“Doubtless it isn’t,” Edginton said, adding a belated “sir” for fear of coming across as insubordinate.
“Then what did you hear?”
“Sounded to me like… voices.”
“In which case your ears are playing tricks on you, Edginton. There’s no one around but us.”
Smythe then put into words a question that I myself had been pondering. “Captain, if this civilisation is as ancient and defunct as you say it is, how come these here lizard-head bones don’t look all that old?”
Harrowby had a ready answer to that. “The last few members of the race must have survived until relatively recently. As to how they managed that, there’s a constant supply of fresh water from the waterfall, and their other dietary needs would have been taken care of by consuming, say, bats, the occasional rodent or other small mammal, possibly a wild boar now and then. Hunting parties would not have had to forage far from the cavern to find game.”
“I think, Harrowby, you’re avoiding one other somewhat obvious source of sustenance,” I said. “The tooth marks on the bones would indicate to me that, in extremis, the lizard men resorted to breaking the ultimate taboo.”
“Cannibalism,” said Edginton, and chased the word with an oath. “This temple – it doubled as their dining hall.”
One of the other privates, O’Connor, an Irishman and a staunch Roman Catholic, crossed himself, while Smythe touched the carbine on his shoulder, deriving a more tangible comfort from the weapon’s wooden forestock.
“This be the Devil’s realm,” said Lockwood in his thick Dorset drawl. “’Tain’t for us to be here. This be an antechamber to Hell, is what it be.”
“I won’t abide that sort of talk,” Harrowby snapped. “We are not children. We are grown men, and we mustn’t behave as though—”
Someone let out a cry that was halfway between a gasp and a scream.
“Lance Corporal Fielding,” Harrowby barked. “What was that in aid of? Explain yourself.”
“I saw…” said Fielding. “I thought I saw…” He was staring at the entranceway to the temple. “Someone out there. Moving. Looking in. He had a face. Wasn’t no ordinary face. More like…”
“Like what?”
“All scaly. Long snout. Bulging eyes. Like one of them lizard men would look like for real.”
“If any were still alive,” said Harrowby, “which they are not. They are long extinct. I want you all to listen very closely to me. You are letting your imaginations run riot. You need to get a grip on yourselves, every man jack of you. Remember who you are: subjects of Her Majesty the Queen. Remember what you are: soldiers of the British Army, the greatest fighting force on the planet. Remember what that means: you are not a bunch of mithering, lily-livered poltroons. Got that?”
There were nods all round, some more avid than others.
“Now,” Harrowby continued, “let us concentrate solely on the matter at hand. We are standing in a place of worship where a long-dead race, quite possibly the missing evolutionary link between Homo sapiens and the dinosaurs, paid tribute to—”
Those were Roderick Harrowby’s final words, rudely truncated by the appearance of a man-shaped beast which sprang out from behind the idol’s plinth and lopped his head off with a single swipe of a taloned, reptilian hand. One moment Harrowby was standing there pontificating. The next, his head was rolling across the floor while his decapitated body sagged to its knees and keeled over.
His assassin absconded before any of the rest of us could do a thing about it. The culprit was one of them, the lizard men from the carvings. He clambered swiftly up the side of the wall, using his talons like a climber’s pitons, and disappeared into the shadows of the ceiling.
Somewhat after the event, wits were collected, shock overcome, rifles unshipped, bolt actions worked, rounds discharged; but the perpendicular volley of bullets resulted only in cacophony and a hail of stone fragments, none of the shots finding their target in the gloomy recesses overhead.
As the firing petered out, I assumed command. Being the highest ranking after Harrowby, it fell to me to order a withdrawal.
“Where there’s one of those things, there may be more,” I said. “We fall back in an orderly fashion. We make for the tunnel.”
“You heard the man,” said Lance Corporal Fielding, giving my authority the subaltern stamp of approval. “Move!”
