Mycroft had never seen anything like it before, although he had heard of similar deformations. He knew that he ought to make a closer investigation of the symptoms, but he felt a profound reluctance to touch the diseased flesh.
“Watson has no idea how to treat it,” Sherlock said unnecessarily. “Is there any member of the Diogenes Club who can help?”
Mycroft pondered this question for some moments before shaking his head. “I doubt that anyone in England has a ready cure for this kind of disease,” he said. “But I will give you the address of one of our research laboratories in Sussex. They will certainly be interested to study the development of the disease, and may well be able to palliate the symptoms. If you are strong, Mr. Chevaucheux, you might survive this, but I can make no promises.” He turned to Sherlock. “Can you honor your promise to find this man Rockaby?”
“Of course,” Sherlock said stiffly.
“Then you must do so, without delay—and you must persuade him to lead you to the store of artifacts from which he obtained this stone. I shall keep this one, if Mr. Chevaucheux will permit, but you must take the rest to the laboratory in Sussex. I will ask the secretary to send two of the functionaries with you, because there might be hard labor involved and this is not the kind of case in which Watson ought to be allowed to interest himself. When the artifacts are safe—or as safe as they can be, in human hands—you must return here, to tell me exactly what happened in Dorset.”
Sherlock nodded his head. “Expect me within the week,” he said, with his customary self-confidence.
“I will,” Mycroft assured him, in spite of his inability to echo that confidence.
Sherlock was as good as his word, at least in the matter of timing. He arrived in the Strangers’ Room seven days later, at four-thirty in the afternoon. He was more than a little haggard, but he had summoned all his pride and self-discipline to the task of maintaining his image as a master of reason. Even so, he did not rise from his seat when Mycroft entered the room.
“I received a telegram from Lewes this morning,” Mycroft told him. “I have the bare facts—but not the detail. You have done well. You may not think so, but you have.”
“If you are about to tell me that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in my philosophy . . .” Sherlock said, in a fractured tone whose annoyance was directed more at himself than his brother.
“I would not presume to insult you,” Mycroft said, a trifle dishonestly. “Tell me the story, please—in your own words.”
“The first steps were elementary,” Sherlock said morosely. “Had Rockaby been in London, the irregulars would have found him in a matter of hours; as things were, I had to put the word out through my contacts in Limehouse. Wherever Rockaby was, I knew that he had to be dosing himself against the terrors of his condition, and that was bound to leave a trail. I located him in Portsmouth. He had gone there in search of a ship to carry him back to the Indian Ocean, but no one would take him on because he was so plainly mad, and he had given up sometime before, in favor of drinking himself into oblivion. Chevaucheux and I went down there posthaste, and found him in a wretched condition.
“There were no signs of Captain Pye’s disease on Rockaby’s body—which gave me some confidence that the stone was not carrying any common or garden-variety contagion—but his mind was utterly deranged. My questions got scant response, but Chevaucheux had slightly better luck. Rockaby recognized him, in spite of his madness, and seemed to feel some obligation to him, left over from a time when they were on better terms. ‘I shouldn’t of done it, Jacky,’ he said to Chevaucheux. ‘It warn’t my fault, really, but I shouldn’t of. I shouldn’t of let the blood have its way—an’ I’m damned now, blood or no blood. Won’t die but can’t live. Stay away, lad. Go away and stay away.’
“Chevaucheux asked him where the remainder of the stones could be found. I doubt that he would have told us, had he been well, but his condition worked to our advantage in that matter. Chevaucheux had to work hard, constantly reminding Rockaby of the ties that had bound them as children and shipmates, and in the end he wormed the location out of him. The place-names meant nothing to me, and probably meant nothing to anyone who had not roamed back and forth across the isle with the child that Rockaby once was, but Chevaucheux knew the exact spot near the sea cliffs that Rockaby meant. ‘Leave ’em be, Jacky,’ the madman pleaded. ‘Don’t disturb the ground. Leave ’em be. Let ’em come in their own time. Don’t hurry them, no matter how you burn.’ We did not take the advice, of course.”
