“I’ve tried to do just that, but to no avail,” I said. “As soon as I move from the confines of the henge, the Whisperer seems to move with me, purposely eluding me. That is also how I ken there is an intelligence behind it.”
“Sometimes conducting a solitary investigation is very much an advantage, but in my limited experience at unraveling the skeins of human problems I find my thought processes often facilitated by the presence of a companion,” he explained. “In this case, the presence of another might also work against this Whisperer that seems intent upon bedeviling you. Late tomorrow, we will journey to the henge and await darkness. You shall post yourself within the henge, while I take up a post elsewhere.”
I sighed with relief. It was nae that I dinnae appreciate the lad’s belief and assistance, but it seemed much too simple an answer to a mystery that had, in me mind, built up to imponderable proportions. Then I was reminded of all the times I had tried to pound into me students’ dullard minds the lesson of Occam’s Razor.
“Thank ye, lad, I appreciate it much, whether or nae we bring this to a resolution.”
“Oh, it will be brought to a resolution,” Holmes vowed. “But not, perhaps, one either of us expect. I suggest you get some rest, Professor, for tomorrow’s events will surely tax you to your limits, and beyond.”
“And ye?”
“I have never needed much sleep, and I doubt I ever shall,” he said. “When my mind worries a problem like a dog does a bone, I am at my best, my most alert. It is only when my mind is free of mysteries and puzzles that I am gripped by despair, that I yearn for some escape from the boredom of life.” His lips curved into a wan smile that would have seemed more at home on the face of someone much older. “If you do not mind, I will make use of your extensive library tonight. And there is one other thing.”
“Pray tell?”
“A generous supply of that shag tobacco of yours,” he replied. “I seem to have become quite accustomed to it.”
As I retired for the night, weary from the unburdening of a long-held secret, I glanced at Holmes and could nae help but smile. He was surrounded by towers of old books, and his bairn face was afflicted by a seriousness only the aged should bear, but what brought a smile was the plume of bluish smoke rising from that old clay pipe like a factory ablaze. I had always caught the dickens from Mrs MacDonald and Cook for making the manor house ‘a reeking unfit place to live and please keep it confined to yer study, thank ye very much.’ Whether Holmes was destined to share a marriage bed or to merely share rooms, I pitied the poor devil.
I passed the night sorely troubled by strange dreams, reliving the terrors of youth and seeming to hear whispers no human throat could make. At dawn, Holmes was still shut up in the shag-clouded study, refusing to break fast. I dinnae see Holmes till long past the nooning, and a right wretched sight he was, eyes sunken and face creased with worry, perhaps even a touch of fear.
“Holmes!” I cried. “Have ye nae had any rest at all?”
“Rest is the enemy when the game is afoot.” he said.
“Aye, perhaps, but ‘tis nay a game, is it?”
“No, Professor, not, as you say, a game, but a deadly serious affair,” Holmes replied. “Myths, legends and folklore lack the same weight as facts, but they bring a preponderance of evidence to a case, much as amassed testimony does in a civil court action. Your woods have always been held in ill repute, first by the Picts and other tribes, then by Romans that penetrated this far, Kelts, Saxons and Normans. Much of the enmity felt by so many people, and even continuing today, stems from that ring of stones.”
“Aye, though I’ve not yet read all the accounts, it did seem a constant theme,” I admitted. “Me cousins and I were but wee lads, shut away from the talk of our elders, but we heard enough to ken it was a dreadful place, home to an ancient evil, hence the dare that planted such a black seed in me brain, to reap such a tainted fruit after all these years.” I paused, pondering a lifetime of nightmares kept hid ‘neath a life spent questing for knowledge. “Aye, a canker in me soul, so to speak. The time to exorcize it is long past.”
We spent most of the morning pouring over maps of the area, not just survey charts but maps of all types, some dating back many hundreds of years.
“This structure here,” Holmes said, pointing to a spot where the river came hard by the clearing and its henge. “I noticed it during my ramble. It appears to some sort of irrigation mechanism, perhaps two centuries old, but constructed over an even older base.”
