The Cthulhu Casebooks

by James Lovegrove

  Seated at carrels, of which the chamber boasted only four, Holmes and I leafed through book after book, taking reams of notes. I can safely say that much of this literary arcana was pure drivel, the ramblings of deranged or depraved minds. Some of the books were concerned with black magic and ancient hermetic traditions which had little or no bearing on the subject matter that provided our focus. Others, such as Malleus Maleficarum – or Hammer of Witches – by German Inquisitor Heinrich Kramer, took a steadfastly Christian approach to manifestations of the supernatural, and thus seemed irrelevant also. The same applied to such medieval treatises on necromancy as The Sworn Book of Honorius and The Key of Solomon. Nowhere did any of these incunabula contain mentions of Cthulhu, Hastur and the like.

  We were likewise able to discount books like the Grimorium Verum, a fraudulent text purporting to have been written by an Egyptian, one Alibeck of Memphis, in the early 1500s, but in fact the work of some unknown European author a couple of centuries later. We flirted with discourses on alchemy and matters qabalistic, but found that they too had little useful to offer us.

  Soon enough we were able to winnow out the books that were truly pertinent to our needs. These included De Vermis Mysteriis, the compendium of spells and enchantments which Gong-Fen had used on Box Hill. Its author, Prinn, was a thirteenth-century Crusader who had been taught by wizards whilst being held captive in Syria and had also studied at the Library of Alexandria. Holmes addressed himself assiduously to this particular work. Another such volume was the unexpurgated edition of Unaussprechlichen Kulten, the book from which Roderick Harrowby had divined the location of Ta’aa. I would look up frequently from my own studies to see Holmes transcribing long passages from it, sometimes page after page, and making copies of its illustrations too.

  There were more: the Book of Iod, the Book of Eibon, the Cultes des Goules, the Pnakotic Manuscripts, Thaumaturgical Prodigies in the New-English Canaan, the Liber Damnatus Damnationum. These often made references to other texts of which no copies were known to have survived into the modern era and to scriptures, such as the Seven Cryptical Books of Hsan and the Tablets of Nhing, which had never been seen on Earth and were thought to reside only in the palaces of the dark gods themselves.

  Day upon day, we entered the basement and immersed ourselves in the books. Where our understanding of French or Middle English was deficient, Miss Tasker stepped in to assist. She was one of the most educated women I have ever met, having eschewed the customary feminine pursuits of wifeliness, motherhood and domesticity in favour of a life of scholarship. Her grasp of Latin was likewise invaluable to us, who had both learned the language as boys but had found little use for its conjugations and declensions since then and had allowed our familiarity with the intricacies of its vocabulary to lapse. Often she would upbraid one or the other of us for failing to make sense of a line which she regarded as simple to translate, much as though she were a schoolmistress and Holmes or I a dull-witted pupil. Yet she developed a fondness for us, and we for her. The archive was not a frequented spot, and she, queen of this lonely domain, was glad of regular company.

  It was a period of intensive labour, and it took its toll. One could bear only so much exposure to all that abstruse lore and convoluted cosmology before one’s head began to reel. For respite, Holmes and I would enjoy long, restorative strolls round Regent’s Park or apply ourselves to more worldly tasks, such as tracking down Gong-Fen’s errant coachman.

  In that enterprise we drew a blank. Holmes took out advertisements and interviewed various members of the carriage-driving fraternity, while I spoke to as many of Gong-Fen’s remaining domestic personnel as I could locate. Since their employer’s death, his dual sets of household staff had gone their separate ways, taking up new posts wherever they were able. To a man and woman, they swore they had no idea what had become of Thacker. They had said as much to the police, and they were saying it to me, and I did not doubt their word.

  Time and again I would see Holmes with the enigmatic unsigned note that had been sent to Gong-Fen and that had effectively been his death warrant. He had appropriated it from the Chinaman’s pocket shortly after he expired, and was wont to scrutinise it in a spare moment as though its scant six words – “Dear me, Mr Gong-Fen. Dear me!” – might yield up a trove of secrets. The cursive handwriting was neat but nondescript, the paper a high-quality bond but one that might be purchased from any good stationer’s. If he hoped the note a Rosetta Stone which would somehow miraculously unlock the identity of the sender, he seemed doomed to disappointment.

