The Cthulhu Casebooks

by James Lovegrove

  In this manner I fictionalised the not dissimilar events set forth above. I transposed them to the dramatic setting of the Aare Gorge and replaced the black, deceptively tranquil pool in the cave with the seething white maelstrom at the foot of the waterfall. It provided me with an opportunity to express the anguish I felt when I thought Holmes had died right in front of me, dragged underwater by Moriarty and Nyarlathotep, and the surprise and joy engendered by his return, all of it dusted with a liberal sprinkling of poetic licence.

  There was never, in truth, any journey across Europe, with an angered Moriarty dogging our footsteps; nor was there any visit to my home by a deformed, wizened book-collector who proved to be Holmes in one of his disguises. The so-called Park Lane Mystery – the murder by air-gun of Sir Ronald Adair at the hands of Colonel Sebastian Moran – did indeed occur, but not wholly as I have recounted. The emotions conveyed in those two tales, which bookend what some have called the Great Hiatus, are sincere. The content is largely fabricated.

  * * *

  Here, at any rate, was Holmes, freshly arisen from the pool. The loose end of the chain was wrapped about his forearm, and in his hands was the Triophidian Crown, which he had retrieved from the ground where it had fallen.

  He repeated his command to the cobra man and the other snake men: “N’rhn!” His voice carried enough authority at least to catch their attention and make them accede to his request, if only out of startlement. He had told them to halt, and they halted.

  It was a temporary measure at best, however, a mere stop-gap. While the mob of snake men paused, confusion writ large on their faces, Holmes installed the Trophidian Crown on his head.

  It was slightly too big for him, Moriarty having had at least two hat sizes on Holmes. It sat askew, balanced on his ears.

  That would be of no consequence as long as he could make the magical diadem work for him.

  I saw his brow furrow. I saw him concentrate intensely. His grey eyes lost focus. His jaw clenched.

  Tentatively at first, falteringly, the Trophidian Crown began to glow. A flicker of greenish light trembled across its tubular bronze contours. It was no brighter or more substantial than a will-o’-the-wisp, there and gone in an instant.

  Then it returned, stronger, more definite, as Holmes gained mastery of the crown. Although he had never worn the device before, he fathomed its workings with remarkable alacrity. Perhaps nobody else could have accomplished the feat so quickly.

  He projected into the snake men’s minds his thoughts, his will, his wishes. Almost immediately, the more biddable members of the mob stepped aside, moving from the dais. The less suggestible took a little longer to disperse, but one by one they did.

  Eventually only two remained, one of them being the cobra man. He and his fellow, who was possessed of yellow and black striping all over, were clearly the most independent and obstinate of the lot. They would not easily be subjugated. They stood firm, determined to finish what they had started and exact retribution on the three shackled humans. Their bodies quivered like violin strings as two opposing desires warred within them. On one side, bloodlust. On the other, Holmes’s prohibition.

  The yellow and black striped snake man surrendered. With a moue of rancour, he backed away from the stalagmite.

  The cobra man continued staunchly to defy Holmes. My companion frowned even harder. I could tell it was taking every ounce of his mental wherewithal to operate the crown. Unlike Moriarty he had not practised with it, nor did he have any innate preternatural knack for mesmerism. He had only his wit, intellect and forcefulness to draw on. It would be enough. It must be enough.

  The crown flared more brilliantly than ever, and at last the cobra man’s obstinacy was worn down. Capitulating, he too left the dais. He trudged all the way, shoulders sloped, like a scolded, recalcitrant child.

  Holmes hurried forward and fished in my pocket for my revolver and spare cartridges.

  “The manacle key went down with Moriarty,” he said, “and there is no time for lockpicking. I cannot do that and keep the snake men at bay. We shall simply have to eschew the niceties and take an unsubtle approach to releasing you.”

  He loaded the gun.

  “Avert your face, Watson.”

  The report, right by the side of my head, was ear-splittingly loud.

  The chain was severed.

  He shot at the other end of the chain.

