The Cthulhu Casebooks--Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic Monstrosities Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also Available from James Lovegrove and Titan Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Preface

  Foreword

  Part One

  Chapter One: Living Targets

  Chapter Two: The Anonymous Inmate

  Chapter Three: The Stories and Real Life

  Chapter Four: A Catch from the Trawl

  Chapter Five: The Dead Menagerie

  Chapter Six: Arbiters Upon the Unspeakable

  Chapter Seven: Back to Bedlam

  Chapter Eight: The Impossible Rather than the Improbable

  Chapter Nine: Most Irregular Irregulars

  Chapter Ten: The Near-Dead Detective

  Chapter Eleven: The Looking-Glass World

  Chapter Twelve: The Book and the Compass

  Chapter Thirteen: To the Farmhouse

  Chapter Fourteen: Attack of the Nightgaunt

  Chapter Fifteen: The Nangchen Lamasery Liquor of Supremacy

  Chapter Sixteen: A Banquet of Terror

  Chapter Seventeen: Bearding the Lion in His Den

  Chapter Eighteen: Flight to Far Cathuria

  Chapter Nineteen: The Thing in the Cage

  Part Two

  Chapter Twenty: An Undergraduate in Arkham

  Chapter Twenty-One: The Omnireticulum

  Chapter Twenty-Two: The Innsmouth Belle

  Chapter Twenty-Three: The R’luhlloig Peccadillo

  Chapter Twenty-Four: Fort Fredericks

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Black Water, Red Leech

  Chapter Twenty-Six: The Mi-Go Expedition

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Forbidden Places

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: A Realm of Twilight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Thing in the Pit

  Chapter Thirty: Night of the Shoggoth

  Chapter Thirty-One: Uncharted Waters

  Chapter Thirty-Two: “You Cunnin’ Fellas Went An’ Made Yerselves a Monster”

  Chapter Thirty-Three: A Foretaste of Damnation

  Chapter Thirty-Four: What Motivates a Monster

  Chapter Thirty-Five: The Terrible Arrogance of Gods

  Chapter Thirty-Six: A Betrayer Betrayed

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: A Well-Woven Web

  Chapter Thirty-Eight: A Terrible Tug-of-War

  Epilogue

  THE CTHULHU CASEBOOKS

  SHERLOCK HOLMES

  and the Miskatonic Monstrosities

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM

  JAMES LOVEGROVE AND TITAN BOOKS

  THE CTHULHU CASEBOOKS

  Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows

  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

  The Devil’s Dust (June 2018)

  Sherlock Holmes and the Christmas Demon (November 2019)

  JAMES LOVEGROVE

  TITAN BOOKS

  The Cthulhu Casebooks: Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic Monstrosities

  Hardback edition ISBN: 9781783295951

  Paperback edition ISBN: 9781785652929

  Electronic edition ISBN: 9781783295968

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark St, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: November 2017

  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 © 2017 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.

  PREFACE

  BY JAMES LOVEGROVE

  HERE IS THE SECOND OF THE THREE MANUSCRIPTS I inherited recently in a somewhat roundabout way from a distant relative, the late Henry Prothero Lovecraft of Providence, Rhode Island. As with the first, it was written by Dr John Watson, a man known to millions across the globe as the chronicler of the exploits of his great friend, that pre-eminent Victorian Sherlock Holmes; and like the previous book, published under the title Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows, this one recounts an adventure of the world’s first consulting detective which in tone and content is largely at odds with the canon of four novels and fifty-six short stories hitherto published.

  As Watson himself said in his foreword to The Shadwell Shadows, that book and its sequels “lay bare all that [Holmes] really did, all that he really achieved over the course of his life. They make up, for better or worse, an alternate history of his career, one that has the benefit of being unimpeachably true.”

  Now, some may query that last statement. These three books deal, after all, with subject matter that seems far removed from everyday reality and contradict the ethos of rationalism and empiricism that Holmes customarily brought to his investigations. He was always dismissive of the supernatural. In “The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire”, for example, he is on record as refusing even to consider the idea that a mother is feasting on the blood of her infant. The thought that vampires might exist provokes nothing but derision from him: “Rubbish, Watson, rubbish! What have we to do with walking corpses who can only be held in the grave by stakes driven through their hearts? It’s pure lunacy.”

  Yet The Shadwell Shadows shows him developing a belief in, and then confronting, just the sort of paranormal phenomena to which he gives such short shrift in the quotation above. Similarly this book, The Miskatonic Monstrosities, and the last of the three, The Sussex Sea-Devils, depict a Holmes – and a Watson – aware of the fact that ancient entities of godlike power and hostile intent lurk at the fringes of our world and striving to mitigate the harm and havoc these beings can wreak on human lives.

