Sherlock Holmes and the Sussex Sea-Devils Read online

  IT IS THE AUTUMN OF 1910, AND FOR FIFTEEN LONG years Sherlock Holmes and Dr John Watson have battled R’lluhloig, the Hidden Mind that was once Professor James Moriarty. Europe is creeping inexorably towards war, and a more cosmic conflict is nearing its zenith, as in a single night all the most eminent members of the Diogenes Club die horribly, seemingly by their own hands. Holmes suspects it is the handiwork of a German spy working for R’lluhloig, but his search for vengeance costs an old friend his life.

  The companions retreat to Holmes’s farm on the Sussex Downs, and it is not long before a client comes calling. Three young women have disappeared from the nearby town of Newford, and the locals have no doubt who is responsible. For legend has it that strange amphibious creatures dwell in a city on the seabed, coming ashore every few centuries to take fresh captives. As Holmes and Watson seek out the terrifying interlopers, the scene is set for the final battle that will bring them face to face with the Sussex Sea-Devils, and perhaps with Cthulhu himself…

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also Available from James Lovegrove and Titan Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Contents

  Preface

  Foreword

  Chapter One: Things That Move in Darkness

  Chapter Two: The Brotherhood of the Pulsating Cluster

  Chapter Three: A Glaucous, Slobbering Blob

  Chapter Four: Holmes’s Own Personal Ambrosia

  Chapter Five: Tragedy on Pall Mall

  Chapter Six: Breaking the Silence

  Chapter Seven: Mycroft’s Final Steps

  Chapter Eight: What Was in the Box

  Chapter Nine: The German Connection

  Chapter Ten: The Dust of Compelling

  Chapter Eleven: The Sorrows of Young Werther

  Chapter Twelve: Mufti Men

  Chapter Thirteen: Baron Von Herling

  Chapter Fourteen: A Sibilant Interlocutor

  Chapter Fifteen: Ssswitssserland

  Chapter Sixteen: Gregson (No Longer) of the Yard

  Chapter Seventeen: That Most Tempestuous and Unyielding Force of Nature

  Chapter Eighteen: Keeping Beelzebub at Bay

  Chapter Nineteen: Sea-Devils

  Chapter Twenty: The Way of Things in Newford

  Chapter Twenty-One: Sentinels on the Shore

  Chapter Twenty-Two: The Dead Brought Back to Life

  Chapter Twenty-Three: Three Sea-Devil Suits and a Conundrum

  Chapter Twenty-Four: A Hansom of the Deeps

  Chapter Twenty-Five: SM U-19

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Duty Over Self-preservation

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: Our Last Bow?

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Excerpts from My Diary of the Voyage

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Further Excerpts from My Diary of the Voyage

  Chapter Thirty: Yet Further Excerpts from My Diary of the Voyage

  Chapter Thirty-One: R’lyeh

  Chapter Thirty-Two: Gibberers in the Dark

  Chapter Thirty-Three: The Resting Place

  Chapter Thirty-Four: The Fall of Cthulhu

  Chapter Thirty-Five: Toadies

  Chapter Thirty-Six: Phantoms in the Sky

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: Time and Sherlock Holmes

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Publisher’s Note

  Gods of War

  Chapter One: The Case of the Purloined Pearls

  THE CTHULHU CASEBOOKS

  SHERLOCK HOLMES

  and the Sussex Sea-Devils

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM

  JAMES LOVEGROVE AND TITAN BOOKS

  THE CTHULHU CASEBOOKS

  Sherlock Holmes and the Shadwell Shadows

  Sherlock Holmes and the Miskatonic Monstrosities

  THE NEW ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES

  The Stuff of Nightmares

  Gods of War

  The Thinking Engine

  The Labyrinth of Death

  The Devil’s Dust

  Sherlock Holmes and the Christmas Demon (November 2019)

  The Cthulhu Casebooks: Sherlock Holmes and the Sussex Sea-Devils

  Hardback edition ISBN: 9781783295975

  Paperback edition ISBN: 9781785652936

  Electronic edition ISBN: 9781783295982

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark St, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: November 2018

  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 © 2018 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

  SO WE COME TO THE THIRD AND FINAL VOLUME OF The Cthulhu Casebooks. Here we find Sherlock Holmes, now in his late fifties, still engaged in his secret war against hostile cosmic forces whose existence alone gives the lie to the notion that mankind is in any way a superior species and has a meaningful place in the order of things. We humans are not blessed, not special. That is the disquieting message that comes from these texts and likewise from the writings of my distant relative and near-namesake H.P. Lovecraft. We are, in the eyes of certain godlike beings, little better than cattle. Their unholy divinity proclaims that we live in a godless universe – a universe in which capital-G God isn’t the adoring super-father the Bible says, more like a deadbeat dad who wants nothing to do with his “children”.

  At any rate, some of the action of this book, The Sussex Sea-Devils, takes place in the vicinity of my hometown Eastbourne. It is well known to readers of Dr Watson’s published oeuvre that Sherlock Holmes retired to that part of Sussex in 1903 to take up the study of beekeeping, among other occupations. His rural retreat is described, in Watson’s preface to His Last Bow, as “a small farm upon the South Downs”. In “The Adventure of the Lion’s Mane” we get a little more detail, although not a lot: the house is a “villa […] commanding a great view of the Channel”. Its location is generally reckoned to be within a few miles of Eastbourne.