“Aye, ‘twas Great-Great-Uncle Comhnall’s idea to divert the river, though none could say why, ‘cept he was daft and it was nay surprise he died in a madhouse,” I said. “A menseless idea, it would have flooded the meadow and woods, undermined the henge, and brought misery to crofters, not to mention playing hobb with the water rights downstream.”
“But he was not the first to have the idea,” Holmes observed.
“Aye, as ye said, he built upon a stone age base, this far older than the henge,” I concurred. “Its purpose was just as mysterious as Uncle Comhnall’s folly—too small to divert any great amount of water and the area is unsuited for agriculture.”
“The device appears to be in working order,” Holmes said.
“Comhnall was madder than a hatter on Sunday, but he was a first-class engineer,” I said. “What he built, why-ever he built it, was built for the ages.”
That afternoon we set out for the henge. I carried the victuals prepared by Cook for our journey and the long nightwatch. I also carried the shotgun that had belonged to Grandfather, a muckle great weapon that could bring down the most fearsome of beasties. Holmes’ burden was far greater than mine, consisting of a large number of ropes, packets of explosives given reluctantly by the estate’s groundskeeper, two paraffin lamps and a container of the highly flammable liquid, and several wax-coated boxes of lucifers. I dinnae ken what to make of Holmes’ preparations, and he was very reluctant to share his ideas.
“I cannot say for sure what we will face tonight,” he admitted. “I have some theories based upon what you have told me, what I have learned from others, and what I have read, both in your library and in the Special Collection at Cambridge, but theories are not facts. They are no more than rank speculation at this point, even if they do explain some of the known facts. I hesitate to…”
“After all I have unburdened to ye, mon, I think I can wrestle with any terror you might…”
“You misunderstand me, Professor,” Holmes interrupted. “Age has not diminished your mettle, no matter the infirmities that come to us all, and I do not doubt your courage. But it will be better for you as a disinterested…”
“Disinterested me foot!”
“Unbiased would be a better term,” he said. “Whatever you see tonight, assuming we see anything at all, must be observed through your own eyes, unfiltered by any notion I have conceived from my own interpretation of the facts.” He paused a moment, then said: “If we were dealing with smugglers or a band of housebreakers, or any other human sin, I might be more candid with you. The blackness that takes root in a man’s heart can be deep, but it is rarely complex, and is usually disappointingly simple. Here, though, we face forces that may transcend what we know of time and space, that may have endured since before humanity’s creation, so the possibilities are accordingly complex.”
“Cannae ye say anything for certain about tonight?” I asked.
“Only one thing, Professor,” Holmes replied. “No matter what we encounter, whether it is your ancient Whisperer or some entity projecting the terrors of its realm into our own world, like shadows on the wall of Plato’s Cave, I can tell you, with no hesitation, that it will have as little regard for us as you might have for an ant under the heel of your boot.”
Holmes’ reticence and his final warning combined to send me into a pensive state, one which I tried to hide. The sun was shining brightly as we put the manor house behind us, but it seemed to impart neither light nor heat. The landsc
ape’s life-long familiarity bled away, like a watercolor drawing left in the rain, leaving behind alien shadows and shapes, now ominous where once they had been reassuring. In silence we penetrated the woods’ shunned depths, and were surrounded by a more profound hush, one in which not a leaf trembled and the wee creatures of the woods seemed afeared to move, lest they be noticed by the Whisperer that prowled that ancient realm.
We came to the clearing with the sun westering. Shadows of the standing stones grew long, the blackness deepened. Faint stars glimmered in the east and the far horizon seemed stained with blood. In the last of the fleeting day we made our preparations. I gave Holmes half the victuals. Then, at his insistence, I took up a post in the midst of the prehistoric henge, back against the central altar stone, shotgun across me lap. Holmes vanished into the encroaching dusk.
Sitting in the middle of the henge, stars waxing bright, I felt transported back in time, was again the goamless lad daft enough to rise to taunts and dares. It had not occurred to me then to turn the tables on a bevy of gawky cousins, daring them to pass the night in the ancient henge. Had I done so, I might have seen them as being spineless lubbarts, and been spared a life shaped by haints and nightmares. But I had nae done so, and the path which I had chosen might now lead to destruction, nae only for meself but for the brilliant lad who’d taken up an old man’s heavy burden.
