by Andy Lane
'Whatever is in there is heavy,' I pointed out, indicating the way the floor bowed towards us. 'It might just be a storehouse.'
'I'm going inside anyway,' Ace insisted.
'Why? It's obviously important to them, whatever it is.'
'That's exactly why.'
'I'm not going to risk it!'
'I didn't ask you to.'
True to her word, Ace moved away from me towards the edge of the caravan, where the lip of one of the doors jutted out. Cursing, I followed.
She checked that the coast was clear, and then emerged into the open.
The spherical suit made it difficult for her to swing up to the door, and in the end she reluctantly let me help her up. Somehow I managed to scramble up beside her without bursting my own bubble. The incised sides of the caravan loomed above us. It must have been some ten or twelve yards high.
Ace examined the edges of the door.
'It's an airlock,' she announced.
'A what?'
'It keeps the air in. Look at the seals. There must be another one, just inside. Fair enough, unless they've got a pump or something they'll lose whatever air is trapped between the doors, but I guess that doesn't worry them. They can probably replenish it. Shall we go?'
'Are you sure about this?'
'Does the Pope wear a funny hat?'
'Not the last time I saw him,' I replied. She grinned at me, shedding a lot of years as she did so. I smiled back.
She pushed at the door. It opened easily, giving us access to a chamber about the size of a large wardrobe. I closed it behind us, and noticed that it pressed against a door-seal which was made of some material like guttapercha. There was a door ahead. Judging by the hinges, it opened away from us. It too had a rubbery seal. Ace pushed against it, but it resisted her.
'Air pressure,' she grunted. 'Give us a hand.'
I added my weight to hers. For a moment nothing happened, then a crack appeared between the door and the seal. A sudden hiss made me jump.
My bubble misted up and began to wrinkle.
'Pressure's equalizing,' Ace said. Her envelope was also sagging. She pushed the door fully open.
I did not know what to expect when I entered that foul, awful place. My mind could have conjured up a myriad possibilities, but never, never in a million years, could it have hit upon what I actually saw.
The interior of the caravan was one huge space. Flying buttresses braced the sides against the floor and the high ceiling. Windows of coloured glass, high up in the caravan's sides, admitted the weak crimson light of the sun to cast illumination upon a creature that should have remained in darkness forever.
Extract from the diary of Bernice Summerfield
As Sherringford Holmes stood over us, flanked by his gargoyle-like rakshassa bodyguards, I felt a terrible sinking feeling in my stomach. Or
'breadbasket', as Watson would have called it in his po-faced Victorian way.
The Doctor chuckled slightly, surprising me.
'You knew!' I accused him.
'I had my suspicions,' he admitted. 'So did Holmes, although he didn't want to acknowledge it. Sherringford was so against us pursuing the Baron to India that I began to smell a rat.'
'Hang on,' I said, 'it can't be Sherringford. I mean, it is Sherringford, but it can't be. Didn't Holmes and Watson see this mysterious hooded man in Euston just before you all met Sherringford in Holborn?'
'Yes,' the Doctor said earnestly, 'but we were almost forced off the road by a carriage which raced past us. Sherringford must have been inside it, doing a quickchange act on his way back to the Library to meet Mycroft.
And then there's those curious gloves...'
'The gloves? What about the gloves?'
'Well, that's the curious thing. . .'
'The Doctor leaned back with a self-satisfied smile on his face, and looked up to where Sherlock Holmes was staring at the gaunt, greyhaired form of his brother.
'I had hoped that my reasoning was faulty...' Holmes said finally, and trailed off into silence. He looked pretty stunned. I guess I would to, if my brother turned up as the villain of the piece. Especially since I haven't got a brother.
'I had hoped that you were in blissful ignorance, dear boy,' Sherringford said. 'Once Mr Ambrose in the Library told me of his intention to recommend you to the Pope, I sent Colonel Warburton out to Vienna to follow you, and then detailed K'tcar'ch to monitor your investigations in London, but they both reported that your suspicions were directed at Maupertuis. Out of interest, what gave me away?'
'A number of minor clues, most important of which was Father's journal.'
'What of it?'
Explaining his reasoning seemed to be helping Holmes calm down. He wasn't quite as pale as he had been, and his eyes weren't quite as glazed.
'I asked myself why only one of our party should be kidnapped from the hotel in Bombay. Why not take all of us? The only answer I could come up with was that the kidnapper wanted not the Doctor but the book that he carried, the book with the chant in it. Not only did you evince a strong desire to keep the book back in England, but you were also one of the few people to know that we were heading for Bombay.'
'How careless of me,' Sherringford sighed. 'I needed the book in order to open the gateway, of course. When I knew that it was coming to India with the Doctor, I sent a message ahead to Maupertuis and followed on the next ship.'
