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

  It was bad enough being aware of the penalty for failure to escape the beasts’ ravening clutches. Worse still was the fact that we were actively inciting them to chase us, for in my jacket pocket, as in Holmes’s, lay a slip of paper upon which was inscribed a summoning sigil. This drew the monsters like a beacon, and were I to have discarded mine, there is every probability they would have left me alone; Holmes likewise. The sigils made us living targets. Bearing these irresistible attractants upon our persons was nothing short of suicidal.

  Onward we ran, the beams of our dark-lanterns bobbing frantically before us, affording fleeting glimpses of rail, sleeper and the moist, rugged brickwork of the tunnel wall. I was flagging. We had been racing full tilt for the best part of a mile and I was not sure I could keep going at this demanding pace much longer. My heart was hammering; my lungs burned. A minute at most, I thought, remained before exhaustion overwhelmed me and I had to stop.

  “How— how much further?” I gasped.

  “Nearly there,” replied Holmes. He sounded less winded than I was but only marginally so. “Around the next bend we should— yes!”

  The tunnel opened out ahead and dimly I glimpsed the edge of one of the platforms at Aldgate. There lay our ultimate destination. Once we reached the station, we might just have a hope of survival.

  I darted a glance over my shoulder, only to see a noseless face and a pair of deep-set, pallid eyes looming directly behind me. The owner of these unprepossessing features was within arm’s length. One sweep of its taloned paw could have felled me, sending me sprawling to the track, never to rise again.

  I tapped into reserves of energy hitherto undreamt of. I put on a turn of speed that would have done champion mile-runner Fred Bacon proud.

  Within seconds I had arrived at the station, Holmes hot on my heels.

  “This is it, Watson!” my companion cried. “Exactly as we rehearsed, remember!”

  The station was dark and deserted, for it was not yet five o’clock. Metropolitan trains would not begin service for at least another hour. Holmes and I scrambled up onto the platforms on either side of the dual tracks. The three creatures pursuing us appeared at the tunnel’s mouth and, as one, came to a halt. Something made them pause. Some instinct, perhaps, was telling them that to proceed might be unwise.

  I groped for a length of rope, which dangled from the roof. Holmes did the same.

  “On my mark,” said he. “Wait for it. Wait for it.”

  One of the creatures loped forth from the tunnel, just a step or so. It, like its two brethren, was the size of a small horse and sheathed in the knotty, rugose hide akin to that of a rhinoceros. Its questing eyes were without irises, moon-like beneath an all but non-existent brow. It turned its empty gaze upon me, then upon Holmes. Indecision was writ large in its bearing.

  “Come on,” Holmes urged. “Come on, you hideous beauty. You and your confederates must oblige us by venturing all the way out into the open, else our efforts will have been for naught.” He snatched the summoning sigil from his pocket and waved it. “Here is the charm that has so entranced you. Come and get it.”

  The monster fixed its attention upon the weird, curlicued symbol, a pattern delineated in ink that was partly composed of human blood – Holmes’s own, to be precise. Though lacking anything that resembled nostrils, the creature seemed to be scenting the air, in the manner of a hunting beagle. All at once it leapt from the track onto the platform, as lightly and easily as a grasshopper. The other two instantly followed suit.

  “Watson!”

  I did not need to be told twice. This was it, the moment for which we had painstakingly planned. We had spent all night setting up the trap. Now we sprang it.

  By dint of tugging on the ropes, Holmes and I released the various bolts of heavy black cloth that we had tacked over the station’s skylights. One after another they fell away, each pulling down the neighbour to which it was attached. The material – the same cotton drapery fabric used for stage backdrops – tumbled to the floor, and the gleam of dawn filtered in through the skylight glass.

  As it radiated downward, the grey illumination bathed the three creatures. They, in unison, raised their heads, opened their mouths and screamed.

