Carnacki: The Edinburgh Townhouse and Other Stories

by William Meikle

  *

  "The shark chose that precise moment to launch another attack, head on, slamming directly into the cage. We rocked and rolled, almost tumbled, but fortunately, and for the time being, we stayed within the bounds of the pentacle etched on the floor. Remembering the success of my chant earlier, I raised my voice again.

  "'Ri linn dioladh na beatha Ri linn bruchdadh na falluis,'

  "'Ri linn iobar na creadha, Ri linn dortadh na fala.'

  "It had no discernible effect.

  "Gault groaned again, and I looked down to see blood drip onto the floor from between his fingers. That only served to enrage the beast in the fog; it came at us again, and again, tossing the cage from side to side and threatening to bowl us over with every strike.

  "'Yon beast is after my blood,' Gault said in a momentary lapse in the attack. 'Perhaps you should let me out, old man. There's no sense in both of us getting killed.'

  "Even as he said it, the next attack came, the strongest yet, and one that threw the cage clear across the library floor and far out of the protections. The left side of the cage buckled and fell outward, the comforting hum cut off. The link to the generator had been severed.

  "We crawled out on our hands and knees before standing up, blind inside a sea of wet gray fog. Blue lightning flashed, and the huge mass of the shark moved, mere feet from where we stood, gliding silently alongside us, its length seeming as if it was never going to end until a tail fin swished in front of my nose and it was gone again.

  "Gault stood beside me, clutching an arm that was now bathed almost wholly red. I suddenly had a thought, about his last remark before we had been struck.

  "'Maybe it is the blood it is after,' I said. 'Let us give it some, shall we?'

  "'Are you mad, man?' Gault said, but I ignored his pleas and grabbed at the hand of his bad arm. His blood pooled, hot in my palm, even as the gray shadow loomed up fast in the fog, coming straight for us.

  "The shark's maw gaped open, big enough to swallow both of us whole should the bite be finished.

  "I shouted.

  "'Ri linn dioladh na beatha Ri linn bruchdadh na falluis,

  "'Ri linn iobar na creadha, Ri linn dortadh na fala.'

  "And in the same action I threw blood over the teeth from my hand; one, two, three splashes, as quickly as that. Blue lighting flashed to accompany each splash and a thunderous roar filled the air. The fog seethed and roiled and the great mouth opened even wider. Had I wished to, I could have reached out to touch those razor-sharp teeth as they came within inches of my face.

  "I shouted again.

  "'Ri linn dioladh na beatha Ri linn bruchdadh na falluis,

  "'Ri linn iobar na creadha, Ri linn dortadh na fala.'

  "And this time, almost to my astonishment, but certainly to my most definite relief, the fog began to drift away. The shark's bite did not close on us, and the huge head moved aside, as if it were suddenly confused.

  "Once again we saw the length of the Great White slide away in front of us, until it too faded and drifted apart into wisps of misty gray that dispersed quickly as a cold breeze blew in through the library door. The last thing to vanish was three splashes of color, red, where I had daubed the teeth with Gault's blood.

  "'Is that it?' Gault said, little more than a whisper. 'Is it truly over this time?'

  "I turned toward him to confirm my suspicion that the job was indeed done. I was in time to catch him as his legs gave way and he almost fell.

  "I needed to get him to a doctor, and quickly at that. I half-carried him out through the hallway and threw open the front door, intent on hailing somebody, anybody, who might help me with him.

  "The captain was too far gone in a faint to see the real end of the affair, but I was able to relate it to him later as he recovered in the Royal Hospital the next day.

  "It is a sight I shall never forget.

  "A thin fog, no more than an inch deep, hung over the whole stretch of Cheyne Walk. Ten yards away from my door, and heading fast toward the river, a tall dorsal fin carved through the murk. And right there beside it, to the left, three other fins, small fins, as of young sharks, cavorted and danced alongside until all four were lost to sight in the gloom at the riverbank."