'You must know by now that your scheme has been scotched.' Holmes's voice rang with a kind of righteous indignation, brother or no brother. 'The army which Baron Maupertuis raised for you has been scattered. You may have retrieved your fakirs from the fray, but you cannot proceed with your invasion of Ry'leh. You may as well give yourself up and return to England, where I can...' The words seemed to catch in his throat. '. . . I can promise you a fair trial.'
'Oh Sherlock,' said Sherringford, 'you can never abandon a theory once you've got your teeth into it, can you? At least Mycroft, lazy though he may be, is flexible in that regard.'
He smiled in brotherly affection.
'We aren't invading Ry'leh,' he said. 'We're invading Earth.'
Chapter 16
In which God wants to have a word, and an evil from the dawn of time is debunked.
'Invading the Earth?' Holmes snapped. 'I've never heard anything so preposterous. Why in Heaven's name would you betray everything that you hold dear in the name of some alien race?'
Sherringford leaned forward earnestly.
'Have you heard the word of God?'
There was a moment of silence as we tried to work that one out. The Doctor was the first person to come up with an adequate response.
'Were you thinking of any god in particular, or would a general chit-chat with any deity suffice?' he piped up eventually. 'You see, I've come across enough gods in my time to stock several pantheons and still have a few left over for a Gotterdammerung or two. There's even a planet I could point you to where they worshipped me for a few generations, but then, I suppose that's understandable. I hope you don't want references, because I'm not on good terms with very many of them. Apart from myself, of course, and even then we had our differences.'
He frowned, as if rerunning the spiel in his mind to check that it all made sense. I knew that the whole thing was a trick to give him time to think, and to make Sherringford underestimate his intelligence, but I couldn't help thinking that he was overdoing it a bit.
Sherringford had heard the Doctor out in good humour.
'You are a heathen, Doctor, but that will change.'
'I doubt it,' the Doctor said. 'I've bandied words with bigger megalomaniacs than you without any noticeable change in my opinions.'
The rakshassa took a step forward. Its claws gouged holes in the wood and its spiked tail swung ominously. I'd felt the strength in that tail, and I didn't particularly want to come up against it again.
'You will regret those words, heretic. . .' it whispered.
'Worry not, Brother K'tcar'ch,' Sherr
ingford said soothingly. 'God will protect me.'
'K'tcar'ch?' the Doctor exclaimed. I could see he was surprised, and suddenly remembered the name. K'tcar'ch was the alien that they had all met in the Library in Holborn, but I thought the Doctor had told me that it looked like a large walnut with five legs, like the Ry'lehans fighting on the slopes of the mountain.
'We have already met, Doctor,' K'tcar'ch hissed, 'but now I know the Peace of God, and have abandoned my body of flesh for this spiritual form!'
'Brother K'tcar'ch has been converted to the One True Faith,' Sherringford said with some pleasure. 'Another of Her miracles. Once you have heard the Word, you too will know Peace.'
'Peace?' spat the Doctor, 'I've seen more, bigger and nastier wars than you've pulled wings off flies, and most of them were the result of the members of one faith thinking they were better than the members of another. I abjured religion a long time ago. You may have come across some creature that claims to be a god, but I will eat my hat if it is the real thing.'
'You will meet Azathoth shortly,' Sherringford assured him with a benign smile, 'then you will understand.'
Now there's a familiar name, I thought, as the rakshassa made a complex sign across its armoured and studded chest, and the Doctor's face fell.
'Azathoth?' he said.
Sherringford beamed.
'Not the Azathoth?'
'Indeed.'
'Not the amorphous blight of nethermost confusion that blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity, coexistent with all time and conterminous with all space?'
Sherringford's face broke into a joyous smile.
'Doctor, I had no idea that you had studied the Faith!'
The Doctor cocked his head and gazed up at Sherringford.
'Oh, I've come across some of your sales literature in dentists' waiting rooms and the like,' he said with a straight face. 'I may even have attended a jumble sale or two. What confused me is what an omnipotent, omniscient god like Azathoth is doing here on Ry'leh.'
'This is hardly the time for a theology lesson,' Holmes muttered.
'On the contrary,' his brother corrected him, 'your transubstantiation will be easier if you are prepared and if you understand what hearing the Word truly means.'
Holmes sneered and turned away. Sherringford turned to the Doctor and me and smiled.
'After giving birth to the cosmos, Azathoth drifted, discorporate, through the void,' he said in the tone of voice reserved for priests and religious lunatics the universe over. 'Across the Universe, Her followers prayed that She would be born into a physical body. After hundreds of billions of years, their prayers were answered, and Azathoth became incarnate amongst them. As a mark of Her special favour She spread the Word amongst them, so that they might be more pleasing in her sight.'