  It was as far from a human sound as can be imagined, that ululation. It was screeching and mournful, a hoarse, high-pitched threnody of suffering, and I could scarcely bear to listen to it. All three creatures shrank before the nascent daylight, pinned in place by their helpless agonies, howling. I watched them collapse one by one, and I continued to watch while their bodies twisted and warped elastically, wracked by terrible fatal spasms.

  It took five minutes, all told, for the monsters to die. Their demise was not merciful, but then the creatures themselves had shown little mercy to their victims. If nothing else, there was a primitive, retributory justice at work here.

  * * *

  So perished a triumvirate of ghasts, anthropophagous abominations who had been lurking in the deeper strata of London’s underground railway system for several months. Their presence had been drawn to Holmes’s attention and mine thanks to the death of a man called Cadogan West, a clerk at the Woolwich Arsenal. His body had been discovered lying upon the tracks not far from this spot, horribly mauled and mutilated. His fiancée, Miss Violet Westbury, had come to our rooms at 221B Baker Street, begging that Holmes investigate the matter. It was assumed by the police that West must have fallen from a Metropolitan line train while passing between carriages and been dragged beneath its wheels. Miss Westbury had reason to suspect otherwise.

  Upon examining the body in the morgue, Holmes found the torn remnants of a sigil in West’s pocket, an eldritch totem that would have acted as catnip to the ghasts. He was able to deduce, too, from an indentation in the skull, that West had been killed before the ghasts got to him, the recipient of a savage blow to the head. His corpse had then been hurled from the window of a house overlooking a stretch of line near Gloucester Road Station where the tracks temporarily go above ground. It had landed on the roof of a passing train, and had later slipped off, dislodged when the train passed over points at the junction just outside Aldgate.

  Inspector Gregson, at Holmes’s instigation, arrested the culprit. His name was Captain Valentine Walter and he was the brother of West’s superior at the Arsenal, Sir James Walter. Valentine Walter was a scurrilous old rogue known for the seduction of young women who took his fancy. Often he would resort to occult methods for gaining their compliance, plying them with wine that was laced with an aphrodisiac philtre whose recipe may be found amid the scraps of ancient, forbidden lore known as the Pnakotic Fragments or, more commonly, the Pnakotic Manuscripts. Then he would have his wicked way with the hapless female at his flat in Caulfield Gardens, Kensington, the backs of which terrace overlook the railway. Afterwards the victim would leave with nothing but a hazy, confused recollection of the offence committed against her and an erroneous belief that she had been a willing participant.

  Walter had developed a liking for Miss Westbury, which he pursued with an ardour that only intensified the more it was robustly repudiated. The final straw for the lady was when he began to make veiled threats against both her and Cadogan West, implying that the two of them might suffer dire consequences if she did not oblige him. She was too scared to tell her husband-to-be what had transpired, for she feared he might confront Walter. A contretemps between him and his employer’s brother might well jeopardise his future prospects.

  Frustrated, Valentine Walter elected to remove what he thought was the only obstacle standing between him and Miss Westbury’s capitulation, namely Cadogan West. He was aware that ghasts had taken up residence in the Underground; the creatures had, it transpired, been responsible for the mysterious disappearances of several Metropolitan Railway employees in recent weeks. Walter thought that by summoning them to West’s defenestrated body with the sigil they would consume it whole and thus dispose of the evidence. He had, however, overestimated their numbers, or thei
r appetite, or both. The three ate their fill but inconveniently left enough of the corpse behind that it could be identified.

  Holmes had devised a scheme for eliminating the ghasts, for whom direct natural light was as lethal as cyanide gas. It necessitated him and me making bait of ourselves in order to lure the creatures to the Aldgate terminus, whereupon the rays of the rising sun, freed from the obscuring black cloth, would do the rest.

  Now, as the echoes of the ghasts’ death throes drifted amongst the station’s rafters, my friend and I regarded each other across the tracks. I slumped to a seated posture, elbows upon knees, while Holmes leaned against a pillar. If my face looked anything like his, then it was smudged with soot and streaked with perspiration, framing eyes that stared white and wild and were more than a little bloodshot.

