“And that is another plank of evidence shoring up the veracity of your experience, and by extension mine.”
“But what are we to make of all this?”
“I do not know, but I suspect you and I can never be the same again. I suspect we have been changed irrevocably by what we have learned, and to some extent damaged by it. The challenge before us is to try to carry on as before.”
“As though nothing is different? I’m not certain I can do that, especially now that I no longer have the excuse of being able to tell myself that none of it was real. Ta’aa was real. So were the lizard men. So are Cthulhu and his ilk. Your dream-quest has put that beyond doubt, as far as I’m concerned, just as my account of Ta’aa has put your dream-quest beyond doubt. I have never felt so small, Holmes, so unsteady. Never has the ground beneath my feet felt so liable to give way at any moment.”
“The remedy,” said Holmes, “would be to throw ourselves back into the fray.”
“What fray? You mean the Shadwell murders?”
“One way to rid the mind of unwanted tenants is to occupy it with something else, something practical.”
“But the matter is almost resolved, is it not?” I said. “Gong-Fen Shou is the guilty party, Stamford his puppet. You were right about the two of them manufacturing a new and dangerous drug. Never mind that Gong-Fen denied it when you accused him. Of course he would. The same goes for Stamford’s death. The Chinaman must be responsible for that as well. All that remains for us is to compile compelling evidence against him and present it to Inspector Gregson. He can do the rest.”
“It is not so simple, I’m afraid, Watson.” Holmes waved a hand at that day’s Times, through which he had been distractedly leafing while I toyed with a poached egg. “There has been a complication.”
“Pray tell.”
“The spate of deaths by emaciation has claimed a fifth victim after all. Look here.”
The piece was short and to the point. Since I neglected to make a clipping of it, I cannot reproduce it verbatim here, but the gist was this. Stevedores arriving for work at the London docks the previous morning had happened upon a body on Tench Street, propped against the back wall of a wharf building. The victim was of Chinese descent and appeared to have starved to death. There was the suggestion that he had been a stowaway on a ship from the Far East and had perished during the long voyage. His body having been discovered by the crew on arrival in London, it had been dumped overnight. Police, apparently, were chasing up all possible leads.
“Or so they say,” Holmes said, “but I doubt the Met will pursue the investigation aggressively. One dead stowaway will not rank high on their list of priorities.”
“The article does not link the death with the others,” I observed.
“So far the broadsheets have been wholly oblivious to the goings-on in Shadwell. Reportage of same has been confined to the pages of the yellow press. A paper like The Times will have noted this death simply because of the morbid and somewhat exotic overtones: the foreign fugitive wasting away unknown in the hold of a merchantman, then tossed out like so much bilge water. Well!” Holmes rose to his feet, buoyed by a sudden surge of energy. “We who know better, who are aware of connections overlooked by others, must do our duty. The game is afoot, Watson. Grab your overcoat and come with me.”
“Where are we going?”
“To the East End, of course, to make a tour of the area’s hospitals. Specifically, their morgues.”
* * *
Holmes and I spent a dreary few hours traipsing from hospital to hospital, including my alma mater Barts. My medical credentials secured us access to the morgue of each, until in the basement of the London Hospital on Whitechapel Road we found what we were looking for.
The Chinaman’s cadaver was brought out for us and laid on a marble slab, covered with a sheet. As the morgue attendants left, Holmes commented to me that this was to be his first chance to view one of the emaciated corpses. From anyone else the remark might have sounded ghoulish, but his interest stemmed from genuine forensic curiosity. Before, only the accounts of others had been available for him to go on. Now he could examine a victim for himself and perhaps glean fresh data.
At his invitation I drew back the sheet, to reveal the head and bare torso of what appeared to be a frail, wizened old man who had somehow avoided the indignity of his hair going grey. His cheeks were sunken, his chest hollow, with the ridge of his clavicle and every rib prominent. There was virtually no muscle on him. His veins and tendons stood proud against his skin, which had the colour and texture of parchment. He looked to weigh no more than five stone, half the average for someone of his height.
