No doubt as a consequence of tiredness depressing my spirits, I found myself sinking into mournful musings about my late wife. This route was one I used to travel regularly during the weeks of our engagement, when I would leave Baker Street to visit her at the Forresters’ house in Lower Camberwell where she lived and worked as a governess.
Mary had loved this hour of day, the onset of dark on a summer’s eve in the city. The deep purplish-blue of the eastern sky reminded her of her early childhood in Bombay, where twilights simmered and the stars emerged in such brilliant profusion that you could read a book by their light. Now and then I would ask her if she longed to go back to India, and she, with that gentle sincerity so typical of her, would reply that she could never be where her heart was not, and her heart lay here. To illustrate the statement she would point not at London but at me, whereupon I would be suffused with a joy so great it was nigh inexpressible.
“I want my very last words to be your name, John,” she said to me once. “When I am on my deathbed, I want to call out to you and have you come to me.”
“You will outlive me by far, Mary,” I replied.
“But don’t you see? Even if you predecease me, I shall still call to you and you will still come. Our souls will be together in the hereafter just as we are together now.”
And when Mary did die, my name was indeed the very last thing upon her lips. She screamed it in agony, as a slobbering, ravening byakhee tore her to pieces before my eyes.
“You are remembering the late Mrs Watson,” said Holmes, intruding upon my melancholy reverie.
“How can you tell?”
“I have seen, many times since her funeral, the particular solemn demeanour that has now come over you. More tangible evidence is afforded by the fact that you are plucking at your shirtcuff in a rather wistful manner.”
“My shirtcuff?” I had indeed been performing this action unawares. “What has that got to do with anything?”
“Did you not once tell me that you and your wife made a formidable partnership at cards?”
“We did.”
“And that at the root of your success at the card table, when playing bridge or whist with friends, was a system of secret signs which the two of you had devised to indicate to each other what play you were about to make?”
“Yes. It is not something I am especially proud of, and we utilised it only when we were up against our neighbours the Atwells. They are a pleasant enough couple except when it comes to cards. Competitiveness brings out the worst in them, and Mary and I resolved that we would rather beat them by cheating than lose to them and be subjected to mockery.”
“You told me that if either of you was about to play a trump, you would alert the other to this by discreetly plucking at your right shirtcuff with your left hand. Seeing you do so now, I could only infer that your mind must be on Mary. I have noted that often when she is the topic of conversation, you adopt this unconscious practice, in remembrance of happier times and the intimate conjugal sympathies you and she shared. Ergo, it stands to reason that you would do the same whenever she crops up as the object of your inner contemplation.”
“It is two years now since Mary was taken from me,” I said, “and sometimes it seems like yesterday and at other times an age ago. Whenever I feel that the pain might have begun to dim, it returns anew, as acute as ever, if not more so. I… I could have saved her. I could have prevented it. The byakhee… Had I been a fraction quicker off the mark I could have killed it before it pounced.” My voice shook with emotion. “Holmes, I am as guilty of Mary’s death as that creature.”
“You are not!” my friend exclaimed. “How dare you say that, Watson, let alone think it. You and your wife were ambushed. Given that you were taken by surprise, it is remarkable that you responded with the alacrity that you did; a lesser man would have been paralysed with fear, but not John Watson. He got off a shot and killed the beast.”
Even now I can vividly recall – how could I ever forget? – the moment when the byakhee invaded our house. Mary and I were enjoying a companionable evening by the fireside, she busy with her needlepoint, I perusing the latest edition of The Lancet. A picture of domestic contentment, and then there was an almighty shattering of glass as a nightmarish beast broke through our sitting-room window – a large hulking thing with webbed feet and membranous wings; an amalgamation of buzzard, bat, wasp and more besides, but also corpse-like in appearance, rotted-looking and emaciated.
