The only directions I could extract from the young man were rudimentary. He pointed down a path that led toward the mountains, and said only “cave” and “golden sign.” I secured a torch, which I carried as a cudgel during my long walk, and hoped to catch up with the Weeping Ones on the road.
Despite the burdens in their care, the priests managed to stay so far ahead of me that I never caught them. Fortunately, the road proved easy to follow. Even the weather cooperated, with a thick, steel-gray blanket of clouds covering the sky from horizon to horizon. The heat remained oppressive, of course, but without the lash of the sun, it was almost bearable.
Full dark was upon the world when I found the entrance to the cave. I knew it to be the correct one by the yellow sigil engraved in the stone to either side. I lingered at the mouth, staring into the maw and squinting at the gloom within. Oddly, the darkness of the cavern was less absolute than that of the land beneath the moonless, cloud-choked night sky. Far into the mountain, at the limits of my vision, a faint luminescence lit the interior. This was not the wavering light of torches, but a steady glow. Still, I set fire to my torch before venturing inside, and felt the more secure for doing so.
The source of the light proved to be a dripping, noisome mold, which grew in patches at irregular intervals all along the course of the cavern. The yellow-green glow it produced was identical to that of the strange lanterns the Weeping Ones carried. Despite the eerie natural lighting, I was still glad for my torch. In many places the mold light shone only weakly. In others, where the priests had harvested the slime, darkness reigned.
The tunnel twisted and turned, but never forked, as if it had been excavated for the sole purpose of leading men to the huge central chamber into which it emptied. I soon found myself on the brink of that vast room, at the top of a broad stair that descended to a floor patterned with shattered and gouged mosaics. Towering walls hemmed in the chamber on all sides, with the stone made to resemble the facades of some ancient city. These carvings might have been beautiful once, but now mold obscured their magnificence. For three stories or more the walls stretched up, to where my eye should have met a ceiling or a dome, but instead found the night sky.
Far below this expanse of star-dotted emptiness, at the very center of the chamber, a group of altars squatted on the floor like mushrooms. Twoscore or more of the Weeping Ones stood amongst the altar stones, their attention focused on their leader and the two corpses that had been carried from the village that afternoon. The dead men were laid out on their backs so that their scabrous faces stared up into the night. And as I watched, the head priest rested a porcelain mask upon each of those disease-ravaged faces and began to chant.
Voices unused to speech took up the prayer, until they filled the chamber with a horrible wailing, like the cries of drowned men at the bottom of a lake. I dropped my torch and covered my ears in hopes of blocking out the sound. But the prayer of the Weeping Ones rang clear, scoring itself upon my memory as indelibly as the sight of those two dead villagers even then rising up and adding their voices to the chorus.
“They were never dead,” I whispered, my mind struggling to maintain its hold on sanity. “Only catatonic, or mesmerized . . .”
I did not have time to decide which, for at that instant a gloved hand closed over my right shoulder and pushed me, face first, into the wall. The grip was firm, yet somehow also disgustingly soft, as if the flesh yielded too much when I pushed back against it. I tore myself free and turned on my attacker. The masked priest leaned close, tears brimming in his eyes.
I lashed out with a fist, possibly the worst thing I could have done at that moment. The sudden exertion ripped open my wound, while the blow tore the porcelain mask from the face of the priest. The mask did not fall, though. It hung at his chest, suspended on clear, ropy strands that secured it to the remains of what had once been a human face.
Staggering back, I managed somehow to draw my revolver and fire three times. The bullets bit into his body. Clear stains spread out from each impact, but the bullets, though well placed for such hasty shooting, seemed to do him no serious harm. It was as if his entire form were gelatinous beneath those robes.
My own wound had driven me to the ground, and in the fall, I lost my revolver. I slid my back to the wall, tried to push myself to my feet, but it was useless. I could only watch in horror as the priest pressed his mask back into place with a wet sound, then advanced upon me with that unhurried, mechanical gait.
