Sherlock Holmes: Cthulhu Mythos Adventures (Sherlock Holmes Adventures Book 2) (15 page)

The rushing sounds suddenly returned, but louder, closer, just beyond the woodline surrounding me. The wind, nothing but the wind whipping and thrashing its way among the trees. So I told myself, but now I also heard the
thud-thud-thud
thumpings of hundreds of hooves against the loamy earth and the maniacal bleatings of an army of goat-like beings.

At the return of the sound, I had instantly leaped to the center of the clearing. I whirled around and around, determined not to show my back to whatever menace threatened me, armed with nothing but a stout walking stick and a knife proven useless to its former owner.

At that point I may have found my voice, may have shouted for Holmes’ help, but even now, years later when time has softened the facts, I cannot be sure. If I gave voice to my alarm, my efforts were puny compared to the sounds that hemmed me in. And even they seemed but mere whispers compared to the roaring, seething, flashing thing that erupted from the trees.

What was it? I have asked myself that same question many times, not as much in the first few years as later when I could think of it without quailing at the memory. It pulsed and throbbed, lacking a defined form, striking at me with appendages that sometimes were like hooves, other times like tentacles or clawed hands having too many or too few fingers. It was black like petroleum raw from the bowels of the earth, but vague colors shimmered across it. The beast had eyes that flashed malevolently and seemed to slide upon its amorphous body, and a myriad of mouths snapped at me, all filled with scissoring teeth. The knife flew into the night. I heard and felt my walking stick snap in half before it was yanked from me and flung into the darkness. A flashing limb struck me, cracking ribs and sending me flying. I hit the ground hard. The breath was driven from my lungs. The beast surged toward me.

“PH’NGLUI MGLW’NAF CTHULHU R’LYEH WGAH’NAGI FHTAGN!
” sounded though the woods, booming in a voice that was inhumanly loud even as it was strangely familiar. “
M’NAR EPH’OS H’TEP CTHULHU R’GHIAT AS’KHAN’TA!
”

The shouted words hammered through the pain, through the physical and mental shock of the attack, but the only word that held any significance was ‘Cthulhu,’ the legendary ruler of the infernal pantheon with which Holmes seemed so unaccountably familiar. I waited for a final blow that never came.

Vaguely, I saw a tall man conferring with an even taller figure in a robe the color of deep blue midnight, a garment that seemed to hold shimmering stars and swirling nebulae within its folds. On the battlefields of Afghanistan I had treated soldiers so shell-shocked and wracked with concussion that they saw visions which could not possibly exist in the real world. Now, I shared that experience with them, for the phantasms flitting about me as I phased in and out of consciousness could have nothing to do with reality, or so I prayed.

I recall mere fragments: fiery eyes, grinning black goat skulls, fang-filled maws that approached and receded, myriad hooves flailing and flashing in the darkness, oily tentacles around me, the stink of matted fur. And then oblivion. Blessed oblivion.

By slow degrees, I returned to a state of consciousness, dimly aware I still lived, that I was no longer prone on the forest floor. I was shot through with excruciating pain. At first it seemed as if I floated among the trees. The dreamlike state in which I found myself gradually lifted and I realized I was being helped along by a figure at my side.

“Holmes?” I murmured.

“Steady, old fellow,” he whispered in my ear. “You have had a hard time of it, but you’ll be fine now.”

“But the…the thing that came out of…” I tried to twist about, to look back the way we had come.

“Quiet now, Watson,” he cautioned. “We have been allowed passage out of the woods, but we dare not linger.”

I had not the strength to either resist or argue. Reluctantly, I gave myself to Holmes’ strong arm about my shoulders propelling me away from the horrors of the darkling deep woods, toward an ancient, shadow-infested village that was also one of the dark places of the Earth.

Sometime during the long journey back to Upper Orm, I let the soft sable of nothingness consume me.

