Sherlock Holmes: Cthulhu Mythos Adventures (Sherlock Holmes Adventures Book 2)

by Ralph E. Vaughan

  We returned to Slate House. The doctor was called for me. When I awoke two days later, I learned Holmes had moved on, taking with him only a basket prepared by Cook, a few books that had caught his fancy, and a goodly measure of the shag tobacco of which he had become so fond. Days later, when I’d got back me wind, I returned to the henge, now the site of a steep-walled tarn. Even now, the water of the diverted river flows in to it, never filling it, and it remains a shunned place.

  The disappearance of the Vicar was wagged about for several weeks, till everyone decided he had been as queern-headed as his father and the village was well off without him. No one spoke about the strange goings-on in the woods that night, and everyone spoke about them, for such is the way of a small village.

  The destruction of the henge brought an end to nightmares and visions, the breaking of a link between me and it, forged when I was a wee daft lad ignorant of what sent me fleeing in terror. I never saw Sherlock Holmes after that, and I doubt he ever thinks of what he encountered in the Highlands of Scotland, but I often think of him and that night, even more now, as I near a century of years. He was but a lad then, but he saved me life and me sanity.

  Well, there ye be, Mr Williams, the whole story, though what claptrap a scunner scrivener like yerself will foist on the goamless public I cannae say. But I tell ye, ye adlepated mooncalf—I’ve a bonny good solicitor…and a shotgun good enough to send a god back to the hell from which it came. Ye have been warned.

  This story unites Sherlock Holmes with Arthur Conan Doyle’s other literary character, Professor George Edward Challenger, hero of The Lost World. The blustering and energetic Professor, known for causing riots at the Royal Academy and chucking journalists and critics into the street, also starred in lesser known adventures, one of which presciently postulated the Earth as a living creature. It’s unfortunate Conan Doyle did not write further stories of Challenger and perhaps do for the scientific adventure genre what he did for crime fiction. In this tale, we also meet my own Laslo Bronislav, occultist and sociopath, featured in “The Quest for the Copper Scrolls,” an early novel. “The Terror Out of Time” was first published by Gryphon Books in 2002, one of the many publications made out-of-print by Hurricane Sandy. At the time, editor Gary Lovisi wanted another Holmes story, preferably linked to the Cthulhu Mythos, as my last effort was a highly improbable fusion of Sherlock Holmes and HP Lovecraft’s Dreamlands Universe. However, I then feeling at odds with the Mythos, so I wrote a monster story in the Penny Dreadful tradition, drawing upon British and Maldivian mythologies. The result was, as one reviewer wrote, a great Cthulhu Mythos story that never once mentioned the dread name of Cthulhu. Well, who am I to argue?

  The Terror Out of Time

  Prologue

  2617 BC

  Denak of the South River People gripped his ash-handled, bronze-bladed knife and watched the day’s last light die beyond the rock-barricaded doorway of his stone hut.

  Behind him, his woman softly tossed telling-bones onto the packed dirt floor. She had the Sight, his woman did, but he feared to know what the sky gods whispered, or if they whispered at all. He wanted to believe the gods of the upper air still watched over them, even when the Dark Ones were strong. But if they did avert their eyes from their children, he did not want to know of it.

  Behind the woman, against the strongest part of the wall, their children huddled. The girls were protectively adorned with multiple strands of beads and shells.

  Denak fought a sigh. When the Orm came, would the beads and shells be any more effective than his bronze knife?

  Day’s blood-light gave way to purple twilight and the first stars of evening through the inevitable chinks of the blocked doorway. River-mist was rising, flowing through the village; with it came the smell of the deeps, the stink of dank things that slithered and swam and crawled hidden from the light.

  Damn Shar! Denak thought. And damn the Elders of the tribe for listening to him.

  They should have driven him from the village, should have stoned him for the dangerous blasphemies he uttered. The warriors of the South River would have gladly done just that, or worse, had their hands not been stayed by the Elders, who were swayed by the emissary of the Channel Shell People. Denak well recalled the day the blue-painted man had been racked within the circle of stones, stretched across the upended tree-trunk, its roots reaching skyward. No one could utter a lie when suspended between the vault of light and the house of dust. When the excruciated man averred Shar had actually destroyed the Channel Shell Orm, it had to be the truth, so said the gods, so believed the Elders. Denak had had doubts.

