Sherlock Holmes (4 page)

Gropingly I descended, hands outstretched on
either side to feel the wet rock of the wall that sometimes
narrowed to the straitest of seams: terrified of what might lie
below me, yet I feared to be in the power of the madmen I knew to
be above. I was dizzy, panting, my mind prey to a thousand
illusions, the most terrifying of which was that of the sounds that
I seemed to hear, not above me, but below.

In time the darkness glowed with thin smears
of blue phosphor, illuminating the abyss below me. Far down I could
descry a chamber, a sort of high-roofed cave where the nitre
dripped from the walls and showed up a crumbling stone altar,
ruinously ancient and stained black with horrible corruption. There
was an obscene aberration to the entire geometry of the chamber, as
if the angles of floor and walls should not have met in the fashion
they appeared to; as if I viewed an optical illusion, a trick of
darkness and shadow. From the innermost angle of that chamber
darkness issued, like a thicker flow of night, blackness that
seemed one moment to congeal into discrete forms which the next
proved to be only inchoate stirrings. Yet there was something
there, something the fear of which kept me from moving on, from
making a sound – from breathing, even, lest the gasp of my breath
bring upon me some unimaginably nightmarish fate.

My fellow captive's high, hysterical giggling
on the stair above me drove me into a niche in the wet rock. He was
coming down – and he was not alone. Pressed into the narrow
darkness I only heard the sounds of bodies passing on the stair. A
moment later others followed them, while I crouched, praying to all
the gods ever worshipped by fearful man to be spared the notice of
anything that walked that eldritch abyss. At the same moment sounds
rose from below, a rhythmless wailing or chittering that
nevertheless seemed to hold the form of music, underlain by a thick
lapping or surging sound, as if of thick, unspeakably vile liquid
rising among stones.

Looking around the sheltering coign of rock,
I saw by the growing purplish hell-glare below me the tall figure
of Burnwell Colby, standing beside the altar, an unfleshed skull
held upraised in his hands. Darkness ringed him, but it seemed
almost as if the skull itself gave light, a pulsing and horrible
radiation that showed me – almost – the shapes of which the utter
blackness was comprised. I bit my hand to keep from crying out, and
wondered that the pain of it did not wake me; an old man lay on the
altar, and by his sobbing giggles I knew him to be he who had been
shut into the stone crypt above with me. Colby's deep voice rang
out above the strident piping: “
Ygnaiih
…
ygnaiih
…
thflthkh'ngha
…”

And the things in the darkness – horrible
half-seen suggestions of squamous, eyeless heads, of tentacles
glistening and of small round mouths opening and closing with an
appalling glint of teeth – answered with a thick and greedy
wail.

“
H'ehye
n'grkdl'lh
,
h'ehye
… in the name of Yog-Sothoth I call, I command…”

Something – I know not what nor do I dare to
think – raised itself behind the altar, something shapeless that
glowed and yet seemed to swallow all light, hooded in utter
darkness. The old man on the altar began to scream, a high thin
steady shriek of absolute terror, and Colby shouted, “I command you
… I command …!” Then it seemed to me that he gasped, and swallowed,
as if his breath stopped within his lungs, before he held up the
skull again and cried, “
Ngrkdl'lh
y'bthnk
,
Shub-Niggurath! In the name of the Goat With Ten Thousand Young I
command!”

Then the darkness swallowed the altar, and
where a moment before I could see the old man writhing there I
could see only churning darkness, while a hideous foetor of blood
and death rolled up from the pit, nearly making me faint. “Before
the Five Hundred,” cried Colby … then he staggered suddenly, nearly
dropping the skull he held. “Before the Five Hundred…”

He gasped, as if struggling to speak. The
thing upon the altar lifted its hooded head, and in the sudden
silence the dreadful lapping sound of the deeper darkness seemed to
fill the unholy place, and the far-off answering echo of the
now-silenced pipes.

Then with a cry Colby fell to his knees, the
skull slipping from his hands. He choked, grasping for it, and from
the darkness of the stair behind him another form darted forward,
small and slim, and stooped to snatch up the talisman skull of the
terrible ancestor who had ruled this place.

