“You’ve not told Emerson of your observations, your fears?”
“He’s a good man, more intelligent that a porter has a right to be, and his loyalty has edged into a sort of friendship,” Wilmarth mused. “But share my fears? What I thought were delusions?” He shook his head. “He knows no more than the villagers, but is not as terrified. Even after assisting me in my researches, correlating the links between folklore and ancient religions, between arcane tomes and the modern world, he remains a surprisingly pragmatic and level-headed man. I think it helps that he has found solace in the realm of chemical research, mostly the non-organic compounds.”
“He has a laboratory then?” Holmes asked.
“Oh, yes, a very complete one,” Wilmarth replied. “Financing it was the least I could do, considering he…”
A new sound suddenly lanced through the wind-filled night, a booming voice chanting in a guttural, inhuman tongue. Wilmarth and Holmes looked at each other, both recognizing the words. They were taken from the pages of the blasted Necronomicon, a book no islander should have had in his possession, the nearest copy residing in a double-locked vault in the recesses of the British Museum. The incantations were familiar to both, but only Holmes recognized the voice as belonging to the recently returned Captain Camshronack.
The tempo and the tone of the chanting voice increased. As if in response, the wind around the mist-bound manor swirled faster and shook the study windows until it seemed they would surely burst from their frames. Then, above Camshronack’s voice and the rising wind from the north there came another sound, the rhythmic beating of giant wings.
“What does it mean, Holmes?” Professor Wilmarth demanded.
“It means Captain Camshronack’s subterfuge for coming to St John is revealed,” Holmes declared. “Having lost everything, he seeks to regain it through an invocation of Ithaqua. He first tried five months ago.”
“When I first spied the creature,” Wilmarth blurted.
“He succeeded only in calling it back to his ancient home, where his forefathers once enforced its cult among the islanders.”
“That would explain the ill repute this house…”
“We must stop Camshronack, for his own good,” Holmes said.
“I don’t understand.”
“He thinks he can appeal to Ithaqua for a restitution of his familial status and control of the islanders, but he is a fool,” Holmes said. “He admitted the Brotherhood of Thieves was after him, in addition to the Tsar’s secret police, but neglected to specify the ‘great evil’ he committed while in the Russian prison camp.”
“Something to do with the cult of Ithaqua?”
Holmes nodded. “A blood sacrifice, likely members of the Brotherhood. It never occurred to him, when he left his home to seek wealth and power in the world, he also abandoned Ithaqua. Beings like Ithaqua cannot survive without worship. Without it, they enter a state like hibernation. His sacrifice summoned it here, but there was no propitiation, only rage. On his lower back he is marked with the glyph of Ithaqua, a tattoo likely the heritage of this island and his family since it is of no known school of inking, but that will not save him. Ithaqua has grown impatient waiting, has been unable to sate itself with sheep, and even men, has been unable to engender the worship it once enjoyed, which was the birthright, and the responsibility, of Clan Camshronack. Only the most elderly of villagers recall the old ways, and that is not enough to bring about the worship needed by Ithaqua. Camshronack took the sigil, named his ship after the creature, and probably even propagated its cult among ignorant savages, thinking he still curried the creature’s good will.”
“But he left his family for the outside world,” Wilmarth said, finally catching the drift of Holmes’ reasoning. “His action weakened the family, leading to its downfall and the abandonment of the Ithaqua cult. All that remained was a sister who wanted no more than to hide from the evil of her own family.”
“Precisely, Professor,” Holmes confirmed. “Like other minions of Cthulhu, Ithaqua survives in the world only through the sacrifices of cultists. Camshronack seeks his own reinstatement as the cult’s high priest, but Ithaqua wants only revenge on him.”
The doors of the study burst open, revealing a wild-eyed and breathless Emerson. “Professor! Mr Holmes! Come quickly! There is a madman behind the house, and something…some unholy thing is coming out of the north!”