  Manacles still encircled both my wrists, but I was free.

  In swift succession Holmes performed the same service for his brother and Gregson. The Seal of Unravelling on each bullet had no particular effect on the chains since they were simply links of forged metal, imbued with no magical or alchemical force. The bullets by themselves, however, were more than sufficient for the task of shattering them.

  “I shall probably be deaf in one ear for ever after,” said Mycroft, grousing.

  “You’re very welcome,” replied Holmes. “Now to make good our exit. To the pyramid! Mycroft, lead the way. Watson, help Gregson, will you?”

  The policeman was ashen-faced and unsteady on his feet. The strain of all he had seen and suffered in the past two days had taken its toll. I put my shoulder under his armpit, draped his arm round my neck, and supported him as we headed for the entrance to the vestibule at the pyramid’s base.

  Holmes, the Triophidian Crown still glowing on his head, snatched up the Necronomicon and wrapped the oilcloth around it. Tucking the book under his arm, he hastened to catch up with us.

  The snake men, led by the cobra man, roused themselves to follow.

  We ascended. It was torturously slow going. The stairs were steep. Mycroft, at the head of our small procession, found climbing so many of them in succession hard work, due to his poor physical condition and sheer size. I myself had Gregson to deal with. He was barely able to walk, just so much dead weight leaning on me. Holmes, at the rear, devoted the majority of his energy and attention to the Triophidian Crown. The snake men were pursuing us tenaciously up the stairs. They still thirsted for vengeance. Holmes was dampening down their ardour via the crown but not altogether successfully. Without him they would have sprinted after us full tilt and easily overtaken and overwhelmed us. As it was, they only shuffled, every step an effort. I could hear them below, muttering exhortations to one another, interspersed with threats against us. Holmes was giving it his all, but the snake men were nonetheless gradually gaining on us. Their collective resolve was proving harder and harder for him to curtail, while the crown made ever greater demands upon his mental resources.

  We were perhaps three-quarters of the way to the top when Mycroft shuddered to a complete halt. He planted his hands on his knees, panting and wheezing like a man with terminal emphysema.

  “Can’t… go on…” he gasped.

  “Damn it, of course you can,” I said. “You have to.”

  “Hardly… breathe…”

  “Don’t you dare give it up now. I forbid it.”

  “Doctor’s… orders… eh?”

  “Yes. Precisely.”

  I know not how he managed to get going again, but he did. He stirred his considerable bulk and placed one foot in front of the other, and thus we continued laboriously onward and upward. We were all but blind in the darkness, with only the Triophidian Crown affording any illumination. The susurration of the snake men’s footfalls grew louder at our backs. I began to despair of ever making it to the pyramid’s apex. The journey seemed unending, interminable, an uphill slog with no promise of a summit.

  Then, in an instant, the triangular aperture appeared ahead. We all picked up the pace, even Mycroft. Not far now. Almost there.

  One by one we passed through the doorway, into the pit Moriarty had excavated. Straight away Holmes set down the Necronomicon, then reached inside the obelisk, grasped the door and tugged. It would not budge. I settled Gregson on the bare earth floor of the pit and joined him, adding my strength to his. Still the door did not move.

  The snake men were almost at the
top now. The cobra man was in the vanguard. His eyes lit up as he saw us struggling with the door. Only a few more steps and he would have us.

  Holmes pushed me back and withdrew from the doorway himself.

  “Obviously it cannot be closed by conventional means,” said he. “I should have known as much. It is not that sort of portal.”

  He proceeded to repeat the incantation Moriarty had used, word for word.

  Nothing happened. The door did not move.

  I groped for my revolver and the box of cartridges. Was this what it had come down to? Shooting the snake men singly as they filed out from the pyramid? Well, so be it. I would despatch as many of them as I could, in order to buy time for the Holmes brothers and Gregson to find sanctuary.

  Holmes tried the incantation a second time, only now he replaced the word ktharl, “unlock”, with its antonym, tharl.