“
Ygnaiih
,
ygnaiih
Yog-Sothoth!”
cried a woman's voice, high and powerful, filling the hideous
chamber, and the darkness that had surged forward toward her seemed
for a moment to close in as it had closed around the old man on the
altar, then to fall back. By the queer, actinic luminosity of the
skull I could see the woman's face, and recognized her as Judith
Delapore, niece and granddaughter of the madmen who ruled
Depewatch. Yet how different from the sweet countenance painted on
Colby's miniature! Like the ivory mask of a goddess, cold and lined
with concentration, she bent her eyes on the heaving swirl of
nightmare that surrounded her, not even glancing at her lover, who
lay gasping, twisting in convulsions at her feet. In a high, hard
voice she repeated the dreadful words of the incantations, and
neither flinched nor wavered as the dreadful things that flittered
and crawled and bounced in the darkness.

Only when the hideous rite was ended, and the
unspeakable congregation had trickled away through the blasphemous
angle of the inner walls, did the young woman lower the skull she
held. She stood in her black gown, outlined in the gleam of the
nitre on the walls, staring into the abyss from which those
dreadful unhuman things had come, barely seeming to notice me as I
stumbled and staggered down the last of the stairs.

Of the old man's body that had lain upon the
altar nothing whatsoever remained. A thick layer of slime covered
the stone and ran down onto the floor, which was perhaps half an
inch deep in a brownish liquid that glistened in the feeble blue
gleam of the nitre. Having seen Burnwell Colby engulfed by that
wriggling darkness I staggered to where he had lain with some
confused idea of helping him, but as I dropped to my knees I saw
that only a lumpy mass of half-dissolved flesh and bones remained.
The bones themselves had the appearance of being charred, almost
melted. I looked up in horror at the woman with the skull and her
eyes met mine, clear golden hazel, like other eyes I could not
quite recall. Her eyes widened and filled with anger and hate:

“You,” she whispered. “So you did not take
him after all?”

I only shook my head, her words making no
sense to me in my shaken state, and she went on, “As you have seen,
Uncle, it is I, now, and not Grandfather –Grandfather who has not
existed for over fifty years – who rules now here.” And to my
horror she held out her hand toward that hideously anomalous angle
of the walls where the darkness lay waiting. “
Y'bfnk
–
ng'haiie
…”

I cried out. At the same instant light blazed
up on the stairway that led to the upper and innocent realms of the
ignorant world: blue-white incandescence, like lightning, and the
crackle of ozone filled the reeking air.

“My dear Miss Delapore,” said Holmes, “if you
will pardon my interruption, I fear you are laboring under a
misapprehension.” He came down the last of the stair, bearing in
one hand a metal rod, from which a flickering corona of electricity
seemed to sparkle, flowing back to a similar rod held up by
Carnaki, who followed him down the stair. Carnaki wore a sort of
pack or rucksack upon his back, of the kind one sees porters in
Constantinople carrying; a dozen wires joined it to the rod in his
hand, and lightnings leaped from that rod to Holmes', seeming to
surround the two men in a deadly nimbus of light. The cold glare
blanched all color from his face, so that his eyebrows stood out
nearly black, like a man who has received a mortal blow and bleeds
within.

Looking down at me he asked, as if we shared
a cup of tea at Baker Street, “What was your wife's favorite
flower?”

Miss Delapore, startled, opened her mouth to
speak, but I cried in a convulsion of grief: “How can you ask that,
Holmes? How can you speak of my Mary in this place, after what we
have seen? Her life was all goodness, all joy, and it was for
nothing
, do you understand? If this – this blasphemy –this
monstrous abyss underlies all of our world, how can any good, any
joy exist in safety? It is a mockery – love, care, tenderness … it
means nothing, and we are all fools for believing in any of
it…”

“Watson!” thundered Holmes, and again Miss
Delapore turned her eyes to him in astonishment.

“Watson?” she whispered.

His gaze held mine, and he asked again: “What
was Mrs. Watson's favorite flower?”

