Peering down, we saw no evidence of her landing. Princess Mina crouched beneath her bed, apparently unharmed.
An extensive search of the grounds provided no further clues. Holmes sent a messenger to Captain Gent announcing there had been another attack and requesting he meet us back at the sanatorium as quickly as possible. Leaving the princess with her mother under guard, Holmes commandeered a coach and lashed the horses forward as I scrambled aboard, still shaken with disbelief. (To think I had actually embraced the bloody thing!) We rode like the devil through the deserted streets. Arriving at our destination, Holmes pushed the night clerk aside and we raced to Miss Cookson’s cell.
She chuckled nervously as Holmes slammed the door.
“Your daughter Sarah has been arrested and charged with the attempted murder of the Princess Wilhelmina,” Holmes told her. “If you would save her—I’d have you call off that creature this instant!”
Her humor quickly left her. “You must release my daughter; she’s no part of this!” she pleaded.
“That’s up to you now,” Holmes replied, unmoved.
“But—I have no power to halt what’s begun!”
“Then instruct us,” I said, stepping forward.
“It were the princes, not I, that planted the damned thing. Sarah knew nothing of it, she was but a child,” she moaned, quaking.
“Planted? Do explain!” Holmes demanded.
“No, I mustn’t! Het wordt mij verboden!”
“Forbidden by whom?” At this, Holmes drew forth the locket, unclasped it, and held it forth. “Take this back as a token of my word that you’ll be protected. And think now of Sarah above yourself!”
She grasped the locket and gazed upon the photograph, quieting. “When they received word that Mina was born, they were furious. Alexander was schooled in the Pnakotic ways and damned his knees at the altar of Yog-Sothoth, invoking the forbidden rites from the stolen book and setting the thing to grow. He took my Sarah’s blood from her against my wish.”
“Blood, you say? How much blood was taken?”
“A pint,” the crone whispered. “One pint per month for a year from my dear one. Siphoned with the cruelest of tools. She were helpless, sir!”
“To what purpose was this blood put?”
“So the Shoggoth might grow to bear her likeness—this slave of their revenge.”
The strange word birthed terror within me, for I knew it to be coupled to the dream.
“How might this Shoggoth be stopped?” Holmes demanded, his voice tripping on the alien word, confirming my dread that it was not of Dutch origin. “Speak now. I hear the captain’s coach approaching!”
The woman shriveled up against the stone in the corner as Holmes’s broad cloak enveloped her.
“Find the root. Sever the thing at the root, lest it grow back, God allemachtig!”
“Where do I find it?”
“Where it was begun,” she whispered hoarsely. “The southernmost tip of De Veluwe.” At the last she collapsed, blathering. We left her there, staring into the locket, to join Captain Gent.
We took Gent’s coach, as it was more fortified, and we three, accompanied by five guardsmen, sped off for the Veluwe, a dense wooded area several hours’ journey east. The sheer insanity of all that had transpired nearly overwhelmed me, and I struggled to keep my wits, saying little, but fearing much.
“I trust Sarah Cookson’s name will be cleared,” Holmes said to Gent, “seeing that this last attack came whilst she was held in your custody.”
“The girl will be released, Mr. Holmes, when I’m sure that the princess is safe, not before.”
The damp and evil sounds of the night increased tenfold as the road gave way to forest trails. The hooting of several large gray owls announced our passage as if telegraphing danger, and Gent’s men began preparing their rifles with ammunition.
“If this is a trick of the old woman, she shall pay dearly,” Gent said.
The southernmost tip of the Veluwe was an odd bit of woodland. We stepped from the coach in silence, enthralled by the milky-black stillness. The captain’s men used kerosene lamps to light torches, and passed one to me.
“See how the trees grow so densely in that patch,” Holmes directed our attention. “Most unnatural.”
We approached the cluster of trees and circled its perimeter. “Holmes,” I said, clasping his elbow as we moved, “Do you smell that? The same scent as from the palace.”
He nodded affirmation as I supressed my urge to run.