  The trilogy ventures into territory marked out by the famed master of uncanny literature, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, with whom Watson corresponded a great deal in his declining years. Lovecraft and several contemporaries – principally Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, August Derleth, Robert Bloch, Frank Belknap Long, Henry Kuttner and Fritz Leiber – between them codified the nature and lore of what is nowadays called the Cthulhu Mythos. Watson, who by his own admission read some of their output in American pulp magazines such as Weird Tales during the 1920s, seems to have alighted eagerly on their shared preoccupation and found it intriguing and familiar.

  This would be because, by then, Sherlock Holmes had spent a lifetime secretly combating various manifestations of the Great Old Ones and the Outer Gods, with loyal Watson constantly at his side. That is the story that these three books, collectively known as The Cthulhu Casebooks, tell.

  There are those who might argue that the evidence points in the opposite direction. Such people would contend that Watson became infected by “Cthulhu fever” and decided, for some reason or other, to reinvent the history of Holmes’s career to incorporate Lovecraftian elements of cosmic horror. Since he wrote the three books very late in life, it has even been suggested that they are the
product of a man succumbing to the delusions and confusion of old age; that as Watson’s body was deteriorating, so was his mind. Senile dementia left him prey to fantasies which his younger, fitter self would have had no difficulty rejecting.

  I would refute this assertion simply by saying that the writing in the trilogy is as sharp and focused as any he produced, and if anything more honest and impassioned. If Watson was losing his marbles, there’s no sign of it in the novels’ execution.

  I would also refute accusations made by various people – in online forums, in reviews of The Shadwell Shadows – that the author of The Cthulhu Casebooks isn’t Watson at all, but me. As evidence I would point them no further than this very book. For one thing, its structure mimics closely that of two of the canonical Sherlock Holmes novels, A Study in Scarlet and The Valley of Fear. It is divided into two parts. The first involves Holmes directly; the second, containing a subsidiary narrative nested within the primary narrative, details past events which illuminate the case he investigates. From a purely forensic point of view, this would surely indicate authenticity. The format is as individual as a fingerprint.

  Then there’s the narrative-within-a-narrative itself, which with its high-flown reportage style bears a strong resemblance to the writing of Lovecraft. If this book is my handiwork, then I would be pastiching not just one author but two. Only a very bold person, or a very foolhardy one, would attempt that. Anyone who knows me will be able to tell you that I’m neither of those things.

  In my preface to The Shadwell Shadows I tentatively advanced the possibility that Henry Prothero Lovecraft was the trilogy’s true author, and thus the perpetrator of a hoax. In my considered view, though, there is no question that these books are genuinely the work of Watson. It’s an older, wiser, more sombre Watson than readers are perhaps used to, who has gone through more than his fair share of hellish situations and stared too deeply into the abyss, but still the same redoubtable, earnest figure we know from the canon, the sidekick who endured so much ridicule from Holmes because he knew what a privilege it was to be that man’s one and only real friend.

  J. M. H. L., EASTBOURNE

  November 2017

  FOREWORD

  BY DR JOHN WATSON, MD

  “I HAVE NEVER KNOWN MY FRIEND TO BE IN BETTER FORM, both mental and physical, than in the year 1895.”

  I may have written thus about Sherlock Holmes in the first line of the story known as “The Adventure of Black Peter”, but it could not have been more false. In fact, the very opposite was true. I never knew him to be in worse form than in that year.

  The tale shows him as being at the pinnacle of his career as a consulting detective, with illustrious clients fairly hammering down the door at 221B Baker Street in their eagerness to engage his services. During the opening paragraphs I indulged in a little judicious name-dropping, an aristocrat here, a pontiff there. In others of my published accounts of his exploits in ’95 I had Holmes unmask a Central American despot who was in hiding in London, engineer the arrest of a foreign spy determined to acquire top-secret plans for a submarine, and fathom the identity of the bearded cyclist who followed Miss Violet Smith on her journey from Chiltern Grange to Farnham railway station every Saturday morning.

  All of this served to give the impression that the man was flourishing professionally, that his health was good, his bank balance sound, his public status at its zenith, his zest for life inexhaustible.

  Would that it had been so.

  Holmes, in truth, was in very poor shape. It was fifteen years since he and I had stumbled upon a new world – a world of profane cosmic entities, hidden races, black magic and ancient evils – a world in which rationality, the rule of law and the comforts of Christianity had no place. From that time on we dedicated ourselves to combating the forces of darkness wherever they manifested, defeating them when we could, corralling them when we couldn’t. We had come to the aid of people caught up in conspiracies so inexplicable that no policeman might resolve them, or even any priest. We had banished horrors, vanquished monsters, and rescued more than one bedevilled innocent from the clutches of madness.

  Most of these incidents were so blood-curdlingly horrific I can hardly bear to recollect them now. Moreover, I could not have made them a matter of public record, not without revealing too much of the sinister reality that lies beneath the placid surface of what we call civilisation. Yet neither could I not write about them in some form or other, if only so as to rid my mind of a portion of their encumbrance. Thus, commencing in 1886, I set about putting down on paper the adventures in which Holmes and I participated; but I recast them in such a way that they would appear entirely credible to any who read them and would carry not the merest whiff of the supernatural.