Mycroft observed that Sherlock seemed to regret that now. “You went to St. Aldhelm’s Head,” he prompted. “To the sea cliffs.”
“We went by day,” Sherlock said, his eyes glazing slightly as he slipped back into narrative mode. “The weather was poor—gray and drizzling—but it was daylight. Alas, daylight does not last. Chevaucheux led us to the spot readily enough, but the old mine where the stoneworkers had tunneled into the cliff face was difficult to reach, because the waves had long since carried away the old path. The mine entrance was half blocked, because the flat layers of stone had weathered unevenly, cracking and crumbling—but Rockaby had contrived a passage of sorts, and we squeezed through without disturbing the roof.
“When your clubmen set to work with a will, one plying a pickax and the other a miner’s shovel, I was afraid the whole cliff might come down on us, but we were forty yards deep from the cliff face, and the surrounding rock had never been assailed by the waves. I never heard such a sound, though, as the wind got up and the sea became violent. The crash of the waves seemed to surge through the stone, to emerge from the walls like the moaning of a sick giant—and that was before your men began pulling the images out and heaping them up.
“You studied the one that Chevaucheux gave you by lamplight, and magnified its image as you did so, but you can’t have the least notion of how that crowd of faces appeared by the light of our lamps, in that godforsaken hole. More than a few were considerably larger than the one Rockaby sent to Captain Pye, but it wasn’t just their size that made them seem magnified: it was their malevolence. They weren’t carrying a disease in the same way that a dead man’s rags might harbor microbes, but there was a contagion in them regardless, which radiated from their features.
“Chevaucheux had shown me the stone faces built into the houses in Worth Matravers, but they’d been exposed for decades or centuries to the sun and the wind and the salt in the air. They had turned back into mere ugly faces, as devoid of virtue as of vice. These were different—and if they had stared at me the way they stared at poor Chevaucheux . . .”
Mycroft knew better than to challenge this remarkable observation. “Go on,” he prompted.
“Reason tells me that they could not really have stared at Chevaucheux—that he must have imagined it, in much the same way that one imagines a portrait’s gaze following one around a room—but I tell you, Mycroft, I imagined it, too. I did not perceive the eyes of those monsters as if they were looking at me, but as if they were looking at him . . . as if they were accusing him of their betrayal. Not Rockaby, although he had told Chevaucheux where to find them, and not you or I, although we were the ones who asked him to locate them on behalf of your blessed club, but him and him alone. Justice, like logic, simply did not enter into the equation.
“ ‘Do you see it, Mr. Holmes?’ he asked me—and I had to confess that I did. ‘It is in my blood,’ he said. ‘Sam was wrong to think himself any more a seaman than Dan Pye or Jacky Chevaucheux. There are stranger seas, you see, than the seven on which we sail. There are greater oceans than the five we have named. There are seas of infinity and oceans of eternity, and their salt is the bitterest brine that creation can contain. The dreams you know are but phantoms . . . ghosts with no more substance than rhyme or reason . . . but there are dreams of the flesh, Mr. Holmes. I have done nothing of which I need to be ashamed, and yet . . . I cannot help but dream.’
“All the while that he was speakin
g, he was moving away, toward the narrow shaft by which we had gained entry to the heart of the mine. He was moving into the shadows, and I assumed that he was trying to escape the light because he was trying to escape the hostile gaze of those horrid effigies—but that was not the reason. You saw what was happening to his torso when he was here, but his face was then untouched. The poison had leached into his liver and lights, but not his eyes or brain . . . but the bleak eyes of those stone heads were staring at him, no matter how absurd that sounds, and . . . do you have any idea what I am talking about, Mycroft? Do you understand what was happening in that cave?”
