“I am cold,” said he. “Are you not cold, gentlemen? In those damp clothes you must be. The nights get chilly quickly out here, even during what passes for summer in England. While the tea steeps, I shall light a fire.”
He busied himself at the hearth, soon kindling a small blaze from the logs laid in the grate. Then he proceeded to pour out the tea, handing a cup to Holmes and me. Once again I noticed that there seemed to be a problem with his left hand; he used it to keep the teapot lid in place as he poured, but with little dexterity. The fingers seemed stiff and unwieldy. I wondered whether the hand was afflicted by some sort of mild paralysis.
After milk and sugar were dispensed, Whateley raised his cup to his lips. “Your health,” he said.
I made to copy him, but then a thought occurred. What if the tea were poisoned?
I tried to console myself with the fact that Whateley had said he intended us no harm. Still, there was something about this whole situation that did not sit right with me. Whateley had made such a song and dance about preparing the tea and playing the good host, it inclined me to believe that he had an ulterior motive. Had he spared us from death at the hands of the nightgaunt only to inflict another kind of death, one that was more intimate and perhaps more excruciating?
I gave my tea a surreptitious sniff. It smelled fine, but then many poisons were odourless, and indeed tasteless. I glanced across at Holmes. He was holding cup and saucer but had yet to drink. Was he thinking as I was?
Whateley too had not yet drunk. There was a moment when all three of us were in stasis, each poised as if waiting for another to make a move. I was put in mind of gunslingers facing off in the main street of some dusty town in the American West. Instead of six-guns, we had teacups.
Then the impasse was broken as Whateley, with a queer, secretive smile, took a sip. When he had swallowed it down, Holmes duly followed suit. Only then did I feel it was safe to drink.
“It is remarkable to me,” said Holmes to Whateley, “that you are so adept when it comes to a creature like a nightgaunt and the methods required to tame one. You are more than a mere devotee of zoological oddities, it would seem.”
“And, by the same token, sir, you are more than a mere solver of crimes. We each of us have hidden depths.”
“I have had cause, at times in my career, to investigate mysteries that lie outside the mundane. I have, accordingly, developed a certain level of expertise in that sphere.”
“One would not know it from Dr Watson’s published oeuvre.”
“Such cases go unrecorded. You can perhaps appreciate why.”
“That I most assuredly do. Your reputation rests on pragmatism, and you fear you might be cold-shouldered by polite society were any occult dabblings made known.”
“You sound as though you speak from experience.”
“A little. My interest in exotic beasts has led me further afield than I first thought it might.” Whateley flicked a lock of hair away from one eye. He wore it collar-length, in the manner of an aesthete. “Initially I was fascinated only by the wilder, weirder fringes of natural history. As a child I loved to read about duckbilled platypuses, Tasmanian devils, mole rats, manatees and the like – all those reports brought back from the far-flung corners of the earth by naturalists, explorers and missionaries about animals so bizarre and misbegotten, one could hardly believe they were real. From there grew a curiosity about legendary creatures, of which there are a plethora in the United States alone: Bigfoot, the thunderbird, the wendigo, along with any number of swamp men and lake monsters. To me, there was a correlation. There had to be. What most would dismiss as folklore or superstition, I regarded simply as things that science had yet to discover and classify. I knew that that was to be my life’s work, creating a taxonomy of the semi-mythical, and I devoted all my energies in that direction. I graduated from Miskatonic University with a degree in biology and duly stayed on to pursue studies in more recondite areas of that discipline. I fancied myself a latter-day Linnaeus, building upon the foundations he laid to unite the worlds of the natural and the supernatural into one.”
“Which led you eventually to mount an expedition up the Miskatonic River in ’93 to catch a shoggoth.”
“Now how would you know about that, Mr Holmes?” said Whateley with bemusement.
“I should have thought it was obvious. The talk you gave.”
“The talk I gave?”
“A few months back.”
“I give talks all the time. You will have to be more specific.”
“To members of the Diogenes Club.”
