Sherlock Holmes (3 page)

Yet when Carnaki spoke of the abomination of
abominations, of the terrible amorphous shuggoths and the Watcher
Of the Gate, Holmes nodded, as one does who hears familiar names.
The shocking rites engaged in by the covens of ancient believers,
whether American Indians or decayed cults to be found in the
fastnesses of Greenland or Thibet, did not surprise him, and it was
he, not our host, who spoke of the insane legend of the shapeless
god who plays the pipe in the dark heart of chaos, and who sends
forth the dreams that drive men mad.

“I did not know that you made a study of such
absurdities, Holmes,” I said, when we stood once more on the
fog-shrouded Embankment, listening for the approaching clip of a
cab-horse's hooves. “I would hardly have said theosophy was your
line.”

“My line is anything that will – or has –
provided a motive for men's crimes, Watson.” He lifted his hand and
whistled for the Jehu, an eerie sound in the muffled stillness. His
face in the glare of the gaslight seemed pale and set. “Whether a
man bows down to God or Mammon or to Cthulhu in his dark house at
R'lyeh is no affair of mine… Until he sheds one drop of blood not
his own in his deity's name. Then God have mercy upon him, for I
shall not.”

All of these events took place on Monday, the
20th of August. The following day Holmes was engaged with turning
over the pages of his scrapbooks of clippings regarding unsolved
crimes, seeming, it appeared to me, to concentrate on
disappearances during the later part of the summer in years back
almost to the beginning of the century. On Wednesday Mrs. Hudson
sent up the familiar elegantly restrained calling-card of the
American folklorist, the man himself following hard upon her heels
and almost thrusting her out of the way as he entered our
parlor.

“Well, Holmes, it's all settled and done
with,” he declared, in a loud voice very unlike his own. “Thank you
for your patience with old Delapore's damned rodomontade, but I've
seen the old man myself – he came down to town yesterday, damn his
impudence – and made him see reason.”

“Have you?” asked Holmes politely, gesturing
to the chair in which he had first sat.

Colby waved him impatiently away. “Simplest
thing in nature, really. Feed a cur and he'll shut up barking. And
here's for you.” And he drew from his pocket a small leather bag
which he tossed carelessly onto the table. It struck with the
heavy, metallic ring of golden coin. “Thank you again.”

“And I thank you.” Holmes bowed, but he
watched Colby's face as he spoke, and I could see his own face had
turned very pale. “Surely you are too generous.”

“S'blood, man, what's a few guineas to me? I
can tear up little Judi's poor letter, now we're to be wed all
right and tight…” He winked lewdly at Holmes, and held out his
hand. “And her old Dad's damned impudent note as well, if you
would.”

Holmes looked around him vaguely, and picked
up various of his scrapbooks from the table to look beneath them:
“Didn't you tuck it behind the clock?” I asked.

“Did I?” Holmes went immediately to the
mantle – cluttered as always with newspapers, books, and unanswered
correspondence – and after a brief search shook his head. “I shall
find it, never fear,” he said, his brow furrowing. “And return it,
if you would be so kind as to give me your direction once
more.”

Colby hesitated, then snatched the nearest
piece of paper from the table – a bill from Holmes' tailor, I
believe it was – and scribbled an address upon it. “I'm off to
Watchgate this afternoon,” he said. “This will find me.”

“Thank you,” said Holmes, and I noticed that
he neither touched the paper, nor came within arms' reach of the
man who stood before him. “I shall have it in the post before
nightfall. I can't think what can have become of it. It has been a
pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr. Colby. My felicitations on
the happy outcome of your suit.”

When Colby was gone Holmes stood for a time
beside the table, looking after him a little blankly, his hands
knotted into fists where they rested among the scrap-books. He
whispered, “Damn him,” as if he had forgotten my presence in the
room. “My God, I had not believed it…”

Then, turning sharply, he went to the
mantlepiece and immediately withdrew from behind the clock the note
which Carstairs Delapore had sent to Colby. This he tucked into an
envelope and sealed. As he copied the direction he asked in a
stiff, expressionless tone, “What did you make of our guest,
Watson?”