  And he doubted still, now more than ever.

  A quavering moan split the night, rising and falling like the wail from a hunter’s horn.

  The Orm was abroad, ranging for food.

  His predatory cry sounded through the foggy night, then subsided into a long portentous silence.

  The roar that shattered the silence rattled the stone walls of the hut. It hurt the ears and vibrated bones with its intensity, but the fiery rage of the dark god also knifed through the thoughts of the huddling villagers—it was terrible enough to catch fragments of the Orms’ air-speak as they communicated with their own kind or their human slaves, but it was almost soul-shattering to feel the range of the Orm burst so vividly amongst their own thoughts.

  Denak staggered under the psychic assault, but he held fast to his knife, gripped the ash hilt even tighter. The village shaman had anointed the keen bronze with words, fire and blood at the portal of the Other World, but what was all worth that when pitted against the wrath of a god?

  They knew the reason for the Orm’s fury. It had come to the feeding place at the new moon and found no sacrifice on the stone table, no lotteried villager or foreign prisoner trussed with hemp cords and painted the colors of the deeps. In anger, this Orm, which called itself Vaxax, would mete out punishment to the village. It would feed gluttonously, barricaded doorways or not.

  Denak heard slithering noises moving between the huts. The massive Orm slammed against his barricade. It held, but it bowed in and several rocks fell. The overpowering odor of the Orm filled the hut. Thick black ropy tentacles shot through gaps, questing for the occupants within. Denak slashed at them, but even the keenness of his blessed bronze blade did little against the tough black hide.

  The rock wall collapsed, and the Orm surged into the hut. Denak was thrown aside. One of the Orm’s hooks slashed his forehead. Through a curtain of blood he saw the Orm reach for his woman and squalling infants.

  Denak knew he was dead, as were they all, yet he frantically launched himself at the Orm, slashing and hacking. With less effort than a man might swat a gnat, the Orm slammed him against a wall.

  The Orm reached for the woman and the children.

  Then it paused and quivered.

  Suddenly the Orm surged out of the hut, far more swiftly than it had broken in.

  Vaxax vanished into the misty darkness.

  After the eternity of a few heartbeats, Denak convinced himself that he and his family still lived. Fighting pain and darkness, he crawled to his woman and their clinging daughters. Despite the pounding in his head, he heard the diminishing roars of the Orm. Beyond that, however, there was another sound, the cry of another Orm, but one whose voice was filled with terror and pain.

  He touched his woman’s trembling arm. Another noise intruded upon his consciousness, tiny and fragile, yet echoing like thunder through the darkness of his mind. She had thrown the telling-bones. He saw only scattered small bones, but she had the Sight.

  “What?” he whispered. “Do the sky people look down on us?”

  “No,” she replied raggedly. “It is Shar, Killer of Dark Gods.”

  Shar, formerly of the Land’s End People but now an orphan among the tribes of men, lowered the curiously fashioned horn from his thin lips. Standing atop the rock-strewn tor above the plain, he peered across the black star-lit leagues toward the mist-filled river valley
. Frowning, he again put the horn to his lips and sounded another dire cry into the night.

  It had taken him a long time to learn the shrill cry of a distressed Orm, and longer still to craft an instrument that would mimic it with absolute fidelity. So far, five Orms had been lured to their deaths, and this one, this Vaxax that haunted the river valleys of the region, was next. It was slow-going, killing these gods one at a time, with many moons between, but he would not stop till the last one had been eliminated from the whole of the Isles.

  He sent his Sight ranging.

  The Orm was on its way.

  He could not yet see it rising up from the misty river valley in the dim starlight, but he felt its approach. He felt the fire of its rage, felt the tremors beneath his feet as its ponderous bulk writhed across the plain.

  He signaled his men to hide themselves among the rocks of the tor while he scrambled down its face. He paused at the wide opening they had forced into the chambers below.