  After a while my brain became so crammed with mind-boggling newfound knowledge that there seemed little room for more. Many of the phrases and images I came across in the books at Sequestered Volumes stayed with me long after I left the museum, and haunted me in my dreams. I was, in addition, not sleeping well. Our encounter with those creeping shadows and the formless being that lurked within them had left me with an abiding wariness of the dark. I had adopted the practice of keeping a lamp burning by my bedside the whole night through, habitually waking up to replenish its oil reservoir whenever it ran low. Even passing a patch of dim shade outdoors during the daytime would be enough to make me cringe and cavil. Darkness, I had learned, was no friend. It is a phobia I have retained into old age. The sort of fear that children are supposed to grow out of, I grew into and still cannot wholly shake. And it is only one of many fears I have, and none of them exists without good reason.

  * * *

  Our continuing sojourns in Sequestered Volumes led us, with seeming inevitability, to the Necronomicon.

  Or rather, would have, had the book still been there.

  It was a source of some consternation to Miss Tasker when Holmes asked her to fetch down the museum’s copy of the Necronomicon for him and she was unable to find it. She checked thoroughly, wondering if it had been misplaced, returned to an incorrect slot by some careless browser. She became flustered as she scanned every shelf in the chamber, to no avail.

  “I… I cannot believe this,” she said, both appalled and angered. “It is gone, quite gone. This should not happen. It is unheard of. I have never lost a book, never! My standards are most exacting. Who can have stolen it?”

  The Necronomicon is the ultimate repository of information about Cthulhu and company, and was the book towards which Holmes and I had been building up in all those days of study and research – our final destination, the goal for which we had been sedulously shaping and preparing ourselves.

  First set down around 730 by the Yemeni mystic and scholar Abdul Alhazred, it was translated from Arabic into classical Greek two hundred years later by Theodorus Philetas of Constantinople, and then into Latin in 1228 by Jutland-born Olaus Wormius. Various modern-language versions have appeared since, one in Spanish allegedly by Cervantes, another in English by the astrologer and occultist Dr John Dee.

  Full of rites, symbols and formulae, the Necronomicon is considered crucial to codifying and understanding the nether gods, and to summoning them as and when required. Yet its history is littered with tragedy and horror. Not for nothing has Abdul Alhazred come to be known as the “Mad Arab”, for madness is the fate of almost everyone who has encountered his book, and more often than not a terrible death too.

  Alhazred himself was torn apart by an invisible beast on the streets of Damascus. In 1771 Joseph Curwen, a Rhode Island merchant and sorcerer who owned a copy, disappeared in mysterious circumstances after a raid on his farm in Pawtuxet by some of Providence’s most influential men. In 1840 the luckless von Junzt, who published a German translation of the text, was found dead in his room, the door locked from the inside, his throat viciously slashed as though by talons.

  Many copies were burned by the authorities. Pope Gregory IX placed it on the Index Expurgatorius. Incomplete manuscripts of translations were frequently lost, never to be recovered. The Necronomicon, throughout its long life, has seemed to attract nothing but misery and misfortune.

  In many ways, I was
rather pleased that the British Museum’s copy had gone missing.

  Miss Tasker went in search of it in another of the building’s literary collections, reckoning that a classification error might have led to it being stacked with the medieval anatomical textbooks, although her tone of voice implied she thought this an improbable scenario. She returned downcast, but not empty-handed. She had with her the ledger in which were written the names of visitors to Sequestered Volumes and a list of the books consulted by each. She was punctilious about recording who read what and when. All of December 1880 was taken up with entries for Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, with our signatures against our printed names and the times we had arrived and departed each day, correct to the minute. She flicked back through the pages, looking for the last time someone had requested the Necronomicon. It had been in May of the previous year.