Giving vent to an unholy screech, the byakhee prowled menacingly across the carpet towards Mary, who sat frozen in her chair, face slack with shock and incomprehension. I, for my part, lunged instinctively for the chiffonier in which I kept my service revolver. The time it took me to cross the room, yank open the drawer and pull out the revolver felt like hours. I could not kill the byakhee with my bare hands; the creature was too strong for that. A well-placed bullet, though, would fell it, for byakhees are far from invulnerable. They may be able to fly through the vacuum of space, interstellar steeds for those with the wherewithal to tame them and the audacity to ride them, but they can nonetheless be brought down by small arms fire like any conventional animal.
The byakhee moved with appalling swiftness, far faster than I could have imagined. It was upon Mary even as I swivelled round to confront it. Its talons were dug into her torso, rending. Its beak-like maw was clamped around her neck. She cried out my name, her words dissolving into a thick, wet gurgle.
Next instant, the byakhee was dead.
A minute later, cradled in my arms, Mary was too.
“Furthermore,” said Holmes, “we found the culprits, did we not? The trio who cast the spell to conjure up the byakhee and sent it to your house.”
I nodded. “Abdullah Khan. Mahomet Singh. Dost Akbar.” I reeled off the names in a litany of hatred. Each tasted like acid upon my tongue.
These were the three Sikhs whom, along with Jonathan Small, had been cheated out of their ill-gotten booty by that blackguard Bartholomew Sholto. Sholto was under the misapprehension that he had got his hands on a box containing a cache of jewels that included the fabled “Great Mogul” diamond, said to be the second largest such stone in existence. What the box actually held was a small idol chiselled from sea-green stone and fashioned to represent Bokrug, the god worshipped by the semi-amphibian Thuum’ha race who dwelled in the city of Ib in the long-lost land of Mnar some ten thousand years ago. The idol was stolen by the inhabitants of neighbouring city Sarnath, an altogether more human-like race, after they had committed genocide upon the Thuum’ha, repelled by their soft, batrachian bodies. Sarnath’s victorious warriors set up the idol in their city’s main temple as a trophy but it disappeared that same night, the only witness to its removal the high priest Taran-Ish, who was found dying on the temple floor, his face distended in terror. A thousand years later, magical revenge was enacted upon Sarnath when a feast celebrating the destruction of Ib was disrupted and the revellers were mysteriously transformed into green, flabby, voiceless beings much like the murdered Thuum’ha. The humbler citizens of Sarnath fled in terror, never to return.
During the millennia since the Bokrug idol vanished from Sarnath, it resurfaced now and then, changing hands, passing from owner to owner and bringing nothing but misery to any who touched it. By the 1870s it had fetched up in the possession of a rajah in the northern provinces of India. He had added it to his hoard of gold and gems believing it to be nothing more than a decorative jade effigy of a water-lizard.
With the Raj tightening its control over the subcontinent, the rajah began fearing for his wealth. In a cunning feint he secured what he reckoned his least valuable item, the idol, in an iron box with a Buddha hasp and despatched it to the fort at Agra for safekeeping. He told the servant into whose care he entrusted the box, a man called Achmet, that its contents accounted for half his worldly goods, whereas in truth practically everything he had was stowed away in the vaults beneath his palace.
Achmet, posing as a merchant,
arrived at Agra with Dost Akbar as a travelling companion. He had revealed the nature of the box’s contents to Akbar, who was Abdullah Khan’s foster brother, and that sealed his fate.
Together, Small, Khan, Akbar and Singh killed Achmet and opened the box. Their disappointment at finding not a king’s ransom of jewels within but rather a paltry-seeming artefact was great. Khan, however, was a widely read autodidact with an interest in the arcane and he recognised the idol for what it was. He knew that, humble though it seemed, this lump of weathered stone harboured significant power, and he managed to persuade his co-conspirators that the idol was worth more than all the riches in the world, for with the right incantations it might be wielded like a weapon. Indeed, if used appropriately, it had the capacity to make the four of them gods amongst men. Accordingly, they stashed the box in a hole in a wall of the fort, agreeing to retrieve it once things had settled down in the country; but they never got the chance. Achmet’s body was discovered and the four killers were arrested.
