We should not have rushed into doing what we did. Intercranial Cognition Transference is not safe. That much is apparent to me now. You have suffered more than I as a result of our intemperance, and you will bear the mark for the rest of your days, but lest we forget, I myself have suffered too. In financial terms alone—”

I burst forth with vituperation. “Financial terms? I have lost a hand, Nate! I am disfigured for life! This face of mine, which was not unhandsome once, now elicits winces of disgust and moues of pity. Even from you – I can see it. I am an object of revulsion and sympathy, and I will always be. Do you know how that feels? Can you have any inkling? I doubt it. And now here you are, casting me aside like a broken plaything. You would have gone from Arkham without my knowledge, had I not chanced along when I did. I thought you my friend. How wrong can a man be?”

He made to console me, but I would have none of it. “What is more,” I said, and I was in full spate now, “I had plenty of time to think while lying in that hospital bed. Plenty of time to go over the events of the expedition and especially the events of the night the shoggoth came to life and attacked, for that was the pivotal moment, the moment when it all turned sour.”

Again and again I had revisited the incident in my mind. I had focused in particular on the footfalls I had heard after Junior started screaming. My assumption at the time had been that they belonged to someone going to Junior’s aid. That was why I had plucked up the courage to exit my cabin. But of course, when Nate and I reached the boat’s stern, there had been nobody there except Junior, who was being mauled by the shoggoth. I had not marked this inconsistency then, and amid the hectic horror of that night and the distractions of the days following, I had given it no further thought.

But with the leisure to reflect while in hospital, I had realised that the footfalls must have been – could only have been – Nate’s. They had gone past my cabin, not towards Junior, but the other way, towards Nate’s cabin. When I had headed out on deck and caught sight of Nate in his doorway, he had not been on the point of leaving but, rather, had been returning. He had, in other words, been somewhere else immediately prior.

“How did the shoggoth awaken, Nate?” I asked. “How did it slip its bonds and crawl up onto the boat? How did it find Junior?”

“Who can say what motivates a monster?” Nate replied airily.

“Did the shoggoth come round of its own accord – or was it roused? Did someone perchance recite an incantation, deriving the requisite wording from a certain book, and deliberately wake it from its slumber? Did that same someone then rouse Junior and summon him outside on some pretext, before leaving him to the shoggoth’s tender mercies?”

“These are absurd accusations. Do you even know what you are saying, Zach? Listen to yourself. What rot!”

The vehemence of these protests, the heatedness with which Nate maintained his innocence, only inclined me further towards thinking him guilty as charged.

“You arranged it all,” I said. “You set it up so that we might have human subjects upon which to experiment. What a blind fool I was not to recognise it sooner. It was no ‘fortuitous opportunity’. You created the circumstances yourself and then, in spite of my objections, performed the operation. You did this to me!” I waved my abbreviated arm in his face. “You have ruined me!”

Nate enquired how he could have engineered the dual feat of having the shoggoth not only inflict fatal injuries upon Junior Brenneman but drive Charley irredeemably insane. That would have required both extraordinary prescience and extraordinary luck.

“The luck of the devil,” I retorted. “Perhaps R’luhlloig helped you.”

Now I knew I had scored a palpable hit, for Nate’s expression clouded for a moment before reverting to its former state of bland amusement.

“Yes, your precious R’luhlloig,” I said. “Demon, master, confidant, whatever it is. The thing with which you converse, via the medium of the Necronomicon. It may not exist. It may just be a voice in your head. But in the light of all I saw while we were sailing up that damned river, I am beginning to think R’luhlloig may be real. There is something within you, Nate, something that is not normal, not right. A darker presence. I glimpsed it when the red leech attacked Junior, and again that night when you surprised me at your cabin door and, for one moment, looked as though you might hit me. I believe you are in thrall to an entity that is not of this world. It possesses you. It guides you. I realise, of course, how outlandish that sounds. Nonetheless…”

“Outlandish?” said Nate, his eyes gloatingly agleam. “Well, it’s good you realise that, Zach, because you are welcome to share this revelation of yours with anyone you like. Tell people about me and R’luhlloig. See what it does for you. How quick will they be, do you think, to declare you crazy? How soon before word gets around that Zachariah Conroy lost more than a hand up the river – he lost his mind? By accusing Nathaniel Whateley of being in league with some otherworldly spirit you will do yourself no favours whatsoever. Even in Arkham, where strangeness is commonplace, it will put you beyond the pale, let alone in the rest of Massachusetts. Such tattered shreds as remain of your prospects will be ripped away, never to be regained.” He leaned closer, and every trace of bonhomie was gone from his features. “Try to destroy me, Zach, and you shall destroy only yourself.”

“I never… I never said I would tell anyone,” I said stammeringly.

“And you won’t. Anything you have intuited about me – or believe you have intuited – you will keep to yourself. Just as you will continue to keep to yourself the facts of what happened on the Miskatonic, if you know what’s good for you. You have no power here, Zach. The power is all mine. You are insignificant. You are a flea. When the world changes – and mark you well, it is going to change, and more radically than you can ever know – men like me will have everything and men like you will be left trailing behind in our wake. That is the future. You would be wise to remember that.”

* * *

Such were Nate’s final words to me. It was a parting shot the nature of which I still do not fully comprehend. I am not even sure who it was that uttered those last, vaunting, valedictory sentences. Was it Nate? Or was it his shadow self, R’luhlloig, speaking through Nate as a ventriloquist speaks through his dummy? What was this “future” he described? It sounded more than ominous, the way he phrased it. It sounded like a threat to all mankind.

Dark times followed. I slouched back to Boston and my parents’ house, where I was greeted, not like a prodigal returning, but like a remote acquaintance. Neither my father nor my mother could quite bear to look at me, and I received the intimation that what had happened to me was somehow deserved, the manifest result of some defect in my character, in the same way that Absalom’s death was undeserved, for it had been in direct contravention of his virtue and promise. Oppression beset my soul, loneliness and self-recrimination vying within me, underscored by the deepest sense of betrayal. I drank. I became sullen and withdrawn. I went nowhere, saw no one, and did nothing. Then came the foolish business with the length of window sash cord and the coat hook; it came to naught, but it did spur my mother and father to action, and they had me committed to a sanatorium, the Westborough State Hospital, some thirty miles out of town. It was for my own good, they said, but I imagine it was for their peace of mind too, so that they might be rid of my morbid presence. For months I received creditable psychiatric treatment and eventually I was released. By then I had formulated a plan. Clarity had returned to my thoughts and purpose to my life. I knew what I must do.

I would seek out Nate. Wherever he had got to, I would find him and I would get my own back. That which he had, and I had not, would be mine. I would redress the balance.

And I shall. Indeed I shall. Even if it is the end of me. So I hereby vow.

ZACHARIAH CONROY
November 1893
Boston, MA

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

The Terrible Arrogance of Gods

SHERLOCK HOLMES CLOSED THE CALFSKIN-BOUND journal, his manner pensive.

“Well, old friend,” he said. “What do you make of it?”

“A gruelling read,” said I. “Gruesome, too. There are passages where, in spite of Conroy’s somewhat florid and ungainly turn of phrase, the vivid horror of the scenes depicted gave me chills.”

“I did not ask for a literary critique. Does the author in you never relax? What I am after is your thoughts on the content of the narrative, not the style.”

“I believe it. Every word. How’s that? Satisfied?”

“Even the part about the omnireticulum? I heard a sharp intake of breath, as of surprise, when we reached that section of the narrative, as though what Conroy was asserting did not tally with your medical expertise.”

“It was intrigue more than surprise,” I said. “I am not cognisant of any cerebral gland corresponding to the one he describes. I do not recall seeing it pictured in Gray’s, for instance. That is not to say, however, that the omnireticulum might not exist. The brain, being perhaps the least understood organ of the body, is full of mysteries. Wise men from René Descartes to the phrenologist Franz Joseph Gall have speculated that the soul resides somewhere within our grey matter. Conroy would seem to have identified just where.”

“Well, for my own part, I believe the journal too – every word. Little wonder Whateley was so keen to gloss over the events of his journey up the Miskatonic when addressing Mycroft and the Dagon Club. What a ghastly, tragic reality he was hiding.”

