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.../ cannot help but dream.’
“All the while that he was speaking, he was moving away, towards 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 pretence 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. Saint 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 vice. 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 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 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 ringing his tale to its inevitable end, “whose texture was like some frightful, pulpy cephalopod, and whose shape 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’”
MR. BRIMSTONE AND DR. TREACLE
As soon as he had read Utterson’s manuscript, as reproduced in Stevenson’s account of the strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the one thought in Hector Treacle’s mind was to re-create the Jekyll formula.
Whereas other men seemingly regarded Utterson’s revelations as a cautionary tale warning scientists against unwary tampering with the mysteries of Nature, Dr. Treacle saw the true potential of the elixir. The fact that a prototype had malfunctioned was, in Treacle’s opinion, no reason to give up on the project; all new technologies had their teething-troubles, which could be worked out by those who persevered. Like Stevenson—but unlike Jekyll or Utterson— Hector Treacle was a Scotsman; unlike Stevenson, however, he was the kind of Scotsman who was much given to perseverance. He was a sterner man by far than Henry Jekyll.
With time and effort, Treacle felt sure, he could deliver a product that would not only separate the good in men from the evil, but would empower the good to strangle and obliterate the evil. He immediately gave up all other work in order to concentrate on this great mission, instructing his servants to turn all would-be patients away from his door no matter how desperate their condition might be.
After several years of hard labor, and many experiments, Hector Treacle finally succeeded in his endeavor. He produced a serum that would tear his personality in two as violently and as precisely as Henry Jekyll’s had been riven, but would also place the higher self firmly in the driving seat of the soul.
Gladly, he drank it down.
At first, as was only to be expected, Treacle suffered a few problems. He had always been a man of very precise habits— perfectly regular in his attendance at the kirk, unable to tolerate the slightest laxity on the part of his wife or his domestic staff, utterly scrupulous in the management of his inheritance—but the darker side of his personality, temporarily liberated in order that it might be conclusively crushed, disrupted his routines severely.
Treacle had expected his alter ego—which immediately adopted the appropriately diabolical pseudonym Lucifer Brimstone—to be a creature of pure but all-inclusive malignity, as Jekyll’s Hyde had seemingly been, but he was not. Brimstone appeared to be an individual motivated entirely by the deadly sin of wrath, but his was a sly kind of wrath that was by no means all-consuming.
Naturally enough, Brimstone hated everything that Treacle’s nobler self loved, and did his best to wreak havoc therewith, but he did so with low cunning rather than frank brutality.
Brimstone loathed the church for the sternness of its morality and its abomination of sin; he had the temerity to interrupt the pastor’s sermons with all manner of serpentine sophistries. Worse still, Brimstone took a positive delight in all the most vulgar trappings of sexual intercourse—even with Mrs. Treacle, on one or two occasions when he happened to take control of Treacle’s flesh by night. To add insult to injury, Brimstone took advantage of another brief interval of tenure to give a firm promise that he would not dismiss a pregnant kitchen girl, which poor Treacle had of course to honor. Worst of all, however, the demonic Brimstone began to give away significant amounts of money to the most unsuitable causes imaginable: hospitals for the poor; mechanics’ institutes; hostels for battered wives and abused children; societies for the promotion of racial equality, and even the Labor Party!
To add further insult to these further injuries, it seemed that for some utterly unaccountable reason, everyone liked the man! Even Mrs. Treacle, who had long since ceased to exhibit any conspicuous affection for her husband, visibly warmed to the appalling presence of Lucifer Brimstone!
Fortunately, Hector Treacle had done his work far better than poor Henry Jekyll. Lucifer Brimstone’s influence upon the world was mercifully short-lived. Treacle’s higher self ground him gradually but inexorably into dust.
Within a matter of months, the good doctor had purified himself, body and soul. It only remained to give his invention to the world, thus to institute Utopia.
This he did, in a spirit of humility and generosity.
The way ahead was not smooth. For some incomprehensible reason, large numbers of people objected to the serum and refused to take it. In order to overcome their obduracy, the drug eventually had to be force-fed to them by their wiser and better-disciplined fellows. In the end, however, the triumph of Treacle’s elixir was assured.
Outrage, moral laxity and vulgar pleasure were banished from the world of men, never to return.
The entire Earth—even including England—became the kind of paradise of which every Scottish Presbyterian had always dreamed.
* * * *
Author’s note: When I first dreamed this story it had a different and far more nightmarish conclusion. Fortunately, in exactly the same way that Fanny Stevenson pointed out to Robert that he had missed the opportunity to pen a telling moral fable, and forced him to burn the original, my dear wife Chastity intervened to persuade me to consign the uncensored version to perdition. She insisted that I owed it to the world to provide a happy and uplifting ending, so I did.
JEHAN THUN’S QUEST
The day had been clear when Jehan Thun set off from the inn on the outskirts of the city of Geneva, but the weather in the lake’s environs was far more capricious than the weather in Paris. He had hoped that the sky might remain blue all day, but it was not long after noon when grey cloud began spilling through the gaps in the mountains, swallowing up the peaks and promising a downpour that would soak him to the skin and render his path treacherous.
There were villages scattered along the shore of the lake but he had no thought of asking for shelter there. The time seemed to be long past when one could be confident of receiving hospitality from any neighbor, and the people in Geneva who had recognized his surname had looked at him strangely and suspiciously, although none had actually challenged him. It would have been better, in retrospect to avoid Geneva altogether, since the Chateau of Andernatt was on the French side of the lake and he could have followed the course of Rhone, but he had hoped to find the city of his ancestors more welcoming by far than any other he had passed through on his flight from Paris. At least the many repetitions of his grandmother’s story had drummed the stages of the route that she and Aubert had followed into Jehan’s mind: Bessange, Ermance, ford the Dranse; Chesset, Colombay, Monthey, the hermit
age of Notre-Dame-du-Sex.
When Jehan’s grandparents had made that journey the churches of Geneva had still been affiliated to Rome; now, fifty years after Calvin’s advent, they preached a very different faith. Notre-Dame-du-Sex was on the French shore, but Jehan was not at all certain that the hermitage would still be occupied. The apparatus of charity that had supported the hermit who gave temporary refuge to Aubert Thun and the daughter of Master Zacharius had been transformed for several leagues around the city, just as the environs of Paris had been transformed before St. Bartholomew’s Day.
The rain began before Jehan had reached the Dranse, but it was no deluge at first and the torrent had not become impassable. The downfall became steadier as he left the shore, though, and the further he went up the slopes the greater its volume became. He dared not stop now, or even relent in his pace. It had taken his grandparents more than twenty hours to reach the base of the Dent-du-Midi, but they had been slowed down by Old Scholastique; he reckoned on covering the same ground in fourteen hours at the most—as he would have to do if he were to avoid spending the night on the bare mountain.
He had hoped that fifty years of footfalls might have smoothed the paths a little since his grandparents’ day, but it seemed that hardly anyone came this way any more; parts of the path had all but disappeared. On a better day, the Dent-du-Midi would have served as a fine beacon, but with its top lost in the clouds he was unable to sight it.
Jehan Thun was a man well used to walking, but the gradients in and around Paris were gentle, and he was glad now that he had had to cross the forbidding slopes of the Jura in order to reach Geneva, for his legs had been hardened in the last few weeks. His cape and broad-brimmed hat protected him from the worst effects of the driving rain, but that would not have been enough to sustain him had he not been capable of such a metronomic stride. He had walked like an automaton since St. Bartholomew’s Day, but even an automaton needs strength in its limbs and power in its spring.
The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels Page 8
