The Cthulhu Casebooks Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by James Lovegrove

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface by James Lovegrove

  Foreword by Dr John Watson, MD

  Chapter One: A Study in Scar Tissue

  Chapter Two: A Private Clarence

  Chapter Three: To 221B

  Chapter Four: The Four Deaths

  Chapter Five: Gregson of the Yard

  Chapter Six: A Horribly Familiar Language

  Chapter Seven: A Moveable Feast

  Chapter Eight: The Lair of the Dragon

  Chapter Nine: The Trespasser in the Night

  Chapter Ten: The Box Hill Barrows

  Chapter Eleven: The Dream-Quest of Sherlock Holmes

  Chapter Twelve: The Lost City of Ta’aa

  Chapter Thirteen: Speaking of the Devil

  Chapter Fourteen: Not Prey but Guests

  Chapter Fifteen: An Anonymous Admonition

  Chapter Sixteen: Students of the Unusual

  Chapter Seventeen: Sequestered Volumes

  Chapter Eighteen: Moriarty

  Chapter Nineteen: A Little Mesmeric Legerdemain

  Chapter Twenty: Unhappy Christmas

  Chapter Twenty-One: A Caller and a Telegram

  Chapter Twenty-Two: The Queerest Club in Christendom

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Forearmed Mice

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Magic Bullets

  Chapter Twenty-Five: The Triophidian Crown

  Chapter Twenty-Six: The Onyx Obelisk

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: An Issue of Quality not Quantity

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Crawling Chaos Comes!

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: A Serpentine Lynch Mob

  Chapter Thirty: Rectifying a Desecration

  Epilogue

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM

  JAMES LOVEGROVE AND TITAN BOOKS

  THE CTHULHU CASEBOOKS

  Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic Monstrosities (November 2017)

  Sherlock Holmes and the Sussex Sea-Devils (November 2018)

  THE NEW ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

  The Stuff of Nightmares

  Gods of War

  The Thinking Engine

  The Labyrinth of Death (June 2017)

  The Devil’s Dust (June 2018)

  The Cthulhu Casebooks: Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows

  Hardback edition ISBN: 9781783295937

  Paperback edition ISBN: 9781785652912

  Electronic edition ISBN: 9781783295944

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark St, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: November 2016

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by James Lovegrove. All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  This book and its sequels are dedicated to Miranda Jewess, who not only instigated them but edited the hell out of them – or should that be into them?

  PREFACE

  BY JAMES LOVEGROVE

  IN THE SPRING OF 2014 I RECEIVED AN EMAIL OUT of the blue. It was from a firm of lawyers based in Providence, Rhode Island. At first I thought it was spam and nearly deleted it. As I scrolled through, however, I realised the email was bona fide, and I read on with curiosity and a growing bemusement.

  The sender was Mason K. Jacobs III, a senior partner at Laughlin Jacobs Travers LLP. The subject heading was “A Legacy”, which was why I’d been suspicious about the email, thinking it might be one of those scams where some Nigerian princeling wants to use your bank account to stash several million dollars temporarily, with you getting a percentage cut for your trouble (and in no way will your account details be stolen).

  The text began as follows:

  Dear Mr Lovegrove,

  You are likely unaware of the recent passing, at the age of 82, of Mr Henry Prothero Lovecraft. This individual was a lifelong resident of Providence and a longstanding if not regular client of Laughlin, Jacobs, Travers. Unmarried and without issue, he succumbed to heart failure in the fall of last year, leaving behind an estate worth in the region of $75,000.

  As part of our due diligence in probate we have been chasing down relatives who might be in line to inherit part or all of his legacy. Mr Lovecraft was a solitary man and died intestate. He lived in a modest condominium in Smith Hill, which as you may or may not know is one of our city’s less favored areas. The bulk of his estate accrues from the sale of his apartment, said property amounting to a $95,000 capital value. After taxes, various other duties and our fees have been deducted, we arrive at the residual $75,000 figure mentioned above.

  By this point my heart had started to race. I was beginning to infer that I was in line for a cash windfall equivalent to roughly £50,000 sterling. The email certainly seemed to be heading in that direction. Ker-ching!

  My hopes of a new car and a reduced mortgage, and perhaps a Caribbean holiday, were dashed by the next paragraph.

  We have managed to track down a grand-niece of Mr Lovecraft’s in Kennebunkport, Maine. To her – a Ms Rhonda Lachaise – goes the legacy, and to her it has been accordingly disbursed.

  Curse Mason K. Jacobs III and his lawyerly punctiliousness. He’d never intended to mislead me. He’d just set out the facts of the matter in order, failing to appreciate that the reader – me – might imagine his preamble was heading in one direction when it was actually heading in another. He inadvertently led me up the garden path, only to slam the front door in my face.

  Nonetheless, there were certain items among Mr Lovecraft’s effects to which Ms Lachaise wished no claim. He was, it seems, an inveterate hoarder of books, papers, exotic paraphernalia, and sundry pieces of statuary and handicraft whose purpose appears to be religious but whose provenance is hard to determine and, frankly, baffling.