“I wish I did,” Mycroft said. “You, my dear brother, are perhaps the only man in England who can comprehend the profundity of my desire. Like you, I am a master of observation and deduction, and I have every reason to wish that my gifts were entirely adequate to an understanding of the world in which we find ourselves. There is nothing that men like us hate and fear more than the inexplicable. I do not hold with fools who say that there are things that man was not meant to know, but I am forced to admit that there are things that men are not yet in a position to know. We have hardly begun to come to terms with the ordinary afflictions of the flesh that we call diseases, let alone those which are extraordinary. If there are such things as curses—and you will doubtless agree with me that it would be infinitely preferable if there were not—then we are impotent, as yet, to counter them. Did Chevaucheux say anything more about these dreams of the flesh?”
“He had already told me that Dan Pye had been right,” Sherlock went on. “They were more than dreams, even when they were phantoms. Opium does not feed them, he said, but cannot suppress them. He had told me, very calmly, that he had already seen the deserts of infinity, the depths within darkness, the horrors that lurk on reason’s edge . . . and that he had heard the mutterings, the discordance that underlies every pretense of music and meaningful speech . . . but when he moved into the shadows of the cave . . .”
Sherlock made an evident effort to gather himself together. “He never stopped talking,” the great detective went on. “He wanted me to know, to understand. He wanted you to know. He wanted to help us—and, through us, to help others. ‘The worst of it all,’ he said, ‘is what I have felt. I have felt the crawling chaos, and I know what it is that has me now. St. Anthony’s fire is a mere caress by comparison. I have felt the hand of revelation upon my forehead, and I feel it now, gripping me like a vise. I know that the ruling force of creation is blind, and worse than blind. I know that it is devoid of the least intelligence, the least compassion, the least artistry. You may be surprised to find me so calm under such conditions as this, Mr. Holmes, and to tell you the truth I am surprised myself—all the more so for having seen Dan Pye upon his deathbed, and Sam Rockaby on a rack of his own making—but I have learned from you that facts must be accepted as facts and treated as facts, and that madness is a treason of the will. You might think that you and your brother have not helped me, but you have . . . in spite of everything. Take these monstrous things away, and study them . . . learn what they have to teach you, no matter what the cost. That’s better by far than Sam Rockaby’s way, or mine . . .” Sherlock trailed off again.
“Mr. Chevaucheux was a brave man,” Mycroft said, after a moment’s pause.
Sherlock met his eyes then, with a gaze full of fear and fire. “Am I damned, Mycroft?” he demanded harshly. “Is the disease incubating in me, as it was in him? Are my own dreams worse than dreams?”
Mycroft had no firm guarantees to offer, but he shook his head. “There was something in Chevaucheux, as there was in Pye, which responded to the curse. You and I are a different breed; the art in our blood is a different kind. I cannot swear to you that we are immune, or will remain so, but I am convinced that we are better placed to fight. Those effigies you took to Lewes may have the power to make some men see a terrible truth, and to make some human flesh turn traitor to the soul, but they are not omnipotent, else the human race would have succumbed to their effect long ago. At any rate, there is no safety in hiding them, or in hiding from them. Whatever the risk, they must be studied. Such studies are dangerous, but that does not excuse us from our scholarly duty. We must try to understand what they are—what we are—no matter how hateful the answer might be.”
“You believe that we are safe from this contagion, then—you and I?”
Mycroft had never seen Sherlock so desperate for reassurance. “I dare to hope so,” he said judiciously. “The Diogenes Club has some experience in matters of this sort, and we have survived thus far. The entities that men like Rockaby term the Others have proved more powerful in the past than those he calls the Elder Gods, but the blood of Nodens is not extinct; it flows in us still and it has its expression. The gift that was handed down to men like us is not to be despised. You sometimes suspect that I think less of you because you have become famous instead of laboring behind the scenes of society, as I do, but I am glad that you have become a hero of the age because the age is direly in need of your kind of hero. Our art is in its infancy, and many more confrontations such as this one will expose our incapacity in years—perhaps centuries—to come, but we must nurture it regardless, and store its rewards. What else can we do if we are to be worthy of the name of humankind?”
Sherlock nodded, seemingly satisfied.
