I looked again at the sign-carven trees. There was a pattern to them not previously perceived, a demarcation of sorts, as a squire might post his lands to give notice to poachers and other trespassers. There were a few Elder Sigh sigils, and one for Cthulhu, as if giving a nod to that ancient god’s status as overlord, but it was clear from preponderance and alignment that the deep woods, and perhaps those who dwelt therein, were claimed by the hideous entity called Shub-Niggurath, the mere mention of whose name had had such a startling effect on Ignatius Dean. With a shudder, I wondered if Dean also carried a mark, but hidden to the human eye.
I traveled back to the ancient track where the body of Quint had been discovered. Had Dean left his cottage, he could certainly have spied upon whatever transpired without being seen. The body was long removed, but it seemed almost as if an aura of dread lingered, though I sought to suppress the idea, as it recalled to mind Holmes’ comments about how often I allowed facts to become subservient to my imagination.
In attempting to dispel all psychic impressions of the place, I concentrated minutely upon its physicality. The branches of a few bushes were bent, but I failed to see the level of disturbance that should have accompanied a life-and-death struggle. A bit further on I noticed another bent branch, then a couple more beyond. The signs of disturbance led me farther from both the ancient track and Dean’s cottage, deeper into the darkening woods.
Eventually I reached a small space clear of trees though the air above was choked with thickly intertwined branches. As I glanced upward, I was troubled to see the firmament deepening toward purple. It was late when we found our way to Dean’s cottage, and in my zeal to follow what I took to be signs that Quint’s body had been moved I had lost all sense of time. Looking around, I also noticed, with no small measure of dismay, that I had no idea where I was in relation to either Dean’s cottage or the overgrown track.
The underbrush at the edge of the clearing was beaten down and broken, as I would expect from a struggle that had ended the life of a man as vital and large as Henry Quint. Confirming the idea that this was the actual murder scene, at least in my mind, were several dark splashes of blood, black and copper-scented upon the leaves in the encroaching twilight. As I saw it, Quint had been killed here, then carried to where he had been found by the unlucky hiker. The purpose, however, escaped me, for if the body had not been moved its discovery would have been unlikely.
I was startled by the sudden sound of something rushing among the shadow-infested trees on the opposite side of the clearing. The noises vanished. Some moments later I realized I was still holding my breath. I breathed, but softly, careful not to make a sound. More noises came to me, as if a herd of small animals were rushing unseen among the trees; I jumped to the center of the clearing when the same rustling, rushing sounds appeared behind me.
Foxes came to mind as I stood in the center of that space armed with no more than a walking stick. Wolves and dogs also appeared in my thoughts, as did bugaboos less easily envisioned.
I also told myself it might be nothing more than a night wind whipping and snapping its way through the underbrush, tearing at leaves and shaking branches in its passage. In convincing myself that it was naught but the wind I was no more successful than had been Poe’s raven-haunted narrator. I, however, did not possess the solace, real or imaginary, of a hearth-cheered chamber.
My heart seemed on the verge of bursting when the sounds suddenly ceased. There was no tapering of the noises, merely an abrupt cessation. I strained my ears, but all that came to me though the leaden silence was something that sounded like a faraway sigh, before it faded away altogether. I wanted to call out to Holmes in the gloom, but I held silent, not because I feared he would not hear me but because I feared someone other than Holmes might.
As I stood in the dusk, I noted glowing marks upon some trees opposite. Intrigued, yet wary, I approached and saw the illumination was phosphorescent moss that had grown in deeply carved symbols. Again I saw the sign of Shub-Niggurath, a warning against trespassers, a proclamation of ancient ownership. These symbols, however, had been defaced, slashed. At the base of one tree, I stepped on a hardness. I reach down and picked up a hunter’s knife, a sturdy instrument accustomed to rough use, but the hardwood hilt was cracked and the blade nicked and bent. I smelled the bitter scent of dried sap upon the metal, but there was also an alien smell, as sharp as blood, but tainted by a foulness that stirred primal memories in the deepest part of my brain.