The troops hurried from the temple, reloading their rifles as they went. I took a last look back at Harrowby’s corpse, a pitiable sight, death having come for him unexpectedly at what he believed was his moment of crowning glory, the accomplishment that would set him up for life. The eyes in his severed head looked startled and just a little chagrined, as if he acknowledged now, too late, his own hubris and folly, but also recognised the injustice of his fate.
Then I turned and ran.
* * *
Our journey back from the temple to the escarpment began as an organised retreat but became a shambles. In many ways it was Maiwand all over again, although in this instance our enemy did not leave us be. Rather, we were harried the entire way. The lizard man in the temple was far from being the only exemplar of his race. There were, as we rapidly ascertained, scores of the reptilian hominids still resident in Ta’aa, and they did not take kindly to intruders in their midst. No, that is not strictly accurate. In some respects they welcomed us in their city, for had there not been human remains, human skulls, amid the bone piles in the temple? Had the carvings not told the story? The lizard men were not merely cannibalistic but anthropophagous, and we were their next meal.
They leapt at us as we scuttled along the streets. They pounced from the rooftops. They sprinted out from between the houses. They were naked and smoothly scaly. They were bandy-legged, with powerful thighs, which made them fast, disconcertingly so. They were, above all, ferocious.
They hissed as they attacked, and sometimes their hisses formed speech. One phrase in particular stood out, a set of words they reiterated again and again in their foul, inhuman voices, as though it were a war cry.
“Ph’nglui mglw’nath Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!”
I would not have been able to represent it accurately here in text form if not for later studies conducted by myself and Holmes. Only during the course of the events that comprise the main body of this narrative did we garner a working knowledge of the language known as R’lyehian, or occasionally Aklo. Likewise, I could not have understood then, as I do now, that the lizard men were reciting the principal line of a chant they would have used in their rites of worship, a paean of praise and fealty to their obscene god: “In his home at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”
The hominids uttered it as they besieged us, their forked tongues a-flicker, their lipless mouths seemingly fixed in grins of ecstasy. They shared it with one another as a rallying cry, calling up more of their number from wherever they lay in wait. Ambush followed ambush, all accompanied by lizardly throats chorusing the words in unison or antiphony.
One must thank the Lord, and the manufacturers of small arms, that our guns were able to cut down the lizard men. Else none of us would have made it even halfway to the escarpment. A well-placed round from rifle or pistol could stop one of our squamous assailants in his tracks. They were as vulnerable in that regard as any living thing.
But, although we had the firepower, the lizard men had the superior numbers. They also knew the layout of Ta’aa, whereas we were fumbling through the city, having long abandoned all hope of retracing the exact route we had taken on the way in. One jagged, house-fringed street looked much like another. Our sole point of visual reference was the temple. The more distance we put between us and it, the likelier that we were going in the right direction. The escarpment was not visible in the fungus-lit gloom, not until we were fairly close to it.
By that point we were running low on ammunition and one amongst us, Lockwood, had fallen prey to the lizard men. The Dorset native had stumbled mid-run and gone sprawli
ng, and hominids had caught him and dragged him off. His piteous screams were abruptly cut short, and we knew there was nothing we could do for him. The apprentice butcher had himself been butchered.
On we went, and then a massed horde of the lizard men attacked from front and rear at once. Still hissing that ugly chant of theirs, they closed in. We felled as many as we could at long range, then when every last round had been fired, engaged them hand-to-hand. Those of us who had knives and bayonets used them. I myself raided my medical kit and retrieved a bone saw and a scalpel, both of which performed respectably well in an offensive, non-surgical capacity. We cleaved through the lizard men’s ranks, matching their talons with our manmade claws. We spilled plenty of their blood, but so they did ours, alas. By the time we were clear of them, we were down to three: Smythe, Edginton and me; by the time we gained the foot of the escarpment steps, that total had been reduced to two. Smythe had sustained a terrible leg wound during the foregoing fracas, and Edginton and I carried him between us as far as we could before realising that he was no longer able to assist by propelling himself along with his good leg and had become so much dead weight. His femoral artery had been nicked and he had died of blood loss, slipping away silently in our embrace.