  “Ah yes,” she said. “I remember the man well. Courteous he was, and oddly charming, if somewhat lacking in looks and physical grace. He came just the once. He was interested only in the Necronomicon. He spent the morning absorbed in contemplation of it and then he…”

  Her brow furrowed. She was perplexed.

  “Do you know what? It is most strange. He came. I am clear about that. I remember him walking in and introducing himself and stating his wish to see the Necronomicon. But of his departure I have no memory whatsoever. He must have left, it goes without saying, and he would have had to pass by my desk to do so. But I cannot say I saw him go. And I am not a forgetful person.”

  “Besides,” said I, “you would first have had to release him from this chamber. He would have been locked in, as is the case with us.”

  “It would have been no great feat for him to gain egress independently,” said Holmes. “There is a keyhole on the outside only, but he could have reached his hands through the bars. The lock itself is old and of the kind that easily surrenders to jimmying with, say, a file.”

  “I would have heard him,” said Miss Tasker. “Unless, maybe, I nodded off. But that is not my habit. Sleeping on the job? I would rather die.”

  “Still, somehow he must have let himself out and made his way past you, with the book concealed about his person. If I may be so indelicate, Miss Tasker, did you abandon your post at any time that day to answer the call of nature?”

  “It is of course possible, but I am careful about such things. I feel a terrific burden of duty towards these books. They are my charges, I their custodian, and I am loath to leave them unsupervised. Oh, Mr Holmes, I am cudgelling my brains to recall the events of that day, but it was a year and a half ago, and I am not as young as I was. The details have become… well, foggy.”

  “Do not upset yourself, madam.”

  “I shall lose my job over this. I’m sure I shall.”

  “Not if I have any say in the matter,” Holmes declared. Although he never evinced any romantic interest in the fairer sex – not even with respect to the bewitching nemesis he so admired, Irene Adler – my friend was unfailingly gallant towards females. Damsels in distress brought out a knightly streak in him. “Watson and I will find the fellow in question and, if he has the book in his possession, prevail upon him to return it. What, pray, is his name?”

  “Now, what is it again…?”

  Miss Tasker ran a finger down the column in the ledger until she arrived at the requisite entry.

  “Ah yes,” said she. “Moriarty. That’s right. Professor James Moriarty.”

  THE NAME ITSELF HAD NO EFFECT ON HOLMES when he heard it that first time. Why would it? Moriarty was unknown to either of us, and to the public at large, back then. His name bore no associations, generated no particular frisson. It was merely a name.

  The signature beside it, however, did pique Holmes’s interest. He squinted at it, then extracted the note to Gong-Fen from his jacket, unfolded it, smoothed the creases, and laid it alongside the open page of the ledger. He examined the signature and the writing on the note for fully three minutes, before saying to me, “Look at that. Compare the hands. What do you see?”

  “They are similar.”

  “Similar? They are identical! Consider the loop beneath the lower-case g in ‘Gong-Fen’ and the loop of the y of ‘Moriarty’. They are of the same shape and dimensions, the tail on each overlapping the downstroke to precisely the same distance. The dot above the i in both cases is exactly the same height above the bulk of the letter. The capital M’s of ‘Mr’ and ‘Moriarty’ have peaks and valleys of matching size, their internal angles alike almost to the degree. The two characters are twins.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do say so. In fact, I insist upon it. The note to Gong-Fen came from the man who wielded his pen here on this ledger. This Professor Moriarty is the Chinaman’s one-time ally, the mentor who then turned on him when Gong-Fen displeased him by anointing himself mentor to me. I am certain of it. If you are still unpersuaded, take into account the fact that he appears to have made off with the Necronomicon, right under poor Miss Tasker’s nose. The nature of the book, the urtext of nether god worship, puts the matter beyond doubt.”

  The more I thought about it, the more Holmes’s supposition seemed valid.