Henry Quint had offended the forest—Dean’s brash words when panicked by the prospect of confinement. I recalled Holmes’ comments about the Roman concept of genius loci, before it was corrupted by a rational world. What ancient force had marked these woods as its own, had taken offense at Quint’s defacement?
The rushing sounds suddenly returned, but louder, closer, just beyond the woodline surrounding me. The wind, nothing but the wind whipping and thrashing its way among the trees. So I told myself, but now I also heard the thud-thud-thud thumpings of hundreds of hooves against the loamy earth and the maniacal bleatings of an army of goat-like beings.
At the return of the sound, I had instantly leaped to the center of the clearing. I whirled around and around, determined not to show my back to whatever menace threatened me, armed with nothing but a stout walking stick and a knife proven useless to its former owner.
At that point I may have found my voice, may have shouted for Holmes’ help, but even now, years later when time has softened the facts, I cannot be sure. If I gave voice to my alarm, my efforts were puny compared to the sounds that hemmed me in. And even they seemed but mere whispers compared to the roaring, seething, flashing thing that erupted from the trees.
What was it? I have asked myself that same question many times, not as much in the first few years as later when I could think of it without quailing at the memory. It pulsed and throbbed, lacking a defined form, striking at me with appendages that sometimes were like hooves, other times like tentacles or clawed hands having too many or too few fingers. It was black like petroleum raw from the bowels of the earth, but vague colors shimmered across it. The beast had eyes that flashed malevolently and seemed to slide upon its amorphous body, and a myriad of mouths snapped at me, all filled with scissoring teeth. The knife flew into the night. I heard and felt my walking stick snap in half before it was yanked from me and flung into the darkness. A flashing limb struck me, cracking ribs and sending me flying. I hit the ground hard. The breath was driven from my lungs. The beast surged toward me.
“PH’NGLUI MGLW’NAF CTHULHU R’LYEH WGAH’NAGI FHTAGN!” sounded though the woods, booming in a voice that was inhumanly loud even as it was strangely familiar. “M’NAR EPH’OS H’TEP CTHULHU R’GHIAT AS’KHAN’TA!”
The shouted words hammered through the pain, through the physical and mental shock of the attack, but the only word that held any significance was ‘Cthulhu,’ the legendary ruler of the infernal pantheon with which Holmes seemed so unaccountably familiar. I waited for a final blow that never came.
Vaguely, I saw a tall man conferring with an even taller figure in a robe the color of deep blue midnight, a garment that seemed to hold shimmering stars and swirling nebulae within its folds. On the battlefields of Afghanistan I had treated soldiers so shell-shocked and wracked with concussion that they saw visions which could not possibly exist in the real world. Now, I shared that experience with them, for the phantasms flitting about me as I phased in and out of consciousness could have nothing to do with reality, or so I prayed.
I recall mere fragments: fiery eyes, grinning black goat skulls, fang-filled maws that approached and receded, myriad hooves flailing and flashing in the darkness, oily tentacles around me, the stink of matted fur. And then oblivion. Blessed oblivion.
By slow degrees, I returned to a state of consciousness, dimly aware I still lived, that I was no longer prone on the forest floor. I was shot through with excruciating pain. At first it seemed as if I floated among the trees. The dream
like state in which I found myself gradually lifted and I realized I was being helped along by a figure at my side.
“Holmes?” I murmured.
“Steady, old fellow,” he whispered in my ear. “You have had a hard time of it, but you’ll be fine now.”
“But the…the thing that came out of…” I tried to twist about, to look back the way we had come.
“Quiet now, Watson,” he cautioned. “We have been allowed passage out of the woods, but we dare not linger.”
I had not the strength to either resist or argue. Reluctantly, I gave myself to Holmes’ strong arm about my shoulders propelling me away from the horrors of the darkling deep woods, toward an ancient, shadow-infested village that was also one of the dark places of the Earth.
Sometime during the long journey back to Upper Orm, I let the soft sable of nothingness consume me.