“Apart from anything else, his willingness to make scapegoats of the innocent Red Indians is shameful,” I said, “the more so because, were it not for those Wampanoag braves, he would not be alive to tell the tale. Even if our present circumstances were not proof enough, it shows that in Nathaniel Whateley we are dealing with a ruthless, vicious scoundrel.”

“Are we?” said my companion. He stood and made a circuit of the barn, stretching his arms and legs. We had been sitting on the bare cold floor for the best part of two hours while reading the journal, and my limbs were stiff too, so I joined him in his perambulations, although I steered well clear of the cage and the sleeping ghoul within.

“Are we not?” I said.

“I mean to say: are we dealing with Nathaniel Whateley, Watson? That is the question. Or is it some other?”

“R’luhlloig, you mean? The Hidden Mind? An Outer God travelling around inside Whateley like a passenger in a coach?”

“More like the driver,” said Holmes, “if Conroy’s account is anything to go by. But no, I am not referring to R’luhlloig. Do try to think, please, if you can. The clues are all there.” He indicated the journal. “Everything you need to draw the correct inferences lies in those pages and in the observations that we have made ourselves tonight and previously.”

I racked my brains, which still felt somewhat dulled after our exposure to the fumes from the Devil’s-foot root. Slowly, painstakingly, like a small child stacking up wooden building blocks, I assembled a hypothesis.

“He did it,” I said at last. “Of course!”

Holmes essayed a small smile. “It is like seeing a light come on in a far-off window. Who did what, Watson?”

“Conroy. Intercranial Cognition Transference. He pulled it off successfully. He did it to himself and Whateley. My God! Somehow he made it work. It is not Whateley who has taken us prisoner. It is Conroy. And those remains…” I motioned in the direction of the ghoul’s cage and the grisly detritus within. “They belong to Conroy, and yet they do not. He has vacated them and continues to walk the earth, alive and well in Nathaniel Whateley’s physical form. But how did he manage it? How could he dissolve his own omnireticulum and then inject it into Whateley? The procedure leaves the donor in a vegetative state. He must surely have employed some impoverished medical student to assist him, or else a physician, some quack who has been struck off the register and is desperate for money.”

“That is certainly a possibility.” Holmes picked up a long, rusty nail from the floor and began toying with it ruminatively.

“Also, the technique was far from perfected, at least up to the point where the journal leaves off. Conroy must have refined it considerably since. But would that not mean more human test subjects? Where did he find people upon whom he could conduct trials? And would he not have left a trail of brain-dead catatonics in his wake? How could he do so without drawing unwanted attention?”

“All good questions, Watson, governed by an unassailable logic. There is clearly some other factor at play here. What is apparent, beyond all reasonable doubt, is that Conroy has insinuated himself into Whateley’s form as though donning a suit of armour. Hence the peculiar mannerisms Whateley has exhibited. He was unclear about the talk he gave to the Dagon Club and needed reminding that he had taken a house in Pimlico. More pertinently, we saw him again and again touch the left side of his face, as though he could scarce believe it was intact, while the seeming paralysis of his left hand would suggest that he has forgotten how to use it over the course of two years when he has not had a left hand. He has grown accustomed to the lack and has yet to adjust to its restoration.”

“Intercranial Cognition Transference would account, too, for the injection mark you perceived on the back of the Bethlem inmate’s skull, and for the fellow’s state of non compos mentis. It all fits.”

“Not quite. As you have just remarked, removal of the omnireticulum’s contents leaves one bereft of all sense. Yet the Bethlem inmate conversed with us, albeit at a rudimentary level, and could write with charcoal. A dim spark of lucidity remained.”

“Perhaps that is the difference between conducting the procedure upon humans and upon animals,” I said. “With humans, the self cannot be erased entirely. Had Junior Brenneman not died after the operation was performed, the body he left behind might have evinced the same degree of basic brain function we observed in the Bethlem inmate. There might have been some sediment remaining that was identifiably Junior. We can at least say with some degree of certainty that Conroy has spent the time since he penned his memoir perfecting the procedure.”

“Can we?” said Holmes enigmatically, squinting as he examined the point of the rusty nail.

“It is a speculation worth wagering on, I would suggest.”

“I will not take that bet. On the other hand, I would lay you good odds on Conroy being the one who sent Whateley the parcel, the arrival of which triggered his abrupt departure from his home in Pimlico. I would lay good odds, too, on the contents of said parcel being the journal we have just read.”

“The parcel did have the dimensions of a book.”

“And how could Whateley read the journal and not be provoked? Conroy’s narrative lays bare every wrong thing they did while on the Miskatonic River.”

“You mean Conroy hoped to blackmail him with it?” I said. “But that would never work. As Whateley said in the journal, by exposing the truth Conroy would damage both of them. Nor would any sensible person believe Conroy’s account. Monsters, mind transfer, murder – it would read to most like the worst kind of penny-dreadful fiction. Given that it comes from a man who has spent time in a sanatorium, Whateley would have had no trouble discrediting it.”

“The journal’s closing words constitute a direct personal threat. Conroy wrote that he intended to find Whateley and get his own back. Whateley could not afford to ignore such a warning. That is what I meant by his being provoked. Here is his erstwhile intimate friend and hapless dupe, whom he has not seen for two years, suddenly back in his life. Conroy has crossed an ocean to be reunited with him. He wants Whateley’s attention, and the journal is a good way of getting it. Presumably it came accompanied by a covering letter, something that told Whateley where Conroy was staying. Whateley saw no alternative but to head out to confront his antagonist. But when the two of them met, things did not go as he foresaw. It was a trap. Conroy overpowered him, sedated him, and performed the operation.”

“Why not simply kill Whateley, if vengeance was what he sought?”

“Would it not be a far sweeter revenge to inhabit Whateley’s mortal coil? To usurp his life? One discerns a marked covetousness in Conroy’s descriptions of Whateley – his looks, his manner, his accomplishments. At the start of their relationship, at least, he loved and envied the fellow in equal measure. To Conroy – who was, let us not forget, left more than a little deranged by the events of the Miskatonic expedition – there might well be a perverse thrill to be gained by becoming the very man who ruined him.”

“Even if he knew Whateley to be in league with R’luhlloig? He had already sensed the Hidden Mind’s sinister presence within Whateley. Would that not put him off?”

“Conroy must have weighed up the pros and cons and decided there were more of the former than the latter. Even with an Outer God in the equation, he might reckon that two hands and a handsome, unblemished face, not to mention a decent unearned income, more than compensated.”

“Perhaps he thought that R’luhlloig and Whateley were conjoined,” I suggested. “When he ousted Whateley, R’luhlloig would be ousted along with him.”

Holmes greeted this with a nod. “Perhaps. What cannot be gainsaid is that R’luhlloig has been a constant refrain throughout this whole affair. Is there some connection between the Hidden Mind’s conquest of Cathuria and the ‘world-changing’ future Whateley crowed about to Conroy? There must be, surely. When last there was war amongst the gods, back in prehistoric times, the earth suffered. Entire continents were sunk during the conflict. The very face of the planet was reshaped. A trace memory of it can be found in the myths of a ‘great flood’, which permeate practically every ancient culture. People of old knew that a global cataclysm had occurred in the dim and distant past, and some even ascribed it to divine wrath.”

“To some extent it was. The wrath of godlike beings waging internecine war.”

“Imagine such a conflict erupting today, in our populous modern era. Imagine the carnage. Millions would perish, trampled underfoot as the gods rage back and forth, smiting one another with weapons of awesome destructiveness. It hardly bears thinking about. Homo sapiens might well be driven to the brink of extinction, and indeed beyond.”

I shivered, and at that same moment the ghoul in its cage emitted a strange, snuffling whine. Both Holmes and I swivelled round to look at it. I thought the creature might be awakening from sleep, yet the ghoul merely turned over in its foul bed, rubbed its gore-pinkened muzzle with a forepaw, and grew still again.

Thereupon my companion and I kept our voices, which were already low, down to a murmur.

“Whateley allied himself with R’luhlloig,” Holmes said. “He allowed the Outer God access to his person by means of the Necronomicon, the book serving as a sort of bridge between planes of reality.”

“For what purpose?”