At the penal colony in the Andamans, Small fell in with two of the officers in charge, Major Bartholomew Sholto and Captain Arthur Morstan. He told them about the box, with a view to securing their agreement to recover it from its hiding place on his behalf. He lied about the contents, however, thinking that neither man would be interested in a crudely made heathen idol but would be motivated by the thought of a share of a treasure trove. Sholto then betrayed Small and Morstan, making off alone with the box.
Small spent the rest of his time on Blair Island plotting vengeance. In this he was aided by an Andaman Islander he befriended, a witch-doctor who taught him how to inflict sickness through a curse and to command a homunculus to do his bidding. Morstan, meanwhile, returned to England and disappeared shortly afterwards in mysterious circumstances. In fact, he died of a heart attack during an altercation with Sholto, who disposed of the body and told no one.
Morstan’s daughter Mary was the conduit through which Holmes and I became embroiled in the affair. She had begun receiving strange, cryptic letters consisting only of an inked sigil akin to an Elder Sign but with its central star sporting four points rather than the traditional five. The letters proved to have been posted by Small, who suspected that Mary knew the whereabouts of the iron box, although she did not, as her father had never mentioned it to her. In fact she had not seen or heard from Captain Morstan since he came home on leave some ten years earlier.
The sigil – which Holmes dubbed an Elder Sign of Four – was part of a plan by Small to unsettle and unnerve Mary. By sending one to her repeatedly, he meant to undermine her mental equilibrium to the point where he could swoop in and take advantage, cajoling from her perturbed mind the information he sought. It would have been dangerously provocative to send her a real Elder Sign, so he devised a version of his own, sinister-seeming but essentially innocuous.
Once Holmes and I had put paid to Small’s scheme, we thought the matter over and done with. What we did not count on was his erstwhile co-conspirators. A few years later the three Sikhs, who had each received a life sentence for Achmet’s murder, escaped from prison in Madras and made their way to London. Abdullah Khan had read my novel The Sign of Four and, with his inside knowledge, had easily divined the true story embedded within its pages. He inferred correctly that the Bokrug idol was now in Sherlock Holmes’s hands. He and his fellows wanted it back and determined that the best way to go about this was to kill me using a byakhee. Through striking at Holmes’s closest friend and ally, they thought that they would leave him so crippled by grief that he would prove easy prey.
Perhaps it might have worked. However, by inadvertently killing Mary instead, the Sikhs brought down upon their heads the righteous wrath of both Holmes and her widower. Our hunt for the culprits was relentless and our treatment of them, when we caught them, brutal. I am not proud of what we did. Nor am I ashamed. We gave them back their idol. At the same time, we invoked its terrible power upon them. Doom came to Khan, Singh and Akbar in a cascade of strange lights and a welter of green mist, from which they emerged transfigured, their bodies reduced to a mute, hunchbacked, froglike condition. Thereafter I executed them summarily with bullets to the brain, but even before I produced the gun, I swear I saw abject terror in their black, bulging eyes, and it was a source of huge satisfaction to me. The three were aware of what had befallen them. They knew how they had been altered, how odious and noisome they had become. Death must have seemed to them a merciful release. To me, it was sweet and merited justice.
“It was my fault,” I insisted.
“How in God’s name have you arrived at that conclusion, Watson?”
I drew a breath and sighed it out. “Because I wrote that book.”
“The Sign of Four?”
“Yes, and it led the three Sikhs to my door as surely as any signpost.”
Holmes fixed me with a grave stare. “You have never said this before.”
“It has been stewing within me all this time. I have tried to reason it out with myself, with decreasing success. I have told myself that the Sikhs would have found us eventually, regardless of whether I had published the novel or not. The book merely made their task easier and hastened the inevitable.”
“Absolutely.”
“Yet perhaps I should have camouflaged the true story better. I should have changed names as well as facts, so as to throw people off the scent. I felt misgivings even as I was composing the first draft, but dismissed them. I wanted to celebrate Mary. I felt I was writing her a love letter. Instead, I was writing her death sentence.”
I turned aside from Holmes. My eyes were pricking, tears brimming in them, and I did not wish him to see.
