Sherlock Holmes: Cthulhu Mythos Adventures (Sherlock Holmes Adventures Book 2) Page 4

  “I see what you mean, Mr. Holmes,” I said. “I think.”

  Darkness was fully upon Arkham by the time the train pulled into the station. I was fatigued from the journey, and I could see that my companion was weary as well. I looked forward to a good night’s rest before investigating the Starry Wisdom sect. I hailed a taxi and gave my address.

  “They are still with us,” Holmes whispered before we had gone a full block.

  I started to turn in my seat but he stopped me.

  “A rather squat man wearing the dark coat of a common sailor in the merchant marine,” Holmes replied. “He does not realize that we are on to him, and I plan to put his ignorance to good use.”

  After we reached home, not far from Miskatonic University, Holmes instructed me to go through all my usual procedures for turning in for the night, doing nothing out of the ordinary. When I happened to look through the window overlooking the street, I caught a glimpse of he man in the dark overcoat. I thought I heard Holmes leave by the back entrance, but I could not be sure. After turning out all the lights, I noticed the man was gone from his post. A quick tour of the house showed that Sherlock Holmes had indeed left me alone. I did not sleep soundly after that.

  I awoke the next morning to find Holmes in his room. His shoes were at the end of the bed; they were wet and smelled of the sea. He was sleeping soundly, and I did not see any reason to wake him. I spent the day puttering around the house, reading and writing letters, perusing review copies of books from various publishers attempting to solicit comments, trying my best not to make any noise. I was eager to try to pick up the trail of my poor cousin, but I deferred to Holmes’ experience and wisdom.

  Holmes awoke late in the afternoon but refused to speak of anything that might have happened in the night. The afternoon and evening wore on, but Holmes did not seem disposed to do anything more energetic than sit and smoke. As darkness fell, he went upstairs. A moment later he returned and asked me to lower, then raise the front window shade. Puzzled, I complied with his request.

  “What is going on, Holmes?”

  “Patience, my dear Philips,” he said. “All in good time.”

  Several loud shouts shattered the silence of the night, and there was the sound of a fight outside. Moments later there was a loud knocking at my door.

  At Holmes’ direction, I opened the door. Two very large men rushed in. Between them was the man in the dark overcoat I had seen earlier. Upon closer examination, I decided this was the same man I had seen outside the Copely Plaza Hotel, either that or of the same repulsive stock, possessing wide batrachian features, scaly skin and bulging eyes. When I told Holmes my suspicions about our captive, he merely nodded.

  “These two gentlemen,” Holmes said, “are operatives of the Pinkerton organization, the nearest thing America has to a competent national police force. I realized our curious friend would be back this evening. However, I knew he would not readily accept an invitation to join us for an elucidating conversation, hence the service of the Pinkertons was required.”

  Holmes motioned for the Pinkerton men to bring their captive into the living room, which took some effort since the man was still struggling mightily to free himself from their grasp. His motions reminded me of a captured fish. They forced him to sit, then sat themselves, very close to him to keep him from bolting.

  For long moments, Holmes stood before the repellant little man, regarding him with piercing eyes. The longer Holmes stared, the more agitated the man became.

  Finally Holmes said, “What did you tell Master Enoch Bowen last night?”

  The man instantly stopped struggling and stared at Holmes as if he been unmasked as a demon from the lower depths of hell.

  “I don’t know what you’re be talkin’ about,” the man slurred in an odd accent, with archaic diction.

  “Oh, come now,” Holmes said, turning his back. “After leaving here last night, you traveled the back streets to the wharf area along the River Miskatonic. You went to the building of the Starry Wisdom Sect and met Enoch Bowen, a dark man though obviously not of Negro blood. You spoke some time to him.” Holmes paused. “You also licked his hands.” He smiled at the man’s expression. “Afterwards, you went to a flophouse where you passed the night.”

  The man’s huge eyes had grown ever more bulbous.

  “No one followed me! I seen no one!”

