The Cthulhu Casebooks

by James Lovegrove

  “So you jiggered the lock on the door and—”

  “Oh tush, Mr Holmes! Jiggered the lock? Nothing so tawdrily practical as that. All I needed to do was summon Miss Tasker and convince her to let me out without checking whether I had returned the book to the shelves. She did so most obligingly.”

  “You bribed her, then?” I said. “To turn a blind eye?”

  “Again, tawdrily practical, Dr Watson, and unlikely to have worked with someone like that, so dedicated to her vocation. No, again this was an instance of my persuasiveness. I have a knack of getting my way, when I wish it. I possess the silveriest of silver tongues.”

  “Professor,” said Holmes, “much though I find this verbal joust entertaining, I feel we must get down to brass tacks.”

  “Do let’s.” Moriarty rubbed his hands together.

  “I am of the view that you pose a great danger – to London, to the empire, perhaps to the world. You have begun trading with a being of immense power in order to accrue power for yourself. That is inordinately rash, and I am here to tell you to stop. Desist at once. Relinquish the Necronomicon to me, so that I may return it to its rightful place in Sequestered Volumes, and abandon all your dealings with whichever god you have attached yourself to. It is not too late. You can still turn back. This course you have embarked upon will lead only to your ruin, as it has for many others.”

  “Your concern is most touching.”

  “Did you not learn your lesson that night you conjured up a monster in your university rooms? Did that not frighten you into seeing sense?”

  “You have been diligent, sir. Enquiring into my background. I should be flattered. But to answer your question, no, it did not. On the contrary, it gave me a glimpse of the limitless majesty of the Great Old Ones and their ilk, their sheer ineffable might. It gave me a taste of greatness. It was intoxicating!”

  “Nothing will come of these dabblings except your destruction,” Holmes persisted. “I know enough about Cthulhu and his kith and kin to know that with absolute certainty. You cannot master a force so ancient and deadly. You risk unleashing Hell in your efforts to command a god.”

  “Or,” said Moriarty, “I risk becoming like unto a god myself. The game is then definitely worth the candle, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “That is your goal? Divinity?”

  “Something close.” Moriarty sighed, as though wistful. “I have studied asteroids – their orbits, their trajectories, their elemental composition. I have contemplated the stars and the endless gulfs of space. I started by looking out beyond Earth through telescopes, but as time wore on my astrophysical researches became more metaphysical. I turned from science to older disciplines, from the new orthodoxy to longer-enduring traditions. The more I learned, the less it seemed that we in the modern era, for all our advancements, know. Brute logic had told me that the cosmos is cold and inimical. I discovered that, at its birth, it spawned entities who bore those same traits, which made them perfectly fitted to their environment. They are gods, but not the kind that the vast majority of people worship nowadays. They do not love us. Neither, for that matter, do they hate us. They are supremely, supernally indifferent to us. They use us from time to time, as a beekeeper uses his bees; our souls are like honey to them, a side-product of our lives, a sweetmeat. Why should we not use them in return, if we can, if we are bold enough? Why should we not claw something back from them for ourselves?”

  “I am warning you, Moriarty…”

  “No.” The head oscillated more intently than ever. The hooded eyes stared at us with a disconcerting fixity. “I am warning you. Both of you. The time has come for you to take a step back. I have indulged you so far, tolerated you. I will not do so further. Go and be a detective, Mr Holmes. Go and solve crimes, unmask murderers, recover stolen property. Help the heir who has been swindled out of a legacy, the woman who is on the receiving end of a blackmail demand over some past indiscretion, the innocent who has fallen prey to ruffians. That is what you are best suited for. Keep your friend Dr Watson by your side and devote your huge intelligence to a life of sleuthing. It is likely to bring you riches and renown. There is no harm in that, nor any shame.”

  He leaned closer to us. Something in his tone of voice, in the glitter of his eyes, was making me feel ill at ease – but also strangely acquiescent, even docile. With his words he wove a kind of tapestry which, to me, seemed attractive and desirable. The future he depicted had nothing wrong with it that I could perceive. A life of adventure and public service, and no monsters, no gods, no hideous immortal beings from the ancient past. Why not?

