The Hell-Hound of the Baskervilles

by G. S. Denning

  Something is wrong. The room is green. The boy! His eyes are fire—green fire! He gives one last scream, then he stiffens and is still. Has he died at the first cut? Talog does not know what god or spirit he is servicing here, but he hopes this will do. In his own country his gods would be very angry if the offering died before everyone could drink.

  Talog cannot sense much of the hidden world. He does not feel the movement of magic, nor can he tell when the attention of an outside being is on him. So he does not feel the great rush of force as all the fear and horror of this momentous evening speeds into one spot, just outside the door of the great hall. Suddenly, there is fire—an explosion of flame that shakes Baskerville Hall to its deep stone roots. Fire, smoke and shadow coalesce into a shape—a magnificent hound. It smiles at the Aztec—a human expression laden with malice and intent—then comes at him. Talog cries out and rises to face it, but the knife is slick with blood and he drops it. He fumbles for his blade, screaming to have to face the beast unarmed.

  There is something on Warlock’s cheek—that is what wakes him. Something is nuzzling him. It is hot—in fact, it’s burning—but the fire does not scorch Warlock. He opens his eyes. A flaming black wolf the size of a stag is standing over him. It is hard to tell where the dog begins and ends; it seems as if it is made of shadow, wreathed and interspersed by flame. He can hear it thinking, Master. Maker. I love you. You found my shape.

  The boy feels a swell of love, too. It may just be the gratitude of one whose life has been saved, but the truth is—growing up poor and lonely—Warlock Holmes always wanted a dog. And however evil this beast may be, it has no malice for Warlock. He can feel its feelings. It loves him without limit or condition. Warlock sits up and looks around. The hall is large—it could easily seat sixty, maybe eighty men—but there is no wall of it that is not decked in scraps of Talog To-Tek. Holmes is not in much better shape, himself. His head is pounding; mortal frames are simply not meant to be the focus of as much power as has passed through him tonight. His body is beaten and stiff. His thoughts are confused. His leg! The cut is so deep, he may die of it. Look how much blood is on the floor.

  Yet, this fear is instantly quelled. There are so many blood gods whispering promises to him. He will never want for blood. The exercise of his art shall be marked by it. Walls will bleed. Rocks will bleed. The crimson flood shall attend him, always.

  The hell-hound puts its muzzle just behind his ear. “Master, what would you have me do?”

  Nothing? Get out of here? Make the voices stop? Get me back to my family? Keep me safe from Moriarty? No! Warlock knows exactly what the hound must do.

  “Bhehr-Lylegnag! They’re going to sacrifice her! Hound, you must get her somewhere safe—somewhere Sir Hugo and my master can’t kill her!”

  The hound turns and begins to run, battering open the massive oak doors. Scenting the outside air, it pauses to bay its hunting howl, then is gone out onto the moor. Running to the door as best as his injured leg will allow, Warlock can see the hound glowing in the night like a fleck of fire.

  Holmes sets out after the beast. He cannot travel fast. He is tired and disoriented; his leg is lame. But what is there for him here? He sees a light and wanders towards it, but suddenly it is gone. It reappears over his shoulder, so he goes that way, but this light disappears as well. There are two more, in front of him now. Another appears on his right. Three more behind. The wisps close in on him, from all sides, flickering, fading, laughing at him.

  Where can he go? He wanders in an otherworldly realm of wisp-light. The wind brings him fragmentary reports of battle. He hears Sir Hugo’s hounds baying, for they are close to Bhehr-Lylegnag. Then suddenly they’re yelping and squealing with mortal terror. Snatches of speech: Moriarty demanding to know where the farmer’s daughter is. The farmer screaming. Horses chewing. One of Hugo’s hounds drags itself past Holmes. It has only one leg remaining. Sir Hugo’s cry of triumph: he has found Bhehr-Lylegnag. His horse, screaming as the hound strikes. A shot. Sir Hugo, gurgling terribly. The wisps all blink out.

  And there they are.