  *

  Carnacki sat back in his chair and smiled now that the tale was done. He took our questions with good grace over one last round of smokes and drinks, and we were all relieved to discover that the captain was making a fine recovery and hoped to be soon back at sea.

  "Now, out you go," Carnacki said, and showed us outside into the cool night air. There was fog away to my left by the river, but I took the long way home via higher ground.

  Just in case.

  The Cheyne Walk Infestation

  From the personal journal of Thomas Carnacki, 472 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea.

  My good friend Dodgson has done such a heroic job of setting down my experiments, adventures, and misadventures, that I sometimes forget that there are cases he has either found too outlandish, or has been too personally involved in, to do them justice in their writing. As such many of these stories remain, as yet, untold, and that is possibly for the best for the bulk of them.

  But in idle moments, I sometimes find a need to have everything I do written and collated, if only for the sake of any that come after me and wish to tread the same paths I have trod. So in that spirit, I will proceed where Dodgson will not, and make a record, when I find the time, of those cases that hold special points of interest to the seeker after knowledge.

  *

  The case of the infestation from beyond that nearly drove me from my home in Chelsea is one such tale, and to spare Dodgson any qualms about its telling, I shall attempt to set it down here for myself as well as I can remember its particulars. Forgive me if I am not so eloquent in person as my transcriber often attributes to me in prose but I shall try my best to give you the full and proper flavor of the story in my own words.

  It begins, as most of these tales do, with a Friday evening dinner party in Cheyne Walk. If I remember correctly, I had a quiet day, mostly spent in study, for supper was a simple one to prepare and did not involve me spending hours in the kitchen. The chaps all arrived promptly, and we set to our fare. The conversation was mostly about rugger, a subject on which I have few opinions, none of them noteworthy.

  I was mulling over how best to approach my tale for the evening which was to be a telling of the matter of Grimes Graves, and the thing I found in the darkest deep place there, when I noted that my slices of mutton were tough as old shoe leather. My train of thought was thus more along the lines of admonishing my butcher than on anything metaphysical, and so when Arkwright let out a yelp, I presumed at first that it was a reaction in disgust at the poor fare on his plate. But it did not take me long to discover that the mutton was going to be the least of my worries that evening.

  *

  I looked up the table to see my friend stab his fork into the body of something that was pale, almost translucent, and was almost as long as my arm, with far too many legs ranked along the length of a sinuous, armored, body. Its internal organs were little more than a pulsating, pink tube that ran through it from front to rear and were clearly visible. It most resembled a monstrously large example of a common millipede, or it would have, had it not been so clearly spectral in nature.

  It was not, however, so spectral that it could avoid Arkwright's well aimed fork thrust. He speared it squarely in the back, and it burst with a soft pop, like a soap bubble, before falling, little more now than a rainbow hued flicker in the air, into my table cloth to be lost completely. There was nothing left but a thin oily smear that faded as I leaned forward for a closer look.

  As you can imagine, this produced quite the fuss around my table, and we all sat there for long seconds, staring at the spot. Arkwright, unusually for such a renowned trencherman, did not touch his food but leaned across the table, fork poised, waiting to make another thrust should one
be required. Everyone held his breath. There was an air of expectancy, as if I had paused at an exciting part of a story, and everyone was waiting on my next word. Unfortunately, I was not in control of this particular tale.

  "I say, Carnacki," Arkwright said after a minute or so when there was no recurrence of the phenomenon. "If that was a prank, it was a jolly bad show all round. You could put a chap off his food with that bally nonsense."

  I tried to placate my friends, but everyone had seen the thing crawling on the table, and as you can imagine, they had taken a bit of a funk. It is my role in our comradeship to face up to such things after all, and they were more than happy to hear of them over a smoke and a drink, but not to have the bally things turn up in their supper plates.