I awoke between clean, crisp sheets in a small room filled with bright sunlight and cool air. At a sound, I turned my head and saw a woman in a blue and white uniform, her back to me. I must have made a sound of some sort, for she turned to me.
“Ah, ye be awake, sir” she commented in broad Hammershire tones. “Be ye lying still now, not trying lift yourself up, sir.”
I realized I was indeed trying to sit up in bed, but it was much too difficult. I lay down.
“Where am I?”
“Well, you’re in the surgery of Doctor Kindman, aren’t you?” she replied. “In Lower Orm.”
“Kindman?” I murmured. “Doctor Kindman, the Coroner?”
“Aye, Doctor be the Coroner for the area, but don’t let that fret ye none, sir,” she said. “A fine doctor he be, trained up in London he was, but no less a good man for being an outsider.”
“I’m sure he is, Nurse…”
“Nettles, sir,” she said. “Nurse Ella Nettles.”
“How long have I…”
“Begging your pardon, sir, but there be a man awaiting to see ye now that ye got your wits back,” she interrupted.
Before I could question the nursing sister further, she flashed through the door and out of the room. She returned moments later, with Sherlock Holmes in tow.
“Only a few minutes, Doctor says,” Nurse Nettles admonished. “The poor man be as weak as a bairn, so don’t be ailing him none.”
“Of course, thank you, Sister,” Holmes said, pulling a chair near to my bedside. He waited until the door closed fully, then leaned forward and said in a conspiratorial whisper: “If asked about what happened, you were attacked by some kind of animal.”
“An animal?” I sputtered incredulously. “I may not be able to describe the horror that assaulted me, but it was no mere animal.” As I recalled my struggle, sweat broke out upon my forehead and my breath quickened. “It was the Black Goat of the Woods, the Mother of a Thousand Young…Shub-Niggurath!”
“Steady, Watson.” He grasped my arm reassuringly. “It was foolish wandering off as you did, but it convinced Lestrade of the reality of a savage animal more than did my deductions. I had already proved to his satisfaction that Dean’s clothes were bloody by absorption, not by splatter, that no weapon wielded by a man could produce the exact marks on Quint’s body, and that if Dean was guilty of anything it was nothing more than moving the body, which he did out of superstitious ignorance.” He paused and smiled. “But you being wounded in the same fashion was quite helpful.”
“I am glad I could be of assistance,” I grumbled. “But it was no animal, we know that.”
“Animal, god, intrusion from the ancient world—whatever you wish to call it, it is something that needs to be left alone,” Holmes said. “And if we call it an animal, it will be left alone.”
The truth of my experience burned within me, but I understood Holmes’ reasoning. If the thing in the woods was termed anything but a dangerous animal, if would become an attraction for the same sort of fools who constantly flock to the shores of Loch Ness, who occasionally vanish or are presumed drowned in its cold depths. Left an animal, it would be dismissed by the outside world, never become a matter of concern beyond Hammershire, where it would exist as yet another village legend in a legend-haunted county. And if it were not explained as such, the burden for Quint’s murder might again fall upon Dean’s shoulders.
I nodded. “Dean?”
“Already freed from confinement,” Holmes replied. “Lestrade has decided that PC Barnes was correct, though I am sure it caused almost physical pain for him to do so.”
“Poor Lestrade,” I murmured. “I hope no apology was asked.”
Holmes looked at me askance.
“No, that would be a step too far,” I agreed.
“Though Lestrade would rather the matter had ended with a man in the dock, he is not entirely displeased with the results,” he said. “He has been proven correct about the innocence of Dean, so PC Barnes and the county CID have not entirely escaped disgrace. Our friend Lestrade is happy to put Hammershire behind him.”
“He has returned to London?”
“After checking in on you, old boy,” Holmes said, “to ensure you were not about to shuffle off your mortal coil.”
“Very decent of him, I am sure.” I reconsidered my words, for Lestrade is a better man than I have often depicted him. “Surprising he accepted the beast story so quickly after being so adamantly against it, even given your testimony and my wounds. He seems too good a detective to be taken in easily.”
