The heads of the horses cleared the tunnel gloom. Light spread along their toiling backs, down their tails, now arriving at Holmes’s feet and mine. The shadows shrank back from it as though it were scalding hot. For us, it was cleansing, like a warm spring zephyr. The more the light spread over us, the more like ourselves we felt. The shadows were repelled by it, just as the lizard men of Ta’aa had been by the sunshine outside their cavern home. When one of the dark tendrils extended past the tunnel’s shade, its tip evaporated to nothingness and the stump withdrew as though in pain.
Then, at long last, Holmes and I were fully free of that accursed tunnel, and the horses found a new quickness of pace. All at once they were trotting enthusiastically, fired with a zeal to be away from the bridge. The whip was no longer necessary. Holmes had only to snap the reins to encourage them to keep going.
I peered over my shoulder. Some shreds of the shadow tendrils still clung to the clarence, but they were dissipating, vanishing into thin air. Within the tunnel the shadows themselves were retracting back into the dark niches whence they had been spawned. Even as I watched, the railway bridge reverted to being nothing more than it was, a brick-built structure supporting a section of the Great Eastern Line not far from its terminus at Bishopsgate Station. It could not, from any objective viewpoint, have looked more ordinary.
We had escaped. We were free.
So why was Gong-Fen still screaming?
Holmes hauled back on the reins, bringing us to a standstill again. The cab rocked back and forth, Gong-Fen ululating in his native Mandarin. I saw him through the front window. Shadow tendrils wreathed him. Even detached from their source, there were still enough sunless spaces in the cab for them to thrive.
Holmes and I dismounted with alacrity. As one, we flung the cab doors open on either side, letting more light in. This destroyed the remaining shadows, leaving Gong-Fen writhing on the seat, unencumbered by their sinister black embrace but still afflicted by dreadful paroxysms.
I seized him and dragged him out, Holmes assisting. We laid him supine on the roadway. He weighed no more than a child might, and the reason for that was perfectly apparent. He was shrunken, reduced by half. His suit, formerly so well-fitting, now hung about him in baggy folds. His shirt collar was several sizes too large for a neck that had become as scrawny as a vulture’s. His teeth seemed too big for his mouth, his eyes for their sockets.
He groaned and mumbled, wild-eyed, raving. He was alive, but to my mind not for much longer. His pulse was feeble and intermittent. Cardiac arrest was imminent, and there was nothing I could do to forestall it.
“Gong-Fen,” said Holmes. “Gong-Fen. Speak to us. You must help us. What were those shadows? Where did they come from? Who sent them? Who laid that trap? If you want the malefactor brought to justice, you have to tell us.”
“Holmes, he is past that,” I said. “He can’t hear you. He has but moments left.”
Holmes was not to be deterred. “Gong-Fen Shou, I demand that you listen to me. Focus on the sound of my voice. You are going to a place where you are beyond risk of reprisal. You have nothing to fear from your friend-turned-enemy any more, and so nothing to lose by naming him. Quick, man! Out with it, while you still can.”
The shrivelled, dying creature that had been Gong-Fen Shou strove to articulate a response. Lips and tongue attempted to form words around gasped exhalations from failing lungs. Holmes put his ear close, but it was all in vain. There was to be no revelation from Gong-Fen, no identification of his murderer. There was only one last wavering aspiration, and then Gong-Fen was gone.
“SO THIS IS IT, IS IT?” SAID INSPECTOR GREGSON, having been fetched from Scotland Yard by a constable whom Holmes had collared on the Mile End Road. “This ties it all up nice and neatly?”
Holmes and I, standing on the opposite side of Gong-Fen’s body from him, both nodded.
“Gong-Fen,” Holmes explained, “was the mastermind behind the entire scheme. He inveigled Dr Stamford into acquiring victims on his behalf for experimentation. Together they had devised a new kind of drug, a potent form of opiate which happened to have deleterious side effects.”
