Dean snorted derisively. “Ignorant of their ignorance they be, a passel of sheep who feel not the knife, nor hear the footfalls of They Who Walk…aye, the Lonely Ones who come.”
“The Old Ones who walk serene and primal, who trod the Earth in times past and shall…” Holmes started to say.
“Nay!” Dean shrieked. “Say not the words, sir! Ye know not what things dark and hidden ye invoke without mind.”
“You know the words…their sources?” Holmes asked.
Dean nodded.
“You were taught from them, were you not?”
Again Dean nodded, his face caught between apprehension and fear. His black eyes darted as if he expected someone to intrude upon us, though he never once glanced at the cell door.
“I believe I can help you, Mr Dean,” Holmes finally said. “You did not murder Quint, and were not present when he was killed. I think I can prove that to the satisfaction of the police, but I must have more information from you about what happened that night. You may not have been present, but you know what…”
“Nay, I cannot!” Dean protested. “They put their marks upon the places and folk that be theirs…”
“The wardings,” Holmes said.
“Aye, the wardings,” Dean agreed. “That which be theirs from the before times be theirs still…be theirs for all time.”
“Syha'h k'yarnak ep ph'ah fhys'uhn abu hafh'drn gnaiih, Shub-Niggurath kadishtu nagotha,” Holmes said. “In the woods are the wardings, and then there is the watcher…and the watched.”
Holmes’ unearthly words made Dean cringe, half in wonder, half in fear, but now his fright was not directed toward an outside source, but at Holmes himself. Had I felt free to speak at that moment—I did not because Holmes was clearly playing upon the superstitions that constituted Dean’s perception of reality—I would have admitted total bewilderment. I thought back to the tomes with which Holmes had returned at the neap of the night, and wished I had examined them myself.
“Ye know too much for a man-spawn, but I will talk with ye,” Dean whispered. He looked at me. “But not with he.”
“Watson, would you mind stepping out for a moment?” he asked. “Please assure Lestrade all is well. I shall join you shortly.”
I did mind, but I also trusted Holmes’ judgment implicitly, so I had no choice but to do as he asked. There never was a time in my life when I wished so fervently I were a fly upon the wall, in that cell listening to the quick words that flew between the accused man and his lone defender. But, try as I might, I could not make out what was said, though it did seem at times they lapsed into that odd and unearthly language which had cadences and sounds never uttered by any human tongue. I was surprised when Holmes called for release just five minutes later.
“What did you learn, Holmes?” I asked.
“Many things,” he replied. “And nothing.”
Lestrade, too, pressed Holmes for information, but my friend made the Sphinx seem talkative by comparison. While Lestrade was not as well acquainted with Holmes’ nature as was I, he knew when to stop beating his head against a stone wall.
“What now, Holmes?” Lestrade asked.
“I will examine Dean’s cottage and its surroundings.”
“Very well,” Lestrade replied. “I’ll have that oaf Barnes take the two of you out there.”
“No need, Lestrade,” Holmes said. “It should be even easier to find by the light of day.”
We left Lestrade scratching his head in confusion.
When we reached Dean’s cottage I could no more understand how anyone could live in it than how Holmes was able to find his way to it with naught but starlight to guide him. I had come upon it by daylight, or at least by as much sunshine as ever filtered down through the leafy canopy, guided by Holmes, yet, as I stood there, surrounded by wooded quietude, I doubted I could find it again on my own. We had left a barely discernable path, Holmes showing me signs of where Quint’s body had been found, then dodged among thick tree trunks and thicker bracken until Dean’s home appeared in a cup of a hollow, ancient trees clustering around it.
The cottage was fallen down in places, propped up in others. It had seen better days, but how many centuries had passed since then, there was no telling. A lean-to nearby sheltered firewood, but the odd thing was that none of the wood had been chopped, which I pointed out to Holmes.
“All found wood,” I said. “None taken by blade.”
“A surprisingly astute observation on your part, Watson,” he remarked. “What do you deduce from it?”
“Obviously Dean enjoys solitary rambles through the woods,” I said. “Picking up fuel from the forest floor no doubt gave him more than enough for his needs.”