  Arkwright in particular was taking it sorely, and refused to lower the fork. He sat there, old batsman that he is, eyes on the spot where the thing had disappeared, ready and alert to any possible need for action.

  The rest of us had all quite lost our appetites, and after ten more minutes passed without any more unwanted apparitions, I managed to mollify them by leading them through to the parlor and plying them with some rather fine brandy I had recently procured.

  I had, however, decided to forego the telling of any tales that night, for fear of reminding them of the damnable bug. We conversed quietly about the latest obituaries in The Thunderer, and, ever so slowly, everyone became a tad calmer in the familiar, cozy, surroundings around my fire.

  The liquor, of course, helped enormously, and I felt that a larger than usual hit to my brandy supplies was a small price to pay for a quiet end to the evening. However, if I thought I was to get away with no further ructions that night, I was quickly to be proved mistaken, and in the worst possible manner.

  *

  Arkwright had recovered his aplomb sufficiently have moved on from what he considered to be the far too morbid topic of the recently deceased. He was now expounding on one of his favorite subjects, the state of the current England cricket team, a matter on which he was capable of yammering on about for hours if given his head. The rest of us were concentrating on our drinks and smokes, and managing to maintain an air of polite, if not quite rapt, attention, when there was another yelp. This time it came from Dodgson.

  The poor chap almost leapt from his chair. I looked down in time to see another of the blasted bug things scuttle away under my drinks cabinet, but I had no time to go after it, for Dodgson had blood pooling in his left shoe at the ankle. The bally thing might be half-spectral, but the other, more solid half had given my friend a dashed serious nip.

  Arkwright and the others set to thrashing about under the cabinet with the pokers and fire irons from beside the hearth while I tended to Dodgson as well as I could. The wound wasn't deep, but it was bleeding freely and after I fetched some ointment and bandages from the kit in the dresser and bound him up, there was still a slight seepage of red coming through the white cotton cloth.

  Dodgson took it stoically enough, with the help of more of my brandy, although he looked pallid and more than a trifle fearful as he watched Arkwright and the others. They stood around the drink cabinet, freshly poured drinks in one hand, poker or irons in the other, all of them watching the gap between the cabinet and the floor, ready to pounce should anything show itself from beneath.

  "Is it dead? Did you get it?" Dodgson said.

  "I bloody well hope so," Arkwright bellowed. He turned to me. "What are these blasted things anyway, Carnacki? I know you're not a man for pranks and jests, so tell us straight. Is this serious? Are we in trouble?"

  Before I had time to tell him that I was starting to formulate a theory, another dashed thing appeared. This one came up out of the rug in the center of the room, as if it was climbing up through from my wine cellar. And now that I was close enough to hear it, I noticed the high-pitched whine it was giving off, a squeal that grated on my teeth and vibrated in my jaw.

  Despite his wound, or perhaps because of it, Dodgson was the first of us to respond to the new arrival in our midst. He stood, stepped forward and, swinging his right foot as if he was back on a rugger field in his youth, punted the bally thing high and hard against the wall of my parlor. The bug hit the angle where the wall met the ceiling with a moist thud, and was already disappearing again, oozing rainbow color in a trail behind it as it slid down the wall. All trace of it was gone before it hit the floorboards.

  Dodgson let out a yell of almost childlike joy, but we had no time to celebrate this small triumph. Another of the bug things, its feet solid enough to be scratching and scuttling on the floorboards like a dozen hungry mice, came out fast from the corner nearest the bay window. Arkwright stamped down on that one with a stout boot, but two more were already advancing from the hearth, and there was a third running about under the table that Jessop was trying to get with my pair of long coal tongs.

  I was, for my own part, dashed curious as to the nature of these manifestations, and would even have welcomed some time to study their behavior more closely. But with my friends in the room, and Dodgson already a walking wounded, I decided that discretion was most definitely the better part of valor.

  "It might be best if we beat a hasty exit, chaps," I said. "Let's get you to a place of safety, then I can return and deal with these intruders in the right and proper manner."

