Sherlock Holmes vs. Cthulhu

by Lois H. Gresh

  I was the first female to fulfill the third oath of the Order, to bear the child of a Deep One…

  … for Koenraad was of Dagon as surely as I was of Dagon.

  My acolytes stooped on the rocks heaved ashore from the endlessly vomiting sea. Black boulders poked up from dark water frothed orange from a dying sun.

  Mau fetia, the stars, reached down and embraced me.

  A cluster of perhaps a dozen men and an equal number of women writhed around me, their backs straining, their arms shaking, their mouths hardened into twisted shapes that emitted the Dagonite sounds.

  One mouth, with lips as fat as grapefruit slices but the color of beets, formed a shape only a Dagonite would recognize.

  From this opening, a shrillness rang over the water and rocks, a sound only a Dagonite would understand: “Yog’fuhrsothothothoth ’a’a’a’memerutupao’omii!”

  Another mouth looped into a Dagonite shape even more complex than the first, and from these twisted lips came a screech.

  “Aauhaoaoa demoni aauhaoaoa demoni aauhaoaoa demoni!”

  My followers warbled and squealed in a chorus that, within my depths, I knew the Old Ones sang.

  In taiotua, the outer sea, we join you forever, swelling with pride and happiness. I had no purpose other than to serve those of the Deep and to spawn the next generation.

  “Come,” I said in the elder language, “and follow me into the sacred cave, where we will give ourselves to the great Dagon and the Deep Ones.”

  My webbed feet slopped across the rocks, and behind me, grunting and still warbling and screeching, my acolytes followed. Toe suckers popped from rocks, webbed feet splashed across wet sand.

  Before me, the cliff cowered, clamped beneath its burden of dense trees and undergrowth. The birds nesting there were deformed monsters, feeding on mice and cats. I spotted one now, a monster bird whose beak could grip an animal with the power of an alligator’s jaw. Diving from a sky-high pine, it crashed through branches, which snapped and fell. Its wings were wide and covered in leathery toad-green skin, beneath which the bird’s muscles possessed the coiled strength of wiry rope. A falling feather from one of these birds could cripple a man as if a boulder had hit him.

  When I passed the slab of open waters, my gills fluttered and heat rushed to my head. It was here that Koenraad had splayed my legs and seeded me.

  Briefly, I rested my head upon the slab, and the slime of my flesh slicked across the mold creeping over the black slate. Slime upon slime. Time beyond time. One creature whole with all else in existence. All creatures united as one.

  Humanity had it all wrong. People thought they mattered more than the oceans, the cliffs, the birds, the fish, the caves.

  But to whom did they matter?

  Only to themselves.

  Following my lead, each acolyte rested his or her face, slime upon slime, upon the slab. Each offered to slit his or her own throat with sharp rock.

  I declined all such offers, for this was not the time for death sacrifices.

  That would come later.

  The air was heavy with the mustiness of Old Ones, creatures who came from the Great Beyond, who settled beneath the seas and rivers, emerged into the open air; congregated, bred, multiplied, and infused every breath sucked into the gills of all at Half Moon Bay.

  You come, and you wait with us, I thought. Yog-Sothoth has already opened the way, and now you wait for the great Dagon Himself. But your wait is nearing an end, for the womb-incubation of hatchlings is rapid and most unlike the many months needed by human females to live-birth only one baby.

  Koenraad!

  My heart surged. The acolytes and I would chant until we fulfilled Koenraad’s true desires, until Dagon and Cthulhu emerged from the sea and reclaimed what was long ago theirs—the land, the air, the sky, the waters, and all of us. We were but receptacles and tools.

  Koenraad!

  You of the seed must bow back and let me bond with Yog-Sothoth. You must let the female feel her power. You must let it grow. You must.

  The chant pounded over and over inside my skull: “Aauhaoaoa DEMONI aauhaoaoa DEMONI aauhaoaoa DEMONI.”

  At the base of the cliff, I swept aside a tangle of vines to expose a clearing, where a coal fire and a water tank pumped steam into a device that rotated a wheel, which in turn, powered a generator. Two cables throbbed along the ground, providing electricity from the generator to a cave, the Dorset coast den.