  “Of course you saw no one,” Holmes snapped, turning about. “What did you tell Enoch Bowen?”

  “Ph’nguli nglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wagah’nagi fhtagni!” the man screamed.

  The two Pinkerton men startled by the man’s outburst, momentarily loosened their iron grips on the prisoner. The man immediately leaped free, shoved Holmes from his path, and ran toward the large living room window. He crashed through the window. The Pinkerton operatives were instantly after him and probably would have brought him down again if circumstances had not intervened. I helped Holmes to his feet.

  “He didn’t get away, Mr. Holmes,” one of the agents said, standing at the window.

  We joined them. In the faint light, I saw the body of the man. A long jagged shard of glass protruded from his back, where he had fallen during his escape attempt. From his body flowed a pale ichor that was not at all like blood.

  “What does it mean?” I asked.

  “It means that our friend has as much in common with the human race as a frog,” Holmes answered. “Lovecraft was more correct than he realized when he wrote in the file that certain biological experiments have been conducted on captured humans and willing followers. Here is the proof.”

  “Sorry he got loose,” the other agent said.

  “No real matter,” Holmes replied. “I already knew what had been said. I was more interested in his reactions than his answers. At least I now know how much power this Bowen holds over those affiliated with his Starry Wisdom Sect. Believers prepared to die can be the most dangerous kind. We must be very cautious when we go against them tonight.”

  “You mean…“

  “Yes, Philips, I know where Carter Randolph will be later and what fate is intended for him.”

  “Where is he?”

  “We will go to him shortly,” Holmes said. “He is in very great danger and will need our help if he is to survive.”

  Holmes paused to write a short note, which he handed to one of the Pinkerton operatives. He murmured something to the men. They nodded and left.

  “What is going to happen?” I asked.

  He shrugged on his coat, and I did the same.

  “Do you own a gun?” he asked.

  “Several pistols.”

  “Bring two as well as ammunition,” he instructed. “We shall certainly need them.”

  I did as he asked, though my patience was growing thinner.

  “Mr. Holmes, I want to know what’s going on,” I demanded. “Carter Randolph is my cousin, and I have the right to know what has happened to him, what is going to happen.”

  “You are correct, of course,” Holmes said softly. “We will do our best to save the life of Carter Randolph, but I must warn you now that it might not be possible to do so. We will if we can, but there are greater things here than just the life of a single human being, as precious as that is.”

  “What could be more important than a human life?”

  “The lives and freedom of every person on earth,” Holmes replied, his eyes not leaving mine. “The dangerous fanatics in the Starry Wisdom Sect have tapped into invisible lines of power more potent that any form of electricity, broached dimensions beyond the three to which we are accustomed. This energy may be the same power primitive men once called magic without understanding they had accessed the natural laws of a veiled universe.”

  “How does Carter fit into all this?”

  “Your cousin is the key to their plan,” Holmes explained. “They believe that his blood – the blood of an innocent man – will open the door to other dimensions. He is their hope of summoning forth Cthulhu, the ch
ief and most terrible of these ancient creatures ignorantly called gods.”

  We drove swiftly by motorcar out of the city and toward the shore. I drove while Holmes gave me terse directions. We pulled off the road and stopped some distance from the cliffs.

  Holmes took the lead. As we neared the cliffs, Holmes guided us down a narrow trail. There was a horned moon, but it shed little light. Holmes halted me with a raised hand and motioned me to keep low. I soon saw the reason why.

  Ahead, there was a shadow on the trail. When it moved, I saw it to be a man. Holmes moved silently forward, becoming little more than a shadow himself. The muffled sound of a struggle reached my ears, then the sound of something hitting the rocks below. I peered uselessly into the blackness.

  Holmes joined me. “A guard,” he said. “of the same hybrid branch of humanity as our friend back at the house.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “Yes.” He appeared almost embarrassed. “The chap succumbed to a Japanese wrestling trick.”

  We continued down the trail. At the water’s edge, Holmes stepped into the ebbing surf. I followed as we waded through the water, around a jutting promontory.