“Preferment. Material success. The fulfilment of ambition. Consider how mesmerically charming Whateley was in Conroy’s narrative. How he could influence not just people but the outcome of events. Almost invariably, what Nathaniel Whateley wanted, he got. That is the message in the journal. He latched onto poor, timorous, unworldly Conroy and groomed him like a show poodle, seeing in him the potential for making a fortune.”

“Only to be undone when Intercranial Cognition Transference proved unfeasible between humans.”

“At that stage, yes. Who is to say how much of Whateley’s remarkable skill at manipulation was his own by nature and how much the doing of R’luhlloig? An Outer God, by bestowing a small fraction of his quintessence upon a mortal, would be able to grant that person just such powers as Whateley exhibited. Whateley, one may infer, struck a deal with the so-called Hidden Mind, and R’luhlloig duly kept his half of the bargain.”

“But what might R’luhlloig want in exchange?” I said. “I doubt the deal was one-sided. Such compacts seldom are. What could Whateley give R’luhlloig that R’luhlloig could not obtain for himself ?”

“An agent on Earth perhaps? The services of a living conduit between our world and his? A pair of eyes and ears through which he might spy upon mankind? But it does not seem sufficient return on the investment.”

“At any rate, the deal between Whateley and R’luhlloig will have been rendered null and void now that Conroy is Whateley and Whateley is no more.”

“Has it?” said Holmes. “Here we are, you and I, held captive. If R’luhlloig had chosen to rescind his arrangement with Whateley, leaving Conroy to his own devices, then Conroy would have had no cause to drug us and lock us in this barn.”

“Well, no cause other than to protect himself. Look at it from his point of view. Sherlock Holmes comes calling at his door. For all he knows, you are on to him. You have linked him with the kidnapping of the Bethlem inmate and the death of the attendant, McBride. By taking us prisoner, Conroy can contain the problem and then, with the ghoul’s assistance, cover his tracks. Given what he has done to his former body, I would not put it past him to dispose of us in the same manner.” I shook my head, marvelling that I could talk so casually about the prospect of being fed to a monster.

“Then why has he not done so already?”

“The ghoul has a full belly. He is waiting until it is hungry again.”

“A fair point. But there is more to it, I would suggest. What if R’luhlloig has struck the same deal with Conroy as he did with Whateley? What if Conroy has succumbed to the Hidden Mind just as his former friend did? Conroy is eminently suggestible, is he not? His journal presents ample evidence of a rather weak-willed individual, for all his intellectual prowess. I would be far from surprised if he has not kowtowed to R’luhlloig as readily as he did to Whateley back in Arkham. In a sense he was already in thrall to R’luhlloig, if we are right in thinking that R’luhlloig was behind Whateley’s uncanny charisma all along. All that has happened is that Conroy is now directly under R’luhlloig’s sway, rather than at one remove through Whateley. It is hardly a great shift from the one to the other.”

“And R’luhlloig has convinced him that you and I must die.”

“The Hidden Mind has perceived that we stand in opposition to him and his kind and that we would not have them gaining any sort of toehold in this world. If he did not know it beforehand, he would have discerned it from my attempted use of the Liquor of Supremacy to seize control of the nightgaunt. We are a threat to him, he believes – rightly, I trust – and must be eliminated.”

“Then were we meant to read Conroy’s journal,” I said, “so that we might fathom all of this out for ourselves?”

Holmes nodded. “Just as, no doubt thanks to R’luhlloig, we were meant to experience that Dreamlands vision of conquest.”

“But to what end?”

“R’luhlloig is so confident that we are doomed, he does not care if we know the full story. Indeed he wants us to. He wants us to understand how badly we have failed. It is the terrible arrogance of gods. As far as they are concerned, it is not sufficient merely to crush us mortals. We must be humiliated first.”

“You make it sound as though you have given up all hope, Holmes.”

“Do I? By God, I won’t deny that ennui has set in, Watson. I have become tired of this constant struggle. I find myself pining for the life I have in your fictions, where I glide with sublime ease from case to case, confronting nothing worse than blackmailers, murderers, jewel thieves and the odd blackguard with designs upon some hapless, blushing female. I am able to resolve every problem balletically, and with barely any risk to my sanity or my soul. Nobody could blame me for wanting it all to be over. But!” He wagged the rusty nail in the air, rather like an orator illustrating a point with a forthright forefinger. “If this current business has shown me anything, it is that I must forge on. R’luhlloig is a danger to the future of mankind and must be stopped. For that to happen, of course, we need first take steps to escape.”

I could not suppress a grin. “By the living Jingo! I thought you would never get round to it. You have devised a method, yes? Some clever stratagem?”

“Clever? Perhaps. I cannot vouch for its wisdom, however, for it may as likely kill us as liberate us.”

After a moment’s thought, I shrugged. “Since the only alternative is death anyway,” said I, “I am content to try the thing that does not guarantee that fate over the thing that does. Tell me more.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

A Betrayer Betrayed

IT WAS NOT QUITE DAWN WHEN WHATELEY CAME for us. Holmes and I had waited patiently, I feeling more than a smidgeon of unease at the escape plan my friend had outlined but trying to console myself that, for all its hazardousness, it could not be worse than anything Whateley – or R’luhlloig – might have in mind. Also, I myself could not think of a better plan, and that was not for want of trying.

A key turned in the lock. Holmes and I swiftly took up the positions that he had previously specified. We affected nonchalance as the barn door swung open and in stepped Whateley.

“Gentlemen,” he said. “I bid you good morning.”

Hovering just behind him was the nightgaunt, a black silhouette like his own shadow enlarged and horrendously distorted.

My Webley was in his hand, and he waved it at both of us. “You will see that I have come armed. You will see, too, if you look carefully at the cylinder of the revolver, that there are rounds in the chambers. I found your box of ammunition, Doctor, in Mr Holmes’s portmanteau. I have no desire to shoot either of you. I will as a last resort, but to kill you so mundanely would be a disappointment.”

“You have something else in mind,” said Holmes, “something more elaborate.”

“Something positively Gothic,” said Whateley with relish. “A death so harrowing, even Mr Poe might have blanched at the thought of it.”

“Involving the ghoul, no doubt.”

“A shame not to exploit the beast’s peculiar talent, if I can. It craves flesh and is none too fussy where that flesh comes from, or what condition it is in.”

“You refer to our flesh.”

“The meat of two fine Englishmen. A delicacy, I’m sure. But there will be little point feeding you to it all in one go. As you can see from the leftovers in the cage, a ghoul can consume only so much at a single sitting. It makes sense to eke out the meals over a span of time. A leg one day, an arm the next, and so on. I will start with you, Mr Holmes, naturally.”

“Naturally?” my friend queried.

“Well, what is the good of having a licensed medical practitioner to hand if one does not take advantage of him? Dr Watson will perform the amputations and nurse you through the ordeal. As your oldest and dearest friend, he is sure to give you the very best care. It will be interesting to see how long you last. I cannot imagine you giving up the ghost easily, even as you are forced to watch yourself being eaten piece by piece. Let’s think… At the rate of one limb per day, that’s four days until you become a torso with a head. Then, on the fifth day, I shall lift you into the cage and let the ghoul have at you. If the good doctor rises to the challenge and you display sufficient stamina, that is the lifespan remaining to you: five very unpleasant days.”

“You utter fiend!” I cried. In my hot-temperedness, I forgot all about our escape arrangements and took a step towards Whateley. He levelled the revolver at me.

“You could still carry out your surgical duties with a bullet lodged in your leg, Doctor,” he said, “although I suspect you might prefer not to.”

“I would kill Holmes rather than allow you to inflict such a protracted torment upon him,” I said, reverting to my former position.

“It will be a test of your Hippocratic oath, that much is certain. I wonder if your impulse to keep a patient alive at all costs will override your desire to put him out of his misery. At any rate, for what it’s worth, your own death will be swifter. Once Mr Holmes is gone, what is the point in leaving you alive? I will probably just shoot you. It might take a few days for the ghoul to polish you off, but if by the end you have become a bit gamey, so what?” Whateley shrugged. “You will be that much more tender.”

“This is a particularly nasty finale you have lined up for us,” said Holmes, sounding remarkably sanguine. If what Whateley was proposing perturbed him at any level, he gave no indication. “There is a downright sadistic aspect to it which I find hard to reconcile with the facts as they stand. What have Watson and I done to deserve such a vicious Grand Guignol execution? Granted, we are capable of exposing you as a murderer, but if you intend to ensure our silence by killing us, would it not be far less bother simply to shoot us? Delaying our deaths means there is always a chance we might turn the tables on you. I see no tactical benefit in it for you, only the pleasure of watching us suffer.”