Holmes’ expression was of faint disappointment.
“The cottage has been here for generations, and so have these trees,” Holmes said. “Foresters have taken trees from the edges of the woods, but look at these trees, Watson. What do you see?”
I looked closely at trees nearest Dean’s cottage, then widened my view. Seeking to redeem myself, so to speak, to regain Holmes’ favor, I paid particular attention to the surrounding area.
“They are evidently of old growth,” I ventured. “That is clear, not simply from the girth of their trunks or the reach of the branches but from their clustering. As you say, foresters have long harvested timber from the periphery of the forest, but many of these trees are marked with forester signs, indicating that they were considered for harvesting. That they were not might indicate an avoidance of Dean or the difficulty of transportation from such a lonely spot. The avoidance would promote an aura of fear, prompting others to leave the area untouched. As to why Dean did not, well, gathering fallen wood is easier than actually doing work to get the same result.”
“Yes, no axe has ever assaulted these trees, Dean’s or those of foresters,” Holmes agreed, though the look of disappointment was still clear. “Dean was not lazy but followed an old tradition of not giving offense to the forest. The difference is, he knows the reason for the tradition.”
“The reason Quint was killed” I breathed. “You give credence to that, Holmes? Why? Even Dean recanted his words to Lestrade.”
“Not recanted, but regretted,” Holmes looked about. “It was a truth, as far as he was concerned, but not one admitted to outsiders, probably not beyond the confines of his own family. Had he not been so frightened by the prospect of confinement, he would have kept the reason to himself.”
“Really, Holmes!” I cried in exasperation. “What does it even mean? Giving offense to the woods? Utter nonsense!”
“The markings on the trees are not the work of foresters, as you surmised,” Holmes said, pointing from tree to tree. “They are far older than you suppose. They were there when the Romans set up their towns and posts in Hammershire, and when the Kelts migrated to this isle from the Continent.”
“Surely not of such antiquity,” I protested. “I see some of them are…” My words died as I looked more closely at signs I had taken as recent handiwork. While some were of modern vintage, many more were old; further, the oldest ones had been re-carven many times…as the bark regrew over millennia. “My God.”
“Certainly someone’s idea of god,” Holmes murmured, smiling slyly. “These signs are symbols representing a pantheon of beings called the Old Ones. That bloated, twisted star there is called an Elder Sign, signifying them all. The wide one there symbolizes a being named Yog-Sothoth, also known as The Gateway, while that lone sign is a symbol of Great Cthulhu, master of them all.”
“What about these?” I asked, pointing out a symbol that vastly outnumbered the others. It was composed of intricately angled lines linking a number of suggestive spheres. “Which of the so-called Old Ones does it symbolize?”
“Ah, that is Shub-Niggurath,” Holmes replied. “Black Goat of the Woods, Mother of the Dark Hoard.”
It was one thing, I discovered, to hear such a grotesque name uttered aboard a train, in a building, or in any other bastion
of human civilization; it was quite another to hear it in the dark depths of the woods, where the only manifestation of man’s suzerainty over nature was a cottage on the verge of collapse, home to a man who seemed to have little in common with ourselves. Until then, I had not noticed the absolute silence of the woods, the lack of movement by any living thing.
“These signs, then, are…” I could not finish, for an old memory had surfaced from my boyhood in Scotland, mixing with something Dean had said. “Warding…wearding…”
“Indeed,” Holmes agreed. “Derived from Old English by way of the Picts. To guard, to ward off, to put out of bounds, so that the sign delineating the forbidden area becomes the wearding itself, the wardings of which Dean spoke.”
“To disregard the warding?” I asked, glancing about.
“Is to give offense, not to the area but to that which the symbol represents,” Holmes explained. “We return to the genius loci, but to Dean it is not an abstract concept, but a manifestation of an actual personage, Shub-Niggurath. Quint violated the wardings, came to kill someone with a generational relationship to Shub-Niggurath. In doing so…”
“This is preposterous!” I exclaimed, though my tone remained a whisper. “Your logical nature barely admits the existence of an amorphous deity, only enough to allow you a refined sense of justice. Do you also give equal credence to an outlandish pantheon of monster-gods such as these Old Ones?”