  My own house lies at the westernmost edge of that town, within easy walking distance of the only building in the area that matches the above description in every part – a flint-walled smallholding set back from the road leading from Beachy Head to Birling Gap. (I often pass it when out exercising my dog.) It’s a windswept, slightly austere place, and I can easily imagine the great detective tending to his beehives in the lee of the shrubbery that forms part of the property’s perimeter.

  My genealogical links with Lovecraft may be tenuous, each of us perched on wide-apart branches of the family tree. However, my geographical links with the Sussex coast, where I was born and have lived most of my life, are deep-rooted. I have chalk and grassy downland in my bones. The crunch of pebbles underfoot, the bluster of a salty breeze, the hiss of surf, cloud shadows racing across the sea, smooth green undulations of hill – these are the things I think of when I think of home. For which reason I feel a stronger than usual connection to the story told within the pages of this typescript.

  The other town
that features prominently in The Sussex Sea-Devils is Newford. It’s an odd little place that hunkers beside a shingle beach between two frowning brows of cliff, a few miles due west of Eastbourne. Newford is best defined by what it is not. It isn’t a thriving port, although fishing boats and pleasure yachts do put out from its tiny harbour. It isn’t scenic enough to be a holiday destination, despite a handful of bed-and-breakfasts and a single, forlorn-looking hotel. It has very little to offer in the way of historical significance other than a couple of concrete pillboxes and the remains of a gun emplacement dating from the Second World War, all gazing towards France with a somewhat wistful air as if pining for the glory days. Otherwise it is simply a warren of narrow streets that revolves around twin hubs, one spiritual, one secular: a medieval church with a crooked spire and a small pedestrianised shopping precinct built sometime in the 1960s where the retail units sell nothing anyone in their right mind would want to buy (but at least sell it cheap). There’s a railway station, sitting at the end of a spur on the Hastings-to-London line, but trains are a rare sight at this one-track terminus, calling in only four times a day, half as often on Sundays. Buses may stop along the high street; I don’t know.

  What Newford has is mystery. Specifically, it has rumours of strange amphibian humanoid creatures who have been visiting the spot since the Iron Age or earlier, back when – according to the archaeological record – there was nothing there except a tiny cluster of huts, barely even a settlement. The creatures, known as Sea-Devils, are said to emerge from the waves at night, usually after a fog has rolled in, and roam the streets. Their arrival is customarily presaged by eerie lights glowing in the sea some distance offshore.

  On such occasions you may, from the sanctuary of your home, hear the soft, moist flap-flap-flap of webbed feet on tarmac. If you have any sense, you will keep the door locked and the curtains drawn and not venture outside. Some local historians even claim that Sea-Devils and inhabitants of Newford have interbred in the past and that descendants of the two commingled bloodlines still live there. They have a distinctly piscine look about them, these hybrids, and seem to walk awkwardly on land, but are often skilled swimmers. For proof, one might consider the statistically high incidence of Newforders who have achieved success in aquatic athletics, amongst them an Olympic breaststroke silver medallist and two cross-Channel record holders.

  I can’t comment on any of that. I do know that the town council did attempt once to capitalise on this piece of folklore. Not far from the aforementioned shopping precinct stands a statue depicting a Sea-Devil. Erected in the seventies, it is sculpted in the Elisabeth Frink style, a thing of rough, pitted bronze with etiolated limbs and a rather sombre air. Its eyes are bulbous. Gills flare upward from its neck. Its broad mouth has drooping, pendulous lips that remind me of the actor Alastair Sim at his most lugubriously disapproving. Coincidentally – or not – many Newford townspeople I’ve seen have a similar look about them.

  The figure was intended as a tourist attraction, something to put Newford on the map. Curiosity seekers and students of the esoteric were supposed to come to the town in their droves in order to learn more. Cryptozoology – and the paranormal in general – was big in the seventies. It was hoped that Sea-Devils would become Newford’s Nessie and that Newford itself might gain the cachet of the Bermuda Triangle or Area 51. You can never underestimate the optimism of municipal councillors.

  Nothing came of it, of course. The statue is now splattered with guano and more often than not someone will have lodged an empty can of lager on its head – or, more amusingly, an empty can of the energy drink Monster. It’s become a running gag. Seldom does the statue go uncrowned.

  Having read The Sussex Sea-Devils (and edited it for publication), I feel I now know a little bit more about Newford and its putative amphibious guests. I also know a little bit more about Sherlock Holmes’s later years and consequently feel greater awe for his accomplishments than ever before, as well as greater compassion for the man himself. If everything Watson says in this book is to be believed, then the great detective fought valiantly to keep the world from harm and paid a steep price for it. Over a century on, we owe him far more than we realise.

  J.M.H.L., EASTBOURNE

  November 2018

  FOREWORD BY

  DR JOHN WATSON, M.D.