  I stooped and entered the den. Two candles flickered by the rear wall. Several Dagonites lay in humps across one another, their bodies seemingly merging into a single blob of chartreuse flesh that breathed Old Ones in and out of a tubule jutting from the top.

  My acolytes slopped into the cave behind me and collapsed against the walls. Lumpy, warped bodies; limbs more like long boneless snakes than human appendages; bloated heads; eyes filled with pus; their twisted mouths foaming and dripping a viscous sludge: some of the pack already possessed the chartreuse cast of an Old Ones addict. A few slumped into a merged heap, and from this heap of flesh, a tubule popped up and drank of the Old Ones air.

  My den operator, Koos, nodded eagerly at me, awaiting instructions. Tall and heavily muscled, he lacked in intellect what he possessed in physical strength. He would do my bidding, no matter what I asked of him.

  I commanded him now.

  “Koos, strap in a few worshipers and Eshock them. Give the others the Old Ones Serum. After a brief Eshocking, unstrap the first group and strap in a second. Give everybody a chance at Eshocking. Give everybody as much serum as they want.”

  I squatted between the boulders holding the two candles, as Koos yanked a few dazed Dagonites into Eshockers, secured the wrist and ankle straps over various malformed appendages, and then moistened the head sponges.

  Squawking and chattering with excitement, my followers ripped the tops off wooden crates and whipped out bottles of serum. Webbed fingers tore caps off bottles, heads tilted, lips smacked, people hiccupped and swigged serum.

  A young acolyte, no more than ten years old, took one sip of serum and fell against the cave wall. Her back slid down it. Her eyes closed.

  The air was so ripe with Old Ones in here, and the power of my presence so potent, that even an innocent and naïve child had fallen into the grip of intoxication, the Old Ones infiltration of the mind.

  All fell into its grip.

  All became addicts merely by entering this cave. No den in London could compete with the ecstasies of the Dorset coast den.

  Add a dose of serum—nothing more than alcohol and opium, really—and some Eshocking, and addiction was assured.

  Koos pulled down the side lever on an Eshocker.

  Zzzzzzzz…

  Flesh sizzled, limbs jerked, smiles blossomed, tubules pumped the dense air in, then out, then in again.

  I wailed, my chants begging Cthulhu to show Himself, beseeching Dagon to give me a bountiful harvest of hatchlings.

  Koos swapped one batch of followers for another in the machines. All drank of the serum. All chanted and wailed, warbled and shrieked.

  We were finite.

  The Old Ones were infinite.

  We were mortal.

  The Old Ones were forever.

  Infinity.

  I gripped the rock floor. The spawn inside me pushed downward, anxious for release. My knees spread. My heart pounded.

  Playing against the far wall, a multi-winged Thing seeped from the blackness into the shadows. Multiple eyes glowed, chartreuse flecked with green.

  Could it be that I’d unleashed Cthulhu, the Greatest of all Old Ones, He Who Ruled the Earth from the Beginning of Time?

  Yet He was to rise from the sea, not from the walls of the cave.

  My heart picked up pace. I clutched at my chest. Pain spread, like ink from a broken bottle.

  “Take me in this way, yes, O Mighty Cthulhu, yes!” I cried. “Take me, but first unleash my hatchlings!”

  The pressure upon my body grew fierce. I fell to
my side, then rolled to my back.

  The looming Thing on the far wall approached. A thrumming filled the air, a deep-throated static. My gills vibrated. Any moment now, and the hatchlings would come.

  An acolyte screamed, and my head snapped up. Koenraad Thwaite stood at the cave entrance, drenched in the glow of candles.

  My gills stopped vibrating. The static died. There, by the back wall… there, in the blackness, dark upon dark…

  Where was the multi-winged Thing?

  It was gone.

  It had disappeared as quickly as it had shown itself.

  Koenraad had broken my spell, had stifled my ability to bring forth those from the Beyond. Koenraad had intruded.

  I scrabbled to my feet and hurled myself at him, shoved him to the rock floor, where we rolled—gripped in a fierce embrace—until we slammed against the cave wall.

  “You are my mate,” he hissed. “I chose you! I made you what you are!”