  Arkwright set about one of the two from the hearth, clubbing it into mere vapors and oily residue with a poker.

  "Whatever you say, old chap," he replied. "Dashed dull sport in any case. They don’t even put up much of a fight."

  They might not be 'good sport' in Arkwright's parlance, but they were about to make up for that by attacking in some numbers. More arrived, from every direction, up through the floorboards and rugs, out from the wainscoting. Several fell through the ceiling, although those popped and burst as soon as they hit the floor. Within seconds there was a score and more of the damnable things scurrying all around us.

  The chaps were now flailing around with the fireside utensils and stomping their feet in a grotesque facsimile of a music-hall dance routine as they tried to stop the scuttling things from closing in enough to give them a nip to equal that which Dodgson had received. More of the bugs poured through the walls. I lost count at forty when I had to lunge aside to avoid one that was intent on dropping on my head from the chandelier above.

  We were in serious danger of being completely overrun, and it was only a matter of time before one or more of us would get wounded, or worse.

  I let out a rallying cry.

  "Into the hall, chaps. Last one out, slam the door behind them."

  We beat a hasty retreat. Dodgson was tardier then the others and I was preparing to go back in to check on him when he appeared at the doorway. He had the small scuttle I use for shoveling coal in one hand and a full bottle of my best Scotch in the other.

  "I thought both of these might come in handy," he said with a grin, even as he dispatched another of the beasts that was approaching his left foot. He stomped down on it, leaving a shimmering rainbow smear on the floor, then pulled the door shut behind him.

  It closed with a slam that rang all through the house, then silence fell.

  *

  "What now, old man? Jessop said, as we stood there in my hallway in the sudden quiet.

  I waited for a few seconds to see if anything was going to come through the wooden panels of the door before answering. My first thought was to open the outside door and shoo all the chaps out into the street in the accustomed manner, to leave me to sort out the problem without having to worry about their safety. But that option was quickly closed to me. More of the dashed things came out of the doorframe and some even rose up from the stone slabs between the front door and our position. We all had to step back sharpish to get out of their way.

  Once again I heard the high-pitched whine, and now that it was coming from more than one of the beasts, it sounded less of a formless wail and more like some kind of commun
ication. If I'd had the time right then, I might even to have been able to discern a pattern to it. But time was not something in great supply at that particular moment; the beasts at the doorway skittered and scratched across the floor, all heading towards us, as if impelled by a single purpose. At the same time, I heard another sound, a great scratching and tearing from beyond the closed parlor door, as if a veritable army of the things was ripping at the wood on the other side trying to get through.

  "To the library, chaps," I shouted, "and be quick about it. We need to get ourselves into my protections, and I need to find some bally time to think."

  I took the lead; Arkwright brought up the rear. My old friend took some degree of pleasure from slashing at the scuttling things with the long poker, wielding it like a cricket bat and sending the bugs either popping like bubbles or flying to all corners with a variety of sweeps and drives.

  The other chaps were not tardy in following my lead, and I quickly got us all into my library and had the stout door closed behind us. A survey of the room showed that it appeared to be free of any infestation, for the time being at least.

  "Arkwright, are you okay to guard the door for a minute?" I asked.

  He nodded.

  "Bring them on; I have some more boundaries in me yet." He swung the poker alarmingly to emphasize the point, and I could see by the color in his cheeks that his blood was up.

  I bade the others stand inside the protective marquetry circles I have inscribed in the center of the floor in the library. They were reluctant at first, but as soon as the scratching and scuttling started on the outside of the library door they did as was requested with some alacrity.

  I made sure they knew the seriousness of our plight, and the necessity of staying inside the inner circle, then I headed for the cupboard under the stairs. I knew I had to move fast as the scratching from out of the hallway was frantic now, accompanied by the high noise that now sounded more than ever like communication, or perhaps song.