They followed Emerson till they reached the rear of the house, but Holmes restrained them from going out. They tried to run to the lone figure in the expanse of land between the house and the low wall, beyond which lay northern St John Island. Though the house was ominously enshrouded in three directions by thick mist the wild winds of the north had revealed the island’s primal landscape under a crescent moon. By the light of the occulted satellite they saw something moving against the descending night.
“We’ve got to stop him, Holmes!” Wilmarth shouted.
“Who the devil is it!” Emerson demanded.
“We can do nothing for Camshronack, Professor,” Holmes said as he struggled to keep the two men from sharing Camshronack’s doom. “Ithaqua is, like other survivals from that elder time, a very jealous god and does not brook abandonment, or intervention.”
Aulay Camshronack screamed ancient incantations into the enfolding darkness, against the bluster of the wind, as he had been instructed as a lad by sire and grandsire. Fools, he had thought them at the time, trusting in a hoary religion when the world was changing and filled with so much promise, but now those ancient ways were all he had left, his only hope. His face was twisted with hatred and greed, but also with fear as it occurred to him that the Calling was not going as it should have. Nothing had gone right, not from the beginning when he had spilled the blood of those who called him Brother, and certainly not since returning to the island he had sworn never to see again. The villagers should have deferred meekly to him, as they had in the time of his grandfather, but they had merely gazed at him with a mix of wariness and disgust. Then he discovered his fool of a sister had sold the family property and land to an outsider. He realized now that he should have dragged his sister and her companion back to this ancient manse, an offering to Ithaqua, rather than venting his murderous rage upon them.
He saw Ithaqua soaring from out the northern reaches of the island, rising from among the ancient crags where its temple lay in ruins. It was only the second time he had seen the creature, the first being when their father offered his youngest brother as a sacrifice to ensure his own ascension as high priest. It was not the blood, or the devouring, or even the screams that had caused him to forsake his family, but the realization that they were staking their future on the whims of a being that could not be controlled. Better to strike out into the realm of steam and steel, of nations and commerce, where a man could seize the world by the throat and demand what he wanted, to take and not be forced to grovel and ask.
Almost as an afterthought, he named his ship for Ithaqua, had even turned blighted pagans from one idol to another, but without any emotion on his part. He attended to the god of his fathers with less diligence than did the abject reprobate who sat through church service on a blue moon Sunday to slough off the crust of sin. Not enough, he now realized with dismay, not nearly enough.
Time had diminished Ithaqua in his memory. He had forgotten the Great Old One’s power and majesty, its terrifying vastness. It neared him, seeming to fill the sky, occulting moon and stars. For once in his life Aulay Camshronack felt small and naked, and insignificant in an uncaring cosmos of infinite immensity and darkness. In a blinding flash of insight, he realized Ithaqua was not coming to instill something he had lost but to punish him, a long-delayed reward for his apostasy.
Camshronack turned toward the house and ran. He saw three men watching from an opened door. Two were shouting, urging him to run faster, but the third watched with grim fatalism. In Sherlock Holmes’ eyes Camshronack saw the coldness of an impersonal and analytical universe where humanit
y was naught but a spark that burned dimly in the darkness before expiring forever.
Camshronack stopped, put the house in which he had been born at his back, and forced his eyes to remain open when he wanted nothing more than to close them and weep. The ruby eyes burned him as chill black mist enfolded him. He tried to scream, but in less than an instant Camshronack and his vengeful servitor were high above the Earth, in the airless reaches where screams are unheard.
“What happened to that man?” Emerson asked. His fingers clutched the jamb of the door they had opened in hopes of saving the now-vanished man. “Where did that…that…thing take…”
Sherlock Holmes stepped out the door, the others following hesitantly, all gazing upward into the vault. After a moment, they heard a soft hissing sound, and Holmes pushed them back.