Holmes was correct: this was no natural formation of trees. The trunks were gnarled with great tumors, their limbs woven together like incestuous lovers, the flaking bark of the wood cold and slick to the touch, like the skin of a reptile. The thorned branches thrust sharply outward like claws, and the whole growth gave one the impression of many black entities congealed into a single one. Each step I took was laborious, each outthrust root a cause for alarm.
Holmes beckoned me with a wave of his torch to a dark cavity carved in the wood.
“An orifice,” he whispered, reaching out to touch the lip of the opening. His hand came back wet. He brought down my torch to inspect the viscous red fluid on his fingers, then called out, “Captain, come at once!”
All torches were brought to bear; we gazed into the hole and beheld the unspeakable.
There, burrowed in the wet wood, entwined with bloodied vines like throbbing veins, the girl was nestled. A perfect doppelgänger of Sarah in every detail, save the insidious expression on its carved face as it slumbered.
“God allemachtig!” Gent cried out, visibly shaken.
“The Shoggoth,” I whispered with twin dread and awe at the alien word on my lips. “Holmes, touch your ring to the wood.”
Holmes touched his left hand to the trunk for a moment. The girl-thing writhed.
“Wells, how do we kill this thing?” Holmes asked, deferring to my sudden display of intuition.
All eyes fell on me as I shivered and surrendered myself to details of my dangerous vision—how the Dark Things would exterminate their land-born slaves. “It’s fire,” I proclaimed. “Burn the tree and it dies along with it!”
“Are you quite sure, Wells?”
“How can I be sure, Holmes? But it’s clear that this tree is the nest.”
Captain Gent stood guard before the hole as his men retrieved kerosene from the coach whilst Holmes and I dragged up huge mounds of dead needles and dry twigs to ring the base of the tree. Then Holmes pulled his pipe, struck a match, took a draw, and knelt to light the kindling.
We stepped back and watched the tree catch fire and burn as hideous, soul-wrenching screams emanated from the very wood itself—screams that would haunt me the rest of my days.
“We’ve saved the princess, Holmes,” I said.
Holmes nodded and drew at his pipe. “Indeed, Wells, though I fear this particular evil is but one severed tentacle heralding much darker forces to come.”
I pulled my cloak tightly about my shoulders as the sun began filtering through the trees.
Holmes was correct: the journey had been inspirational, in a most horrific manner. The girl, Sarah Cookson, was released and provided a modest endowment for her silence. Upon the king’s subsequent death, the Princess Wilhelmina did indeed ascend the throne, at age ten, and conduct her country admirably through the Second World War. I can only assume that Holmes confiscated and destroyed the evil Necronomicon, though I have never dared to broach the subject. For when social occasions brought the two of us together, he refused to speak openly of the matter—though I observed that the silver ring, twin to my own, remained always upon him.
The Weeping
Masks
JAMES LOWDER
In looking back over the accounts I have written about the singular exploits of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, and remembering all those cases which I never set down upon paper, I recognize only now how foolish I was to deny him the chance to solve the greatest mystery I ever encountered. He wou
ld have welcomed the challenge, of course. His keen mind would have pierced the veil of strangeness surrounding those awful events in Afghanistan, and focused upon the true cause of the things I witnessed there. Then, with a glitter in his eyes akin to boyish mischief, he would have explained away the horrors, made them vanish under the intensity of his intellect like so much moor mist before a bright morning sun.
Now that sun has set, its fires doused by the torrent of the Reichenbach Falls, I am left to wonder why I did not allow its light to shine upon the darkness secreted within me while I had the chance. He recognized its presence; it was impossible to hide anything from Holmes completely. I suspect he saw the telltale signs of habitual dread upon me even at our initial meeting. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,” he noted after he shook my hand that very first day. He later revealed the details about my manner and appearance that had led him to that conclusion—my medical knowledge, military air, tanned face, and stiff, obviously wounded left arm. But those things might just as well have marked me as an army doctor come from the Sudan or Zululand. No, he observed something else in my haggard face: The stunned stare common to those who serve in Afghanistan. No British soldier leaves that desolate land without it. And my features were all the more blasted for the extraordinary things I had witnessed in that hellish place.