  “Yes,” he continued, languidly, lullingly, “you know in your heart of hearts that that is what you want. You want certainties, not vagaries. Logic, not mysticism. The empirical, not the imprecise. Keep that in mind as you depart now. Leave alone what should be left well alone by a man such as yourself. It will go hard for you otherwise.”

  * * *

  I recall nothing from that moment on until some while later, when I once again found myself seated opposite Holmes at Baker Street, the clock in our sitting room chiming midnight. I had no memory of leaving Moriarty’s house, or of crossing London. It was all a blank.

  Holmes was wreathed in a haze of pipe smoke, and was tapping out the dottle and refilling the bowl as I came to with a start.

  “Ah, there you are, old chap,” he said. “Back in the land of the living.”

  “I was not aware that I had been absent from it. And yet – when did we get in? Did we walk here? Drive?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I cannot tell you. The past few hours have been like a dream, the sort one cannot recall upon waking. I myself only came around from the reverie at a little after eleven. You were clearly deeper under Moriarty’s spell than I.”

  “Spell? As in magic?”

  He barked a laugh. “Hardly. Hypnosis, more like. I daresay he employed an element of something less mundane and more eldritch in the process, but the basis of it was good old animal magnetism. A certain rhythmic vocal cadence, a compelling gaze, words that worm their way into one’s ear and impinge upon one’s subconscious… The same technique no doubt enabled him to ingratiate himself with Gong-Fen, pilfer the Necronomicon right from under Miss Tasker’s nose, and cajole Thacker into hurling himself off the parapet of Waterloo Bridge. In a sense we were lucky. Moriarty could have done far worse than merely send us home. But perhaps, when all is said and done, he is right.”

  “Right? In what respect?”

  “Perhaps we should do as he counsels and leave well enough alone.” Sombrely, pensively, Holmes lit his pipe. “I quite fancy the idea of being a mere consulting detective. It is all I have ever wanted from life. The alternative presently before us is too… extreme. Too convoluted. I have a penchant for the outré, but there is outré and then there is…” He half smiled. “Outer God. It would seem wise to follow his advice and back out now, while we still can, before we wade in over our heads and begin to drown.”

  I nodded.

  I shook my head.

  Then I nodded again.

  Then, with great vehemence and finality, I shook my head once more.

  “Listen to yourself, Holmes. Is that you talking, or Moriarty?”

  “It is I, of course.”

  “No. He has wormed his way inside your skull. He is preying on your qualms, your misgivings. You must not let him.”

  “You seem adamant about that. How so?”

  “I don’t know. No, I do.” I undid the top two buttons of my shirt, then pulled my collar open to expose my wounded shoulder. “See? See this scar?”

  Holmes surveyed the deep, puckered cicatrix. “Nasty,” he opined with a wince. “The lizard man certainly took his pound of flesh.”

  “He did, and it still causes me pain. The ache has not yet gone away and possibly never will. Cold weather like this only seems to exacerbate it. The scar is a constant reminder of Ta’aa and Roderick Harrowby and our ill-fated excursion. It will be with me fore
ver. I have at last come to terms with it and everything that it means, but only recently, since meeting you and becoming embroiled in these shadow-creature killings. If there is any redeeming feature in what I went through, it is this: I am ready to confront the inexplicable and the otherworldly. I may not like it, but I am the product of the trial I endured in the Arghandab Valley. And I have not reached this accommodation with myself only to give up now, simply because an unrepentant scoundrel like Professor James Moriarty has told me to. Neither should you.”

  Holmes regarded me through the smoke, then clapped his hands.

  “Capital fellow! Well said. I was merely testing your resolve.”

  Was he? I had my doubts.

  “You have passed with flying colours,” he continued. “Moriarty cannot surely have thought he could deter us with a few well-formed sentences and a little mesmeric legerdemain. He was giving us a sporting chance, that is all. It was a demonstration, more than anything else, of his supreme self-confidence. He does not rate us as opponents.”