“That success has made him bumptuous,” I
replied, for I had liked Colby less in his elevated and energized
mood than I had when he was merely unthinking about his own and
other peoples' money. “Holmes, what is it? What's wrong?”

“Did you happen to notice which hand he wrote
out his direction with?”

I thought for a moment, picturing the man
scribbling, then said, “His left.”

“Yet when he wrote the address of the Hotel
Excelsior the day before yesterday,” said Holmes, “he did so with
his right hand.”

“So he did.” I came to his side and picked up
the tailor's bill, and compared the writing on it with that of the
Excelsior address, which lay on the table among the scrapbooks and
clippings. “That would account for the hand being so very
different.”

Holmes said, “Indeed.” But he spoke looking
out the window into Baker Street, and the harsh glare of the
morning sunlight gave his eyes a steely cast, faraway and cold, as
if he saw from a distance some terrible event taking place. “I am
going to Shropshire, Watson,” he said after a moment. “I'm leaving
tonight, on the last train; I should be back…”

“Then you find Viscount Gaius' sudden
capitulation as sinister as I do,” I said.

He looked at me with blank surprise, as if
that construction of young Colby's information had been the
farthest thing from his mind. Then he laughed, a single sharp
mirthless breath, and said, “Yes. Yes, I find it … sinister.”

“Do you think young Colby is walking into
some peril, returning to Depewatch Priory?”

“I think my client is in peril, yes,” said
Holmes quietly. “And if I cannot save him, then the least that I
can do is avenge.”

*

Holmes at first refused to hear of me
accompanying him to the borders of Wales, sending instead a note to
Carnaki with instructions to be ready to depart by the eight
o'clock train. But when Billy the messenger-boy returned with the
information that Carnaki was from home and would not return until
the following day, he assented, sending a second communication to
the young antiquarian requesting that he meet us in the village of
High Clum, a few miles from Watchgate, the following day.

It puzzled me that Holmes should have chosen
the late train, if he feared for Colby's life should the young man
return to fetch his fiancée from the hands of the two monomaniacs
at Depewatch Priory. Still more did it puzzle me that, upon our
arrival at midnight in the market town of High Clum, Holmes took
rooms for us at the Cross of Gold, as if he were deliberately
putting distance between us and the man he spoke of – when he could
be induced to speak at all – as if he were already dead.

In the morning, instead of attempting to
communicate with Colby, Holmes hired a pony trap and a boy to drive
us to the wooded ridge that divided High Clum from the vale in
which the village of Watchgate stood. “Queer folk there,” the lad
said, as the sturdy cob leaned into its collars on the slope. “It's
only a matter of four mile, but it's like as if they lived in
another land. You never do hear of one of their lads come courtin'
in Clum, and the folk there's so odd now none of ours'n will go
there. They come for the market, oncet a week. Sometimes you'll see
Mr. Carstairs drive to town, all bent and withered up like a tree
hit by lightnin', starin' about him with those pale eyes: yellow
hazel, like all the Delapore; rotten apples my mum calls 'em. And
old Gaius with him sometimes, treatin' him like as if he was a dog,
the way he treats everyone.”

The boy drew his horse to a halt, and pointed
out across the valley with his whip: “That'll be the Priory,
sir.”

After all that had been spoken of monstrous
survivals and ancient cults, I had half-expected to see some
blackened Gothic pile thrusting flamboyant spires above the level
of the trees. But in fact, as Carnaki had read in William Punt's
book, Depewatch Priory appeared, from across the valley, to be
simply a 'goodly manor of gray stone,' its walls rather overgrown
with ivy and several windows broken and boarded shut. I frowned,
remembering the casual way in which Colby had thrown his sack of
guineas onto Holmes' table: Feed a cur and he'll shut up
barking…

Yet old Gaius had originally turned down
Colby's offer to help him bring the Priory back into proper
repair.

Behind the low roof-line of the original
house I could see what had to be the Roman tower Carnaki had spoken
of – beyond doubt the original “watch” of both priory and village
names. It had clearly been kept in intermittent repair up until the
early part of this century, an astonishing survival. Beneath it, I
recalled, Carnaki had said the sub-crypt lay: the center of that
decadent cult that dated to pre-Roman times. I found myself
wondering if old Gaius descended the stairs to sleep on the ancient
altar, as the notorious Lord Rupert Grimsley had been said to
sleep, and if so, what dreams had come to him there.