  Miss Tasker had been listening attentively to our exchange. Now she piped up: “The Necronomicon carries a formidable reputation. They say it is dangerous, capable of robbing a man of his reason. They say, in the wrong hands, it could destroy the world. That’s so much hogwash as far as I’m concerned. However, this copy of the Necronomicon poses a risk to me personally, because it has been stolen while in my care. My professional integrity is at stake. I beg you, Mr Holmes, Dr Watson, for my sake, find the thief – Professor Moriarty, if it is he – and wrest the book from his clutches.”

  * * *

  For the remainder of that day Holmes left me to my own devices in Sequestered Volumes while he went off to unearth as much intelligence as he could about Professor Moriarty. My current endeavour was compiling a lexicon of the language that was called R’lyehian by most and, by a few, Aklo. To that end I scoured various texts, jotting down every instance where a word or phrase of R’lyehian was used, and cross-referencing it with the appended translation if there was one. It was painstaking work but I found it strangely rewarding. Its methodical nature was refreshingly normal. My brain, schooled in the art of memorising the names of bones, organs and diseases, had an aptitude for it.

  Facts about R’lyehian were scanty. It was held to be the tongue spoken by Cthulhu himself and his extended family tree, and was first written down by an unknown author on a set of clay tablets – the Black Tablets of R’lyeh – some fifteen thousand years ago. Traces of it are preserved in China in the form of scrolls from the third century BC. The glyphs used to represent it are akin to Chinese script but bear elements of Sanskrit as well, consisting as they do of characters suspended from horizontal bars.

  From the Far East, knowledge of the language spread westward through Babylon and Persia. A Latin translation of the scrolls cropped up in Rome circa 200 BC, and latterly a German translation of that translation, entitled Liyuhh, surfaced in Heidelberg during the eighteenth century. The notorious rake and libertine John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester, is said to have produced an English version in spare moments when he was not composing bawdy poetry or bedding the wives of half the aristocracy, but no copies of that publication exist.

  With a thoroughness that I hoped would do Holmes proud, I had gradually been amassing a decent working knowledge of the ancient tongue. It is not always easy to follow the sense of a sentence in R’lyehian since the language makes no distinction between parts of speech, and rules of grammar are all but non-existent. A noun can serve as a verb, an adjective as an adverb. Pronouns are optional. Verbs appear in only two tenses, the present and another tense which can be past or future, perfect or imperfect, and which can be parsed solely depending on context. Singular and plural have no meaning, word order is variable, and pronunciation is guesswork. All in all, R’lyehian seems tailor
-made to perplex, frustrate and obfuscate. It has as little affinity with any human mode of speech as the roar of a lion does with the chatter of a monkey.

  Holmes had reproduced from memory Stamford’s reiterated R’lyehian outburst at Scotland Yard, and I now embarked on the business of using my lexicon to render it into English. Initially it was difficult to make head or tail of what he had said, but in the end, with persistence, I succeeded:

  STAMFORD

  “Fhtagn! Ebumna fhtagn! Hafh’drn wgah’n n’gha n’ghft!”

  MY TRANSLATION

  “He waits! He waits in the pit! The priest controls death in the darkness!”

  I remained unsure about “controls”. The word wgah’n does double duty, meaning “reside in” also. Under the circumstances, “controls” seemed the more logical choice, but the sentence could also be interpreted as “Death resides in the darkness with the priest!” Such is the imprecision of R’lyehian, a language in which perhaps only gods are meant to be fluent.

  As to who it was who “waits in the pit”, was that “the priest”? Or was it some personification of “death”?

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” I said to Holmes when he returned from his excursion, having shared with him the fruits of my labour.

  “Hmmm,” was his reply. “Stamford was undoubtedly very keen to convey something. Was it the parroting of something he overheard? Or was he trying, in a befuddled way, to give us a clue? If only his brief period of lucidity at the end had lasted longer. Well, you have made sterling progress today, Watson. Would you care to hear about mine?”

  “I would.”

  “Then let us get a restorative cup of coffee, and I shall tell all.”

  Having bade Miss Tasker a good evening, with Holmes renewing his promise to do everything in his power to retrieve the Necronomicon for her, he and I repaired to a coffeehouse on Great Russell Street.