“Ah yes. That one. You were there? I am sure I would have remembered if you were.”
“Not I. My brother.”
“Oh right,” said Whateley. “Yes. Your brother. Whose name is…?”
“Mycroft.”
“Yes. Mycroft Holmes. And he told you about the expedition?”
“He did. Both its purpose and its rather ignominious end.”
Whateley flinched. “Yes. One could hardly call it my finest hour.”
“By your own account, Indians beset you and your team as you were journeying upriver. There was a slaughter from which only you and another escaped, one Zachariah Conroy, a university colleague of yours.”
“Zachariah. A good man. It… it pains me to recall how he suffered.”
“You and Mr Conroy have had no dealings since?” Holmes asked.
I had been trying my best to fathom the approach Holmes was taking. At first it had seemed as though he was simply sounding Whateley out. Now I apprehended that his goal was to catch Whateley out. He was laying careful snares for him, with a view to establishing once and for all that Conroy was the inmate at Bethlem and Whateley behind his abduction.
I settled back in my seat, feeling oddly calm, as though a spectator at some sporting event watching two opponents vie for a trophy and knowing that my man was surely the more skilled of the two. The scent of woodsmoke in the room was sweetly pungent, almost perfumed. Whateley must have laid the fire with logs from some sort of resinous evergreen, I thought. The blaze itself was soothingly warm, and I welcomed its heat.
“Why do you ask, Mr Holmes?” said Whateley. “Why the interest in poor Zachariah?”
“Because unless I am much mistaken, Mr Conroy has been a visitor to England of late. Did you not know?”
“I… I believe I may have heard something to that effect. Yes, come to think of it, a mutual acquaintance mentioned it to me the other day. It was a case of: ‘I bumped into someone you might know from your alma mater. Name of Conroy. Remember him?’ A passing reference, is all.”
“You did not pursue the connection?”
“I guess, given what had happened, I felt Zachariah might not be best pleased to see me again. He was hurt quite badly, you know, and blames me for his injuries. It wasn’t my fault, of course. I told him that over and over. I couldn’t have predicted that our boat would be attacked by Red Indians, and there was nothing I could have done to prevent it. Boy, those savages were terrifying. They came at us in the night, out of nowhere, whooping like banshees, tomahawks flashing in the moonlight…”
Whateley shook his head sombrely at the memory. I, meanwhile, had a sudden lucid vision of the scene he was describing. I imagined the Indians swarming over him and his cohorts, their faces striped with war paint, their heads adorned with feathers, and the carnage that ensued. For a second or two I was seeing the event as though it were taking place right there before me, and I the Indians’ next victim whose scalp they would slice clean off the skull before they hacked me to pieces.
I took a couple of deep breaths to steady myself. The woodsmoke was reassuringly pleasant in my nostrils.
“It sounds appalling, Mr Whateley,” said Holmes. “You have my commiseration. I can see why you might not have wished to renew acquaintance with Mr Conroy, if he felt such animus towards you. Then again, one must speculate upon his reasons for coming to England in the first instance. He surely must have bee
n aware that this is where you had fetched up.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows what might be going through his head.”
“You do not suppose he was seeking you out?”
“If so, he never found me.” Whateley stroked his cheek in a manner that seemed not so much contemplative as self-regarding.
“That strikes me as singular,” said Holmes, “in as much as I would have thought he would have no difficulty locating your whereabouts in London, if he wished.”
“London is a big city.”
“But an enterprising, reasonably intelligent man would need only spend a day or two making enquiries to yield a result.”
“Perhaps he didn’t want to. Perhaps he didn’t even know I was over here.”
Holmes leaned forward, setting his teacup aside. “What also strikes me as singular is this: you, Mr Whateley, have not once queried Watson’s and my presence here in Rainham Marshes. You seemed, if I may say, almost to have been expecting us.”