  Keeping to the rocks and shadows, we made our way along the base of the cliffs, going up on the shore. Before us was a horseshoe-shaped area bounded on three sides by cliffs and by the Atlantic on the fourth. Out on the sand were figures, and a faint chanting in an unknown tongue floated on the night. In the midst of the fifty leaping, dancing, gibbering revelers was an altar and on that altar was a human figure.

  I started forward.

  Holmes touched my arm. “We must wait for the proper moment. If we attack them now, they will overwhelm us and everything will be lost.”

  I nodded, but it took all my willpower to hold myself back, to keep me from running out to save the cousin I loved.

  A tall dark man now stood by the altar. The others grew silent before him. At the man’s feet crouched two black panthers, and they licked the man’s hands. He raised his voice, chanting in an unknown language. The words were picked up and intoned by fifty guttural, semi-human voices. He raised his arms and his tone, his chanting becoming more fevered. The air, the ground, the sea all seemed to be throbbing in time with their voices, as if the world itself was taking up the chant, calling to something beyond the limits of this world.

  I grabbed Holmes’ arm and pointed out to sea. The sky was beginning to break up, as if ready to splinter into a million shards like a broken window. It was all I could do to keep from screaming out in terror. Something from…from Outside was trying to break into this world. At the same time, something monstrously hideous was rising from the benighted waters of the Atlantic. It was as if all the screaming nightmares of humanity had gathered into one mountain of heaving scaly flesh.

  Until this moment, I had been able to bolster my emotions with a kind of disbelief. Despite all that I had seen and heard there was in the back of my mind a large nugget of skepticism with which I could batter back the reality of unreality, pretend that none of this could really be happening, if only because it was impossible. With the sky ready to shatter into dimensional shards and a nightmare from beyond time rising from the deeps, that nugget of reason burst asunder and I felt myself overwhelmed by monstrous truths that no mind could be expected to bear and still remain sane. Unreasoning terror shot through me and I felt as if I were on the brink of tumbling into a vast and endless black gulf.

  “We must act now, we have no other choice,” Holmes said calmly. “Pray all is in readiness.”

  The unruffled banality of Holmes’ voice pulled me back from that brink. In his voice was neither belief nor disbelief, merely a cool and steady resolve.

  I withdrew my revolver.

  The dark man was raising a knife above the struggling sacrifice. Holmes and I both aimed at him as the screaming chants reached a fevered pitch, as the creature offshore began to take form, as the dark man started to bring the knife down.

  We fired.

  I was not sure, but I thought both our shots struck the dark man. He staggered back and dropped the knife.

  Instantly the half-human revelers turned toward our hiding place. They charged us. I fired a few times, but my full attention was not directed towards them. Instead, I looked to the sea.

  How shall I describe what I saw? To say that the creature from the sea was part octopus, part man, part bat, part shark, and part something else which is not of this world would not do justice to the hideousness of the thing. Was this Cthulhu? If so, what was trying to break in from Outside?

  Above the thing risen from the sea, the night sky was laced by lines of force radiating from a single point. The sky itself seemed to bulge.

  My revolver was empty, and I dropped my ammunition as I fumbled in the darkness. The worshippers were almost upon us.

  Shots rang through the air, the inhuman revelers cringed and some fell before us. They were being fired upon from the tops of the cliffs.

  “The Pinkertons!” Holmes shouted joyously above the din. “And the Arkham police.”

  Holmes handed me shells which I loaded into my revolver. The worshippers of the ancient gods had taken flight, but still we fired, especially when we saw them shed their clothes and leap into the roiling surf like sleek seals.

  Holmes shouted a command to the men above and moved forwards; I followed. The dark man who called himself Enoch Bowen was back on his feet, knife in hand, desperate lurching toward my cousin.

  The bullet I fired without thought or aim found its way into the diseased brain of Enoch Bowen. He fell lifeless to the sand. Holmes killed the panthers as they leaped at us to avenge the death of their master.