He stood over me, tilting his head so that the ooze of his decaying face welled up under his eyes like tears. I knew then how the plague was spread from village to village, knew, too, that I would not let him infect me. I felt the ground around me for anything I might employ as a weapon. My fingers closed upon the abandoned torch.
The blow I struck was feeble, hardly enough to make him stagger a step. But the dying torch did the work neither my arm nor my revolver could complete. The flame leaped up the white robes and engulfed the priest as if his decaying flesh were oil. He screamed only once with that terrible, liquid voice of a drowned man, then collapsed into a still-burning heap.
My victory was short-lived. From within the temple came the sounds of movement, the slow, steady approach of the fifty or more Weeping Ones gathered there. I thought to escape back down the tunnel. Even if my wound had not prevented me from putting that desperate plan into action, the commotion that echoed along the stony corridor dashed any hopes I had of retreat. They had caught me. I wiped my blood-slicked fingers on my jacket and retrieved my revolver, ready to fight to the end.
It is fortunate I lacked the strength to pull the trigger when the first figures rushed toward me from the tunnel. It was not more priests that were arriving from the direction of the cave entrance, but a small band of Ghurkas led by my orderly, my friend, Murray.
The Ghurkas carried torches of their own, and even an oil lantern or two. Once they knew what to do, the lads made short work of the priests. As Murray field-dressed my shoulder, we saw the smoke from their burning bodies rise up through the open roof of the chamber into the starry night sky. After that, we left the cave in silence.
Murray later explained that he had indeed gone off from the village, but only after hearing one of the goatherds tell of spotting a small British expeditionary force the previous day. Given the mood of the natives and the trouble with the masked priests, Murray knew we had to depart as soon as possible. He could not pass up a chance to secure some assistance for us, uncertain as he was of my ability to make the long trek back to Kandahar on my own. The village elder would have been able to explain where Murray had gone, had the old man not been struck down by the plague.
And the silver medal that prompted my foolhardy assault on the temple of the Weeping Ones? Murray had left it with one of the sick men before he went to search out the patrol. The priest must have taken it from the unfortunate fellow before his corpse was prepared for burial.
The simplest explanation for the medal ending up in the hands of the priest eluded me; that is hardly a surprise. Even now, after all my lessons in deductive reasoning from the one true master of that science, I cannot claim with any confidence that, given the same evidence, I would not reach the same wrong conclusion, or perhaps a different, but equally faulty one. Still, I trust in logic. With it I can explain away the masked priests as victims of some rare form of leprosy, as damaging to the mind as it is to the body. The rites I saw enacted did not raise the dead, merely roused the sick men from a catatonic state, one rather similar to the sleep paralysis I myself suffered the night I first saw the priests. These are explanations of which Holmes would have approved. And if I cannot imagine how he would have explicated what I saw through the roof of the temple chamber, it is because I lack his talent for deduction.
I wonder now more than ever how he would have explained it: a roof opening onto a clear night sky when clouds were all anyone could observe outside the cave. The scene might have been painted on the rock, and yet I witnessed the s
moke from the burning priests curl up and out of the chamber, not gather at the roof as it surely must do were the sky mere decoration. Or perhaps the cloudless vista seen by the visitors to that chamber resulted from some freak weather condition, like the eye of a hurricane, only lacking the storm. I can almost bring myself to believe those explanations. What I cannot describe away is the thing that I saw move against that starry sky: a mammoth . . . being, all boneless limbs and writhing darkness, with a face more horrible than the decaying visages of its priests. Even as the last of the Weeping Ones fell, I lay on the cold stone floor at the entrance to the chamber, staring up at the sky much like the initiates did from their position on the altars. I watched the thing blot out Aldebaran and, turning, the constellation of Taurus. And in that same instant, I knew that it was looking back at me.