  The door duly swung shut, blocking out the cobra man’s startled, thwarted face and those of the snake men behind him.

  “Safe,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief. “For now. But we must keep going. It will take them but a moment to reopen the door.”

  “I would not be so sure,” said Holmes. “The inscription on it suggests otherwise. Look. Here. This part.” He ran a finger along the lines of R’lyehian text, translating aloud. “‘Only may one who is without become one who is within, by speaking the words enshrined in tradition.’ This is a door built to keep those below in their place.”

  There were infuriated hisses and howls from within the obelisk, and the thumping of fists on the inside of the door, but these subsided, and in the end the snake men could be heard tramping back downward to their dismal underground domain.

  And with that, it was over.

  OVER? WELL, NOT QUITE.

  At Holmes’s insistence, we set about re-burying the onyx obelisk. I would dearly have loved to call it a night and gone home. I was exhausted, near dead with fatigue. The same was true of Mycroft and Gregson, who had had a longer ordeal than Holmes and me. However, the pyramid and the underworld at its base could not be left accessible. The obelisk must be covered up before anyone else found it. There was no point putting it off until later.

  From the sexton’s hut Holmes commandeered an additional pair of shovels. He also broke into the church itself and appropriated a bottle of communion wine from the vestry, with which we fortified ourselves for the task ahead. This act of burglary was a crime, yes, and perhaps even a sin; but it was a desecration undertaken in order to aid us in rectifying a far more major desecration, and thus we concluded it was pardonable.

  Holmes undid our manacles using his conventional lockpicks. Then he, Gregson and I set to work with the shovels. Mycroft, a stranger to manual labour in all its forms, adopted a supervisory role. Bathed in the light of candles which, like the wine, Holmes had requisitioned from the vestry, we decanted soil from the piles heaped around into the pit itself. Of the three of us, Gregson was the one who really put his back into it. Stripped to his shirtsleeves, he shovelled with machine-like regularity, his tight-lipped expression redolent of both disgust and resolve. Re-inhuming the obelisk was, to him, a way of laying to rest all that had happened below.

  During a brief pause for rest, I asked Holmes how he had managed to free himself from Moriarty’s clutches in the pool.

  “I did not,” he replied. “We were sinking fast. I have no idea whether the pool has a bottom. Perhaps it does not. I was convinced I was done for, at any rate. All I knew was icy cold blackness, Moriarty’s face dimly before me like a pale moon, a sensation of pressure in my ears, and the pain of my lungs as they ached to draw air. And then… he let go.”

  “Let go?”

  “What else do you think I mean? Took his hands off the chain.”

  “Yes, but deliberately?”

  “So it appeared. All of a sudden I was no longer being dragged down, while Moriarty continued to plummet, still enmeshed in the coils of Nyarlathotep’s tentacle.”

  “The deed cannot have been conscious on his part. Perhaps he simply could not maintain his grip on the chain. Perhaps he became too infected by weakness, Nyarlathotep stealing the last ergs of his strength.”

  “I really don’t think so,” said Holmes. “You were not there. You did not look at him as I did. He made a decision. He wanted me loose.”

  “But why? Remorse? Contrition? An attack of compassion? It hardly seems like the man.”

  “No, and that troubles me now. It did not trouble me at the time, of course. All I could think of was striking upwards and reaching the surface of the pool before my lungs gave out. It was a close-run thing. I almost didn’t make it.”

  “Well, speaking for the three of us, I am very glad you did.”

  “I cannot shake the feeling, though, that Moriarty released me only because he knew the game was not over. He wanted me to live to fight another day. Which would imply that he himself was far from beaten.”

  I recalled the scheming look I had seen on the academic’s face as he was being pulled down into the pool, and could not suppress a shiver.

  “He is gone,” I insisted. “He shall not bother us again. And good riddance, I say.”

  Holmes’s sceptical grimace only amplified the scepticism I felt inside.

  “I trust you are right, my friend,” was all he said.