“Lily of the valley,” I said, and buried my
face in my hands. Even as I did so I saw – such was the horror and
strangeness of my dream – that they were the hands of an elderly
man, thin and twisted with arthritis, and the wedding-band that I
had never ceased to wear with my Mary's death was gone. “But none
of it matters now, nor ever will again, knowing what I now know of
the true nature of this world.”

Through my weeping I heard Carnaki say
softly, “We'll have to switch off the electrical field. I don't
think we can get him up the stairs.”

“You will be safe,” said Miss Delapore's
voice. “I command Them now – as did my grandfather, or the thing
that for so many years passed itself off as my grandfather. I knew
his goal – its goal – was to take over Branwell's body, as it had
taken over my grandfather's fifty years ago. He despised my uncle,
as he despised my father, and as he despised me as a woman,
thinking us all too weak to withstand the power raised by the Rite
of the
Book of Eibon
. Why else did he bring me home from
school, save to lure that poor American to his fate?”

“With a letter blotted with tears,” said
Holmes drily. “Even in the margins, and the blank upper portion by
the address. Hardly the places where a girl's tears would fall
while writing, but it's difficult to keep drops from spattering
there when they're dipped from a bedroom pitcher with the
fingers.”

“Had I not written that letter,” she replied,
“it would be I, not Grandfather, who was given to the Hooded One
tonight. At least by luring Branwell to me I was able to give him
poison – brown spider-mushroom, that does not take effect for many
days. Grandfather would have had him, one way or another – he does
not give up easily.”

“And was it you who sent for him, to meet
your grandfather in Brighton?”

“No. But I knew it would come. When
Grandfather – when Lord Rupert's vampire spirit – entered poor
Branwell's body, that body was already dying, though none knew it
but I. I knew Uncle Carstairs had mastered the technique too, of
crossing from body to body – I assume it is you who were his
target, and not your friend.”

“Even so,” said Holmes, and his voice was
quiet and bitterly cold. “He underestimated me – and both
underestimated you, it seems.”

And there was the smallest touch of defiance
in her voice as she replied, “Men do. Yourself included, it
seems.”

The snapping hiss of the electricity ceased.
I opened my eyes to see them kneeling around me, in the horror of
that nighted cavern: Holmes and Carnaki, holding their electrical
rods to either of my hands, and Miss Delapore looking into my eyes.
Somehow despite the darkness I could see her clearly, could see
into her golden eyes, as one can in dreams. What she said to me I
do not remember, lost as it was in the shock and cold when Carnaki
touched the switch…

*

I opened my eyes to summer morning. My head
ached; when I brought my hand up to touch it, I saw that my wrists
were bruised and chafed, as if I had been bound. “You were off your
head for much of the night,” said Holmes, sitting beside the bed.
“We feared you would do yourself an injury – indeed, you gave us
great cause for concern.”

I looked around me at the simple wall-paper
and white curtains of my bedroom at the Cross of Gold in High Clum.
I stammered, “I don't remember what happened…”

“Fever,” said Carnaki, coming into the room
with a slender young lady whom I instantly recognized from the
miniature Burnwell Colby had showed us as Miss Judith Delapore. “I
have never seen so rapid a rise of temperature in so short a time;
you must have taken quite a severe chill.”

I shook my head, wondering what it was about
Miss Delapore's haggard calm, about her golden-hazel eyes, that
filled me with such uneasy horror. “I remember nothing,” I said.
“Dreams… Your uncle came here, I believe,” I added, after Holmes
had introduced the young lady. “At least … I believe it was your
uncle…” Why was I so certain that the wizened, twisted little man
who had come to my room – whom I believed had come to my room –
yesterday had been Carstairs Delapore? I could recall nothing of
what he had said. Only his eyes…

“It was my uncle,” said Miss Delapore, and as
I looked at her again I realized that she wore mourning. “You
remember nothing of why he came here yesterday? For before he could
mention the visit to anyone at the Priory…” And here she glanced
across at Holmes; “He fell down the stairs there, and died at the
bottom.”

I expressed my horrified condolences, while
trying to suppress an inexplicable sense of deepest relief that I
somehow associated with dreams I had had while delirious. After
inclining her head in thanks, Miss Delapore turned to Holmes, and
held out to him him a box of stout red cardboard, tied up with
string. “As I promised,” she said.