“Is that not enough?” said Whateley.

“Frankly, no. You are an intelligent man. You would not be allowing us to live, even for just a few days, unless you had some specific reason for prolonging our agony. A personal reason.”

Whateley looked cagey. “Perhaps I have, perhaps not.”

“I cannot think of a reason why Nathaniel Whateley might hate Watson and me so intently.” Holmes paused. “Nor, for that matter, can I think of a reason why Zachariah Conroy might.”

“Why bring him into it?”

“Conroy? I think you know full well why, Mr Whateley. I think you know that I have deduced by now who you really are.”

A small smile appeared upon our captor’s face. “I could scarcely have made it more obvious, Mr Holmes.”

“We read the journal, as you clearly wished us to. The rest was easy. I suppose congratulations are in order. Your procedure works after all. Not only that but you have used it to wreak a peculiarly apposite revenge upon Whateley. You are he now. You have his money, his looks, everything you envied about him. You have his body, moreover, which is as immaculate as your former body was flawed. All that Whateley took from you, you have taken back. Bravo, Mr Conroy. Bravo.”

The man who was outwardly Nathaniel Whateley but inwardly Zachariah Conroy preened. “Justice has been done,” he said. “Nate has got what he deserved, and so have I.”

“You must have toiled hard on your Intercranial Cognition Transference, in order to make it work on human beings.”

“Actually it was easier than you might think.”

“Really? Well, at the least, you must have had help carrying out the operation on yourself and Whateley.”

“I did. Superlative help. A surgical assistant of unparalleled quality.”

“Let me guess. R’luhlloig.”

Now the small smile became a large one. “Well done, Mr Holmes,” said Whateley, whom I shall hereafter refer to as Conroy, just as Holmes himself had taken to doing. “Well done indeed. You are piecing everything together exactly as I hoped you would.”

“Is that not the aim of this little game?” said Holmes. “For me to tease out the truth and for you to chart my progress?”

“It is entertaining, I must say, watching the cogs turn in that formidable brain of yours. Quite the spectator sport.”

“So you threw yourself upon the mercy of Whateley’s otherworldly confederate, the Outer God whom you had already identified as his motivator. That, I would submit, is where you have been directing your efforts since you were discharged from the Westborough State Hospital in Massachusetts. Your focus has not been on furthering your scientific researches but your arcane ones.”

“I returned to Arkham from Boston in the spring of last year and paid a series of visits to the university library,” said Conroy. “Nate, perhaps not surprisingly, had not returned the Necronomicon, for all his assurances that he would. However, there were other books in the library’s darker, dustier corners that could furnish me with the information I sought. You will be familiar with them. Von Junzt. Prinn. The Pnakotic Manuscripts. None quite as encyclopaedic as Alhazred’s tome, nor as steeped in eldritch power, but I took detailed notes and cumulatively they provided me with a framework upon which to build.”

“Then came rituals. Prostration before idols. Nights of incantation and obeisance.”

“You speak with weary disdain, as though it is an old, old story to you,” said Conroy, “but to me it was new and exciting. I treated it like a scientific discipline. I followed the wording of the rites to the letter, much as though they were the protocols of a laboratory experiment. The night I first made contact with R’luhlloig…” The American’s eyes blazed. “How terrifying it was, yet how thrilling too, in all its blasphemous transgressiveness, its glorious obscenity. Though I hail from devout Episcopalian stock, I had never had much time for God. And there I was, communing with a deity – a divine being that was not a forgiving father figure but rather a thing of calculation and appetite and cool resolve, a thing whose nature I actually found estimable. I knew R’luhlloig to be at least partly to blame for the disasters that had befallen me, but somehow that did not matter. To turn the tables on Nate by using the very same god who had been his ally – how delicious! Some nights it was all I could think about: how I would take everything from him, even R’luhlloig. Such thoughts kept me warm.”

“You embraced that which had been the agent of your downfall,” said Holmes. “There is a peculiarly self-destructive streak in you, Conroy.”

“Perhaps, Mr Holmes. Perhaps. But the moment when R’luhlloig’s voice flowed through me, as icy as the gulfs of space – it felt right. R’luhlloig seemed to know just what I wanted. I felt that he had been waiting for me to make contact, and moreover that I had, without knowing it, been waiting my entire life to contact him.”

“And that is how they ensnare you, these alien cosmic entities,” I said. “They gull you into believing you matter to them, when all they are after is whatever they can get from you. They prey upon the weak and the obsessive, and the price is eventually, inevitably, madness and death.”

“R’luhlloig is not like that,” Conroy shot back. “He is not as other gods, Outer or Old Ones or otherwise. He is not subject to cruel whims, nor is he motivelessly malignant. He is ambitious. He has plans.”

“Destructive plans.”

“Not for those who would be his acolytes.”

“But R’luhlloig already had, in Nathaniel Whateley, a loyal servant,” I said. “What would he gain from you standing in Whateley’s stead? Why help you commandeer Whateley’s body?”

“To gain himself a servant even more loyal than Whateley,” Holmes interjected. “Is that not so, Mr Conroy? A servant who has given himself wholly over to R’luhlloig, body and soul, since he has benefited so much in return. Tell me how you were able to perform the exchange, with R’luhlloig’s aid.”

“It was not so hard,” said Conroy. “Painful, yes, but not hard.”

“First you lured Whateley out of London with that journal of yours.”

“That part was ridiculously straightforward. R’luhlloig furnished me with Nate’s London address. I posted him the journal with a covering letter. ‘You had better meet with me if you know what’s good for you.’ Something to that effect. I also enclosed a map providing directions to this location. Nate fell for the ploy. He inferred that I was after money, because that was the first thing he said upon arriving. It was late in the afternoon, and he looked to have had a hard, difficult journey getting here. ‘How much did you think you might get, you pathetic little worm?’ he barked, brandishing the journal. ‘Because I warn you, I shall not pay a single penny. If extortion is what you were hoping to achieve by sending me this worthless piece of trash, then you are sorely mistaken. I would burn the damn thing if I didn’t think you had another copy squirrelled away somewhere.’ This exchange took place by the front door to the farmhouse.”

“I presume you rented this retreat and stocked it with a nightgaunt and a ghoul?”

“Correct.”

“Creatures furnished you by R’luhlloig.”

“R’luhlloig guided them to me. I taught myself the methods necessary to control the nightgaunt, while the ghoul requires somewhat less in the way of husbandry. As long as it is fed, it is content, and the cage will keep it contained. Do you or do you not want to hear about the meeting with Nate?”

“By all means continue. I apologise for the interruption.”

“Even as Nate fulminated,” Conroy said, “I played the part of meek, importunate Zachariah Conroy, claiming that I had fallen upon hard times and money was indeed my object. ‘Not much,’ I said. ‘A couple of hundred dollars perhaps, to set me back on my feet.’ This drove Nate to greater heights of indignation. ‘You have come all this way,’ said he, ‘to ask for an outrageous sum, which you must know I am not going to hand over. You have wasted your time. I always thought you naïve but never, until now, did I think you an idiot. Here, take your damn book. Never presume to trouble me again.’ Thinking me cowed, he turned to go. That was when I struck him down from behind.”

“He should not have turned his back on you.”

“He should also have looked more closely and asked himself why I was keeping my hand behind my back – a hand that held a leather sap.”

“Often the crudest methods are the most effective.”

“I coshed him hard, and down he went like a sack of coal. I dragged him indoors. When, an hour later, he came to, he was so groggy and enfeebled that I almost felt sorry for him. But I could also not help feeling triumphant. I was the dominant one in our relationship now. As I watched him writhe on the floor, I wondered why I had ever thought him so great. How could this vain peacock have dazzled me the way he did? He was all surface and no substance. Then the work commenced.”

“The operation,” said Holmes. “I am going to put forward my theory as to how R’luhlloig contributed. He took over Whateley, yes? Exerted power over him until Whateley became his puppet.”