Then there was his face.
The eyes were wide. I imagine someone at some point must have tried to close them, only to find the lids stiff and unresponsive, and hence left them as they were. The same went for his mouth, which gaped in a rictus, exposing his buccal cavity all the way to the uvula. Rigor mortis would have locked it in that position by now.
For all the world he looked as though he was screaming.
In that cold, glazed-tiled room below street level, with our breath emerging as wisps of vapour, Holmes and I were hardly at our warmest. Yet the sight of the dead Chinaman’s face sent a shiver through me that had nothing to do with ambient temperature. There was I, a doctor, having only a couple of days earlier spoken dismissively, with the disdain of an expert, about the so-called “look of terror” on a dead body; how such a thing was a misreading of a perfectly unremarkable physiological phenomenon. Yet now, confronted with that self-same phenomenon in the flesh, my immediate response was that of the unlettered layman. All I could think was: yes, this was just that – a look of terror. The Chinaman had died in a state of hopeless, cringing fear. I might even have gone so far as to aver that it was terror that had killed him, rather than malnutrition. Whatever he had seen in his last moments on Earth had been sufficiently horrendous to stop his heart.
“Oh, Watson, Watson,” said Holmes, running his eye over the cadaver, “this is fascinating. Quite fascinating. One would say, would one not, that the poor fellow had eaten and drunk nothing in many days, to judge by his condition.”
“It would be the logical conclusion.”
“Yet you and I both know that that is impossible.”
“How so?” I lowered my voice, even though we were alone, with no one to hear us but the Chinaman himself and the other unclaimed dead. “Because of Cthulhu and suchlike? Because we are both now aware that the impossible is all too possible? I don’t know about you, Holmes, but I am not going to go around seeing the inexplicable everywhere, in everything. That is not how I wish to live my life, not if I can help it. My sanity, such as it is, is too precious to me.”
“I am not asking for that. I am asking you merely to observe. Observe the cadaver’s face.”
“I have done so, and would prefer not to have done.”
“Observe his moustache, then.”
The man had long strands of hair hanging down on either side of his mouth.
“What of it?” I said. “That style of facial topiary is not rare amongst the Chinese. We met someone just the other night who wore exactly the same…”
My voice trailed off.
Holmes smiled thinly. “Now study the face itself closely. Granted, he is much altered. He is not the man he was. But the bone structure remains. Note, too, the small discoloured patches on his left forearm and his solar plexus. That is not livor mortis. Those are bruises inflicted ante mortem. I can be sure of that, since I myself was the cause of them.”
I could not deny what he was asserting, much though I might have liked to.
Holmes and I were looking at the body of one of the employees at the Golden Lotus Hotel. The one who had held me hostage with my own gun. The one named Li Guiying.
* * *
“But he was in perfect health when last we saw him,” I said to Holmes as we left the morgue and threaded our way back through the hospital
. “There is no way he could… In the space of a single night… I mean, it’s…”
“Impossible?” said my companion, his eyebrows arched. “The very thing you have resolved not to look for. Yet here it is, rearing its ugly head once more. I hate to say this, but ‘impossible’ would seem to be the path we are destined to follow, my friend, at least in the foreseeable future.”
“Did you know in advance that the dead man would be Li Guiying?”
Holmes nodded. “Gong-Fen appeared irked by him. ‘Ill-judged’ and ‘ungracious’ were how he described his behaviour in taking your revolver. I imagine the reward for those who earn Gong-Fen Shou’s displeasure is a harsh one. In addition, a fifth death was required to perpetuate the model already established – one murder a month. This time Gong-Fen chose not a random stranger but someone closer to home.”
“But the new moon was two nights ago.”
“Better late than never.”
We emerged from the main entrance and started down the front steps.
“Well, if nothing else,” I said, “we now have a solid foundation upon which to build a case against the fiend. Li was a known associate of his.”
“Li worked at an opium den which Gong-Fen is only alleged to have ties with,” said Holmes. “That is not a hard-and-fast link between the two of them.”
