"And this is what Gaius Delapore and his son believe they have in their basement?" My eyebrows shot up. "It should make it easy enough for us to assist young Mr. Colby in freeing his fiancée from the influence of two obvious lunatics."
Holmes said softly, "So it should."
We remained at Carnaki's until nearly midnight, while Holmes and the young antiquarian—for so I assumed Carnaki to be—spoke of the appalling folkloric and theosophical speculations that evidently fuelled Viscount Delapore's madness: hideous tales of creatures beyond human imaginings or human dreams, monstrous legends of dim survivals from impossibly ancient aeons, and of those deluded madmen whose twisted minds accepted such absurdities for truth. Holmes was right in his assertion that the visit would supply the palette of my knowledge of London with hitherto unsuspected hues. What surprised me was Holmes' knowledge of such things, for on the whole he was a man of practical bent, never giving his attention to a subject unless it was with some end in view.
Yet when Carnaki spoke of the abomination of abominations, of the terrible amorphous shuggoths and the Watcher of the Gate, Holmes nodded, as one does who hears familiar names. The shocking rites engaged in by the covens of ancient believers, whether American Indians or decayed cults to be found in the fastnesses of Greenland or Thibet, did not surprise him, and it was he, not our host, who spoke of the insane legend of the shapeless god who plays the pipe in the dark heart of chaos, and who sends forth the dreams that drive men mad.
"I did not know that you made a study of such absurdities, Holmes," I said, when we stood once more on the fog-shrouded Embankment, listening for the approaching clip of a cab-horse's hooves. "I would hardly have said theosophy was your line."
"My line is anything that will—or has—provided a motive for men's crimes, Watson." He lifted his hand and whistled for the Jehu, an eerie sound in the muffled stillness. His face in the glare of the gaslight seemed pale and set. "Whether a man bows down to God or Mammon or to Cthulhu in his dark house at R'lyeh is no affair of mine . . . Until he sheds one drop of blood not his own in his deity's name. Then God have mercy upon him, for I shall not."
All of these events took place on Monday, the 20th of August. The following day Holmes was engaged with turning over the pages of his scrapbooks of clippings regarding unsolved crimes, seeming, it appeared to me, to concentrate on disappearances during the later part of the summer in years back almost to the beginning of the century. On Wednesday Mrs. Hudson sent up the familiar elegantly restrained calling-card of the American folklorist, the man himself following hard upon her heels and almost thrusting her out of the way as he entered our parlor.
"Well, Holmes, it's all settled and done with," he declared, in a loud voice very unlike his own. "Thank you for your patience with old Delapore's damned rodomontade, but I've seen the old man myself—he came down to town yesterday, damn his impudence—and made him see reason."
"Have you?" asked Holmes politely, gesturing to the chair in which he had first sat.
Colby waved him impatiently away. "Simplest thing in nature, really. Feed a cur and he'll shut up barking. And here's for you." And he drew from his pocket a small leather bag which he tossed carelessly onto the table. It struck with the heavy, metallic ring of golden coin. "Thank you again."
"And I thank you." Holmes bowed, but he watched Colby's face as he spoke, and I could see his own face had turned very pale. "Surely you are too generous."
"S'blood, man, what's a few guineas to me? I can tear up little Judi's poor letter, now we're to be wed all right and tight . . . ." He winked lewdly at Holmes, and held out his hand. "And her old Dad's damned impudent note as well, if you would."
Holmes looked around him vaguely, and picked up various of his scrapbooks from the table to look beneath them: "Didn't you tuck it behind the clock?" I asked.
"Did I?" Holmes went immediately to the mantle—cluttered as always with newspapers, books, and unanswered correspondence—and after a brief search shook his head. "I shall find it, never fear," he said, his brow furrowing. "And return it, if you would be so kind as to give me your direction once more."
Colby hesitated, then snatched the nearest piece of paper from the table—a bill from Holmes' tailor, I believe it was—and scribbled an address upon it. "I'm off to Watchgate this afternoon," he said. "This will find me."