For awhile, I heard Holmes outside the henge, but eventually the only sound was the rushing of the nearby river. The hardness of the stone and the cold rising from the ground combined to pain me joints. Reluctantly I swallowed a portion of the powder from the chemist, washing it down with water from me canteen. I cursed me weakness, for soon me eyelids drooped; despite me best efforts to remain watchful, I dozed.
How long I remained under the sway of the soporific I dinnae ken, but I jerked awake, gripping the shotgun, alert. I listened hard to the night. All that broke the stillness was the river’s roar, or so I at first thought. The rush of the water seemed loud in the silence, but I soon perceived another sound, subtle and sly upon me ears, a sort of counter-rhythm to the gurgle and swish of the river’s current. I felt an old pang and a coldness, first felt as a skairt lad, then again as an old man afeared of the long night.
It was the voice of the Whisperer!
Instinctively, I almost called to Holmes, but I fought the base impulse. The lad no doubt heard it, for he would not drift off to Nod like a witless old fool. Instead, I rose to one knee, stifling a groan of pain, gazing over the altar stone, surveying the blackness.
By starlight, the standing stones of the henge were like black fingers of a buried giant, only slightly lighter than the stygian night beyond. I saw no movement. As I concentrated, the fell voice of the Whisperer waxed more plain, and the reassuring noises of the river waned. The words still bore no resemblance to any decent tongue of man, but after a moment I felt as if they spoke to me on a deep level, raw and primitive. I was struck by a vivid flash of vision, almost a memory, but possessing the profound lucidity that comes only in the deepest of dreams.
I squatted afore a campfire reeking of dung and yew, but I was nae alone. A half-dozen dirty savages clad in rough tartan cloth also clung to the fire, their angular faces painted with outrageous designs in vivid blue and ochre. Instantly, I realized I was nae with these men from the age of unpolished stone, but was one of them, also pressing close enough to the fire to get singed, nae for any warmth, but to cleave to the light. Terror was etched in their faces, and mine as well, for I, too, heard the sounds booming out of the endless night, the words of the Whisperer.
I noticed a dimming of the henge and looked upward. Shadows spread across the sky, blotting out the stars, even though there was no trace of any physical presence; whatever cast the shifting shades capered nae in our world, but in a realm beyond time and space. At the same moment, the ground heaved, knocking me down.
I clambered up, clinging to the edge of the altar stone, pulling upward mightily, but making sure I dinnae lose grip of the shotgun, though I admit I dinnae ken what effect it might have on something that could cast shadows from other dimensions or slither through the chambered earth.
The words of the Whisperer rumbled like thunder, but I ken the loudness was naught but in me mind, for me ears never heard aught but a sibilant hiss. Yet that murmur drowned out the river’s roar.
The words assaulted me. I was caught between the present and the distant past. I had heard alienists keen on about humanity’s ‘racial memory,’ but until that moment I dismissed it as naught but hypal tripe. There I was, a scientist of the mid-Nineteenth Century and yet I shared a soul with a stone-age man.
I would have fired the shotgun in the direction of the Whisperer but I nae could single out a source for the chanting. By that time, though, the earth was heaving and bucking so wildly beneath me I scarce could aim level for two seconds going. Also, I had nae idea where Holmes might be, and I had to be ever mindful of him.
The henge’s stones gyrated about me like the dancing giants of myth, reanimated after a long petrifaction. Terror rising within me, I realized the long-sedate stones moved nae of their own accord, but because they were being shoved aside by some enormous entity pushing up from below. Jagged cracks split the earth. The starlight had all but vanished, but now a new illumination glimmered, a dull reddish glow seeping up through the widening fissures.
“Run, Professor!” Holmes shouted. “Run now, man! Run for your life! Run to save your soul!”
Till I heard Holmes’ frantic exhortation, I had nae idea how frozen I was, trapped between childhood fears and an old man’s terror. His voice shattered the hold exerted by both the Whisperer’s hypnotic voice and the dreadful anticipation of the horror from below. Staggering over the uprising ground, I ran toward the river, from where I thought Holmes’ voice might have come.