'You see,' the Doctor said, turning to me, 'how the truth becomes distorted and woven into the legend? Azathoth must have floated around in the vortex for billennia before managing to find a gap and manifest itself corporeally on somebody's home planet. It was always the weakest of the Great Old Ones, according to legend.'
'They went out into the universe in their star-spanning craft to spread the gospel of Azathoth,' Sherringford went on, 'but the unbelievers took arms against them. There was a jihad, a holy war. Azathoth, in Her infinite mercy, would not lay waste to the forces of darkness, and was vanquished.
They wanted to kill Her - as if a God could be killed! - but they were too weak and divided, and banished Her to this cold, hard world with the most faithful of her followers.'
'For which,' the Doctor murmured, 'read "Azathoth tried to spread her religion around a bit via a sophisticated sort of mind control, and got stomped on".'
'It's a bit hard on the inhabitants of Ry'leh,' I said. 'Having a god dumped in their laps.'
'Inhabitants?' the Doctor asked.
'His lot,' I said, pointing to K'tcar'ch. 'The ones with five legs.'
'The Shlangii?' He shook his head. 'No, they don't live here. The Shlangii are the most feared mercenaries in the known universe. I presume that a couple of garrisons of them were stationed on Ry'leh to stop Azathoth escaping. They are notoriously unreceptive to new ideas, which makes them ideal choices to guard a creature with a natty line in mass hypnosis.
Unfortunately, it looks as if Azathoth has managed to convert a substantial number of them. I knew that it reminded me of something back in Holborn, but I couldn't remember what.'
Sherringford had been following our conversation.
'Alas,' he said, 'the remainder have taken steps to prevent themselves hearing the message. Some form of surgery I believe. Poor, misguided creatures. If only they knew the glories that they have blinded themselves to.'
'So they're not peaceful philosophers?' I asked, just to make sure. He just laughed.
'That's why they were attacking Maupertuis's men,' the Doctor said. 'They must have thought that Maupertuis had come to rescue Azathoth.'
'Which, of course, he had,' said Sherringford. 'Although he did not know it.
But we tarry too long. It is time that you heard the Word yourselves.'
Holmes was staring at his brother's hands.
'I have been wondering ever since we met in the Library why my brother has been wearing gloves,' he said suddenly. 'An affectation, I thought, or perhaps a disfiguring skin disease. I noticed then that his nails had not been cut for some time - the material of the gloves was stretched to a point in an unmistakable way - but it has just struck me that his nails are considerably longer now than they were in the Library. Longer than they could feasibly have grown in that time.'
'The Mark of Azathoth,' the Doctor said quietly.
Sherringford raised his right hand.
'Our stigmata,' he said, flexing his fingers. Something seemed to ripple beneath the glove, which suddenly split along the seam. Scarlet flesh swelled out, revealing fingers that were clawed, pebbled and veined with black. Scraps of white material fluttered to the wooden floor of the caravan.
'Such a relief,' he sighed. 'I have been trying to hold this back for weeks.'
His shoulders began to swell.
'Dealing with pagans and unbelievers, I have been forced to retain this debased guise, hiding any changes beneath by clothes, but now I can allow my transubstantiation full rein.'
We were all backing away from Sherringford now. Holmes was horror-struck. He held out his hands towards his brother in a way that was either an entreaty, an offer of help or a warding off. The Doctor was looking on with a detached scientific interest. I just wanted to get out.
Sherringford's shoulders erupted through his robes into moist, filmy wings. I could see the pulsing of veins as blood pumped into them, filling them out as I watched. Droplets of some fluid sprayed across my face. The wings stretched until they touched the ground. As soon as his wings could take his weight his legs began to wither away into an armoured tail.
'You will be so happy when you have heard the Word,' he hissed.
A continuation of the reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D.
The creature was vast and swollen, like the carcass of a beached whale that had become bloated with putrefaction.
A discharge of some mucus-like substance hung in thick, cobweb-like strands from its rugose skin to the floor. It was a vivid purple in colour, with irregular black spots marring its surface. I saw no limbs, no eyes, no organs of sense at all, just one huge toothless maw that slobbered incessantly at us. The wooden planks of the floor were bent under its weight, and pitted as if it sweated some acidic substance.
'Oh my God!' I whispered. There was a stench within the caravan: a stench of something old, and decayed, and evil.
'My child...'
I whirled, looking for the speaker, but we were alone.
'Where . . .?' I said.
Ace inclined her head towards the . . . the thing in front of us.
'There,' she said.
'You poor lost souls, you have made your way to salvation.' Th
e voice continued. It was mellifluous and curiously hypnotic. I could not believe that it came from this swollen leech.
'Who are you?' I cried. 'Where are you?'