  Convincing the Elders of the South River People to rise against the Orm was an easy matter compared to obtaining their permission to open this tor, the tomb of the legendary Tovane Warriors. Even he had been reluctant to disturbed their centuries sleep. But the fact that the Tovanes had been arch-foes of the Orms in the Dawntime of the Isles decided both Shar and the Elders that they would not raise any vengeful ghosts. He would rather have used a natural cavern or a bottomless pit, but this was the best they could do.

  He stepped into the subterranean gloom and brought the horn to his lips. This time, the cry possessed a particularly piteous quality, echoing from the rock walls. The vibrations rising up through his legs told him the Orm was almost upon them, slithering gigantically across the wilderness.

  Knowing his men were ready with casks of thinned pitch, he penetrated the depths of the ancient tor, inspecting one last time the baffles that had been erected, the channels that had been cut, the braces that would fall away at the proper time. Entering the lowest chamber, a vast space, he was surrounded by a pale green glow. It was nothing but the natural action of certain lichen, but he had been unable to convince his conscripted workers that the weird light was of this world and not the next. None of them had entered this ultimate chamber, so only Shar had beheld the withered yet still ennobled visages of the ancient Tovane Warriors, men of heroic stature in life, half again taller then any man now living. Even Shar, who believed in nothing he could not prove, gazed upon them with awe, and yet he felt they were more like him than not.

  The crypt shuddered. Shar jerked his attention to the wide passage he had just descended. The Orm waited at the entrance of the tor. Already uneasy away from water, it hesitated at the prospect of venturing underground. He put the horn to his lips and sent an Orm’s cry echoing upward, this time weaker, more desperate.

  The entire subterranean structure shook when the Orm plunged into the depths. Shar hoped none of the braces would fall before their time. He heard the Orm’s sucking, oozing motions, heard rocks grinding against its tough hide. He felt its murderous rage and ravening hunger. The ability to mind-talk was a dangerous trait of its race. With it they communicated with their own kind but also used it upon weak-willed humans, both to keep them from fleeing, as a serpent might transfix a bird, and to control them.

  The Orm was almost into the lowest chamber, time for Shar to escape up the narrow branch they had cut parallel to the main passage. The men above were already emptying their casks of thinned pitch. He smelled it running through the cut channels. With a final nod of respect to the long-entombed warriors, he rushed up the escape tunnel.

  He was halfway out when the Orm surged against the barrier separating man and beast. Shar needed only to wait for a moment, to let the Orm fully pass, then make for the surface.

  The Orm grabbed one of the side-tunnel supports as it writhed downward. One of its ropy tentacles pulled the brace free. A portion of the ceiling in the side tunnel collapsed, cutting off Shar’s path to safety. He looked at the mass of immoveable rock, but only for a moment. He headed back to the crypt.

  Hunting gods is a dangerous game, he thought. For the hunter as well as the hunted. It was inevitable.

  The Orm’s pulsating black bulk filled the chamber. Its oily leathery hide appeared gangrenous in the lichen light. Its tentacles constantly writhed and quested. It made low, dangerous sounds as it looked for a wounded Orm. Suddenly, its cowl-shaped head whipped about, its fiery gaze settling upon Shar.

  Where is the other? The Orm demanded.

  The fire of the Orm’s mind-speak was intense, like standing too close to the flames of a bellows-pumped copper smelter. The ferocity of the thoughts might have forced another man to his knees but Shar, Killer of Gods, merely smiled thinly.

  “There is no other Orm,” he said. “You were drawn here by means of a ruse.”

  The Orm’s bright disc eyes glared at the lean human. The Orm understood his words for the beasts were dangerously intelligent and comprehended the tongues of many peoples.

  “I brought you here,” Shar continued.

  Why?

  “To kill you,” Shar replied. “As I have killed five Orms before you. You are alone, and alone you shall die.”

  The Orm’s roar was ear-shattering, its thoughts inarticulate, raging. Shar staggered under the force, but he remained standing. Now, he told himself, was not the time for weakness.