“The unspeakable one,” the priests called him. “He Who Is Not to Be Named.” At least that is how the scholars at the British Museum translated the parts of the prayer I could pronounce. Again, Murray was correct: it helps to know a little of the enemy’s tongue. But a little is enough. Although I remember the entire incantation, I have no desire to make my mouth pliable enough to form the other blasphemous words, even if it will help those scholars to recover a language that was old when the Pharaohs ruled Egypt.
What name would Holmes have given the beast? I will never know now, and I suspect that is for the best. I had opportunities enough to tell him about the thing in the night sky, to make him understand that it was not my experiences at Maiwand or the enteric fever I contracted in hospital at Peshawur, after my escape from the Weeping Ones, that forced me to be shipped back to England. So why did I hesitate?
The answer to that is simple enough, even for my flawed powers of deduction: Elementary, my dear self. You do not wish to end up like Murray.
He might have pulled through if he had not asked me to confirm what he, too, saw that night. So long as he could tell himself that it was a delusion, like the screaming wound I saw on the Ghazi he killed during our escape from the battlefield, he could bear the burden. He could dismiss it, then, or ignore it, and keep his too-rigid view of the world intact. The moment I confirmed his fears, though, he was undone. And when the Catholic priest at Peshawur could not frame that impossible experience within the tenets of the Church, Murray walked to the most isolated part of the hospital, so as to disturb as few people as possible, and shot himself through the heart.
Yes, that is why I never shared this tale with Mr. Sherlock Holmes. After I described the awful events, he might have leaned back in his chair, steepled his fingers, and solved the mystery. Or perhaps there are things logic cannot conquer. Holmes knows the truth or falsity of that, now that he has taken that fateful plunge at the Reichenbach Falls. Reason tells me that the very fact of his death provides my answer: The thing in the Afghan caves remains, while Holmes is gone, all hope with him. Then again, I could be coming to the wrong conclusion. I have been known to be wrong before. In this case, I am counting on it.
Art in the Blood
BRIAN STABLEFORD
“Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.”
—A. CONAN DOYLE, “THE ADVENTURE OF THE GREEK INTERPRETER”
It was not yet five o’clock; Mycroft had barely sunk into his nook and taken up the Morning Post when the secretary appeared at the door of the reading room and gestured brusquely with his right hand. It was a summons to the Strangers’ Room, supplemented by a particular curl of the little finger which told him that this was no casual visitation but a matter in which the Diogenes Club had an interest of its own.
Mycroft sighed and hauled his overabundant flesh out of his armchair. The rules of the club forbade him to ask the secretary what the import of the summons was, so he was mildly surprised to see his brother Sherlock waiting by the window in the Strangers’ Room, looking out over Pall Mall. Sherlock had brought him petty puzzles to solve on several occasions, but never yet a matter of significance to any of the club’s hidden agendas. It was obvious from the rigidity of Sherlock’s stance that this was no trivial matter, and that it had gone badly thus far.
There was another man in the room, already seated. He seemed tired; his gray eyes—which were not dissimilar in hue to those of the Holmes brothers—were restless and haunted, but he was making every effort to maintain his composure. He was obviously a merchant seaman, perhaps a second mate. The unevenness of the faded tan that still marked his face—the lower part of which had long been protected by a beard—testified that he had returned to England from the tropics less than a month ago. The odors clinging to his clothing revealed that he had recently visited Limehouse, where he had partaken of a generous pipe of opium. The bulge in his left-hand coat pocket was suggestive of a medicine bottle, but Mycroft was too scrupulous a man to leap to the conclusion that it must be laudanum. Mycroft judged that the seaman’s attitude was one of reluctant resignation, that of a man determined to conserve his dignity even though he had lost hope.
Mycroft greeted his brother with an appropriate appearance of warmth, and waited for an introduction.
“May I present John Chevaucheux, Mycroft,” Sherlock said, immediately abandoning his position by the window. “He was referred to me by Dr. Watson, who saw that his predicament was too desperate to be salvageable by medical treatment.”
“I’m pleased to meet you, sir,” the sailor said, coming briefly to his feet before sinking back into his chair. The stranger’s hand was cold, but its grip was firm.