He patted my shoulder. “Now I understand why your pen has fallen idle. It was not to comply with any request of mine, or at least not solely. Since losing Mary, you have become ‘gun-shy’.”
I nodded. “You had already asked me before then, more than once, not to write about you any more. It seemed the perfect pretext. Mary was not long in the ground, and the three Sikhs too, and I was beginning to realise that these chronicles of mine were not mere harmless diversions. So I wrote one more short tale, a capstone to the career of the fictional Sherlock Holmes wherein I consigned him to oblivion, and Professor Moriarty with him. I was acceding to your demands but I was also trying to purge myself of the guilt I was feeling over The Sign of Four. I did not appreciate that at the time but have come to do so since, in hindsight. The upshot is that even if you were to give me licence to ‘resurrect’ you at some point in the future, I am not sure I would. My stories have become a double-edged sword. For all the benefits they have brought us, they have hurt us too.”
“In light of what you have just told me,” said Holmes, “our argument at the hammam yesterday now seems all the more regrettable. I am an insensitive blunderer sometimes, Watson.”
“Sometimes?” I echoed with a brittle smile, which he reciprocated.
“Yet I am not unsympathetic. You know that. I wish you had confided in me before today. I vow to be more perceptive of your feelings.”
“You cannot break the habit of a lifetime, surely.”
He chuckled. “Well, no. Maybe it is asking too much of myself. But I shall endeavour henceforth to be aware that my Watson, redoubtable as he is, has his vulnerabilities just like any other man. Behind that stalwart exterior there lies— Oh-ho! What is this?”
The hansom was pulling up outside Bethlem, and Holmes’s attention had been caught by something that I myself, with my eyesight still somewhat blurry, had not observed. He swung open the waist-high doors in front of us and leapt down to the kerb.
“Pay the man, Watson,” he called out as he hastened off towards the asylum.
Moments later I rejoined Holmes. He now formed part of a small knot of people that was gathered on the concourse facing the building’s east wing. The knot consisted of two others, a uniformed attendant and a man in a suit. The latter was a potbellied Anglo-Indian whom I took to be a resident
specialist, recalling Gregson’s mention of a “half-caste” Bethlem doctor. He was crouched on his haunches, absorbed in inspecting a body upon the ground. As I arrived, he concluded his examination with a sorrowful shake of the head.
“Poor wretch,” he said, straightening up. “Nothing I can do. You say you found him like this, Burrell?”
“Not five minutes ago, Dr Joshi,” replied the attendant.
I moved to get a better view of the body. Even had I not overheard the doctor’s pronouncement, I would have known I was looking at a corpse. The head was canted at an unnatural angle to the torso. The tongue protruded dumbly from the mouth. The whites of the wide-staring eyes were suffused with scarlet.
Then it dawned on me that I knew this man. Sudden, violent death may have deformed his features, but the carroty hair and bristling eyebrows were distinctive.
It was McBride.
My breath caught in my throat. The Scottish attendant, amongst whose charges was the inmate we thought to be Zachariah Conroy, had met a grisly end. One did not have to be Sherlock Holmes to fathom how it had happened, either, for the body was surrounded by shards of glass and flinders of painted wood. Holmes was looking upward, and I followed the line of his gaze to see a broken window on the third floor. The window was a jagged, gaping hole with no pane left intact. The few splintered transoms and mullions still in place were all angled outward like snaggle teeth. McBride had either leapt or been hurled through it, falling three storeys to a neck-snapping death.
Dropping his gaze, Holmes announced himself with a double clearing of the throat. Dr Joshi spun round, having been hitherto oblivious to both my companion’s presence and mine.
“Who the devil are you?” he barked.
“Sherlock Holmes. And you are?”
“Dr Simon Joshi, alienist. Ah yes. Of course. I heard that the illustrious Mr Holmes had paid us a visit yesterday morning. I have no idea what has brought you back but I do not believe you could have come at a worse time.”
The Cthulhu Casebooks--Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic Monstrosities Page 7