“Highly deleterious,” said Gregson, “given that it killed any who used it stone dead. A drug lord wants to create addicts, not corpses. The money lies in repeat custom.”
“Gong-Fen and Stamford persevered nonetheless in their attempts to refine and improve the drug, believing it could eventually be made safe and therefore profitable. At what location they performed the tests on their human subjects, I can only speculate. Gong-Fen must surely have warehouses all over the East End, any one of which could be put to use as a laboratory.”
“I will have my men perform a search.”
“One wonders how long that would take. There must be better allocations of manpower than to hunt for a makeshift laboratory, which is now of no importance anyway, given that the two men who operated it are dead.”
“It would yield evidence, if found.”
“Well, Inspector, if that is your wish,” said Holmes airily. “But it strikes me that you would be on a hiding to nothing.”
Gregson shrugged, seemingly half persuaded by Holmes that the task was not worth undertaking. “Can you at least tell me why I am looking at Gong-Fen’s dead body?”
“Aware that my investigations were bearing fruit and the net was closing in, Gong-Fen opted to take the easy way out, rather than face the inevitable scandal and ruin which a conviction for multiple murder would entail.”
“The easy way out?” Gregson eyed the withered, gape-mouthed corpse at our feet. Around us a small crowd of onlookers had assembled. Uniformed policemen kept them at bay. “Doesn’t look all that easy to me, from the state of him.”
“Death on his own terms,” said Holmes, “without a trial, the resultant public opprobrium, the hangman’s noose. To a man of his standing, this counts as a kind of victory. Not for him the undignified end of a common-or-garden killer.”
“And how did he actually do away with himself?”
“The method is obvious, surely: a fatal dose of the same drug he and Stamford administered to their victims. He took it right before our eyes. We rushed to prevent him, but alas we were too slow. The good doctor here tried his hardest but could not vitiate its effects.”
Gregson looked at me sympathetically. I tried to radiate an aura of medical virtue, as though I were at that very instant mentally reciting the Hippocratic Oath. In truth, my thoughts were scattered, barely coherent. I was struggling to digest all that we had just been through, and wishing I had even half of Holmes’s remarkable powers of dissimulation.
“And, let me get this straight,” Gregson said. “The two of you were passengers in his coach up until the final, fatal moment?”
“We were,” said Holmes.
“How did that come about? My guess would be that you cunningly engineered a rendezvous, Mr Holmes. You waylaid and boarded the carriage, with a view to bearding Gong-Fen. You planned to confront him with definitive, inescapable proof of his culpability.”
“That is exactly what happened.”
“But unbeknownst to you, he had an escape route secreted on his person: the drug.”
“That too, alas, is so. Gong-Fen Shou was the sort of man to plan ahead for every eventuality, even for his own defeat. You cannot be as successful as he was without putting a great deal of forethought into all that you do.”
Gregson returned his gaze to the corpse, specifically to the hypodermic syringe which protruded from its neck. The needle was embedded in the carotid artery, the plunger was fully depressed, and the clear barrel showed smears of a sinister-looking yellowish liquid inside. He could not have known that, before Holmes sent for him, he had despatched me to the nearest chemist’s to procure both the hypodermic and measures of various poisons, nostrums and potions. We had mixed the liquids together to create a concoction which would have killed Gong-Fen as surely as the marauding shadows did, then injected it into the still-warm corp
se before disposing of the excess materials, bottles and all, down a drain. A coroner examining the contents of the hypodermic would conclude that they were responsible for Gong-Fen’s death, and, although hard put to account for the corpse’s emaciation, would be unable to rule out the possibility that the injection had caused that too.
“And the coachman?” Gregson turned his gaze to the clarence and its stationary, dully nodding horses. “What of him? Where is he?”
“He fled the scene the moment he realised something was amiss,” Holmes said. “We were too busy attending to Gong-Fen to intercept him. I wonder if he feared he would be implicated in his employer’s demise.”
“Or, more to the point, in his murderous activities.”