After London's stuffy heat the thick-wooded
foothills were deliciously cool. The breezes brought the scent of
water from the heights, and the sharp nip of rain. Perhaps this
contrast was what brought upon me what happened later that day, and
that horrible night - -I know not. For surely, after I returned to
the Cross of Gold, I must have come down ill, and lain delirious.
There is no other explanation – I pray there is no other
explanation - -for the ghastly dreams, worse than any delirium I
experienced while sick with fever in India, that dragged me through
abysses of horror while I slept and have for years shadowed not
only my sleep, but upon occasion my waking as well.

I remember that Holmes took the trap to the
station to meet Carnaki. I remember, too, sitting by the window of
our pleasant sitting-room, cleaning my pistol, for I feared that,
if Holmes had in fact found some proof that the evil Viscount had
kidnapped beggar-children for some ancient and unspeakable rite,
there might be trouble when we confronted the old autocrat with it.
I certainly felt no preliminary shiver, no premonitory dizziness of
fever, when I rose to answer the knock at the parlor door.

The man who stood framed there could be no
one but Carstairs Delapore. “Withered all up like a tree hit by
lightnin'“, the stable-lad had said: had his back been straight he
still would not have been as tall as I, and he looked up at me
sideways, twisting his head upon a skinny neck like a bird's.

His eyes were a light hazel, almost golden,
as the boy had said.

They are my last memory of the waking world
that afternoon.

*

I dreamed of lying in darkness. I ached all
over, my neck and spine pinched and stiff, and from somewhere near
me I heard a thin, harsh sobbing, like an old man in terror or
pain. I called out: “Who is it? What is wrong?” and my voice
sounded hoarse in my own ears, like the rusty caw of a crow, as
alien as my body felt when I tried to move.

“My God,” sobbed the old man's voice, “my
God, the pit of six thousand stairs! It is Lammas-tide, the night
of sacrifice – dear God, dear God save me!
Iä
!
Shub-Niggurath! It waits for us, waits for us, the Goat With Ten
Thousand Young!”

I crawled across an uneven floor, wet and
slimy, and the smells around me were the scents of deep earth,
dripping rock, and far off the terrible foetors of still worse
things: corruption, charred flesh, and the sickeningly familiar
scent of incense. My hands touched my companion in this darkness
and he pulled away: “No, never! Fiends, that you used poor Judith
as bait, to bring me to you! The Hooded Thing in the darkness
taught you how, as it taught others before you – showed you the
passages in the
Book of Eibon
– told you how to take the
bodies of others, how to leave their minds trapped in your old and
dying body … the body that you then sacrificed to them! A new body,
a strong body, a man's body, healthy and fit…”

“Hush,” I whispered, “hush, you are raving!
Who are you, where is this?” Again I touched his hands, and felt
the stick-like bones and flaccid, silky flesh of a very old man. At
the same moment those frail hands fumbled at my face, my shoulders
in the dark, and he cried out:

“Get away from me! You weren't good enough
for him, twisted and crippled and weak! And your daughter only a
woman, without the power of a man! It was all a trap, wasn't it? A
trap to lure me, thinking it was
she
who sent for me to set
her free…” His thin voice rose to a shriek and he thrust me from
him with feeble hysteria. “And now you will send me down to the
pit, down to the pit of the shuggoths!” As his sobs changed to
thin, giggling laughter I heard a stirring, far away in the
darkness; a soughing, as if of the movement of things infinitely
huge, and soft.

I staggered to my feet, my legs responding
queerly; I reeled and limped like a drunken man. I followed the
wall in darkness, feeling it to be in places ancient stones set
without mortar, and in others the naked rock of the hill itself.
There was a door, dessicated wood strapped with iron that grated,
rusty and harsh, under my hands. I stumbled back into the darkness,
and struck against something – a stone table, pitted with ancient
carvings – and beside it found the only means of egress, a square
opening in the floor, in which a flight of worn, shallow steps led
downwards.