  These have been disposed of, on the grounds that they have no obvious useful function and in some instances constitute a public hygiene hazard. The books and papers were of little value, according to representatives of both the public library and the John Hay Library at Brown University, while the majority of the objects – figurines, effigies, fetishes and such – were fashioned from organic materials such as hide and hair and were rather moth-eaten and sordid. I would not be surprised if Mr Lovecraft had made them himself. They had a kind of homespun crudity about them.

  One particular item stood out, however, and seemed worthy of preservation. It is about this that I am contacting you.

  During our researches we ascertained that you, Mr Lovegrove, are a distant relative of the late Mr Lovecraft. The connection is attenuated, dating back some three hundred years, but real enough.

  Furthermore, a junior partner in our firm is an avid consumer of genre fiction and is familiar with your work. It was he who suggested you were the appropriate candidate to receive the item in question.

  The artifact, the nature of which you are no doubt eager for me to divulge, is a book manuscript. To be precise, three typed manuscripts which together tell a single tale. They are of some antiquity, perhaps a centur
y old, and at a cursory glance purport to have been written by none other than Dr John Watson, a literary figure with whose oeuvre you have a more than nodding acquaintance, to judge by your own recent published output. They were discovered at the back of a closet in Mr Lovecraft’s bedroom, inside a rusty strongbox.

  Now my heart was racing again, but this time with a mixture of excitement and incredulity.

  To cut a long story short, we believe these manuscripts to be nothing more than forgeries, at best some kind of pastiche. They center around Sherlock Holmes, naturally enough, given the purported author. The adventures they narrate, though, are like none to which aficionados of the character are accustomed. In point of fact, with their emphasis on strange and uncanny events they seem utterly antithetical to the spirit of rationalism which to my (admittedly limited) knowledge typifies the Holmes canon.

  You, Mr Lovegrove, deserve to take possession of the manuscripts, by virtue of your familial association with Henry Lovecraft. You are also the best person, we feel, to adjudge their quality and authenticity, by virtue of your professional experience in the fields of fantastical fiction and, if I may use the term, “Holmesiana.”

  I am therefore dispatching them to you by international courier and they should arrive within the next two weeks. If by any chance you are able to make something of them, and perhaps even deem them publishable in some guise or other, we would of course be more than happy to represent you in whatever legal or executive capacity we are able.

  Yours sincerely,

  Mason K. Jacobs III

  I spent the rest of that day visiting genealogy websites, frantically trying to establish how Henry Lovecraft and I were related. At the back of my mind lay the thought that this Lovecraft must be a descendant of the noted author Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937) whose horror fiction has been so seminal and enduring. There was the coincidence, or not, of the two men’s identical initials. Of more relevance was the location, Providence, which was the birthplace and, for most of his life, home of the more celebrated Lovecraft.

  I soon discovered that the three of us were indeed linked by bloodline. It turns out that our ancestral roots lie with Bavarian nobility, the Von Luftgraf family. The word Luftgraf translates loosely from the German as “high count”. The Von Luftgrafs owned a large swathe of Upper Franconia, up until the 1760s when they experienced some sort of financial calamity and lost their estates and castles. As far as I could work out, one scion of the dynasty became involved with a cult of demon-raising black-magic practitioners, went mad, and essentially bequeathed his fellow acolytes all his worldly wealth, thereafter living out his final days in an insane asylum, the proverbial gibbering wreck.

  To escape the shame and penury caused by this incident and seek a fresh start, the remaining handful of Von Luftgrafs emigrated in two directions, some north to Great Britain, others west to the United States. Both groups shortened and anglicised their surname on arrival in their new homelands, the British contingent adopting the spelling Lovegrove, the American contingent Lovecraft. Henry Prothero Lovecraft belonged to a different branch of the family tree that spawned Howard Phillips Lovecraft, the trunk of which was from those first mid-eighteenth-century arrivals in New England. All the same, he seems to have shared his relative’s keen fascination with the occult and the arcane.

  What this meant was that I was, in fact, a cousin about a hundred times removed from H.P. Lovecraft himself, whose stories I had devoured in my teens. That was fairly thrilling to learn, I can tell you. Lovecraft’s facility for evoking the eldritch and for imparting a sense of creeping dread is unparalleled, but also anchored by a cool, cerebral reportage/memoir/diary technique and by fleeting winks of black comedy. His less wholesome personal attributes – principally his racism, a disgust for non-Anglo-Saxon cultures often expressed in his journalism and private correspondence – were unknown to me when I first discovered his work. Awareness of them blights it now to some extent, as does the occasional imprecision and over-baked ungainliness of his writing style, the latter more noticeable to me in middle age when I am an author myself and, I like to think, conscious of what does and doesn’t constitute decent prose.

  All the same, the H.P. Lovecraft. He and I had an affinity that was more than the simple fact that both of us eked a living from our pens. This was the man who explored and codified that amalgamation of ancient elder gods, forbidden knowledge, hostile supernatural forces and cosmic indifference which has come to be known as the Cthulhu Mythos – and he was family. We shared DNA. I even became aware of a vague physical resemblance between us, especially around the eyes.