  There is Holmes, looking at his dog. There is Hugo, with his throat torn out, grabbing at the hound’s fur, as if holding on to his murderer might staunch the flowing blood. There is Bhehr-Lylegnag, cowering before the advancing hound, grasping at her chest. There is blood between her fingers. The hound looks at Holmes and lowers its nose to the ground in apology. There has been a mistake. Sir Hugo’s shot has missed the hound and hit the girl. Bhehr-Lylegnag is gasping for breath. Air wheezes out through her wound.

  “I am sorry, master.”

  “No!”

  “Don’t worry, I know a safe place.”

  There is a flash and a horrible cracking noise. Holmes is flung back. His hound is gone. Bhehr-Lylegnag is gone. Sir Hugo is gone. Where the humans were, two pointed pillars of stone rise into the sky.

  From his coach, Moriarty sees the hound disappear. Where, he cannot tell, but he can feel the tumult in the earth subside as the pointed pillars rise. The line is stable now. The sacrifice is made. An innocent and a magician have been lost from this world, through the new line, into one of the thousand realms beyond. At least the convulsing lines will not break open tonight; there will be no demon invasion. Moriarty will have to take comfort in that. The rest of the evening has been disappointing in the extreme.

  Look at them all. He can see the flood of demon promises hovering around Warlock Holmes. He should have guessed it. There is a cursed providence that attends the boy. Moriarty wants to kill him. Perhaps it would be easy; Holmes’s mortal form is exhausted and injured. But look at all the help he has! What makes that damned boy so special?

  Moriarty reluctantly settles back into his seat and calls to his driver, “Home, Grimesby.”

  “Home?” the man asks. “What about the Turk?”

  “I’m keeping him,” Moriarty says. “I must have something to show for all this effort, mustn’t I?”

  “And the boy?”

  “Leave him. If there is such a thing as luck or justice, the wretch will starve.”

  WATSON’S NOTE

  AT THIS POINT, I PAUSE TO ADDRESS A CONCERN THAT may have been growing in many of my readers’ minds.

  It is possible that some of you may have encountered the term “warlock” before. Though my own magical studies are superficial, still it did not take long for me to come across this word. I assumed my friend Holmes had been named after this particular type of magical practitioner, but could never draw him to discuss it. He had a reason for his silence, I knew, but I’d always failed to guess what it was. So funny in retrospect, for the reason was as simple a one as could be conceived.

  The term is named for him.

  Yes, it’s been in usage for over 200 years, but we are now at the point where the reader knows that Holmes himself has been around for over 250, so this is not unaccountable.

  What then, is a warlock?

  There are many types of magician. Shamans practice ancestral magic, calling upon the spirits of their dead and their elemental surroundings. Witches tend to focus on the subtly supernatural effects that can be coaxed from brewing various herbs. Glamourists twist the ephemeral threads of perception, weaving it against the even more elusive threads of truth. Wizards spend great deals of time in study, pursuing knowledge of the most powerful magics they can find. Sages practice very little—not at all, sometimes—but are the keepers of that magical knowledge wizards so earnestly crave. A warlock may be any of these, or any of the vast number of other types of magic-users, which I have not herein named. It is not a type of magical practice, in and of itself; it is something you are in addition to the main avenue of study.

  A warlock is a magician of any type who has something fundamentally, terribly wrong with him.

  I would cite the case of the mad sage, Fh’tagn, who is often referred to as a warlock. It is said that his mind failed suddenly, upon his discovery of a certain secret. On that day, he changed from a hoar
der of magical knowledge to a teacher of it—willing to speak arcane truths to any who would listen. He referred to the secret that had broken his mind as “The Song of All Ending,” and spoke of it as if it were a consciousness. Despite his hatred of it, he feverishly spent the remainder of his life seeking to spread his knowledge—and with it, his madness—devoting the remainder of his days to the service of his tormentor. Indeed, he may have spread this thought contagion to us all and doomed the race of man if it were not for one important fact: nobody wanted to listen to him. He was, after all, just barking mad.