  The men above by now knew what had happened and what they must do. They would do what was necessary.

  A torrent of flaming pitch suddenly flooded the chamber, splashing over the Orm. Its rage became panic. Simultaneously, the interior of the tor collapsed around them, the demolition brought about by shifting weights and counterweights, the same human ingenuity that raised rings of standing stones throughout the length of the Isles and beyond.

  You shall die! the Orm screamed. You and the other human cattle!

  “I’ll die, but the knowledge of how to bring death to Orms will not die with me,” Shar observed, calm and curiously feeling no pain. “I know your weaknesses and have passed that information to my apprentices. They, too, know the secret of imitating the cry of the Orm. The overlordship of your race has entered its twilight.”

  The Orm reached for Shar, but failed.

  Shar felt the Orm die, knew he would join it momentarily. As he fell, he looked at the ranged warriors. It seemed they gazed upon him with approval. To die in the company of such men while accomplishing such a task was not such a bad death, as deaths, went. Since death came eventually to all men, only the manner of death mattered, and to die well was the best a man could hope for.

  Shar stared into the Orm’s blind eyes and smiled.

  Chapter One

  India Jack Neville gripped the heavy, oil-papered, hemp-bound package he had transported across three continents and six seas. By murder he had come to possess the heathen object, and twice more murdered to retain it. But before it had ever passed into his hands it had already been steeped in centuries of darkness and blood.

  The evil nature of the repulsive idol was a palpable presence, a black aura obvious to him the moment he beheld it. It was death and madness incarnate, the stuff of nightmares and primal fears. It was a fell burden, but one assumed because of an avarice greater than any degree of evil. Despite its manifest malignancy, however, only it was only since departing Alexandria that he had felt overshadowed by a sense of dread, of imminent danger.

  Just out into the harbor, with the towers and minarets of Alexander’s jewel yet close at hand and baking under the bronze Egyptian sun, he felt a vague, indefinable uneasiness, a sensation that quickly resolved into a conviction that he was being keenly observed. Several times in the Mediterranean, and more since Gibraltar he thought he perceived watchers out the corners of his eyes, but they became the phantoms under his full gaze, merely the faces of innocuous strangers passing. More often, however, he was felt watchful eyes when absolutely alone, when there was nothing about him but vacant walkways and the vastness of the sea.
During their many portfalls he remained sequestered in his tiny cabin aboard the merchantman, acutely aware of the dangers concealed within polyglot throngs. Long before they sighted Dover’s cliffs he locked himself in his cabin, sliding the bolt only to retrieve the meager meals left by the Malaysian cabin boy.

  When the ship entered the Thames, India Jack felt no elation at returning after so many years. He had told himself a homecoming was one of the reasons for accepting Bronislav’s employment, but home now brought only bitterness. To keep his thoughts from the fear he was being stalked by an unseen yet material menace he concentrated solely upon the gold he would receive from Bronislav, but he was not entirely successful. So, as the ship passed from the Blackwall Reach of the Thames into Blackwall Basin upon the Isle of Dogs, where it waited with twelve other ships for the rising tide and the opening of the lock, India Jack sat and brooded and felt very small in a dark cosmos. When the ship finally entered the protected waters of the West India Docks and made its berth, he remained behind his locked, barricaded door till near midnight when the ship was quiet and the docks all but deserted.

  A fog thick with the dark scents of the Thames and the abyssal mysteries of the deep, acridly fouled by London’s innumerable coal-fires, swirled along the Docks. Naked masts of myriad docked vessels rose like finger-bones of dead giants. The warehouses, most of which were five stories high, were indistinct in the mist and just as easily could have been the cyclopean remnants of an earlier age. He did not linger, but moved hastily among the litter of cargo crates, ropes, pilings and cantered small boats undergoing repairs.

  By the time he reached the West India Dock Road, which would quickly dogleg into Commercial Road, he was attended by doubt and despair and even a tinge of unadmitted fear. One thing he was certain of now was that he would need much more than sailor’s luck to put this heathen thing in Laslo Bronislav’s bloody grasp, receive his gold due and get out of this thing alive.