  His expression hardened.

  “And that is a mistake,” he concluded icily, “a great mistake, and one that he shall rue.”

  * * *

  The following morning Holmes vanished after breakfast, without a word. He returned half an hour later looking grimly satisfied.

  “Where have you been?” I enquired.

  “The telegraph office. I could not leave our business with Moriarty unfinished, he believing that we had been swayed by his mesmerism. I have sent him a wire stating in no uncertain terms that we are worthy of his notice, and shall continue our investigation into the deaths in Shadwell. He was wrong to have dismissed us as if we were beneath his concern.”

  “That is tantamount to a declaration of war.”

  “Then so be it,” said Holmes with a determination that I wished I shared. “Moriarty has made an enemy of us, and now must face the consequences.”

  THE NEXT NEW MOON WAS TO FALL ON NEW YEAR’S Eve. We had until then to stop Moriarty presenting another victim to the Shadwell shadows and thus cementing further his status with the demonic god to whom he had pledged allegiance, and whose power he hoped to exploit for his own gain.

  That meant more hours spent in Sequestered Volumes. Miss Tasker was still willing to assist but a certain chilly gulf had opened up between her and us. Our failure to bring back the Necronomicon as promised had been a disappointment to her, and although she thanked us for trying, she was obviously demoralised. Holmes insisted he would recover the book eventually, and she consented not to tell her superiors about its purloining for another couple of weeks. She was too dutiful, however, to keep the fact a secret from them any longer than that.

  Lacking a copy of the Necronomicon, we had no ready method of establishing what rites Moriarty might be using and with which particular god, out of the whole dark pantheon, he had forged a relationship. Miss Tasker knew of only two other copies of the book in public ownership and thus accessible to all. One was at the National Museum of Prague, but in order to view it an application had to be lodged at least three months in advance and a twenty-page form filled out, the enquirer then being subjected to a tortuous, labyrinthine bureaucratic process with no guarantee of success at the end of it. The other was all the way over in the United States, at Miskatonic University in Arkham, Massachusetts. In both instances, time was against us. It would take too long to secure permission to see the Prague Necronomicon and it was too far to travel to consult the Arkham Necronomicon and return before New Year. On that front, we were stymied.

  It was not a happy Christmas for us. Church bells rang, families sat down to roast goose, gifts were exchanged and children were thrilled with their new toys – while Holmes and I felt a cloud hanging oppressively over us. Our rooms remained undecorated with festive ornaments, no evidence that the season of goodwill was upon us save for a single solitary Christmas card from Holmes’s brother Mycroft perched on the mantelpiece. Holmes had not to my knowledge reciprocated the gesture, and this served to deepen my melancholy, for it made me think of my own older brother, who at that time was still alive but suffering one of his periodic bouts of indigence. With his finances straitened by his excessive expenditure on alcohol, and his conduct likewise impaired, he had been evicted from his current accommodation and was of no fixed abode. Would that I could have sent him, my only living family, a card, or better yet paid him a call, but his whereabouts were unknown to me.

  On Christmas Day itself, Mrs Hudson invited us to join her and a few friends downstairs for a festive meal. We declined. We remained in our rooms, listening to the laughter and chatter below. Crackers snapped. Stemware clinked. Voices rose. Jokes were told. We could not have joined in the merriment had we tried. It was profoundly depressing.

  A dreary Boxing Day was followed by that empty period between Christmas and New Year, that anticlimactic aftermath which is neither one thing nor the other, neither holiday nor the full resumption of routine. Snow fell in listless showers, enough to garnish the tree branches with white but not enough to settle and form a thick blanket on the ground; all it produced instead was a grey patina on the pavements and cold brown mud on the roads. That and a knifing north wind deterred one from going out. The British Museum was closed, besides, so we had nowhere we needed to go.