  Away from shore, the monstrosity from the sea began to subside, returning to whatever dark lair from which it had been summoned; the sky began to mend.

  I untied my cousin, who was weak but alive.

  Finally I joined Holmes as he stared at the body of Enoch Bowen, I had to exercise great control to keep from retching. Where there had been a man (or something that had resembled one) there was now a pool of shimmering goo, body parts and facial features barely recognizable.

  “There never was a man named Enoch Bowen,” Holmes said quietly. “Only this creature, to whom all the fellahs of Egypt bowed, and the animals licked his hands.”

  I cast a confused look at him.

  “Something written by Lovecraft,” he explained.

  I looked to the sea, but the dark waters were undisturbed.

  “Whether they are really gods or children of another world,” Holmes said. “It’s over. At least for the moment.”

  “What happens now?” I asked.

  “We continue with our lives,” Holmes said. “And you help your cousin continue his, as best he can.”

  “And what of the ancient gods?”

  “There will always be those who yearn from gods to serve.”

  The Pinkertons and the police joined us then, and we helped my cousin from that place.

  Though two years have passed since that dread night. I still see the ancient gods in my dreams. I know that beliefs never really dim in the minds of men, just as I know of late that I am once again being followed. I have started carrying a gun again.

  My cousin Carter Randolph never quite recovered from the events of that night on the beach, nor from whatever horrors he experienced during his captivity. He never speaks of it, and I do not press him. He has halted his investigations and does not correspond with Lovecraft any longer. He also no longer reads pulp magazines.

  That which motivated me to set down my experiences and thoughts was the reported disappearance of Sherlock Holmes. While finishing this narrative, however, I finally received a letter from Holmes, dated two days before he was reported missing from his villa by his housekeeper, Mrs. Hudson. The letter reads:

  My dear Philips,

  By the time you receive this letter you will have heard I have disappeared. In the two years that have elapsed since our adventure, I hav
e not been idle. My investigations have led me to believe humanity is not helpless in this struggle against those that men would term gods. I, who once spurned most science as irrelevant to life, have turned to scientists for help. I have received assistance from Einstein, Curie, Schrödinger and especially Tesla, as well as others who do not wish to be known as soldiers in the battle. There are ways of bridging the gulfs. Do not be alarmed that I have seemed to disappear; I, as well as my companions, am entering those other realms of being. It may be that we shall never return, but who can say? I am told that time itself passes differently there, so I may one day return to my beloved England. Or I may die, being as mortal as the ‘gods’. Considering what we endured together, I thought you deserved to know. Be on your guard, Philips, for there will always be those who yearn for gods. Convey this knowledge to Lovecraft, but spare your cousin, who has suffered enough, and believe me to be, my brave companion, to be

  Very sincerely yours,

  Sherlock Holmes

  I pray Holmes will succeed and one day return to a world very much in need of him. If there is any man in this world who stands a chance of defeating those to whom planets are but motes of dust, it is the wisest and most valiant man I have ever known – Sherlock Holmes.

  London’s Whitechapel area looms large in criminology and fiction, and for the same reason—it was where history’s first real serial killer plied his trade, setting the scene for an urban legend and providing fodder for mystery writers to create the myth that the serial killer is either the smartest guy in the room—he isn’t—or in league with dark forces. The Ripper was not as prolific as those who came later, but it’s hard to top being first. And he is enhanced by having become an iconic figure: Ellery Queen set Holmes against him, Robert Block brought him into the present (and future), and scores of mostly well-meaning writers identified him as everyone from a Russian fishmonger to a member of the Royal Family. Jack the Ripper was not the only game in town in 1888 (readers are directed to the excellent 1888: London Murders in the Year of the Ripper by Peter Stubley), nor was he the last horror to haunt Whitechapel. Hard on Jack’s heels came a rash of disappearances which have never been explained. In this story, Holmes has the assistance of Sherrington, scholar, occultist and young clubman about town, as well as Brigadier General (ret) James Wellington Knight, whose appearance in any tale always seems to guarantee strange adventures ahead.