London, however, was where he discovered the truth: that the gods are amongst us, and want only our lives and our destruction. Up until then, gods had been a fanciful delusion as far as he was concerned. Let simpletons and the unlearned believe in them. In England’s capital, of all places – that peerless urban jewel, heart of empire, epicentre of the modern world – this presumption of his was rudely shattered.
“There is more to London than the average Londoner realises, Mr Holmes. Far more. It is a city resting on primordial foundations, with neglected and forgotten corners where the old interpenetrates the new. London was there well before the Romans came and built a settlement. Long, long ago, the tribes of primitive Britain camped at a confluence of rivers large and small, and erected their temples and shrines, and paid brutal tribute to the entities they venerated by offering them the lives of captured foes and of the undesirables from amongst their own number. Do you know how the city gained its name?”
“Surely from Londinium, the name the Romans gave it.”
“So the history books tell us. But the etymology of ‘Londinium’ itself is uncertain. According to Geoffrey of Monmouth a semi-mythological pre-Roman king called Lud was the actual founder of the city and ‘Londinium’ derives from his name, but scholars dispute this, and it has lately been suggested that the word is a corruption of a Celtic term, lowonida, meaning a river too wide to ford.”
“That would describe the Thames, certainly.”
“However,” said Gong-Fen, “in a small number of little-read texts you will find associations between the capital and a god going by the name of Lobon.”
“Can’t say I’ve heard of him.”
“Few have. Lobon was one amongst several deities whose influence was strong in the area at that time, three or four millennia BC. A warrior god, his followers were belligerent and ferocious even by the standards of the day, and thus came to dominate the neighbouring tribes. From ‘Lobon’, by a long and winding path of translation and mutation, we arrive at ‘London’.”
“This is all very fascinating, I’m sure, but…”
“But what is the relevance? Merely to lay the groundwork for what lies ahead, Mr Holmes. I have had my own mentor in this process of gnostic revelation. Now I feel it is my turn to don the mantle of mentor and impart what I have learned to one whom I deem a worthy recipient.”
Holmes bowed to Gong-Fen as if flattered, which I think he was to some extent. He had noticed that the clarence had begun an uphill climb, and the gradient of the road was growing ever steeper and the horses’ efforts more laboured. His knowledge of the geography of the Dorking area was not comprehensive, but to his mind they must be ascending the slope of the North Downs, that ridge of chalk hills which stretches all the way from Guildford to the White Cliffs of Dover. In fact, they were travelling to one of the highest points on the North Downs, Box Hill.
When the road petered out and the clarence could go no further, Holmes and Gong-Fen disembarked. They continued the rest of the way to the top on foot, with the mysterious chest suspended between them, each of them holding one of its handles. They must have looked, Holmes said, for all the world like a couple of friends setting out on a picnic. The chest was heavy, however, and although he had no idea what it contained, he heard objects click and clank inside it as they walked.
They gained the summit, and a vista of Surrey and Sussex stretched away at their feet, twenty miles or more to the South Downs. On a brighter, less cloudy day this would have afforded a breathtaking prospect, rural England in all its forested, hedgerow-parcelled, gently undulating glory. Even on a gloomy December day, with the ploughed fields brown and the trees leafless, it had its charms.
But they were not there to enjoy the view. Gong-Fen led Holmes to a set of pillow-shaped mounds which he identified as burial barrows, the resting places of prehistoric dignitaries – kings, chieftains and high priests. They set down the chest and Gong-Fen unbuckled the leather straps that secured it. From its interior he brought out a large, worn, aged book, some jars of powder, and a hypodermic syringe filled with a brownish liquid. He spent the next half hour shaking the powder carefully out onto the grass, describing a large circle with it and then drawing peculiar ornate symbols at points equidistant around the perimeter, all the while consulting the book for reference.