“Indeed.”
“Would you happen to know his name?”
“I would not.”
“Never mind. I’m sure he’ll turn up if we look for him. His testimony would be useful in corroborating everything you have just told me. Not that I doubt your word in the slightest, Mr Holmes,” Gregson hastened to add, “or yours, Dr Watson. I am simply the sort who likes all the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed. Thorough, that’s me. Meticulous.”
“And we would have it no other way, Inspector,” said Holmes. “Now, if we’re done here…?”
Gregson deliberated, then nodded. “Yes. This would seem to put the lid on it all, wouldn’t it? Once again I am indebted to you, Mr Holmes. You have managed to lighten my caseload on a couple of occasions lately, and here, now, you have done so again. Congratulations, sir.”
* * *
The fluency and readiness with which Holmes – and to a far lesser extent I – had lied to Gregson disturbed me. Yet we had needed to, for expediency’s sake. As Holmes himself put it that afternoon, when we were settled once again in the cosy confines of our lodgings, “What alternative was there? To give him the uncensored, unvarnished truth would be to risk incredulity at best, at worst out-and-out ridicule. Gregson and his ilk are simply not equipped to deal with the implications of the mare incognitum upon which your barque and mine are now sailing.”
“I’m not sure I am either,” I said. “Living, moving shadows that can suck the very life force out of a man? The inhabitants of Shadwell have been right all along. Those reports that seemed to some so much bunkum are true. It is incomprehensible. Not to mention ghastly.”
“Come now, Watson! Straighten that spine. Stiffen those sinews.”
“Had you but seen what I did in the thick of those shadows, Holmes, you would not find that such an easy command to obey.”
“I did catch sight of something myself, as it happens, and I grant you, it was not pretty. Where we must count ourselves lucky is that neither of us viewed it fully, in all its unfettered glory.”
“I pray I never shall. I doubt I would survive.”
“You are made of sterner stuff than you realise, Watson. One of your great virtues is that you do not know quite how courageous you are. To take an example, if you had not climbed up into the driving seat of the clarence when you did, I might not have followed. You showed remarkable pluck. Do not forget that.”
“It was more foolhardiness than pluck,” I said, “but I shall accept the compliment. So, what now? Having all but perjured ourselves to a senior police officer, how are we to proceed? Is it too much to hope that, with Gong-Fen Shou out of the picture, these ‘shadow’ deaths will cease?”
Holmes shook his head with a kind of whimsical regret. “I fear not. Gong-Fen, after all, did not instigate the attack on the clarence. Rather, he was the victim of a betrayal.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Come, come, Watson! It’s obvious. Do you not recollect his words when it dawned on him that Thacker the coachman had abandoned us, and not at random but in a deliberately chosen location? ‘I can’t believe it,’ he said. ‘This is not right. Not fair.’ It is also quite plain, from Thacker’s behaviour, that the coachman was either browbeaten or bribed to do as he did. So by whom?”
“The author of the note to Gong-Fen, I would hazard.”
“As would I. His former mentor, the singularly persuasive gentleman whose foreign expeditions he sponsored and whose willing acolyte he became. It is evident that this personage can command those eldritch shadows to do his bidding, which makes him a threatening proposition indeed.”
“I’ll second that,” I said, with feeling.
“The question is, was Gong-Fen the sole intended victim of the ambush, or were we targets as well?”
“I hope the answer is that he was and we were not, but I fear otherwise.”
“Indeed. Chasing down Thacker would seem a profitable course of action, and I shall take it, although I do not see much prospect of success. Thacker was prepared to be disloyal to Gong-Fen Shou, no doubt fully cognisant of the treatment his employer is liable to mete out to those who offend against him. That would imply that the person with whom he has thrown in his lot – our unnamed master of shadows – is someone he knew would be able to shield him from retaliation if things did not go according to plan, someone whose power and influence are the rival at least of his late master’s.”
“Someone, too, who if need be can shield him from the long arm of the law.”