The lizard men were still in hot pursuit. Dropping Smythe’s lifeless form, Edginton and I scrambled up the crude steps, near frantic in our efforts to escape. Our mob of assailants followed, some using the steps too, others crawling up the sheer face of the escarpment. By God’s good grace we reached the summit before any of the hominids, and then we were in the tunnel, racing through it with all the ebbing strength in our bodies. Not having had the time to light our lanterns, we were more or less blind in the dark. So were the lizard men. Yet we made no attempt to be cautious. Better to hare along, arms out, feeling our way, and receive the occasional bump on the head or knock to the knee, than to proceed with prudence. We did not have that luxury.
Ahead, a dim golden glow began to waver. It meant the cleft, the natural courtyard, the defile. On no account did it guarantee sanctuary, but at least we would no longer be underground in the lizard men’s domain. They would be in ours, and in broad daylight we might stand a better chance. At the very least the cleft was so narrow that they would have to exit it one by one, and the two of us could then deal with them accordingly. The numerical advantage would, for a change, be ours.
A yelp from Edginton, at my rear, made me halt and turn.
“Private Edginton?” I said, peering. I could just about make him out, a dozen yards behind, canted against the tunnel wall, one leg drawn up. “What is it? What’s the matter?”
“Tripped on my own ruddy bootlace, didn’t I, Dr Watson. Only gone and turned my damn ankle over.”
“Let me help you.”
“No, sir. I’ll only be a burden. Can’t put an ounce of weight on my foot. You go on.”
“Don’t be daft, man. Together we can still—”
“All due respect, but that’s rot and you know it.”
“I’m not leaving you to the mercy of those monsters.” I could hear the lizard men fast approaching, the clatter of their feet, the murmuring of their prayer to Cthulhu.
“Not your choice to make,” said Edginton adamantly. “I have my bayonet. I can take a couple of them with me. Get out of here alive, and tell everyone about this hellhole, and make sure somebody comes back with dynamite and seals this tunnel. Promise me.”
“I’m not—”
“Promise me, Dr Watson. On your word.”
So I solemnly made the promise – a vow I was not to keep – and Edginton, brave Edginton, wished me godspeed, then about-faced, raised his bayonet aloft, and hobbled to meet the lizard men head-on.
“Come and get me, you beauties,” was the last I heard from him, not counting the long, protracted scream that issued along the tunnel a few seconds later.
I all but flung myself out from the cleft, falling prostrate to the dusty ground. Heaving for breath, I tried to get to my feet, but I was weak, scarce able to move. The horrors I had seen overwhelmed me.
Just as control over my body returned to me, the foremost of the lizard men appeared, framed by the cleft. A hand grabbed for me, bent on hauling me back into the darkness, to my certain doom. I reacted quickly but not quickly enough. The hand seized my shoulder. I wrenched away from it, and one of the talons tore deep into my flesh. With a shriek of pure anguish I lunged forward, heading for the defile.
Upon reaching it, I dared a glance back, fully expecting to see the thwarted lizard man lumbering after me with a swarm of others hot on his heels.
It was not so, however. The hominid had shrunk back into the cleft, one hand shielding his eyes. He wanted to continue the chase and finish what he had started, but was incapable of doing so. The same was true of his fellows, who were congregated behind him in the tunnel. None of them was able to go any further. They could not leave the tunnel’s shade.
It dawned on me as to why. The dazzle of the sun, which was just past its zenith, was too much for them. A lifetime spent in Ta’aa, with only the pale purple luminescence of the fungus to see by, had left their vision unable to adapt easily to a much brighter light source. Even indirect sunshine was as torturous to their optic nerves as the flare of burning magnesium is to ours. Previous generations may have been more frequent visitors to the outside world, judging by the presence of the carvings; that or they had engraved them by the light of the moon alone. Whichever it was, no lizard man of the present era could leave Ta’aa during the daytime.