As I neared the limits of the toppling henge, dodging stones and avoiding the ever-expanding fissures, something bolted at me from the outer darkness. I raised the shotgun, but nae could fire afore it slammed into me, knocking me to earth. The black shape loomed over me, seeming miles tall.
“Stay inside the henge! The sacrifice must be made!”
Two things happened simultaneously: the entity that seemed to tower miles into the shadowy air suddenly shrank into a man in a dark robe, and I recognized the voice shouting at me, both as the mysterious Whisperer and as a man I had known all me life.
“Reverend O’Cain!”
“Ye shan’t escape me as ye did afore!”
“But ye be a man o’ God!” I protested.
“Aye, the true god, Yog-Sothoth, not the mewling pup of ye Christ-eaters,” the Vicar sneered blasphemously. “By yer sacrifice, I shall succeed where me father failed. Eternal life shall be mine!”
The old vicar’s madness was etched in his features, red-lit in his cowl by the embering light waxing brighter behind me. O’Cain gazed beyond me, enraptured by the advent of that which he had called from the depths. I wanted to turn about, wanted to see what was coming, but dared not.
“Run, Professor!” Holmes shouted. I could now see him behind the Vicar, beyond the ruins of the ancient henge, sparks flying out of both his raised hands—fuses burning down to explosives. “Get up, Professor, and run!”
Where the strength came from I dinnae ken, but I scrabbled up and fled the confines of the henge. At the same time, the sizzling packets sailed over us. The Vicar tried to stop me, but distracted as he was by Holmes’ actions I knocked him aside easily.
“No!” O’Cain screamed. He ran in as I ran out.
I dinnae want to see what terror had been called forth from the depths of the earth, from out of unguessed dimensions of horror, but I could nae help meself. The henge was totally destroyed, all the stones knocked over like a bairn’s toys. From the midst of the henge rose a creature nae created by God’s hand. I cannae forget its form, but neither can I describe it. I saw writhing tentacles and multiple eyes bright as serving platters; saw pulsating
bladders and gaping maws filled with rows of scimitar teeth; saw hooks and claws and skeletal armatures and other appendages that have no parallel in our world. I smelled the reek of acrid gases and things long dead.
The cyclopean beast heaved itself upward.
Hard upon the explosives flung by Holmes came the canister filled with paraffin.
“Yog-Sothoth iah fatwa tibnash gwrnag diaft zo!” the Vicar shouted from the midst of the crawling chaos.
That which had been summoned had been called forth with the promise of a sacrifice, but I had evaded Reverend O’Cain, just as I had in ignorance previously, and had done so with his father all those years ago. Only the Vicar remained within the henge, standing alone and vulnerable in his failure.
In an instant he was gone, lost in the gaping mouth of madness.
The explosives with their sputtering fuses landed among the ancient god’s writhing tentacles only seconds before the canister of paraffin. It reached for me, the explosives detonated, flames soared skyward, and I fired both barrels of the shotgun, all in the same flash of eternity.
The kick of the shotgun threw me back, but it was a strong hand gripping the collar of me coat that pulled me from the limits of the henge, all the way to the edge of the woods. I staggered, but was held steady in Holmes’ arms.
“Holmes!” I shouted. “It was the Vicar! Reverend O’Cain was the Whisperer. He called forth the Old God.”
He nodded. “When I spoke to him about parish records, he knew more about the old ways than a simple country parson should. A son of Kilglarig, he did not realize how much his words revealed to me…” Holmes smirked. “…a mere callow youth.”
“Ye are wise beyond yer years, me friend.”
At that moment I realized we were shouting to be heard. The river roared louder than it should have. Spumes of spray pelted me. Under silver starlight a new river flowed out of the forest, rushing toward the henge. There was no sign of the creature, nothing but a gaping pit to prove we had not experienced a waking dream.
Sherlock Holmes: Cthulhu Mythos Adventures (Sherlock Holmes Adventures Book 2) Page 21