  IN MY PUBLISHED WORKS I HAVE GIVEN THE impression that Sherlock Holmes’s retirement in Sussex was for the most part an easeful and contented one. I sketched a portrait of a man enjoying a rural idyll interrupted now and then by the call of duty. The beekeeping, the monographs, the smallholding overlooking the sea; what could be more desirable for a city gent whose hurly-burly is done and whose battles, if I may continue my paraphrasing of Shakespeare, have been lost but largely won?

  It was not really so. For Holmes, as for me, the battles were still very much being fought. To all intents and purposes my friend did give up his practice as a consulting detective in 1903. By then he had successfully resolved a few non-supernatural cases for certain very high-born clients who were so unstinting in their generosity that he was left independently wealthy. No longer did he need to pursue the tawdry, mundane enquiries that furnished a dribble of income or to rely on contributions out of my pocket. He was, in a sense, free.

  Prior to this newfound liberty Holmes had numerous interactions with R’luhlloig, the god formerly known as Professor James Moriarty. R’luhlloig had declared war on Holmes in 1895, as I have related in the previous volume of this trilogy, The Miskatonic Monstrosities. In the eight years following, the two of them skirmished often, the so-called Hidden Mind having taken it upon himself to badger and beleaguer my friend persistently.

  Some of these clashes I have chronicled amongst my fictionalised accounts of Holmes’s exploits, in disguised form. Readers familiar with “The Adventure of the Creeping Man”, for instance, cannot possibly suspect that the awful transformation undergone by Professor Presbury, the famous Camford physiologist, was induced by exposure to spores from a fungus hitherto unknown to botanical science and believed to come from space, the properties of which caused him to regress to the state of one of our primitive ancestors. Nor is it common knowledge that Godfrey Emsworth, the blanched soldier from the story of that title, was suffering from a curse inflicted upon him by a tribal wizard in South Africa, which resulted in his succumbing to a gradual necrosis of the body, a kind of living death. As for the lion that allegedly mauled Mrs Ronder, wife of the celebrated circus showman, suffice it to say that the beast was, in truth, no lion.

  The presence of R’luhlloig lay behind the three above-cited examples and behind many another, like some deep organising power. Able to insinuate his consciousness into that of any susceptible person and influence his host’s behaviour, R’luhlloig would set up a teasing conundrum liable to be brought to Holmes’s professional attention, whereupon he would spring a trap, in the hope of snaring and killing his prey. Several times he almost succeeded. The caveman-like savagery of Presbury, the traumatised psychosis of Emsworth, and a leonine monster that can only be called a were-cat – all placed Holmes and me in direct mortal danger. Happily we were able to outwit our lurking foe’s machinations each time, but not without cost. I have more than a few ugly scars upon my body which bear testimony to that.

  By 1903, however, the frequency of such cases had tailed off, prompting Holmes to feel that he could move out of London, away from the hub of things. He did not abandon altogether his investigations into crimes that had a basis in the occult and the eldritch; it was just that fewer of them came to his notice. He and I concomitantly saw less of each other. I remained in Marylebone, enjoying my practice and the less hectic pace of life which distance from Holmes brought. For both of us it was a respite. Neither of us, however, believed it to be a cessation of hostilities. That, indeed, was a common topic of conversation whenever I went down to Sussex to visit him. “One knows the difference between a pause and a halt, Watson,” said Holmes, “and this is surely the former.
We are in the trough between two waves, and the next wave, I fear, may be the biggest and most powerful we have yet faced.”

  Herein I recount the breaking of that wave: Holmes’s final, fateful and I will say fatal encounter with R’luhlloig, which occurred in the autumn of 1910.

  By that time the seeds of the recent global conflict had already been sown, ready to burst forth four years later and bear terrible, bloody fruit. The great European imperial powers had already come to the brink of war in 1906, over Morocco. The aftermath of that crisis led to a strengthening of alliances on two sides, with Russia joining the entente cordiale that existed between England and France, and Germany, feeling ever more isolated and belligerent, forming a tripartite coalition of its own with Austria-Hungary and Italy. Opposing positions were becoming ever more firmly entrenched thanks to a succession of diplomatic rows and political moves seemingly designed for no other purpose than to antagonise, such as Austria-Hungary’s annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908.

  A fevered atmosphere, fraught with hostility and mistrust, gripped our nation, as it no doubt gripped our neighbours. People could not help feeling a sense of ineluctable doom, like an anchor dragging at their hearts. The march to war seemed inexorable. It was a question not of if but when.

  Few could have had any inkling that another war, one of hellish, cosmic proportions, was already underway.

  J.H.W., PADDINGTON

  1928

  CHAPTER ONE

  Things That Move in Darkness

  UPON ARRIVING AT SHERLOCK HOLMES’S FARM IT did not take me long to ascertain that nobody was home. The sun was setting and the air was growing chilly, but no light shone in any window, nor did I glimpse the flicker of a welcoming hearth fire as I strode up the front path. Above all, the house had that markedly desolate air that a building exudes when it is uninhabited, like a body from which life has fled. It came as little surprise when my knock at the door went unanswered.