"Thank you," said Holmes, and I noticed that he neither touched the paper, nor came within arm's reach of the man who stood before him. "I shall have it in the post before nightfall. I can't think what can have become of it. It has been a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr. Colby. My felicitations on the happy outcome of your suit."
When Colby was gone Holmes stood for a time beside the table, looking after him a little blankly, his hands knotted into fists where they rested among the scrapbooks. He whispered, "Damn him," as if he had forgotten my presence in the room. "My God, I had not believed it . . . ."
Then, turning sharply, he went to the mantelpiece and immediately withdrew from behind the clock the note which Carstairs Delapore had sent to Colby. This he tucked into an envelope and sealed. As he copied the direction he asked in a stiff, expressionless tone, "What did you make of our guest, Watson?"
"That success has made him bumptious," I replied, for I had liked Colby less in his elevated and energized mood than I had when he was merely unthinking about his own and other peoples' money. "Holmes, what is it? What's wrong?"
"Did you happen to notice which hand he wrote out his direction with?"
I thought for a moment, picturing the man scribbling, then said, "His left."
"Yet when he wrote the address of the Hotel Excelsior the day before yesterday," said Holmes, "he did so with his right hand."
"So he did." I came to his side and picked up the tailor's bill, and compared the writing on it with that of the Excelsior address, which lay on the table among the scrapbooks and clippings. "That would account for the hand being so very different."
Holmes said, "Indeed." But he spoke looking out the window into Baker Street, and the harsh glare of the morning sunlight gave his eyes a steely cast, faraway and cold, as if he saw from a distance some terrible event taking place. "I am going to Shropshire, Watson," he said after a moment. "I'm leaving tonight, on the last train; I should be back—"
"Then you find Viscount Gaius' sudden capitulation as sinister as I do," I said.
He looked at me with blank surprise, as if that construction of young Colby's information had been the farthest thing from his mind. Then he laughed, a single sharp mirthless breath, and said, "Yes. Yes, I find it . . . sinister."
"Do you think young Colby is walking into some peril, returning to Depewatch Priory?"
"I think my client is in peril, yes," said Holmes quietly. "And if I cannot save him, then the least that I can do is avenge."
Holmes at first refused to hear of me accompanying him to the borders of Wales, sending instead a note to Carnaki with instructions to be ready to depart by the eight o'clock train. But when Billy the messenger-boy returned with the information that Carnaki was away from home and would not return until the following day, he assented, sending a second communication to the young antiquarian requesting that he meet us in the village of High Clum, a few miles from Watchgate, the following day.
It puzzled me that Holmes should have chosen the late train, if he feared for Colby's life should the young man return to fetch his fiancée from the hands of the two monomaniacs at Depewatch Priory. Still more did it puzzle me that, upon our arrival at midnight in the market town of High Clum, Holmes took rooms for us at the Cross of Gold, as if he were deliberately putting distance between us and the man he spoke of—when he could be induced to speak at all—as if he were already dead.
In the morning, instead of attempting to communicate with Colby, Holmes hired a pony trap and a boy to drive us to the wooded ridge that divided High Clum from the vale in which the village of Watchgate stood. "Queer folk there," the lad said, as the sturdy cob lean
ed into its collars on the slope. "It's only a matter of four mile, but it's like as if they lived in another land. You never do hear of one of their lads come courtin' in Clum, and the folk there's so odd now none of ours'n will go there. They come for the market, once a week. Sometimes you'll see Mr. Carstairs drive to town, all bent and withered up like a tree hit by lightnin', starin' about him with those pale eyes: yellow hazel, like all the Delapore; rotten apples my mum calls 'em. And old Gaius with him sometimes, treatin' him like as if he was a dog, the way he treats everyone."
The boy drew his horse to a halt, and pointed out across the valley with his whip: "That'll be the Priory, sir."