Holmes looked on, stamping his feet and rubbing himself to stave off the cold. He could not determine the nature of the powder other than that it was pale grey stuff, some kind of ash perhaps, clumpy and feathery. As for the book, the gold leaf lettering on the spine was so rubbed and worn as to be almost illegible, but he managed to make out the author’s name, one Ludwig Prinn, and construed that the title was De Vermis Mysteriis, or something close to it.
The clouds loomed very low overhead, sending down opaque tendrils to brush the caps of the bare-branched trees which stood in a semicircle overlooking the spot like the audience at an amphitheatre. All was quiet and seemed to grow quieter as Gong-Fen worked. The occasional croak of a rook or clap of a woodpigeon’s wings were the only sounds to disturb the hush, and these soon dwindled and died out, until all that remained was the sough of a soft wind, like a continuous, wavering exhalation of breath.
At last Gong-Fen declared that everything was ready, and instructed Holmes to roll up one sleeve.
“What preparation is that?” Holmes asked as the Chinaman tapped the syringe to dislodge any air bubbles, then depressed the plunger to expel a few tentative droplets of the liquid from the needle’s tip.
“A concoction of my own devising,” came the reply. “An amalgam of various substances – one might call it a cocktail – the main constituent ingredients being opium and cocaine, added to which are various extracts of herbs known to grow only in mainland China.”
* * *
“And you let him inject it into you!” I said, aghast. “Holmes, are you mad? Do you have any idea how rash that was?”
“I hardly had a choice. Without the drug, Gong-Fen said it would be all for naught. Nothing would happen. My ‘dream-quest’, as he termed it, would not occur. I might as well just stand there twiddling my thumbs. If one wished to draw down lightning, one needed a lightning conductor, and such was the drug.”
“Still, old man…”
“Nag me later, Watson. For now, keep listening. I have to relate this while it is still fresh in my mind. Later, I may come to believe it was all just some feverish delusion.”
* * *
With Gong-Fen’s “cocktail” circulating through his veins, Holmes stepped into the powder circle. The Chinaman himself stayed outside. He instructed Holmes not to disturb any of the markings.
“The powder with which you have drawn them,” Holmes said. “It appears to have a high calcium content. Would I be correct in thinking…?”
“Bone ash,” Gong-Fen confirmed.
“Ah. And I hazard that it is not the animal bone ash used in the manufacturing of bone china.”
“Its source is the ossuary beneath St Bride’s Church on Fleet Street. Not easy to obtain, nor cheap. The crypt keeper drove a hard bargain. Now kindly sit down and make yourself as comfortable as you can.”
Holmes seated himself cross-legged on the ground, trying to ignore the chilly dampness that seeped through the seat of his trousers; trying to ignore, too, the proximity to his person of a significant quantity of pulverised human bone.
Gong-Fen reopened the book, flicked through to the page he sought, and began to read aloud.
The words were unknown but the language was not. Holmes recognised it as the self-same tongue used by Stamford in his cell at Scotland Yard. All those rough agglomerations of consonants, the glottal stops within the individual words, the awful snarling cadences – it could be no other language, because no other language resembled it.
As the words insinuated themselves snakelike into his ears, he could simultaneously feel the drug swirling through his bloodstream. The sensation was akin to tiny ice-cold fingers crawling beneath his sk
in. He felt fear and curiosity both at once, a weird kind of eager calm, as though there were an unavoidable rightness about this experience, a necessity. In time he no longer listened to Gong-Fen’s voice. He heard the ungainly rhythms of the sentences and knew them to be an invocation of some sort, an appeal to an otherworldly power, but they seemed to be receding behind a veil, becoming distant and insignificant. He blinked, and suddenly perceived that he was alone on the hilltop. Gong-Fen was gone. All was still. Even the breeze had dropped.
Then the dream-quest began.
TO BEGIN WITH, HOLMES THOUGHT THAT THE EYE-BLINK must in fact have been a brief period of insensibility, during which Gong-Fen had taken the opportunity to slip away. It occurred to him then that the Chinaman must have been playing an elaborate prank on him. All that talk of occult matters in the clarence, the magic circle of powder, the invocation – it was simply a big build-up to nothing, a crescendo followed by a resounding anticlimax. The powder was not human bone ash but only animal. The so-called drug had merely been tinted water. The disconcerting physical sensations he had experienced had been no more than psychosomatic. A hoax, and he had fallen for it wholesale.