  The manuscripts arrived at my house a fortnight later, and I unsealed the package straight away and got to reading. The paper was yellowed and brittle, the text faint in places yet still perfectly legible.

  The contents were, to put it mildly, remarkable.

  I’m not going to say much further. The books should speak for themselves. I’ve had the paper checked by an expert, who tells me that the watermark and the high rag content denote that it is exactly the sort of bonded foolscap which someone in the 1920s might have used. Another expert confirms that the typewriter employed is an Imperial Model 50, judging by the font, the width of the carriage and the strike depth of the characters. That particular make was popular in Britain between the wars, which is when Watson, according to his foreword, wrote the books. In other words, on the face of it the manuscripts seem to be the real deal.

  At the same time, I can’t help wondering if they’re a monstrous hoax (and I use the adjective advisedly). Reams of the right paper and a typewriter of suitable vintage are readily purchaseable. I’ve checked on eBay. For a few hundred quid, they could be yours. That and a bit of skill with literary mimicry is all you’d need to make the deception look credible.

  I’ve spent a year or so, on and off, studying the manuscripts, rereading them, evaluating their worth, trying my very best to decide whether or not they genuinely are the work of the esteemed Dr Watson and do, in his own words, present “an alternate history of the career of Sherlock Holmes”.

  A part of me, for my own sanity, hopes that they don’t; hopes that someone else, not Watson, perhaps Henry Prothero Lovecraft himself, is their creator, and they are just some abstruse metafictional joke, something designed to fascinate and bamboozle the world, that’s all.

  Because otherwise, almost everything we know about the great detective – his life, his work, his methods, his accomplishments – has all been a big fat lie, a façade concocted to mask a deeper, darker, more horrible truth.

  I’m submitting the three manuscripts in published form under the umbrella title Cthulhu Casebooks. The individual volumes bear the titles Dr Watson gave them – Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows, Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic Monstrosities and Sherlock Holmes and the Sussex Sea-Devils – and the central events in each take place at fifteen-year intervals, in 1880, 1895 and 1910 respectively. All I’ve done to the original texts after scanning them into my computer is correct a few solecisms and grammatical errors, resolve the continuity glitches for which the author is famous (some might say notorious), and weave in a sentence or two of explanation here and there to shore up an otherwise obscure reference.

  I leave it to you, the reader, to make up your own mind about the books. You can decide if they effectively rewrite the Holmes canon, skewing it through the distorting prism of the Lovecraftian one, or if they are just the fevered outpourings of some reclusive, semi-anonymous scribbler exploiting the popularity of not one but two iconic figures of our times.

  Call it crossover. Call it mash-up. Call it cash-in.

  Or call it a revelation.

  It’s up to you.

  J.M.H.L., EASTBOURNE, UK

  November 2016

  FOREWORD

  BY DR JOHN WATSON, MD

  I AM AN OLD MAN. A TIRED, FRIGHTENED OLD MAN. I have lived a long time, done much, seen much. Now my eyesight is fading, my body is gnarled and weak, and I fee
l my life ebbing with each passing day. I am a trained medical practitioner. I know senescence when I see it, and the mirror habitually shows it me in all its greying, decaying glory, ever more blurred, ever more saddening.

  That is when I can bear to look in the mirror at all. For the reflections in mirrors do not reveal only remorseless corporeal collapse. They also, potentially, expose things hiding in corners, things lurking at the periphery of one’s vision, things that, once glimpsed, start to titter or whisper or else sometimes simply sit silent, watching.

  I have written at length about the best and the wisest man whom I have ever known, a man I was proud to call friend and by whom I was proud to be called friend. I refer, of course, to Mr Sherlock Holmes, and to the dozens of narratives, all well received, in which I have recounted his adventures. I have expatiated on his deductive powers, his ratiocination, his peerless ability to penetrate to the truth of a matter, uncover malfeasance and bring wrongdoers to justice. His analytical methods, by my auspices, are known worldwide and have indeed been adopted and emulated by representatives of several international police forces. I flatter myself that in bringing his exploits to the attention of the masses, I have contributed significantly to the science of detection and improved the lot of law-abiding citizens everywhere, and by extension vitiated the efforts of the less law-abiding.

  I can now, in the twilight of my life, confess that I have not told the whole story. Far from it. I have in fact told one sort of story in order to deflect attention from another, which strays into realms most ordinary people are incognisant of and are all the better off in their ignorance. I have constructed a shell of artifice around a dark, rotten kernel so as to protect civilisation from certain facts that would throw its cosy self-assurance into drastic and lasting disarray.

  The time has come to unburden myself of secrets I have kept long after Sherlock Holmes died. At his express request I have buried the truth, but its grave has been unquiet and disturbances from it have since troubled me in the night. I would not go to my own grave without just this once, at last, exhuming the undecaying corpse and exposing it to scrutiny.