After all that had been spoken of monstrous survivals and ancient cults, I had half-expected to see some blackened Gothic pile thrusting flamboyant spires above the level of the trees. But in fact, as Carnaki had read in William Punt's book, Depewatch Priory appeared, from across the valley, to be simply a 'goodly manor of gray stone,' its walls rather overgrown with ivy and several windows broken and boarded shut. I frowned, remembering the casual way in which Colby had thrown his sack of guineas onto Holmes' table: Feed a cur and he'll shut up barking . . . .
Yet old Gaius had originally turned down Colby's offer to help him bring the Priory back into proper repair.
Behind the low roof-line of the original house I could see what had to be the Roman tower Carnaki had spoken of—beyond doubt the original "watch" of both priory and village names. It had clearly been kept in intermittent repair up until the early part of this century, an astonishing survival. Beneath it, I recalled, Carnaki had said the sub-crypt lay: the center of that decadent cult that dated to pre-Roman times. I found myself wondering if old Gaius descended the stairs to sleep on the ancient altar, as the notorious Lord Rupert Grimsley had been said to sleep, and if so, what dreams had come to him there.
After London's stuffy heat the thick-wooded foothills were deliciously cool. The breezes brought the scent of water from the heights, and the sharp nip of rain. Perhaps this contrast was what brought upon me what happened later that day, and that horrible night—I know not. For surely, after I returned to the Cross of Gold, I must have come down ill, and lain delirious. There is no other explanation—I pray there is no other explanation—for the ghastly dreams, worse than any delirium I experienced while sick with fever in India, that dragged me through abysses of horror while I slept and have for years shadowed not only my sleep, but upon occasion my waking as well.
I remember that Holmes took the trap to the station to meet Carnaki. I remember, too, sitting by the window of our pleasant sitting-room, cleaning my pistol, for I feared that, if Holmes had in fact found some proof that the evil Viscount had kidnapped beggar-children for some ancient and unspeakable rite, there might be trouble when we confronted the old autocrat with it. I certainly felt no preliminary shiver, no premonitory dizziness of fever, when I rose to answer the knock at the parlor door.
The man who stood framed there could be no one but Carstairs Delapore. "Withered all up like a tree hit by lightnin'," the stable-lad had said: had his back been straight he still would not have been as tall as I, and he looked up at me sideways, twisting his head upon a skinny neck like a bird's.
His eyes were a light hazel, almost golden, as the boy had said.
They are my last memory of the waking world that afternoon.
I dreamed of lying in darkness. I ached all over, my neck and spine pinched and stiff, and from somewhere near me I heard a thin, harsh sobbing, like an old man in terror or pain. I called out: "Who is it? What is wrong?" and my voice sounded hoarse in my own ears, like the rusty caw of a crow, as alien as my body felt when I tried to move.
"My God," sobbed the old man's voice, "my God, the pit of six thousand stairs! It is Lammas-tide, the night of sacrifice—dear God, dear God save me! Iä! Shub-Niggurath! It waits for us, waits for us, the Goat With Ten Thousand Young!"
I crawled across an uneven floor, wet and slimy, and the smells around me were the scents of deep earth, dripping rock, and far off the terrible fetors of still worse things: corruption, charred flesh, and the sickeningly familiar scent of incense. My hands touched my companion in this darkness and he pulled away: "No, never! Fiends, that you used poor Judith as bait, to bring me to you! The Hooded Thing in the darkness taught you how, as it taught others before you—showed you the passages in the Book of Eibon—told you how to take the bodies of others, how to leave their minds trapped in your old and dying body . . . the body that you then sacrificed to them! A new body, a strong body, a man's body, healthy and fit . . . ."
"Hush," I whispered, "hush, you are raving! Who are you, where is this?" Again I touched his hands, and felt the stick-like bones and flaccid, silky flesh of a very old man. At the same moment those frail hands fumbled at my face, my shoulders in the dark, and he cried out:
"Get away from me! You weren't good enough for him, twisted and crippled and weak! And your daughter only a woman, without the power of a man! It was all a trap, wasn't it? A trap to lure me, thinking it was she who sent for me to set her free . . . ." His thin voice rose to a shriek and he thrust me from him with feeble hysteria. "And now you will send me down to the pit, down to the pit of the shuggoths!" As his sobs changed to thin, giggling laughter I heard a stirring, far away in the darkness; a soughing, as if of the movement of things infinitely huge, and soft.