“Gong-Fen admitted to knowing him when he broke into 221B the night before last and handed back my gun.”
“Hearsay. Inadmissible in court. The same goes for everything he told me on the journey to Dorking, which was all but a confession to his involvement in opium smuggling. If it came up in a trial, he could simply deny saying anything of the sort. It would be my word against his, and although a jury might not be favourably inclined towards a wealthy Oriental businessman, they might equally look askance at an impoverished aspirant sleuth, even if he were of English origin. Any decent lawyer – and Gong-Fen can afford the best – would tear my testimony to shreds.”
“Dash it all, the man’s laughing at us,” I said. “Mocking us openly. He’s getting away with murder, and daring us to prove otherwise, knowing we cannot. He’s the Devil himself, Holmes.”
“And speaking of the Devil…”
A carriage was pulling up beside us, a four-wheeler, and as it halted its door opened and from its interior issued the voice of the very man we had just been discussing.
“Mr Holmes, Dr Watson,” said Gong-Fen Shou. “A moment of your time, if you will. Please step aboard. It’s urgent.”
I HAD NO DESIRE TO ENTER GONG-FEN’S CLARENCE. I would much rather have walked barefoot into a nest of vipers. I did not even have my Webley on me, which might have offered me some reassurance. There would then have been the option of simply shooting the scoundrel if all else failed.
Holmes, by contrast, showed little hesitation about climbing into the carriage, which left me with no alternative. I could not allow him to face Gong-Fen alone, unaided. I had done so once, to my regret. Not again.
Gong-Fen rapped on the front window, the coachman whipped the horses, and we were away. The Chinaman now presented a somewhat different figure from the confident, serene sophisticate who had invaded our home. There was a marked perturbation about him. His hand showed a tiny but distinct tremor as he drew the curtains at the front and the blinds at the sides and back, cocooning the carriage’s interior in shade. He was trying to behave like his usual self, and failing.
For all that, I could not help muttering to Holmes, as an aside, “I do not feel that this is wise. Now we cannot even see where he is taking us.”
“Tut, Watson. Think it through. Mr Gong-Fen wants us here, in his carriage.”
“Of course he does. To kidnap us.”
“Perhaps I spoke inaccurately. He needs us here. Why did he pick us up? Did he simply happen to be driving by the London Hospital, look out, spy us passing, and decide to make good on an opportunity presented by fate? He did not. He knew we were likely to visit the hospital at some stage, because he knew we would be looking for Li’s body and he knew it had been taken to this very morgue. Hence he waited for us outside.”
“So it was a trap, and he has sprung it. Li’s body was merely the bait.”
“A singularly poor trap, in so far as we have entered it willingly, knowingly.”
“You did.”
“And we could quite easily overpower our trapper, could we not? If it came to that. Am I not correct in my surmise, Gong-Fen? We are not prey but guests.”
The Chinaman nodded. “I see you are as perceptive as ever, Mr Holmes. You have come through your dream-quest unscathed.”
“More or less.”
“I knew you could endure it. A lesser mind might have cracked.”
“Like Stamford’s, you mean?”
Another nod, this one slightly rueful. “It was his choice. I might have counselled against it, had he not been quite so insistent. An addict of any kind is always on the lookout for newer, more intense experiences. After a time he builds up an immunity to the rush of sensation he receives from his addiction. He seeks greater heights, higher stakes. In Dr Stamford’s case, opium no longer fulfilled his needs. He was smoking it in ever-increasing quantities but still becoming inured to its effects. He wanted more, and knew I could provide it.”
“That was the incentive for him, no?” said Holmes. “That was how you got him to perform abductions for you. You dangled before him, like a carrot before a donkey, the promise of an even more powerful narcotic than opium – the same narcotic you gave me atop Box Hill. Your ‘cocktail’.”
“Stamford knew I had the knowledge and the wherewithal to make it. He had heard me speak of its dizzying transformative properties. He was so far sunk in desperation that he would have done anything, agreed to anything, for a taste of it.”