I awoke between clean, crisp sheets in a small room filled with bright sunlight and cool air. At a sound, I turned my head and saw a woman in a blue and white uniform, her back to me. I must have made a sound of some sort, for she turned to me.

“Ah, ye be awake, sir” she commented in broad Hammershire tones. “Be ye lying still now, not trying lift yourself up, sir.”

I realized I was indeed trying to sit up in bed, but it was much too difficult. I lay down.

“Where am I?”

“Well, you’re in the surgery of Doctor Kindman, aren’t you?” she replied. “In Lower Orm.”

“Kindman?” I murmured. “Doctor Kindman, the Coroner?”

“Aye, Doctor be the Coroner for the area, but don’t let that fret ye none, sir,” she said. “A fine doctor he be, trained up in London he was, but no less a good man for being an outsider.”

“I’m sure he is, Nurse…”

“Nettles, sir,” she said. “Nurse Ella Nettles.”

“How long have I…”

“Begging your pardon, sir, but there be a man awaiting to see ye now that ye got your wits back,” she interrupted.

Before I could question the nursing sister further, she flashed through the door and out of the room. She returned moments later, with Sherlock Holmes in tow.

“Only a few minutes, Doctor says,” Nurse Nettles admonished. “The poor man be as weak as a bairn, so don’t be ailing him none.”

“Of course, thank you, Sister,” Holmes said, pulling a chair near to my bedside. He waited until the door closed fully, then leaned forward and said in a conspiratorial whisper: “If asked about what happened,  you were attacked by some kind of animal.”

“An animal?” I sputtered incredulously. “I may not be able to describe the horror that assaulted me, but it was no mere animal.” As I recalled my struggle, sweat broke out upon my forehead and my breath quickened. “It was the Black Goat of the Woods, the Mother of a Thousand Young…Shub-Niggurath!”

“Steady, Watson.” He grasped my arm reassuringly. “It was foolish wandering off as you did, but it convinced Lestrade of the reality of a savage animal more than did my deductions. I had already proved to his satisfaction that Dean’s clothes were bloody by absorption, not by splatter, that no weapon wielded by a man could produce the exact marks on Quint’s body, and that if Dean was guilty of anything it was nothing more than moving the body, which he did out of superstitious ignorance.” He paused and smiled. “But you being wounded in the same fashion
was
quite helpful.”

“I am glad I could be of assistance,” I grumbled. “But it was no animal, we know that.”

“Animal, god, intrusion from the ancient world—whatever you wish to call it, it is something that needs to be left alone,” Holmes said. “And if we call it an animal, it
will
be left alone.”

The truth of my experience burned within me, but I understood Holmes’ reasoning. If the thing in the woods was termed anything but a dangerous animal, if would become an attraction for the same sort of fools who constantly flock to the shores of Loch Ness, who occasionally vanish or are presumed drowned in its cold depths. Left an animal, it would be dismissed by the outside world, never become a matter of concern beyond Hammershire, where it would exist as yet another village legend in a legend-haunted county. And if it were not explained as such, the burden for Quint’s murder might again fall upon Dean’s shoulders.

I nodded. “Dean?”

“Already freed from confinement,” Holmes replied. “Lestrade has decided that PC Barnes was correct, though I am sure it caused almost physical pain for him to do so.”

“Poor Lestrade,” I murmured. “I hope no apology was asked.”

Holmes looked at me askance.

“No, that would be a step too far,” I agreed.

“Though Lestrade would rather the matter had ended with a man in the dock, he is not entirely displeased with the results,” he said. “He has been proven correct about the innocence of Dean, so PC Barnes and the county CID have not entirely escaped disgrace. Our friend Lestrade is happy to put Hammershire behind him.”

“He has returned to London?”

“After checking in on you, old boy,” Holmes said, “to ensure you were not about to shuffle off your mortal coil.”

“Very decent of him, I am sure.” I reconsidered my words, for Lestrade is a better man than I have often depicted him. “Surprising he accepted the beast story so quickly after being so adamantly against it, even given your testimony and my wounds. He seems too good a detective to be taken in easily.”