“Belief is immaterial, Watson,” Holmes said. “Belief in one’s ability to fly will not negate gravity. Disbelief is equally irrelevant.”
“But monster-gods, Holmes?” I sighed. “I can see Dean and Quint as opposite sides of the same coin, but the coin is counterfeit. Dean believes in the reality of the shadows amongst which he dwells, and Quint believes in the power of evil and in the power of his own hatred, but neither man’s beliefs, no matter how strong, can bring a monstrosity like Shub-Niggurath into existence.”
“The world has not always been as it is,” Holmes pointed out. “In a man’s lifetime, the world becomes unrecognizable. How much more so in a hundred lifetimes, a thousand lifetimes, or a hundred-thousand? Every creature and race lives in its own moment, but you yourself noted how the past endures in Hammershire.”
“But such a creature is an impossibility,” I cried.
“So were saurian giants of the primordial world and prior races of mankind, till fossils and stone axes gave certain proof that ancient legends were true—dragons and giants in the Earth,” Holmes said. “Mythology is the shorthand of history, a way of preserving facts which would otherwise fade from our minds…or be shut out because they were too terrible to recall except as fairy stories and campfire tales. We ourselves might one day become the stuff of legend, for behind every myth, no matter how fabulous or blasé, there exists some nugget of reality from which it derives. The mythos of Cthulhu, Shub-Niggurath and the other ‘gods’ echoes in the tales of many cultures worldwide, and perseveres both as a memory of what was and a warning of what might still be.”
I shook my head. It was inexplicable that a man who could not be bothered to know the Earth revolved about the sun would admit to filling his mind with myths, legends and esoteric history.
“As you mentioned, Watson, men kill each other over beliefs all the time,” Holmes remarked. “But I know not a single case in which a man was murdered over astronomy.”
I looked up sharply, wondering how he knew.
“Come, Watson, let us explore the abode of Ignatius Dean.”
He picked his way forward, not even acknowledging he had perpetrated on me yet another music hall trick. Holmes is ever my best friend, but there are times when I might gladly strangle him.
The interior of the cottage was worse than the exterior, at least as far as the structural soundness of the place. It was free of dust and clutter. Dean obviously made an effort to maintain a home for himself. It flitted through my mind that it was perhaps an influence from his unknown mother; quick upon that innocuous thought came a dread one—when it came time to perpetuate his lineage, an urge common to all men regardless of birth or breed, what woman would agree to such a life?
Holmes searched quickly and methodically, as I expected he would, but he moved with a surety and confidence that could only have come with familiarity. His vagueness that morning about his actions had made me doubt his excursion had been limited to the confines of the sleeping village. And I thought about the nature of the wounds to which I had attended.
“Your search of the cottage earlier was unproductive?” I asked. “I imagine the inadvisability of showing any light was very much a handicap to you.”
He paused momentarily, half-turned his head and allowed me the thinnest of smiles. “Well done, Watson.”
He returned to his examination of drawers and boxes, nooks and niches, knocking also on the decaying walls as if searching for hidden spaces within. I had no idea what Holmes hoped to find, though the curious weapon used to kill Quint was foremost in my mind, but I pitched in and looked for anything out of the ordinary.
“It was indeed inadvisable to show a light in or around the cottage,” Holmes continued after a moment. “These deep woods are never doused in sunlight, as you can tell from the half-twilight of our surroundings, but at night they are positively stygian.” After a moment, he added: “And quite dangerous.”
“It’s a wonder you did not fall and break a leg or crack open your skull,” I grumbled. “You were lucky to escape with abrasions and lacerations as mementoes of your foolhardy expedition.”
He paused, touched his face, and said: “Perhaps so.”
During our long association, Sherlock Holmes often withheld information from me. Sometimes he would reveal key facts much later, sometimes after reading my notes, often after a case had been fictionalized in some publication, making me feel quite the fool. I am sure there were times when he held back information entirely. Before I could question him further, he uttered a cry of discovery.