“Tell me, then,” Mycroft said, “what happened in the cave. I know that you and my faithful servants succeeded in taking the artifacts to Lewes, but I know that Chevaucheux was not with you. Rockaby has been committed to a lunatic asylum, where an agent of ours will be able to interrogate his madness, but I gather from the tone of your account that Chevaucheux will not be available for further study. Do you feel able now to tell me what became of him?”
“What became of him?” Sherlock echoed, fear flooding his eyes again. “What became? Ah . . .” As he paused, he put his hand into his pocket and took out a bottle. Mycroft had no way to be sure, but it seemed to him to be an exact match to the outline he had observed in John Chevaucheux’s clothing a few weeks before. The label on this bottle, scrawled in a doctor’s unkempt hand, confirmed that it was laudanum.
Sherlock put his hand to the cork, but then he stopped himself and put the unopened bottle down on the side table. “It does no good,” he said. “But they are only dreams, are they not? Mere phantoms? There is no necessity that will turn them into dreams of my flesh. That is what Chevaucheux told me, at any rate, when he reached forward to give me the bottle, before he ran away. I think that he was trying to be kind—but he might have been kinder to remain in the shadows. He had faith in me, you see. He thought that I would want to see what he had become . . . and he was right. He ought to have been right, and he was. Before he ran to the end of that makeshift corridor of stone, and hurled himself into the thankless sea, where I hope to God that he died . . .
“That brave man wanted me to see what the crawling chaos had done to him, as it turned his flesh into a dream beneath the evil eyes of those creatures we had excavated from their hiding place . . .
“And I did see it, Mycroft.”
“I know,” Mycroft answered. “But you must tell me what it was you saw, if we are ever to come to terms with it.” And he saw his brother respond to this appeal, seeing its sense as well as its necessity. All his life, Sherlock Holmes had believed that when one had eliminated the impossible, whatever remained—however improbable—must be the truth. Now he understood that when the impossible was too intractable to be eliminated, one had to revise one’s opinion of the limits of the possible; but he was a brave man, in whom the blood of Nodens still flowed, after a fashion, still carrying forward its long and ceaseless war against the tainted blood of the Others.
“I saw the flesh of his face,” Sherlock went on, stubbornly bringing his tale to its inevitable end, “the texture of which was like some frightful, pulpy cephalopod, and the shape of which was dissolving into a mass of writhing, agonized worms, every one of them suppurating and
liquefying as if it had been a month decaying . . . and I met his eyes . . . his glowing eyes that were blind to ordinary light . . . which were staring, not at me, but into the infinite and the eternal . . . where they beheld some horror so unspeakable that it required every last vestige of his strength to pause an instant more before he hurled himself, body and soul, into the illimitable abyss.”
The Curious Case of Miss Violet Stone
POPPY Z. BRITE AND DAVID FERGUSON
I came down to breakfast one morning and found Sherlock Holmes still in his dressing gown, contemplating a note written in a large, straggling hand. He waited for me to pour my first cup of coffee, then passed the note across the table to me.
Mr. Holmes:
Please, sir, may I come and see you. I fear for the life of my dear sister. I will come after luncheon today. Please, Mr. Holmes, I do not know where else to turn.
Thomas Stone
“What do you make of it, Watson?” he asked when I had had time to peruse the childish scrawl.
“Not much. I suppose you already know all about him, though.”
“No more than appears in the note,” Holmes said, though I was well aware that even such a short note might speak volumes to his practiced eye. “A fact or two, nothing more. Let us wait and see what the man himself has to say.”
The morning had dawned clear and mild, but by midday a loathsome yellow fog rolled through Baker Street, pressing like a greasy face against the windows and filling our cozy rooms with a damp chill. Holmes was stoking the fire when the bell rang and Mr. Thomas Stone was shown in.
I could not determine his age at once, for he was a young man who seemed somehow old. His features did not appear particularly aged—in fact, he was fair-haired and handsome, with dark determined eyes and a set to his jaw that suggested a tendency toward stubbornness. His shoulders were broad, but something in his posture and bearing made me think at first glance that he might almost be a pensioner. Then I looked again and determined that he could not be more than twenty-five. The cuffs of his trousers were dark with some grime heavier than that of the London streets.
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