He was quite incensed by the notion, and resolved that Gong-Fen would not get away with making a fool of him.
Then he noticed that the wind had stopped blowing. This in itself was not remarkable, but far more so was the silence left by the wind’s absence. Holmes had never encountered a silence so total, so all-negating, so deadening. From near and far there came not a single sound. The countryside is never truly quiet. There is invariably the chirrup or chatter of some woodland creature, a cowbell, a birdcall, the yell of a farmhand, the trundle of cart wheels, something. But now Holmes was enveloped in absolute noiselessness. Even when he shifted a foot on the grass, it generated not the least rustle. All he could hear was his heartbeat and his breathing.
The clouds were not moving. This was possibly even more unnerving than the silence. They hung as though painted, the backcloth to a stage play. The world seemed in stasis, frozen in a moment in time.
Or between moments in time. That was how it felt: as though he had slipped into the gap between the tick and the tock of the clock. Holmes took out his hunter watch to confirm the supposition, and sure enough it had stopped. The second hand was stationary. He wound the sidewinder, but the watch refused to go. Either it was broken or the world had somehow come to a complete standstill.
Then a man appeared.
Holmes was not aware of seeing him approach. The man was not there; then all at once he was, right in front of him, within arm’s reach.
He was clad in a kind of kilt, with fur boots on his feet and a cloak draped across one shoulder, secured by a finely wrought copper clasp. Gold armlets encircled his biceps and a gold torc his neck. Bright blue markings zigzagged across his skin; Holmes took them to be daubings of woad, the plant dye. His hair was shoulder-length and shaggily cut, and his complexion overall was weatherbeaten and swarthy.
He was muscular in the way that no modern cultivator of the physique is. His lithe, sinewy body was that of one who has known hardship and strife in abundance, for whom life has been a battle on every front. He was carrying, as if in illustration of this, an axe with a double blade. It hung from his hand, haft clasped loosely, head near the ground. Both of its cutting edges were nicked and pitted, and Holmes could not help but think that these marks indicated that the axe had struck both armour and bone, and often.
The man eyed Holmes speculatively, then grunted, although it was not obvious whether this signified approval or the opposite. It may have been a greeting. When he finally spoke, it was in gruff tones, and somehow Holmes knew it was in an unrecorded, unremembered language, although he could understand it perfectly and the man in return could understand him.
“You have come. Who are you?”
“I might ask you the same question. I am Sherlock Holmes, and either you are real and Gong-Fen has gone to a lot of trouble getting you all dressed up like some sort of Celtic warrior, or I am dreaming you and you are little more than a figment of my imagination. Whichever it is, I would judge that you represent some ancient ancestor. That is what you are supposed to be, or actually are, depending on how one looks at it.”
“I am ignorant of any Gong-Fen,” said the man. “Is he a druid? A wizard?”
“He may well fancy himself as such. I still am not cognisant of your name.”
“My name is immaterial. Know that I was a chieftain once, leader of a great tribe. We came from the north, from the harsh mountainous lands where the winters are long and the winds blow hard and cold. We fought our way southward through year after year, generation after generation, expanding our domain, absorbing the tribes who allowed themselves to be absorbed, eradicating those that would not. We reached this far, almost to the white coast, and the majority of Britain belonged to us. That was when I erected my fortress by the banks of the great Tamesas river and called it home. There I held sway with my iron axe and my iron will. I had paid tribute to the gods in blood and pillage, and for a time I reaped the rewards, mighty and uncontested.”
“No doubt you were. But all good things come to an end, eh? Reading between the lines, that is my impression.”
Holmes evinced a rare sanguinity before this imposing stranger. Despite the man’s rugged, surly demeanour and sizeable battle weapon, he sensed that he had nothing to fear from him. Their meeting had been engineered for his benefit, to bring only edification, not destruction.