  “Well,” said Holmes eventually, “now that the danger is past, I must go and alert Inspector Gregson, who is waiting outside. Do you mind remaining here? I shall not be long, and someone needs to placate any railway staff who may happen along.”

  I blearily waved a hand. “I doubt I have anything to fear from a trio of cadavers. Go.”

  In the eerie quiet that fell after Holmes’s departure, I began musing upon how I might transform this escapade into a fictional adventure. Inspired by the nature of West’s employment, I wondered what if there were some top-secret blueprints involved? Something military, vital to our nation’s security – patented plans for a new kind of submarine, perhaps – and an enemy spy eager to get his grubby hands on them?

  A story, a bowdlerisation of the truth, purged of all otherworldly elements and thus made suitable for public consumption, began to take shape in my mind. It was the kind of tale I could easily see gracing the pages of The Strand and, in the States, Collier’s Weekly. I would probably omit any mention of Inspector Gregson, substituting Lestrade in his place. Gregson was the man we invariably turned to when dealing with matters supernatural, for he was almost as well versed in them as we were, but his more literal-minded colleague seemed a better fit with the prosaic yarn I was spinning. Neither of them would mind. Lestrade enjoyed taking credit for work he had not done, whereas Gregson, being of a more self-effacing bent, preferred to shun the limelight.

  The exercise was pointless, in any case, since I would not be publishing further chronicles of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. My literary career had gone on hiatus and I had no idea when, or indeed if, it would ever be resuscitated.

  Holmes presently returned, accompanied by Gregson. The Scotland Yard official brought with him two constables who he said could be counted on both for their discretion and their strong constitutions. One of them gave the lie to the latter part of the assertion when, upon seeing the ghasts, he was immediately overcome by nausea, with the inevitable rebarbative consequences.

  “What in heaven’s name are those things?” the fellow declared, wiping his mouth.

  “Circus freaks, escaped from their cages,” Gregson said with brisk authority. “Now sharpen up and set to work, lads. You know what you have to do.”

  The constable got a grip on himself and, if still somewhat whey-faced, joined his colleague in removing the ghasts. They bundled the creatures up in lengths of the black cloth and lugged the corpses out to a waiting Black Maria.

  “The Thames will dispose of the evidence,” Gregson said. “Tide’s on the turn. My men will toss the bodies into the river. The current will carry them out to sea.” He cast a speculative eye over Holmes and me. “You both look like you could do with several good nights’ sleep. Jolly time, was it?”

  “Delightful,” I said.

  “And how did you catch the monsters?”

  Holmes explained.

  “Ah,” said Gregson. “Doctor, did you not employ a similar method with that marauding phantom hound on Dartmoor a few years back? You each carried some sort of amulet, is that right?”

  I nodded. “An amulet bearing the soul-symbol of a corpse-eating cult of Leng. The hound was drawn inexorably to it, and we in turn led the hound towards a Portal of Banishment we had set up in the Great Grimpen Mire.”

  “But the creature got away from you.”

  “Alas it did, and Holmes and I were lucky to escape with our lives.”

  I can never forget the awful baying of that spectral hound as it pursued us across the moor. Nor can I forget stumbling on a tussock of grass and falling head over heels, and the hound, glowing like the moon, rearing up to pounce on me. Its claws, although intangible, had the power to scoop away a portion of a man’s soul with a single swipe, and its fangs could rob a man of his senses; I would even now be a gibbering, half-sane wreck, were it not for Holmes’s quick-wittedness. He came to my rescue by interposing himself between me and the beast, brandishing a medallion made of greenish soapstone with an Elder Sign etched into it. Repelled by the protective glyph, the hound veered away, retreating into the mist until it was just an incandescent dog-shaped outline, a canine will-o’-the-wisp, flickering then gone.

  “It was a close shave,” Holmes said. “The creature continues to haunt the moor to this day, a hazard to anyone unfortunate or unwary enough to stray into its path, but it will be some five years before an appropriate alignment of stars recurs to make a Portal of Banishment viable again in that region of the country. I cannot say I look forward to our second meeting.”