  Holmes paced like an animal in a cage. He walked circles in the sitting room, his brow furrowed so deeply I feared he would be left with a permanently ingrained scowl. A pipe was never far from his lips. The delivery boy from the tobacconist’s came daily with a packet of shag for him. He scraped at his violin from time to time, but distractedly, without conviction. It reached the point where he became so uncommunicative, I was lucky if he even grunted at me.

  At one point I suggested that we should simply have done with it and go over to Moriarty’s and thrash him into submission. This proposal received very short shrift.

  “The man is hardly likely to give us the opportunity, is he? He has only to deploy that mesmeric influence upon us again to render us helpless. He might even use it to make us turn on each other this time.”

  “What if we were to lie in wait and ambush him? Fasten a gag around his mouth before he can speak? Failing that, the judicious application of a blackjack…”

  “But even if we were to incapacitate Moriarty himself, there is another threat to consider. The god with which he has affiliated himself remains at large. The shadow aspects which this entity can assume are not necessarily going to go away even if Moriarty is taken out of the equation. They could well run rampant, making them as much of a present danger, if not more so, than our wayward academic. No, Watson, we are better employed trying to defeat both enemies – Moriarty and the deity – in one fell swoop. Would that I knew how.”

  Things thus stood at an impasse. Holmes, try though he might, simply could not think his way to a solution to the problem.

  Then two events transpired in close succession which helped bring the entire affair to a head.

  IT WAS THE MORNING OF NEW YEAR’S EVE. IF Moriarty were to offer up another sacrifice to his chosen deity, he would surely do it that night, to coincide with the dark of the moon.

  Holmes’s mood, as a consequence, was itself of the darkest. He had reached a nadir of frustration and self-recrimination. When I went to bed the previous evening I had left him sitting in his armchair, knees drawn up beneath his chin, hands clasped around his bony shins, staring into the middle distance. When I came downstairs in the morning he was in the exact same pose. All that had changed was that the room reeked more strongly than ever of tobacco smoke and the ashtray beside him was full to brimming with stubbed-out cigarettes.

  “Holmes, did you even sleep? If the pinkness of your eyes is anything to go by, I very much doubt it.”

  He twitched his head a fraction, like someone who had just heard a distant sound he could not identify. “Oh. What? Hum! Sleep? Perhaps. Possibly. Probably not.”

  “Well, at least get some food inside you. I shall
call down to Mrs Hudson. I believe I can smell her cooking some of her excellent devilled kidneys.”

  “Not hungry. How can I be? Someone in London is going to die tonight, die in the most horrible manner, and I am powerless to prevent it. I have no way of telling who it might be, whom in this city Moriarty has set his sights on. Even knowing that the sacrifice will take place somewhere in Shadwell is of no benefit. I cannot patrol an entire borough.”

  “Then bring in the police. Contact Inspector Gregson and enlist his aid.”

  “As far as Gregson is aware, the case is closed. We saw to that, remember? We bamboozled him into believing that Gong-Fen took his own life and the spate of deaths by emaciation is over. We cannot now go to him and confess that we lied, then hope that he will see fit to overlook that and offer us Scotland Yard’s full support. We’d be lucky if he didn’t throw us in jail. We are hoist with our own petard, Watson.”

  “How about the other fellow, then?” I said. “The one you also rate. What’s his name? Lester?”

  “Lestrade.”

  “Yes. We haven’t perjured ourselves to him yet, have we? We can try him.”

  “Really, Watson!” Holmes snorted with disdain, as though he had never heard anything so nonsensical. “If you have no worthwhile suggestions to offer, you would be better off not talking at all.”

  “I say, Holmes, you have no right to speak to me like that. I am only trying to help.”

  “Then don’t.”

  “What is wrong with the idea of engaging Lestrade rather than Gregson?”

  “Everything. For a start, it would put us in exactly the same predicament as if it were Gregson. We would have to account for why Gong-Fen Shou’s so-called ‘suicide’ has brought no end to the killings, and that would entail the risk of incriminating ourselves. Lestrade would want to know the reason we had omitted to tell Gregson the whole truth. We would lay ourselves open to the accusation of hampering the police in the course of an enquiry.”