“Did I?” Whateley waved a hand dismissively. “Could it be just that I am a phlegmatic person, able to take all manner of unusualness in my stride? My vocation has taught me, if nothing else, to expect the unexpected. So perhaps—”
“Do that again,” I said. I was startled to hear myself voice the demand. Normally politeness would have hindered me from interrupting someone mid-sentence. Yet for some reason the inhibition was not there.
“Do what again?”
“Your hand. Wave it.”
“Like so?” Whateley repeated the gesture.
Something was awry. The hand left a trail behind it as it moved, a kind of sparkling rainbow studded with hand-shaped afterimages.
“What is it, Doctor?” he said, peering at me intently. “What do you see?”
“I… I am not sure.” I rubbed my eyes. “Some optical phenomenon. I am tired. That might account for it.”
“Are you experiencing distortions of vision?”
“No. I don’t…”
Whateley’s face had started to sag. The flesh of it was melting, dripping downwards with glutinous slowness, like tallow. One of his eyes bulged larger than the other. His mouth pulsed like a sea anemone.
I blinked hard. Normality returned. Except that now the floor was distending. Its rectangle became a parallelogram, which in turn became a diamond. The floorboards warped. The patterns on the Turkish rug came alive, chasing one another round in circles, while the rug’s tasselled ends rippled like millipede legs. The walls bowed inward like wind-billowed sails.
“Watson?” said Holmes.
“Holmes?” I said, although it sounded as though I was hooting.
“Watson, why dun hair plea fan?”
“Holmes, I can’t understand you. What are you saying?”
Another stream of nonsense syllables issued from my companion’s lips, and then his face, as Whateley’s had, began to melt. I clutched my own face, for fear that it would follow suit. I thought that I might be able somehow to hold it in position.
The room was darkening. I glimpsed Holmes rising to his feet, then staggering. Little wonder he did, for the floor had become a steep slope. It was a miracle that he did not slide completely off it.
In the event, he sank to his knees. He pointed an accusing finger at Whateley. His mouth moved, and the words it emitted came to me as though from miles away, slurred and somewhat delayed, but this time intelligible at least.
“You did this,” he said. “You have drugged us. Not the tea. The firewood. Damn you, Whateley. The smoke. You…”
Then everything went grey.
And after that, nightmare.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Flight to Far Cathuria
THERE WERE STEPS, SEVENTY OF THEM, AND I descended.
There were two high priests, both lushly bearded and wearing tall crowns reminiscent of Ancient Egyptian headdresses, in a cavern temple lit by a pillar of flame. They were called Nasht and Kaman-Thah, and they approved of me, and so my journey continued, down another seventy steps.
Then I was in a dark, enchanted wood. Gigantic twisted tree trunks surrounded me, and fungi grew in preponderance amidst the leaf litter, their caps phosphorescent, glowing like multi-coloured stars. Large brown rodent-like creatures scurried about my ankles, muttering to one another in some strange fluting tongue.
They were hostile, these cat-sized rat-things that were known as zoogs. Individually none would pose an insurmountable threat, but I feared they might attack me en masse. If only I might fly, up above the treetops. Then not only would I escape the zoogs but I might perhaps find civilisation, some sort of sanctuary.
And so I flew. I did it without conscious thought. All at once I was aloft, and I glided through the warm night air, beneath constellations I did not recognise and a moon whose face was not that of the Earth’s satellite, its features somehow less benign.
The Enchanted Wood extended for many miles, but from my eagle’s-eye vantage I saw, beyond its bounds, rivers that gleamed like silver veins. I saw, too, volcanic mountains to the north and south whose summits rose higher than those of the Alps. Somehow I knew their names. Mount Lerion. Mount Hatheg-Kla. Mount Ngranek. Their snowy peaks were as white as fangs.
Ahead loomed the mighty basalt pillars of the West atop promontories on either side of a strait through which the Southern Sea channelled itself in a torrent. I followed the course of the rushing water, between those vast cyclopean columns. Men had toiled generation after generation to erect them, spending their lives piling stone upon stone, all in the pursuit of divine preferment.