“The gods,” said the nameless chieftain, “are not always appeased, and are easily disappointed. They demand souls released in the tumult of armed combat or on the altar stone by the priest’s sacred blade. Usually that is enough to sate their appetites and ensure they do not awaken fully from their slumbers. Sometimes it is not, and then the world of men had best beware.”
“You can keep them docile by feeding them. Is that it? Rather as a mother contents a fretful infant in the night by suckling.”
The chieftain laughed balefully. “They are not the infants. We are. The gods are old, older than time. They came here from the stars, from other worlds, while the Earth was still young and unformed. Some say they were banished, others that they left of their own free will, seeking pastures new. They rode across the cosmic gulfs on the backs of comets, arriving here in their hordes. They were not one race but many intertwined. They made this world their own, dividing it up between them. But they were not at peace. It is not in their nature.”
“They fought amongst themselves.”
“Over millions of years, these star-spawned creatures of nigh limitless power and fearsome knowledge clashed and clashed again. Son rebelled against father. Servant battled master. Brother warred with brother. They ravaged continents with their competition. Their weapons were terrible, of a nature and magnitude hard to comprehend. They razed mountains and fissured canyons. It is reckoned that all the land masses of the world were one, until the gods’ hostilities broke them up and set them moving apart.”
“There are geologists – Antonio Snider-Pellegrini for one – who would offer an alternative explanation for the phenomenon of continental drift.”
The chieftain glared at Holmes.
“But do go on,” Holmes said.
“In time, the more powerful of the gods established themselves as the rulers of the Earth,” the chieftain said. “The lesser ones withdrew, some underground, others beneath the sea. Many were imprisoned for the crime of being on the losing side, and their dungeons were not always on Earth but elsewhere, in other realms, within folds in reality. A kind of truce was agreed and enmities were put aside, although not always forgiven. Between Cthulhu and his half-brother Hastur the Unspeakable, for instance, there will never be anything other than hatred.”
At those two names, particularly the first, Holmes succumbed to a shudder that was involuntary, deep-seated, almost atavistic. Although he had never heard them before in his life, it was as though some inner part of him
self, some embedded race-memory, knew to be frightened at their mention. Cthulhu. Hastur. The words spoke to him of dread and rage and horror.
“Slowly,” the chieftain went on, “the gods sank into sleep, as the bear hibernates for winter. Their conflicts were done, and it was time to rest. There are cycles in the cosmos, just as there are seasons in the year. Even immortals, with all their power, must perforce close their eyes and dream. In their far-flung cities, in their caverns, in the spaces between worlds, they now lie dormant. Yet they are watching us still. They have always watched us, observing mankind as we emerged from a state of animal ignorance and awakened to self-knowledge. The Great Old Ones and their kin are aware of us, and now and again call to us, wanting whatever we can give them.”
“You, I take it, did not give them enough. That was your downfall.”
The chieftain nodded sombrely. He cast a look backwards at the barrows. “There my bones lie mouldering. My flesh became food for worms. I was an acolyte of Lobon. My forebears were from Sarnath originally, where Lobon was the ruling deity, and when that city lapsed into ruin, his faith travelled with the populace in their exodus out of the land of Mnar. I am a direct descendant of those that came to these islands, and to me, as king of my tribe, fell the duty of maintaining Lobon’s favour. Since he is a warrior god, the blood and hearts of our enemies were sufficient for that.”
“‘Were’. What changed?”
“I changed. I wearied of strife. As age encroached, my taste for battle waned. I wished only to preside over the lands I already had gained, not to acquire fresh territory. Hence our inexorable southward march stalled. Lobon was displeased. He came for me in the night, in the form of an ivy-crowned youth bearing a spear. We fought in my bedchamber, he and I, but there could be only one outcome.” The chieftain sighed. “I wielded my axe bravely and with vigour, but who can win against a god?”
The Cthulhu Casebooks Page 11