“What have you found, Holmes?”
“The birthright of Ignatius Dean,” Holmes replied, lifting from concealment a number of books, all seemingly of great antiquity. “These have been passed from father to son for generations.” He glanced through them slowly. “The Livro de Cidades Perdidas, the Mae Ocwlt Arglwyddi y Tywyllwch Allanol, and, of course, the Necronomicon. And several others, hitherto unknown.”
“Seems I’ve heard of that one, I think,” I said, grasping at an elusive memory. “Figured into some sort of occult hoax, did it not? A fraud named Bronislav?”
“Laslo Bronislav,” Holmes confirmed. “But not a hoax, quite unfortunately. Likely you saw the final newspaper accounts, prior to the affair slipping from the public eye entirely. You were in France with your new wife when it blazed through the English papers; I doubt it made much of a splash on the Continent, where the outré is not only commonplace but yawned at.”
“Were you involved in that matter, Holmes?”
“To a very small degree.”
I do my best to document Holmes’ cases, even when they are not publishable for one reason or another, but I am at his mercy when it comes to cases prior to our introduction by Stamford. The same applies to those cases with which I am not involved; at times I am not available because of medical or personal responsibilities, or there might be regimental duties to which I must attend, but more often than not it is because he rushes into the wilderness of London without notifying me, either alone or in the company of someone else. Of course, I bear Holmes no ill will, for he always has been and always will be a free agent. But his note-taking is sporadic and his handwriting even worse than mine.
“The books bear a marked resemblance to those freighted to you from London,” I observed.
“They are all products of times when books were individually written and bound, so they bear a superficial resemblance to the eye accustomed to books spewed by modern steam-powered presses,” Holmes replied. “However, they differ in language and content, even binding.” H
e paused and gazed closely at one of the tomes. “Judging from the pore-pattern, this book, written in proto-Welsh is bound in human skin.”
“Good Lord!” I cried.
“Despite all their differences,” he continued coolly, “what they have in common is that they explore various aspects of the so-called Cthulhu Mythos, some in the form of chronicles or collections of stories, others as personal explorations of the unknown.”
“Incantations, conjurations and other mumbo jumbo.”
“Some are indeed spell books, grimoires as they are known by seekers after occult knowledge,” Holmes said.
“Occult,” I spat. “Charlatans. I once saw a lad climb a rope and vanish into thin air. A trick, nothing more. Nothing occult about it.”
“Occult means nothing more than hidden,” Holmes explained. “The occult history represented by the Cthulhu Mythos is nothing more than hidden history, separated from our own enlightened age by the veil of time and a case of racial amnesia, a voluntary one at that—humanity has no desire to recall a time when terrors strode the Earth and mankind was little more than cattle or sheep.”
In my life, I had traveled to some dark places where fear and ignorance gripped heart and mind, had seen men huddle shivering against the terrors they knew to be abroad in the night. Few of them could tell me what they feared, the vast formless shapes looming from out their own forgotten past. I had always counted them as primitive savages. It was quite a shock to hear from a man whom I held in such high esteem that my own countrymen were perhaps no better than the natives I had always derided.
“I must study these books,” Holmes said.
“Between the two of us, we should be able to get them back to the village with no problem,” I observed.
He paused, staring first at the books, then looking around the tumbled-down cottage. “No, it would be best to study them here.”
“As you wish.” I shrugged. “I fail to see how anything in these books could have a bearing upon Quint’s murder.”
Holmes, however, did not answer. Instead, he pulled a rickety chair over to the deal table and began perusing through the tomes. I tried to engage him about the case, with various conjectures and theories that had come to mind after our encounter with the bestial Dean, but it quickly became clear I was speaking to myself. I spent time further searching the cottage, hoping to find another secret space where might be hidden the unique weapon Lestrade believed was the source of Quint’s wounds, but it seemed we had already found all the cottage’s secrets. Despairing any further illumination from Holmes, I eventually wandered outside.
Sherlock Holmes: Cthulhu Mythos Adventures (Sherlock Holmes Adventures Book 2) Page 11