  I rolled on top of him, pinned him down, and splayed my neck flaps across his breathing tubules. Choking, he threw me off, and I skidded across rock, as the hatchlings clawed for release. My head hit the cave wall first, then my back, and pain shot down my legs.

  Two hands gripped my upper arms.

  Zzzzzzzz…

  Flesh sizzled.

  Eshockers shocked.

  Serum slurped, oozed, dribbled.

  “Koenraad!” I screamed.

  “You are my mate,” he hissed again. “You cannot reject me. If you misbehave, think what the others might do. I am their leader.”

  My spawn froze in the womb. They would wait for release. They would wait because Koenraad Thwaite had forced himself into my most intimate moments with the Old Ones.

  “My power exceeds yours,” I said. “You are in the way.”

  “Everything here belongs to me, including you,” he said.

  He was wrong. I belonged to the vast unknown. In life, in death—it was the same, a seamless web of existence, of nonexistence, of being.

  Koenraad had fulfilled his purpose. He was no longer necessary. And yet…

  If my spawn did not hatch, did not survive, Koenraad’s services might again be required.

  “If you misbehave, think what I might do,” I said.

  He released me, sank down against the wall next to me.

  “You can’t get from the others what you get from me,” he said.

  “Sperm?” I almost laughed, but he looked so sad and defeated, that instead I said, “Koenraad, go to the sea, swim to the reef.”

  I knew that he would do as I requested, for we both lived, and some day would die, for the same reason. We existed to do the bidding of Dagon and Great Cthulhu.

  22

  PROFESSOR MORIARTY

  Half Moon Bay

  After Mann and Choir’s betrayal, I decided to travel to Dorset to see for myself the two females they had told me about. My credulous agents had spoken of magical powers, and though I was far from believing in such stories, I wanted to discern the nature of the trick that had so many people fooled.

  As it happened, I knew of a local man, Archibald Pewter, a former merchant sailor who had worked one of my smuggling lines in the past, and telegraphed him that very night to make my intentions known to him. I traveled on the first train of the day, with five of my burliest agents, and he met us at the nearest station and brought us away by cart. Archibald furnished me with all the information I could hope for about Half Moon Bay, and our cart detoured so that we could look from the cliffs down upon the very headquarters of the Dagon gang—an unprepossessing slab of rock upon a sandy beach, upon which a few of the cultists were gathered. There were no lookouts.

  We lunched at the O Tei Hau Ia I Te Rahi Inn, which nestled in the forest by Half Moon Bay.

  When I asked the elderly landlord—whose exotic tones I could not quite place—about the unusual name of the inn, he explained, “It has been here for all time. It was named for that which lies beyond us in the sea, beneath the depths, that which readies itself for domination. O Tei Hau Ia I Te Rahi. Roughly speaking, sir, it means, that which outstretches all greatness, that which is greater than the greatest of anything imaginable. For all time, we wait, and it will come when all the sand aligns with the stars.”

  “Thank you. Clearly, you possess exceptional understanding,” I told him.

  His head dipped slightly, acknowledging my compliment.

  “I oftentimes am taken by the great thing yonder,” he sputtered, his diction abruptly changing, “and it speaketh through me.” Then he murmured what I took to be “mistletoe” and careened out of the rooms, cane clacking across the battered floor.

  I’m not sure if the landlord’s explanation mattered to my men, for it made little sense to me. As long as I controlled the bizarre gold-making machine on Thrawl Street and got the Dagon gang out of my way, I cared little for this nonsense about great beings from the beyond.

  Following our simple meal, we moved to the front room, where plaster walls sagged and cracks splintered them from floor to ceiling, and where mold stained the cracks like weeds. By the outer door, a window sank in its frame, the view obscured by rotting wooden planks secured with rusty nails. The stench reminded me of a midden.

  I dared not sit in the lone chair, an overstuffed monstrosity that had seen better days, some hundred years ago or more. It would either break or release a flood of insects and vermin; it was best not to take the chance.

  “The sooner we succeed at our task,” I told my men, “the sooner we go home.”