In those early days of my friendship with Holmes, I sometimes hinted at the reason for my disquiet. The prompts were obscure and offered halfheartedly, I must admit. But the awful events were still fresh in my mind, and both my composure and my trust of Holmes too tentative to inspire a more direct disclosure.
The reason why Holmes never pursued the matter still eludes me. Perhaps he did not question me out of courtesy. He could be surprisingly kind at times, especially to me, and he often made it clear that he respected my privacy, beyond what his powers of observation made obvious to him. Or perhaps he never gave the subject a second thought, once he had correctly deduced the origins of my wound and my military bearing. He could be oblivious to such human concerns as fear and despair, too, even when they impacted on his tight circle of friends.
The rest of humanity is not so well armored against the more baneful emotions, and we must deal with them as best we can. Some transmute them into rage and lash out at the world. Others attempt escape. Memories of those Afghan experiences proved so insistent in their companionship, even after my return to England, that I myself took refuge in the bottle. Had Stamford not happened upon me at the Criterion Bar and taken me that same afternoon to meet Holmes—a meeting that resulted in adventures all but guaranteed to reassure me of the supremacy of reason over mystery—I would today be well along the path to gin-fueled dissolution. My only brother followed that same sad road to its inevitable terminus. When I learned of his death, just a year before I shipped out for the East, I could not understand how things could get so bad as to push a sane and well-to-do man to such an end. I pray now that whatever overwhelming unhappiness goaded him to self-destruction was born of more mundane hardships than the ones I faced in Afghanistan.
Maiwand provided me reason enough to take to the bottle. I was but a newly minted soldier when I took my place in the field as assistant surgeon for the Berkshires. I had traveled the East extensively in my younger days, so that I expected the conditions in Afghanistan to be far from inviting. Still, I was unprepared for the long marches across miles of barren ground, with temperatures reaching nearly 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade, were any such luxury to be had.
“Let this heat serve as a caution against an intemperate life,” noted Murray, my orderly, as we trudged toward our fateful meeting with Ayub Khan’s army. “If this weather strikes you as unbearable, imagine what the furnaces of hell are like.”
“Can you be so certain we are not there already?” I replied, hoping the scowl in my voice conveyed the expression my lips were too sun-seared to frame.
Murray gave me a look that surely has passed between veteran and green trooper on every battlefield since time began. “Begging your pardon, sir, but you’d be safer to reserve judgment about hell until after your first battle.”
“Have no fear for me, Murray. I shall acquit myself with distinction when the shooting starts.”
“No doubt, sir, no doubt. But the fighting will be unlike anything the officers described in your training or even the firsthand accounts published in the newspapers back home.”
He paused to swipe away a large swarm of sand flies that had gathered around one of the wounded litters close by in the column. It was a seemingly pointless bit of kindness—the flies buzzed everywhere, and hung especially thick among the pack animals and the wounded—but an act typical of Murray. He went nowhere without pausing to do some little bit of good. He was a veteran of some years, but had long ago rejected the hardness of heart that so characterized the medical personnel drawn to the Queen’s service. To them, suffering was a fact of camp and campaign to be accepted or, worse still, ignored. Murray regarded all hardship as a test of character. To surrender to callousness or despair in the face of such sorrow was to be revealed as its accomplice.
“There’s just no way for anyone to explain what a battle is like,” he continued after he had more securely fixed the netting over the unconscious man. “The words don’t exist to describe the vastness and weight of even the smallest skirmish—not ones that can do it justice. You’ll find that out for yourself, if you’re ever called upon to describe one.”