That which had been Aulay Camshronack, reluctant cultist and late master of the SS Ithaqua, struck the ground very near the spot he had stood when summoning the Great Old One. He shattered into several pieces. Holmes and Wilmarth ran forward, but Emerson clung to the door to keep from falling.
“The body is totally frozen,” Wilmarth breathed. “Shattered.”
“This is how the two islanders died, lifted by Ithaqua into the cold wastes, then flung to Earth,” Holmes said. “I suspected it when you described the condition of the bodies. When the late Captain Camshronack thaws, his ‘wounds’ will be indistinguishable from those of the other victims…or the sheep.”
“Is it over?” Emerson asked, having overcome his nausea to join the others. “Has that thing left for good?”
“No,” Holmes answered, cutting Wilmarth off in the midst of a comforting platitude. “It is just starting.”
IV
Another Flesh
“Now that Ithaqua has killed Camshronack, its only hope for survival is to terrorize the islanders till they return to the old ways,” Holmes continued. “Without worship to sustain it, it will have to return to the hibernation of aeons, or perish altogether.”
“It was so like unto a god,” Emerson murmured, still dazed by the otherworldly encounter. “How can such a being perish?”
“Camshronack was trained in the worship of Ithaqua, and it is reasonable to assume his sister was as well,” Wilmarth said, ignoring his aide. “If she can be persuaded…”
“She is dead,” Holmes stated. “When Camshronack turned to us, blood was visible in a line across his chest. He cut her throat.”
“The village must be warned!” Emerson cried. “If that thing attacks, the people will be annihilated.”
“Not if they turn to Ithaqua,” Wilmarth pointed out. “It will not be the same quality of worship, with the proper rites and rituals, but there will be blood. The most elderly islanders will not know the form, but they will recall the blood and the darkness, will remember how the patriarchs of Clan Camshronack seemed to keep the beast at bay. They will lead the youth into the past, and those who resist will be slaughtered, if not by Ithaqua, then by their own kind.”
“Only knowledge can save them,” Holmes said. “In the past, it was knowledge that allowed humanity to light the corners of the world, to send the Great Old Ones back into their dreaming sleep.”
“We must arm them with understanding,” Wilmarth said. He grabbed Holmes and Emerson by the arms and tried to pull them. His assistant went along like a man moving in a dream, but Holmes resisted. “Come, we must tell them before Ithaqua returns!”
“The two of you must go, and the two of you alone,” Holmes said, shaking off Wilmarth’s frenzied grip. “You and Emerson are not natives, but you are old friends compared to me.”
Wilmarth did not like the idea of leaving Holmes alone in this cursed house, so hard upon the edge of Ithaqua’s wind-blasted domain. If the Great Old One was on the verge of a reign of terror intended to transform the islanders into sheep of Ithaqua’s fold, surely it would begin here, battering down the home of its errant priests. He tried to convince Holmes otherwise, but it quickly became clear the detective was unmovable.
And there was no time remaining to argue the point. The death of Camshronack would settle Ithaqua’s rage, but only temporarily. The systematic destruction of St John could begin at any moment.
Holmes watched Wilmarth and Emerson only long enough to see them vanish into the mist separating the manor house from the southern half of the island. He turned and quickly found his way to Emerson’s chemical laboratory. He set to work.
Emerson and Wilmarth were almost to the outermost houses of the village when the roar of flapping wings sounded above them. A blast of frigid air pushed them to the ground. Wilmarth, flat on his back, saw a vast black shape soar over them, blotting the stars in its titanic passage. Vaguely, he became aware of Emerson screaming beside him. He crawled to his side.
“Quiet man!” the Professor hissed, clapping his hand across the younger man’s mouth.
Emerson struggled, eyes bulging, limbs flailing, but Wilmarth would not relent. After a few moments, Emerson’s eyes regained focus and he stopped struggling. He glanced at Wilmarth, nodded.