“Was he aware how dangerous it was?” I said. “How it might warp the user’s mind and bend him towards madness?”
“If he did, he did not care. He yearned for a more sublime state of alteration than opium alone could offer. He paid little heed to the potential consequences.”
“Five victims,” said Holmes. “That was your price.”
“A fair one, he thought.”
“Yet in the event Stamford furnished you with only four. That is odd. You strike me as someone who does not like it when a purchaser welches on a deal, and who does not hand over goods unless the invoice has been paid in full.”
“Again, so perceptive.”
“Stamford came up short. He let you down. You needed a fifth body on the night of the most recent new moon. He failed to provide one, thanks to us. You gave him the drug anyway. This was not generosity on your part. It was a punishment. You had a fairly good idea it would tip him over the edge. If what he saw was half as devastating as what I saw, it was likely to destroy him. Ravaged by opium use, he was already clinging on to mental equilibrium by his fingernails. You gave him a last little push, and he was gone.”
“My God,” I breathed. “You truly are evil.”
“I am… pragmatic,” said Gong-Fen. “I weigh up the pros and cons and make my decisions accordingly. I cannot make allowance for sentiment or ethics. Those are lifebelts by means of which others may keep their heads above water, whereas I swim. Besides, Doctor, compared with some I am a veritable saint. You have not yet met true evil.”
“On the contrary, I believe I have,” I replied, thinking of the lizard men of Ta’aa. Yet were they actually evil? Were they not merely bestial primitives, with little concept of morality, doing whatever they must to survive?
“Trust me,” said the Chinaman. “There are beings on this Earth – one in particular – whose hardness of heart and commitment to self-interest even I marvel at.”
As he spoke, he seemed to quail inwardly. The trembling of his hands became more noticeable than ever. It occurred to me this might just be some pose, a pretence of fear in aid of making some obscure point; but it appeared that Gong-Fen was riven with a genuine dread of someone – or something.<
br />
“You refer to a god, perhaps?” said Holmes. “A Great Old One such as Cthulhu?”
“Ah, I see your education was thorough,” said Gong-Fen. “What else did you encounter on your dream-quest? The ancient chieftain, perchance?”
“I did.”
“He appears as a spirit guide to some, the lucky few. He serves as a kind of intermediary between this reality and others. His presence eases the transition. I took you to Box Hill, his burial place, precisely in the hope and expectation that he, as a genius loci, would come to you. That is a token of the esteem in which I hold you, Mr Holmes. I would not have gone to all that trouble for just anyone. I certainly did not for Dr Stamford. Him I left simply to wander the streets after I had injected him with the drug.”
“You left me to fend for myself in the backwoods of Surrey. It is not so dissimilar.”
“I was not exacting a penalty from you. Far from it. Having heard of your activities at my ‘hotel’, I was already forming the opinion that you were a man of rare calibre. I was told you fought with skill, utilising an unusual martial art. Jujitsu, from the description Zhang and Li gave.”
“Baritsu.”
“A close relative, deriving many of its holds and disciplines from jujitsu. An arcane choice, especially for an Occidental. I became even more intrigued by you when I called on you at home that same night. Your reputation was all it was proclaimed to be, and more. I saw in you a potential member of an exclusive club, one which only the best, brightest and most deserving are invited to join.”
“The club of Cthulhu.”
“So to speak. I acted, then, as I thought fitting.”
“You took me to Box Hill, performed a ritual, dosed me with your drug, subjected me to a spiritual baptism of fire,” Holmes said, “all in order to recruit me. To induct me into some elite cadre.”
“Such was the intent. We are few, we who know of the true gods, we who understand their power and would wish to partake of it. In the civilised world, that is. I am not talking about the many savages who genuflect before idols and mindlessly ape the rituals handed down to them through innumerable generations. They are of no consequence. We” – Gong-Fen indicated himself and Holmes – “are men of consequence. We matter. We are capable of reaping so much more from knowledge of the existence of the Great Old Ones than simply being their vassals.”
The Cthulhu Casebooks Page 15