  They grunted in agreement, as they jostled for room in the cramped space. I barely knew their names—they were that interchangeable to me. If one died in combat, I hired another. If all five were to die, I would simply round up five more men with steel fists, easily obtained on the streets of Whitechapel. Muscle was cheap. For a few coins, these fellows would torture, maim, and mutilate anyone. No questions asked, the way I liked to operate.

  “Chester. John. Grant.”

  As I uttered each name, my men snapped to attention. Three responded with guttural noises. Grant was the largest, a brute with blond hair curling down the sides of a face resembling a small boulder. His nostrils flared beneath a broken nasal bone, still scabbed and purple from a recent fight. His jaw hung crookedly beneath splintered teeth and the puffy remains of his mouth. He towered over me by at least six inches, and I am well over six feet tall. His hands were paws, his arms twice the size of mine.

  “Grant,” I said, “take Chester and John with you—” I gestured at the other two, whose eyes lit with eagerness—“and plant the dynamite down on the beach, where we saw the big black slab of rock.”

  “You want it by the rock or the cliff? By the water or on the sand?” Grant rubbed his hands together, already anticipating the fun he’d have with his task—blowing up the most sacred meeting place of the Dagon gang.

  “All of it,” I answered. “I want the three of you to blow up and completely destroy the entire beach surrounding that black slab of rock at Half Moon Bay. There’s an extra sovereign in it for each of you if you eradicate the slab itself,” I added, and then: “When they’re distracted, you grab the leader—Koenraad Thwaite. Once you’ve got him, hole up in the place we talked about and wait for my instructions.”

  “And what do you want with the rest of us?” Michael asked, apparently conscious that he, Lloyd, and Archibald had yet to be called upon. He shot me a greedy look.

  “Don’t worry. You’ll have your reward. We’ll make those idiots run to their rocks and their beach, and the rest of us will grab Amelia Scarcliffe, and if we find her, Maria Fitzgerald. Archibald, we shall have need of you to guide us to Miss Scarcliffe’s place of abode—where she shall hopefully be alone, unguarded.”

  At this, Michael visibly quivered. He and Lloyd turned from me, already anxious to get to the door and begin their work.

  “Not so fast.”

  These men were even stronger than the trio I was sending to oblitera
te the black slab of rock. Kidnapping requires muscle. The dynamite was merely a diversion. Of course, it was a thing of no great consequence to me, blowing up the Dagon gang’s headquarters, which happened to be on a beach. My main purpose in doing so was to make the competing gang’s men race to their headquarters, leaving Amelia Scarcliffe—and possibly, Maria Fitzgerald—alone and vulnerable.

  Michael scratched the side of his head by the left ear. It was a nervous habit that annoyed me more than I cared to admit. I shifted my eyes to Archibald and then to Lloyd, both rock-solid and wearing bloodied gashes on their cheeks and foreheads. Tough as whipcord. Nothing got past these two.

  “Go quietly,” I told them. “Make your way to the cottage Archibald told us about—the flower shop. There, you will find Amelia Scarcliffe. She has enormous powers, so be careful. I’ve heard she can flatten men with the flick of a finger.” I didn’t believe this myself, of course, but I didn’t want the woman harmed any more than necessary.

  “Ha. That cannot be,” Lloyd laughed. “No woman can outsmart us, outrun us, out-anything us.”

  “This one can,” I said, “you’ll need to creep up on her cautiously so she doesn’t hear you coming. Wait until you hear two explosions, then wait five more minutes. Wait, I tell you, for the dynamite to do its magic and draw the men to the beach. Only then do I want you to grab the woman, subdue her, gag her and tie her limbs, ready to bring her to London.”

  “And the other lass?” Michael asked, cracking his knuckles.

  “The other is but a girl. She is in an orphanage hereabouts. I hope to get further information from the Scarcliffe woman. Also, beware of the leader, this—” I spat his name—“Koenraad Thwaite.”

  “Black-robed?” Michael asked, confirming what I’d already told my men.

  I nodded.

  “Short, the one with the froggy body?”

  I nodded, my patience withering.

  “Beard? Funny-looking feet? Flaps on his neck? Hahaha.”

  The men broke into nervous laughter, muttering amongst themselves about their own masculine endowments and superiority over the black-robed, froggy-bodied, bearded man with funny-looking feet and neck flaps.