“Lestrade is a canny man,” Holmes admitted, “not as easily duped as you would have others believe, but he knows when to give up the chase. The Coroner’s new finding is death by misadventure, and Lestrade is wise enough to let that stand.”
“When do we return to London?” I asked. Like Lestrade I was eager to put Hammershire to my heels. Holmes once told me the lowest and vilest alleys of London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside. Until our journey to Upper Orm in Hammershire, I did not appreciate the truth of his judgment.
“Tomorrow,” Holmes replied. “Your unconsciousness has been more a reaction to mental and psychic shock, the turmoil caused by your rational mind’s contact with the irrational, like clashing waves. Now that reality has overwhelmed the other, your mind may safely return to a world with which it has made an uneasy peace.”
“You sound very much like an alienist, Holmes.”
“Our adventure in Vienna did not totally alter my views about psychotherapy,” he allowed, “but I no longer put the alienist in the same bin as I do the astrologer and palm reader.”
“I suppose Dean is happy this is all behind him,” I ventured. “I take it he is back in his sylvan solitude.”
Holmes frowned. “Ignatius Dean set out from Upper Orm after he was released, but he did not return to his cottage. No one knows where he has gone, but I have no doubt his departure from the area has already been adsorbed into the tapestry of local myth.”
“But the books that had been in his family for…” I paused, for I noted an odd, detached expression in Holmes’ eyes, as if he were looking backward in his own life. “You told him not to go back.”
Holmes nodded. “Panta rhei…everything flows. Just as a man cannot step into the same river twice, neither can a man return home once he has lost it. I told him what was told me in the deep forest, that he was no longer part of the woods, that he was…” He paused. “His mother no longer recognizes him.”
“His…that thing?”
“The unseen wife to generations of Dean men.”
A darkness enveloped me as I grasped the enormity of what Holmes revealed. I thought of his analogy of clashing waves, of the irrational seeking to overwhelm the rational. I fought my way back into the light.
“What about the horror in the Orm Woods?” I asked.
“It can take care of itself,” Holmes said. “The death of Henry Quint, the flight of Ignatius Dean, the hearth stories whispered to the children of Hammershire about the cursed cottage—all will work to protect i
ts solitude as surely as its signs upon the trees.” He smiled. “Even the attack upon two men from London might also become legend.”
I nodded. None of it made any sense, of course, not unless one were prepared to set aside rational thought, to believe in the history of myth. If history was a lie, I would take the lie over the truth.
“There is one last thing to know, Holmes?”
“For your notes, Watson?”
“No, Holmes, for myself,” I replied. “This is not a case that will ever see print, even fictionalized. The world will never be ready for it. But I must know—how did you save me?”
“You encountered a being considered the Lord of the Forest,” he said after a moment. “I reminded it, even lords have lords, that sleeping things must left sleeping…until the stars are right.”
The next day, we departed for London. I did not raise the shade upon the window till Hammershire, with all its dark tracts of forest and lonely farmhouses, was far behind us.
Editor’s Addendum—the following note was slipped between pages116 & 117 of the day-book of Dr John H Watson: “Without the presence of the Yog-Sothoth mark the mention of Cthulhu would have had no effect. They are not beyond the laws of nature, but bound by a different set. As to the other thing, you should not have taken me so literally. –SH”
When one thinks of Sherlock Holmes, London leaps to mind, the city known in its time as the Capital of the World, but Holmes’ work often took him far from the ‘Great Smoke,’ and cries for help called him even further afield, to the very edge of the map, and beyond. In this tale, Holmes travels to the far north of Great Britain, to a realm the ancient Romans termed ‘beyond the inhabited world.’ In various published tales, Holmes warned of the dangers found in the sparsely populated countryside, far from any helping hand, but on St John Island, a miserable speck of land in the midst of the North Sea, he learns that there are even lonelier places in the world, bastions of solitude where terror might come upon the howling wind.
Sherlock Holmes: Cthulhu Mythos Adventures (Sherlock Holmes Adventures Book 2) Page 12