“It was an extraordinary act of possession,” said Conroy with a nod of acknowledgement. “Nate was unable to resist. R’luhlloig infused him from crown to heel, gaining full mastery over his motor functions. Jerkily Nate rose to his feet. He could not speak. He could not do anything R’luhlloig did not want him to. And the best part of it all? The abject terror in his eyes. Nate was fully aware what was happening to him, and there was nothing he could do to prevent it. It must have been like being trapped in a nightmare. I saw hurt in his expression, too. His god had turned on him. He had no idea why. How delicious I found that anguish of his. It giddied me to my core.”

“Your vengeance upon Whateley was complete.”

“Almost. Almost. First of all, I extracted the essence of Nate’s omnireticulum. I had him lie down prone and bored a drill into the base of his skull, then inserted four hypodermic needles one after another, three to inject and the last to extract. He was, of course, conscious throughout the entire procedure. R’luhlloig kept him stock-still, paralysing his muscles, so there was no screaming or squirming, but I am sure he felt every ounce of the agony.” Conroy grinned with awful relish.

“You did not leave your former body untenanted, though,” said Holmes. “This was no mere appropriation, but an exchange.”

“It was thanks to Nate that I had been left a cripple, so why not let him live for a while as I had had to for two years? Let him see how he liked it.”

“Was that not a risk? Whateley, alive, would pose a danger.”

“As weak, crippled Zachariah Conroy? Hardly. At best he might be a nuisance.”

“It would seem, then, that even rendered effectively brainless, Whateley’s body was still capable of performing the operation on you in turn. R’luhlloig was able to physically manipulate him.”

“R’luhlloig had full mastery of his nervous system,” said Conroy. “Like a hand in a glove.”

“I presume you anaesthetised yourself suitably before undergoing the procedure,” I said.

“I did not want to be fully unconscious, in case there were complications. I took a substantial draught of laudanum beforehand.”

“That would have dulled the pain but not numbed it altogether.”

“You are right. Even with the laudanum, what I went through was far from pleasant. It was, in point of fact, horrendous. But I endured it. I knew what this pain was going to buy me. The reward was worth the price.”

Conroy paused a moment, reflecting on the experience.

“To feel one’s inner self slowly being eroded,” he said, “one’s life and memories slipping away…” He shook his head. “I cannot truly put it into words. It was as though all that I was, the sum of my time on earth, was telescoping down, with a blackness encroaching upon me from all sides. I imagine actual death is not dissimilar. With each injection of Conroy’s Solution, I lessened. Then, with the withdrawal of my omnireticulum’s contents, I ceased to be anything recognisably ‘me’. I was formless. I had become chaos. I was a million moving parts, all whirling around and shooting off in different directions. I sensed that if I did not hold myself together somehow, I would dissipate entirely. I would lose coherence and never re-coalesce.”

“Why was Junior Brenneman not able to maintain integrity of mind when transferred into another body, and you were?” Holmes asked. “Does it have something to do with the desirability of the body in question? Junior found himself within a Negro. To one such as him, that must have been intolerable. You, on the other hand, have been installed into the physical frame of a figure whom you once admired and aspired to be like, and in some obscure way still do.”

“A nice analysis,” said Conroy, “psychologically valid, but wrong. The solution is both simpler and less mundane. R’luhlloig made the difference. R’luhlloig’s power was the glue that kept me from falling to pieces. What my own science lacked, he provided through divine might. He cupped me in his hands and sustained me while in serum form, so that I did not drift apart. Then, when I was inserted into Nate’s omnireticulum, I soon began to regain a sense of self.”

“Might I ask how the serum was injected into Whateley’s omnireticulum?” I said.

“Doctor, you are a fund of good, pragmatic questions.”

“Your former body was unoccupied. For Whateley to reach round to the back of his own head with the hypodermic needle containing your essence and use it accurately would have been nigh on impossible.”

“R’luhlloig had him thrust the needle up through the roof of his mouth.” Conroy mimed the action with a forefinger between his lips. “It penetrated the soft palate and up into the omnireticulum. The back of my throat is somewhat sore, even now. For the first day or so I could hardly speak. But again, as with the pain of the procedure, I felt this bearable and worthwhile. I was Nate Whateley! For ever after I would have the prestige of his family name. I would have his background, his finances, his allure to women, the lot. Zachariah Conroy was no more, and good riddance. He had only ever been a disappointment. From now on I could slip into the life of someone who had the world at his feet, rather than ploughing on as before –disfigured, missing a hand, a paltry loner.”

“There followed the final twist of the knife,” said Holmes. “Installing Whateley’s essence in your vacated body.”

“Another reason why I could not sedate myself. The job needed to be done quickly, while the serum was still potent and before the hole drilled in the back of Nate’s neck closed up. Thereafter all I had to do was sit back and wait for him to come round. I can assure you, his first whimpers of distress when he realised what I had done to him – it was music to my ears. Then he begged me to kill him, in that halting, clumsy baby-blather that was the closest he could now get to speech. His mind had withered during the transference, like Junior’s, for he had not had R’luhlloig to help him. Most of him had been lost. Yet he was self-aware enough to implore me to do away with him, and I? I refused. I would not show him that kindness. Not yet.”

Conroy exhaled a sigh that I can only call ecstatic. “And that is my story,” he concluded. “The tale of a man who plumbed the depths but crawled back out to scale the heights.”

“It is undoubtedly a useful coda to the text of your journal,” Holmes averred, “but it is not the full story, is it? There is more.”

Conroy arched an eyebrow. “Pray tell what I have omitted.”

“R’luhlloig will have demanded something of you in exchange for his bountifulness. I wondered whether it might be your services as a spy, but I am unconvinced by that idea. I think he would want something more intrinsically valuable, something he could obtain from you that he could from no other.”

“Why don’t you elucidate, Mr Holmes? Since you seem to believe you have all the answers.”

“Not all the answers,” said Holmes. “I am conscious that R’luhlloig has a specific disliking for me. He, through your auspices, has arranged it so that Dr Watson and I are your prisoners and that I am to have a cruel and unusual death visited upon me. Was it R’luhlloig who proposed you release Whateley, the occupant of your former body, and allow him to run free?”

“What if it was?” said Conroy coyly.

“By convincing you to turn Whateley loose, R’luhlloig was laying a trail. He would have known that Whateley would be found. It does seem surprising that this wretched figure, so addle-witted he was barely able to string a sentence together, could have contrived to escape from under your nose. A more credible explanation is that he did not. You let him go. He then became the first in a chain of clues leading me inexorably to your door. A naked man, seemingly insane, gabbling away in R’lyehian? Of course he would come to the notice of Sherlock Holmes. That was your intention, or rather R’luhlloig’s, and I am ashamed that I did not realise it sooner.”

“You are not infallible. Who is?”

“Yes, but I hold myself to a higher standard than most. You dangled a hook into the water, with Whateley as the bait, knowing that I would swim by and bite.”

“What tantalises Sherlock Holmes? What can he not resist? A mystery.”

“Then, feeling a tug on the line and needing to reel me in, you despatched your nightgaunt to retrieve Whateley from Bethlem and bring him back to you for disposal. I continued to follow the clues, and here I am. Here we are.” Holmes turned to me, head bent in remorse. “I am sorry, Watson, old friend. It is all too embarrassingly apparent that I have blundered. I simply did not intuit the deeper machinations at work.”

“It is not your fault,” I said. “I daresay the upshot would have been much the same.”

“The trap was well concealed,” Holmes continued, still overcome with chagrin. “But I should have spotted it. Am I forgiven?”

“You are.”

I should perhaps have been more reproachful than I was. Largely, however, I was focused on our imminent escape. I was waiting for Holmes to give the prearranged signal, so that I could put my part of the plan into action. All other considerations were secondary.

“Thank you.” Holmes turned back to Conroy. “So, you have obligingly shown your cards, and I am now under no illusion that I have been outplayed. I should like, though, to have a word with your partner in crime. I have dealt with the monkey; now I wish to speak to the organ grinder.”

Conroy gave a little start, then nodded. “R’luhlloig told me you might make such a request.”

“It is not too much to ask. I believe R’luhlloig is as keen to renew acquaintance as I am.”

Renew acquaintance? I wondered if I had misheard. Had Holmes had some previous interaction with the Hidden Mind? If so, I was ignorant of it. Until this adventure began, this particular Outer God had been unknown to us.