“Lestrade
is
a canny man,” Holmes admitted, “not as easily duped as you would have others believe, but he knows when to give up the chase. The Coroner’s new finding is death by misadventure, and Lestrade is wise enough to let that stand.”

“When do we return to London?” I asked. Like Lestrade I was eager to put Hammershire to my heels. Holmes once told me the lowest and vilest alleys of London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside. Until our journey to Upper Orm in Hammershire, I did not appreciate the truth of his judgment.

“Tomorrow,” Holmes replied. “Your unconsciousness has been more a reaction to mental and psychic shock, the turmoil caused by your rational mind’s contact with the irrational, like clashing waves. Now that reality has overwhelmed the other, your mind may safely return to a world with which it has made an uneasy peace.”

“You sound very much like an alienist, Holmes.”

“Our adventure in Vienna did not totally alter my views about psychotherapy,” he allowed, “but I no longer put the alienist in the same bin as I do the astrologer and palm reader.”

“I suppose Dean is happy this is all behind him,” I ventured. “I take it he is back in his sylvan solitude.”

Holmes frowned. “Ignatius Dean set out from Upper Orm after he was released, but he did not return to his cottage. No one knows where he has gone, but I have no doubt his departure from the area has already been adsorbed into the tapestry of local myth.”

“But the books that had been in his family for…” I paused, for I noted an odd, detached expression in Holmes’ eyes, as if he were looking backward in his own life. “You told him not to go back.”

Holmes nodded. “
Panta rhei
…everything flows. Just as a man cannot step into the same river twice, neither can a man return home once he has lost it. I told him what was told me in the deep forest, that he was no longer part of the woods, that he was…” He paused. “His mother no longer recognizes him.”

“His…that
thing
?”

“The unseen wife to generations of Dean men.”

A darkness enveloped me as I grasped the enormity of what Holmes revealed. I thought of his analogy of clashing waves, of the irrational seeking to overwhelm the rational. I fought my way back into the light.

“What about the horror in the Orm Woods?” I asked.

“It can take care of itself,” Holmes said. “The death of Henry Quint, the flight of Ignatius Dean, the hearth stories whispered to the children of Hammershire about the cursed cottage—all will work to protect its solitude as surely as its signs upon the trees.” He smiled. “Even the attack upon two men from London might also become legend.”

I nodded. None of it made any sense, of course, not unless one were prepared to set aside rational thought, to believe in the history of myth. If history was a lie, I would take the lie over the truth.

“There is one last thing to know, Holmes?”

“For your notes, Watson?”

“No, Holmes, for myself,” I replied. “This is not a case that will ever see print, even fictionalized. The world will never be ready for it. But I must know—how did you save me?”

“You encountered a being considered the Lord of the Forest,” he said after a moment. “I reminded it, even lords have lords, that sleeping things must left sleeping…until the stars are right.”

The next day, we departed for London. I did not raise the shade upon the window till Hammershire, with all its dark tracts of forest and lonely farmhouses, was far behind us.

Editor’s Addendum—the following note was slipped between pages116 & 117 of the day-book of Dr John H Watson: “Without the presence of the Yog-Sothoth mark the mention of Cthulhu would have had no effect. They are not beyond the laws of nature, but bound by a different set. As to the other thing, you should not have taken me so literally. –SH”

When one thinks of Sherlock Holmes, London leaps to mind, the city known in its time as the Capital of the World, but Holmes’ work often took him far from the ‘Great Smoke,’ and cries for help called him even further afield, to the very edge of the map, and beyond. In this tale, Holmes travels to the far north of Great Britain, to a realm the ancient Romans termed ‘beyond the inhabited world.’ In various published tales, Holmes warned of the dangers found in the sparsely populated countryside, far from any helping hand, but on St John Island, a miserable speck of land in the midst of the North Sea, he learns that there are even lonelier places in the world, bastions of solitude where terror might come upon the howling wind.