  Though his story is older than the term, the wizard Souk’seth is retroactively (and almost universally) called the Warlock of Katesh. He was a uniquely powerful fellow, but not an overly kind one. He used his magic for his own gain, crushing all opposition with spells so powerful and so terrible, modern sages are still unsure of how he accomplished them. One thing is certain: he could do no magic without chewing off one of his own fingers. This, of course, limited the extent of his practice. At last, when he had only the index finger and thumb of his right hand remaining, a coalition of forty-two magicians rose against him, thinking to hold him accountable for his crimes. They supposed he would be unwilling to sacrifice either of these last two digits—a thumb is of little use without at least one finger and he who has neither is barred from many of the privileges of humanity. They should have known better. Though he could easily have accomplished it with only the loss of one finger, Souk’seth chose to eat both. The demise of the forty-two was particularly ghastly. Only one survived and this, it is thought, was a conscious choice on Souk’seth’s part so there might be one witness to speak of his might. Of course by that time, his power was spent. He could do no more magic, nor did he possess fingers to work even simple tools. He was slain some time later, by a cow-herd he had wronged in his youth.

  To these and many others, the title “warlock” has been applied. Still, as the remainder of my stories will show, none of them were as potent, as dangerous, or as afflicted as the man for whom the term was named.

  PART III

  ONCE AGAIN, FROM THE JOURNALS OF DR. JOHN WATSON

  13

  WE SAT IN SILENCE FOR SOME TIME. HOLMES HUNCHED forward, staring at me much in the way I imagined the hell-hound must have looked at him all those years ago—sheepishly, afraid of judgment.

  “So,” I began, as softly as I could, “you are over two hundred and fifty years old, then?”

  Holmes nodded.

  “And that is how you came by your… peculiar abilities?”

  “Most of them,” he said.

  “And your love of toast and soup.”

  “Yes, though I have since come to suspect Hestia tricked me. After all, who isn’t comforted by toast and soup?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?”

  Holmes threw up his hands. “Well… it’s embarrassing! I’m running around in a loincloth. I summon a hell-hound. I don’t stop the ley-line from opening. I don’t stop Baskerville. I don’t stop Moriarty. I don’t save Bhehr-Lylegnag. In fact, I wind up dooming her to a hell dimension, beyond even the salvation of death. So… you know… not my finest hour, Watson.”

  “Still, you didn’t think I might need to know some of this, before setting off to investigate the hound-related murder of a Baskerville?”

  “Honestly,” Warlock shrugged, “I wanted you here only to protect Sir Henry. I rather hoped to solve it on my own, before you discovered anything about this humiliating fiasco. That is why I came in secret. Wiggles was kind enough to come down, as well, to keep an eye on you and bring me food.”

  “And how much did you know, when you sent me off to my potential doom?”

  “Hey! You wished to go! If you recall, I urged you to stay in Lo—”

  “Did you know who was hunting Sir Henry?”

  “No. Sadly, I did not.”

  “Did you know who killed Sir Charles?”

  “I feared I did,” Holmes said. “Yet all my guesses stemmed from my original adventure here and that is a shaky base for rational thought. Dartmoor was in an uproar. It didn’t take people long to discover that Baskerville’s groom and stable boy and Bhehr-Lylegnag’s entire family had been horse-murdered, which—it turns out—is somewhat upsetting to most folk. Plus there were bits of hunting dog spread all across the moor, two new standing stones to explain, and all the usual strangeness surrounding a major change in the earth’s magical field.”

  “The earth has a magical field?”

  “Yes, for want of a better term.”

  “And what ‘usually’ occurs when this is disturbed?”

  “In what is now Grimpen, it rained cows for two hours,” Holmes said.

  “My God!”

  “Not a building left standing. Folks were quite put out—well… those that survived. On top of all that, Hugo Baskerville seemed to be gone, yet without a body, the succession issue was rather clouded. Half the moor was crying out for justice and the other half was manufacturing claims on Baskerville Hall and the attendant fortune. Plus there was beef, just everywhere…”

  “And what were you doing, Holmes?”

  “I? Wandering, I suppose. Listening to counsel from the thousand demons in my head, trying to figure out what was real and what was not. I worked out that Bhehr-Lylegnag, Hugo and my hound had gone through to another world. I tried to think of a way to find them and bring them back. Well… two of them, anyway. But I had no luck. I decided to try and close off the ley-lines as best I could. Again, I met with no success. I had no help but a multitude of demons, each of whom wanted the lines to stay open wide. I returned in the 1670s to try and put things in better stead, but again I failed.”