Conroy laughed. “Very well then. I will overlook being referred to as a ‘monkey’ and permit you an audience with R’luhlloig. He will speak through me. Fair warning, though. The gun will remain trained upon you, and my finger will not leave the trigger. No sudden movements, please, and no tricks.”

“I would not dream of it,” said my companion.

Conroy steeled himself. Then, all at once, he stiffened. His face took on a different cast, becoming paler and weirdly attenuated. His eye sockets seemed to deepen, his brow to enlarge. His head hunched forward upon his neck, while his shoulders sagged somewhat.

The transformation took no more than a few seconds, and by the end we were looking at the same man, yet superimposed upon him there was another, one who was not as erect-spined and handsome as Nathaniel Whateley and who gazed upon us with a glittering-eyed intensity that was thoroughly disconcerting. This was neither Conroy nor Whateley, but a third party, an eldritch god incarnated in human form.

And then he spoke.

And then everything that was hitherto murky became crystal clear.

Appallingly so.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

A Well-Woven Web

“MR HOLMES,” SAID R’LUHLLOIG. THE VOICE issuing from the mouth of Nathaniel Whateley had changed somewhat. The accent was markedly more anglicised, with a certain wheedling, spidery cadence that I thought I recognised but could not immediately place. “The years have not been kind. What are you, forty? Forty-one? Yet one might easily take you for a decade older.”

“I am not alone in having changed,” replied Holmes. “You have undergone far greater alterations than I.”

“But you have deteriorated, sir, while I have improved. I am enhanced beyond measure. He who stands before you today is to his former self as the sun is to the moon. No longer am I a pallid reflection of other light; I am a mighty blaze!”

“What has not changed is your egotism.”

“Is it egotistical to extol oneself when one is a god?” Holmes’s interlocutor smirked. “I think not. Gods are, by definition, superior beings. We have no call for modesty. And a god is all the greater when he is one who has ascended to that empyrean acme from the lowly status of a man. I made myself divine. You cannot denigrate that achievement.”

“I have no intention to,” said Holmes. “I can only marvel at it.”

“Holmes?” I said. “I do not understand. You and R’luhlloig are talking familiarly, as though on close terms.”

“Ah, the ally,” said R’luhlloig. “The faithful Watson.” He studied me intently, his head oscillating from side to side with slow, pendulum-like precision. “You, too, have succumbed to the ravages of time, sir, if not as markedly as your colleague. Somewhat thicker around the midriff, somewhat thinner of hair.”

I found his scrutiny discomfiting, the more so since his words implied that this was not our first meeting. Yet how could it not be?

“You have known loss,” R’luhlloig continued, his gaze seeming to penetrate deeper into me. “There is a seam of grief within you, a black fissure that will not close. A loved one. A wife. She was torn from you, and a piece of your heart will forever be missing. How sad.”

“I… I…”

“No. No need to reply, Doctor. Whatever you are fumbling to utter, be it pithy comeback or mulish lament, it is meaningless to me. A god, remember? I have risen so far above human concerns, they are like motes of dust to a star.”

“You are fond of the astronomical simile,” Holmes said. “That is not surprising. Perhaps you have not sloughed off your old skin as completely as you would have us believe. More than a trace remains.”

“There are many things I have not forgotten, Mr Holmes,” said R’luhlloig. “Many aspects of my mortal life are lodged indelibly in my memory – not least its termination. How can I not recall that? And how can I disregard him who was the instigator of it?”

“You brought your death on yourself.”

“Not so. Had you not interfered, had you and I not fought hand-to-hand like two brawling hooligans, all would have been well. Instead, I became the victim of the very fate I had planned for you. In the event, it has proved to be for the best.”

“Then perhaps you should be offering thanks,” said Holmes, “instead of planning a horrible death for me.”

R’luhlloig chuckled throatily. “Still a quip ever at the ready. That much has not changed. As it happens, I am not grateful to you, Mr Holmes. Of course I am not. Nor, though this may come as a surprise, am I angry with you. I am resolved that you must perish, but I desire your demise not out of spite or peevishness or any other petty motive like that. It is tidiness, that is all. It sets things right and clears away a potential impediment. In hindsight, you see, you did me a favour in that cavern beneath Shadwell. You killed me, but at the same time you set me free.”

Now, at last, I knew who R’luhlloig was. The realisation was like a blow to the gut.

“Moriarty,” I breathed.

Once more those beady eyes fixed upon me. “Doctor, you have caught up with the rest of the class. Finally! I was debating whether to put you in the corner with a dunce’s hat on.”

“But…”

R’luhlloig held up a forestalling hand. “No. Let’s not hear any of it. ‘But I saw Professor Moriarty drown. I saw him hauled down into that pool by Nyarlathotep. He is dead. He has to be.’ The evidence of your own senses tells you the contrary. I am not dead. Rather, I have transcended. I have attained godhood.”

“How?”

“Once I realised I was doomed – I was being drawn deeper and deeper into the black depths of the pool and there was no escaping the grip of Nyarlathotep’s tentacle – I resigned myself to the inevitable. I let go of the chain I was holding onto, the other end of which was attached to Mr Holmes and by which I was dragging him down with me. In that moment, I made a decision. Nyarlathotep could have me, but he could not have my adversary as well. My soul, and mine alone, would be surrendered to the Crawling Chaos. I would not share that destiny with another, certainly not with the man who had upset my scheme to have godhood conferred upon me. For I still, even as the air in my lungs gave out and the need to breathe grew overwhelming, harboured the ambition of becoming deified. I merely had to accept that I had forgone the opportunity of doing it one way; therefore I must do it another. In that aim, Nyarlathotep was key.”

“You offered yourself to him voluntarily,” said Holmes.

“The ultimate sacrifice. Whereas I had tried to give him you, your brother, the good doctor here and that policeman in exchange for divine power, now I was giving him a single prize greater than the sum of the four of you: me.”

“If only you had elected to take that tack to begin with. It would have saved us all a lot of bother.”

“Snipe away, Mr Holmes, if it makes you feel better,” said R’luhlloig. Now that I knew he was Professor Moriarty, I could not mistake the snide, condescending tone. Deified or not, he spoke as Moriarty had. “To Nyarlathotep I submitted wholeheartedly. He took my all. He thought of me as sustenance, a feast, but I had other plans. What he had not reckoned with was my indomitable will. I determined that my soul was not mere god food. It was not to be digested. I became, rather, a force within him, insulated, a discrete entity. I resisted being absorbed and instead became the one who did the absorbing. Little by little I fed off Nyarlathotep from the inside.”

“Like a tapeworm.”

“Not an inaccurate analogy, if reductive. I grew fat on his power. I was a parasite within, and him all unknowing. He began to weaken and I strengthened. Soon the Crawling Chaos ceased to be an inchoate mass. I used Nyarlathotep’s amorphousness against him, reshaping him, fashioning him in a new image from the inside out. I was the hidden mind within him, gradually coming to the fore. How long did it take? I cannot say. Time passes differently for the gods. Minutes to them can be hours; hours, eons. Each second is an eternity, and eternity a second. There is no temporal linear flow to it, either, as far as they are concerned: no past, present or future. The gods stand outside time, able to observe it much as we might observe a cube in space, a three-dimensional object that we may turn over, look under, revolve, stand on its end… I apologise. Some concepts cannot readily be conveyed in words. At any rate, whether it took a year or forever or the blink of an eye, Nyarlathotep ceased to exist as he had hitherto been known, and in his place was R’luhlloig.”

“A new Outer God.”

“One born, phoenix-like, from the ashes of a man. Who else but James Moriarty could have made that leap?”

“Congratulations would be in order,” said Holmes, “were you not already congratulating yourself so fulsomely.”

R’luhlloig regarded my companion with lofty contempt. “These efforts to irk me smack of desperation. What result are you hoping for? To goad me into some drastic error of judgement? To provoke me until I shoot you dead out of sheer irritation? Believe me when I say that your barbs find no purchase. I am a god, and you are not even a nuisance.”

“It is clear, nevertheless, that you still hold a grudge against me, Moriarty.”

“‘R’luhlloig’, if you would.”

Holmes puffed out a breath of air dismissively. “Since you insist. R’luhlloig. It is clear, too, that in spite of my being so apparently insignificant, you have gone to a great deal of trouble to effect my capture. You convinced Nathaniel Whateley to relocate to England.”