“Dr. Watson is not here,” Mycroft observed. It was not his habit to state the obvious, but the doctor’s absence seemed to require explanation; Watson clung to Sherlock like a shadow nowadays, avid to leech yet another marketable tale from his reckless dabbling in the mercurial affairs of distressed individuals.
“The good doctor had a prior engagement,” Sherlock reported. His tone was neutral, but Mycroft deduced that Sherlock had taken advantage of his friend’s enforced absence to carry this particular inquiry to its end. Apparently, this was one “adventure” Sherlock did not want to read in The Strand, no matter how much admiring literary embellishment might be added to it.
Given that Chevaucheux’s accent identified him as a Dorset man, and that his name suggested descent from Huguenot refugees, Mycroft thought it more likely that the seaman’s employers were based in Southampton than in London. If the man had come to consult Watson as a medical practitioner rather than as Sherlock’s accomplice, he must have encountered him some time ago, probably in India—and must have known him well enough to be able to track him down in London despite the doctor’s retirement. These inferences, though far less than certain, became more probable in combination with the ominous news—which was ominous news, although it had not been reported in the Post—of the sudden death, some seven days ago, of Captain Pye of the S.S. Goshen. The Goshen had dropped anchor in Southampton Water on the twelfth of June, having set out from Batavia six weeks before. Captain Pye was by no means clubbable, but he was known to more than one member of the Diogenes as a trustworthy agent.
“Do you know how Dan Pye died, Mr. Chevaucheux?” Mycroft asked, cutting right to the heart of the matter. Unlike Sherlock, he did not like to delay matters with unnecessary chitchat.
“He was cursed to death, sir,” Chevaucheux told him bluntly. He had obviously been keeping company with Sherlock long enough to expect that Holmesian processes of deduction would sometimes run ahead of his own.
“Cursed, you say?” Mycroft raised an eyebrow, though not in jest. “Some misadventure in the Andamans, perhaps?” If Pye had been about the club’s business—although he would not necessarily have known whose business he was about—the Andamans were the most likely spot for him to run into trouble.
“No, sir,” Chevaucheux said gravely. “He was cursed to death right here in the British Isles, though the mad hatred that activated the curse was seething for weeks at sea.”
“If you know the man responsible,” Mycroft said amiably,
“where’s the mystery? Why did Watson refer you to my brother?” The real puzzle, of course, was why Sherlock had brought the seaman here, having failed to render any effective assistance—but Mycroft was wary of spelling that out. This could be no common matter of finding proofs to satisfy a court of law; the secretary’s little finger had told him that. This mystery went beyond mere matters of motive and mechanism; it touched on matters of blood.
Sherlock had reached into his pocket while Mycroft was speaking, and produced a small object the size of a snuffbox. His expression, as he held it out to Mycroft, was a study in grimness and frustration. Mycroft took it from him, and inspected it carefully.
It was a figurine carved in stone: an imaginary figure, part human—if only approximately—and part fish. It was not a mermaid such as a lonely sailor might whittle from tropic wood or walrus ivory, however; although the head was vaguely humanoid, the torso was most certainly not, and the piscine body bore embellishments that seemed more akin to tentacles than fins. There was something of the lamprey about it—even about the mouth, which might have been mistaken for human—and something of the uncanny. Mycroft felt no revelatory thrill as he handled it, but he knew that the mere sight of it was enough to feed an atavistic dream. Opium was not the best medicine for the kind of headaches that Chevaucheux must have suffered of late, but neither he nor Watson was in a position to know that.
“Let me have your lens, Sherlock,” Mycroft said.
Sherlock passed him the magnifying glass, without bothering to point out that the lamplight in the Strangers’ Room was poor, or that the workmanship of the sculpture was so delicate that a fine-pointed needle and the services of a light microscope would be required to investigate the record of its narrow grooves. Mycroft knew that Sherlock would take some meager delight in amplifying whatever conclusions he could reach with the aid of the woefully inadequate means to hand.
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