“Yes, I would not be surprised to find that Thacker is already many miles hence, possibly even at sea, bound for the continent. Wherever he fetches up, there he will be established rather nicely, in splendid seclusion, incognito, incommunicado, hard to reach.”
“That, or he is dead.”
“Yes. It is a possibility. Our unknown foe appears just as coldly callous as Gong-Fen. He might not want Thacker to remain alive, for fear that he might be found and made to turn evidence against him. At this juncture, however, I think our energies are best directed towards divining as much as we can about Cthulhu and company. This last incident has put beyond all doubt the reality of such startling, powerful monsters, as far as I am concerned. If any last shreds of scepticism had been still lingering in my mind, they are now most unequivocally dispelled.”
“What do you propose we do?”
“I have had various thoughts on that score already. We need to put our thinking caps on, you and I, Watson. We must become scholars again – students of the unusual – and take a course in a whole new field of research. A university beckons, one without colleges or professors, and we are to enrol as undergraduates.”
OUR “DEGREE”, IF I MAY CALL IT SUCH, WAS conducted in the basement of the British Museum, in a dusty, remote archive set well apart from the rest of that venerable institution and known by a somewhat euphemistic soubriquet: Sequestered Volumes.
Our guide and helpmeet in this rarefied realm was a woman by the name of Miss Chastity Tasker, a doughty little spinster of advanced years who combined fastidiousness with garrulousness, as free with her talk as she was severe in her habits and sententious about the behaviour of others. A librarian by trade rather than a curator, she bucked the trend of her profession by not insisting on silence, at least not from herself, but she was also adamant, as any good librarian ought to be, that the books in her care be treated with respect by those reading them.
The Sequestered Volumes collection was kept under lock and key in a vaulted chamber with a cage-like door. Miss Tasker instructed us to handle the books as though they might crumble at the slightest touch, which more than one of them looked liable to do.
“A lot of these are considered dangerous,” she added, waving a small, gnarled hand at the mouldering spines on the shelves around us. “For their content, I mean. According to certain individuals, they aren’t simply books, they are portals to knowledge which some deem forbidden and others profane – knowledge which can forever alter one’s perception of the world. Now, many would take that claim with a pinch of salt.” The light sniff with which she accompanied the statement suggested she was amongst their number. “But there’s no accounting for the fragility of some people’s minds. Those of a sensitive disposition, prone to neuroses
and depressive fits or afflicted with an excess of imagination, might be recommended to steer clear. The illustrations, especially in the medieval texts, often border on the gruesome.”
“We appreciate the advice, madam,” said Holmes. “Rest assured, my friend and I are of a sufficiently robust constitution to cope. Nothing we find in a mere book will rattle us.”
“I am quite certain that’s true,” Miss Tasker said, eyeing us up and down. “I feel duty-bound, however, to deliver the warning to any and all who come this way. We have had, on occasion, a visitor depart Sequestered Volumes ashen-faced, looking very much as if he might be ill. Helena Blavatsky herself dropped by one afternoon. She was over briefly from America, where I believe she lives now, and was conducting research for her Isis Unveiled. She spent less than an hour here, leafing through various of the more obscure texts. Something she read left her quite offended, disgusted even, and close to fainting.”
The librarian chuckled, amused at the idea of the notorious and cantankerous spiritualist displaying such infirmity.
“Perhaps what she found was confirmation of the fraudulence of her absurd beliefs,” she said. “At any rate, she didn’t return. Not many do.”
Under Miss Tasker’s aegis, Holmes and I spent the next fortnight poring over old works of often obscure provenance and authorship. On each visit, the librarian locked us into the chamber with an enormous brass key and sat at her desk outside, ready for us to call her in when we needed to return a book to its rightful place or request another. The security measures were a safeguard against theft, since many of the books were priceless and a number of them so rare that each was believed to be the sole extant copy of that title.
The Cthulhu Casebooks Page 17