Wilmarth moved his hand slightly aside, then completely when he saw Emerson was no longer panicked beyond reason. He helped the younger man into a sitting position.
“Sorry, Professor, so sorry,” Emerson muttered, face flushed and voice breathless. “It was…I never…”
“It’s all right, Emerson,” Wilmarth consoled.
“The legends in those books, in the old scrolls and on the clay tablets you study,” he murmured. “All true, ain’t they?”
Wilmarth nodded. “It’s my fault, my dear fellow. I should have shared my knowledge with you, told you what I had seen, let you know the real reason I asked Sherlock Holmes to come.”
Emerson smiled weakly and shook his head. “I don’t know that it would have made a whit of difference, Professor. I half-thought you were barmy anyway for studying all those weird ancient tales, for trying to correlate them with mythology and existing tribes. If you had told me you’d seen one of the monster-gods cavorting over the north of St John, I might have thought it all had driven you stark barking mad.” He sighed. “I guess I went a bit barking mad myself there, didn’t I?”
“No time for recriminations of any sort,” Wilmarth said. “We must continue. Holmes is depending upon us, and our friends in the village even more.”
The terrible black form of Ithaqua had swept past, soaring over the village down the length of the island. They helped each other to stand. They heard, amidst the roaring beat of Ithaqua’s wings, rising screams of horror and panic. The lights in the windows went out like candles inundated by an irresistible black wave.
“Come!” Wilmarth cried. “We must hurry! Without knowledge of Ithaqua’s ultimate mortality, its dependency upon their worship, the people will not have the means or the will to resist.”
They started down the steep path, intent on helping people for which they had developed a fondness over the past lustrum. They had not taken more than a few frenzied, stumbling steps toward their goal when a preternaturally loud voice cut through the turmoil of the night. Wilmarth’s heart faltered as he recognized the guttural intonations from the Necronomicon.
“It’s that madman again!” Emerson shouted. “Somehow…”
“No!” Professor Wilmarth interrupted. “Not Camshronack! It’s Homes! He is using the spells of summoning and conjuration to call Ithaqua back to him.”
“Can he do that?” Emerson asked.
“Ithaqua is a creature of rites and rituals,” Wilmarth explained as he pulled Emerson back the way they had come. “It cannot resist a summons any more than a thirsty man can resist a glass of water. Holmes understands that conditioned response and is using it to pull Ithaqua back to him, against its will.”
“He can control it, Professor?”
“No more than Camshronack, your madman, could,” Wilmarth said between gasps of air. “Summoning is not control, something that Camshronack forgot, or did not want to remember. His in
itial rite roused Ithaqua from the long slumber into which it fell when its worship ceased, and he called it to him tonight, but control…” He shook his head. “Ithaqua and the other minions of Great Cthulhu did not reign for long aeons over the primal Earth by ceding control to the humans they regarded as slaves and cattle.”
“Then what can Mr Holmes hope to accomplish by calling that thing back to him?” Emerson demanded. “He’ll be killed, just like that Camshronack chap, and then where will we be?”
Still in mortal danger, but with less hope than ever, Wilmarth thought, but kept his words to himself. Not only were his lungs too much on fire to allow a reply, he felt that as long as he did not give voice to his fears they were somehow less real. But he did allow one further doubt to wriggle into his consciousness: And what in the world can we possibly do to save Holmes…or ourselves?
From behind the two came a rushing noise, like the roaring of all the world’s waterfalls crashing simultaneously. Hearing Holmes’ ancient summons, Ithaqua had turned about over the roiling waters between the mainland and St John Island, soaring once more over the fishing vessels that had not yet righted themselves from the first zephyr of Ithaqua’s passage. It responded to a call ingrained into its being, but its black and frozen heart was filled with rage, even more than it had been at the voice of the traitor. This was the call of a stranger, an interloper from the outside world, an infidel who sought to take what was not his to take. He would learn, as so many others had over countless millennia, the folly of toying with gods.
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