I had no doubt that I was headed for Cathuria. A land of ideals, bedecked with splendid cities built of marble and porphyry, their roofs made of gold. Even the lowliest of its inhabitants lived like kings, dining on luscious fruits and drinking wine made from grapes whose skins were a delicate shade of magenta.
Yet the land I saw now was a far cry from the Cathuria of repute. The countryside was blasted. The cities had fallen, their crumbled architecture blackened by fire. The surviving Cathurians were a depleted, bedraggled lot. They lived as refugees in makeshift camps upon barren plains, huddled together beneath canvas or in shelters crudely built from sticks and foliage; miserable, starving, terrified.
Meanwhile, through the ruins of their former homes, amid splintered bones and shattered skulls, roamed monsters. Monsters who were gods. Gods who were monsters. All shapes and sizes, each a living horror, they strutted about with a cocksure arrogance, rulers of all they surveyed. Once, they had been worshipped and sacrificed to, and they had been content with that. They had enjoyed listening to the hymns and prayers that were intoned in their name and smelling the smoke of burnt offerings and the fumes of wine libations, even if they found such things fripperies and affected apathy towards them.
They were different now, these Outer Gods who were known, here, as the Other Gods. They had changed. Something had roused them from the indolence and the infighting that had characterised their lives over the past several millennia. Something had instilled ambition in them, and a renewed sense of purpose. They had travelled from the outermost edges of the universe to wreak havoc.
I saw how they behaved towards one another when they met. Where before they might have exchanged insults, perhaps even been at one another’s throats, now they shared a greeting – a hailing hand, a flashing compound eye, the flaring of a dorsal fin, the uttering of a sublime mathematical equation. They were, if not cordial, at least courteous in their interactions.
One word recurred in their conversation. One word seemed an emblem of the accord that had lately arisen amongst them.
R’luhlloig.
The Outer Gods had laid Cathuria waste. They had rebelled against their role as deities. They wished to be something more, something worse. And the catalyst for this upheaval was, it seemed, none other than R’luhlloig, the Hidden Mind.
Daemon-sultan Azathoth was one who had violently cast off the shackles; Tulzscha, the Green Flame, another. So was Yog-S
othoth, who is known as the Lurker at the Threshold, and Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young. They and more paraded through the devastation they had created, puffed up with newfound pride, like cruel, hideous children who have plucked the wings off butterflies and are revelling in the insects’ suffering.
“R’luhlloig,” they said to one another, those of them that had mouths grinning.
“R’luhlloig,” they sang, in voices that were either ethereally lovely or infernally loathsome.
“R’luhlloig,” they cackled, with malicious glee.
It was a rallying cry, a call to arms, and I sensed that the Hidden Mind had done more than simply incite a spasm of wanton destruction. This was just a first step.
“Come,” the Outer Gods cried. “Come, you so-called Great Old Ones. We call you forth. Hear us in your prisons, your chambers, your fastnesses, where you skulk and slumber. Come and face us. Stop us, if you have the strength. Come, if you dare!”
The Outer Gods were on the warpath.
Watson.
They were amassing, marshalling themselves.
Watson, can you hear me?
There was impending conflict in the air, loud as drumbeats.
Watson, snap out of it, man.
And at the heart of it all lay R’luhlloig.
A “new god”, they were calling him. A “beacon of hope”. Even a “messiah”.
“Watson!”
* * *
The word hit me like a slap in the face.
Then I realised that I had just been slapped in the face.
I blinked, my cheek stinging. “Holmes? Is that you?”
“Who else? I apologise for striking you, old friend, but verbal imprecation alone seemed not to be doing the trick.”
Cathuria was gone. I was back in the real world. But I could see nothing. Holmes’s voice was coming from directly in front of me, but of Holmes himself there was not even the slightest glimmer. Was I blind?
“You are not blind,” Holmes said as if in answer to my unasked question. “It is merely that we are somewhere almost entirely devoid of light. Your eyes will adjust to the gloom in due course. How are you feeling?”
The Cthulhu Casebooks--Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic Monstrosities Page 14