“I did not. It was his own choice.”

“Then you convinced Zachariah Conroy to follow him to these shores.”

“That, yes, I had a hand in,” said R’luhlloig. “Conroy wished to visit revenge upon Whateley, and since Whateley happened to be living in London, your stamping ground, it seemed serendipitous. Conroy would go after Whateley, and I would capitalise on that situation by using it to go after you. I am not one to turn down a convenient opportunity when it presents itself.”

“Doubtless you also arranged for Whateley to tell the Dagon Club about the expedition up the Miskatonic River. What seemed like foolish indiscretion on Whateley’s part was in fact artful contrivance.”

“After hearing such a confession, your brother and the other members of his silly little cabal would be apt to remember Whateley, while at the same time dismissing him as a garrulous dilettante. The name Nathaniel Whateley would be fixed in their minds, and by association that of Zachariah Conroy, so that should your investigation happen to hit the doldrums, there was dear Mycroft primed with this puff of wind to send you on your way again. Whateley himself had no idea why he mentioned the expedition. It was simply in answer to some instinctive inner prompting.”

“From you.”

“All part of laying the groundwork. It has been inevitable that I must despatch you at some point. I have striven to bring about that end in a way that is as entertaining as possible to myself, and perhaps also, in some manner, to you.”

“You insist upon making little of it, R’luhlloig,” said Holmes, “but the distinct impression remains that I matter to you. That is why you created such a well-woven web to enmesh me. You see in me someone who can hamper you in your broader objectives.”

“No, Mr Holmes!” R’luhlloig declared, but the vexation in his tone belied the denial. “Not in the least. I am in no way troubled by you.”

“You showed Watson and me your subjugation of Cathuria in the Dreamlands. Was that simply to impress upon us how potent and bellicose you are?”

“Yes!”

“And not the act of someone insecure about his accomplishments? A swaggering bully who masks his lack of self-worth by boasting about the number of his victims? Watson has had me dub you ‘the Napoleon of crime’ in one of his stories, and I am wondering if the Napoleon comparison is not apt. The real Napoleon, after all, compensated for his shortcomings by conquering half of Europe. He was a posturing popinjay, a man who behaved less like a general and more like a boy pushing tin soldiers back and forth across the sitting-room carpet, until Wellington came along and made him tidy them away.”

“Mr Holmes!” R’luhlloig boomed.

But Holmes was not to be shouted down. “And I see abundant similarities between him and you. You have begun waging a war. You have marshalled the Outer Gods and aligned them against the Great Old Ones, cementing their loyalty to you by giving them an enemy upon whom to direct their ire. You have thrown down a gauntlet, and it will surely be picked up. The open challenge the Outer Gods have delivered to the Old Ones – Watson and I saw it in our vision of the Dreamlands – is too inflammatory to be ignored. Like sleeping bears, the Old Ones will not care for being prodded and will surely lash out. Is becoming divine not enough for you? It seems you will not rest until you have sparked all-out, cosmos-wide conflict.”

“And won it and established myself as supreme god of all.”

“For what? To make up for some fundamental inadequacy within your being. Where does it end? You would tear apart the entire universe in the hope of filling this gnawing emptiness inside, but where will that leave you? You will be emperor of ruins. Somewhere in your heart – a black, shrivelled organ, to be sure – there is a voice, and it is telling you that you will never be content. Even after your war is over and you have everything you could wish for, it will still whisper to you that you are James Moriarty, failed academic, failed occultist, failed human, failed divinity…”

“My name is not—”

“Failed everything. The kindest thing you can do for yourself, Moriarty, is abandon this course. Look at you. You stand there fuming. If I, a mere man, can render you thus – you, a god – then you must truly fear me. And if you fear me, then you cannot be a god.”

R’luhlloig looked fit to burst. His entire frame was quivering. To say that Holmes had struck a nerve would be an understatement. He had struck oil, and the stuff was gushing to the surface, propelled by tremendous pressures.

“DAMN YOU, SHERLOCK HOLMES!” R’luhlloig roared. He seemed to be growing before our very eyes, the body of Nathaniel Whateley swelling, unable to trammel the full wrath of a god. Veins stood out. Sinews strained. There were a few seconds in which I wondered whether he might actually explode.

The nightgaunt appeared to think this a possibility. The creature began backing warily away from R’luhlloig.

That was when Holmes gave the signal: a downward-chopping motion of his hand. I noticed it out of the corner of my eye. I was so distracted by R’luhlloig, I almost missed it.

Now, while R’luhlloig was lost in a trembling paroxysm of fury, were we presented with our greatest likelihood of success.

We had our opening. We seized it.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

A Terrible Tug-of-War

HOLMES HAD PLACED THE LANTERN ON THE BARN floor, out of direct line of sight from the door, and left it burning low. Together we had distributed the spare straw so as to form a scattered line leading from the lantern to the ghoul’s cage. We had doused the straw in excess lantern oil.

Holmes called it a fuse.

I now lit the fuse by knocking the lantern over with my foot. Its glass chimney shattered. The little oil that was left in its reservoir spilled out. Its flame ignited this dribble of oil and spread quickly to the straw. No less quickly, fire rippled along the fuse, reaching the cage in a heartbeat.

Holmes, meanwhile, lunged for R’luhlloig. The god in human guise was slow to anticipate the attack. Too late did he realise that his captives were staging an escape. We had been awaiting the crucial moment when the attention of our opponent – whether that was Conroy or, as it transpired, R’luhlloig – was unfocused. Holmes had been confident that this moment would come, as long as he was able to play the role of gadfly with sufficient aplomb. Now, taking three swift steps, he grasped R’luhlloig’s gun arm. The gun went off, R’luhlloig squeezing the trigger by reflex. The bullet buzzed past my ear and ricocheted off the barn wall, taking a chunk out of the brickwork. The report brought the ghoul snapping awake. The creature had already been stirring, disturbed by the sound of raised voices. All at once it was on all fours, fully alert, eyes wide, ears erect.

Holmes yanked R’luhlloig forwards, all the way into the barn. He spun him round and at the same time, with a twist of his wrist, disarmed him, plucking the gun free.

I, for my part, was making for the door. Not only was the barn rapidly filling with smoke, the “bomb” to which our fuse was attached was about to detonate. The straw that lined the bottom of the ghoul’s cage had started to smoulder. The ghoul, registering this, let out a shriek of panic, even as fingers of flame began flickering up from its bedding. The creature hurled itself bodily against the bars of the cage. Panic became blind terror. Three times it struck the inside of its iron prison before, abruptly, the door sprang open.

As part of our preparations, Holmes had removed the pins from the cage door’s hinges. Stealthily, every movement slow and steady so as not to rouse the ghoul, he had levered out each pin using, for a jemmy, the rusty nail he had found on the floor. For ten very tense minutes – while I kept an ear to the barn door in case someone should approach – he had worked on the hinges, at pains not to cause any untoward sound or vibration. Since then, the cage door had merely been resting in its frame, with only the lock holding it in position. Had the ghoul awoken sooner and somehow discovered that it was not properly confined, it would no doubt have savaged us. I am sure we would not have survived the encounter.

As it was, the ghoul sprang free from its cage and made straight for the nearest living being. Like any terrified animal, it reacted to danger by going on the offensive.

R’luhlloig was closest; Holmes had manoeuvred him directly between himself and the ghoul. R’luhlloig half turned, sensing the onrush of the beast behind him. He gave a cry that could have been a command or a yell of protest. Either way, it did not deter the ghoul. Jaws clamped around his head. Fangs sank in. Now R’luhlloig screamed. So did Zachariah Conroy. Both of them, in the body they shared that was neither’s original, howled at once, their two voices emanating from the same throat, a duet of pain with one providing the melody, the other a descant, although which was whose, I cannot say.

The nightgaunt, sensing its master’s distress, rushed into the barn. Barging past both me and Holmes, it threw itself upon the ghoul and tried to pry that creature free from R’luhlloig. The ghoul resisted strenuously, lashing out backwards at its assailant. Blood was pouring out around its jaws and it would not let go of its prey. The three of them, monsters all, were engaged in a kind of terrible tug-of-war, as the nightgaunt pulled at the ghoul and the ghoul bit harder into R’luhlloig.