I did not hesitate to seize the advantage this afforded me. I scurried into the defile and along it. Sometimes I was reduced to going on all fours when the path became too tortuous and uneven and my legs could no longer be relied upon to support me. Having passed the pillar with its perching Cthulhu, that brooding demonic scarecrow, I tottered onward into the wilds of Afghanistan, never once looking back.
* * *
Some Afghan villagers found me, half crazed with pain and thirst and caked in blood, not all of it my own. In a rare fit of charity towards one who represented their foreign oppressor, they treated me with kindness and decency. At their headman’s insistence, my shoulder was bound up and I was transported by mule-drawn travois to the nearest hill station. Thence I was borne by wagon to Kandahar and onward by train to Peshawar.
I neglected to fulfil my promise to Edginton mainly because I had resolved already to treat the entire incident as though it had never happened. I managed to persuade myself that there had been no Ta’aa, no bone-strewn temple to Cthulhu, no lizard men. It was the only way to salvage what little sanity I had left. I had been shot by a sniper during the march back from Maiwand, the bullet passing clean through the top of my shoulder. That was the received opinion, based on the dimensions and nature of my wound. Unbeknownst to the main body of the retreating troops, some cowardly Ghazi had fired on me from his hiding place. The same sniper, with his Jezail, had done for Captain Harrowby and a half-dozen other men as well. I, sole survivor of the sneak attack, had been left behind, forced to fend for myself, roaming injured and delirious through inhospitable terrain for days until my rescue.
It was a miracle I had lasted so long. I was lucky to be alive. So everyone insisted, and who was I to argue?
I was lucky to be alive.
THE FOLLOWING MORNING FOUND HOLMES AND ME in subdued mood. We exchanged hardly two words over breakfast, and Mrs Hudson, sensing the atmosphere between us but misconstruing its root cause, was prompted to remark, “I do hope you two haven’t had a falling out already, so soon after Dr Watson moved in? That would be a shame. You seem, if I may be so bold, a most compatible pair.”
Eventually Holmes said to me, “Well, my dear fellow, either we can pretend that we are both deranged, or we must accept that each of us, in his separate way, has pierced the veil of a great occult mystery. I use ‘occult’ in its literal as well as its figurative sense, meaning hidden as well as paranormal.”
“You no lon
ger question the content of your vision on Box Hill?” I asked. “You are certain it was fact, not fancy?”
“One might easily argue that Gong-Fen’s drug did nothing more than cause me to experience wild hallucinations. Vivid and disturbing though they were, they had no more substance than De Quincey’s laudanum-induced dream of silvery seas paved with upturned human faces.”
“And yet…?”
“And yet, immediately after I described my vision to you, you took it upon yourself to relate your adventures in the city of Ta’aa, where you too encountered evidence of this Cthulhu entity. You saw with your own eyes religious iconography pertaining to him, along with a breed of half-human beasts who worshipped him. I myself saw, with the eyes of the mind, the god-creature himself in his Pacific fastness, surrounded by his servitors. You provided independent verification for something which I would otherwise be quite happy, in the cold light of day, to reject as delusion.”
“You doubt nothing I said?”
“Not a bit of it. You are far too stolid and unimaginative, Watson, to invent a tale like that.”
I took umbrage at the remark. Stolid and unimaginative? But Holmes seemed to mean it as a compliment.
“No,” he continued, “none of it can be dismissed as mere coincidence. The overlap is too great, the details too consistent. Much though I wish it were not so, it would seem that this god Cthulhu was known and venerated by the ancients. Worse” – his expression became pained – “that he was and is real. And if he is real, then everything else I saw is real too.”
“There is the unknown language as well,” I said. “We both heard Stamford use it. The lizard men also spoke it.”
“Hence your queer turn at the Yard. Stamford’s utterances must have transported you straight back to the cavern and the gruelling ordeal you underwent there.”
“They did. Very much so.”
The Cthulhu Casebooks Page 14