  We picked up our shovels and returned to the business at hand. Within a couple of hours all the soil had been transferred back whence it came, and we embarked on the process of re-laying the flagstones, dragging them into position one after another and stamping them flat. Here, Mycroft came into his own, for it was like constructing a jigsaw. The flagstones were of irregular dimensions, and there was only one correct solution for replacing them in the space available. Mycroft had an uncanny knack of identifying which belonged where. Under his guidance we made short work of it, at the cost of a broken fingernail or two and the occasional squashed toe.

  The bells of St Paul’s Shadwell were tolling midnight as we emerged from the crypt into the night air. We were quite a sight – grimy, dishevelled, our clothing torn, our shoulders stooped with tiredness. The cold drizzle falling from the sky was a boon, refreshing and cleansing.

  “Happy New Year, one and all,” said Gregson with a mirthless laugh. “Let’s hope eighty-one starts better than eighty ended.”

  That he was recovering his sense of humour, if in only limited form, seemed a good sign to me.

  “I have no idea what to make of all I’ve just been through,” said Mycroft. “It is almost impossible to take on board. Reptilian men. Monstrosities in pools. Human sacrifice. And what of you, Sherlock? What have you become? I thought you were pursuing this ‘consulting detective’ whimsy of yours. Now I learn that you have assumed a more chimerical role, embracing the supernatural.”

  “I would not have done it willingly,” Holmes said, “but as you have seen for yourself, the supernatural is real.” As if to illustrate the point, he held up the Triophidian Crown. He bore the Necronomicon, in its oilcloth, in his other hand. “Moreover, it is a threat more potent and injurious to the stability of society than any criminal activity. I cannot deny the call I have heard – the call of Cthulhu, one might say – and I cannot in all conscience refuse to heed it.”

  “The call of what?”

  “You have much to learn, Mycroft. Many hours of revelation lie ahead of you. Because you are now a part of this. You too, Inspector.”

  “I am?” said Gregson.

  “We all four are. We, for better or worse, have become conscripts in a war, and it is a war we must wage in secret, without the public ever learning of it. For civilisation rests on the assumption that the universe is kindly disposed towards mankind and intended for our benefit. Imagine the upheaval were it to become widespread knowledge that that is not so.”

  “You believe the danger is not yet past?” I said.

  “From what I know, it will never be past, not while the Great Old Ones and the Elder Gods live. They will alwa
ys be pursuing their sinister agendas, whether that means seeking the total enslavement of mankind or merely wreaking havoc with the minds and souls of individual mortals. Whatever lusts they wish to slake or cruelties they wish to inflict, they will, with scant regard for the consequences. We, to these gods, are little better than flies. Shakespeare was right. They are like wanton boys, killing us for their sport. Someone must stand against them, and against the people who, like Moriarty, would facilitate their dark designs.”

  “And that someone is you. And us.”

  “Exactly, Watson. With regret, and by default, the four of us.”

  I tried to take in the import of what Holmes was saying. He was asking us to commit ourselves to a campaign combating the forces arrayed against Earth from beyond, from the far reaches of space, from the nether realm below, from all quarters. It seemed both an insurmountable task and an unendurable burden. It required far more than we four had to give, and the rewards it offered were paltry, if they existed at all. In fact, the only certainty about this war was that it was likely to bring us horror, madness and death.

  “I cannot demand that you join me, any of you,” Holmes went on, as though privy to my thoughts. “If you decline, I shall understand, and think no less of you for it. But if you search your hearts, you will realise that the choice is no choice at all. Besides,” he added, “I would rather not stand alone, when I could have fine, upstanding allies at my side.”

  Mycroft, Gregson and I exchanged looks.

  There could really be only one outcome.

  In that lonely churchyard, beneath miserable rain, we all shook hands. A compact was sealed. We had become recruits.

  Our army was small, pitifully so.

  Our enemies were many and terrible.

  Our struggle would be long and arduous.

  There would be losses along the way – so many losses, of all kinds. There would be scars, too; some physical, the majority invisible but no less disfiguring for that: scars of the psyche, scars of the soul.