All the while, the fire was spreading rapidly. The barn’s ancient, tinder-dry timber framework was the perfect fuel. Flames were reaching for the rafters. The smoke was becoming impenetrably thick.

Holmes hastened outside to join me. The three struggling figures within the barn were silhouettes amidst the inferno. R’luhlloig’s screams were just audible above the mounting din of the flames, and they reached a new pitch of agony as the nightgaunt at last succeeded in separating him from the ghoul. The ghoul was hauled off him, but not without taking a large chunk of his neck with it. R’luhlloig sank to his knees, his head lolling horrifically to one side. Ragged tendons and torn musculature stood exposed, and blood jetted from his severed carotid.

“Enough gawping,” said Holmes. “The door, Watson.”

He and I bent to the task of shutting the barn door. A last glimpse through the narrowing aperture showed me the nightgaunt and the ghoul wrestling in the midst of the conflagration, the latter snarling, the former imperiously silent. They were two wild animals locked in bitter conflict, oblivious to all else, and I cared not which won. I wished the both of them would rend each other to pieces.

The door slammed. Holmes turned the large key.

We staggered back, away from the barn, and watched it burn.

* * *

It burned for three hours. By the end, it was a crumpled, skeletal hulk, with a few stalwart flames still licking along spars of timber that jutted out at all angles, mottled black and ash-grey. A tremendous heat still radiated from the smouldering debris, and an immense plume of smoke hung in the morning sky, drifting slowly westward across the marshes under the prevailing wind. Now and then something snapped or creaked loudly amidst the wreckage, and there would rise the occasional flurry of embers like a column of glowing gnats circling one another.

We had stayed in order to make sure that the raging inferno consumed everything. I had feared that the nightgaunt, at least, might prove resistant to immolation and somehow break free, but my concerns were not borne out by events. Once the barn’s roof came down – in a sudden, thundering collapse – it seemed indisputable that none of the three beings trapped inside the structure could have survived. Nonetheless, we had to be certain.

As the smoke dwindled, we ventured as close as we could to the ruin and peered in. The first charred corpse we were able to distinguish was that of the ghoul. It had been sundered in two by the nightgaunt, ripped at the waist, and the halves lay side by side, limbs distended and brittle-looking. The nightgaunt was comparatively intact. It was hunched over, prostrate, like a Mussulman praying, and there was no question that it was dead; but its leathery hide had not so much burned as shrivelled. Its wings were tattered parodies of their former selves, but the rest of it seemed baked rather than incinerated, as though it had cooked within its skin.

After a moment or so I perceived that there was something beneath it. The nightgaunt was crouching over the remains of Nathaniel Whateley. I remarked upon this fact to Holmes, who said, “Fascinating. The nightgaunt was trying to protect its master even in extremis. It was hoping to shield him from the flames with its body. Such devotion.”

It had failed in the attempt, of course, for the corpse it sheltered was as charcoal-black as that of the ghoul, and as motionless. The body had been drawn into a foetal position by the tightening of its sinews as they burned. The mouth hung open in a grinning, lipless rictus, and the eye sockets were rimmed with a crust of boiled vitreous humour.

“Is that the end of him?” I said.

“Of Whateley? Yes,” said Holmes. “Conroy too. But R’luhlloig? Can one kill a god?”

It was then that the head of the corpse moved.

It rolled on what remained of its neck, turning towards Holmes and me, as though reacting to the sound of our voices. Those empty eye sockets fixed upon us, and it spoke. A thin, papery rustle issued from its scorched throat, just discernible above the crackling of the dying conflagration.

“Mr Holmes,” it said. “You cannot think… that you are rid of me… so easily.”

Just about every hair I had upon my person stood erect. I had seen some ghastly sights, but this talking carbonised cadaver surpassed them all.

Holmes himself, if not dumbstruck, certainly seemed to need a moment to gather his wits before responding.

“One could be forgiven for hoping,” said he.

“Only fools… hope,” said R’luhlloig, “and you… are no fool. You have… incommoded me. That is… inarguable. You have caused me… considerable suffering.”

“Then today has not been a waste.”

“But you have not… defeated me. Not even… close.” It was apparent that to speak in this manner required the expenditure of a great deal of power by R’luhlloig. Animating the seared, inert shell of Nathaniel Whateley took effort, even for a god. “All you… have done is… harden my resolve. I shall not… deviate from my plans. And you? You shall be the… object of them. I shall be… coming for you… and I shall… bring hell with me.”

I shot him.

Holmes had returned my Webley to me shortly after we escaped the burning barn. I had had my fill of R’luhlloig’s invective and could stomach no more. I unleashed round after round at that vile, blackened head. From a range of half a dozen yards the bullets blasted it to bits. Nothing was left but a shattered brainpan and lumps of grizzled cerebral tissue.

“That’s enough from you,” I said, my ears ringing from the gunshots. “You have made your point.”

I turned to Holmes, whose grey eyes twinkled with amusement.

“Mere hollow threats,” I said, pocketing the revolver. “An attempt by R’luhlloig to save face.”

Holmes shrugged. “Well, we shall see, Watson. We shall see.” He rubbed his hands together. “At any rate, we have a long walk ahead of us, back to civilisation. Let us gather what victuals we can from the farmhouse, and be on our way.”

* * *

The farmhouse had not been touched by the fire, save for the odd singed roof tile. The barn was just sufficiently far from it that the flames had not spread. We rummaged in the kitchen for food. We found also, in an upstairs bedroom, the Necronomicon. This Holmes slipped into his portmanteau alongside his own copy, purloined from the British Museum.

“They make a nice matching pair,” he said.

The sun was high, the sky was bright. Together, Sherlock Holmes and I struck out across the marshes along a raised pathway. Birds trilled in the hedgerows. Holmes whistled a tune. A stranger might be forgiven for thinking us simply a pair of friends out for a country stroll, neither of us with a care in the world.

Yet, at our backs, a pall of smoke hung on the horizon; a legacy of horrors past and a sobering portent of things to come.

EPILOGUE

FIVE YEARS LATER, ON A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT upon Dartmoor, Sherlock Holmes and I were once again running for our lives.

It was our second attempt to banish the phantom hound, and we were using the same method as before, that of offering ourselves as bait. I shall not rehearse the details herewith. I shall simply summarise. Where before we failed, this time we succeeded. The beast entered, unawares, the portal we had conjured in the Great Grimpen Mire, was swallowed up, and was thus returned whence it had come.

Not long afterwards, Holmes informed me that I was entitled, if I so wished, to write further stories about him. This Holmes, at the turn of the new century, was a different man from the beleaguered, haunted Holmes of 1895, when he had been at his nadir. This Holmes was sprightlier, shot through with a steely sense of purpose, altogether invigorated. He saw no harm in my resuming the lucrative practice of penning sanitised versions of our adventures together, and neither, in the event, did I. I had recovered sufficiently from my grief over Mary and could see now that neither I nor The Sign of Four was to blame for her death; the guilt lay solely and squarely with the three Sikhs.

I duly turned in a novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles, which was serialised in The Strand in 1901 and collected as a bound volume the following year. It received great acclaim and healthy sales, and I continued thereafter producing – intermittently – a string of further such narratives, both long and short. I ceased in 1927 and my only literary output since then consists of this trilogy. These books I consider my final testament, in which I offer a rendition of the truth about Sherlock Holmes after all the fictions I have published, much as Zachariah Conroy’s journal served to set straight the lies he had told about the Miskatonic expedition.

The simple fact is that the resurrection of Professor Moriarty as R’luhlloig, far from cowing Holmes, had a galvanising effect upon him. It sharpened him, as the whetstone does the blade. A man like him needed a nemesis, it seems, even if he had not realised it, or indeed wanted it. Holmes now had a specific focus for his talents. He had an enemy with a name and an agenda. R’luhlloig had declared war not merely on the Great Old Ones but on Sherlock Holmes, and Holmes rallied to the cause and rose to the challenge.

How that war impinged upon him, and upon the earth, will be the subject of the third and final volume of these memoirs, detailing events of 1910. It began on the rugged chalky coast of Sussex, but its ramifications stretched across worlds and brought us face to face with danger in a myriad of guises, not least in the shape of creatures from the briny depths who earned the sobriquet “sea-devils” and who, I will say, were both more and less than that name might imply.