I staggered to my feet, my legs responding queerly; I reeled and limped like a drunken man. I followed the wall in darkness, feeling it to be in places ancient stones set without mortar, and in others the naked rock of the hill itself. There was a door, desiccated wood strapped with iron that grated, rusty and harsh, under my hands. I stumbled back into the darkness, and struck against something—a stone table, pitted with ancient carvings—and beside it found the only means of egress, a square opening in the floor, in which a flight of worn, shallow steps led downwards.
Gropingly I descended, hands outstretched on either side to feel the wet rock of the wall that sometimes narrowed to the straightest of seams: terrified of what might lie below me, yet I feared to be in the power of the madmen I knew to be above. I was dizzy, panting, my mind prey to a thousand illusions, the most terrifying of which was that of the sounds that I seemed to hear, not above me, but below.
In time the darkness glowed with thin smears of blue phosphor, illuminating the abyss below me. Far down I could descry a chamber, a sort of high-roofed cave where the niter dripped from the walls and showed up a crumbling stone altar, ruinously ancient and stained black with horrible corruption. There was an obscene aberration to the entire geometry of the chamber, as if the angles of floor and walls should not have met in the fashion they appeared to; as if I viewed an optical illusion, a trick of darkness and shadow. From the innermost angle of that chamber darkness issued, like a thicker flow of night, blackness that seemed one moment to congeal into discrete forms which the next proved to be only inchoate stirrings. Yet there was something there, something the fear of which kept me from moving on, from making a sound—from breathing, even, lest the gasp of my breath bring upon me some unimaginably nightmarish fate.
My fellow captive's high, hysterical giggling on the stair above me drove me into a niche in the wet rock. He was coming down—and he was not alone. Pressed into the narrow darkness I only heard the sounds of bodies passing on the stair. A moment later others followed them, while I crouched, praying to all the gods ever worshipped by fearful man to be spared the notice of anything that walked that eldritch abyss. At the same moment sounds rose from below, a rhythmless wailing or chittering that nevertheless seemed to hold the form of music, underlain by a thick lapping or surging sound, as if of thick, unspeakably vile liquid rising among stones.
Looking around the sheltering coign of rock, I saw by the growing purplish hell-glare below me the tall figure of Burnwell Colby, standing beside the altar, an unfleshed skull held upraised in his hands. Darkness ringed him, but it seemed almost as if the skull itself gave light, a p
ulsing and horrible radiation that showed me—almost—the shapes of which the utter blackness was comprised. I bit my hand to keep from crying out, and wondered that the pain of it did not wake me; an old man lay on the altar, and by his sobbing giggles I knew him to be he who had been shut into the stone crypt above with me. Colby's deep voice rang out above the strident piping: "Ygnaiih . . . ygnaiih . . . thflthkh'ngha . . . ."
And the things in the darkness—horrible half-seen suggestions of squamous, eyeless heads, of tentacles glistening and of small round mouths opening and closing with an appalling glint of teeth—answered with a thick and greedy wail.
"H'ehye n'grkdl'lh, h'ehye . . . in the name of Yog-Sothoth I call, I command . . . ."
Something—I know not what nor do I dare to think—raised itself behind the altar, something shapeless that glowed and yet seemed to swallow all light, hooded in utter darkness. The old man on the altar began to scream, a high thin steady shriek of absolute terror, and Colby shouted, "I command you . . . I command . . . !" Then it seemed to me that he gasped, and swallowed, as if his breath stopped within his lungs, before he held up the skull again and cried, "N'grkdl'lh y'bthnk, Shub-Niggurath! In the name of the Goat With Ten Thousand Young I command!"
The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Page 53