  “Me neither,” I said.

  “I don’t blame you,” said Gregson. “There is only so much of this sort of stuff a fellow can handle. Frankly, I have no idea how the two of you manage it, day in, day out. Helping you clean up the aftermath is bad enough. I’ve got more grey hairs than someone my age ought to, and I pin the blame firmly on my dealings with Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson.”

  “We are, alas, sharers in a terrible secret,” I said. “The three of us and Holmes’s brother. It is a heavy burden.”

  Gregson nodded with feeling. “Sometimes I fancy that everyone else is sleepwalking through their lives, and we are the only ones awake. Even Mrs Gregson does not know about any of this, though I hate to keep anything from her. Equally, because I love my wife, I prefer that she remains oblivious, for her own peace of mind. It isn’t just the monsters that infest this city and its environs; that is bad enough. It is the other things. The ‘gods’.”

  One could quite clearly hear the inverted commas with which he bracketed the word. It seemed sacrilegious to dub them gods, those terrible ancient beings that lay at the fringes of the universe and in the depths of the planet, biding their time, ever ready to arise and enslave mankind. Yet creatures so numinously powerful could scarcely be called anything else.

  The police official shuddered. “Civilisation is thin ice, is it not? With a cold darkness below. And most people skate on it all unknowing, little realising how it could give way beneath them at any moment.”

  We all three exchanged glances of sombre acknowledgement. Since the events of Christmas 1880, which I have related in The Shadwell Shadows, Holmes, Gregson and I, along with Mycroft Holmes, had forged a secret brotherhood. Together we had made a pact to keep the world safe from unholy horrors and unearthly threats, and we had stuck by it during the intervening fifteen years, albeit at a cost to each of us in his own way. Gregson, for instance, might well have advanced further up the police hierarchy, were he not repeatedly being diverted from his usual cases in order to assist Holmes in extracurricular excursions about which he could not tell his peers or superiors. He had become notorious at the Yard for the frequency with which he disappeared from his desk without explanation and, as a result, had garnered a reputation for unreliability.

  “While I’m here,” said he, “something has come to my attention which may warrant yours.”

  “Go on,” said Holmes, evincing no considerable enthusiasm. If he was as worn out as I was, then all he craved right now was a bath and bed.

  “It may be nothing,” Gregson said, “but then again it may not. I have an arrangement with an attendant at Bethlem Royal Hospital. This fellow, whom
I first encountered in a professional capacity, is under instruction to let me know if anything out of the ordinary, anything truly perplexing, comes his way.”

  “A useful contact.”

  “Indeed. And yesterday McBride – that is his name – sent a note to tell me the asylum has recently taken in a new inmate. The man was brought in a few days ago, stark naked. He had been found wandering somewhere in the region of Purfleet, dazed and disorientated, shortly after sunrise, by a farmhand on his way to work. He was covered in scratches and bruises, and also the marks of older, more severe injuries. There was no form of identification upon him. Enquiries have been made but no one has any idea who he might be, and he himself is no help in that regard. He was catatonic to begin with, and lately he has begun to show signs of life, but according to McBride, when he speaks, what comes out is a barely comprehensible babble.”

  “So far, so unremarkable.”

  “Yes, but here’s the rub. He has scrawled things on the walls and floor of his cell, shapes or pictograms or something. McBride is of the view that they are words in a foreign alphabet, but if so, nobody can recognise which. The letters hang off horizontal bars rather in the manner of Sanskrit but, according to a half-caste Indian doctor who works there, they are most certainly not Sanskrit.”

  I glanced at Holmes, he at me.

  Gregson, seeing our looks, said, “Yes. Thought that might pique your interest. As I said, it may be nothing. Nevertheless…”

  “I am grateful to you for that, Inspector,” said Holmes, “and for your assistance this morning.”

  The policeman touched a finger to the brim of his bowler. “We do what we can, Mr Holmes. Fighting the bad fight.”