  My initial efforts, the novels A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four, received a decent enough critical reception, although they were poorly served by their publisher Ward Lock & Co., as was I. The first of the twain drew upon autobiographical elements – my service in Afghanistan, my first meeting with Sherlock Holmes – but re-envisioned them to seem more mundane than they genuinely were. The majority of the book was all my own invention.

  The second novel likewise incorporated aspects of my own history, principally the happy confluence of fate that brought me and Mary Morstan together and led to her becoming, for all too brief a span, my beloved wife. Much of the narrative cleaves to events as they happened, but I downplayed certain of the less easily palatable aspects. One-legged Jonathan Small, for instance, was no mere ex-soldier with a grudge but a man who had become a student of the mystical arts during his time in India, learning at the feet of swamis and sadhus. Accordingly, his accomplice-in-crime was not a diminutive Andaman islander called Tonga but a loathsome homunculus whom Small kept contained in a spirit jar and was able to conjure up in corporeal form when required. Furthermore, the debilitating illness from which Major Sholto suffered was not malaria but rather the leprosy-like effects of a curse laid upon him by Small. As for the Agra treasure, I shudder whenever I recall what was contained in that iron box with the Buddha hasp. If only it had been something as beautiful and inert as jewels.

  As the years went by, I continued to turn Holmes’s and my adventures into fiction. Largely I confined myself to short stories, but there were two further novels, The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Valley of Fear. All of these literary endeavours George Newnes was good enough to publish in his magazine The Strand, the novels in serialised form. Newnes compensated me appropriately, too, unlike Messrs Ward and Lock. The stories became a huge success and furnished me with a considerable extra income to add to my earnings as a general practitioner. This was necessary, since Holmes himself made very little money from his labours and I supported him financially throughout his entire career.

  The stories which proved so popular and are well-known by so many, are almost all of them neat and pleasing disguises for hard-to-stomach truths. What would my readers think, I wonder, if they learned what really lay in the cardboard box which the spinster Miss Susan Cushing brought to us? Would they believe that the eerie, expressionless yellow face seen peering from an upstairs window by Mr Grant Munro was not a mask worn by a young half-Negro girl but another, more sinister kind of mask; a pallid, featureless one that hid the sense-shattering face of a creature born to Munro’s wife following a highly ill-advised liaison with something not of this earth? Would they wish to know about the beast patrolling the grounds of Copper Beeches, which was no mere mastiff, and the thing behind the barred door in that same country house, which was not Alice Rucastle?

  I suppose I could have presented these episodes to the world uncensored, in all their phantasmagorical glory, and billed them as works of uncanny fiction, in the manner of Poe. That, however, would have been to their detriment, as well as Holmes’s. His analytical powers deserved to be celebrated in their purest form, I felt, and the best way to do that was to strip away anything that might distract from them. Only in a context of realism would his geni
us be seen to its best advantage. My portrait of him would be all the more striking if encompassed by a plain frame rather than some ornately carved one with an ormolu patina.

  It was an aesthetic decision, but it proved to be justified both commercially and in terms of Holmes’s reputation. I was in many senses the making of him. I helped create the image of Sherlock Holmes that grabbed the public’s attention and endures to this day.

  Yet how different things were some thirty-three years ago, when on a bright summer’s afternoon Holmes and I received an invitation from Inspector Gregson that was to lead us once more into the grim, chilling domain to which we had perforce become so accustomed…

  J. H. W., PADDINGTON

  1928

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  Living Targets

  IT WAS EARLY ONE MORNING IN THE SPRING OF 1895, and Sherlock Holmes and I were, as usual, running for our lives.

  When I say “as usual”, I should qualify the remark by stating that this was far from being an everyday occurrence. It was not, by the same token, uncommon. Nor do I wish it to appear that I had grown accustomed to the experience or blasé about it. I most assuredly had not.

  Running for our lives was nonetheless something our habitual forays into the supernatural demimonde often obliged us to do, and on this particular occasion the urgency entailed was perhaps greater than it had ever been.

  The venue of our desperate, headlong flight was an Underground tunnel to the west of the Aldgate terminus. As for our pursuers, they were a trio of humanoid beings who kept after us in a series of powerful leaps, propelled by hind legs so heavily muscled they put a kangaroo’s to shame. Both Holmes and I were sprinting flat out, yet the creatures matched our pace seemingly without effort. I could hear them behind us as they landed upon the track with a clatter of hooves and took off again in a single bound. I could hear their panting breaths, so much wider spaced and more measured than my rapid, stertorous own. I could sense them getting closer and closer, and knew that if they overtook us we would not stand a chance. They would tear us apart and feast upon our still-warm remains.