As he was with so many things, Murray was correct about this. When I attempt to relate the events of that fateful day, the resulting narrative either scuffs along with the parched precision of our column on the way to the fight that morning, or swirls out of control, like the retreat of the survivors from the field a scant four hours later. Only fragments can be made clear—the awful shriek of the cavalry horses when a shell landed in their midst; the unearthly sight of a lone Afghan woman, veiled and ghostlike, moving among the massed enemy, exhorting the warriors to vengeance and glory; the palpable feeling of hatred that enwrapped the battlefield as each side did its utmost to annihilate the other.
Positioned as we were on the right flank, the Berkshires confronted the enemy in the form of Ghazis. Thousands of these religious zealots had joined with Ayub Khan in hopes of driving the hated British from the land or, failing that, hastening their own trip to the afterlife. To this end, they came to the fighting ready-clad in shrouds. Some even charged at us unarmed, so eager were these madmen to gain whatever eternal reward their mullahs had promised them. I still see them in my nightmares: fearsome white-wrapped figures emerging from the dry riverbed that ran alongside our position. Brilliant bit of strategy that, using the ditches to hide an advance. Their abrupt appearance had added impact in that it resembled nothing so much as shrouded corpses scrabbling up from some mass grave.
We did our best to put the Ghazis back in that hole as actual corpses. A blizzard of Martini-Henry rounds mowed them down by the score. For two hours we stood our ground, and might have held out all day had the British left flank not been overrun. The retreating infantry and artillery rolled into us like a wave, and we broke, too.
How I got cut off from the Sixty-sixth I cannot recall, at least not clearly. One moment I stood next to Murray; the next I found myself alone and surrounded by a small mob of zealots. The earlier fighting was orderly, well mannered even, when compared to the chaos that descended after the lines broke. It was no longer army against army, but man against man, a thousand savage brawls occurring within a stone’s throw of one another, but isolated by a choking soup of smoke and dust. Shrieks of victory commingled with the cries of the wounded, the thunder of onrushing Afghans with the clatter of the British retreat, until a single sound—a deafening, skull-shaking din—overhung all. Little wonder, then, that neither I nor my would-be murderers discerned the crash of the oncoming artillery limber until it was almost upon us. The galloping horses appeared as if from nowhere, scattering ally and enemy alike. Crazed Ghazis hung from the
wagon in a dozen places, while the driver and a gunner, armed only with handspikes and Khyber knives, hacked madly at their hands and arms, anything to loosen their hold and keep them from the gun.
The passing of the limber broke up the mob. I escaped, only to find myself a moment later at the edge of the dry watercourse the enemy had used to such good effect. The haze was not so thick here, though that was nothing to be cheered. Bodies lay two and three deep at the bottom of the steep-sided ravine, men and animals together, as far as the eye could trace the rift. Here were the Ghazis we had cut down, and the British who had been slaughtered as they abandoned the field. Most were still. A few raised trembling hands to the sky or tried in vain to free themselves from the bloody tangle. A camel with shattered forelimbs thrashed about, moaning like a damned soul—which was appropriate, as the scene resembled nothing so much as an illustration of Dante.
I stood on the brink of the ravine, frozen by fear or mesmerized by the horrific scene before me—I cannot now say which—until a figure on the opposite bank drew my attention. Dazedly I noted that he wore an obsolete British uniform, the familiar red cloth tunic and dark blue trousers of our soldiers in the first Afghan war. But atop his head rested a turban, and the twin rifles slung across his shoulder were not Enfields or Sniders, but jezails. My own rifle was gone, fumbled and dropped in my scramble away from the runaway artillery wagon. I reached for my service revolver. Before my fingers even touched the holster, the Afghan soldier raised one of his long-barreled flintlocks and fired.
The bullet bit into my left shoulder, spun me around so that I fell into the ravine backward. Chest aflame with pain, I slid down the embankment and came to rest atop the corpse river. The mass of bodies shifted slightly at my arrival. Cradled there among the dead and near dead, I felt the hot, wet mark of my wound spread. Feebly I tried to stanch the flow, all the while staring up at the red-coated assassin. Calmly he dropped his first rifle and raised the second. The jezail takes so long to reload that experienced Afghan warriors carry more than one, ready to fire, for just such eventualities.
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