  I began to feel vastly sorry for Holmes. We sat a while longer until at last, I asked, “So… was it your dog that killed Sir Charles?”

  “No,” he said, brightening. “I feared it might be. When Mortimer told us what had chanced, I immediately thought Foofy—I call him Foofy; oh, it makes him mad—I thought Foofy had slipped back into our world, alone and uncommanded, and begun killing. Imagine how I felt.”

  “But that is not what happened? This Foofy of yours did not come back?”

  “He did, but not alone. Oh, you should meet him! Do you want to meet him, Watson?”

  “A hell-hound? Not likely!”

  “He is a perfectly agreeable dog!”

  “Er… an agreeable hell-hound, you mean?”

  “You cannot assume an animal’s behavior based entirely on its breed.”

  “He dragged two people to a torture dimension!”

  “Well, he didn’t know what else to do. It wasn’t mean-spirited,” Holmes insisted.

  “He is made of pure fear. He is terror, given shape.”

  “He does have that effect on people,” said Holmes with a defeated sigh, “but he really did try his best to help me and Bhehr-Lylegnag. He’s a very kind, obedient dog. Come on, Watson, come meet him. As long as you are with me, you are perfectly safe, I assure you.”

  Holmes was tugging my arm as if he wanted me to meet his hellish pet that very instant.

  “Is he… is he nearby?”

  “Oh yes! The next hut over.”

  “The next hut?”

  “Indeed.”

  “Just… twenty feet that way, or so?”

  “As you say.”

  I suddenly felt queasy and had the overwhelming desire for a snifter of brandy and a good sit down. “So,” I reflected, “quite a good thing I tried this hut first, eh?”

  “What? Oh! Oh… yes; probably a good thing. For all of us. I would have felt awful. Foofy would have been yelled at…”

  “And I would have been torn to pieces, I assume,” I said.

  Holmes shrugged. “Judge for yourself.”

  At his continued insistence, I dragged my unwilling feet over to the next hut and peered in the door.

  “Hullo, boy, it’s me,” Holmes called. “I’ve brought a friend! This is Watson. I’ve told yo
u about him, remember?”

  Curled up on the floor of the little stone hut was a… well… a very ancient hell-hound. As a breed they are just as promised: gigantic black dogs, composed of smoke and shadow, wreathed in flame. Yet, for all that, it was hard to fear Foofy. Hard not to pity, in fact.

  “Keep in mind,” Holmes said, “it has been almost seventeen hundred dog years.”

  The poor animal tried to stand, but its back legs no longer functioned as they ought. He feebly wagged his tail, brushing soot around in the old stone hut. Foofy resembled nothing so much as a moose skeleton, wrapped in wrinkled butcher’s paper and painted black. His muzzle was gray, his eyes milky and blind. The years had cooled his hellish flame; he smoldered, weakly.

  “Hell-hounds usually live for an hour or two, I surmise,” Holmes said. “They are more suited to a bloody blaze of glory than to old age. Yet here he is. As soon as I arrived I heard him calling to me. I found him at the center of the Great Grimpen Mire. There’s an old mine shaft in the hill at the center; he was chained up there.”

  I reached out my palm to the monster, who sniffed it and gave one feeble lick. His tongue was sizzling hot, but not enough to burn, only to pink the skin. Against my better judgment, I gave his head a little pat, musing, “Tied up in the mine, you say? On the day I met him, Stapleton said he was the only man who could navigate there.”

  “Well, I managed it too,” said Holmes, “but you’ve put your finger on it, I think.”

  “He is our enemy?”

  “He is. I am preparing to face him—I have been for several days. To my great regret, some of this preparation must be done at Baskerville Hall. I think we should go there now. When we arrive, I shall show you things that will make the whole matter more clear.”

  We set off. I’d have liked to interview Holmes further as we walked, but the sun had gone down and my entire attention was spent trying to keep from tripping over bushes. The darkness didn’t bother Holmes, but when he saw me stumbling about he said, “Perhaps we’d better get a little light, eh?”